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“With pleasure, Lynch.”
12
Deep Shit
Willow
I wake up likeI’m digging my way out of the softest, warmest grave. I can’t even remember the last time I slept so well. My vision is blurry and out of focus for a long moment as I blink away the grogginess.
I’m lying down on the firm surface of a dark couch. There’s a fire—a real one—burning in a fireplace. A wall of exposed dark stone, a smooth floor with a square grey carpet, a large, low glass table.
I roll myself upright to get a better look, slumping against the back of the couch. Stark, dark furniture, cavernous space, a wall of black mirrors—no, not mirrors, window. To my left, near the fireplace, three shadows sit like obsidian statues.
Three enormous dogs with pointed ears and long snouts and clever eyes. Black Dobermans, watching me with the patience of a predator waiting for its prey to slip up before pouncing.
But of course, I already slipped up, and the pouncing has already happened. My memories take shape. The run, the dog, the bite. With the remembering comes a fresh flood of pain throbbing through my leg.
I look down: my jeans are gone. I’m in my black underwear and jumper, and my right leg is wrapped in crisp white bandages, secured with bandage pins. A professional job.
Raising my arm, I weakly jab the air with a middle finger in the direction of the dogs.
“Fuck you,” I tell them. The one responsible will know I’m addressing him.
“Don’t be rude to my dogs,” a voice drawls from behind me.
I don’t bother turning; Luca Fletcher-Lowe strolls into view. He’s got two glasses in his hands, a thumb of amber liquor in them. His movements are so slow and still that the alcohol doesn’t so much as tilt in the glasses as he sits down facing me. He sets the glasses down on two coasters, one on my side of the table and the other on his.
He gestures at the glass in a sort ofgo-aheadmovement, and I raise my eyebrows.
“Really? You think I’m going to drink anything you offer me?”
“If I want to drug you, Willow, I have another needle in my pocket and several more where it came from. This isn’t a mediaeval royal court, and I’m not some devious traitor duke. I don’t need to poison your drink.”
“What did you give me?” I ask him, rubbing my temples.
The grogginess is wearing off, but the pain is slamming home with a vengeance. Not just my leg but my side, my head, and my neck where he stabbed me.
“Just a nice polite dose of propofol,” Luca says with a gracious smile. “Nothing as glamorous and dramatic as your soproxin.”
“Such a gentleman.”
By the looks of this place—the abundance of the space, the sparse, bleak decor and the three dogs waiting by the broad hearth—Luca has brought me back to his. I didn’t think he would; I didn’t really imagine him as an entity with ahome. You’d think someone like him would inhabit some shadowy pocket in the in-between space between the different layers of hell.
The pain hammering me right now is distracting, but not distracting enough to stop me from realising I am in the shit.
Deep,deepshit.
I’ve gotten myself out of bad situations before, but I’ve never found myself quite so trapped. This is going to require ingenuity, extraordinary powers of manipulation, strength or some sort of deus ex machina of luck and good fortune. Probably all of those things combined.
I grab the glass from its coaster and slam it back. Fuck it. If nothing else, the alcohol might give me some relief from the pain. It burns all the way down, but it does make me immediately more alert and alive. I sit back and meet Luca’s gaze head-on.
“Alright. Spit it out, then. What do you want?”
His eyes are a shade of grey that’s more an absence of colour than anything else. His features are carved and almost delicate, that sort of fragile aristocratic beauty of someone who’s bathed in milk their whole lives. He’s pale all over, from his eyes to his hair to his skin. There’s a sickliness to him, too, like he was born wrong, like he’s half a ghost. His gaze is unnerving, but I hold it still.
“What makes you think I want anything?” he asks.
“You rich fucksalwayswant something.” I gesture vaguely in the direction of our surroundings. “And you didn’t bring me back to your place to cook me dinner.”
