Page 8 of Seduced

And, at the risk of being sent back to the freezing chapel and the seeds, she asked:

“What will happen to the man now, brother?”

Once more his hand on her head stilled, and she felt her brother stiffen.

“Have I not made it clear, my dear,” he said with frosty calm, “that this is none of your concern?”

“You have, forgive me,” she replied. Silence for a bit. The clock was ticking on, deafening in the silence. She licked her dry lips. “I shall go downstairs to inform the servants that you are ready for your breakfast.”

“You must,” her brother pronounced sadly, “mustn’t you? It was because of your insubordination and sin that our routine was interrupted, after all. They, as well as I, must suffer the consequences. Your own sin is something everyone else will have to pay for, Persephone. Do not forget it.”

Poppy didn’t.

She struggled to climb the stairs down to the kitchens, crying in pain the whole time, but she didn’t care. All she could think about was that man and his heart wrenching cries:

‘I am ruined, I have lost everything. I lost everything at the card table. Help me, please, I have no one to turn to.’The man had stopped for breath, and Poppy could hear his sobs all the way from across the hall. ‘For God’s sake, what is to become of me? What of my wife and children?’

It’s not right, she had thought then, and she thought it again now.

It’s not right.

And then.

Her first act of rebellion, real rebellion, in five years.

She didn’t know why it was now that the need seized her to rebel, to be disobedient, to sin.

She didn’t know why now, when she was in so much agony and pain from her recent discipline session.

But, for some unfathomable reason, it was now.

Maybe because for once, in spite of the threat of pain and cruelty, this was important.

Maybe for once, it was more important to be disobedient.

And that was how it started, her descent into hell.

Because that cold morning in February, when she was weeping from pain, her spirit completely broken, her memories of herself and her father almost entirely erased, Poppy Wyatt had one singular, rebellious, sinful thought.

And this was the thought:

I have to do something.

And she did.

…

The man who had come to consult her brother the night before had been a middle-aged man, a baron with a wife and six children. He had ruined himself inside the walls of an establishment of sin, the gaming club everyone called ‘Hell Club’.

Its real name was The Hellion Club, and it was housed in a set of buildings situated beneath London’s tangled streets, appropriately named ‘The Underworld’.

From what Poppy could tell, the place was aptly nicknamed the Hell Club, because every night it attracted desperate men of low or no morals, who would then proceed to fleece the meager fortunes of poor unsuspecting men who happened to have a gambling addiction, like this baron.

Poppy’s brother had taken hours to finish his diatribe on the vices of gambling and the like, and after that, he had bestowed one of his long-winded prayers on the poor, ruined man. But Poppy had known that praying would not bring back the money the man had lost on the gaming table, nor would it feed or house his six children, since he had lost hisancestral seat to the satan-like owner of the Hell Club, a man so deeply deprived and immoral, he was nicknamed ‘Lord Hades’.

The day wore on, excruciatingly slowly, and soon it would be nighttime again.

Her brother spent the whole day enclosed in his study, and she was free to soak her wounded legs in warm water and think.

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