Page 23 of Seduced

“Oh but you do,” Alexei replied. God, his head was killing him. He hoped Wilder was back and safe. “It might scare you into confessing. Unless you tell me why you are spying on me, I can’t let you leave. And then we both will have to suffer.”

“Won’t everyone be asleep by now?”

“This place never sleeps, my boy. In fact, it is right about at this time, the first hours of daylight, that my best customers arrive. The repressed ones, those who have spent all night fighting the urge to give themselves over to pleasure.”

The boy mumbled something unintelligible behind him. They were on the stairs now.

“It’s stupid, really,” Alexei continued.

He had never talked so much in his life, if he were being honest. Why was he doing it now? Maybe he wanted to fill the silence; the boy not talking and walking behind him like this, with his head down, was more unnerving than two assassins coming at him simultaneously in the thick London fog.

“Is it?” it sounded like the boy murmured.

“Whynotgive in to pleasure?” Alexei replied. “Give me one good reason one should deny themselves indulgence, when life is so short. Not to mention, so hard.”

“It’s a sin.”

Alexei’s boots froze on the last step.

“Pardon?” he said, his voice icy cold.

“One good reason is that it is a sin,” the boy enunciated, as if he were talking to a simpleton. “Another is that places like this ruin lives, and…”

Alexei, having had quite enough, threw open the door to the first private room he found in front of him. This one happened to be one of the most secluded gaming hells in the entire club.

He was hoping that the mere sight of how crowded it was would shut the boy up. So he flung the door open and stood there, at the door’s narrow opening, unnoticed by any one of the gamblers, and took it all in.

The foggy atmosphere, the fear, the shame. The hiding. The hope, the pain, the disgust, the relief. The despair. He knew that all sorts of horrible, unmentionable things went on in these rooms, and that was why he rarely visited them himself. Walking through the upper card rooms, surveying his kingdom, was one thing. But down here, one could taste the poverty and the desperation.

It made for a depressing view, and he kept away from it. Suddenly, he wasn’t all too sure that he wanted the boy exposed to this view. He turned around, only to come almost chest-to-nose with the short lad, who was peering curiously around his shoulder.

The boy made as if to reach for the door.

Oh no no no.

The boy was supposed to justlook. Not go in. No way in hell was he going in.

“If you think I’m letting you back in there,” Alexei said viciously, “you…Hey!”

Suddenly, everything changed. The boy, his body rigid and hard, appeared to be shoving—shoving—him aside, and stepping around him, bursting into the room forcefully enough for him to get an eyeful of—

Poppy

She didn’t remember ever eating as much as she wanted to or as much as she needed before now. She did not remember ever feeling as satisfied.

It was disorienting.

Her stomach was full and comfortable for the first time in years, and she didn’t know how to handle the feeling. She was close to tears; wasn’t that the single most pathetic thing in the whole world?

But a certain clarity came with not being hungry, too.

Her head felt clear and her body vibrant as it hadn’t felt since her father was alive.

Everything made sense.

Memories were returning, along with a sense of her lost self.

But Hades was already moving on ahead, and she had to follow.

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