ten

Alexei

"What is wrong with you?" Alexei murmured, but got no response.

It was just as well. Alexei didn't know who ‘you' in his question was: the girl or himself? They rode on, in silence.

The girl barely moved. It was as if someone had sucked the soul right out of her. Alexei observed her profile. Her features were soft, delicate, feminine. Her lips were a little bit too large for her face's slender, heart-shaped frame, but her eyes made up for any asymmetry, being wide and unbearably green.

And to think, I had thought her a man.

"You know my name," he said at length, "may I know yours?"

She did not speak; seemed incapable of it.

"You do know it, don't you?" he pressed her. He didn't know why her silence and general docility made him want to exert himself thus, but he couldn't stop himself. "Do you remember me?"

Finally, she stirred.

"You…you…" Her tongue rolled painfully over the words, her voice a shadow of a ghost of what it had been when she had chatted incessantly in a much similar situation, a week ago.

Well, she had been dressed as a man then. Still, it was the same person—or it should be. A sudden fury seized him.

What on earth happened to her between then and now?

"You…" She seemed unable to talk past that one word.

"Exactly," Alexei said. "As you so eloquently put it, Hades at your service, ma'am," he bowed his head, for he was seated.

"I remember you, Your Excellency," she said, "but you…"

"Oh, you thought I didn't know it was a woman underneath those clothes?"

"Yes, I thought you didn't know," she said. "I am used to being invisible, or at least uninteresting. No one ever sees me."

His spine shuddered.

"Well, someone did," he said. "Me. And I was not too happy with what I saw."

"What do you mean—?"

"The way you fell against me that day," he said, swallowing past a sudden lump in his throat. "Did you think that after catching you in my arms I would continue to idiotically think you were a man? I mean, I am quite stupid, we seem to have established that, miss…"

"Wyatt," she said, her voice wavering, unsure. Much as her other, boyish voice had got on his nerves, this one infuriated him. He hated it, and whoever had put that weakness, that hesitation in it. "Persephone Wyatt. But I am called Poppy."

The irony was not lost on him. Hades and Persephone. He laughed, harshly, but he did not have time now to pursue that line of conversation, much as he would enjoy the implications that would fluster her and make her squirm. But there were more pressing matters at hand.

"Well, Miss Wyatt, answer me, if you please, why are you barely able to walk? Are you hurt?"

"I have a limp, remember?" A spark of her old spirit was back, and he felt at once relief and frustration.

"It didn't seem to stop you from traipsing up and down London with me at your heels, a few nights ago. I could barely catch up to you, and only found you in time to rescue you from the Thames." He said that last part on purpose, watching her closely, hoping that she would respond the same way she had then, when she had bristled at the very idea that he might have rescued her or the cat.

She remained silent.

Alexei wondered if he was meant to live the rest of his days with a piercing headache as his constant companion.

"Will you not answer me?" he said, much more gently than he had inded.

"I am not in the habit of answering to kidnappers," she said, and Alexei couldn't help the smile that spread across his face.

There you are. You've come back.

"Why are you limping?" he asked her again.

She just looked at him, mute.

"Answer me."

Nothing.

"I know you are lame," he said quietly, with what he hoped sounded like well-suppressed rage. Because it was—well, maybe not that well-suppressed. "But you walked and ran and…and were so annoying that night. So bloody annoying. You wouldn't shut up. And now you barely talk, and you can't even walk, and you won't resist my men when they are accosting you…" He tugged at his hair. "Let me see."

And, without thinking too much about it, such was his need to find out what the hell had happened to her, he lifted her skirt.

No, he hadn't thought about it at all.

If he had, he would have realized what a horribly bad idea it would be to come face to face with her soft, supple skin, her slender limbs, her…

Wait.

"What the hell is this?"

His fingers touched something hard and dark coming out of the skin on her calf. There were several more all around it, but it didn't feel soft like a sickness would. It was rock-hard, and the skin around it was raised, bruised, tortured.

"Pomegranate seeds," her voice said above his head—barely recognizable. It was soulless, as if she had forced herself to close off her humanity in order to respond. Alexei's stomach dropped. What? "And rice, next to it."

"What the bloody—"

"I knelt on it for days. That's why I can't get it out of my skin now."

He lifted her skirt and saw her knees. There were seeds embedded on her skin, as if she, as if...He was nearly sick then and there.

She whimpered, struggling against his hands.

That was when he realized that he was touching her, everywhere. He had moved her until she was almost sitting on his lap, and was lifting her skirt up around her waist, as if he were accosting her more aggressively than he ever had any of his whores.

‘I don't like to be touched.'

But he was touching her. A lot.

"I'm sorry," he said, and his voice broke, because he had never said it before. "I apologize, I'm sorry."

He covered her legs again and took a blanket from underneath the seat to bundle her up in it. She didn't move while he was doing all this, just sat there, like a doll.

He wanted to die.

He turned his face away, closing his eyes, and the image of her ruined knees swam before him.

"Who did this to you?" he asked, and his voice was shaking. His entire body was shaking.

"I did," she replied.

He froze. Then he opened his lips to ask, but they were trembling so much, he couldn't form the words.

"What the bloody hell did you say," he pronounced, as soon as he could, teeth bared.

"I did it. Willingly. To atone."

Was he mad? Was that what was happening? He could not possibly be hearing these things. Nothing made any bloody sense anymore.

"My God." the words burst from him.

"I had to," Poppy went on, for once speaking unprompted. He wished she would stop, but he had to know. He had to. "I had to kneel on the seeds, to atone for all my sins."

He turned his entire body to face her.

"I know little of religion," he said, trying to tame the feral emotion that was spilling out of him, "less still of God. But I know one thing: This is the sin," he motioned towards her knees.

She withdrew her legs, her little hand hovering, trembling over her skirt, as if she were afraid that he would draw back her stocking again, and he felt like an absolute monster.

"Don't…" she started saying, and he wasn't sure if she would continue or not, but he couldn't stand to let her.

"I'm sorry," he repeated. "I'm sorry for what I did. Please forgive me."

"You are? For the abduction as well?"

Alexei clamped his lips shut.

He swallowed his words, completely taken aback.

The little minx!

She had completely cornered him into that one, and he, fool that he was, had been duped into feeling sorry for her. Where was that pitiful, submissive creature of the last half hour? He was glad to see her gone, of course, but now, the lady seemed to have somehow got her spirit back, undetected, and had unleashed it all on him.

He drew back against the corner and raised his chin up to hide his face from her.

Alexei wasn't one to rethink his own decisions; once he had made up his mind to do something, he went ahead and did it, never looking back. There was nothing but torture in looking back anyway.

But today, on this crisp winter's morning, as his barouche tottered along on the dirty London streets, carrying him and the abducted Miss Wyatt to his Hell Club, he wondered, maybe for the first time in his life.

What the hell have I done?

Poppy

The club looked even more resplendent in the morning.

There was little natural light filtering through the heavily-draped windows, but it was enough to make the place look magical: the great hall was dripping with marble and gold, every surface covered in intricate embroidery and Persian carpets. It was like stepping into a palace, like stepping into a fairytale.

Poppy's heart was too heavy and numb to enjoy it, but she would probably be too frighed to do so even if she hadn't been hurting so badly. As it was, her legs and back ached so much that she was constantly holding back a scream. Her throat, raw with the effort not to shout in pain, felt as though it had been shredded into a thousand ribbons.

"Have you had breakfast yet?" a voice she was quickly starting to despise asked.

Hades looked even more intimidating in the daylight, if that was possible. His beauty was of a dark and icy nature, a barrier between him and the world, and he seemed cont to shield himself behind it and his surly attitude. He seemed untouchable, as if nothing could break or sof his marble-hard fa?ade.

Least of all she.

Poppy quickly decided, instinctively, that appealing to his pity would be useless, a waste of time. But other than that, she was too tired and in too much pain to think of what to do.

Resist, a voice said in her head. Fight.

She stumbled along, hurrying up to follow Hades' long strides, every step an agony.

No, do not resist, she replied sternly to that voice in her head. Do not give in to the temptation. Resisting means starvation, punishment and death. You have lived this truth for years and years. Submit. Obey. It's the only way to survive.

"What now?" Hades asked, sounding bored.

He was a few steps ahead of her, but he had stopped walking. She had given up the effort, too, and stood there, in the middle of a room big enough to be a ballroom, its walls lined with books, its ceiling an Italian mural. A literal army of cats was slowly making its way to her skirt, and she was surrounded by them within seconds.

"The cats need feeding," she said.

Hades sneered. "Right," he said, in that darkly sarcastic way of his, "the cats."

His mouth twisted into what might pass as a smile in his world, but the rest of the world would call a grimace.

"Are you hungry?" he asked, finally facing her.

Poppy tried to think. Was she? She had turned off the part of herself that felt hunger; it was too painful, and she'd had to starve for days. It was even more painful to turn it back on.

"God in heaven, how long will it take you to decide if you are hungry or not?" Hades did not just sound impatient, which was only normal, after all: her brother was constantly out of patience with her. She must be so tiresome. But Hades also sounded furious, for some reason.

"I don't know," she replied truthfully, but that only seemed to make matters worse.

Hades ran his hand through his thick, black hair, ruining its style completely.

"That's what I mean!" he practically roared. "Who doesn't know if they are hungry or not? What is wro—" He stopped himself midsence, took a deep breath. "You know what? Forget it. I'm feeding you anyway, and then you will tell me exactly who and what did this to you."

"Why?" she asked, taking her life into her own hands.

Hades had turned around to begin his furious pacing again, but at her question, he froze, his back growing se beneath his jacket.

"So I can murder them," he replied, not turning around.

"I see," Poppy said, although she didn't see at all. One of the cats was attempting to climb her skirt as if it was trellis, ruining the tattered fabric. "Will you tell me why you brought me here, my lord?"

"I thought it was clear," he replied, slowly turning to face her. "You are here to pay."

"For dressing up in men's clothes?"

"For spying on the Hell Club."

"I was not spying!"

Careful, her brother's voice said in her ear. That sounded an awful lot like defiance.

"I'm sorry," she told her brother in her head. Except that she said it out loud. Hades lifted a dark eyebrow; how could the man possibly look so annoyed and so handsome at the same time? "But I really was not here to spy. My reasons were…of another nature altogether."

"There is no need to try to convince me, sweetheart," Hades spat, "I have planned some very special treats for you, that I'm sure will loosen your tongue soon enough. I need you to start talking, and even though you did a lot of that the other night, you never said anything of substance."

"T…treats?" A shiver ran down her spine.

More torture? Would there be rice and seeds here too? Her knees almost buckled at the idea.

"Quite," Hades said, his face hardening. "I shall need to know why you were spying, what you find out, who sent you, what they…" He stopped, looked at her. "Are you all right?" he asked unexpectedly, his voice strange, unnatural.

Poppy was not all right.

She hadn't been all right in years and years.

But no one had ever noticed; why was he asking her now? It made little sense. She opened her mouth to speak and the blood drained from her head, pooling at her aching legs. She felt like an empty sack, about to be poured out onto the carpet and disappear forever.

"Oh, for God's sake," the words burst out of Hades with a mix of impatience and disgust, but she heard them as if through a wall of water that was quickly swallowing her up.

And then she was being lifted by something strong—arms?—that swayed slightly. Someone was carrying her. The relief was so immense that she gave a little sigh.

Too loud.

Hades chuckled above her head.

His chest was rock-hard, but still a better pillow than the cold floor of the chapel. She leaned against it, not caring how angry he would get. What was another man angry with her? She must have got used to it by now, surely.

"What are you hiding," she said, lost in that trance-like state, somewhere between fainting and dying. "What are you hiding that is so important as to make you paranoid that every poor soul who walks into your precious club is spying on you?"

Hades swallowed loudly above her ear, said nothing.

"Oh, I hit the nail on the head, did I?" Poppy went on. "Who would have thought that my brain still works? Well, somewhat works." She chuckled to herself. When was the last time she had laughed? Maybe she never had; she couldn't remember. "Now. What are you hiding that is so important? It's driving you crazy, you know."

"Stop talking," Hades said, biting his lip.

He was barely out of breath, even though he was walking as fast as before, and carrying her as well. His arms around her felt relaxed, not too se or struggling. But his Adam's apple was bobbing—she could feel it against her ear. What had him so distressed, if it wasn't her weight on his arms?

Oh.

Oh.

"It's not something," she said, with a sudden epiphany. "It's a someone."

And that was when Hades dropped her to the ground.