The Consequence

by Giana Darling

  I threw myself into furnishing our new apartment to take my mind off of everything. Armed with Sinclair’s black AMEX, Emma Meyer’s professional opinion and way too much angsty energy, I hit the best of New York’s stores. Though we had already purchased a variety of things online or through Emma’s connections with auction houses, warehouses and antique stores, it was fun and somehow mandatory to touch most of what would be in my home before I bought it. We were searching for a French provincial style sofa to match the coffee table we had found at Jung Lee’s when my phone rang.

  “Giselle,” Sinclair said in greeting.

  The one word was laden with meaning; his longing and the relief he felt at being able to talk to me, his continued frustration at the collapsing Paulson deal and his resulting bone deep exhaustion.

  My heart ached for him.

  “Sin,” I said, infusing the one syllable with the very same love and yearning I’d sensed in his voice.

  He sighed gustily. “There, that is better already. Tell me what you are doing so that I can pretend I am with you, were I am supposed to be, instead of here in the office.”

  “Emma and I are still shopping. I thought it would be overwhelming to furnish an entire, massive, house but Emma has this system where she catalogues everything we’ve bought into folders on her iPad so that we can always refer back to them and make sure everything is copasetic.”

  “Excellent,” he said. “We wouldn’t want to live in a mismatched house. I cannot think of a worse fate.”

  “You’re teasing me.”

  “I am.”

  “You miss me.”

  “If you only knew how much, you would be here as quick as a cab could carry you.”

  I bit my lip. “I’ve been desperate to do just that but I worried that I would be distracting you.”

  Another sigh, this one short and punctuated with irritation. “You would. Especially as it has been three interminable days since I had you. No, the next time I lock eyes on you, Elle, it will be in a private place where I can take you properly.”

  A little shiver shot down my spine as I sighed in longing.

  “That little gasp you make when I’ve been teasing you and I finally dip between those sweet thighs,” Sinclair continued, in a voice that pebbled my skin and drew my nipples tight like a sluice of cool water. “I crave those little sighs and moans you make when you try to keep yourself still under my fingers. Such a good girl.”

  “Sin,” I breathed, my thighs pressed together as I stood, helplessly turned on, in the middle of a furniture warehouse.

  “Are you wearing a skirt today?”

  I looked down at the dark grey of the raw silk dress I was wearing. It was a cold but snowless winter day in New York, so I paired it with thick black hold ups and knee high black leather boots.

  “Yes.”

  “Good, when you get off the phone I want you to go into the restroom, take off your panties and put them in your purse. Then you are going to touch yourself until you make those little noises I like so much but because I am not there to hear them, you will not come. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir,” I whispered.

  “I have to go but I promise that I’ll be back tonight. Wait for me naked, on your knees by the door at seven o’clock, d’accord?”

  Emma chose that moment to return. “Giselle, I need you to look at this gorgeous love seat they have. Neoclassical French. You’ll die. And I know you wanted to wait to pick out the bed with Sinclair but there is this huge back wrought iron affair that I know you would both love.”

  “Ugh, Sin, I have to go,” I said into the phone.

  “Get the bed.”

  “Excuse me?”

  There was a smile in his voice when he said, “Get the bed, Elle. I love the sound of wrought iron, it will be easy to tie you to the headboard that way.”

  I swallowed thickly as his disconnection cut off his smoky chuckle.

  “I have to use the restroom but when I come back, take me to the bed,” I told Emma. “And is there anyway we could put a rush on delivery?”

  It was early evening before I got the chance to visit Cosima in the hospital, later than I usually went, so I wasn’t surprised that someone else was there to visit here. I was surprised, unpleasantly so, by whom it was though.

  Elena sat in a chair pulled up beside the bed with Beau, her best and only friend. I hadn’t seen him since my welcome back party in the fall but previously, we had always enjoyed a amicable friendship. He was very beautiful, proudly gay and had an insane sense of fashion. I didn’t know what he made as a lawyer’s assistant but it was enough to keep him in Boss, Prada and, on the rare occasion that he dressed ‘down’, Lactose.

  My lips were smiling before my brain could register that he was glowering at me. Actually, glowering was probably not a strong enough word to describe the absolute hatred that he emitted. It thrummed and throbbed through the room, making me somehow motion sick.

  “What are you doing here?” he snarled, even though Beau was a smart man and it was obvious I was there to visit my potentially dying sister.

  “Cosima,” I murmured.

  “Get out.” That was Elena, her eyes still focused on our sister in the hospital bed. “You aren’t welcome here.”

  I wanted to get out. I wanted to run out of the room, out of the hospital, out of the state and across the Atlantic back to France because if I let myself be propelled by the sheer force of her hatred, that is where I would have ended up. Far away from her.

  Her eyes cut my way blazing with inner fury and I readjusted; not just far away from her. Elena wished I was dead.

  She affirmed my belief by saying, “It should be your lying, cheating, fat ass in this bed and not Cosima’s.”

  I reeled, my stomach tossed backwards, my heart hitting hard against the back of my ribcage. My foot caught me before I fell on my ass, but only just.

  The Mean Girls snickered.

  I opened my mouth to say something without any idea of what exactly to say when a large presence at my back made me stiffen.

  “Excuse me,” an incredibly posh British accent ordered.

  I whirled around to face the man and my mouth fell further open. The man in front of me was even taller than Dante, some impossible height that was made even more astonishing by the fact that he was perfectly proportioned, not as deeply muscled as the Mafia man but close. That was where the similarities ended though, because this man was not rugged. His dark blonde hair was pushed back from his regal forehead like a golden crown, highlighting the aristocratic features that I honestly didn’t think I could have recreated with paint or brush. He was so exactly symmetrical, so beautifully colored in tones of all gold but for the bright glint of steely sliver at his eyes. They weren’t black, those eyes, but I recognized in them, as they bore down on me, the same ruthless, violent capabilities that lived in the eyes of the made men I’d known in my youth.

  This stranger was not a good man.

  Elena seemed to have surmised the same thing. She stood swiftly, moving to the front of Cosima’s bed to block our vulnerable sister from the newcomer. It was a beautiful gesture that made me feel better about her as a person and worse about her as my sister.

  “You have the wrong room.”

  The blonde prince - seriously, he could have been King Arthur reincarnate - looked down his nose at us. “I do not.”

  “This is Cosima Lombardi’s room,” I offered.

  Elena dug her sharp elbow into my soft side.

  “Perhaps you are in the wrong room. This is Cosima Davenport’s room.”

  “What?” I breathed.

  “Excuse me?” Elena asked harshly.

  The blond stranger was completely unfazed by our horrified expressions. In fact, he idly adjusted the gold cuff link at his wrist and said, “The woman you are trying to hide from me is my wife.”

  Oh my God.

  Oh my God.

  Putain.

  Who was this guy?

&nb
sp; “Who are you?” I asked, my voice still breathy with incredulity.

  “Her husband,” he said, standing straighter, proud and so tall even Elena, who was tall for a woman at five foot eleven, had to tip her head back to maintain eye contact with him. “You may call me Alexander, seeing as we are family.”

  Still reeling, Elena, Beau and I stood mutely as he walked briskly around us and took the unoccupied chair up against Cosima’s bedside. He sat down on the very edge, looking stupidly big for the tiny orange chair, and immediately took up her hand.

  “My beauty,” he murmured, his hard mask collapsing as he took in her lank hair, the deep bruises that were turning yellow over the left side of her face.

  “Cosima isn’t married,” Elena said, the first to recover.

  “She is. I was at the ceremony.”

  “She would never get married without telling us,” Elena snapped, moving forward to point a finger in his face. “You are some freak stalker who has seen her in magazines and fixated on her. Get out!”

  Alexander stared at her without expression. Even though I was used to Sinclair’s immaculate mask, there was something terrifying about this British man’s blank face. Sinclair hid behind his propriety, his beautifully honed manners and perfectly enunciated speech both because he been trained to do so by his adopted parents and then because it gave him a degree of necessary separation from others.

  Alexander was not wearing a mask. He truly seemed devoid of feeling. So, the way he stared at Cosima with devoted yearning sent shivers of revulsion down my spine. I wouldn’t have been surprised if this man was a psychopath. Was this the man that had put those deep bruises around my sister’s wrists when she had visited England before Thanksgiving?

  His unfeeling gaze cut to mine and I had my answer.

  “I would say your goodbyes,” he said quietly. “Visiting hours are over and I am the only one who has been granted the choice of staying the night with her.”

  “Like hell you are,” Elena snapped. “How do I know that you are who you say you are?”

  “He is her husband,” Dante said from the doorframe, his voice uncharacteristically low and subdued.

  We both swung his way.

  “They were married two years ago in England. If you press him, I am sure he will show you the marriage certificate,” Dante continued.

  “What the hell is happening?” Elena demanded. “First you and now, this manic who claims to be her husband?”

  “Stop.”

  Everyone froze for one eternal second before leaping into action, converging on the hospital bed like carrion around a scrap of meat.

  “Cosima,” I breathed out on a sob, reaching out to grasp her calf because Elena and Alexander both had hold of her hands already.

  “Bambina,” she croaked, her eyes barely slatted open. “Water.”

  Alexander was already tipping a small plastic cup to her lips so that she could sip. “Just a little bit, my beauty. You do not want to make yourself sick.”

  “I’ll go get the doctor,” Beau said before dashing out the door.

  “You scared me,” Elena breathed in a voice I hadn’t heard from her since she was a little girl. “You terrified me, Cosima. What would we do without you?”

  “You would survive,” Cosima whispered hoarsely.

  Elena’s hand spasmed against hers. “No, I wouldn’t. So much has happened…”

  Cosima’s eyes darted to me and I knew she understood just exactly what had happened during her absence.

  “You will survive,” she repeated, giving both of us a slight smile.

  “Everyone needs to leave,” Alexander demanded with the kind of authority I had only ever felt before from Sinclair.

  “We don’t need to do shit,” Elena cursed, clearly beyond her breaking point.

  “Xan,” Cosima scolded softly, tilting her head on the pillow so that she could address her apparent husband. “You came.”

  His face softened, growing so handsome that both Elena and I gasped softly. He leaned forward to smooth her hair out of her face.

  “I am the only one who hurts you, remember?”

  I shared a look with my sister, completely disconcerted by the entire situation, but mostly by the increasingly-more-likely-a-psycho-than-not Alexander Davenport.

  Cosima had no such reservations. She leaned into him and dragged a deep breath in like it was the first and only breath she had ever taken.

  “I know,” she agreed.

  We watched them share an intimate moment before Elena cleared her throat. “Cosima, I know you just woke up but what the actual fuck? You are married?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, closing her eyes and resting back against the pillow. “I know you are worried but Alexander cares for me. He is here to take care of me, and so is Dante.”

  The doctor hustled into the room at that moment, bracketed by a small contingent of nurses who somehow bustled us out of the way as they went about checking out Cosima.

  “You need to leave,” the doctor, a stern man by the name of - no joke - Kyle Steele, demanded.

  “I am the husband,” Alexander said, throwing back his shoulders so that he seemed to take up the entire right side of the room.

  Dr. Steele stared at him for a moment. “Fine, but stay in the corner. The rest of you, out.”

  “It’s okay,” Cosima assured as we stared helplessly at her. “I am awake now. I’ll see you again soon, si?”

  We both nodded woodenly and though we didn’t speak on our way to the elevator and rode down together, I knew that we were both more worried about our sister than she had been even when she was in a coma.

  Sinclair stood in the doorway, one long line of gorgeous French man, and even though I wondered absently why he didn’t come closer, I was happy for the opportunity to soak him in after days apart.

  All that thick mahogany hair was pushed back from his forehead but curled slightly around his ears, overlong once more and striking against his dusky skin, his incandescent irises. His suit was one I hadn’t seen before, a light, luminescent grey that hugged his tall, lean form like quicksilver. I took a moment to note his expression, it’s blankness, and then to hunt for his little tells. His eyes were dark under heavy brows, his mouth firm, unyielding and his stance strong.

  A little shudder zipped my spine closed vertebrae by vertebrae until I stood ramrod straight. Because my Dom stood in front of me.

  I had called him immediately after leaving the hospital to tell him about Cosima waking up with the strange addition of an honest-to-God husband at her side and I had assumed that we would table the play for the night and talk about what was happening with her.

  Apparently, Sinclair had other plans and as I had grown wet the moment I set eyes on him after a long three days apart, I was rearing to go.

  “When you finish undressing, go into the main room and sit in the chair positioned for you, close your eyes and do not move until I tell you to do so.”

  My mouth was dry around the words, all the moisture in my body rushing to between my legs. “Yes, sir.”

  I shed my clothes on the move, so eager to have his hands on me, his voice in my ear commanding me to please him that my fingers were shaking.

  The chair was in the middle of the small living room and the other furniture had been pushed to the side, isolating the chair, isolating me, in the empty center. I took my seat with my pulse already pounding between my legs.

  It felt like a long time later but it was probably only ten minutes when I felt Sinclair’s presence behind me. He loomed over the back of the chair and I could tell his body was curled over mine, not protective and not threatening, just close enough to bear down on me with nothing but his presence.

  “I bought you a gift, my siren. Would you like to open it?”

  I was surprised, too aroused to immediately respond to the non sequitur. He chuckled as his hand appeared from around my back to offer me a large, flat, black velvet box. My fingers continued to shake as I took it from
him and flipped open the lid.

  My breath caught as I took in the large, blush pink pearls coiled within the satin. They gleamed dully in the low light shed from a lone lamp in the corner of the room but I knew they were expensive, utterly beautiful. They perfectly matched the pearl collar I wore at my throat.

  “Sinclair,” I said, his name full of thanks.

  He stayed behind me but leaned forward to pluck the strands from the case, lifting one long necklace and then another and finally, two more. They reminded me of the 1920s girls that dripped with pearls in Paris’s hottest jazz clubs.

  “I love them.”

  “Good,” he murmured, finally coming out from behind my chair.

  He was still wearing his suit pants but they were unfastened, revealing the tantalizing trail of dark hair that lead down from his naval. I watched raptly as he crouched before me, his lean muscles undulating. Gently, he took my left hand and wove one strand of pearls around my wrist while he began to explain to me.

  “Really, these are a gift for both of us. You are such a lady, Elle, when we are in public, in your feminine dresses and classy accessories. It’s fucking delicious,” he leaned forward to breathe against my lips as he wrapped the pearls and therefore my left wrist to the arm of the chair. “Do you know how hard it makes me to see you like that knowing that you’re mine? All that innocence and purity, mine to corrupt.”

  I shivered as he bound the other wrist to the wooden arm. There was no room for me to move but the restraints, being delicate pearl necklaces, would be easily broken if I thrashed or pulled too hard.

  Sinclair read my mind. “You’ll have to stay very still for me, can you do that?”

  I swallowed hard. “What are you going to do to me?”