Chapter 5

A/N: Sorry about a short chapter, but it's the first part of a rather lengthy flashback and I promise to update very soon. Just trying to explain where Lauren is coming from.

The door opened noiselessly and a tall dark-skinned man strode, confident and graceful, across the speckles extent of the laboratory. He stopped mere steps away from the woman, who was sitting, bent-backed and slouched over a microscope, so engrossed that she probably wouldn't hear the approach of a full-grown rhino.

"Doctor Lewis," the man called in a deep, low-pitched, husky voice and the woman, startled, jerked around, dropping a slide in the process. Her huge brown eyes, scared and disoriented, looked up into the arrogant, slightly smiling face and she immediately sprang up to her feet.

"I am sorry, I was working," she mumbled under her breath while a singeing thought was burning the insides of her mind – he shouldn't have strutted into her lab without as much as a knock or a warning cough, as if he was the master here. Instead of voicing that idea, she quickly reminded herself that he actually was it – the master of the lab, the owner of the doctor. Powerless to deny that, Lauren curled her fingers around the necklace that was choking her, as loose around her neck as it was – the necklace that marked her out to everyone in the know, everyone of significance, not as just any human piece of meat but a piece of the Ash's property.

"Such a sight for the sore eyes," the man drawled, his booming voice elusively mocking, "A servant who actually enjoys serving. Then, my next order will only play into your zeal. I've got a subject for you, doctor, a delectable subject I should say. A fae of a rare species that I need studied and analyzed and reported on asap and even sooner."

Lauren passed a tired hand over her brow and rubbed at her strained eyed with her fingertips. "My caseload is already challenging," she dared voice an objection, "And it's been a week since I had a chance of attending to Nadia."

Her voice, carrying a distinct note of despair, did little to perturb the Ash as he measured the slender woman with an intense stare. "Your… human, as I should make it clear, doctor, is not a priority, has never been, but my orders are," he declared with the confidence Lauren couldn't help but haltingly admire, "You'll deal with her once you're through with your assignments. Relax, she isn't going anywhere from her pod."

Mute with anger and indignation winning over the forced humility, Lauren went into an internal tirade about her human being the thing that had brought her into this servitude and about an ignorant haughty bastard that the Light fae had for a leader. Eloquent and sincere as her little pitch was, adorned with a few choice expressions and a terminology-heavy assessment of the Ash's mental faculties, it had to stay internalized and Lauren only nodded, her eyes scrutinizing the pristine floor.

With an economy of polite gesture that was so him, the Ash turned his broad back to the blonde and headed for the exit, throwing over his shoulder the last instruction, "I'll have one of my soldiers bring her over to you, doctor, and I am counting on speedy results. And mind it, she's a complete wildling, raised by humans, no self awareness, no sense of her true value, which is your task to assess and report straight to me and no one else."

Ten minutes later, after a door swung open again and a struggling female was unceremoniously pushed inside by a tall muscular fae Lauren had met before during a physical, the human doctor found her mind thrown into a new turmoil – her exhausted head stubbornly refused to dwell on Nadia's pale lifeless face or concentrate on the task at hand. Oh, no, her well-schooled, perfectly reasonable scientific self was not researching, it was admiring, feasting on every square inch of the view that presented itself to her screen-dried brown eyes. Lauren was not yet sure of the species or the significance of the young woman that was perching on the examination bed in front of her, luminous and glorious in her majestic, magnetic beauty, but the one thing the doctor knew was that her life, with Bo in it, was irredeemably thrown off its steady, doomed course.

Bo had proven a fascinating subject – a creature with fae physique and human mentality, sometimes more human than Lauren herself, compliant and defiant at the same time. Raised in a human family, without any knowledge of her true nature of her powers, the young succubus had been on the run for years, bouncing from town to town, leaving a trail of dead lovers behind, racked by guilt and unable to stop from feeding or to mitigate her murderous powers. Until one day she popped up on the Light-fae radar after an unfortunately conspicuous feed and was captured and brought up to the attention of the Ash.

What was his reasoning behind letting the anomaly live but keeping her prisoner under research was not immediately clear for Lauren but she followed her five-year policy of keeping the fae, who was holding her life and the life of her beloved in the palm of his hand, pleased and satisfied with her services and her docility.

From what the doctor could glean from her more talkative fae patents or from her infrequent sallies out of her lab and beyond the infrimary, the succubus was far from obedient or compliant, refusing to pledge to the Light or the Dark and recognize a ruler, breaking from her prison by seducing her guards, recaptured but un-chastened by the experience. But Bo kept coming to the lab, giving herself up meekly to the doctor's needles and tests, claiming she was as curious to know her own biology as the scientist was to study it, but both the women knew that there was another interest lurking just underneath the obvious.

"Why don't you try and succubus me stupid, so that I let you out of here?" Lauren asked once, her eyes glued to the computer screen where the latest bloodwork test was being processed, "Much easier than taking on your ogre guard and the reinforced metal door of your room."

"I don't like it easy, doctor," Bo smiled cockily, "I like it interesting. Succubus compulsion is piece of cake but it's not what I want. Besides, it wouldn't be very nice of me to leave you behind to take the rap for my escape."

Lauren's mind only half-engaged with the work, the woman, unused to either fae kindness or being hit on by such a level of walking hotness, felt a sudden constriction in her throat that she had to gulp down in order to speak up.

"Very noble of you," she finally managed out and added with genuine curiosity, "And what is it you want, Bo?"

"Someone who would love me without being succubused, someone I could love back without sucking the life out of," the brunette replied in a steady voice but it didn't take mind-reading powers to hear the decade-worth of pain and loneliness in it.

Right at that moment, admiration swirling inside her and her gaze drawn to the data showing on the screen, Lauren took the first-ever bold decision in her fae-slave career not to impart the research results to her all-mighty boss. The file that she submitted to the Ash contained a detailed study of the rare fae species, consistent with whatever was known about succubi so far, requesting an extension on the research and neatly hinting at a possible stunning break-through without giving any meat to it. Lauren's file struck just the right balance between intriguing and uninformative to elicit a consent to further the research. But the deeper the doctor delved into it, the less she felt like revealing the fact that her gorgeous supernatural patient with human principles possessed quite a few properties that went far beyond her succubus nature or that the bond that was being forged between them pushed the professional boundaries.