My mind was still floating, my pussy still spasming when he drove his thick cock straight to the end of my pussy. My dazed eyes spun in my head and then settled on the mirror over his shoulders.
I could see his buttocks, carved and full like perfect half-moons, flex as he thrust into me. I wished my hands were free so I could cup him there and feel the strength and the suppleness of his golden skin under my touch.
He pushed me farther into the bed with his hips and spread my legs up and wide with palms on the insides of my thighs.
I was lewdly displayed in the mirror, and I realized that was his intent, so I could watch his ruddy sink into my glistening pink pussy with each and every hard kick of his hips.
I screamed as his tip nudged my womb, the bruising push of it spiraling my mind even further into outer space. My orgasm went on and on, softening slowly like the tide after a tsunami until I was limp but aware Alexander lay on top of me. Outside, my cunt grasped against nothing as his cock lay still hard on my thigh.
I wanted to protest that he hadn’t cum because somehow that seemed vital to me. Was I good submissive if my Master didn’t come?
But then I noticed he was stroking my hair.
I froze, my breath arrested in my lungs like amber.
My eyes scoured his face for answers to the tenderness, but all I found was the perfect symmetry of his aristocratic features, the plushness of his lower lip, and the bow of the top. There was stubble lining his strong jaw like flakes of pure gold, and his long eyelashes looked like spikes of precious metal over his storm cloud eyes.
I could read nothing in his face.
Unless he wanted it to be, there was nothing there ever.
I’d never seen a man with a face so much a mask.
Truth be told, it made my empathetic heart ache for him. What kind of life had he led that made him so removed, so callously reserved?
“I’ve never seen more inquisitive eyes,” he murmured as he looked down on me. “A golden palimpsest of questions. What will you ask the hawk first, little mouse?”
“Why didn’t you come for me?” I asked even though the question burned as it left my throat.
His smile spread slowly over his face, and he was close enough for me to watch how it changed his eyes from pewter to light grey and how it hooked from one side of his mouth and pulled through to the other.
God, but he was such a beautiful beast.
I had thought I’d known beauty before but never like his. Never a handsome so powerful it hurt the eyes, not a man so beautiful he could weaponise it.
“I didn’t come for you because that is not always the purpose of our play. Sometimes, it’s to teach you a lesson, sometimes to reward you for good behaviour, and sometimes, it will be about good old fashioned power dynamics. You just came like an eager little wanton while I was controlled enough to stave off. How does that make you feel?”
I knew the blush wouldn’t show on my skin, but my cheeks burned with shame. “Like a whore.”
“Mmm,” he acknowledged with a very slight, smug grin. “Only ever for me.”
“You seem to enjoy this, being cruel one moment and sweet the next. It’s driving me even crazier than the isolation in the ballroom did,” I admitted to him, staring at his fingers as they twirled a piece of my silky hair.
I watched as his eyes turned over from sun-shaded silver to the dark side of the moon, pocketed with craters and tortured mysteries. He stared as his fingers in my hair as if the strands held the answers to all of life’s questions.
“I was raised to be a Lord and a Master. My father and his… friends trained me from a young boy to be ruthless in my perusal of pleasure and power, in dealings with money, society, and especially women. I’m not sure if I would have been born with the inclination to stripe a woman’s ass with a cane, but isn’t that the endless question of nature versus nurture?”
“I think you like it,” I whispered, because this transparency between us was new, and I didn’t want to tear the paper as I careful traced his edges. “You like to hurt me.”
“Yes,” he agreed as his other hand slinked up my torso, between my breasts to collar my throat. “I love to see your body exposed and shaking under me like a stripped wire. I would do this to you even if I didn’t have to.”
“But you do have to. Tell me about Salvatore.”
His sigh ruffled my hair as he shifted over me, tucking one of my thighs between his legs so that my entire body was plastered to his. I wanted to nuzzle under the right angle of his jaw, tip my nose against his pulse and feel him so strong and sure against me, better than any security blanket could be.
I shouldn’t have felt so close to him or so safe in his arms, but I told myself it was the strange euphoric aftermath of submission that made me unduly needy and nearly weepy.
“When I held you in that alley, I knew who you were before you told me your name. I could see him in your eyes and in the cut of your jaw then when you spoke, you shared the same accent, the long, soft vowels of Neapolitan.”
“What are you saying?” I asked, staring down the edge of cliff, my toes curling around the side for purchase.
I didn’t want to fall, but momentum at my back was pushing me forward, and I knew the drop was inevitable.
Alexander’s hand tightened around my neck so forcefully, I couldn’t breathe. “Isn’t it obvious? Amadeo Salvatore is your father.”
I gasped, desperate to draw air and sense into my body, but Alexander wouldn’t let me. His weight against my chest deepened, and his fingers throbbed over my throat in time with my pulse.
“Your mother had an affair with him over eighteen years ago when your father was held in prison for a time. I only know because Amedeo and my mother spoke of it sometimes over the years, when it was late and they thought little boys should be in bed. It resulted in twins, two babies so beautiful that even though he couldn’t father them, he also couldn’t let them go.”
“Stop,” I croaked as stars exploded in front of my eyes.
I didn’t know if was from oxygen deprivation or the fact that my entire universe was rearranging itself to make sense of this news.
Salvatore wasn’t my father.
He couldn’t be.
Mama wasn’t a zealot, but she was a devout Roman Catholic. It was one of the reasons she had never divorced Seamus even when she should have.
To have an affair with another man when she was married with two other babies at home… it just didn’t compute.
Only, I could call up the haunted longing in Mama’s eyes as she stared out the lone window in our small kitchen and how she would cry sometimes at night, holding her rosary beads and a book of prayer, mumbling about forgiveness and sin. I’d always assumed she was praying for Seamus, our family’s penultimate sinner, but what if I was wrong?
I didn’t look like Seamus or my sisters who had inherit only their golden complexions from Mama and otherwise were replicas of our father.
Sebastian and I were cut from dark cloth, constructed into strong angles and long lines that spoke of different genes.
Ones that harkened back to a capo I’d known my entire life, one that hovered over our small lives like a dark power. He was tall, strong, and swarthy with a smooth, rolling gait that reminded me suddenly of Sebastian’s.
Alexander’s smirk cut like a knife wound across his face. “You see it, don’t you? I took you because your biological father killed my mother, and your faux father was stupid enough to use you to repay his debts. It seems both your fathers’ sins have shackled you to your fate long before you realized it.”
My breath wheezed through my throat like a poorly equipped air conditioning unit, my body hot and cold in strange turns.
“I thought about killing you,” Alexander mused as he resumed stroking my hair, only this time, his touch wasn’t tender; it was perfunctory. The way one might pet their prize hound after he’d passed his prime before he was sent to slaughter. “But that was before I met you and saw those
prized money eyes Amedeo had always spoken about so poetically. What a better fate, I thought, to use you, to bend you to my will and then send you back to him. How much more poetic would it be if it was his own sacred daughter that led him to his demise?”
I want to scratch at his hand, desperate to peel his steel fingers away from my windpipe, but I was still tied to the bedposts, helpless as a starfish too high on the shoreline. My mind had lost its tether to my shatter reality and I was beginning to lose purchase on any semblance of my life as I knew it.
It was very possibly that he was killing me.
“It was such a good plan, you see, topolina, and I am loath to change it. Only now, things have changed irrevocably. I,” he pulled in a deep breath and put his face even closer to mine so that his eyes swallowed my vision like a lunar eclipse, and his mouth was against my lips. “I find myself as much in your thrall as you are in mine. The taste of you lingers in my mouth, the echo of your giggle in my ears, and the feel of your satin skin haunts my fingers, so in strange moments, I feel I could manifest you in my hold from out of thin air.
“I don’t wish to use you anymore to kill your father. I don’t wish to be duplicitous about my motivations. I want you to desire to help me. Help me bring justice to a man who left you for poor and gone in the wasteland of Naples for years to fend for yourself until he finally sold you into sexual slavery. Help me send the man who killed my mother out of jealousy and rage to prison for his crimes. Please,” he said with a stroke on his tongue over the top of my parted mouth. The word sat like a pearl on my tongue, a precious gift I wanted to swallow and keep safe in the shell of my belly for all time. “Please, when the time comes, help me.”
I wasn’t thinking rationally.
My whole world had changed that day for the zenith time in the short span of three months, and I needed time to think. Time to be away from a man who radiated a magnetic field to rival the earth’s poles, who drew my eternal moral compass to him like a faulty true North.
I didn’t take that time, and I didn’t want to.
He had manipulated me too soundly. I was filled with anger that had been latent too long, with righteous indignation that needed some end and that end was being given to me.
Didn’t arrogant, destructive Salvatore, who ruled the criminal underworld of Naples that had tormented my family for years, deserve to be punished?
He might have been my biological father, but that only meant I’d been seeded by the Italian devil. In truth, he had done just as much lasting damage as Seamus had, and hadn’t I gotten rid of him?
What was one more wrong righted? Especially if riding Naples of Amedeo Salvatore meant my family could move forward unscathed.
My passionate mind and heart collided in unity, but it was my gut that churned up a response. “Yes, when the time comes, if it means you’ll let me go back to my family, I’ll help you bring him to justice.”
Alexander’s taciturn face broke open into a full-lipped smile that took my breath away. He’d removed his hand from my neck, sliding it up my neck so that he could cup my cheek and sink the tips of his fingers into the hair over my ear. His eyes were eloquent with pride, relief, and fierce triumph, but he didn’t voice any of it. Instead, he slowly closed his mouth over mine and let me eat them off his tongue.
“You can’t tell your family,” he murmured. “They can’t know.”
I nodded because I didn’t want them to know for my own reasons. I was the first line of defense for the Lombardi clan, so I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to drop a grenade in their mist.
Besides, how could I be the pane of glass in a family of fractures if my entire life was a well-kept lie? Would Elena still confide in me, and Elle still allow me to support her? How would Mama answer for her sins and move on with me to a better place of understanding?
What would Seb do, knowing he was the spawn of the worst man he’d ever known?
No, it would be just one more secret I harbored like a cancer in my cells so that it didn’t infect my family.
“Will you tell me about Edward?” I asked, desperate to take the pressure of my chest and focus on another mystery that had nothing to do with me.
Alexander rubbed his nose against mine. “No, my beauty. That was confession enough for tonight.”
He pulled away his face shuttering until the light of his tenderness was gone and all that remained was the dark shadow of domination. My mouth went dry at the sight of his enormous cock saluting the ceiling as he walked on his knees, straddling my legs and hips, then settled his buttocks on my abdomen. He fisted his cock in one hand and used the other to plump up my breasts like cushions before pushing them together. I shivered as he spat on the steep valley of my cleavage and then slowly pushed his searing hot dick into their fold.
“Now,” he said in a voice like a hand on my throat. “It’s time for you to make your Master come.”
I was waiting for him.
My thighs were wet, the air around me perfumed with my honeyed scent.
I’d never been very patient, so the waiting shouldn’t have worked on me as such a heady aphrodisiac, but each minute that ticked by struck my pussy like the beat of a gong, lust reverberating through my body from the source.
As much as my sex throbbed, my pulse was heavy, but even, my breathing long and slow. I felt centered by the weight at my core and my single-minded goal.
Wait for me by the door, naked, kneeling with your legs spread and hands behind your back.
When the waiting got too much, I thought of those orders in Alexander’s clipped, unflappable tones, and they cooled me like an ice cube in hot tea, not noticeably enough and only briefly.
My shoulders ached from holding my hands behind my back, from tipping my breasts into the air, my nipples hard and pointed like arrows notched in a bow.
I wasn’t comfortable in any sense of the word.
But my discomfort aroused me.
At that point, after nearly an hour of kneeling in the great hall, everything aroused me.
The cold, unforgiving kiss of marble on my shins, the weight of my entire body compressing my ankles, and the way the constant draft of the old manor whirred around my swollen sex like the whisper of a kiss.
If pressed, I honestly wasn’t sure if I would state my name, date of birth, or prior place of residence.
I was just flesh, made pretty on a plate and waiting at the pass to be served hot to a high-paying guest or a severe critic.
He’d been gone for five days.
It shouldn’t have been such an interminably long time.
In fact, it should have been a beloved reprieve from his constant sexual attentions.
At first, I’d rejoiced in the freedom. I took nearly every meal in the kitchen with Douglas who prepared Italian dishes that almost rivaled Mama’s. I trained in the gym every morning, swimming in the lap pool, staring at the massive statue of Poseidon as I did the breast stroke. I spent every other spare moment in the library, reading first editions of the Bronte sisters and Byron, beautifully illustrated hard copies of fantasy novels like The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, and The Hobbit.
I thought endlessly about Salvatore. I no longer doubted he was my father. It made sense given his eccentric presence in our lives and how much we truly did look like him. Every time I let myself linger over it, I grew so angry I felt as if I would burst out of my skin. It was his face I imagined when I punched and kicked the hanging bag in the gym, his eyes I pretended to gouge when I fenced with Riddick, the only man sanctioned to do so while Alexander was gone.
Sometimes, late at night when the darkness and loneliness ate at my skin like so many crawling bugs, I let myself despair over the what-ifs. What if he’d stayed with Mama? What if he hadn’t killed Chiara Davenport? And why? What kind of man did any of that unless he was just pure, straight-up evil?
To distract myself further, I gorged myself on food, exercise, and reading, but it did nothing to fill the bottomless well of longing that
opened in the pit of my belly the minute Alexander had left for his travels.
My mind was erratic, flitting from interest to interest, unable to settle without the firm direction of Alexander’s commands. I adapted slowly as if waking from a dream. By the fifth day, my mind was my own again but tuned to a station filled with static.
It was my body that suffered the most. I felt aching and restless, so listless at moments I wondered if I could get out of bed.
It was as if I was a depleted battery, and the only thing that could reanimate my ions was sex.
Apart from Douglas, Riddick was the only man I saw even though it was normal for me to cross paths with other male servants. It didn’t take me long to realize they were being deliberately kept from me. Noel was gone with Alexander, so I didn’t even have his chess games to fill the void.
Alexander had turned me into a sexual monster, but the only person he wanted me weaponised against was himself.
My sensitive ears picked up the telltale rumble of gravel churning under wheels even through the thick stone walls.
A car was pulling up.
We never had visitors, so it had to be him.
My Master.
My mouth flooded with salvia. I itched to catapult out of my pose so that the moment the door opened, my body would be on his, his hands catching my ass as I linked my long legs around him, and all would be right with my world at Pearl Hall.
It physically hurt to quell the impulse, but the ache when I clenched those mental muscles felt good. It felt good because I knew I’d be rewarded for my uncharacteristic patience.
When he saw it, he would know it was just another new trick in an arsenal of traits he was teaching me.
Heels clicked against the stone pavers on the steps. A low muffle of voices.
Then the heavy velvet against velvet sound of the door pushing open.
My breath left my body as I was filled to the brim with nervous, delicious anticipation.
Enthralled Page 16
