To see her standing was a feat in its own. When she collapsed against him, he fell with her to lessen the blow. Part of him wanted to step aside so she could meet intimately with the cold stone floor, but a stronger sense urged him otherwise. The impromptu decision lead to a less than graceful decent. In it, he ended up with his body mostly in her lap, and his back arched slightly to avoid crushing her leg. Yet, without missing a beat, Scarlet began to run her fingers through his hair. The touch of her skin against his scalp felt like raking razors despite the intended affection behind it.

"You ...were going to...kill me, weren't you?" She murmured, her voice akin to a record whose needle would not settle.

It unnerved him. He was, but the painful display of affection had him questioning what exactly went through her head. Dead was naught but a minor inconvenience to her. To her, a stopped heart or severed head was the closest to torture she could get compared to a mortal. What fear could be derived from a condition with no permanence? Her grip tightened on his arm and the fingers slid past his leather and began to plunge beneath the skin like a hot iron. With clenched teeth, he bore the pain and tried to shift himself to a position capable of righting them both.

"No one WilL take You from mE...." Scarlet continued to mumble with demonic undertones.

Her grip loosened and the assassin managed to get his arms beneath her. Like soft, quiet drums, blood pattered to the floor from his new injury. Tendrils of ivory quickly tried to mend the finger holes but they shriveled and turned to ash faster than they could form. Lye carried the woman to the bed and laid her gently down into it. Beads of sweat rolled off her forehead and matted down locks of crimson.

She mumbled something else, too unintelligible for Lye to make out. It sounded like a threat. To whom, he was not sure. The assassin took a step back to inspect his own wounds and to let Scarlet slip into obscurity. The flesh seemed rotted, dead. His bones still reached out to seal the injury, but twisted and warped as they tried to weave into one another. His lip flared. He would need to cut the dead meat from the living. The assassin's arm fell to his side. Drip by drip of blackened crimson fell to the floor.

"I don't know," he finally answered. Tool? Mother? Noble? Slave? Lover?

"I don't know," he repeated.

A knock resounded on the door.

"Master, I've brought the sheets," spoke the voice of a familiar succubus. The first word seemed spoken through layers of venom.

"The door is open," Lye replied. Advencia walked through and staggered to a standstill at the sight of Scarlet. "Be careful."

Lye held up his dripping forearm as a trickle of red stemmed from his silver hairline and down his cheek. Advencia looked between the two with a raised eyebrow and a bit of shock.

"I'll leave you to it. I have a raven to send." Lye walked past Advencia and left to send a message to his favorite Briarheart bookworm.