She was glowing. What he would do to make her happy, and this, this was the only thing that made her truly smile. No cost was too great for her fleeting pleasures. Not family, not love, not even the surety of tomorrow, so long as this monster could wantonly slaughter whoever she managed to lure past their threshold.

Their threshold? Her threshold. He paid for the place and he slept here – and sometimes hardly that. This was Nisa’s dungeon, and their father had been the first who mistook it for home.

He lowered her arms, and he had visions of that noose tool wrapped about her neck. His face was expressionless, wood in his hands. There was something … off, about the way she was standing.

The man’s face was still bloated, reddened, when Aslan made eye contact with him. He stilled like a hunted deer – like Aslan had been the ‘true’ threat all along. This man. He had watched and waited, like a hawk? For a moment to catch his little sister, alone and presumably defenseless?

That she wasn’t was not the important part.

Drugged them with tea. Lady (complicit? Antagonist?) incapacitated, or worse. Came here with him, unchaperoned, to do what? Aslan’s hands tightened at first, rope still loose but grip hard on the sordid weapons. Then, his grip slackened. Had they succeeded in what they set out to do-

The victim yanked hard, scrambling out from underneath Nisa in his moment of puzzled distraction. He managed to wiggle out and slide a few steps away, lubricated in his own blood. Aslan caught up in two strides, planting a boot in his back to still him.

“What did you two come here for, that needed me gone?” Aslan demanded, fists clenched.

The man snarled, choked, cried, no words coming out coherently.