aconite

i. balsamine

Copper Bourbon tastes bitter when a pistol's trigger feels so sweet.

The expensive liquor's wooden taste lingers in the back of Albe de Clare's throat, like heartburn. Yet, his tongue sits motionlessly in his mouth, swelled from the corrosion caused by the alcohol. His jaw remains unhinged, loosely hanging in the basket created by his tender facial muscles. His eyes drag heavily over his desk's content—documents and flyers litter the sandalwood desk like snow decorating a porch after a long June night.

He extends his arm, trembling timidly, and plants the flat bottom of the tumbler next to the gun. The black, hollow iris is looking at him with vengeance. With lust. Beneath the tumbler is a vile golden file containing the demise of his existence. He presses his lips together, staring at the crude handwriting in the bottom corner of the file. His eyes barely touch the words, and as if in a car crash his head starts to burn. He feels paralyzed from the neck down. 

Elijah Francis Boyes-de Clare.

Oh, how sweet the boy's name looked in the messy handwriting of a cop who could not be bothered any less with yet another missing affluent teenager. They gave Elijah a few weeks to return—like every other Kensington brat driven by parental hatred. There was a running-away flu amongst the richest street in London's kids, as if they wanted to spite their parents by getting abducted and killed while they were out rebelling. Elijah's case had to be different. The child was stubborn, but he did not hate his father and he did not have an inferiority complex.

Albe pushes his chair back, as far away as possible from the sight of the name. He has read over the yellow folder's content over and over again. He thought the folder would contain a novel—an entire memoir, but there is only two pages to it: the missing person's report and a summary of the boy's roundabouts mere hours before his feet never settled behind the front door of Albe's Kensington mansion. He twirls in his chair from left to right, bringing the rest of the room into perspective.

His office, compared to the rest of his mansion, seems rather measly. Albe's house has the most exquisite marble counters and Swedish timber laid across every floor, knocking to the hollow footsteps of his home staff. His office has nothing the rest of the house has. No Swedish Timber, polished monthly. No marble countertops over silky oak cabinetry, where the finest imported truffles and salmon steaks are sliced and fried. Nothing.

He has the same simple sandalwood desk he bought from his third paycheque about twenty-five years prior—after he moved out of his nan's house for the first time. He had been working for the small agricultural importing and exporting company for three months, packing and hitting the tills, of which the two first months of pay were used to cover the rent his mate forgot to pay. A month after the second incident, he kicked his mate out of the flat—he had used the money he owed Albe to buy whiskey sodas at the pub on the ground floor of their apartment building, gambling the rest of his earnings on a horse named Madame Winnings. Ironically the horse did not bring his roommate any winnings other than the gain of cholesterol medication and narcotics anonymous meetings.