Downfall
For an anon on Tumblr, who asked for #31 from the AU prompt list (prostitute/client AU), saying "i maaay have seen pretty woman a few too many times".
Unlike you, dearest Anon, I have never seen Pretty Woman, so I'm fairly sure this is nowhere in that vicinity. XD But it was fun to write!
"Milady." The Cardinal bows over her hand, lips brushing over the back just like any of her would-be swains, but there's only cool calculation in his eyes as he guides her to a corner. He's got a job for her – she knows that look – and sure enough, once they're out of earshot he says, "I've someone I need you to handle."
Her brows lift. "Permanently?"
"No need to stain your pretty hands, my dear." His smile is thin and humourless. "No, I just need him deep enough that he can't expose this without ruining himself."
That makes her smile in turn, a lazy feline curve of crimson-painted lips. "A seduction. That should be amusing. Who is it, then?"
He nods across the room, indicating a man about her own age, with the sharp kind of eyes she knows from long-ago encounters with the law. He's not unattractive, this target of hers, and younger than many she's taken into her bed. If she's lucky, he may even be persuaded to attend to her, something her regulars are rarely inclined towards.
"Police?"
"Mmm. Lieutenant Olivier d'Athos."
"Why me? He looks the type to want an ingenue rather than a soubrette."
The Cardinal's grim expression doesn't waver, for all that his voice is mild. "Because you have too much to lose if you don't succeed, Milady," he murmurs before leaving her alone.
'He's right, damn him,' she thinks, as he leaves her to study the lieutenant in peace. Investigation too deeply into the Cardinal's business would surely lead to the secrets bought and sold and traded in her bed, and such exposure would be her ruin. This may not have been the life she dreamed of as a girl, but it's a better life than what she'd had then, even if the cage is simply a gilded one. It's a life, and she has no intention of giving up what freedom she's managed to eke out of it.
She exhales slowly, forcing the tension out of her body along with the breath, and pushes away from the wall – hooded eyes, mysterious smile, intent in her stride as she moves towards him. He looks up at her motion, alert and wary, and their eyes meet –
Her smile widens at the surprise she sees there, the flare of attraction that follows. He doesn't know it yet, but she has him.
~ x ~
He comes back. They always do.
He comes back, asks if she's free – he knows what she is, at least on the surface, and does her the courtesy of not pretending otherwise. And yet when the door is closed he is as attentive as she could have hoped, intent on her pleasure in a way that seems to have little to do with asserting his own power. She's had clients who brought her off before, but it has always been about them – proving themselves in some fashion, controlling her reactions. When he looks up from between her splayed thighs, his bearded chin wet and his blue eyes alight, there is such uncomplicated joy there she almost forgets where they are.
'You're a dangerous man, lieutenant,' she thinks as she pulls him up for a kiss, winding her fingers in his hair and her legs about his hips, but in this moment she can't quite make herself care.
The Cardinal is pleased; she can see that when she meets him next to relay the latest of what her other clients have said. She tries not to dwell on the fact that she's ruining a good man, drawing him into this web.
In her line of work, she can't afford scruples.
~ x ~
"Annie," Flea says, in an entirely too smug tone, "has a repeat caller. What is it now, eight times?"
"Five." Anne grimaces as she toys with her straw absently. "I think he's a romantic, which is the worst sort of nuisance."
"And yet you haven't put him off." Sofia eyes her shrewdly from the other side of the table. "You're going soft on us, Annie."
"Hardly," she retorts, but it's mostly because softness is another thing she can't afford. She hasn't had the heart to send Athos packing yet, but he's also different from her usual clientele. Milady de Winter sees some of the richest and most powerful men in the city; she hadn't had any reason other than the Cardinal's initial admonishment to let an earnest police lieutenant into her bed – not after the first time, because once would have been enough to compromise him. But she's let him come back, more than once, because he's different – because she doesn't have to and probably shouldn't.
She's always been very good at wanting things she can't have.
~ x ~
"Anne," she says when she can breathe again, and his fingers still on her bare back. She can't see his face, but she can visualise the perplexed expression there clearly.
"Sorry?"
She's not sure why she said it, only that it suddenly matters that she have this for herself, separate it a little further from her work and the parade of other men (even if that's impossible, when it's why he's here in the first place, why she's taken him to bed to begin with). He knows what she is, she knows the same, and yet the worshipful tenderness of his touch makes it so easy to forget, in moments like this, how easily he could destroy her. And yet –
"What," she asks, making her tone purposefully light, "did you think Milady was my name?"
He's quiet for so long she pulls back, twisting to look at him. There's something intense and indecipherable in his eyes, something she can't (let herself) explore. And then he smiles, that slow hesitant smile from when they'd first met, the one that makes her feel like she's his entire world.
"Anne," he echoes.
She likes (far too much) the way her name tastes on his tongue.
Endnotes: I have a sneaking suspicion these two end badly in this AU ... It feels, in that respect, frightfully close to canon.
Questions or prompts? Hit my Tumblr askbox if you'd like. I am, as always, myalchod over there.