Enthralled

by Darling, Giana

  “If you touch one hair on her head, I will kill you,” Alexander seethed. “I mean it, Noel. I will slaughter you where you stand.”

  Noel looked shocked, and I couldn’t blame him.

  “He’s been kind to me,” I found the audacity to say. My heart thrashed in the cage of my ribs, desperate to flee the ramifications of my actions.

  Alexander turned his frozen stare to me and bared his teeth. “Excuse me?”

  I cleared my throat twice before my voice found traction in my throat. “He has. He gave me a tour, and he’s only teaching me to play chess.”

  His hand was around my throat before I could blink, squeezing hard enough for spots to explode across my vision. He leaned down to growl softly in my face, “No one teaches you anything except your Master. And who is your Master, topolina?”

  “You,” I said, more breath than voice as I struggled to suck in air around his punishing grip. “You are.”

  “Yes,” he hissed, running his nose down my jawline so that he could speak against my lips. “I am the Master of this body, Captain of your fucking fate. I think it is past time you understood that.”

  I gasped as he sank a hand in my hair and twisted, dragging me away from the table by the force of his stride toward the door. My hands flew to his, trying to loosen his agonizing grip to no avail. Tears pricked my eyes, and I struggled even as I was forced to follow close behind him.

  “I’ll deal with you later,” Alexander threatened over his shoulder to Noel as he tugged me out the door and slammed it shut.

  I could barely keep up with his ground eating strides as he stalked up the staircase, heading back to my cage.

  “Master, please,” I begged as a headache stabbed into each temple. “Please, stop this. I didn’t know…”

  “You didn’t know? Here I thought we were passably smart, topolina. You do not, under any circumstances, spend time alone with another man unless it is Riddick, and you especially do not allow any of them to touch you. Clearly, I made a mistake by allowing you to roam. It is an error I do not intend to make again.”

  I screamed as he pushed open the door to the ballroom and shoved me brutally inside. I tripped over my feet, crashing to the unforgiving floor on my elbows and knees so hard I thought for a second that they might shatter.

  The clip of his shoes smacked against the marble like striking flints as he prowled after me.

  I didn’t want to know what might happen if he captured me.

  The ballroom was huge, and at the other end, another set of double doors beckoned me. If I could reach them and get out to the kitchens, surely he wouldn’t hurt me in front of his staff.

  Painfully, I pushed up off the ground and raced toward the door.

  Not one second later, the pace of his clicking shoes erupted like the ticking of a time bomb.

  I was malnourished and not very athletic to begin with, but my sheer desperation to get away from the man-turned-beast was insurmountable. To make it hard for him, I zigged and zagged across the marble, my breasts bouncing painfully, the soles of my feet slick with panicked sweat so that I almost skidded.

  My heart felt near to bursting in my chest as I ran harder than I ever had before. By the time I was a yard away from the doors, my lungs were eviscerated by the strain, and I practically stumbled into the heavy oak frame. My slippery fingers slid off the ornate knob once, twice and then finally, they latched and pulled it open…

  I screamed so loud I saw stars as Alexander’s iron arms caged me against his chest and lifted me off the ground. I tried to kick out with my legs to leverage myself back down, but he was so much taller and broader that I only served to tire myself out.

  “There is no escaping, topolina,” he rasped in my ear as I yelled and yelled, cursing him in Italian and calling for help in English. “It is the law of nature. You are the mouse, and I the falcon. No one here is going to step in to save you now.”

  I turned my head and sank my teeth into his bared forearm, tasting blood as it bloomed on my tongue. He cursed viciously and tightened his hold around my chest so painfully, I could barely breathe.

  With a grunt, he swung a leg forward to capture one of mine and bend it backward in order to take us both to the floor with his heavy body crushing mine. I squirmed and thrashed like the goddess Thetis in Peleus’s hold but to no available. Alexander was too strong, too indominable to evade.

  My screams of protest and yearning for aid drowned in a sudden flood of tears. I sobbed as he pulled my arms behind my back and pinned them there with one hand. As he fisted a hand in the back neck of the button-up I wore and wrenched it off my body with a single brutal tug.

  “You’re my possession to use as I please,” Alexander ground out as he placed a knee over my captured hands in order to unzip and pull open his pants.

  I was mindless, my gut instinct to fight and flee triggered so hard that there was no use for my thoughts, no bias in my heart. Only the sheer terror of being captured remained and so I struggled on, bucking my hips to dislodge him.

  I failed.

  Freed from his trousers, he laid his hot, heavy body against mine once more only this time, the steel length of his cock nestled between my buttocks.

  He panted in my ear as he ground his hips into my ass. “I’m going to make you take every inch of my cock. You can pretend you don’t want it. That you didn’t know somewhere in the darkest corners of your mind that this moment was coming and that you were not secretly looking forward to it, but I know different. You’ve longed for it.”

  “You’re a psychopath,” I grunted as I tried to wriggle away from the increasingly delicious friction of his dick sliding over my sensitive skin.

  “Whatever else I am, I am always your Master,” he said as he canted his hips lower and spread his legs so they pushed mine farther apart. “You can scream, Cosima, and know that no one will come for you.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but the air was punched from my chest as he thrust forward inside me.

  Searing pain erupted through my core. It felt as if someone had ripped out the seams inside my body, and I fractured from the pain of it.

  My virginity was gone. Crushed under Lord Thornton’s expensive heel just as he’d foretold.

  I sobbed against the cold floor, my tears pooling hot and slick under my cheek. He was still inside me for one blessed minute, my flesh protesting around his girth and clamped tighter than a shaking fist around his length. I could feel his heavy breath, the low rumble in his throat as he slid out, paused, and then pushed back inside. My whole body shuddered at the alien feeling.

  I wondered dazedly if this was the point when prey gave up to their predator, when they first drew blood with talons or teeth or cock and it seemed senseless to fight anymore.

  Vaguely, I was aware of Alexander’s harsh breath in my ear, the rough glide of him in and out of my torn pussy.

  “I won’t have you lie there like a broken doll so you can convince yourself that you don’t love the feel of me inside you,” Alexander gritted out before hauling me to my knees and then tipping my hips back against his own as he thrust.

  I gasped, my head falling back onto his shoulder as one of his hands arrowed down to my clit and pinched it between his knuckles. In this position, the head of his dick pressed against something inside me, nudging and nudging until click. Something flared to life inside me, a heat that burned low and slow through my entire body.

  “That’s it,” he said, sinking his teeth hard into the junction of my neck and shoulder, twisting his fingers over my clit, fucking me so hard it hurt. “Take your Master’s cock.”

  God, but it hurt. It hurt like an aching muscle being painfully worked with strong fingers, an edge of pleasure to the pain that made my scalp prickle and my spine bow.

  “I am the only one who will ever touch you,” he growled into my sweat dampened nape as he thrust and thrust and thrust. “I am the only one who will ever hurt you.”

  His hands met at my breasts to ruthles
sly twist my nipples. “Can you hear how wet you are around my thick cock? Sink into the pain, topolina, and you will find all the pleasure I have to give you.”

  I stuttered over my breath, my hips tipping farther to accommodate his girth between my legs. The mad slap of flesh rang out through the empty chamber, but the wet suck of my pussy grasping at his cock was more intimate. It was impossible not to agree with his ownership of me when he was deep within my body, cradled by the most intimate parts of my flesh.

  The pain was transforming in my breasts, burning from a flash flare to a low-grade smolder that sent smoky tendrils of lust curling down my spine over my hips and into my sex.

  I didn’t understand the strange alchemy, how pain could evolve from plain hurt into golden desire. It set my teeth on edge even more than the sensation of being shackled to the floor like a dog.

  “Bring your mind back to me,” Alexander demanded, sucking deeply at the skin on the other side of my neck and punctuating it with firm biting kisses. “I am fucking you. Cosima Ruth Lombardi, loving sister, beloved daughter, and burgeoning model.”

  It felt as if he was reading my tombstone. The finality to his tone, to his words and the red evidence of the death of my innocence between my thighs where he churned and claimed were impossible to negate. I felt razed to the ground, the fire of my fight long extinguished by the wind so I lay as dust and ash on the floor, so easily conquerable I wasn’t even worth the effort to conquer anymore.

  But still, it wasn’t enough for Master Alexander.

  He gripped my chin, tilting it toward his mouth so he could claim mine. I moaned around his silky tongue as he plundered my mouth in tandem with his cock in my pussy. I could smell his cedar scent, his masculine musk, and the unique tang of our mingled sex. I could feel the roughness of his suit jacket against my back, his light stubble abrading my chin and cheeks as he kissed my breath away.

  There was nothing to think or feel but him.

  Nothing to be but his.

  “Now, you’re going to come for me, and it’s going to hurt while you do it.”

  I was close enough to see the cold triumph in his eyes, the steam of passion as it collided with the heat of his constant fury.

  I wanted to know why he was so furious with me, why he had to treat me so, but there was no voice in my sore throat and my thoughts were too diaphanous to grasp.

  I felt as if I was losing myself to the intoxicating contrast of pain and pleasure, as if my very skin and bones had turned into an impossible oxymoron of sensation. Where were my ferocity and my independence?

  His hand found the place we were joined, his fingers parting over the girth of his shaft as it tunneled inside me, his thumb rubbing slow, firm circles over my clit.

  And suddenly, I could feel my spine.

  It arched back into his thrusts, strong against his opposing momentum so that he hit harder at the knot of sensation deep inside me.

  I could feel the ferocity unfurl in my belly, heat coiling and colliding into something so big it made my womb ache.

  “That’s it,” Alexander ground out as he pounded into me, every component of his body playing mine ruthlessly.

  Not just for his enjoyment now, but for my own.

  He turned my body into a traitor as I recognized the beginnings of an orgasm taking form in my sparking blood.

  “You’re going to come for me just like this,” he taunted me.

  And God, I did.

  My womb cramped so tightly I keened with pain, my pussy a vise around his cock so that he could barely pry himself out of my spasming folds. I screamed as he ripped me apart, and I screamed even when everything I was collapsed to the floor beneath him and still he pumped away.

  Only when his shout of release joined my voice did I quiet, my mind preoccupied with the sting of his hot cum against my overly sensitive, abraded walls.

  For a long moment, he stayed inside me, and his big hands moved slowly over my back, my buttocks and my thighs. It was oddly soothing, and the absurdness of his sudden tenderness made me want to cry again.

  I didn’t because he’d taken too much for me.

  Finally, he pulled out, and I could feel the rush of our combined juices run out over my thighs. Alexander’s wide palm cupped me there between my legs in a gesture that was somehow more possessive even than his taking of me. Gently but firmly, he smeared our cum from the front of my pussy over my clit to the end of my crack well beyond my asshole.

  And as he claimed me like a primate, he told me in the elegant accent of a titled gentleman, “You are mine now, Cosima Lombardi. It is my cum between these pretty thighs, my ache in your womb, and my bruises beneath your skin. You will wear me like this every day for the next five years, and by the time your term is up, I promise you, you will beg me for another five.”

  I lay on the ground after he disappeared on the click-click of his expensive shoes, my sweat and blood and his cum cooling on my skin as my heartbeat slowed incrementally.

  There were times in your life when it felt as if you were not really living it. I believedyou were soulless at those moments, your spirit escaping your body through a puncture wound, some great trauma that your mind cannot endure, so it lets your essence escape for an all too brief reprieve.

  I felt hollow as a broken relic as I lay there used, corrupted, and discarded, worshipped and warped by a heretic. There were no more tears at the backs of my eyes, but there was sorrow so deep in my bones I feared it would remain a part of me forever.

  At some point, I might have slept because before I could comprehend the change, it was light outside the massive windows, and golden light was spilling across my body. I shivered at the warmth of it, then noticed how it highlighted the bloody smears on the floor, and the arrival of blackberry-coloured bruises on my hips.

  Noel had told me the day before that the amount of floor-to-ceiling windows in Pearl Hall were an extravagance meant to highlight the family’s wealth.

  I hated them.

  “It’s time to get up and leave this place, dearie,” Mrs. White’s voice floated to me through my haze, and a moment later her soft, plump hands were smoothing back my hair.

  I blinked into her face.

  “Come, come,” she urged. “Let me help you get clean.”

  “I don’t think I’ll ever be clean again,” I told her in a hoarse whisper.

  Her eyes shuttered briefly, but she turned her head before I could read the full extent of her expression. “You will, I swear it. Now, do as I tell you, and come with me.”

  My body ached so wickedly as I moved that I couldn’t hold in the ragged moans as I gained my feet. I was a gutted building, my framework swaying in the wind.

  Mrs. White wrapped her arm around my hips, cooing sweet nonsense as she led me slowly out of the ballroom.

  I didn’t ask where we were going because I didn’t care.

  The fire in my soul had gone out.

  I was merely a body now, a vessel for Master Alexander’s cock.

  I shivered so hard it pinched a nerve in my spine, but still, I walked on down the hall into the opposite wing where we stopped before a large red door painted with gold leaf. The knob was delicate red blown glass shaped like a bloom, and I gasped softly at the beauty of it before Mrs. White’s hand moved over it and opened the door.

  The room inside was the colour an oyster with gold cornices, sheer red draperies over the huge windows, and a bed covered in wine-toned satin coverlets and pillows. It was a room fit for a princess from the four-poster bed to the ornate gold vanity with its oval mirror.

  My feet sank into the plush white, red, and pink rugs layered over each other in a way that was artless and beautiful, and I couldn’t resist the urge to wriggle my toes. When I looked up from doing so, Mrs. White was smiling softly at me.

  “This is to be your room for the duration of your stay here at Pearl Hall,” she told me as she went to the bed and pulled back the plush covers to reveal satin sheets.

  “Scusi?” />
  She fluffed a pillow, stood back to survey the bed, and nodded contentedly. “Master Alexander had the room prepared for you. This is where you will sleep.”

  Tears bloomed in my throat, but I swallowed them down. “You mean I don’t have to stay in the ballroom anymore?”

  “Oh, darling girl,” she cooed, rushing forward to take my hands even though I flinched away from her kindness.

  Noel’s kindness yesterday had only bought me pain.

  “You won’t believe me, but I do empathize with your plight. The Davenport men can be… mercurial at the best of times, and they are absolute demons once angered.”

  “I was with his father playing chess. I was hardly doing anything wrong,” I muttered.

  “So much is not what it seems. I would imagine a girl so oft judged like a book by its cover for her beauty would understand the deeper meaning of things.”

  I blinked and looked away from her, ashamed and confused by her words.

  It was easy to judge Alexander, and I felt I’d been given more than a cover to do it by. I’d spent hours with the man now; I lived in his home and had taken him into my body.

  Wasn’t that enough?

  But then, what did I really know about him?

  He was an earl, heir to the Dukedom of Greythorn and the master of Pearl Hall, an estate that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to run.

  I knew the way he looked, admittedly well. His aristocratic feature crowned by the thick, silken gold of hair, overlong slightly at the top and pushed back from his broad forehead. There was age in the creases there and beside his eyes, bracketing his firm, masculine mouth that was only a few shades pinker than his golden skin. He was so symmetrical I could not find fault with any of his features, and each time I looked him in the face, I found I didn’t want to.

  His eyes up close were like twin moons, pale with silver star light but dark and cratered with mysteries I wanted to discover like an ancient astronomer.