Enthralled

by Darling, Giana

  We were led through an immense red tiled foyer down a long hallway to a large closed door. They left us there, padding silently away with no indication of what we should do. So we waited in silence because it felt like sacrilege to speak in such a tomb.

  “If I promised to change?” Seamus spoke so quietly, his mouth unmoving and slack that even though I was looking right at him, I couldn’t be sure he had spoken.

  “You won’t.”

  “Do you think I don’t want to, Cosima? That I like being me? Do you think I want to do this, sell my daughter, for Christ’s sake? I love you.” A shaky breath wavered in the air between us. “I love Mama and our family. Don’t take both of us away from them.”

  “I really think I’m doing you a favour,” I said, and I did.

  I was giving him an out. If he went back to Napoli, he would have to be crazy to think that the family would welcome him with open arms after what he had done. This way, he could leave knowing he had my blessing at least.

  Seamus Moore was a lot of things, but crazy wasn’t one of them.

  “Fine,” he said. “I promise.”

  It should have sickened me how easily he agreed, but I was too busy being relieved. I could feel its effects suffuse my face, my mouth parting on a sweet sigh, my eyes softening like melted butter. There wasn’t enough time between the hush of the lock shifting and the faint breath of the door swinging open for me to rearrange my expression. I didn’t know how I wanted to look like when I met the man who would soon own my body, but it definitely wasn’t like this.

  And I could tell immediately by the look in his eyes that he was taking advantage of my disorientation. Thick lashed silver eyes marked and catalogued my body with the efficiency and mild interest of a librarian with a stack of books and the Dewy decimal system. With superhuman senses, he noted the triangle of moles on the left side of my neck and the ripped cuticles around my long nails, the way my modest patterned dress floated around my thin calves. I could see the conclusions too, in those dark eyes: undernourished, stressed, and covered in the thin film of poverty. The familiar burn of shame forged a steely rod of rage in my gut that lodged itself in my throat and made me want to gag.

  Blinking slowly, I pulled my eyes from the sticky depths of his gaze and studied the man before me. He had thick, luxurious hair the colour of burnished gold that brushed the collar of his suit jacket and skin that seemed edible like caramel stretched taut over his strong features. Surprisingly, he was almost a foot taller than my abnormal height, and the awesome width of his shoulders tapered into a narrow waist. I catalogued these physical attributes without qualm and easily too. Beauty was my profession, and even in my disorientated state, I could appreciate a gorgeous man.

  When my eyes wandered along the square cut of his jaw up to those blade grey eyes again, they were lacquered with mild humour. I bristled, realizing that he had been indulging my curiosity, watching me as I studied his appearance and found him anything but wanting.

  I glared at him in horror as I realized who he was.

  “Not quite worth one million pounds, is she?” His husky voice was at odds with the crisp, obviously upper-class British accent, so it took me a moment to decipher his words.

  I opened my mouth to snap at him, but Seamus quickly grinned and spoke first, “I think you will find that she cleans up very nicely.”

  “Before we get to that,” I bit out, stepping slightly forward and to the side in front of my father to excluded him at least symbolically from this negotiation. “I need to renegotiate the fee.”

  “Do you?” he asked with the kind of bored ennui only the rich could affect so beautifully.

  “I do,” I affirmed, planting my fists on my hips and tipping my chin. “You will also need to provide either a lump sum of 300, 000 pounds or a monthly allowance totalling that amount over the course of my five-year contract. Payable to Caprice Marie Lombardi.”

  The man stared at me with hard eyes, as grey and intractable as stone. He didn’t seem the type to discuss his decisions with others, let alone make concessions. There was arrogance sewn into the corners of his mouth, the creases beside his beautiful eyes, and the geometric line of his hard jaw.

  “What, may I ask, do I get out of this increase in expenditure?”

  I jutted my chin forward and narrowed my eyes at him. “Some may say you owe it to me.”

  My father shifted uncomfortably beside me, completely unaware that this stranger did owe me, for more than just the future use of my body.

  Not so long ago, I’d helped him.

  “You’ll give me unencumbered access to your body and freedom without complaint,” he added blandly.

  “I can’t promise to be completely docile to your wishes,” I ground out.

  “Irish.” The Brit’s eyes narrowed, but there was humour hidden in the fold of his full lips. “Not exactly a fine indication of her temperament. For 1.5 million quid, I expect a docile asset.”

  Seamus stepped slightly ahead of me to block my viciously bared teeth. “You are paying for her beauty. Her nature may change with time.”

  The door opening and closing behind us pulled our attention to an older man entering the room. He carried an expensive looking briefcase, and his hair glistened like a silver helmet.

  “Are you ready to begin then?” he asked expectantly.

  The blond man—my future owner—gestured dismissively toward me, which prompted the older man to step into my space.

  I shied away. “Do we have a deal?”

  He stared at me, his beautiful face entirely impassible. I could only guess at the inner workings of his thoughts behind the façade and pondering that unknown terrified me.

  “We have a deal, though I’ll have it known now that if you resist too much, I reserve the right to terminate our deal. Now,” he ordered, “be still.”

  I was still. Not because I wanted to be, but because I was used to obeying men, used to putting my safety before my pride.

  “Be thorough, doctor. I don’t want to drag her home to England only to find out that she isn’t pure,” the blond man clipped out in an accent like cool British steel.

  I vibrated with fury, but still I stayed unmoving as the doctor rounded me once, twice, and stopped at my side the third time. He made a few quick notes on his clipboard before he tucked it under one arm. I tried not to flinch as he patted me down the way one might inspect a horse, perfunctory swipes down my sides, over the pert swell of my ass and down both sides of my thighs, inside and out. A hiss erupted from between my lips when his cold fingers swiped over my sex before plunging inside, a shallow thrust that poked at my intact hymen.

  “Pure,” the doctor stated, removing his fingers and wiping them on a kerchief he pulled out of his breast pocket. “Beautifully intact hymen.”

  “As I told you,” Seamus said, smugly.

  The blond man shot him a withering look. “Excuse me if I do not trust the word of a man who would sell his daughter to repay his gambling debts.”

  I choked back the slightly hysterical laughter that bubbled up my throat. Seamus scowled, but there was no rebuttal to such a statement of fact, so he remained quiet. I wondered how my owner knew the circumstances of our situation then decided that someone with enough money to pay a small fortune for a girl would have the means to find out anything they wanted.

  “Now is the time to say your goodbyes. The doctor will need to take her to run some tests before we leave,” he told my dad.

  I noticed somewhat warily that he hadn’t looked at me at all after his initial inspection. Why would an obviously gorgeous, wealthy man have to pay for sex?

  Because it was obvious that was the reason I was being sold. What else would anyone want with a beautiful woman? And then it became obvious to me why someone like him would need to buy a woman… because his tastes were too deviant for a free one.

  I swallowed thickly and edged closer to my father even though I had long ago learned not to go to him for protection.

&nb
sp; Seamus surprised me by wrapping an arm around my shoulders and tugging me closer. He rose to his full height, somewhere just over six feet, but even then, he was woefully shorter than the Brit.

  “I need your assurances that she will be well kept,” he surprised me again by saying.

  The other man turned his head slowly toward us, his dark eyes pools of glossy ink before they’ve written words, totally blank.

  “First, get your hands off her. I own her now, and no one but me will touch her,” he said coolly. “Secondly, Mr. Moore, I will make no such assurance. I will do with her what I will as she is no longer a person, but property. You might assume that given the money I am investing in her, I won’t do her too much harm, at least not enough to mar her beauty or kill her too quickly, but you neither deserve assurances nor warrant them through the contract so…” He took only one small step forward, but his powerful frame was coiled like a predator, taking the last step before devouring his prey. “Take your filthy hands off her and get out.”

  I wasn’t sure if it was Seamus or me who shuddered, but after we had both recovered, he quickly dropped his arm from my shoulders and took a large step back.

  Shame and anger burst over my tongue, bitter and thick like bile. What kind of father put his own safety before that of his child?

  Seamus Moore.

  He opened his mouth to say something, his eyes shifting from me like polar magnets, but I beat him to the punch.

  “I won’t ever forgive you for this,” I whispered painfully in Italian, each word squeezed past the iron fist wrapped around throat. “My only consolation, Papa, is knowing that you won’t stop the gambling or the drinking, and you’ll probably get yourself killed in the next few years. If for some inexplicable reason that doesn’t happen, if for some incredible reason, I survive this ordeal you’ve set for me and I see you again, I want you to know that I will kill you myself.”

  Seamus took a staggering step back, his grey eyes wide in his bruised face. A different kind of pain, something worse than the physical, made those eyes blur then shine with tears.

  I remained unmoved.

  The bastard was selling me as a sex slave to save his own ass.

  It amused me to think about how I’d been so afraid of Sebastian joining the Camorra, of my sisters falling to one of their men, when I was the one pledging to kill a man.

  My own father.

  It was disgusting, but my words were true.

  If I survived, if I saw him again, I’d string him up from a tree with bells tied to his ankles so he sang in the wind, just as Rocco had promised to do to the rest of my family.

  “Cosima,” Seamus started to say, stepping forward with his hands outstretched in benediction.

  “Remember the promise you made to me. Now, get out.”

  Stupidly, my father looked at my owner who only crossed his arms over his chest and dipped his chin so he could glare at my father from a better angle.

  Tears spilled over as Seamus looked back at me, but he nodded slowly, his shoulders sunken as he followed the butler out the door.

  I didn’t turn to watch him go.

  Instead, I swivelled to fully face my new owner with my hands on my hips. “Now, you can tell me what the fuck you think you’re doing. I saved your goddamn life!”

  He only blinked at me in a way that was much more elegant than a shrug.

  “So, this is how you repay me?” I snapped.

  “I told you that day to take care where you stick your pretty little neck out. A hunter like me might find you too pretty a thing to not to take a bite out of, or at least to use as bait.”

  Despite myself, his cruel expression scared me. Goose bumps ripped like torn Velcro across my flesh. “I didn’t take you for a man who would resort to buying a woman like livestock.”

  A shift came over his face unlike anything I had ever seen before. His placid expression melted away to reveal the cold as stone heart of him.

  I opened my mouth to say something but stopped when he took a massive step forward into my space. His fingers found my chin and held it in a firm grip so that I couldn’t look away from his liquid black eyes.

  Without thought, my lips curled into a snarl at his proximity.

  “Irish and Italian,” he scolded with a soft click of his tongue against his teeth. “I doubt you’ll prove the stereotypes incorrect and prove to be an obedient, docile little slave.”

  “Hai ragione,” I said, agreeing with him.

  He surprised me by smiling sharply into my face, pressing a thumb over the middle of my closed lips so that I couldn’t speak. “No problem, my beauty. I look forward to breaking you.”

  Then, before I could bite his thumb off the way I planned, a sharp, small pain erupted at the side of my neck, and I passed out.

  Four months earlier.

  Outside, Milan was sweltering and bright. A baby cried somewhere in the street while another couple argued furiously in dialect Italian. The yellow light of a mid-spring dawn saturated the waiting room and made the multitudes of beautiful women lining the white plastic chairs blink sleepily. It was five am and no one had the right to be attractive at such an early hour but for these women, visible fatigue was not an option.

  I sat in the corner in the small, stuffy room clutching my portfolio with both damp palms. It was abysmal really, next to the stacks of photos weighing heavily in the other models’ laps but I couldn’t afford to be pessimistic. There were sixty-seven girls vying for the same multimillion-dollar campaign, and each was more beautiful than the last. A gorgeous African woman with skin like polished bronze and a caramel kissed Afro sat next to me chatting with one of those rare Asian women who are both tall and curvy. Across from me, sat Cara Delavigne and the girls beside me were speaking quietly about Kate Upton’s chances of being chosen. This kind of gig was a model’s golden ticket and everyone in town wanted it.

  The only edge I had against them was this; I needed it.

  The money from a job like this could go beyond just paying Giselle’s art school tuition and using the meager remains to keep the rest of the family in Naples afloat. It could set up Elena in university, get Sebastian out of his dead-end factory job and put Mama in a house with working heat and plumbing. It would get the black-eyed mafia men circling our dying economy like carrion away from us for good.

  I shifted the weight of the world on my shoulders so it settled more comfortably and reminded myself that if Atlas could hold up the world, I could withstand holding up my own.

  The door to the interview room swung open and a ruffled blonde emerged. Her heels made a tsk sound as she hastily crossed the floor between us all and it reminded me of my mother, her finger wagging, tongue clacking as she chastised me.

  “Cosima Lombardi.”

  My head snapped up and I took in the sight of the slim redhead who called my name. She had freckles and a pinched look that I could empathize with; it was obviously stressful catering to exacting businessmen and neurotic models. I smiled demurely at her as I moved passed her through the doorway she stood in, but she only blinked up at me and closed the door firmly behind us.

  I took a deep breath to center myself, pulling every particle of confidence like a shield around myself, before I turned around to face the panel for the go-see.

  Four people would be my judges. The first was perhaps my biggest challenge, Freida Liv. Arguably the most successful model in the world in the past ten years, she was heartrendingly beautiful. Her golden hair was cut short, she had been one of the first to adopt the radical page boy cute twelve years ago, and showcased a perfectly symmetrical face made striking with pale, luminous blue eyes. Despite her beauty, her expression was unattractive, pinched and distorted as if someone were pulling her apart. I guessed someone was, after all, since she was interviewing for her replacement.

  The other was an older man, deeply tanned with eyes like the faded denim of his button-up shirt and brilliant white blonde hair. This was Jensen Brask, the infamous director of the St
. Aubyn fashion house who often forced his models to commit heinous mental tasks before hiring them. Modelling might seem glamorous, he was once recorded saying, but it required true mental fortitude. I was surprised he was here, at the second casting call, when I knew this was only the intermediate step in the selection process. He watched me with a slight frown as I stepped before them, my arms at my sides, my face carefully devoid of emotion. It was always this way at go-sees, the inevitable staring contest while they judged you unashamedly on every physical asset they could reach with their eyes and imaginations. In my limited experience, it was best to stand still and take it.

  Next to him sat Willa Percy, the CEO and founder of Looking Glass Models, one of the largest modelling agencies in the world. If I landed this job, not only would it secure me this massive, international campaign but also a place on Willa Percy’s golden docket. She was a beautifully groomed African-American woman clad entirely in Chanel, but there was a look in her eyes that didn’t speak of class but of ruthless, poverty-given ambition.

  I knew that look because I’d seen it in my eyes often when I looked in the mirror.

  The final critic was none other than the man I’d be modelling beside in the campaigns, Jace Galantine. In less than three years, he had appeared on the American model scene and without skipping a beat, he became one of the biggest names in the industry. Now, he had secured his place as the male face of the St. Aubyn brand, and he had the authority to veto whomever he wanted as his female accomplice. He was staring at me intently; his square cut facial features compressed as he studied me.

  Boldly, I met his gaze and winked slowly at him.

  He blinked before erupting into throaty laughter that was absurdly attractive. “Who is this, Renna?”

  The redhead checked her clipboard. “Cosima Moore, 17 years old, Italian, Tivoli Models Roma.”

  The judges efficiently located my headshot amid their folders and spent a moment reading it over. It was a short portfolio, and I wrung my hands nervously when Freida Liv tossed it aside with a flick of her thin wrist.