#jcrawley

Well. Kaden certainly hadn’t expected this. Over a thousand years of life and he’d never gone through heat before. Was this heat? It had to be, given the symptoms he felt: feverish, irritable, excessively horny. Seemed to be the only explanation, but with a twist. He felt good. Euphoric. The longer he spent in the Undercroft, listening the moans and groans of some of the slaves seeking relief from each other, the more charged he felt magically. Even at half power, he could tell something powerful was behind this to drive the whole castle into heat like this. 

Lost in a daze as he stared at the wall, absorbing the energy from others in the area, he slowly turned his head as he caught movement out of his peripherals. Drunk, high, or whatever this was or not, his senses were still pretty well trained from his years as a detective and soldier. “Let me guess...” he said, mouth curving into a lazy grin as he looked at the other, “You’re struggling about as much as I am.” 

At this point, Kaden realized he’d been straight up ghosted by Lucien. Not that he’d really been in much contact with his master, who’d been texting him non-stop since he’d left the suite in apparently the “wrong outfit.” The Frenchman could be stubborn as hell and when the onslaught on his phone finally ceased, he felt a moment of reprieve right before an aching sense of dread and then the inevitable eye roll of what caused his master’s anxiety. Aurelius. He hadn’t met Lucien’s sire and really had no desire to, knowing the type of man he was just from the few memories and tidbits of information he’d gathered from mind and mouth. The man was someone he never liked and had seen plenty of cases in his time as a detective with battered and traumatized folks – mostly women, but some men as well. As much as he wanted to intervene, the kresnik knew from his experiences that most of the time, sharing his blunt opinion over what the law allowed him to offer wouldn’t help; the victims needed to see it for themselves to get themselves out.

With this latest development of the evening, Kaden wound up at the bar, switching wine for whiskey. He needed something stronger to deal with the frustration that he couldn’t do anything to protect Lucien in this instance. And more importantly, why the fuck did he even care? He found a distraction as someone came up next to him and he glanced over, soon offering the other man a lopsided grin when he recognized who it was. “Well, long time no see there, James,” he greeted, “How’ve you been?”