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 na?ve 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.

She could barely move, let alone think, but for the first time in her life, ever, things finally had become crystal clear. She now knew beyond any doubt what the truth was, and the truth was this:

She was a sinner.

She was about to be sent to eternal damnation, where she would be consumed by hellish flames for every single moment of eternity.

The only thing that might save her, was to obey her brother.

And obey she did.

She stayed quiet and obeyed. She stayed quiet, until she disappeared.

That was the only way she would be safe.

…

It was five days after her ‘night of sin', and she had been allowed to have a glass of milk and two biscuits after her fast ended. But more than that, she was allowed back into her garden.

It had snowed lightly during the night, and her roses were covered with a thin layer of ice. They were so beautiful, she could cry. Except, since being starved, she hadn't been able to shed a single tear, for some reason. But her throat hurt, her eyes stung and her heart was gripped by a tight fist, and so she knew that she was crying, even without tears.

She had been made to do her daily kneeling on the rice on the church's floor for two hours as soon as she woke up, but the moment her two hours were done, she dragged her aching body back to the house. The cold, combined with the pain and the hunger, made it hard for her limbs to function, and so she didn't even bother trying to dress herself—she had been denied all help from the servants anyway. Still in her nightgown, she wrapped a thick shawl around her throat and shoulders, and threw a thick woolen blanket around her like a cape, and half-hobbled, half-crawled the few steps to the garden.

Once there, she sat down on the half-frozen ground and ran her fingers around the frosty petals of her pink roses. She closed her eyes and let her head fall back. There was no sun in the sky today, only thick, white clouds, filled with snow. But the cold on her skin felt like freedom after being cooped up in her room and in the chapel for so many days.

Without realizing it, she had started repeating the words her brother had drilled into her, inside her head:

Forgive me, for I am a sinner.

Forgive me, for I am a sinner.

Forgive me…

Suddenly, she heard hurried steps behind her.

She tensed, at once alert. What new torture was about to descend on her? She did not recognize these steps as her brother's gait, his was more measured and hesitant, but she might have done something to infuriate him enough to come at her like that.

"What is it?" she turned around, but her movements were sluggish.

She wasn't quick enough.

A hand came around her throat, grabbing her from behind, and another in front of her mouth, stopping her words, her breath.

Strong arms lifted her quite off her feet, and long, hard fingers pressed into her throat and mouth until her eyes bulged with the effort to breathe. She tried to fight, but it had been days since she had had any feeling in her legs and arms, and it was useless to even try.

And then, as she was being carried away from her lovely roses and green leaves, she remembered:

She was a sinner.

She shouldn't resist.

Whatever happened to her, she should just obey.

It must be the will of God, or the will of her brother. They were the same thing, weren't they? It must be some sort of punishment, and she knew she deserved it.

She stopped fighting and let the hands carry her away, barely attempting to breathe behind the beefy hand that was cutting off her air. If she suffocated, then so be it. She would not sin anymore. She would be obedient. She would submit.

Alexei

"Stop! Get your hands off her! Now!" Alexei shouted, disgusted.

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 femi 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. Too obedient.

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

"Walk on, come on!"

His words, meant as a simple order, one he would give his own men any day, took on an ugly color as she put her head down and obeyed at once. It made him feel like a monster. As if he had spoken to an animal; as if he was obeyed by a pet.

She could barely walk as it was.

She took one step and inhaled sharply, as if she were in pain. She stopped. Took another step. Stopped again. At this rate, it would take the rest of this godforsaken winter for her to walk to his barouche. Whenever she moved, her body was stiff, reluctant and awkward, as if in the grip of immeasurable pain.

Alexei had had enough. Disgusted with himself, with her, with everything, he snapped his fingers, and two of his men advanced towards her, picked her up, and put her inside the carriage. She did not once resist or speak, except to ask, most politely:

"Why are you abducting me?", in a voice timid like a small animal's, but with a certain spark to it, as if the fire inside of her was fighting not to go out entirely.

Fight, damn you.

"Do not talk to me," he said sternly.

She stopped talking.

Talk to me, he thought, wishing he could unspeak the words.

He had not expected her to obey him.

She pursed her lips, as if she were afraid that they would open without her permission.

Talk, dammit.

But she didn't. She stayed silent, as he had commanded. Alexei was going crazy—or possibly was already demented and only now finding out.

Did I ever think I liked obedience?

I think I might never have loathed anything more.

The girl was quiet—he did not even know her name, but there would be time enough to find out everything once they were safely inside the club.

At present, Alexei was drowning in self-loathing and anger. There was nothing more to say.

In utter silence and frustration, they made their way to hell.