Page 51 of Xerxes Ascendant
I’m here.
Remember the Launch. Honour the Lost. Celebrate the Living.
81 years ago, seven cities rose from an unknowingly doomed Earth, lifting hope, humanity, and heritage into the skies. This Ascension Day, we don’t just look back...we look up.
#Ascension #WeAreTheSky #26August
CHAPTER 15
Kyle
Kyle had decided that not being able to see was almost as bad as not being able to talk. He was grateful their captors hadn’t bothered to gag them, although his requests for information, coffee, and release – in that order – were firmly ignored. But the loss of his sight was beginning to chafe on him. Anxiety swelled and surged, given horrifying form by the darkness in which he was being kept.
Akira’s reassuring presence was the only thing that held the panic at bay: just knowing the man was at his side soothed Kyle’s fears. He wouldn’t let anything bad happen to them.
Like when he’d threatened the Carrions in the car and they’d all gone meek and quiet. By the stars, Akira had been tied up and lying at their feet, and wasstillable to order them around. Kyle’s boyfriend was a fucking god, and one he’d gladly worship for all of eternity.
The sound of an opening door pulled Kyle from his thoughts. It was the first thing to have broken the daunting silence in the hour since he’d been pulled from the car, carried, shoved, and jostled to wherever they were now, and then dumped unceremoniously onto a chair.
A hard, wooden chair that was starting to make his ass ache. Kyle squirmed in his seat with the little movement he had left to him, reluctantly falling still when a throat cleared in warning.
At least the tape around his ankles had been removed. Their captors had evidently decided that re-cuffing their wrists to the backs of the chairs was enough to keep the pair of them in place, which meant they clearly didn’t know Akira and his propensity for escaping handcuffs very well. And yet Kyle’s boss remained motionless at his side, his similarly ragged breathing suggesting that he was also still hooded.
And there they had been left ever since, the silence growing ominous and the air humid and stuffy inside the sack wrapped around his head. His chest heaved with shallow, uncontrolled breaths.
Kyle had so many questions. Where were they? Why had they been taken? What were the Carrion going to do to them?
Where the stars had Akira gotten a gun from, and why did he look so fucking hot with it?
“Hello?” Kyle enquired when whomever had entered the room failed to immediately speak. “I really think there’s been a terrible misunderstanding.” He tried to keep his voice chipper and upbeat, refusing to let them see just how unsettled he was. “How about you remove these hoods, and we can-”
Something was fiddled with at his neck, tickling him, and then the sack was wrenched up over his face. Light flooded in, along with gloriously fresh air.
Kyle half-choked on the unexpected freedom of it, gasping in breaths and blinking rapidly at the sudden brightness assaulting his eyes. He was unsurprised that Akira appeared entirely unaffected when his own hood was removed, seemingly mildly irritated as he blew the hair from his eyes but otherwise barely blinking. The bastard could do coldly composed like no one else he’d ever met.
Kyle strained his neck around further. They were in some kind of bedroom suite, with a neatly-made double bed behind them, a partially open door offering a glimpse of what looked like a bathroom, and the two of them bound to stiff-backed chairs that formed part of a dining table set. While the walls were exposed, windowless brick and the lights bare bulbs above their heads, the carpeted floor and cushions resting on the sofa made the room almost...nice, and not where he’d expected them to end up as prisoners. It reminded Kyle of a hotel room, like the ones Indira would sometimes meet clients in for appointments. House Rho didn’t have the same prohibitions about off-site attendance as House Epsilon.
Two muscled men stood behind the pair of them with the sacks trailing loosely from their fingers, their bulk and Carrion facial tattoos rendering them indistinguishable from the thugs who had captured them in the alley.
And there was a fifth person in the room: a woman with curly red hair, hazel eyes, and a beaming smile.
A woman whom Kyle instantly recognised as the one he’d given money to on the street a few nights ago.
“Hi!” he said cheerfully, and then the instinct to be nice gave way to confusion. What was she doing here? She bore the same three claw mark tattoos on her left cheek as the men, in the place where dirt had been smudged on her skin when he’d met her before. It looked wrong: a symbol of such horrendous violence on someone so innocent.
He didn’t mean her gender. Kyle had met plenty of terrifying women in his time, his cousin Indira included, but this redhead’s flowery dress and necklace of pearls, her permed hair and gently clasped, slightly pudgy hands...all of it gave off a very grandmotherly appearance, and not one he’d expect to find on a member of the fearsome Carrion gang.
“Hello, dear,” she murmured sweetly back to him, continuing to offer that same warm smile, and Kyle relaxed. There had been some kind of mistake, clearly, but everything was going to be fine.
He was allowed to think that for a whole half a second until Akira tensed in his chair beside him. The straining creak of wood was drowned out by the handcuffs’ displeased rattle.
“Sinead,” Akira snarled. “Why the fuck is Kyle here?”
Sinead? Sinead Gallagher?Thiswas the leader of the Carrion?
The one famous for killing her way up the food chain until she achieved undisputed command, displaying the heads of her enemies around Level G after having the rest of their corpses tossed from the city?
Ah.
