The only person who dared to laugh at Lorraine was Mallos. Everyone else was either too smart or too dead.

Lorraine had a poker face for diplomacy, she just rarely needed to deploy it. It wasn’t hard to cover your emotions when you either didn’t care on a personal level, or when you already knew you’d won. Being thwarted, though… her serene mask of conceit wavered, flashing a glimpse of the coiling rage beneath. She unfurled her arms, clenching her hands into fists.

Honesty was an unwelcome nuisance Lorraine almost never had to hear. Diplomats, aristocrats and servants certainly never told the truth, and the only other people she ever had dealings with were the other deities. They were honest, some of them, sometimes, but never in a way which really stung. It was easy to laugh them off because they were just being them, silly darlings. No one ever listened to Lorraine, laughed at her, and countered her barbs with a glaring truth they’d deduced themselves.

In lieu of knowing how to respond to such a novelty, she visibly hesitated for a few seconds. Lorraine wasn’t stupid, just unpractised with people who gave as good as they got. Her eyebrows knitted together, her lips whitened, her teeth gritted. She slid her hands down her dress to her knees and bent over, as though she was speaking to a child.

“Listen to me, you filthy pirate,” she hissed, “let me put this in terms you might understand. There is no way this ends where you win. You might think sleeping with a god makes you immune, but I don’t need to kill you to fuck you up.”

As before, the vulgarity slipped from her tongue as smooth as pearls. Lorraine revelled in it, in herself, in the power crackling at the tips of her fingers. No ship’s rat could ever compete with her. She held open one hand, palm up, feeling the white light dance around her fingers and trying to look as though she was making a visible effort to contain it.

“I strongly advise you walk away.” She uttered softly. The white light wove around her fingers and stretched up her arm, like a pet snake. “It seems such a waste to condemn yourself to lifelong misery over a ‘relationship’ which will be coming to an end soon anyway. Believe me,” she raised a perfectly plucked eyebrow, “when it comes to misery, I can be delightfully imaginative.”