Page 28 of Seduced

No, wait. I don’t shout. I never shout.

I never used to shout before. Before her. Dammit.

Alexei sighed and approached his guards. They were manhandling a poor woman, on his orders.

I seem to have reached a new plane of self-loathing.

He had come here with a specific purpose, a relatively easy task: Find the girl, have his men bundle her up and abduct her to the Hell Club. Simple, clean-cut.

So far, he had botched it.

He had found her home easily, and discovered the girl looking very thin and rather unwell, dressed in little else than a nightgown, sitting on the snow. That was a little strange, but no stranger than her wearing men’s clothing.

She now looked nothing like that annoying boy who had spied on him a week ago in the club. Alexei was embarrassed to ever having thought her a man: She had a tiny waist and translucent skin, and everything about her was so delicate and feminine and fragile, he was worried his men would break her as soon as they touched her.

Still, it was a simple abduction operation. He’d had to orchestrate tens of them. It was supposed to be over and done with within half an hour, and then he would go on with his life. But damn it if everything wasn’t going wrong from the start.

Wasn’t that always the story of his life?

This entire thing was supposed to have been fun, or at the very least something to distract him from the utter and complete dullness of every single day. But instead, it had somehow turned into this grotesque farce.

“Wait! Stop!” he called again. “Can’t you see she is not resisting? Let her be.”

His guards looked at him, mouths agape, and froze midstride, still holding on to the girl. They didn’t know what to do.

“Leave her alone!” Alexei shouted. “At once.”

Their arms dropped from her wrists, her waist, her mouth, and he stopped feeling as if he were about to be violently sick.

The girl nearly stumbled to her knees, but she caught herself right in time. Then, even though she was free, she just stood there, calmly, and waited. There was something in the way she stood, something docile and tame, as if she weren’t human.

Resist, damn you, fight,Alexei thought vehemently.

But she didn’t. She just waited.

“Just walk her to the carriage,” he ordered his men through gritted teeth. “Come on.”

They did. She walked along, docilely, like a damned tame dog.

“What is the matter with you?” The words burst from him with ill-concealed fury. “Why won’t you fight?”

“What would you like me to do?” There was no color in her voice, no expression.

“Do? I don’t know, madam, anything! This is a bloody abduction, in case it had escaped your notice!” Alexei exploded. “What is wrong with you? Won’t you act like being bloody kidnapped?”

“How does one act when one is being kidnapped?”

“Not like this!” Was this what an apoplexy felt like?

“Your Lordship is right,” the girl said, “it would serve me better to scream as you do.”

“I do not scream.”

But he was screaming. He was. And she…she was right. And obedient.Tooobedient.

‘I like obedience,’he had said to Wilder, but right now he didn’t like it one bit.

“Walk on, come on!”

---