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But Rochelle spoke over whatever she started to say. “Ladies, let’s not make a bigger scene than necessary.” She paused at Aric’s side until both women were watching her with suspicious stares. Then she stepped forward again, giving a wide berth to the man Aric still had in chains on the floor. “How about I walk out with you?”
Aric frowned, but when neither prostitute immediately argued, he held his tongue. He disliked the idea of letting Rochelle wander unguided through Awora, but he recognized that the situation had gotten somewhat out of hand. If she could get them to leave peacefully, that was preferable to involving local authorities and formally exposing the Lamont family’s dirty secrets. He did still need to work with Harald for a short while.
Rochelle stopped in the doorway and turned a small smile toward him. “I’ll be back soon, Lord Vardanyan.” She inclined her head and pulled the door shut behind her, leaving him alone with the disgruntled Lamont males.
Aric released a breath and dismissed the magic restricting Lennart.
Harald reclaimed his chair and rubbed at his forehead. “I would have stayed in bed if I’d known this was how my day would go.”
Lennart jumped to his feet and lunged at Aric with a furious roar, magic wrapped around his fist as he swung for a gut punch.
Aric sidestepped, curled his fingers around Lennart’s forearm, and twisted them both until Lennart was pinned at the waist against his father’s desk, facing his wide-eyed father, arm again bent behind his back. This time Aric pressed the fingers of his free hand into the back of Lennart’s throat, over the spine. “Surrender, or I’ll incinerate your unnecessary organs where you stand and then arrest what’s left of you. I’m not in the mood to cater to your wounded pride.”
Lennart let out a low, clearly frustrated growl.
Harald sighed heavily. “Go back to the hotel, Lennart. I’m going to be working today, and likely tomorrow as well.”
A rush of air preceded the release of tension in Lennart’s body before he said, “Fine. You win, Sentry.”
Aric removed his hands from the other man and took a step back. “If you cross paths with my apprentice outside, ignore her.”
Lennart only curled his lip in Aric’s direction before stomping from the room.
****
“Are you at least gonna pay us?” the woman with the shorter, darker hair asked after the three of them had cleared the steps outside the building. She was the one who hadn’t seen fit to flirt with Aric while clinging to her client—or customer, or whatever the appropriate word was.
Rochelle arched a brow at the obscene question. “Pay you?”
The other woman, whose hair leaned a little more auburn than brown, crossed her arms over her chest. The circles under her eyes were much more suited to the glare that accompanied this stance than the expressions she’d worn earlier. “Yeah,” she said. “You cost us good money.”
Rochelle bit back a scoff. “I didn’t cost you anything, and I have no obligation to pay you. If you’re short on funds, lingering around here won’t help you.” She had a few other things she was tempted to say, but she kept them to herself. Her real objective for escorting these women out of the nobleman’s office hadn’t had anything to do with them, so the sooner they left the sooner she could hunt down a restroom. Or a closet.
Both women made displeased faces at her, but a slamming door and stomping feet drew their attention. Rochelle adjusted to keep from leaving her back to the volatile energy. And once again, she quickly found herself wishing she knew Aric’s teleportation spell. The man barreling down the stairs and glaring out over all three of them was the very one who’d caused the scene—Lennart Lamont.
“Oh, Captain!” the flirtatious auburn-haired woman said, bouncing forward as if Rochelle weren’t there at all.
Lennart, however, locked his glare on Rochelle and moved straight into her personal space. “You’ve got a lot of nerve to evenlookat me, Zryn.”
Rochelle curled her hands at her sides and lifted her chin defiantly, refusing to let this sort of man cower her. “Your rank doesn’t impress me, Captain. Nor does your lifestyle.” She was probably out of line, but she could only stomach so much.
His hand shot out, connecting solidly with the side of her face and sending her stumbling back as pain exploded in her jaw. “Would o’ thought a bitch like you knew how to shut up and play along.”
It hurt to open her mouth enough to speak, and the searing pain had brought tears to her eyes. Rochelle lifted a hand gingerly to her face, turned her back on the disgusting man, and started up the stairs. She just wanted to get away from him, though it grated on her to ignore the women’s jeering laughter and what sounded like Lamont spitting after her. She’d have to remember how to heal herself before she returned to Aric, too. It wouldn’t take long for that backhand to show. She might be living in a world other than the one she’d been born in, but she knew her body. She knew when she’d been hit hard enough to bruise.
She also knew she couldn’t wander aimlessly throughout the elder Lamont’s building without raising the wrong kind of attention. There was no signage or partially open doorway to help reveal a conveniently located restroom, and the front lobby-like space was the worst to have any sort of breakdown. So Rochelle hiked up the first flight of interior stairs and went to the only alternative she could think of, as horrible and unpleasantly cliché as it seemed. There was a nook, not even a closet, tucked beneath the stairs leading up to the third floor of the building. Thanks to the way the building was structured, and maybe the time of day, that corner was dark.
She crawled to the back of the space, pulled her knees up to her chest, and whimpered against the pain as she buried her face in her own lap. Tears brought on by pain both inside and out, old and new, rolled past her lashes.
Of all the names in this new, more fantastical world that man had to have a name so similar? Lennart wasn’t the same as Leonard, but it wasn’t hard to hear a resemblance, either. There was nothing about Lennart Lamont that truly resembled Leonard Bailey. Nothing except for the disdain both men held for her in the end. And their willingness to lash out because of it.
Rochelle’s throat swelled as she fought to keep quiet. She wasn’t likely to be seen, but she would easily be heard if she made noise. She needed to get this turmoil out of her system. Why was she even so upset?Shock.Surely it was shock. She hadn’t had a good relationship with her father for the majority of her life, and he’d been gone for more than a decade before she’d left that world for her new one. She hadn’t expected to encounter anyone who in any way made her so immediately reflect on her father, so she hadn’t been prepared for it.
“What’s the point of you?”The question Leonard had so often growled at her when he had too much to drink dragged across her mind like a dull steak knife.
Bridget had always swooped in after those horrible nights with a warm hug and a wide smile, insisting that her father wasn’t in his right mind and didn’t even know what he was saying, that he was wrong. She’d kept up that argument, more or less, even when Leonard took his own life and left behind only a short note and a pile of debt a then-eighteen-year-old Rochelle couldn’t have hoped to pay.
“I’m finally free of you.”That was what Rochelle’s father had written, in large, distinct letters. He hadn’t named her, hadn’t explained what he meant, but he hadn’t needed to. She was an only child, her mother long deceased and both sets of grandparents passed. His depression and his drinking had cost him his job around the time her mother’s father left them, so they’d been pushing through on a meager inheritance, government aid, and later her part-time income. She’d been looking forward to leaving for college, but she’d never imagined she’d come home from her high school graduation celebration to find her father dead and those last words of hate waiting for her on the counter beside his keys.
