Lloyd Atwood ALT :: He really should have run

The silence of the metropolis an hour before dawn possessed a special, almost therapeutic quality. It was the only time of day when the endless hum of cars, sirens, and strangers' voices died down, leaving behind only the low, guttural drone of high-voltage wires and the occasional rustle of wind in the ventilation shafts.

For Lloyd, this silence had always been a refuge.

The spacious penthouse kitchen was drowning in twilight. The man stood at the marble island, methodically slicing fresh figs. The knife moved with its usual precision in his massive hands, which were covered in barely visible old scars. He wore a thick, heavy, oversized gray hoodie that hid his massive chest and broad shoulders, along with loose gray sweatpants sitting low on his hips. His white rabbit ears were relaxed and slightly drooping, only occasionally twitching to catch the distant sounds of the sleeping building.

The thick aroma of freshly brewed coffee and expensive aged cognac drifted through the air. Out of habit, Lloyd had splashed a couple of drops of the liquor into his own cup.

He leaned his hip against the edge of the countertop with his arms crossed over his chest. His heavy, half-lidded amber eyes were fixed on the panoramic window. Beyond the glass lay the city that had once tried to devour him, now submissively lying at his feet. Or rather, at the feet of the man currently sleeping in the next room.

Dates. Relationships. Shared domestic life.

The words felt alien. They scratched at his palate with a falseness the dancer had grown accustomed to over his years working as an escort. His entire life consisted of playing out other people's fantasies. For rich female clients and influential masters, he was 'White Velvet'. A submissive yet dangerous toy, a living embodiment of vice, capable of any filth for the right price. But with this man, the head of the 'Silver Claw' clan, the rules of the game had imperceptibly twisted and broken, leaving behind the exposed wires of a suffocating attachment.

Lloyd took a slow sip of coffee, feeling the alcohol burn his throat.

They had crossed the line separating purchased time from personal life. The mafia boss no longer paid for the hours spent in the rabbit's company. They had started... living. Sharing one space, the same breakfasts, the same bed. Not for the sake of elaborate, scheduled sex, but for that strange, frightening peace they both found in each other. For Lloyd, it was akin to walking blindfolded through a minefield. Trusting someone meant becoming vulnerable all over again.

"Pure surrealism." Atwood chuckled darkly to himself. This thought didn't cause panic. Rather, it sparked an almost scientific interest in his own crippled psyche. He had watched the wolf's grief, absorbing his pain during their first, still-commercial sessions, and without noticing it, he had allowed this predator to get too close. The wolf turned out to be more than just a cruel boss from the criminal reports. There was a depth to him. There was an exhaustion that resonated so painfully with Lloyd's own inner emptiness.

His keen hearing caught the rustle of sheets in the bedroom. Then came the heavy, measured steps of bare feet on the parquet floor.

The rabbit's ears instantly perked up, turning toward the hallway. The round white tail beneath the fabric of his sweatpants twitched imperceptibly. Through sheer force of will, he suppressed the reflex to slip back into the role of a seductive escort. He relaxed his shoulders. He lowered his ears, letting them rest softly along his head. Among demi-humans, it was a gesture of absolute, unconditional trust.

He didn't turn around when the wolf's figure filled the kitchen doorway. Lloyd merely shifted his amber eyes, catching the man's reflection in the dark glass of the window. Something tightened painfully in his chest.

"You snore loudly. It keeps me awake." Lloyd's voice was low.

He turned around, leaning his lower back against the counter. Picking up a slice of fig from the cutting board, he twirled it thoughtfully in his long fingers before popping it into his mouth. His half-lidded gaze slid over the mafioso's figure, taking in everything from the sleep-tousled hair to the tense lines of his body.

"Your coffee is on the table." Atwood nodded at the steaming cup next to him. "No sugar, just how you like it. And if you're going to start grumbling about me getting up at four in the morning again, I'll have to remind you which one of us spent half the night trying to prove his stamina matches mine. Spoiler alert: you lost." A barely noticeable, slightly cynical, yet surprisingly warm half-smile flickered across his lips.

The scent of old paper, dried glue, and book dust worked on Lloyd better than any tranquilizer. The shop owner, a profoundly elderly man, had long since dozed off behind his massive counter. He left his only customers in complete solitude among the labyrinths of tall bookshelves. This antiquarian bookshop was located on the basement level in one of the quiet, forgotten alleys where the aggressive neon light of the metropolis never reached. An ideal shelter from prying eyes.

Atwood moved slowly along the foreign literature section. Today he was dressed as inconspicuously as possible: his usual loose cargo pants and an oversized hoodie, topped with a long, heavy woolen coat. His hood rested on his shoulders, allowing his long, fluffy white ears to stand freely on the crown of his head. Their pale pink insides twitched continuously, catching the slightest changes in the room's acoustics like a blind radar.

His long fingers slid gently over the spines of the books. Vince pulled a massive volume in a worn leather binding from the top shelf. French. A treatise on the properties of plant-derived alkaloids, published somewhere in the middle of the last century. The man smirked with the corner of his lips, carefully turning the fragile, yellowed pages. Knowing five languages, learned at night in cramped back rooms just to eavesdrop on the conversations of rich idiots, sometimes yielded unexpectedly pleasant results.

The soft rabbit tail at his lower back twitched briefly. Atwood exhaled slowly, using a mental effort to force his ears to rise and relax again. He glanced toward the next aisle. He felt his partner's heavy presence at his back even before he caught the familiar scent. The head of the 'Silver Claw' clan.

"If you keep glaring at the culinary section, the books are going to spontaneously combust." Atwood's voice sounded quiet. "I appreciate your attempt to share my interests. But we both know perfectly well that the only reading material you respect consists of financial reports and lists of debtors."

The man snapped the tome shut and returned it to its rightful place. The gesture turned out remarkably elegant. He walked around the wooden bookshelf, stepping into a small gap between the aisles. The lighting here was dim. Only a slanted beam from an antique floor lamp in the corner fell upon them, snatching Vince's sharp cheekbones and stubborn chin from the gloom.

The dancer shoved his hands deep into his coat pockets, tilting his head slightly to the side. One ear drooped down smoothly, expressing absolute peacefulness. The other continued to lazily scan the space. This relaxed posture radiated an astonishing sense of peace.

"The owner is asking a completely indecent amount of money for this treatise," he continued, examining his companion from under half-lidded eyes. Warm amusement danced in his amber irises. "And if you suddenly decide to drop your name as an argument for a discount, I'm afraid the poor guy will have a heart attack. Let's leave the old man alone. Besides..."

Vince took a slow step forward, closing the distance.

"...besides, I've already found everything I planned to," he finished quietly. A barely noticeable, yet absolutely genuine smile touched his lips.

The concrete floor radiated a grave-like chill. This bone-piercing cold crept slowly but surely up his ankles, penetrating the thin fabric of his trousers and knotting his calves in a dull, aching cramp. The air in the abandoned warehouse, located somewhere on the desolate outskirts of the metropolis, felt unbearably heavy and rancid.

Lloyd sat motionless on a massive metal chair bolted to the floor with thick anchor bolts. His wrists were bound tightly behind his back with industrial plastic zip ties, pulled tight enough to crack. The sharp edges of the plastic dug deep into his skin with the slightest micro-movement, sending hot streams of blood down his hands. His broad shoulders had stiffened into one continuous, painful, stone-like spasm, but the man stubbornly ignored the physical discomfort.

Atwood hadn't resisted when the 'Silver Claw' men dragged him straight out of the club's dressing room a few hours ago. He was still wearing his work uniform. It consisted of black, low-rise skinny trousers and an absurdly tight, complex harness made of shiny gold and black leather that rigidly gripped his massive, bare chest. Now, in the gloom of the damp hangar, under the dim light of the single surviving incandescent bulb, this elite, defiantly sexy outfit looked grotesque. It was like a flashy, expensive wrapper from which all illusion had been roughly torn away, leaving only the naked essence.

The dancer's long white rabbit ears were pressed flat against the back of his head in an uncontrollable reflex reaction to the aggressive, unstable environment. The round, soft tail at his lower back was tucked in tensely.

The timer of inevitability had finally reached zero. Lloyd had always been characterized by a grim fatalism bordering on absolute indifference to his own life. A year and a half ago, while flawlessly slipping a rare synthetic neurotoxin into the arrogant girl's glass, he had been fully aware of all the risks. The mafia boss's daughter had reveled in her own impunity, breaking waiters' fingers and crippling demi-humans purely out of boredom. For Vince, the world was forever divided into predators and those physically unable to fight back. That evening, he had simply passed a sentence and carried it out himself. It was the perfect murder, brilliantly disguised as a massive stroke. No one searched for traces of a plant-derived alkaloid, the formula for which he had fished out of dusty French treatises.

But criminal empires of this scale do not tolerate blind spots forever. Sooner or later, pathologists bought by competitors, an accidental information leak, or trivial carelessness were bound to destroy this house of cards. It was only a matter of time. And now, time was up.

His amber eyes remained half-lidded. There was no fear. There was only an exhausting, hollow emptiness. Standing before him was the man who, over the past year, had mutated from a generous regular client into a painful, suffocating constant in his life. The very same half-wolf who shared his bed. The one who knew how to correctly, with terrifying tenderness, bury his fingers into his ash-brown hair without ever touching the sensitive base of his rabbit ears. The one whose presence caused Atwood's damn brain to regularly glitch, producing atypical reactions like genuine affection and the need for protection.

The half-wolf looked destroyed. He wasn't enraged. He wasn't in the state of icy fury with which syndicate leaders usually gave liquidation orders. Absolute, total ruin could be read in his slumped shoulders and in the heavy rise and fall of his chest. The hand gripping the large-caliber pistol was trembling treacherously. The heavy barrel pointed somewhere around Lloyd's knees, entirely unable to bring itself up to chest or head level.

Atwood felt this bleeding agony of another's mind through his very skin. Finding out your only child was murdered. Then finding out the killer is the man you let into your home, the one you grew attached to, the one you slept next to without a weapon under your pillow. The scale of the cognitive dissonance was so colossal that the psyche simply refused to process it, snapping in half.

The dancer inhaled the icy air noisily through his nose.

"You've been keeping your finger on the trigger for too long." His voice ruthlessly sliced through the ringing silence of the hangar. The low baritone didn't tremble. It held no pleas for mercy, nor any pathetic attempts to justify himself. It was just a steady, tired statement of fact. "The tension transfers to your wrist. If you decide to shoot right now, the bullet is guaranteed to go wide. Most likely, you'll shatter my kneecap or my thigh. That's painful, messy, and absolutely won't solve your problem."

Vince leaned his massive torso forward as much as his bound hands allowed. The plastic dug even deeper into his flesh, but his face remained unreadable. He stared unblinkingly into the clan leader's face.

"Why did you drag me here?" Lloyd continued quietly. The corner of his lips twitched into a crooked, venomous smirk. "Your fighters could have put a bullet in the back of my head right in the staff parking lot. Madame Vane wouldn't even have asked questions. She would have just ordered the cleaners to wash the brains off the asphalt. But you ordered them to bring me in alive. Into this concrete crypt. Just to look me in the eyes before I die? You looked. What's next?"

One fluffy ear smoothly lifted from the back of his head, turning slightly toward the man. Lloyd perfectly understood the mechanics of what was happening. The half-wolf brought him here for classic revenge. He wanted to gut his daughter's killer, to make him scream, beg, and choke on his own blood. It was the right thing to do within the coordinates of the criminal world. Reality, however, turned out to be far more cruel. Finding himself one-on-one with his bound, completely defenseless lover, the mafioso suddenly realized he couldn't do it. The bloodlust shattered against his memories.

"She was a monster." The phrase sounded dry, devoid of the slightest emotion. Atwood knew he was hitting straight at an open wound, but he considered lying the domain of cowards. He had never regretted his actions. "She crippled those who were weaker. She entertained herself by breaking other people's lives. I just stopped the infection. I cut out a rotting tumor. And I would do it again."

The words dropped into the frigid air like heavy lead drops. Lloyd was intentionally provoking him. He was squeezing out of the half-wolf that very saving rage that was supposed to bring them both deliverance. It was physically unbearable for him to see this brokenness. Vince was pathologically incapable of striking a real victim, and the person standing before him right now was no predator. Standing before him was a victim of his own feelings.

"Raise the barrel," the dancer said softly, almost affectionately. His hypnotic yellow eyes narrowed, locking onto the trembling hand holding the weapon. "Do it. End everything right here, right now. If you walk out of this hangar without pulling the trigger, you'll stop respecting yourself. Your men will stop respecting you."

The rabbit tail at his lower back twitched nervously. Atwood's pulse, which had been steady until now, began to accelerate treacherously. Behind the impenetrable armor of a cynic, the part of his soul that had managed to become dependent on this man was beating in a panic. He was provoking his own execution precisely because, more than anything in the world, he feared seeing this strong man completely fall apart because of him.

"Shoot." Lloyd exhaled loudly, pushing his chest even further forward to meet the invisible bullet. The leather straps of the harness pulled tight over his sculpted muscles. "Please. Just do it."

For the first time, a barely perceptible crack broke through his drawling, calm voice. It was a crack exposing a desperately tired man who just wanted this endless cycle of violence, attachment, and pain to finally end. Preferably quickly and without misfires.

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