Dear Readers: Let's revisit the dark rose, and see what transpires tonight on the dark streets of Greece...
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Scene 2: In Hell
A.D. 2015
Darkness had never let her down. The shadows, the streets—they had never rejected her, never denied her the power she needed to thrive. She should never have left.
From New York, yes—that had been wise of her to leave. Far from the Golde brother who had sworn vengeance after fucking her in half. Somehow, she didn’t doubt that he would find it. No matter how far or how fast she ran, she felt a trail of blood left in her wake, after what she had done to Ro. And Axel was the bloodhound. On her tail forever, never more than a step behind, to torment her and make her live in fear awhile before she died. On his terms. For he owned her now.
She had hoped to find safety, for a second, with the one soul on this earth she trusted most. But trust required love. And Eldor didn’t love her anymore. Not after what she had become. He found her tragic and disgusting, after all these years—she couldn’t blame him anyway. After all that he’d done to protect her, provide her with the hope of a happy and meaningful future, she had gone off to make a living as a streetwalker. A piece of shit whore. What now, was he supposed to find that charming? How had she dared set foot in his perfect little house? The orbit of perfection that surrounded him on every side, a mile wide?
She should never have left the shadows. She should never seek after the light, ever again. That end of the tunnel was closed. She could only sink backwards, disappear into the darkness whence she’d come.
At least there were plenty of shadows in Athens. And all around the world. She could easily spend all her days in the shadows, till the bloodhound decided to give her the slow, painful death she deserved.
At any rate, Atria remembered having passed by a jewelry store on the way to Eldor’s house earlier today, with a humongous golden necklace in the main window display. She retraced her steps to find the place, peering through the shadows at each storefront that she passed. Most were closed at this hour, on this tourist-friendly strip of street that had been so alive during the day. There was that tacky souvenir shop, the quaint little bakery, the overpriced grocery…
“Oh—pardon me,” a silken voice cooed through the darkness.
Atria blinked, alarmed to have bumped into a woman. Usually, when she collided with anyone, it was a man or boy who walked straight into her on purpose and tried to pass it off as an accident.
“Terribly sorry…” the woman expressed. “You blended right into the shadows, in that black coat.”
Atria had wrapped herself in her trench coat, when stepping out heartbroken into the streets. It was over eighty degrees here at night, but she had donned it nonetheless, out of some blind instinct. Perhaps to better blend into the shadows, just as this stranger had said.
She blinked again. This stranger’s platinum hair stood out stark as a halo in the starlight. Atria should’ve seen her coming. She silently admitted to herself that, for once, the collision had been her own fault.
“Awfully warm tonight for a coat, don’t you think?” the woman commented, tilting her silvery-crowned head, pausing thoughtfully before her next question. “…Are you all right?”
Atria awoke from her brief trance. Something about this woman’s dazzling grey eyes had stunned her into silence; she snapped out of it.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m good,” she stammered, shifting her weight onto one heel to step to the side, out of this woman’s way. Agh, shit—the stiletto wedged itself into a crevice in the pavement.
The woman extended a hand, to help Atria steady herself from the stumble. “Are you sure?”
Of course not. She was the opposite of all right, but it was none of this lady’s fucking business, thank you very much. Atria denied the helping hand, yanked the sharp heel from the crack underfoot. “Yeah.”
She couldn’t afford to say anything more, or to spend another second in that stunning woman’s presence. Staring into her stormy eyes seemed to have the effect of downing shots of a hundred different kinds of high-proof alcohol at once. Then going skydiving straight into a tornado. Or maybe the effect of everything was simply magnified, Atria mused, when her whole soul was broken and bleeding to death.
Either way, she had to forge ahead into the night, as ever.
When she finally reached the jewelry store—closed, of course, but with the big gold necklace gleaming like the sun behind the glass—she knocked thrice very firmly on the front door.
A man answered. He recognized her right away; she could tell. She’d noticed him eyeing her bare legs this afternoon, when strolling down this block with Eldor. Those very legs were at his doorstep now.
“The necklace in the window,” she uttered with no introduction. “How much?”
He raised his bushy brows. “My finest piece of gold…?”
“How much?” she repeated, hands poised impatiently on her hips.
He ran his hungry eyes across her thighs. “From you? Two hours.”
She smirked, dark emeralds in her eyes aglow, reaching to untie the belt of her trench. “Greedy pig. I’ll give you one.”
“Sold,” he breathlessly agreed as she strode in and shut the door.
Conveniently enough, there was a lovely bed upstairs; the jeweler dwelt in an apartment right above his store. Atria wouldn’t have minded the floor, but the bed felt good beneath her bruised and burdened back. Not that she ever spent very much time on her back, while in bed; missionary had a tendency to put her straight to sleep.
Either that, or to remind her of her first time—and her second, and her third, up to her hundredth or whatever. The master of the scary house had always liked to pin her down beneath his body weight and watch her pretty face contort in helpless pain.
Never again. Atria claimed the top now, nearly every time. And no bedfellow of hers—certainly not this jeweler—ever had complaints.
“Hour’s up,” she promptly announced at the peak of his passion.
“But we’ve only just begun…!” he groaned, groping to encircle her slim waist in his hairy arms. “You haven’t even taken off your shoes…”
“Bare feet weren’t part of the deal,” she stated, slipping from his grasp and reaching for her bra. “One hour. That was all.”
“Ah, well…” he sighed, one of his forearms resting on her lap as she fastened the clasp, “…a deal’s a deal. And yet…”
He shifted in the bed, suddenly brought his other hand up to her neck, his knucklebones against her jaw. “…what is a deal to me?” he whispered in her ear. “I’m not a man of honor… Just a greedy pig.”
For a split second, she was under him—buried beneath his body weight—he’d forced her down onto her back, in one swift motion—he was reaching to rip off her bra—he drew back for just an instant, to behold her helpless pain—for the sight would excite him, of course.
But Atria was not helpless, and she was not in pain. Never again. She maneuvered out from under him, more swiftly and more expertly than he had first attacked—the element of surprise worked in her favor every time—and in the next split second, she was back on top, stiletto heel grinding into his groin. He shrieked. In helpless pain. This, now, was exactly why she hadn’t taken off her fucking shoes.
She knew the move too well, from too much practice. All the way back to her days in the attic, when Eldor had taken it upon himself to teach his foster sister basic self-defense. Without the help of a stiletto heel, of course. But since then, she’d never stopped teaching herself. Every night spent in the shadows was a lesson in survival, and tests such as tonight’s came up more frequently than Atria could count.
And with Axel—during her days with the Golde boys, when she had opened up to Axe a little bit about her past, he had offered himself up as practice for her to sharpen her skills, should she ever need them to defend herself from forceful pigs. And she had needed those skills, on certain sultry nights back in New York, and put them to good use.
But she hadn’t been able to use them against Axe, that night. She couldn’t bring herself to fight back, when she felt that she deserved it. A feeling that she’d never had, in all her life till then…
And certainly not now. “You think you’re the first pig to try that on me?” she rasped as her wounded assailant writhed beneath her heel.
She stood to leave only once she knew that he was completely incapacitated, for a while with his mangled manhood. Left him with a few last words. “I hope you drown someday in your own dirty blood.”
She grabbed the golden necklace on her way out, stuffed it in her bag, tied her trench coat extra tightly at her waist. Pretending for a moment in her dark mind that her waistline was the jeweler’s gasping throat. The throat of every pig who’d ever tried to cause her pain.
She could’ve taken every item from the pig’s store—he had given her the key to every glass case, after all, as she had demanded before she’d disrobed. But she took nothing else. She left the key upon a countertop, taking only the necklace. For that was all she’d bargained for. Her victim may have had no honor, but the dark rose kept her word. Never stooping to the level of the swine who did her wrong.
The streets were darker now, and emptier as she stepped into the shadows once again. She thought she heard the hum of nightlife, in the near distance—the pulsing rhythm of a club, the most familiar kind of music to her ears. She moved in that direction.
At one point along her path, Atria passed a pair of local boys with wandering eyes and staggering strides. She could smell the heavy liquor on their breath, even from far across the street. They released suggestive whistles as she whisked by.
“How much?” one of them hollered. “For one night? One hour?”
How much… one hour… the haunting echo of words from her own whorish deal, far too recent to bear reminding, struck her horribly.
Ugh, the stupid brutes—the boys were scuttling across the street to follow her. One even grabbed at her belt. “One night…!” he moaned.
She shrugged them off, shot them a dark green glare that shut them up. “Spend the night in hell,” she muttered as she forged ahead.
As soon as she reached the nightclub on the next block, she asked around till granted entrance to a private backroom where the club owner engaged in shady business. Sold the necklace for a giant wad of cash, just as she’d hoped. The owner happened to be hideous, so she didn’t offer sex for extra dough. She wasn’t in the mood, besides.
She departed the club, set to find a hotel to stay the night. She was exhausted from the flight—not only today’s flight to Greece, but also and more so, the endless flight from death that had become her life. She could use a comfortable night’s sleep, in a room of her own. In a bed alone, for once. Any hotel but the Mega Bretania, she reminded herself, remembering the damned dinner that Eldor had mentioned.
In some way, she thought to herself, the dark rose seemed to be turning a new leaf. At least taking a small step, making a small change for the better, starting with tonight. A slightly different approach to selling her goods: using them to make money to pay her own way, rather than taking on some stranger as a sugar daddy. Still a form of whoredom, she reflected. But it somehow felt less dirty. Didn’t it?
Before she could decide, she glimpsed the rotating red glow of an ambulance light down the street. A crowd had gathered at the site—she found herself drawn there, against her better judgment, beckoned by a strange and sinister sense of foreboding in the pit of her stomach.
Two boys, she learned, had been struck dead by a speeding car. She did not even need to look, to recognize the pair, to know the truth. They were the stupid brutes. Whom she had told to spend the night in hell. They had heeded her orders too well. She was suddenly numb.
And the medics had more to discuss. She overheard, above the deafening dance beats of the club, the murmurs of the gathered crowd, her own thundering heart. Somehow she made out every word.
Another recent death. ‘The jeweler.’ He’d reported a robbery, but then was found dead in his shop—his lungs had spontaneously filled up with bodily fluid. He had sustained some wounds, yet they seemed unrelated to the cause of death. He’d simply drowned in his own blood. Just as she'd bidden him. In his own dirty blood...
“Dark forces afoot tonight,” a medic mumbled.
“No need to get spooky about it,” one of his colleagues scoffed.
“Don’t you just sense there’s something… unnatural in all this?”
“Doubt it. Nothing more natural than death.”
Atria felt faint. Saw a glimmer of hypnotic storm-grey somewhere in the crowd, awash with blood-red light. Then everything went black.
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So what's up with that?? Dark forces? Fatal forces... Fateful forces? Cloe's not the only one with powers, after all ;) I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Next scene, we'll follow Cloe off to meet a special someone at the fanciest hotel in Athens... And if you liked this one, please don't forget to vote! :)