Page 102 of Seduced

“I decided that I cannot let life pass me by while I hide in here. Besides, there is nowhere I can be safe from pain. Even here, it found me.”

“Especially here, I should think,” Alexei said. He was so tired. Already he wanted to sleep again, dammit. “This is hell, after all.”

“It was heaven for me,” Dante retorted, “until I nearly lost you. Anyway, I do not know how I shall deal with school. Probably numb myself with alcohol or something.”

“’S not funny,” Alexei murmured, his words slurring with fatigue.

Peter withdrew the broth and produced a napkin with which he gently wiped Alexei’s jaw. Was anything more humiliating? Then Peter winked at him, drawing the sheet up to his chest, and Alexei did not care anymore.

“Dante was the one who found you,” Peter whispered in Alexei’s ear. “He discovered you in a half swoon and revived you. He fought for your life for hours until help came.”

“It seems there is a trend,” Alexei said quietly, thinking of her fighting for his life.

Then again, when was he not thinking of her?

“Thank you,” he said to Dante. “Be careful at school. Come back here if you…” he gasped, dark spots dancing in his vision.

Talk of a half-swoon. He bit his lip hard, fighting to stay conscious.

“Right,” Peter said, sounding less and less like a pirate and more and more like a governess. “Out we go. He needs his rest.”

“I’ll be right there in a minute,” Dante said to Peter and Valentine as they got up to leave, and then he leaned over the bed and grasped Alexei’s chin in his cold fingers. “I cannot personally imagine how it must feel, Alexei, to long for a woman, or indeed for anyone, for that matter. But those hours I spent trying to save your life were the most gruesome hours of my life. And I’m thinking that if she did that for you as well, you owe it to fight for her.”

“One thing at a time,” Alexei murmured. “Now I am fighting to stay alive.”

“Well, fight, damn you.”

“She needs me,” Alexei said simply, his voice drifting off to sleep. “So I shall stay alive.”

“She is so broken,” Dante replied, and his eyes grew wet again. “So broken, Alexei.”

“She is not broken,” Alexei said stubbornly. “Not like us, Dante. She is pure, perfect. Something…Someonebroke her. I’ll kill him.”

Darkness was already claiming him, but he was completely lucid; he’d meant every word.

“Of course you shall,” Dante said above his head, his voice fading. “Just as soon as you wake up.”

twenty-seven

Poppy

Two weeks later, it was as if nothing had ever happened. It was as if she had never danced with Rania, never eaten eggs with Dante, never spouted her opinions at poor Hades.

The memories were already fading in the back of her starved mind; she was desperately clinging to survival, and there was room for nothing else inside her.

That freezing February morning found her kneeling on the icy grass outside of the chapel, cleaning the graves. ‘Penance and service at the same time,’ her brother had called it. He had made it clear that she would have to pay for her stay at the Hell Club for the rest of her life.

“What about you?” Poppy had dared to ask; it was the second day after she was back, and she had not yet fully remembered how she was supposed to act, if she wanted to survive. She was under the misconception that she could continue voicing her opinion. “You gambled away your fortune, and me, at said club.”

Her brother had gotten absolutely still.

She had taken a step back, expecting an explosion of outrage, but none came.

Instead, there was ice.

“I,” her brother had said, drawing himself up, “have already done my penance. I’ll thank you not to interfere in my affairs, of which you know nothing about.”

And then he had proceeded to make the servants refuse her food for the next three days.

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