That night they walked out of headquarters back entrance and into the street. They were both dressed in blackouts beneath their jackets, taking a leisurely route to Waterloo station and the flats down by the Thames. Moran kept a sharp eye out, but they walked for the most part unnoticed in the twilight.
One pleasant thing about being around Moran all the time was that she could keep her guard relatively lowered, for the most part. The benefits of living with a bodyguard included being able to relax where other people of her standing would need to tense up. She whistled as they reached the address, looking up at the rowhouses with raised eyebrows. "Nice place. Highly paid liaison. I think the only place that beats this is the Russian's."
He nodded slightly in agreement. "Not ideal, though. Good security." He looked along the building, counting windows quietly in the glare of the streetlamps. "That's got to be it there. 304. Waterside, with the flower boxes." He eyed the fire escape. "I can make that jump, but it won't be quiet. Come on, I'll boost you up, you lower the ladder."
"We could do that," she nodded, squinting at the dark walls, trying to find the little box she was looking for. "Or we can find the security system and I can try out the skills I picked up while still mostly useless in America. I assume she has one, being a relatively lucrative target... But if you don't see one, we'll get climbing."
He raised an eyebrow, but nodded. "Let's try your method then, first, tech-head, and if that doesn't work out we'll go to plan B."
"It's not exactly rocket science," she snorted, taking off her jacket as they turned to walk down the side of the house, and then tossing the thing aside into the bushes. Best to be as nonvisible as possible until they were in the house. "I was really bored, anyway. You had your hands full, but I didn't have a thing to do."
"Yeah, I was a bit distracted, that's fair. Poor you, struggling with all that boredom alone." The security grid was back beside the gas meter. "Don't forget to grab that jacket when we leave," he muttered as he pulled on gloves from his back pocket and opened the panel.
She nodded, pulling on her own gloves and moving in as he stepped aside to appraise the inside of the box, fingers tracing wires to their destinations. She checked and double checked, and after a minute of doing so, hooked her finger under one of the wires and yanked it out. "That should do it."
He raised an eyebrow, considering the box for a moment, before swearing quietly and reaching out a hand, pressing it over a dark square in the casing. "Find whatever memory system this thing has and destroy it," he muttered, annoyed. "It's got eyes on us."
"Ah, Christ," she hissed, pulling a screwdriver out of her back pocket and carefully prying open a casing underneath the wires, revealing the motherboard and a tiny hard drive, which she stuck the screwdriver in and then wiggled hard, accompanied by a crunching sound. "Who has a camera inside their security system?"
"We do. Only reason I thought to look for it," he muttered, lowering his hand. "Alright, come on, let's go find our entrance. Back door?"
"Sounds good," she nodded, ducking away for a moment to grab her jacket from the bushes, afraid she would forget it later.
He started walking around the house, observing. It didn't take him long to find his in. The house had been converted to security, not built for it, and there was only so much that one could do about waterfront bay windows. It only took him two minutes to ram Harrison's screwdriver through part of the wooden housing and lever a pane out, and then he was unlocking the window and shoving it upward, climbing through.
She followed him in, a lot more nimbly than she would have five years ago. Her reflexes had improved a lot in that time. Hell, they'd improved a lot in Mycroft's labyrinth.
The house was dark, but outside had been as well, and his eyes adjusted easily. He started moving quietly through the first floor of the house, heading for the stairs.
She was starting to have doubts about whether or not the woman was home when she saw the light under the door on the second floor. She glanced at Sebastian, wondering how he wanted to play this. She could easily follow his lead.
He nodded to her, pulling his gun out of its holster and checking that it was loaded, before nodding to the door and giving her a silent three-count. Then he kicked in the door, gun raised.
The woman had been reading in bed. As soon as the door blew open the book went flying in her surprise, smacking a shelf and knocking a cheap snow globe onto the floor with the shatter of breaking glass.
"Do not scream," Sebastian said calmly, firmly, gun trained on her as he walked forward, "And you might get out of this alive. Scream, and I cut out your vocal chords before I do anything else. Do you understand?"
Lorna stood to the side, a knife held in her hand, letting Sebastian take the lead for the most part. The woman didn't scream, though she was pale, and her grip in the sheets was white-knuckled. "What do you want?" she asked, voice tense.
"Ines sent us," he said, walking forward slowly, gun still trained on her. His finger was cramping slightly, but he kept it in place. "She has some questions regarding your loyalty..."
The woman sat up, hands raising in surrender. "Hey, hey, I've done nothing wrong! It's not like we're close but Ines knows she can count on me!" she protested, shaking her head. "Seriously! What's it take to prove that I'm not going to sell out?"
Moran laughed, then, a low, quiet, smugly pleased sound. "Oh good, I was so worried we weren't going to get to have fun tonight. You heard the woman, Harrison... What's it going to take?"
"Oh, I don't know," she hummed, spinning the knife once in her hand. "I haven't gotten to hamstring anyone in a long time..."
The woman on the bed shifted back toward the headboard slightly, until Sebastian tapped his gun with his finger and she stilled, eyes darting between the two of them uncertainly. "I'm not going to be of much use to Ines if I can't walk. The Chi-"
Sebastian walked forward, pressing the gun to her forehead. "Mr. Moriarty will handle the Chinese. You have other concerns now."
Things seemed to be clicking for the woman. She looked between the two of them, a light sheen of sweat on her forehead. "Oh, shit," she breathed. "Harrison... Then you must be Moran. Look, look, what else was I supposed to do? Get killed because I resisted? C'mon, be reasonable!"
"You gambled, you lost," Moran said, walking forward, gun still raised. "No hard feelings, but you still need to pay the house."
The woman was looking more and more panicked. "Listen, just, please don't kill me. I'll do whatever Moriarty wants, I don't care, just don't kill me, please," she begged. Lorna rolled her eyes.
"Can we silence her, at the very least?"
"By all means," he said with a smirk, waving her forward. "Have fun."
Lorna swept forward before the woman could do anything, her hand coming forward to grab the woman's jaw, yanking it open and jamming the knife in. She came up with the woman's tongue a second later, and the second after that was muffling the woman's scream with her hand. "Well that was satisfying," she said cheerfully, holding both the knife and the tongue in one her hands before she flicked the fleshy appendage aside. "Your turn."
He smiled, taking a slow breath and walking forward, taking her hand in his and licking the blood off of her fingers. "It really has been far too long..." he breathed. "The blood is safe, by the way... she got a full workup a day ago per 'Ines' request. Jim is in a very generous mood..."
Her eyes darkened, shifting down to the prey beneath her with a building excitement. "Fuck... Do you think he's trying to give us an engagement gift?" She laughed softly, careful to keep the blade away from his face. "Or do you think it's more of an expensive dinner for a date you want to impress?"
"I don't know, nor do I, at this moment, care," he murmured in her ear. "Right now all I care about is disassembling this woman and fucking you in her blood."
She felt a tangible shiver run through her body, and she swallowed once, looking back up at him and biting her lip. "Well once you put it that way..." she hummed, fingers tightening on her knife. "What do you think should go first?"
"I don't know," he whispered, sliding his spare hand down over her left hip, tracing her hipbone. "She's certainly not bleeding enough yet... Why don't we take a little skin? It's my favorite organ."
She fought not to let herself be distracted too easily by his wandering hand, and in doing so forgot to reply at all, just leaning over the woman and shifting to pin her with a knee, before grabbing her arm and slowly flaying off a strip of skin, the woman screaming wordlessly.
He reached out to clamp a hand over the woman's mouth. She trembled under his hand, but his attention was on Harrison, watching the flecks of blood appear on her skin like stars after sunset, spattering out constellations. Her eyes were on her work, black with intensity, and he breathed in the smell of iron and fear.
The strip of skin she pulled away was about a foot long, though wasn't even half as wide, and she let it fall onto the bed beside the woman with a wet smack, watching with interest as blood seeped across the sheets.
He kissed the back of her neck, sliding his hand out to curl around her hand on the knife, taking it out of her hand. "My turn..." he whispered against her skin, leaning past her and starting to saw through the woman's finger. The woman gave one more scream, and passed out.
She sighed wistfully, dragging her fingers across the raw flesh she'd exposed, gathering up blood on her skin and watching it drip off. "They always pass out so fast... I thought she would last longer, honestly."
"She'll come back up," he sighed, tossing the finger aside. "Metal grating on bone tends to startle them slightly." He watched the blood ooze out of her finger rhythmically. He realized suddenly that it was the same finger he was missing. He ignored that and ran his finger through the blood, lifting it up and trailing it over her skin.
"Mm, that it does," she muttered, pressing an arm to her chest for a moment to soothe a sympathetic ache starting up, trying to remind her of waking up with things inside her- she took a deep breath. She'd lost some of her appetite. She hadn't carved into somebody this way in a long time. Killed them, yes, but usually quickly, and without torture. She shut her eyes, trying to cut off outside stimuli for a moment, stop herself from beginning to spiral.
He kissed the back of her neck gently, before spreading blood along her shoulder and following with his tongue, licking the crimson off of her skin with a pleased hum.
She shivered a little, eyes still closed, and tried to concentrate on just him. She wanted to enjoy his touch, even if she was a little bit leery about engaging in the torture of this woman.
He could feel the tension in her muscles, and smoothed a hand over her arm, uncertain of the source. Still, he could distract her easily enough, and pressed on, teeth scraping her skin as his hand shifted forward to palm her breast.
She leaned back against him a little, a soft sigh leaving her, her heart rate beginning to pick up a little, an appetite of some kind returning to her, even if not necessarily the same one.
He kneaded her breast through her shirt, lips tracing back up under her jaw, free hand sliding under her shirt to find bare skin, cool against the adrenaline-fueled heat of his fingertips. "It has been far too long since I've seen you painted in someone else's blood," he whispered softly.
She shivered again, the hand not holding the knife going behind her to hook into the waist of his trousers, leaning back to press her ass against his hips. That voice of his did things to her. God, it was amazing how he could still light this fire in her, even after all these years. "I guess we should fix that, then..."
He smiled, though a shiver of his own traveled down his back as she pressed against him. "I suppose we should," he said with a grin, a hand sliding up to wrap around her throat, pulling her back against him.
She sucked in a breath of anticipation, biting her lip to try to remind herself not to keel over without a scrap of dignity, her hand turning to lay palm flat against his taut stomach, fingernails scratching lightly against his skin as they slipped under his shirt, where they lay still for a moment, just feeling his musculature contract and relax as he breathed.
He smiled a little, pushing her away from him then, turning her and setting her against the blood soaked-sheets, hand still gripping her throat playfully. He gives her a toothy grin, eyes dark. "Fucking gorgeous."
"I could say the same about you," she purred, eyes following the lines of his red-coated arms up to his face, grey eyes meeting his icy blue ones, though the blue was pushed all the way to the rim by the wide expanse of his pupils. It was easy to tell when they were in the midst of bloodlust.
He grinned, sitting back after a moment and pulling a pair of handcuffs out of his side pocket. He reached out and cuffed the unconscious woman beside them to the bed, before returning his attention to Lorna. "Work... Now, where were we?"
She reached up, grabbed his collar, and hauled him down to kiss him, teeth nipping at his lips immediately. She wanted to see if she could make him lose control. That was when he was the most fun.
He bit back hard as she tried to assert control, his palms hitting the mattress on either side of her as she managed to pull him slightly off balance. His teeth dug into her lip until he tasted her blood mingled with that of their victim's. He pinned her hips down with his, controlling their motion as she kissed him with baiting ferocity.
She moaned as he pinned her down, dragging her fingers down his chest, the taste of copper in her mouth driving her further up the wall. The knife was forgotten on the floor, her attention now on the honed weapon that was his body. Her hands snagged in his waistband, then skated over to palm him through his trousers- she felt a brush of something soft against her leg, and froze. "I just felt something."
He stilled, too, instantly shifting the adrenaline of domination back into that of the hunt, and shifted enough to look over his shoulder, tensed for attack...
A pair of curious yellow eyes stared back.
"Christ," he muttered, untensing. "It's a fucking cat."
She shifted so she could look, and gasped. It wasn't just a cat. It was a small black kitten. "Ooooh! It's a kitten! Hi, baby!"
He glanced uncertainly at Lorna at the high pitch squeaking sound she was emitting, squinting slightly in confusion before returning his attention to the cat, which was currently licking blood off of his arm with a sandpaper tongue.
"Awww, she's licking blood off of you," she cooed, grinning. "Seb, look at her!"
He raised an eyebrow, glancing between Lorna and the cat again. He had never seen her like this. It was disarming. He shifted so that she could sit up (the cat letting out an indignant noise as his arm moved away) and bent to pick up his knife off the floor.
Still cooing, she sat up and scooped the kitten into her arms, and gasped again as the kitten mewed. "Oh my God, Seb, she needs a home. We can take her!"
She was crazy, he decided. "No, we are not keeping the fucking cat. Absolutely not. We can drop it off at the pound if you really insist, but it has a hell of a feast right here, really..." he glanced at their victim and then back at Lorna. The sight of her cuddling the kitten while covered in blood was almost humorous.
"What? Seb, come on, look at her," she protested, tucking her face next to the kittens, pouting. "We can't just drop her off at a POUND."
"No," he retorted calmly, turning to the unconscious woman. "Come on, we have a lovely art piece going here."
"What do you mean no? We are totally keeping her. You don't have to take care of her or anything. Her name is Magpie, by the way, I've just decided."
"Its name is absolutely not Magpie. Its name isn't anything because we aren't keeping it," he reiterated. "Ignore the cat. Jim gave us a job to do."
"Yeah, alright, let's kill her and then go get cat food," she said, quite stubbornly. "Or drop me off and I'll get cat food. We'll stay in my place. Me and the cat."
He stared at her, expression blank, as he tried to figure out what the fuck she was doing. Finally, without looking, he rammed the knife between the woman's ribs and stood up. "Fine. I'll call cleanup. Shower and change so that we can go." He headed off to find a bathroom, fuming.
She immediately started paying attention to the kitten again, and after kissing its little head once stood with it still in her arms and followed after him to look for a bathroom.