Page 38 of Seduced

“She is going to need some…You know,” Dante said.

“Some what?” Poppy sat up.

“Come on, Alexei, just a little,” Dante was pleading now.

“No.” Hades’ voice was hard, final.

“A little of what?” Poppy asked.

“Opium,” they both said at once.

“Oh.” She lowered her aching body down on the cushions.

“Yes,oh,” Hades said. “I am sure a glass of brandy will do just as well.”

“If you say so,” Dante shrugged, but his eyebrows were knitted. “Now kindly sod off, Your Highness.”

“Don’t call me that.”

Hades turned on his heel and left without a glance at her.

…

“That mad bastard is even madder than usual today,” Dante mused, watching his friend leave. “What have you done to him, Miss Wyatt?”

Miss Wyatt was in the process of trying to cover her legs, suddenly feeling extremely exposed, left alone with the young gentleman. Dante turned around, saw, and immediately strode to her side. His long, tapered fingers rested on her trembling hands, staying their frantic movement.

“Pray do not be afraid of being alone with me,” he said quickly, in a low, earnest voice. Wide, honest eyes met hers. “You are completely safe in my company. I am nothing. I am…barely a person.”

“Why on earth would you say such a—?”

Poppy’s breath caught, and she couldn’t continue. Who talked of themselves in this fashion?

“Do not be shocked, it is quite true, I assure you,” Dante said, in that careless way of his that she was quickly learningdisguised immeasurable pain. “And I do not…with women. You are entirely safe with me.”

“Oh,” Poppy said, leaning back and letting him start to work. “You do not prefer women?”

Dante chuckled. “How does a creature like you know about men who do not ‘prefer’ women?”

“My father was a vicar,” Poppy replied. “My brother is one as well. Men and women come to a vicar for confession, advice and help. There is little that I do not know about what human nature has to offer.”

“Offer…” Dante mused. “Interesting choice of words. People would call things like that something else entirely. Anyway, no. I like neither men nor women. I am…quite broken, beyond repair.”

Poppy shivered. “Me too,” she said, too low for him to hear.

She saw him purse his lips. Dammit, he had heard.Don’t swear.

“I am sorry,” he said simply, and those three words were somehow exactly what she needed to hear, exactly what she had craved to hear for years and years.

And at the same time, they were too much.

She started to cry, silently, while Dante sucked in his breath, as if it washewho was in pain, and started removing the seeds from her skin, one by one. Then, he called in a beautiful woman called Rania to help him dress her wounds, and Poppy couldn’t be too sure, because she was still crying, but she had the distinct impression that Dante was crying as well by that point.

“Rania works here, at the club,” Dante tried to introduce her, but Poppy was past hearing.

Dante and Rania gave her brandy for the pain, and she quickly fell into a fitful sleep right there, on Dante’s settee.

She might have been kidnapped and brought to literal hell, but as she drifted off to sleep, it seemed to her that it was the first good sleep she’d had in six years. She was too drowsy to think about it properly, but as velvet, warm slumber pulled her under, she had just enough consciousness left to think:

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