Dark Days (Written Pictures #2)
Page 28
Mela sat beside Raven and was looking out the window as the jet taxied from the apron and waited at the end of the runway for clearance. She was a good loyal girl, if a little wayward. She had risked so much in coming to help her and Raven allowed herself another smile which, when reflected in the window, had Mela turn with a smile of her own.
It wasn’t Alexei’s hand, and never would be, but when Raven placed her hand on Mela’s as a thank you, she found something that resembled comfort with the supportive touch of another.
The plane started to trundle forward. Ever faster, they sped, the seatbacks shaking from the effects of a runway that had seen better days. Raven gripped the arm-rests tight, then tighter still with the image that formed in her head while Mela gripped too for reasons of her own. ‘I wonder if he is still lying there?’ was her first thought. ‘I’ll always love him,’ was her next. She hoped they had found him, but she had to rely on the Prince to have done the right thing. Biting her lip, Raven turned her head to cope with the hurt, she was reliant on the man that had driven a dagger into her hope.
Raven would be needed to help her through the lingering pain. Their stay in the embassy compound had been relaxing – days by the pool always were. She would apologise to Jade though, to Kat, to Amber. She now knew how they had felt, what they had gone through at her hand. When Mela had explained in the car that the rescue had all been Kat’s idea, Raven had been stunned by the goodness of a soul she had been determined to crush.
“You did the right thing, Mistress,” whispered Mela softly as if reading her mind, trying to find the right words. “We had to go, otherwise they would have found us.”
Mela couldn’t understand though and she would never know just what Alexei had meant to her. Even in that brief time, he had changed her, but not in the way he had originally intended. She had been bent but not broken by force, she had been changed by love. A frenzied fuck and then the hand of salvation – they had told her all she needed to know.
When the wheels finally lifted off the tarmac and retracted back into the fuselage with the usual ‘thunk’, a tear slipped from Raven’s blackened eye. She was speeding from the love of her life, flying from her possible future.
EPILOGUE
The little black and white cat gathered her hind quarters, setting her body in place ready to spring at the threatening-looking sparkly mouse. There was something about it that did things to her, perhaps it was the pink. She couldn’t quite place it but whenever she went close, her body started to tingle and she knew it just had to die.
She pictured herself toying with it, allowing it to run from paw to paw before it got batted to a halt, then being released again to repeat the fun all over. The eyes just seem to stare at her, had done all day and she was sure she had never seen them blink, an intolerable audacity here, at the very heart of her empire between the sofa and the footstool.
The worst thing though was the tail. Florescent pink feathers; what was a cat supposed to do against such enticements? Most of the time they would stay still but every now and then they would twitch with the breeze from the air conditioner and that was just too much to bear.
And so she hunched up, poised and ready, waiting for that next flicker of feathers. Her whiskers twitched, gathering all the extra sensory input she needed. She was so ready to deal with it once and for all and when the air conditioner clicked on again, the little cat pounced for the kill.
== ~ ==
Watching the little cat spring and skid over the wooden floor to land in a mass of pink feathers, Katarina, her head resting on Amber’s shoulder as they curled together in front of the TV, smiled in amusement.
“I think the mouse has had it,” Amber stated.
“Yeah, the great hunter strikes again,” replied Katarina, adding the pink, sparkly mouse to a lengthening list that included her slippers, two hairbrushes and a whole host of pens. “Speaking of which, Mela and Raven should be landing about now,” added Katarina, eyes flicking to the clock on the wall.
Comfortable in each other’s embrace the two women watched the little cat as she tore the toy mouse apart. The tail flew off after a particularly toothy tug. Batting it away, she darted after it and leapt, catching it deftly between two arrays of claws and dived in with teeth just to make sure it died.
“We did the right thing, Amber.” Kat held her blonde lover closer, sensing the turbulence in her mind at the thought of Raven coming back and her fear of the risk that might pose to them. “You know we just had to do it, sweetie,” she added, waiting for a nod of agreement that never came. “She’ll have changed. Just wait. You’ll see.”
Outside, in the gathering gloom of dusk, a dark figure shrank deeper into the thick foliage of the bushes, watching.
Books in The Written Pictures Series:
Descent Into Darkness
August 2014
Dark Days
September 2014
Enlightened Nights
November 2014
Where Once Was Light
January 2015
Shadows Creep
2015
Days End
2016
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