She had a gun.

She had a gun, and she swore she was going to use it. She'd taken it from the study, had been forced to pick the lock to do so, and now it lay heavy and obscene in her dainty little beaded bag, knocking a bruise against her leg as she hurried down the street. A military revolver, developed especially for officers of the navy, with a capacity for six rounds.

The cab she'd hired trundled off in the opposite direction, and she waited for it to clear the corner and disappear before cutting through an alley to the right. The stench of gutted fish and industrial filth met her nose, and she increased her pace, skirts billowing in a susurrus of chiffon and silk.

Her hair, piled atop her head in a dubiously-structured twist, pulled and itched where the pins dug into her scalp, and she paused to extract them, dashing them to the pavement in her impatience. Hair unbound, a new looseness in her chest, she tugged her skirts up to continue on, deeper into the maze of sheds and warehouses and storage containers, the damp-bitter smell of factory air growing more intolerable with every step. She turned a corner, shoes grinding on loose gravel, and withdrew the revolver from her bag.

The dark outline of a man, where a second ago there had been nothing.

The man, who wore a cloak of shadows, seemed himself to be made up of shades of darkness, and she found it was easier to make out the form of him by looking at him sidelong.

"You're late, Mademoiselle," he said, sotto voce.

"Perhaps, Monsieur, you were simply early," she replied, hefting the gun in her hands, fingering the hammer.

He said nothing in return, but the night seemed to pulse and coalesce around him, and she read the anxiety and severity in his silence.

"Were you followed?"

"No."

"So confident," he murmured, and he seemed to bleed back into the night before materializing once more, closer now. Her fingers tightened around the grip of the gun. "And… the firearm?"

"Insurance," she said.

"Indeed?" he asked, amusement colouring his tone.

"You might recall that you abducted me and threatened to kill my fiancé."

"So I did."

"You have yet to seek forgiveness for your actions," she pointed out.

She could easily imagine the grisly grin splitting his face. "As my actions ultimately led, in some way, to this moment in time, I find myself entirely incapable of remorse," he replied.

"Stop talking," she said, reaching into the deepest of his shadows to trace his mouth.

"Christine," he said, ragged and rough, and she replaced her fingers with her lips.

"Stop talking." She pressed the words to his mouth and he swallowed them, and she did not feel his arms come around her so much as she felt herself eclipsed by the lightlessness of him. Her fingers slid along the seam of his mask, and she felt his tension in the cruel clutch of his fingers in her hair and the rigid line of his mouth along hers.

She parted her lips and slotted their mouths together more firmly, drawing his bottom lip between hers. Flattening her palm to his face, porcelain mask cooling against the flush of her skin, she pushed against him, softening him with lips and teeth and tongue until he fed from her with equal force.

Long fingers fisted in the fabric of her gown and he drew her to him, and he bent down, it seemed, in order to envelop her completely. His other hand anchored in her hair, thumb stroking the base of her skull, he paused to trace the nose of his mask along her exposed neck. She shuddered and brought his mouth back to hers and allowed him to lead, to tug her hair and angle her head, to bruise her lips with the force of his kiss.

He froze when she pushed the barrel of the gun to his chest.

She felt his fingers curled like talons in her skirts and her hair, and his breath beat warmly and erratically against her collar.

"This is a surprise," he rasped.

"I need your word," she said, driving the revolver harder against him. She felt his answering tremor and suppressed a surge of sympathy. "Your word, that there will be no more murders."

"The irony of that particular request cannot possibly be lost on you," he said.

The gun drifted lower to press against his belly, and he stiffened further. "Your word, Monsieur."

A pause. "You have it."

"And no more trickery."

His reply came more swiftly this time. "As you wish."

She took a breath. "I need something more."

"I have little more to give," he replied.

"I need your name," she said, "so that I may have power over you, as you have over me."

He stirred enough to detach his fingers from her hair, enough to draw back just slightly. "I am hardly Rumpelstiltskin," he said coolly, but he trembled, and she could not believe in his affected indifference.

She waited, and finally he sighed, and the sigh curled around her ear and took the shape of a name.

She smiled and pulled back, and thumbed the safety of the gun and released the cylinder, raising the weapon to show him -

"It is empty," he said, and she was not sure if he would laugh or snarl.

He did neither: he kissed her.

The heady glide of his tongue against hers, his fingers light under her chin to tilt her head, his arm heavy around her waist, hauling her against the sharp frame of him. Her lungs burned. She tossed the gun aside.

"There is a train," he said, drawing away. She chased his mouth, but he stopped her, holding her chin more firmly. "It leaves at dawn."

"Where will it go?" she asked.

"I thought, perhaps, Italy," he said. "Milan, La Scala, if you wish it."

She smiled again, and took his hand.

Title taken from "Snake Eyes" by Mumford & Sons. Please leave a review!