My mind wanted to break through its physical tethers to my body and float away into space, a balloon lost to the atmosphere. It would have been so easy to sever the ties, to evacuate my pain-riddled limbs and lose myself entirely, but I wouldn’t do it.
There was something like losing in the thought of it.
I was tired of the loss I’d suffered.
My family was gone to me, my name taken and replaced by moniker’s men had given me to mark me as their own. I had no skills, no job, no money of my own. My very future was shackled to the whims of others.
I’d lost so much already; I couldn’t stand to lose myself.
So I tried to sink into the pain. Each lash brought a different type of agony, a different way to feel it.
The seventeenth strike was lightning striking the bloody swamplands between my shoulders.
The eighteenth, a thin wire cutting through warm clay, dissecting my flesh so painfully, so swiftly, it took away my breath.
I held it through the brutal bite of the next strike and the one after that, expelling a tiny swell of air punctuated by a, “Thank you, Mr. Knox,” after each one.
By the twentieth, it was obvious that my tormentor’s arm was growing weary. The whip hit my back strangely, the angle wrong so that the thin tip wrapped around the cross I was bound to and flicked over the tender underside of my breast. I felt the skin split open into red beads of moisture.
The next five had Landon’s entire body weight behind them and lacked his original finesse. They were heavy, brutish blows that pounded me against the wooden beams like hammer strikes and blunt fists.
He finished, and my last thank you was only a wet breath of relief as my body sagged boneless in the cuffs. My wrists and ankles were wet where the cruel metal had abraded through layers of my skin, and I could feel the sticky blood from my back dripping down my bum and thighs.
Just as I became when I was with Master Alexander, I was only sensation.
It was my coping method and my salvation.
I was every ache, pain, and horrible cramp in the body of Cosima Lombardi. I had thoughts, however fractured, and a tall spine, however abused.
There was heavy silence as the men absorbed my resilience. Even in my painful oblivion, I could feel their surprise that I had preserved.
“You should have hit her harder, Knox,” someone sneered.
“I’d like to have seen you do better, Wentworth,” he snapped back.
“She passed,” another voice said wearily. “Let the poor thing down. She looks less appetizing than a skinned rabbit, and she’s spoiling my dinner.”
The sound of shoes drew close, and I shuddered as a finger traced over a raw, opened wound. It felt as if someone had stuck a fork into my socket.
“I think,” Sherwood mused from behind me. “It’s time for Lord Edward to take his turn at her. What will it be, Edward? The quirt or the bull whip for another twenty-five.”
I knew I wouldn’t survive another five lashes, let alone twenty-five.
There was a moment of absolute silence and then an explosion of shouting and movement.
There was a quick, heavy tread of shoes bursting toward me and then a growl as someone fell to the ground close to me.
“Don’t be a bloody fool,” someone whispered harshly over grunts of effort.
“Get the fuck off me before I rip your head off your body,” Alexander growled. “I’ll deal you with later after I take care of these twats.”
“You take this punishment for her, you’re dead, and you fucking know it.” I gasped softly as I recognized the other voice. The voice of Alexander’s brother and rival, Edward. “They’ve been looking for reasons to end you since you beat out Stockbridge for the Olympic bid in 2012. You’re unruly, selfish, and too fucking hard headed for these fucks to rule. Don’t you see what’s going on? Don’t you ever fucking see?”
There was the sound of a tussle and then more men clustering around the two on the ground.
With all my remaining energy, I turned my head against the wood to view the spectacle.
It was Edward on top of Alexander, holding his hands over his head while some of the other brothers of the Order tried to pry him off.
“Please, Lord Thornton, explain your behaviour?” Sherwood asked silkily from where he loomed over Alexander.
“I want to take slave Davenport’s punishment.”
Alexander’s steady words struck me with the force of the snake whip.
“You do?” Sherwood questioned with barely concealed glee. “Because you can’t bear to see her hurt?”
“I submit to the Order’s punishment. Though I haven’t been soft on the slave, I did take my hands to another brother without first going through the Order. I believe a flagellation is the normal punishment for such a misdemeanor.”
“You are correct,” Sherwood mused. “Though it would have to be Lord Edward who wields the whip.”
No, I wanted to scream. There was no way Alexander would take a beating from his own slanderous brother for me. I couldn’t believe it, and more, I didn’t want to.
It said too many things that shouldn’t have been true for us.
“I submit to the Order’s punishment,” Alexander repeated regally, as if he was not being sentenced to a flogging.
“Very well. Prepare him.”
I closed my eyes in sorrow and relief, tears searing through my lids and sliding down my cheeks.
Alexander was taking this punishment so I didn’t have to.
He was going to be beaten by his traitorous brother for me.
My heart set to aching even more than my back.
I gasped as something warm and heavy was draped over my me.
“Hush, bella,” Alexander whispered in my ear as they pressed him to me and shackled him to the contraption with thick, secure leather cuffs. “I’m here, my beauty.”
The urge to cry grew like a thorny thicket in my throat.
“Oh, Xan,” I whimpered as the men jerked loudly on Alexander’s bounds to test their strength and then stepped away. “Why are you doing this?”
“No one hurts you but me,” he claimed fiercely as he used the tip of his nose to wipe a tear from my cheek. “Knox nearly flayed you alive, and he will die for it, I swear to it, but for now, let me save you from this.”
“Begin, Lord Edward,” Sherwood snapped.
“This is the world I was brought up in,” Alexander whispered quickly. “It’s not an excuse, but context, Cosima. If I am a monster, these are my creators.”
A slice and whistle then the sharp crack as the whip ripped across Alexander’s back. His entire body tensed against mine, trying to keep himself off my tender back.
He didn’t make a noise.
Edward beat him soundly, the thwack of the leather harsher to my ears than it was when Knox went at me, and I realized that because Alexander was a man, he was getting an even more thorough punishment.
After a while, he gave up trying to keep a small gap of separation between us and his sweat-slicked torso stuck to my back, stinging the open sores.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered almost drunkenly.
Another apology from my Master, this one so much more potent than the last. It could have been in tribute to so many of his dastardly acts against me, but my brain was stripped of its ability to nuance and so those two small words seemed to encompass everything.
This Lord and Master, who submitted to no one for nothing, was taking a thrashing from a man he reviled for me.
I could feel his great warrior’s body jerk and tremble against my own with each whipping, the jumpstart of his breath after each strike and the sweetness of his lips against my hair, and all I wanted to do was hug him.
I wanted to wrap my aching limbs around the aching limbs of my Master and hold him close enough to feel my heart beat from my chest to his. I wanted to pepper his beautiful face in kisses and cry for the tragedies of our lives.
Instead, I pushed my cheek back slightly again
st his, and I breathed, “I forgive you.”
The twenty-fifth blow landed and then Alexander’s gusty sigh cooled the sweat to my skin.
“Get them down,” Sherwood ordered, his voice rife with dissatisfaction. “Ready the cars.”
There was sharp strike of expensive shoes on wood, and then the muffled sound of the crossing the mats we stood on.
Then Sherwood was there, his face over both of ours as he hissed, “Prove you are repentant, Thornton. Bring the girl to The Hunt.”
It was deep winter in Scotland, the air so crisp it seemed to shatter against my skin as I jumped up and down on my toes to keep warm. I should have been wearing a thick overcoat, scarf, and gloves, or at the very least pants and shoes, but I was not. Instead, I was dressed as the other twenty-six women surrounding me in the corral were in a simple, old fashioned white shift dress. I wasn’t even wearing underwear. One of the girls had questioned a lord in the hall when we first congregated about how we were to keep warm. After he’d slapped her across the face for her impudence, he’d informed her running for her life should keep her warm enough.
I shifted my weight from foot to foot and cupped my hands together in a feeble attempt to warm them with my breath while I looked over the assembly of men, all finely dressed on horseback. It was easy to spot Alexander in the mix with his crown of golden hair glinting even in the twilight fog. He was also the only one wearing thick, elbow length gloves. I looked at the sky and saw his falcon, Astor, circling overhead. As if summoned by my thoughts, Alexander raised his forearm over his head and the bird went plummeting from the sky, pulling up to slow his flight just before he landed gracefully on his Master’s limb.
It seemed Alexander was good at training all kinds of creatures.
All the men wore tweed coats and tight riding breeches in fawn and earthen colours but for the Master, the Earl of Sherwood, his huntsman servant, and the whippers-in who would do reconnaissance and control the hounds for the group. They wore traditional red coats and black hats to distinguish themselves from the lot.
They were the leaders of the annual hunt, but it wouldn’t be the traditional fox they raced to capture.
No, it would be the women corralled together in a wooden pen.
This was the Order of Dionysus’s greatest event, the highlight of their year.
Every man participating must have paid the cost of admission.
A young woman for the other men to hunt.
There were very few rules as far as Alexander had explained it to me this morning before he was called away for the General Assembly.
One, the men were not under any circumstance allowed to use weapons against each other or the girls. Fisticuffs were expected and even encouraged. Sexual assault was literally the name of the game. But no weapons.
As if that made this game civilized.
Two, The Hunt wasn’t over until each and every woman was found and fucked. A man could claim as many women as he pleased, but every time one was captured, they had to be brought back to their captor’s rooms at the hunting lodge before the hunter could go out for more.
Three, a special prize would be awarded to the man who caught the “Golden Fox”, the woman deemed the most desirable by the vote of the men of the Order.
It was this we were waiting for in the brutal clasp of a darkening Scottish evening.
Master Sherwood was on a platform before his great stone hunting manor in the wild Highlands waiting for his manservant to tally the vote and name the girl.
I knew before he accepted the folded piece of paper that it would me because I was just that unlucky.
Whoever said beauty was a gift had clearly never experienced it for themselves because it was nothing but a prettily wrapped curse.
“Slave Davenport,” he announced, and the gathered men let out a collective roar.
They were all sober of drink and drugs but so high on the coming thrill of the chase that the very air around them seemed to shimmer with energy.
A girl beside me with true Scottish colouring, pale freckled skin, and hair the colour of juiced carrots grasped my arm for a moment in empathy before I was ripped away by one of Lord Sherwood’s men.
He tossed me over his shoulder, my dress flipping up to reveal my buttocks to the gathering. There was another cheer, this one tinged with dangerous fervour.
The manservant deposited me on the stage beside Lord Sherwood and stepped back.
I kept my gaze down because Alexander had stressed the importance of my submissiveness until the cows came home on the way to this highland retreat.
I saw the edge of Sherwood’s shiny leather riding boots stop just inside my scope of sight, and then I felt the heaviness of his hand on my head. Instantly, I folded elegantly into a kneel, a human origami shaped just to his liking.
“My brothers, I give you the Golden Fox,” he announced boldly as he placed a cornet on my head I knew was made of golden thorns and ruby flowers.
It was ludicrously expensive, far more valuable to the Order than the woman wearing it. There was deliberate irony in the gesture that set my teeth on edge.
Women were nothing to these men.
They had been practicing The Hunt since they stole the idea from the Spanish Civil War practice during the White Terror, when wealthy landowners would hunt down and murder peasantry.
They wouldn’t spill our blood today, unless it was between our thighs, but it was still unspeakably horrible.
I could only hope Alexander would be the one to find and capture me.
He would hurt me, but only to tame my wild spirit and bring me a calm I’d never before been free to experience.
I didn’t want to think about what the others would do to me.
After the trauma of my previous experience with the Order, I didn’t hold much hope that my mind would emerge unscathed if another Master claimed me.
A shiver rippled through me like a ghost as I thought of Landon and his cruel black snake whip. My back was barely healed from the ordeal, thin pink ribbons of sadism still bifurcated my flesh and twanged with pain when I moved the wrong way.
It had been two weeks since the Order of Dionysus swept into Pearl Hall and fundamentally changed the way of my world there.
Two weeks since Alexander had taken a beating for me.
Two weeks since he’d last touched me.
In fact, after the events of that horrible night, I’d barely since him to speak to him, let alone continue my valet duties of dressing and bathing him, or my sexual duties of taking his cock whenever it suited him.
He gave me nothing but a cruel amount of space and time.
It was Mrs. White who tended to my split and scabbing back, Douglas who delivered my food, and surprise of all surprises, Riddick, who was also trained as a doctor, who sat by my bedside to check me for infection and rewrap my wounds.
Christmas had come and gone, and with it, New Year’s Eve. Douglas invited me to the servant’s dinner, but I didn’t want them to feel strained, so I only had a dinner of turkey on a plate in my room. I’d been given licence to call my family, and I’d cried when I spoke to Sebastian, who had successfully moved to London, and Giselle, who seemed meek as ever but artistically thriving in Paris. Mama had made me laugh as she recounted neighborhood gossip and Elena had listened quietly, attentively as I told her my made-up stories of modelling gigs in Milano and London.
I was homesick and lonely without any true company.
No Alexander.
No Noel either, though I wasn’t so sure that was a bad thing after his behaviour the night of the flogging. I hadn’t looked too closely at his motivation for being kind to me previously because I’d been so starved for affection, so used to my prior life where a person was kind without needing a reason to be.
I was different now.
I knew the truth of the world.
No one did anything for anyone unless it benefited their agenda.
I didn’t know what motivated Noel besides his obvious ha
tred of all things Amedeo Salvatore, but I knew he was playing me across a board I couldn’t see, ready to sacrifice me like one of the pawns he had taught me so much about.
I lifted my chin as Sherwood bade me to rise and rejoin the other girls. My eyes snared on Alexander’s broad frame, seated on a huge white horse that suited his rider’s size and ferocity. My Master’s eyes were on me and inside me, his jaw clenched as he tried to pry my thoughts out of my head across the space between us.
He’d been giving me that look a lot since the ordeal, whenever I caught him leaving early or returning late to the house.
I think he expected me to hate him.
I didn’t.
But I did feel hurt that he had stripped away our rituals together after everything we’d gone through that night.
I was lonely. I missed eating dinner at his feet from his hands, washing his dense muscles and acres of gorgeous pale gold skin before dressing it well, buttoning him up like a present for myself that I knew I would unwrap later.
It was all gone, and it made my slavery feel worse, hollow and cracked like a broken tool.
The five-hour drive from Pearl Hall, which I’d learned was in England’s Peak District, to Glencoe, Scotland, was the first time I had spent any real time with him.
Yet Alexander made me sit in the front with Riddick while he closed himself behind a soundproof partition in the back seat and worked. It was only after we’d arrived, and I was getting out of the car that he’d stopped me with a strong hand on my arm and whispered a few words of wisdom in my ear, including the rules of The Hunt. Before I could reply, he’d turned on his heel and marched inside the stone home, yelling a greeting to someone inside.
A servant began to drag me off the stage, and I shivered as a particularly icy gust of wind raised the hem of my shift. Alexander’s jaw clenched with irritation before he wrenched his gaze away to a man who sat on horseback beside him.
“First time?” the girl with orange hair asked me as I rejoined the others in the corral.
I nodded, wrapping my thin arms around my torso for warmth.
“It’s my third,” she told me, lifting her chin so that I could look into her dead brown eyes. “I have a good hiding place; do you want to stick with me?”
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