Forbidden Desire

7 - Runaway

The hung silence the restricted archives have taken seem to be a lie. The librarian constantly pressing lip to finger as my kind passes through. I've been staring at this pictogram for over an hour, the ink beginning to look like the shiver shine of Lyra's collar.

My skin tingles, a stiff dryness that tightens, a premonition of disaster prickles. One I most certainly seek not to whisper into actualization. The cool breath of the hidden dark breathes along the hairs spanning my neck. They stand, and so do my eyes as I search for her.

I spin my head towards the romance aisle, swirling the stagnant air, expecting, hoping to see her small, peaked, bowed head tucked with her attention in the collection of rubbish she reads, hiding behind foolish dreams.

The aisle is empty.

Like the fool I am, swaggering excuses breach my mind, defending her absence. Maybe she has gone looking in a different, further genre? I questioned my panic away. Maybe she had found the bathroom the relieve herself?

Hidden in the crook of my searched methods lies the information I gathered on her. To break the source, you must first know it. Not just know it, but better than its own self. I read through the files my men sought in the underground markets, old colliding with the new: red hair, O negative, twenty years-old, green eyes, height. Finally, I reach what I paid for. I dissect the papers with precision. The specimen had been cut deeper.

Asthma. It isn't proportional. Miniscule. If not treated well, she'll begin to hyperventilate, foam forming at the corners of her mouth as she shakes unconsciously. Her blood glucose levels are balanced. No need for insulin. She had perfect dental record - a feature of high value in the Auction Houses, despite her thin frame. Something we'll have to work on. I do prefer my pets to fattened with some meat.

I underline with the ink from my pen. Her birthday, I pay no heed to. Her mother looks identical to her, save for the mole the elder has. She lays in her grave now, while her father is marked unknown, most likely dead as well. To my surprise and knowledge, a living relative bears her blood. Leo Hayes.

He has thin frame even for a child of eight. He shares the same mother as my Lyra. The boy serves as an attendant to the little master of Sterling Ridge. A promising and prestigious estate with close ties to my family and uncle, the king. A household no further than an hour from my own. Neat.

Her eyes have no medical issues, and there are neither any mental nor physical issues left to resolve. Her periods, however, tend to be irregular. The files of the auction house seem to be in check. The last line claims her body is clear of any permanent lashes. However, once I gaze my own findings, they are not in tune. My blood boils thin. I've been cheated. The Royal Auction will face me for the lie they've documented.

My slave is supposed the be unblemished. My own investigators confirmed it, reporting one scar from her childhood. The master of auctions himself, having stained my art. Yet as I sit in the dark alcove of dimmed lighting, a 'deep laceration' haunts my men's reports. The Auction House had forged a fake to raise her starting bid. No one lies to a Blackwood and keeps his tongue.

Once over, I check back along the romance aisle, my mind clouded with racing concern.

I calm the heavy thoughts as figure catches my peripherals. A sharp icicle pierces my chest. Assassins? Rebels? I don't have time to process my hypothesis before a voice booms from the end of the corridor. One I would recognize even in slumber with a sickening jolt of sureness.

"Blackwood! Is that you larking like some beast in the shadows of dead debris?"

I smoother my features to mask the worry that consumes me. I turn to face Crawford with my unfeigned bored arrogance. He was a business partner. A member of the Council alongside Valerian. His attendance was few in counting, preferring the walls of booths and the daze the liquor promised. He ran the Northern Docks with an unyielding iron fist, seeking the best trading imports for New London.

While his...particular taste in hobbies and tardiness never interfered with the appearance of his ties, today he looked... disheveled. His waistcoat crocked, shagged breathing with flushed adrenaline contouring his pale cheeks along the few buttons spent and unestablished.

"Easton," I drawled, my pulse a drumbeat of alarm, "I didn't take you for a man of letters."

"I wasn't here for the books," Crawford spat as if I'd insulted his name, adjusting his coat in a fitting huff of annoyance, "A wretched slave girl dared to interrupt my... private activities in the East section of the Alcove. Some prying little bird with brown-no red hair, some silver collar and those piercing green eyes. She ran like a deer before I could teach her the price of its wandering gaze."

The world tilted. 'Little bird? Red hair? Piercing green eyes?'

I pay him no heed. I pay no laughter, expected of a man of my station to laugh this into a joke. I don't offer help in catching his little intruder when I have my own to find. I race towards the romance section, shifting a brunette slave who adjusts her skirt. My boot thunders against the wood. I check every gap. Every nook. Between the shelves. Every shadow behind the pedestals. Once. Twice over.

Empty. Only the scent of her, to tease me to madness, left behind. The faint trace of lavender from my house remained.

Crawford receives my wrath, the 'cold master' persona cracking to reveal the predator beneath. My rage wasn't a performance this time. It was the real, breathing, living thing. Hot, white, and blinding.

I pay no attention to the girl in his presence, "Where did the slave go?" I hiss, stepping into the crook of his space until our chests were mare inches apart. The air between us spinning, crackling with thunder, "Where did my pet run, Easton? Answer me before I decide to reveal your daunting corruption of the Northern Docks, worth reporting, to the Council."

His eyes recoiled, widening at the undone, sheer, raw violence in my tone. He had never seen me lose my composure. No one had. To him, I was the stoic. A strategist. A master of secrets. His image now so heightened to a man whose most prized possession had slipped through his fingers in a building packed with wolves.

"She... she," he stutters, looking between the girl behind him and myself, "She bolted towards the Great Hall. The fields of the courtyard," his shaking fingers pointed towards the main exit. "She disrupted a group of students and collided with a professor on her way out. She looked terrified, Dominic. Like she'd seen a ghost."

Or a monster, my heart yells, sinking into an abyss void of glare.

I don't wait for his farewell. I'm moving through the exit, only to retrace my steps to Crawford, "What did she see?" I demand to know.

He doesn't hesitate to answer, "Us."

I look between Easton and his slave, a motion that nerves my mind, and then I understand. Even my the simplicity of the single world, I do not blame my Lyra for running. An uneducated mind viewing pleasure as violence. She had seen something she wasn't meant to see. And now she was out there, collared, marked, and alone in a world that would see fit to tear her apart just for the sport of it.

"Speak of this to a soul, and I'll have you by the balls you f**k your slave with. I'll ruin you. Your lands collected, titles stripped, illegal solicitations barred raw."

She should have listened! I kick my way between students who part to avoid my anger and the cold gaze in my eyes. I told her to stay, to not wander, to not disturb me. I should have kept her by my side. Protected her. Shielded her from the darker sides of the world she now walks.

A sea of faces raises my hope, crushed when none of them are hers. None hold the green eyes that belong to me and myself alone. The scent of old papers, the sound of a thousand whispers all mask my desperate search for my pet.

My boots echo along the courtyard. She was here just a moment ago, her scene brief and fading. The short shine of the sky clouds once again, the threat of rain exceedingly real and abrupt in a pitter-platter pattern.

The rain intensifies, turning the city into a blurred canvas of gray and charcoal. My legs burn. Not from the sprint, but the toxic realization that I'd let her slip away. That the distinct scent I trace is fast-fading. Every honk and corner, an endless series of possibilities she could be, an entire district waiting to swallow her whole.

I turn into a narrow, damp gutter. The alleyway smells of wet stones and rotting peels, hitting me like a physical blow. Then I hear it. It's quiet, but sure. A coarse, mocking laugh that has the hairs along my arm standing.

"You lost, little girl? Where is your master?"

I stopped, my shadow stretching thin and long against the brick wall. A trio of hybrid, low-level. dockworkers reeking of charred salmon had her pinned against the fire escape. The ringleader, a bulking man of uneven build, eyes a yellowed cur, pressing himself into her chest, his hand wandering her profile... my silver collar.

Lyra shakes, trembling, her back arched against the cold, rotting metal, but her voice holds a sharp edge of defiance that I hadn't expected.

"Do more than this, and Lord Blackwood will finish your lineage," she spat.

For a beat, they stilled. The name Blackwood carried the weight of a guillotine throughout the country. I saw a flash of raw, primal, primitive fear cross the leader's face. A flicker of recognition that they were playing with a timed detonator. It was brief. The fear curdles away into a stupid bravado.

They weren't desperate enough, it seemed. Didn't fear or understand the urgency of this situation.

"Well" the leaders smiles, a sneer spread cross his face, his finger hooking under the edge of her collar, ignoring the visible 'DB' initials that was his certain death warrant, "I don't see Lord Blackwood here to save you. Maybe we'll trade his valuable possession for some coin?"

His sentence doesn't see completion.

Atoms collide. I don't just move, I fission though time itself, vibrating into existence behind him. One moment, a shadow. The next his nightmare. I catch the scalp of his head, ripping his skull, placing my hand over the underside of his chin, my fingers digging into the soft tissue of his flesh.

"That won't be necessary."

I don't grace him with time, nor the mercy of a clean kill. The rage I had been suppressing since the drawing room, the guilt of the blow I had dealt her, and the terror in my search all came screaming to the visible surface. I sank my fangs into his jugular, veins spilling along my tongue. The hot, copper surge of his life-force filling my senses. This wasn't like the crimson tea I wine down at breakfast. It's not like the steepness that ladies prefer. This is raw. Carnal. Authentic. A metallic delicacy. I don't just drink. I drained. In a matter of seconds, his body went limp, a hollow husk of meat and bone remained.

I dropped him like the refuse he was. Never again would his filth graze my Lyra.

The other two don't wait to become like their predecessor. They scrambled backward, boots splashing the oily puddles as they fled the scene into the dark. I let them go. They weren't worth Blackwood time. I didn't care about witnesses spreading the deeds of my brutal kill to those who dared cross me. I only cared about the girl shivering against the brick wall.

I turned to her, my mouth stained and covered with the crimson evidence of my devout hunger. My protection ready to wrap its way around her like a blanket. I want to engulf the red bundle of locks and whisper that she is safe to cry in my hold. Such services vanish. The 'protective savior' is gone. In his place stands the 'enraged master' whose warning she'd disobeyed.

I step into her space, destroying any bubble distancing us. My boots crunched on the gravel. I reached out my hand, trembling not with fear, but with a fury so cold it felt like ice. I wring her by her collar - my collar - jerking the spitfire until her face in inches from mine.

"I told you," my rage blares, nothing left unmarked, the vibration of my voice rattles my chest, "to stay in your section. Not to wander! Do you have any idea what you've cost me today?"

Her gaze, forced, meets my own by the powerful grip. Her eyes were wide, pupils blown out of proportion as if she had just been caught by Easton in wing of the shelves.

"Tell me," I hiss, the coldness in my voice seeping into a shield for a roar of guilt in my chest, "Lord Crawford says you were a peeping tom. He says you hid. You watched him and her. Tell me exactly what had you so spooked to your core that you forgot my deliberate command to stay put."

Lyra's lips tremble, a sob catching her in the throat, but she doesn't spill.

I pin her along the brick, restricting her breath, "What did you see in that alcove, pet? Describe every sordid detail of what has you trembling like a thin leaf!"

"He... he was breaking her, master. He was hitting her with his body... and... and I thought... I thought..."

"You thought what, slave?!"

"I thought such breaking would find me from your hands!"

Her confession was like a physical blow. I let go of her as if she had burned me, her fire a molten ash I dared not inhale.

The rain blasts a cold air, digging her skirts to the exact flesh that will feel my wrath. I have decided how she shall repent for disobedience. The honks of distant motors pull me from the trance of her words. She sees me as brutal as the raw pounding of Easton, and she shall have her monster.