AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Shelia finally turned and shuffled back to where she’d come, down the hall with her clip-clop shoes on the tiles.
In just a few moments, a large, stern officer stomped out and stood in Sheila’s place.
“I understand you’re looking for one, Luke Lancaster?” he said, glaring at all of us. “I’m afraid he is not available at the moment. He has been assigned to a re-education program that starts in an hour. There is no way to stop the process once it begins.”
“Do you know who I am?” Alexander sneered.
“Yes, Mr. Remington, I do,” the man replied. He was trying to be stoic, but his face twitched and revealed his nervousness. “You aren’t able to alter the course of this program.”
“My father can,” Alexander replied. “And he will. I will call him if you’d like. In fact, I’m sure he would love to talk to you.”
The mere thought of Alexander’s father left me with a strange feeling, like an oil slick across my skin.
The officer wanted to fight back. I could see it in the way he clenched and unclenched his jaw. But again, that twitch around his eye belied his fear.
He didn’t reply. He turned and walked back, ignoring us altogether.
“You aren’t going to call your dad, are you?” Rome asked.
“No, he’ll bring him out. I know when somebody is beaten, and that man is whipped,” Alexander said with a cocky smugness that left a stomach rippling disgust in my mouth. He transformed into the man I despised, the Upper who was so infatuated with his own immense power that he couldn’t help himself. He took up too much air in the room. He sucked up all the oxygen and left nothing for the rest of us. Not even Rome, his equal.
When the officer returned just moments later, Alexander’s grin grew lopsided, and he knew he would get his own way.
“Luke—” the officer began to say.
“Mr. Lancaster to you,” Alexander insisted.
“Mr. Lancaster will be out shortly,” he said, his eyes dropping low, and he looked at the floor. “You may collect him on the side of the building, the Lower entrance.”
“The Lower entrance, what?” Alexander demanded.
The officer’s eyes flicked up, and he said, “The Lower entrance,Sir.”
“Thank you,” Alexander replied. “You’ve been most helpful.”
Sarcasm dripped from his words and
Sarcasm dripped from his words, and the thrill of his power vibrated through me. I immediately banished it from my mind, both the thrill and the pleasure I gleaned from being attached to somebody like Alexander Remington. Allowing myself to become corrupted in this place would do terrible things to my soul. I would lose myself to the greed of wealth and position and be ground to dust under the boot of power. I didn’t want to lose my core self to the darkness that played around the edges of Upper life, so I refused to take any sort of pride in it.
We walked around the corner of the building, and the moment we were out of sight of the street, everything became dirtier and rougher. It was built differently, constructed without the elegant embellishments of the facade that faced the Upper side of the world. It angered me again, and I couldn’t understand where I’d gotten the idea that this was wrong in the first place. Even though I felt like I was adjusting to life at Crimson, when I was confronted with such social disparity out in the real world, it enraged me.
But where did that anger form in the first place? Why did it feel like I didn’t belong out here with the social divide staring me right in the face?
I didn’t have much longer to wonder because a door opened just up ahead of us and light spilled out, cutting through the dark side street. My heart caught in my chest, and I held my breath, waiting for Luke to appear.
A guard stuck his head out of the door first, looked around, and spotted us. We kept walking and got close enough that I could see him screw up his face in fear and disgust as he pulled himself back inside.
Seconds later, just as we arrived at the bottom of a short cement staircase, Luke was shoved out without any care. Before I could call out or yell at the guards to be careful with him, the door was pulled shut, and it closed with an audible metal clang. Luke tumbled forward, the metal railing catching him before he rolled off the edge and onto the pavement below.
“Luke!” I cried and ran towards him. Alexander and Rome followed beside me, and Harlow kept close behind. Alexander took the steps two at a time and knelt to lift Luke up. The moment I saw Luke’s face, a sob erupted from deep within my chest, and I made a gargling, animalistic noise of rage and pain.
They had roughed him up at Crimson, but in the short time since then and now, they’d beaten him to a bloody pulp. His eyes were swollen nearly shut, I could just see a flash of color through the slits of his eyelids, and his nose looked crooked and bruised. His cheek was split open, and a dark, mottled color was spreading from the wound, and his lip was torn apart from where a fist had struck it and slammed it into his own tooth. Blood oozed there, dark red and lazy as if it knew it wasn’t going to heal any time soon.
He made a noise, nothing more than a groan and a whisper, but the single word he spoke turned my blood to ice.
“Marianne,” he moaned, and his eyelids fluttered as he lost consciousness in Alexander’s arms.
“Did he say—” Harlow began behind me, but I cut her off as I whirled around to look at her, my eyes impossibly large as they strained with the newfound information.
