Hunters

XVI. Helpless

XVI. Helpless

Lecia was alone at Martis. Catherine and Lisette had both left, and Vaughan was in London. It was only she and the staff. This was the type of situation a dog would be perfect for. Christ, why had she said all of that stuff about dogs at all? The poor man had been trying to be romantic.

But that didn’t matter anymore.

When she’d gotten the hastily scrawled note, she had politely asked Izzy to leave the room. She read it a few times before she fully absorbed what it meant, and then she crushed it into a ball and threw it across the room. In that moment she became a wave that swept across every surface of the sitting room and cast everything to the ground. A few vases were broken: shards of glass scattered on the floor, the flowers dropped, and the water forming puddles and seeping into the rugs. There were books that had fallen open, their pages folded. If she’d had a fire in the hearth, she would have burned things.

For a while she found herself on the ground, collapsed and sobbing. When she ran out of tears, she got up, brushed herself off, and went off to find the liquor in one of the lounges. There were so many bottles and decanters in the large cabinet that she spent half a day just sampling them to see which ones she liked. Many of them she was inclined to spit out as soon as she tipped them into her mouth, others she enjoyed. After a time they all started to taste just fine, and she’d stopped pouring her sips into a glass before tasting them.

She made her way back to her apartment with five bottles balanced in her hands and under her arms. A few servants had offered to help, but she had quickly dismissed them. Lecia set herself up in the antechamber between her sitting room and bedroom. There was a perfect alcove for her to curl up and rest her head against the wall and window. Four of the bottles were set down; the fifth accompanied her to grab a blanket off of her bed. Wrapping herself up in between swigs, she slumped to the ground and tried to keep breathing. Lecia wanted to rip out her heart, but she settled for the alcohol. 

Her father was dead and she’d never apologized for the things she had said; she’d never told him that she was happy; she’d never thanked him.

The guilt was constricting her lungs, so she drank more. It wasn’t helping.

The past few months without him as a comrade had been harder than ever. Lecia had always been closer with her father than her mother, that’s why it had cut so deep for him to pawn her off on the Duke. She expected that kind of thing from the Baroness, not him.

At least he can’t betray me anymore, she thought bitterly, and then instantly felt horrible for it.

Lecia didn’t want to wear black. She didn’t want to mourn. She wanted her father to walk through the door now and say: “Ha! I knew you missed me.”

But he wasn’t coming. She would never see him again.

Zora was probably distraught over the news, crying prettily into the shoulder of her loving husband. Their mother… Their poor mother would be heartbroken, probably catatonic from the shock. Lecia wasn’t sure how her mother would function without her father.

She finished the first bottle and flung it across the room. It bounced with a hollow clunk before rolling and stopping against the wall. The fact that it didn’t break just made her angrier, but not enough to go after it. Eventually, the combination of liquor and tears stole Lecia’s consciousness, and she fell into unsatisfying sleep.

At some point, Izzy had sneaked in to clean up the mess and leave a plate of fresh bread. When Lecia awoke, she didn’t move from her spot. She shoved the bread as far away as she could before starting on the bottle she’d fallen asleep with; she most certainly was still drunk.