Page 26 of Seduced

“Quite so,” Alexei agreed. “At one point, the lad will ask you to leave him alone. Do so, but keep following him closely. If he runs into danger, intervene at once, don’t waste a second. If not, which I consider much less likely, see where he lives and come back here at once to report it to me.”

“Right you are, m’ lord,” Wilder said, in a tone meant to annoy Alexei. “I’ll follow the little lad, never you worry.” Then he turned serious. “It’s not for me to ask, sir, but why on earth would your lordship concern yourself with the fortunes of a sad boy like that?”

“Enough with the questions,” Alexei raised an eyebrow. “I don’t pay you to question, Wilder, but to protect. Now go. Protect.”

“I apologize, my lord.”

“You do no such thing. But go, he is disappearing.”

“I shall be on the boy’s heels, never you worry, Mikailoff,” Wilder said, and he was off.

Alexei stood after him, staring.

Finally, he called me Mikailoff, he thought.That’s a small victory.

The skies began to weep a light, chilling rain.

“That’s the thing, you see,” Alexei said to Wilder’s retreating back, even though he was out of earshot already. “The boy is not a boy at all.”

nine

Poppy

“You thought I wouldn’t find out what you did, you little whore?”

Thus started Poppy’s day.

As soon as she snuck back into her room, she took off her men’s clothes and shoved them deep into a trunk, then quickly slipped into her nightgown and under the covers. She just stayed there, in the semi darkness, shaking like a leaf, and not only from the cold.

Her mind, alive after all these years of being starved and subdued, was racing.

What have I done? What have I done?she kept thinking.

And then:

When can I do it again?

The door was flung open unceremoniously, and her brother’s slight figure stood in the opening, dimly lit by the candelabra he was holding. His face looked sullen and grotesque in the candle’s light.

“Did you really think I wouldn’t find out that you snuck out into the night like a shameless harlot?” he said in his coldest voice.

He proceeded to call her more names, but it wasn’t the names Poppy was afraid of. She had been called all of them before, after all. It was the punishment that made her tremble. Her sentence. Since coming here to live with her brother, she had endured much: Starvation, isolation, kneeling on rice, sleepless nights, pain…But this time, it was worse than ever before.

She had never imagined that it would be so bad.

She was refused food for three days. Water for one, but after that, she was allowed two glasses per day. She would spend all her time kneeling in her room, in prayer, and five hours each day kneeling on rice.

Every night, she would stand in front of her brother as he chewed his dinner and wait for the servant to put out the fire, ‘since she didn’t deserve its warmth—there would be enough fires in hell’, according to her brother.

She would then be made to recite all her sins.

How naïve she had been when she had listed them all in her head, during that nightmarish hackney ride with Hades. Dressing in men’s clothes and walking the streets alone were the least of her transgressions. She now had to add to the list, under the instructions of her brother, pride, sorcery, arrogance, conceit, brutality, evil thoughts, and so many more. All of them, in fact. Every single thing that could be done, or thought, or felt, was there, in the endless list of her transgressions.

Trying to remember them all made her brain hurt and her breath come short, but if she forgot one, she was struck across the fingers with a birch branch. In the end, she always had to add the sin of murder; she couldn’t exactly remember why, but she was sure she had committed it too.

By the end of the three days, she was hungry, bleeding, aching everywhere, unable to walk and wanted to die.

No, wait, that is a sin too.

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