Dark Needs (Tales of Dystopian Decadence Book 1) (7 page)

Chapter 8

When I awoke, it took a moment to remember where I was. My sleep had been so deep and blissful, my dreams so vivid, I thought maybe the night hadn’t actually ended.

“Rise and shine.”

I rolled over and looked at Icharus, who was perched on the edge of the bed. It was difficult to conceal my smile as I asked, “Did you seriously just say that?”

“Well, I don’t know how serious I was, but…”

I pushed myself up on my elbows to glare at him and said, “You know what I mean.”

“I do,” he answered with a chuckle. “Do you want some breakfast?”

I slid my gaze to a tray on the small round table across the room. It was then that I caught the tempting odors wafting from it. “Bacon?” I asked.

“The headmistress told me it’s your favorite, and this is the first morning I’ve been here to share breakfast with you, so I wanted it to be special.” He rose from the bed and approached the table to lift the cover from the tray to reveal bacon, omelets, fried potatoes, and toast. “It’s a shame you’ve been in home every day by yourself and I haven’t spent a proper morning with you since our first night together.”

“Even more shameful when you consider it’s been over two weeks,” I agreed, still smiling. Setting my feet on the floor, I pushed the covers aside and took a few tentative steps across the room. “This bacon looks perfect. And you have strawberries! How did you even get these?” Farms were strictly controlled under the Regime and produce distributed sparingly to the populace.

“The DeVille fortune and name extend far.” He watched me gaze in wonder at the selection.

“Ooh, and whipped cream.” Without any further reservations, I sat down and piled the various delicacies on to my plate. By the time I heaped another serving on the fine china, Icharus was only halfway through his first.

“Slow down,” he said, pointing at me with his fork. “You’ve got the appetite of a baby elephant. You’re going to get a stomachache.”

I stopped shoveling food into my mouth and set my fork down, then muttered, “My stomach is used to aching.”

Icharus looked at me, one perfect brow arched. “They don’t feed you in that school?”

“They do and the food is very…” I shrugged. “It’s elegant. But, before that, I didn’t have much of anything. Courtesans don’t really bring home money – just a lot of gifts, like jewelry. Of course, my mother sold most of it to pay for us to live.”

“I thought being a courtesan was something some women aspired to, because of the glamorous lifestyle.”

Tilting my head, I thought about his question. “It really depends on the situation. For some families with too many daughters, it seems like the only way to keep them well-placed in society. It’s not considered a shameful trade, like working in a shop or another blue-collar job. But it’s really up to the patron to decide how they will reward their courtesan. Most single men take her into their home. The married men do not.”

“When the headmistress negotiated our contract, she had some fairly strict stipulations drawn up.” Icharus sipped at his juice and watched me.

“I know and she normally negotiates very strongly for her girls. I’m not sure what happened to my mother – if the headmistress failed her or if it was another situation entirely. Either way, I think the fact that my mother had a child when she was matched may have lowered her overall value to potential patrons.”

My heart plummeted and I looked down at my plate. The thought that our value was measured based on what a man would pay for us consumed me and the delicious food in my mouth now tasted like ashes.

Icharus reached across the table and cupped his hand against my face. “Adette, I think you are worth far more than I could ever pay for you. Stay with me and we can change everything.”

“No, you can’t change the past.” I blinked and a tear slid down my cheek, then along his palm. “You can’t change the fact that my mother and I lived in poverty, despite the fact that she was courtesan to one of the wealthiest men in the city.” I clutched the silverware in my hands and my knife scraped against the plate with a discordant screech.

“No, that’s not…” He caressed the dampness from my cheek and eye, and continued, “What I mean is, we can keep that from happening to anyone else ever again, especially you.”

I took a deep breath, my nostrils flaring. “Icharus, it
is
happening all over our country. While you go sit in some comfortable, temperature-controlled office and dine on the very best food, the rest of us fight to survive. We hope to avoid Regime notice by keeping our heads down, but at the same time we wonder why they have taken everything from us. I might be too young to know what happened when the Regime overthrew our country’s president, but my mother remembered. Even though no one spoke about the past, she told me what I needed to know.”

More tears stung the corners of my eyes. How could I possibly make Icharus understand this cruel world where a woman’s only commodity was her body, and that was only if a man deemed it worth paying for?

“And she taught you to hate the Regime and everyone associated with it, even before my father had her killed.” His low voice pulled me from my thoughts. “It’s no wonder you feel the way you do about me.”

“Look at me,” I said in a firm voice. He raised his gaze to mine and I grimaced at the pain I saw there. “I don’t hold your father’s cruelty against you. He’s wronged many people and karma is a bitch. I only have one concern about your scheme. He is your father and I know how it feels to lose a parent. Can you still…  Can you still look at me with any fondness if I do this – if I take his life, even if you’re the one who masterminds the entire assassination?”

Icharus clenched his hands into fists, then released them and pressed his palms flat against the table. “I lost my mother too,” he whispered. “Because of him.”

Seeing the pain in his eyes, I drew back in horror. “I’m so sorry…”

“Don’t be. You didn’t kill her. He did.”

“You don’t have to talk about it.”

“No, I want to.” Icharus pushed away from the table, rose to his feet, and crossed the room. “You lived in pain and poverty until the school took you in? I only had the pain, but my father’s wealth – and seeing his face every day, the face of the man who murdered my mother – made it so much worse. He wanted me to feel beholden to him. One day, he even told me I would thank him for doing it – for taking her out of the picture. She was too soft, he said. She would only make me feel, make me care, make me sympathetic to the people I was supposed to learn to hurt.”

He gripped the windowsill and I saw his knuckles whiten.

“The only problem,” he continued, “is he never realized that kind of feeling can’t be taught. It’s a normal human condition, to feel sympathy and empathy. You can’t kill compassion once it’s instilled and nurtured in us. He was too late to stop my mother from doing that. The shock of losing her didn’t change the fact that I already saw that my father was doing the wrong thing to hundreds of millions of people. That’s why I can do this and not even think about hating you, because I’m in your shoes, Adette. We both have nothing to lose, because we’ve both already lost the people who mattered most to us.”

“That’s not true.” I watched him as he leaned on the window frame, his gaze fixed on some distant point I couldn’t see. “We might have both lost our mothers, but you have your life to lose if anyone connects you to his murder once it’s said and done. That’s why you’re using me in this. You’re not the one with nothing to lose; I am.”

“Fine. You’re right about that.” He turned to me. “Maybe I’m already no better than him, using you to do my dirty work. But I’ll tell you this – if the authorities manage to connect you to the murder, I will do everything in my power to keep you from going before the firing squad. You’re very wrong that I have only my life to lose. I stand to lose many things, including you.”

I lowered my gaze to my half-finished food and said, “I don’t mind dying if my life somehow means something, if the end of it means the beginning of something better for others. Otherwise, I really don’t have anything to lose, like I said.”

“That’s not entirely true. If I have you, then you have me.”

I raised my gaze and smiled a little. “I should visit the school. I’m sure the headmistress will be wondering about me and want a report on how things are going between us.”

“I’ve… unnerved you.” He turned and walked back toward me, took my hand, and raised me to my feet.

“Not at all,” I said, but a shiver wracked my body at his touch.

He regarded me for a long moment, then asked, “Adette, was there ever a time you smiled? I mean, truly smiled after your mother died?”

I considered his question and shook my head. “Not that I recall.”

“I know the feeling.” He kissed the back of my hand. “And I don’t know if anyone else in this forsaken country can understand what we’ve been through and how we feel, except one another.”

“Maybe,” I agreed in a soft voice, watching his lips move against my skin. “Maybe.”

Icharus finally let go of my hand and said, “We need to do something fun – something that has nothing to do with plotting murder. I want to take you outside and show you a special little secret. Get dressed.”

“Secret?” My curiosity piqued, I glanced down at the food. My stomach was full, though one more bite certainly couldn’t hurt. I popped another strawberry in my mouth as I turned to the closet for my clothes.

“Wear this.” Icharus selected two items and handed them to me. “And you’ll need your boots.”

It was the first time anyone had suggested I wear pants. They weren’t considered ladylike and the Regime frowned upon women dressing “like men.” Still, I drew the fitted black trousers over my legs and thrust my sleeves into the white button-down shirt. If anyone could break the rules, I supposed Icharus could. The items were remnants of my time on the streets before the school. The headmistress had told me to hold on to them in case I ever needed them. It seemed like an odd suggestion, but I didn’t think too much on it as I laced up my plain black ankle boots.

“Come.” Icharus took my hand in his. He had changed as well, dressed in his standard perfectly pressed slacks and button-down shirt, a pale green one today. The more time I spent at his side, the more handsome I found him. Now that I knew a little more about him, I couldn’t help but smile as he held my hand. He’d made himself more vulnerable to me than I’d ever expected, and that touched my heart.

We walked down the stairs, through the dining room, and into the rear hall. I hadn’t actually visited this part of his house, so it was my first time seeing the glass-paned door through which rays of sunshine angled.

“You wonder about this, don’t you?” he asked. “How do I have the sunshine when the city is still covered in that thick cloud of ash and smog?”

“Yes,” I agreed. “We haven’t seen the sun in such a long time in Los Angeles.”

“The people just don’t live in the right place. You’re about to see something incredible and I think it’s going to inspire you to stay the course.” Icharus opened the back door and together we walked outside. The back yard was a brilliant, fertile green, warmed by sunlight, and I gasped at the sight.

“I still haven’t figure out how you can see the sun here. We can’t possibly be at a high enough altitude to break through the fallout from the eruption,” I said.

“No, but we are at an altitude where we can see through one of the Regime’s many lies. Come here.”

Icharus strode through the yard and I followed, noting he had so much more than I expected – gardens, a pond, even stables! A pair of equine eyes followed us from an open stall and I returned the inquisitive gaze. When I finally dragged my attention back to Icharus, I looked where he pointed down the land that sloped away from his property and gasped at the sight.

At various intervals on the hillsides that surrounded L.A., there were immense machines belching out black smoke. The dark billows melded together, forming that thick, cloudy blanket that had obscured the city for so long.

“The Regime’s one goal is to keep the United States under its thumb and the key to that is controlling the masses,” Icharus said, his mouth a grim line of displeasure. “DeVille Enterprises is the mastermind of this operation. But what good is my money and power if all it buys are the privileges the Regime is willing to distribute? What if I want more than what they decide to reward me with, and what happens when they decide I’m useless to them? What then? They could easily slaughter both me and my father, and then confiscate all our assets, declaring them property of the government. The Regime doesn’t
need
us to run our factories and maintain these machines, but it’s convenient for them at this time. No matter what you might think, the DeVilles are just pawns too, because the wealthy and privileged give the people something to aspire to, while simultaneously keeping them down.”

“No, the privileged ones aren’t just something to aspire to. They are also something to resent.” I narrowed my eyes at the ominous plumes. “You might be the privileged elite now, but someday when the people figure out they can’t be you, they will find a way to do away with you, like they’ve done in so many revolutions around our world.”

“Precisely. And you aren’t just the daughter of one of the Regime’s most famous courtesans.” Icharus put his hand on my shoulder, his gaze also on the scene before us. “You aren’t just trying to follow in her footsteps in one way. Like her, you have the heart of a rebel. What you are seeing here is only the tip of the iceberg as far as the Regime’s hold on the States. Imagine, if you can, what else they have done, are doing, or will do to us if we let them continue to rule. None of us are safe, whether we are the poor or the privileged. We are all being taught to despise one another. The Regime is playing us, class against class.”