Perfume
Title: Perfume
Series: KHR. Technically.
Part: 1/6
Warnings: rampant profanity, sporadic abuse of the capslock key and italics tag, and liberties taken with damn near everything including, eventually, Squalo's person but not in the fun way.
The Merovingian come
Tsunayoshi waved them into various seats. “The Merovingian,” he sighed, “are bringing us a princess.”
They all blinked. “A what?”
“A princess. Look,” he waved a sheaf of papers wearily over his paper-covered desk, “I'm not kidding. Read it.”
“I'll be damned.” Gokudera skimmed the pages and began reading. “'As a token of esteem and goodwill towards our future' blah blah blah... 'we bring you our Princess-' What the hell. France doesn't even have a king.”
“They're flying in from Canada.”
“Canada doesn't have a king either.”
“What are Merovingians?”
“They're a family from France. Very old, but they haven't been very powerful for a couple of hundred years now.”
“Where the hell did they get a princess anyway? It's not like you can pick one up at the store.”
“It might be a figure of speech,” Tsuna said. He had his chin propped on his hand. “She's the Merovingian boss's daughter.”
Reborn shook his head. “She's adopted.”
“How do you know that? Reborn? ...Are you asleep? Well, crap, never mind. Does anyone know what we do with a princess?”
“One that comes with so many damn strings you could use her for a towel?” Gokudera added, frowning through his glasses at the letter he was reading in detail.
Sasagawa shrugged. “...Give her to Xanxus?”
~*~
Squalo had lost the toss, which meant he “got to” show up when the Merovingian brought their princess or whatever they wanted to call this pony show. He had fifty thousand riding on it being a poorly-disguised attempt to get Sawada a wife, or even a mistress, in their family. Good luck with that.
Muffled in a long coat, hat, and gloves, there was very little to see of her. Even less from Squalo's angle-not even the infamous Merovingian hair, just the fur and the back of a hat. She was on the arm of a bright young man with long chestnut hair, braided back, and a slim figure in grays with a long black braid stood back, behind, much too far away to be a right-hand man... but the perfect distance to be an assassin who wanted to make a point. He would know, he was standing at the other such place to be seen as an assassin making a point. Fucking boring work. It wasn't his fucking business if anybody iced anyone else here over a prettied-up pimp show. He watched the figure anyway, more likely than not Merovingian with that hair (and wasn't that the pinnacle of making assumptions, coming from him) but it stood calmly, relaxed. Waiting. Bastard didn't look nearly as cold as Squalo felt, either.
Bastard.
The young man looked around, said something to Sawada Squalo didn't care about, and nodded. He tucked a card into her glove. “If you need anything, for anything,” he said in strangely-accented French, “you call me.” He clasped both her hands in his and kissed her fingers. She smiled at him and kissed his brow.
“Don't worry about me, David.” She said in English as she shook her head. “Worry will be the death of you.” Then she kissed his cheek. “Tu n'hésite pas. Je t'aime.”
“Je t'aime à tout jamais soeur du mon coeur,” he said, and with a wink and a grin and a hard glare at Squalo (and why the fuck he was not the only one here) he left, the end of that braid tapping his thighs in time to his stride, ducking into the back of the dark car, his family getting in after him, the car pulling away.
“Quebec,” Gokudera said, apropos of nothing. He grinned apologetically when he realized he was being stared at. “Sorry, I just placed his accent.” Squalo glared harder, because the brat was right.
“There are Merovingians in Quebec?” The boxer-brat, Sasagawa.
The woman, who had been silent until now, said dryly “There are Vongola in Japan,” and Yamamoto laughed, Sawada laughed, Sasagawa laughed, and Squalo ground his teeth. Levi could have fucking been here for this. Or Fran. Or Lussuria. Or-okay, not Lussuria, but someone else.
“You're right!” the Tenth said, friendly as a fucking puppy, “I guess we are pretty global these days. Where are you from?”
“Victoria,” she said in her pretty voice. She had the smooth, sweet voice of a highly-paid telemarketer, light with sourceless accent. “Western Canada.”
“So you're originally Merovingian.”
She laughed. “The Merovingian have no stake at all west of Toronto, and precious little there. There are Merovingians in Quebec because Quebec wants to be France. No more reason than that. Victoria,” she teased, “wants to be British.” She smiled. “We are even, technically, still a colony of the British Empire, just like Australia.”
“And Hong Kong,” agreed Sawada, and the Merovingian Princess's smile became just the tiniest fraction brighter. Plastic always did shine more than anything genuine.
“Quite.”
And then, finally, the stupid Tenth invited her to come inside which meant he could finally get out of the fucking weather and finally leave this stupid pony show. Not that he couldn't have left before, but what kind of idiot would storm off in November and stay outside? He looked up to where his opposite number had been standing and while annoyed that he hadn't seen the man leave was satisfied to find the space vacant. Probably left with the rest of the Merovingian.
~*~
“Who the fuck are you?” Squalo snarled at a startled-looking woman who, abruptly, looked much less startled when he finished yelling than she had when he'd started. She smiled.
“I'm the Merovingian Princess, Superbi Squalo,” she said. She was unpretty, and her hair stopped shy of her shoulders, but he recognized the voice from the farce in the drive that morning. Squalo snorted.
“Merovingians have long hair.”
She smiled briefly. “You have long hair, and you're not Merovingian. But you're right, I'm as French as Vongola Decimo is Italian.” She paused, smiled wider, longer. “Yes, every bit as French as Sawada Tsunayoshi is Italian. A bit more by birth, though. But that's not important.”
“Pft. How'd you fucking know my name?”
“Why shouldn't I know the Sword Emperor?”
Why not indeed. Squalo, full of pride, relaxed and grinned like his namesake. “I scare you.”
“A bit,” the Merovingian Princess readily agreed. “You startle me, mostly.” She grinned playfully. “I'm afraid of sudden loud noises.”
“VOOOOOOOI!” Squalo watched her jump damn near out of her skin before she visibly reminded herself that it was him making that racket, and refused to feel satisfaction that it was his volume that was intimidating to this woman. “WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN I STARTLE YOU? I'M SUPERBI FUCKING SQUALO AND I COULD KILL YOU BEFORE YOU EVEN NOTICED!”
“That's exactly it,” the woman agreed in her calm-polite voice, so at odds with her racing heart and eyes still a bit panic-wild. “Why should I be afraid of something I'm not even going to notice, much less be able to do anything about?”
“VOOOOOOI-” Squalo, abruptly, realized that he hadn't any fantastic rebuttal to that... that... twistedly practical piece of logic. It pissed him off.
“The Merovingian had very long hair,” the woman said as if they were still talking about that shit, “because they only ever cut it when they were defeated.”
“And what does it fucking say about them that their Princess has short hair?”
She smiled again, bright and sweet as ant poison. “I had long hair. I cut it when I made a vow, to make it important. Because of the Merovingian and their hair.” She tipped her head slightly to one side, teasing, almost coy. “And you have your long hair because someone else has never-”
“SHUT. UP.” She shut up. He didn't know how she fucking knew, he didn't care. It wasn't like it was a secret, but it galled him to have her speak of it. It galled him more that the shining sword against her throat drawing a thin line of blood and cutting that short hair of hers even shorter did not seem to scare her. Indeed, her only fucking acknowledgment of the blade pressed snug under her chin was a total cessation of movement... briefly, before she started cleaning her goddamn fingernails, just without moving her head. There was nothing she could do to stop him from taking her life if he decided to lop her head off, and it pissed him off more that this knowledge made her set aside his skill as unimportant to her fucking point instead of any reason for fear. That she did shut up, not because of the sword she was looking at him so mildly over but because she had been making him upset simply did not bear thinking about.
“Tch.” He pulled back his sword. Somehow killing her smacked of her winning and Superbi fucking Squalo was not going to lose to some tart who was clearly involved in some kind of Zen bullshit. He would kill her, but not like this. This was Not How It Goes. He stalked away, turning his back contemptuously so he couldn't see the slight smile he fucking knew she's goddamn wearing.
“I have shadows of my own, Superbi Squalo,” she murmured after him without acknowledgment.
~*~
“WHAT.”
“Ha ha ha, isn't it nice? You get to take her home with you, Squalo!”
He should not have taught the brat so well. It would have been so much easier to lop that grinning head off if he hadn't.
“You're pretty energetic before dinner!”
“STOP FUCKING AROUND AND HOLD STILL. YOU COULDN'T HAVE FUCKING TOLD ME THIS BEFORE I SHOWED UP?”
“Ha ha ha, if we'd told you you wouldn't have shown up!”
“EXACTLY.”
“C'mon, Squalo, it'll be fun!”
“THEN YOU KEEP HER.”
“You know we can't do that.”
The bitch of it was he did know. Carting her off to another property without fanfare was better than announcing Sawada was putting her up somewhere else and leagues better than letting a potential spy run around the place.
“Look, you won't even have to look after her! She comes with her own guard.”
“WHAT?!”
Yamamoto blinked at him. “Yeah, they left two: their princess and her bodyguard, the Serpent. I thought you knew. You were eying her at the meeting this morning.”
Squalo stood straight, planted the tip of his sword in the floor, and glared. “You want me to take an assassin from another family into the Varia mansion.”
“Yeah.” Really, where else would they keep her?
“Fine.”
~*~
It had been someone's brilliant idea to have them, the Merovingian Princess and Squalo, eat an intimate breakfast together before leaving. Probably the Storm brat, but he was looking forward to finding out for certain so he could 'thank' the right person. Ostensibly the Princess's guardian was eating with them. Ostensibly. Squalo didn't see her.
It was not a good morning.
“Tell me,” he said, buttering a croissant with the kind of precise manners learned by watching the dons' wives launch the kind of political offensives they'd built a monument for in Hiroshima. “What possessed the Merovingian to leave his daughter with the Vongola?”
The Princess snorted. “For about the reasons you're thinking.”
“You don't know what I'm thinking.” Bedroom pawn, score. Kind of a long shot, because she could be Sawada's mother, admittedly a teenage mother, but definitely his mother and without the kind of chronological contortions the Merovingian had got up to. Still. Stranger things happened among the families. Levi so owed him fifty thousand lira.
“Whatever it is, it's probably right. Guillaume will take whatever he can get.” Her nose crinkled. “It's offensive to be called his daughter, you know. Guillaume is nearly my age; it's possible for him to have a daughter my age, but he'd have had to have lost his virginity at a truly ridiculous age to have managed it. He only adopted me as his daughter because he couldn't marry me to support his claim to me.”
“And why would he want to do that?”
“I'm the Tree.”
“I thought you were the Princess.”
She eyed him. “You're the Rain. I thought you were the Sword Emperor.”
Squalo smirked. “Continue.
“The Merovingian want the Serpent. We go as a pair.”
He snorted. “He's already got her. She's your guard.”
The Princess smiled. “She's my guard. The Vongola have more control of the Varia than the Merovingian do the Serpent. Do you know the name Joseph Zhao?”
He sniffed. “Old dragon. Master of Hong Kong.” Filthy place, Hong Kong, and that's coming from him. “Why?”
“Zhao owns me.”
“You just said the Merovingian lay claim to you.”
“They do.”
Squalo was beginning to see the mess, and he just knew it would give him a headache.
“Explain,” he said. “Use small words.”
She smirked. “The British own me too, at least nominally, because I'm from Victoria... but then the British also like to think they own Hong Kong, so they'll never enforce it.”
“Because of Zhao.” He grimaced. “Who owns you and is from Hong Kong. Which they claim.” Hong Kong and the British Empire was a mess everyone from the Vongola to the Yakuza had been staying out of.
She nodded once, placidly. “At the very most, they may point to me at parties to show off.”
“Fucking fantastic.” He sighed, and scowled. “I still don't see why the fuck any of them want you,” he growled-and someone chuckled in his ear, close enough to tickle the fine hairs inside.
“They don't,” purred a dark, slow voice. “Weren't you listening?” A woman's arm wrapped around him to caress his face. Squalo glared at the Princess in front of him watching this all with mild interest. The blade tip pressed against the space between his third and fourth ribs, digging a bloody little hole with every breath, inspired him to keep still. He'd fucking liked this jacket, damn it. “The Merovingian want me.” Her breasts brushed his back.
The Princess frowned. “You didn't poison that, did you?” Squalo sincerely hoped not. Not that it would keep him from killing the bitch, but convulsions were a bitch themselves and so undignified.
“Not this time.” The woman with the knife who fucking blew in his ear leaned, langourously, against his back, both arms winding themselves around his frame. He was vibrating with indignation and he knew he could break free and split her like a fucking roast, but... but. Some thing, some tiny part of him, was advising very strongly against it. Squalo kept still, and ground his teeth.
“And why do the Merovingian want you?” he hissed, and the woman behind him, the Serpent, he presumed, laughed darkly.
“What's not to want?”
Well, she had fucking come up behind him in a fucking sealed room with no fucking cover and he hadn't had a fucking clue until she blew in his god-fucking-damn ear. “Do they have you?”
“No.” She slid round into his lap and smirked at him. Black hair, black eyes, dusky skin, and the most succulent pair of breasts he'd ever seen packaged something priests had probably been warning men about for the last six thousand years. Shit. “Nobody has me... except her.”
He glared at her, eyes narrowed to slits. “And the Merovingian have her.”
Her smirk showed teeth. “They like to think so.”
He shoved her off his lap and screamed. The Princess almost jumped out of her damn skin. On her rump, on the floor, the Serpent laughed.
This was not a good morning.
Part Two
RIE, IT KEPT ME UP AGAIN. I STILL BLAME YOU. I dislike the beginning. Maybe if I read KHR until I'm caught up it'll get better. Or maybe I'll lose the momentum and should finish this beast and THEN read it and edit. Whatever. T_T
Series: KHR. Technically.
Part: 1/6
Warnings: rampant profanity, sporadic abuse of the capslock key and italics tag, and liberties taken with damn near everything including, eventually, Squalo's person but not in the fun way.
The Merovingian come
Tsunayoshi waved them into various seats. “The Merovingian,” he sighed, “are bringing us a princess.”
They all blinked. “A what?”
“A princess. Look,” he waved a sheaf of papers wearily over his paper-covered desk, “I'm not kidding. Read it.”
“I'll be damned.” Gokudera skimmed the pages and began reading. “'As a token of esteem and goodwill towards our future' blah blah blah... 'we bring you our Princess-' What the hell. France doesn't even have a king.”
“They're flying in from Canada.”
“Canada doesn't have a king either.”
“What are Merovingians?”
“They're a family from France. Very old, but they haven't been very powerful for a couple of hundred years now.”
“Where the hell did they get a princess anyway? It's not like you can pick one up at the store.”
“It might be a figure of speech,” Tsuna said. He had his chin propped on his hand. “She's the Merovingian boss's daughter.”
Reborn shook his head. “She's adopted.”
“How do you know that? Reborn? ...Are you asleep? Well, crap, never mind. Does anyone know what we do with a princess?”
“One that comes with so many damn strings you could use her for a towel?” Gokudera added, frowning through his glasses at the letter he was reading in detail.
Sasagawa shrugged. “...Give her to Xanxus?”
~*~
Squalo had lost the toss, which meant he “got to” show up when the Merovingian brought their princess or whatever they wanted to call this pony show. He had fifty thousand riding on it being a poorly-disguised attempt to get Sawada a wife, or even a mistress, in their family. Good luck with that.
Muffled in a long coat, hat, and gloves, there was very little to see of her. Even less from Squalo's angle-not even the infamous Merovingian hair, just the fur and the back of a hat. She was on the arm of a bright young man with long chestnut hair, braided back, and a slim figure in grays with a long black braid stood back, behind, much too far away to be a right-hand man... but the perfect distance to be an assassin who wanted to make a point. He would know, he was standing at the other such place to be seen as an assassin making a point. Fucking boring work. It wasn't his fucking business if anybody iced anyone else here over a prettied-up pimp show. He watched the figure anyway, more likely than not Merovingian with that hair (and wasn't that the pinnacle of making assumptions, coming from him) but it stood calmly, relaxed. Waiting. Bastard didn't look nearly as cold as Squalo felt, either.
Bastard.
The young man looked around, said something to Sawada Squalo didn't care about, and nodded. He tucked a card into her glove. “If you need anything, for anything,” he said in strangely-accented French, “you call me.” He clasped both her hands in his and kissed her fingers. She smiled at him and kissed his brow.
“Don't worry about me, David.” She said in English as she shook her head. “Worry will be the death of you.” Then she kissed his cheek. “Tu n'hésite pas. Je t'aime.”
“Je t'aime à tout jamais soeur du mon coeur,” he said, and with a wink and a grin and a hard glare at Squalo (and why the fuck he was not the only one here) he left, the end of that braid tapping his thighs in time to his stride, ducking into the back of the dark car, his family getting in after him, the car pulling away.
“Quebec,” Gokudera said, apropos of nothing. He grinned apologetically when he realized he was being stared at. “Sorry, I just placed his accent.” Squalo glared harder, because the brat was right.
“There are Merovingians in Quebec?” The boxer-brat, Sasagawa.
The woman, who had been silent until now, said dryly “There are Vongola in Japan,” and Yamamoto laughed, Sawada laughed, Sasagawa laughed, and Squalo ground his teeth. Levi could have fucking been here for this. Or Fran. Or Lussuria. Or-okay, not Lussuria, but someone else.
“You're right!” the Tenth said, friendly as a fucking puppy, “I guess we are pretty global these days. Where are you from?”
“Victoria,” she said in her pretty voice. She had the smooth, sweet voice of a highly-paid telemarketer, light with sourceless accent. “Western Canada.”
“So you're originally Merovingian.”
She laughed. “The Merovingian have no stake at all west of Toronto, and precious little there. There are Merovingians in Quebec because Quebec wants to be France. No more reason than that. Victoria,” she teased, “wants to be British.” She smiled. “We are even, technically, still a colony of the British Empire, just like Australia.”
“And Hong Kong,” agreed Sawada, and the Merovingian Princess's smile became just the tiniest fraction brighter. Plastic always did shine more than anything genuine.
“Quite.”
And then, finally, the stupid Tenth invited her to come inside which meant he could finally get out of the fucking weather and finally leave this stupid pony show. Not that he couldn't have left before, but what kind of idiot would storm off in November and stay outside? He looked up to where his opposite number had been standing and while annoyed that he hadn't seen the man leave was satisfied to find the space vacant. Probably left with the rest of the Merovingian.
~*~
“Who the fuck are you?” Squalo snarled at a startled-looking woman who, abruptly, looked much less startled when he finished yelling than she had when he'd started. She smiled.
“I'm the Merovingian Princess, Superbi Squalo,” she said. She was unpretty, and her hair stopped shy of her shoulders, but he recognized the voice from the farce in the drive that morning. Squalo snorted.
“Merovingians have long hair.”
She smiled briefly. “You have long hair, and you're not Merovingian. But you're right, I'm as French as Vongola Decimo is Italian.” She paused, smiled wider, longer. “Yes, every bit as French as Sawada Tsunayoshi is Italian. A bit more by birth, though. But that's not important.”
“Pft. How'd you fucking know my name?”
“Why shouldn't I know the Sword Emperor?”
Why not indeed. Squalo, full of pride, relaxed and grinned like his namesake. “I scare you.”
“A bit,” the Merovingian Princess readily agreed. “You startle me, mostly.” She grinned playfully. “I'm afraid of sudden loud noises.”
“VOOOOOOOI!” Squalo watched her jump damn near out of her skin before she visibly reminded herself that it was him making that racket, and refused to feel satisfaction that it was his volume that was intimidating to this woman. “WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN I STARTLE YOU? I'M SUPERBI FUCKING SQUALO AND I COULD KILL YOU BEFORE YOU EVEN NOTICED!”
“That's exactly it,” the woman agreed in her calm-polite voice, so at odds with her racing heart and eyes still a bit panic-wild. “Why should I be afraid of something I'm not even going to notice, much less be able to do anything about?”
“VOOOOOOI-” Squalo, abruptly, realized that he hadn't any fantastic rebuttal to that... that... twistedly practical piece of logic. It pissed him off.
“The Merovingian had very long hair,” the woman said as if they were still talking about that shit, “because they only ever cut it when they were defeated.”
“And what does it fucking say about them that their Princess has short hair?”
She smiled again, bright and sweet as ant poison. “I had long hair. I cut it when I made a vow, to make it important. Because of the Merovingian and their hair.” She tipped her head slightly to one side, teasing, almost coy. “And you have your long hair because someone else has never-”
“SHUT. UP.” She shut up. He didn't know how she fucking knew, he didn't care. It wasn't like it was a secret, but it galled him to have her speak of it. It galled him more that the shining sword against her throat drawing a thin line of blood and cutting that short hair of hers even shorter did not seem to scare her. Indeed, her only fucking acknowledgment of the blade pressed snug under her chin was a total cessation of movement... briefly, before she started cleaning her goddamn fingernails, just without moving her head. There was nothing she could do to stop him from taking her life if he decided to lop her head off, and it pissed him off more that this knowledge made her set aside his skill as unimportant to her fucking point instead of any reason for fear. That she did shut up, not because of the sword she was looking at him so mildly over but because she had been making him upset simply did not bear thinking about.
“Tch.” He pulled back his sword. Somehow killing her smacked of her winning and Superbi fucking Squalo was not going to lose to some tart who was clearly involved in some kind of Zen bullshit. He would kill her, but not like this. This was Not How It Goes. He stalked away, turning his back contemptuously so he couldn't see the slight smile he fucking knew she's goddamn wearing.
“I have shadows of my own, Superbi Squalo,” she murmured after him without acknowledgment.
~*~
“WHAT.”
“Ha ha ha, isn't it nice? You get to take her home with you, Squalo!”
He should not have taught the brat so well. It would have been so much easier to lop that grinning head off if he hadn't.
“You're pretty energetic before dinner!”
“STOP FUCKING AROUND AND HOLD STILL. YOU COULDN'T HAVE FUCKING TOLD ME THIS BEFORE I SHOWED UP?”
“Ha ha ha, if we'd told you you wouldn't have shown up!”
“EXACTLY.”
“C'mon, Squalo, it'll be fun!”
“THEN YOU KEEP HER.”
“You know we can't do that.”
The bitch of it was he did know. Carting her off to another property without fanfare was better than announcing Sawada was putting her up somewhere else and leagues better than letting a potential spy run around the place.
“Look, you won't even have to look after her! She comes with her own guard.”
“WHAT?!”
Yamamoto blinked at him. “Yeah, they left two: their princess and her bodyguard, the Serpent. I thought you knew. You were eying her at the meeting this morning.”
Squalo stood straight, planted the tip of his sword in the floor, and glared. “You want me to take an assassin from another family into the Varia mansion.”
“Yeah.” Really, where else would they keep her?
“Fine.”
~*~
It had been someone's brilliant idea to have them, the Merovingian Princess and Squalo, eat an intimate breakfast together before leaving. Probably the Storm brat, but he was looking forward to finding out for certain so he could 'thank' the right person. Ostensibly the Princess's guardian was eating with them. Ostensibly. Squalo didn't see her.
It was not a good morning.
“Tell me,” he said, buttering a croissant with the kind of precise manners learned by watching the dons' wives launch the kind of political offensives they'd built a monument for in Hiroshima. “What possessed the Merovingian to leave his daughter with the Vongola?”
The Princess snorted. “For about the reasons you're thinking.”
“You don't know what I'm thinking.” Bedroom pawn, score. Kind of a long shot, because she could be Sawada's mother, admittedly a teenage mother, but definitely his mother and without the kind of chronological contortions the Merovingian had got up to. Still. Stranger things happened among the families. Levi so owed him fifty thousand lira.
“Whatever it is, it's probably right. Guillaume will take whatever he can get.” Her nose crinkled. “It's offensive to be called his daughter, you know. Guillaume is nearly my age; it's possible for him to have a daughter my age, but he'd have had to have lost his virginity at a truly ridiculous age to have managed it. He only adopted me as his daughter because he couldn't marry me to support his claim to me.”
“And why would he want to do that?”
“I'm the Tree.”
“I thought you were the Princess.”
She eyed him. “You're the Rain. I thought you were the Sword Emperor.”
Squalo smirked. “Continue.
“The Merovingian want the Serpent. We go as a pair.”
He snorted. “He's already got her. She's your guard.”
The Princess smiled. “She's my guard. The Vongola have more control of the Varia than the Merovingian do the Serpent. Do you know the name Joseph Zhao?”
He sniffed. “Old dragon. Master of Hong Kong.” Filthy place, Hong Kong, and that's coming from him. “Why?”
“Zhao owns me.”
“You just said the Merovingian lay claim to you.”
“They do.”
Squalo was beginning to see the mess, and he just knew it would give him a headache.
“Explain,” he said. “Use small words.”
She smirked. “The British own me too, at least nominally, because I'm from Victoria... but then the British also like to think they own Hong Kong, so they'll never enforce it.”
“Because of Zhao.” He grimaced. “Who owns you and is from Hong Kong. Which they claim.” Hong Kong and the British Empire was a mess everyone from the Vongola to the Yakuza had been staying out of.
She nodded once, placidly. “At the very most, they may point to me at parties to show off.”
“Fucking fantastic.” He sighed, and scowled. “I still don't see why the fuck any of them want you,” he growled-and someone chuckled in his ear, close enough to tickle the fine hairs inside.
“They don't,” purred a dark, slow voice. “Weren't you listening?” A woman's arm wrapped around him to caress his face. Squalo glared at the Princess in front of him watching this all with mild interest. The blade tip pressed against the space between his third and fourth ribs, digging a bloody little hole with every breath, inspired him to keep still. He'd fucking liked this jacket, damn it. “The Merovingian want me.” Her breasts brushed his back.
The Princess frowned. “You didn't poison that, did you?” Squalo sincerely hoped not. Not that it would keep him from killing the bitch, but convulsions were a bitch themselves and so undignified.
“Not this time.” The woman with the knife who fucking blew in his ear leaned, langourously, against his back, both arms winding themselves around his frame. He was vibrating with indignation and he knew he could break free and split her like a fucking roast, but... but. Some thing, some tiny part of him, was advising very strongly against it. Squalo kept still, and ground his teeth.
“And why do the Merovingian want you?” he hissed, and the woman behind him, the Serpent, he presumed, laughed darkly.
“What's not to want?”
Well, she had fucking come up behind him in a fucking sealed room with no fucking cover and he hadn't had a fucking clue until she blew in his god-fucking-damn ear. “Do they have you?”
“No.” She slid round into his lap and smirked at him. Black hair, black eyes, dusky skin, and the most succulent pair of breasts he'd ever seen packaged something priests had probably been warning men about for the last six thousand years. Shit. “Nobody has me... except her.”
He glared at her, eyes narrowed to slits. “And the Merovingian have her.”
Her smirk showed teeth. “They like to think so.”
He shoved her off his lap and screamed. The Princess almost jumped out of her damn skin. On her rump, on the floor, the Serpent laughed.
This was not a good morning.
Part Two
RIE, IT KEPT ME UP AGAIN. I STILL BLAME YOU. I dislike the beginning. Maybe if I read KHR until I'm caught up it'll get better. Or maybe I'll lose the momentum and should finish this beast and THEN read it and edit. Whatever. T_T