Page 115 of Seduced

“We?” Wilder was laughing too.

“Beg pardon?”

“You said ‘we have enough money’… Don’t you meanyouhave enough money, my lord?” Wilder said.

“I do not. And I am not your lord. I am your…” He couldn’t quite say the word. But his heart was all warm and his eyes were stinging.

“Friend,” Wilder smiled more widely than Alexei had seen anyone smile. “I know. I am too.”

“Well, that’s that then. Now empty the club, if you would be so kind. On my orders.”

Wilder smiled rarely, but again he flashed his teeth at Hades.

“Right away, Mikailoff,” he said.

thirty

Poppy

Someone was crying. Which was not unusual, except:

It wasn’t her.

Usually, it was her.

A dark head was leaning against the mattress, shining black curls spilling over her sheets. She lifted her hand—she hadn’t been able to do that before, had she? The man had tied her wrists together, then he had hit her so hard she had fallen unconscious. She lifted her hand and buried her fingers into that delicious hair.

Alexei jerked, turning his head.

His eyes were red and puffy, his face wet with tears. He sniffled and his eyes shone like twin lakes under the moon, water pouring out of them.

“Poppy,” he murmured and his breath came short, stopping abruptly.

“Don’t cry, you idiot,” Poppy told him, and was at once seized by coughing.

Which might have been what she deserved for calling him an idiot first thing after dying, but she couldn’t help herself: he was one. Immediately, Alexei leaped to hold her up with a hand on the nape of her neck.

“Breathe,” he said, wrapping his other arm around her waist. “Your lungs are still fragile from being…from…”

“Now who is the one who is suffocating?” Poppy said.

“It’s not funny, Wyatt,” Hades gasped. He sounded as if he were in pain.

“We have been through so much, you and I, my lord,” Poppy told him. “We have to start finding things funny at some point, or we won’t survive our own memories.”

“That may be so.” Alexei sat back, still sounding far too serious, as he usually did, and fluffed her pillows. She leaned back into them gratefully. “But now is not the time for levity,” he said.

“If not now, when?” Poppy whispered and finally, she got a small, watery smile out of him. He turned his head away abruptly. “Oh. You are angry with me,” Poppy observed.

He was angry, that much was clear. And usually, when people were angry in her vicinity, it was with her: it was not a stretch of logic to draw that conclusion.

“What on earth did you just say?” Alexei thundered.

He wasn’t angry: he was incensed.

“I realized, after you left, how weak I had been,” Poppy explained. “I realized that what was being done to me…And by whom.” She did not want to refer to her brother; she hated to even mention him. “But suddenly, it was so easy to stand up to him. It was the easiest thing in the world. I despise myself for not doing it sooner. For being so weak. And surely you must despise me too.”

“Despiseyou?” Alexei’s voice was a screech. “You cannot be serious. I’ve been worshipping the ground you walk on for weeks!”

---