Forbidden Desire

5 - A Researched Method

It's quite evident that her vision swarms as the hybrid hauls my pet out of the room. Her ears must be ringing as she tries to catch her balance. My fury has calmed, my gaze lingering back onto the papers, a pen tapping. I couldn't look back up. If I did, I would see the way she slumped, or hear her hitched breath in that silent, broken sob. The mask would then shatter, and we'd both be dead.

I recall the ghost of the impact still molted in the palm of my right hand. A tingle of heat and a sickening reminder of the blow I'd landed on her temple. It was calculated. Hard enough to bruise, to satisfy something I do not yet know, but not hard enough to crack a bone.

The text before me manifests into a blur, the harsh words I spat coming back, "Beneath a street rat!" The words tasted like ash. What beauty compares to a street rat?

I lean back, the leather of my chair creaking. My glass of metallic tea washes my thoughts. From the drawing room, the sound of faint, melodic laughter, followed by the shrill, insincere chatter of the other ladies. Vulture they were. Adorned in silk. There was a pretence in coming for tea, a truth in only being here to glimpse the newly acquired beast of Lord Dominic Blackwood. They wanted to see if the rumors held truth. Had Dominic truly brought a pet into his home?

I have to tame her, I remind myself. Nothing else matters. If I don't, someone else surely will. A master with similar intent to Valerian's measured cruelty.

Ten minutes phase by. Then Fifteen. I will my being to focus on the numbers - a crate of lead rifles, a new battalion of young minds, business for the king. My ears, however, manage to chime into the frequency of the room next door. I hear the porcelain clink. The pouring of liquid. The sound of the world coming to an end.

A sharp, jagged screech pierced the air, proceeded by the certain shatter of silver and its impact on the floor. My chair doesn't shriek this time. It meets the floor. I don't have time to think or calculate as I mask my features with irritation, remembering the cruel master I'm supposed to be.

I slow my pace, hesitating along the threshold. The scene is a bloodbath of petalled tea. A hallow and steep crimson liquid everywhere. Splattered across the lace tablecloth, soaking my Turkish rug and I'll be damned, dripping over the cream silk gown of Lady Tessa.

Lyra stands in the middle of commotion, her face the color of chalk. Swaying, hand pressed over her temple, a bruise forming right where I had struck her. The shattered ceramic laid bare at her feet, seeping below her and staining the furs.

"Lord Dominic!" Lady Tessa wailed, like a untrained child, her contorted face masked with the satisfaction of her atrocious fury, "Look at this! Look at what your creature has done! She's ruined the silk the king himself bestowed to me."

My mother stays perfectly still, a hollow shake, containing the urge to laugh. The scene is quiet amusing. Her cup halfway to her lips. She doesn't look irritated, more concerned laded into her icy expression as she observes the chaos. Well Lord Blackwood? How will my son and master of his house handle his unqualified acquisition?

"I told you," my voice coldly relaying, a growl of predatory possessiveness vibrating in my chest. One I do not recognize. I tread along the broken glass, each step igniting a blaze against my core that threatens to burn, finally reaching my pet, "I told you she was clumsy."

The heat radiating from her is tangible and concrete: the stress, the heat and pain, the sheer exhaustion of the auction and the move into an unfamiliar environment. She's burning up. Her gaze is deliberate, planned. A recurring reminder, unspoken, from the moment I told her not to look me in the eye.

She needs rests. I know that much. Instead, I grab her chin and force her to look at the sobbing Tessa, "Apologize," I hissed.

Lyra's broken lips part, however, no sound is received. She sways, her fading in motion. Her weight shifts against by bigger build, her knees beginning to buckle. Should she fall now, I thought, if she fainted, these vultures would call for the whip. They'd say she was faking it to escape her assured punishment.

I lean in, my breath barely a whisper on the crevasse of her lobe, "I said apologize, or I'll be forced to do something we both regret."

"I-I... I am..." she whispers, her voice an audible crack.

"She's not apologizing, Dominic!" Tessa snapped, on the brink of whining, shaking as a maid tends to her stained skirts. "She's mocking me. Us! You! She did it on purpose. I know it. I saw it," she clears her throat, "the way she looked at me as if she were higher. She thinks she's better than us."

A force of spiced temptation controls Tessa as she lunges for Lyra, sending the finishing blow. The pressure in the room is suffocating. I look at Lyra, the exact moment her greens disappear into white and her eyes roll back.

I catch her before more damage can be done.

Finally, my mother breaks her silence, "She is unwell," her icy gaze forces Tessa to retreat with her hand, taking a step back, "Does your anger for the finery of silk boast beyond your care for others? For the health of a house?"

"She's faking," Lady Tessa tries, "A common trick of low-born." She backs aways in disgust as if Lyra is a disease. A contagious sickness.

"The tea is over," I announce over the room, "I'll whip her until her skin peels. Until the very bone I wish to crack becomes visible," I promise, "Get out! All of you. Now!"

They scramble like hens ready for slaughter, their eyes full of fear for my assured punishment. My mother holds my gaze. She suspects something but doesn't quite say. She places her cup with a clatter, her annoyance directed not at the girl in my arms. At me. "She needs rest," she explains as if it is not the most obvious thought that plagues my mind. She takes her leave.

I look down at Lyra. She limp, her head falling against my biceps, exposing the pale, vulnerable lines along her throat. Her temple darkens, a vivid blue-purple. A canvas of my anger. A brand of my own making. A surge to protect her rages through my very veins. It's pure, raw, unadulterated, and a distraught calamity.

My adrenaline spikes as the doctor informs me of an unyielding fever. I watch, dazed, as the maids dress her. The first night, the silk is pink, her heat a force I cannot put out, "She is still under, My Lord," my butler informs. The second night, the lace is white. "The fever is yet to break, master."

I gaze onto the grounds, cars flowing relentlessly, the sky a subtle reflection of my soul. Nerved and uncertain. The wait for her to recoil from her deep slumber is tedious, unnerving. The doctor, my butler, the staff - all of them useless to my demands.

I tend the passage of my halls, my hand grazing the rails. An unmistaken creak in the steps. My gaze lifts. Without thinking, without so much as a thought, I race to capture her before her fall reaches its completion. There is a burn in my lungs, a fire I don't wish to part from. It hammers against my ribs. It terrorizes me, shakes me to face the released tension my bones have kept.

She reeks of fever and lavender and buttery honey, her gaze shifting below us, hung on the drunk state between the land of the living and the urge of sleep. Her breath is uneven, "I'm sorry, Lord Blackwood. It was an accident," she tilts her head up, her voice a dry, croaked rasp, skittering like the dead along the grave, "My head - tt-the swelling, the tea. I did not mean it."

"Master," I correct, "I'm sorry master." My voice is low and distant, a jagged vibration hiding a tremor in my soul. I wanted to tell her the tea didn't matter. The dress and the ladies didn't matter. It didn't matter as much as the light returning to her eyes. However the wall had ears. The floor boards had mouths. If I told her my worries, surely before the break of dawn, news would reach Valerian.

I cannot wait to hear the response from a ghost the collection of fragile silk and chattering tethered teeth. When her eyes met mine, she didn't see me - not the man who sat at her bedside for three long nights. They saw the monster from the hall. The monster that dealt the weight of the blow I delivered and for which she apologizes for.

Her words hung between us, my heels hotter than the moment, my boots thudding rhythmically as the master returns.

The morning brings about a reset. It allows for the belief that the previous days were nothing more than forgotten memories. The sun feels like an insult as I clip the collar around her neck. It's a simple silver bank with the initials of my house. Of my name. The click echos through the hollow void of the plush town car. It's mechanical and devoid of the emotional ritual that some masters prefer.

A unspoken, but absolute hierarchy is known about. I seat high against the leather cushion, towering her kneeled taken position, the scent of the expensive sandalwood interior, masking the musk of splattering rain around us. The sun fades into the clouds as rain picks up it's brutal pound.

Lyra looks more vibrant today. Her fever retreated, her skin more creamier than the dry ash it resembled in her sick state. Her tucked knees are a constant remind of the 'street rat' status I forced upon her. Every swerving motion of the car has me contemplating to reach, and steady her, but my hands stay folded in my lap as I stare out the tinted glass.

The building looms over us, casting a shadow of mahogany shelves. The Royal Library was like a city, a temple of forgotten gods, hushed whispers and bustling scholars. I wait for her to step under the shade of my umbrella, the only sort of protection I can gift.

We head, on my lead, towards a secluded wing, shadowed by dust and the lights the being to seep through the stain-glass, the notes of centuries old music dancing in the dimmed silence, "Stay within this section," I command, my voice an echo bouncing off my leather bound slacks, "You are free to read to your liking. Find your entertainment, provided that you do not wander from my sight. I have work to do. I wish not to be disturbed."

She drifts towards the romance isle, something haunting in seeing the collared and owned girl reach for stories of love, of escaping and hot f*****g. I turn before my growing obsession can fester into a foothold, my boots heavy as I move towards the restricted archives.

My "work" was a decent into hell. A madness meant for the white room. I pulled the heavy rusted volume of dust from the shelf: Cognitive Fragmentation: The Art of Conquest. I spread it open, the pages detailing the psychological breakage, subjugation pets to be tamed. The pages groan as I skin through the diagrams: sleep deprivation schedules, chemical insertions, r**e. The clinical process to break the human will.

I needed to understand how Valerian thought. I needed to know what "break" meant to him. How he expected me to accomplish this wager. As I read about Stockholm Effect and sensory impoverishment, I find my gaze lifting over the book.

The gaps allow a glimpse of Lyra, sitting on the floor as she read about her heroine and lost herself to a world with her shining knight. While she read of how to save the heart, I researched on how to break the mind.