Aurelia is a Courtesan, not an Assassin. Her world is turned upside down, however, when she kills a high-ranking Senator in self defense. Given his status, and the political power his family wields, Aurelia knows she will be executed without a trial...
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"Aurelia!"
The distant voice sounds as though it is coming through a tunnel, all thick and desperate, faded and hoarse. For a moment, all that exists is the echo of that voice, filling the black void. But she follows it and the feeling of her body comes rushing back to her.
Her heart is beating a sharp, staccato rhythm, bruising her ribcage. Her lungs burn as she struggles to catch a breath. There's a ringing in her ears, so loud it is deafening. Aurelia blinks, and slowly, the world comes into focus.
At first all she sees is red. It's splattered against her bare thighs, drenching her hair, smeared over her hands. Her gaze focuses on her wet, sticky palms, and she spends a moment staring down at the ten trembling fingers attached to them. Red constellations are splattered against them, smeared between her knuckles.
Her gaze drops to her knees, which are sprayed with drops of scarlet, spread wide apart, straddling a pair of familiar, sturdy shoulders and digging into warm flesh.
All sound filters away. All sound save for the uneven rasp of her breath and the pounding of her heart. Aurelia traces the familiar tanned skin with her eyes- the white nick of a scar in the hollow of the throat, the prominent Adam's Apple, dusted with a fine coating of blonde fuzz. The strong jaw that she has peppered with kisses, which has rested over her breast, listening to her heartbeat. Which has clenched tight and ticked with anger- the only warning sign before...
She blinks again and the fragment of a thought is gone.
The face... the face is not quite so familiar anymore.
Eyes as blue as chips of the sky are unrecognizable now. One is gray and glazed. The other... there is no other. Where it had once been is now a mangled mass of flesh, still oozing, the blood so thick it's black rather than red. A hair stick protrudes from the bloody, gaping hole, smattered with bits of flesh and gore.
Aurelia half expects life to flood into the man's remaining eye, for his hands to regain their strength and wrap their way around her windpipe, squeezing until she begs for breath.
He doesn't move.
"Ari," says the voice that had called her from the void, and she turns to find another familiar face attached to it- deep bronze skin faded to a grayish pallor, jade green eyes blown wide. The blue light cast from the floor to ceiling, underwater plasti-glass window adjacent to the bed paints him in shades of blue; it makes him appear nearly as much a corpse as the cooling body beneath her thighs.
She looks back to what remains of the corpse's face, and swallows.
"I think I killed him." Her voice comes out soft and hollow, as empty as an echo.
She has no recollection of any of it. Just the bottomless abyss that pressed in on her from all sides until Kaol called her hazy mind back into focus. The memories are there, like the frayed ends of cloth- the more she reaches out to pull at them, the more they unravel and slip away from her.
