Chapitre 25: Into the Belly of the Beast(Part-3)
A fresh eruption of raucous laughter echoed in the alley ahead. She froze, every sinew tensing as her mind instantly flooded with possibilities—ribald revelers, criminal opportunists, or perhaps even those who had already marked her for pursuit.
Inching forward with infinite caution, she rounded the next bend to find a motley tableau spilled out across the alley's cramped width.
A cluster of gaudily dressed lads were clustered around an ancient oil drum glowing with flickering flames, the searing warmth and promise of merriment irresistible lures amidst this monochrome squalor.
One particularly brutish figure spotted her lingering approach and lifted a keg sloshing with some vile home-brewed spirit.
"Oi there, freshmeat! Fancy a nip o' Old Will's private stock to put some lead in yer pencil?" The raucous offer was met by a chorus of indelicate guffaws and gestures from his besmirched compatriots.
Pulling her stained cap lower over her eyes, Elara muttered a terse, "No thanks," and increased her pace to hasten beyond their lascivious orbits.
The ribald jeers followed in her wake, mixed with crude commentary over her decidedly unfeminine gait and appearance.
"Ugly lump of squeezed meat, that one!" The sneering assessment ignited a flare of impotent fury deep within her core, though she fought to keep her face utterly impassive.
Part of her yearned to wheelspin on the offending wretch and unleash a tongue-lashing befitting her aristocratic breeding.
But such indulgences would only shatter her precarious facade and invite depredations beyond these primates' coarse ridicule.
As if to reinforce the lesson, heavy footfalls abruptly joined the chorus behind her.
Elara resisted the instinct to glance back at her pursuer, keeping her shoulders squared and her motions steady and unhurried.
To flee or reveal the slightest inkling of trepidation would be to surrender the upper hand completely.
Only when the shadowed figure pulled abreast of her, its bloated silhouette blotting out the alley's dim skylighting, did she finally turn to face her unwelcome companion.
The figure was a behemoth, squat and craggy-featured with ruddy jowls seeping over his collar.
A frayed waistcoat and greasy trousers strained to contain his porcine girth, every gasping inhalation sounding like a rusty bellows at the brink of collapse.
"Allors now, luvvy," he wheezed in a voice like shattering gravel. "Where's a comely filly such as yerself off to harryin' through this festering pucker-cut, eh?"
His meaty paw shot out, fingers bunching around her upper arm with a grip like a vise clamping shut.
Elara's instinct was to shrink from the rancid troglodyte's fetid proximity.
Yet she consciously remained utterly straight-backed and poised,staring impassively through her tangled fringe of hair into the small, piggish eyes glistening above those wheezing jowls.
"Just passing through." Her reply was calmly level, utterly devoid of the fear the lout had no doubt anticipated. "Now kindly remove your hands before you force me to do something we'll both regret."
A ripple passed through the onlookers as they clearly detected a deviancy from the usual petitioning tone of the prey-creatures they so relished terrorizing.
The giant himself seemed taken aback for a heartbeat, squinting quizzically at her before his thick lips peeled back in a phlegmy leer.
"Oh, fancy a bit o' guff on ye, do we?" He leaned closer, his miasmic exhalations hot and wet against her face.
"I do so love me a bit of sport with the saucy fillies. Gets the codger all nice and tumescent, wouldn'tyousayso!"
His bellowing guffaw was accompanied by an oinking tug as he hauled her into the sweaty, hair-matted valley of his heaving chest.
Elara saw his other ham-hock of an arm already coiling in preparation to complete the enveloping bearhug that so often preluded his victims' violation.
His jovial wheezes froze in his throat, however, as the razor edge of her pilfered pen-knife suddenly kissed the underside of his distended jowl.
The tungbodied brute's small eyes swiveled downward, widening in dawning alarm as the blade's steel whisper drank the first ruby droplets of his ruptured flesh.
"I will say this just once," Elara said in a tone of arctic calm, her gaze unwavering. "Release your grip this instant and walk away. Should you force my blade to drink deeper, I shall be sorely vexed."
For a perilous heartbeat, the standoff seemed to hover on a razor's edge. Then the fingers mantled around her arm loosened, flinging her back with a grunt of stunted exhalation.
The pen-knife remained level and steady, precluding any sudden lurchings as the giant backpedaled out of its whisper-keen caress.
Fleshy fingers clutched at the minuscule crimson seam Elara had effortlessly opened in the bestial face. "You'll rue that, you gyttripe tart! The Ravens 'll 'ave your tits strippit and nailed to a pike for that'n!"
Without deigning to reply, Elara merely slid the blade back into her pocket and turned on her heel to continue down the alley's swallowing umbra.
Her movements remained steady and unhurried, granting no quarter to the rippling mutterings of disbelief and promised retribution trailing in the encounter's wake.
She had taken her first life-or-death gamble in this new world of peril and prevailed, at least for the moment.
But the bristling expanse of glowering eyes and knotted whispers portended that such confrontations were merely the opening salvos in a protracted war she now found herself inextricably embroiled within.
With each step delving deeper into the boroughs's fetid capillaries, the hazards would only intensify.
She would need to remain ever-vigilant, constantly shrouding even her most minute expressions and instinctive responses beneath an impenetrable facade of cold indifference if she hoped to navigate these snares unscathed.
More than her aristocratic bearing and breeding had been cast off back on Brick Lane.
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