Page 20 of Seduced

“T-the club? And then what?” The boy was trying hard to appear uncaring, but he was deeply scared.

Alexei could feel his little breaths fluttering in the semi-darkness, and the rapid rise and fall of his chest. Good. It was about time he took this seriously.

“Then, little cat thief, you shall be made to pay for what you have done,” he said.

“I didn’t steal no—”

“A good idea,” Alexei said, dropping his voice and leaning towards the boy in a wolfish manner, “would be to stop talking now, actually. You wouldn’t want to annoy me further, would you? I might take it into my head, for instance, to introduce you to the ways of the world. To make a man out of you.”

As he had expected, the boy’s face went white with terror. A smattering of freckles stood out on his nose as the moonbeams hit the carriage’s window before the clouds bathed it in shadows once more.

“Are you going to try to ruin me, Your Honor?” the boy asked, inhaling sharply.

“You are already ruined,mon pauvre,” Alexei replied. “And stop that, you’ve run out of titles to give me.”

“I’m sorry, Your Excellency.”

“Wrong again.” Alexei looked outside the window. “We are almost there,” he said. “Brace yourself for carnal pleasure, young one.”

“Y-your lordship wouldn’t dare,” the boy breathed.

Alexei thought that he should ask for the boy’s name.

Oh, but who cared?

“Wouldn’t I,” he said simply, and sat back to watch the lad squirm.

The boy shrugged and his face pinched, as if he were trying not to cry. His thin shoulders started shaking soundlessly, and Alexei discovered, with a pang, that his heart would be torn in shreds if the boy started crying there and then.

“Oh wait, it seems that you may have provoked someone’s wrath before you met me,” the insufferable boy said. Just asAlexei’s heart was beginning to soften a bit. “You are bleeding at the temple.”

Alexei rarely flinched, but he made an exception as a pair of grubby little fingers reached for his cheek. He ducked, barely avoiding the boy’s touch, and almost breathed a sigh of relief, before he swallowed it quickly. It wasn’t that he was disgusted by the prospect of being touched by the boy; he just couldn’t abide it. By anyone.

“Where?” he asked abruptly, hating the harshness in his own voice.

Was it his impression or did the boy withdraw imperceptibly, his large, green eyes wide as twin lakes? No, nobody could be that easily frightened, especially not an annoying little yelp of a boy who abducted people’s cats and saved them from drowning.

“Right here, on your forehead,” the boy said. “Blood.”

Speaking of which, the boy’s face had drained of blood almost entirely. The coach swayed merrily on its way, but it could never go fast enough to suit Alexei.

“Oh that,” he said. “I think I killed two men tonight. In my defense, they killed me too.”

“I see,” the boy mused, looking barely surprised. “Two more corpses strewn about the streets. Just what London needs.”

“I did not leave them out in the street!” Alexei hissed, affronted. “I am not a complete barbarian.”

“You could fool me.”

“What is wrong with you?” Hades asked. And not in a good way.

Poppy

Oh, sarcasm.

She did not know that she still had it in her; but some distant memory surfaced, a memory of her sparring with words with her father, competing with him idiotically as to who would make the other laugh in the cleverest way.

They would battle for who would come up with the most underhanded insult, and then they’d roll on the carpet in front of the fire with laughter as they ate cheese and bacon for dinner. Surely that was the feverish dream of a Bedlamite, and not a real memory.

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