Prelude (Underworld Lucian Fanfiction)

74 - Chapter LXXIV: The Folly of Old Ways

Hours passing. Days. She woke to the feeling of pain...and by sight and memory, she knew where she was. The oak of the four-poster bed...the glass chandelier in the middle of her bedroom, the side table, and a glass bowl filled with blood. Stains on her bedding as though it had spilled more than once. And always the sensation that someone had just been there. Or perhaps they were still there, only out of sight.

For hours, she could not move. Her body warm, like someone had flayed the damaged skin, leaving the muscles intact. The bones no longer hurting, but her skull filled with pain. The candles too bright. Her eyes hurting whenever she opened them for too long. On occasion, feeling an arm holding her up. A woman with tawny eyes. Feeding her. Holding her hand until the fever passed. Until she remembered again that they were not candles.

Electricity.

All of it so confusing. But their names coming back to her. Rena holding her. Allegra keeping her distance. Asking her questions while guards hovered in the doorway. Something about a gun. Bullets. Had she known what she was doing. How lucky she was that no one had died...

...but she remembered nothing. Only the moments before it happened. Like the fever had stripped her. Singe testing her blood. Over and over. The weakness forcing her to lie down whenever she tried to rise. But her head finally able to move. Turning from side to side, feeling the slight tug of cloth, the strips of a bandage wrapped around her skull. The knots undone and the cloth falling to the side of the bed.

Unwilling to hope even for a second. Until she reached for one of the strands from her scalp...holding it aloft. The strands melding with the darkness. The bones of her hand showing skin as smooth as a bone bleached under the sun.

She was young.

o...o...o

Two weeks later.

He'd sent the guards out. The page turning as it should, the words entering his conscience, drifting into that chasm which cared not a whit for books, words, or knowledge. Allegra was still against the idea of him being here so soon, but considering all involved parties had been captured, protocol aside, it was still his bloody house, he thought, focusing on the tome in hand. Twice, he thought he heard something...but the hours passed and the bedroom door remained closed.

Singe was calling it a 'momentary lapse.' Something about her waking before a process had completed itself. Given her service in the war, the Council had been willing to let her remain in his den, provided she was heavily guarded. Not that they had a choice in the matter considering how stripped they were for resources after the war.

In any case, her duties had been set aside until the Council finished interrogating Kolya. The issue being that whoever that woman had been, whatever memories she'd carried were now absent.

Or sleeping.

His nails starting to gouge the side of the book before he heard the door open, the first sign that she was more than she'd been. To walk in silence only a room from his ears...already she was different.

He looked up.

Attuning himself to her movements, her breathing, the doorway in which she was standing. As though she'd lost her way, leaving an empty space in the photograph where she'd once lived. The hair on his arm rising at seeing her in front of him. Seeing that which, he had...considered...perhaps even dreamt of, yet now, disturbed him so much...

...and yet some things were the same. Her height. The shape of her jaw. The way her hands clutched around the blanket, looking past him to the curtains. Keen to see if the world was still there. His thoughts reaching back to the first night he laid eyes on her. The smallest things taking his focus. The colour of the sea caught in each iris.