“Gentlemen,” Sherwood boomed. “Welcome to the 76th annual Hunt!”
There was a cacophony of shouts and hollers before a servant in red on horseback raised a horn to his lips and blew.
The trumpet echoed through the small clearing and stirred the dark trees at the edge of the forest.
“What happens now?” I asked the ginger-haired girl.
“Run.”
The doors to the corral were thrust open, and a stampede of terrified women flooded out, nearly pushing me to the ground in their haste. I heard the muffled cry of someone fall behind me and then the crack of breaking bone, but I didn’t turn around.
I ran.
Away from the barking hounds and agitated horses. Away from the predatory men who would spend the entire night chasing us down, one by one.
I ran and a small part of my brain wondered if I could run fast enough and long enough, then maybe I could run away from it all forever.
It was dark as tar and just as sticky, tendrils of night black low-hanging branches from trees ripped across my arms and face. I tasted blood on my lips, the metallic heat of bile at the back of my tongue as my lungs labored like overworked billows to keep my arms pumping and my legs churning. Running. My mind would waste my body away to nothing just to keep on running.
The lord had finally let me out of the manor, but my liberation was a trap I should have known better to have taken.
Why does any master let the fox out of its cage?
To hunt it down…
And I was being hunted, ruthlessly and ceaselessly through the late hours of the night by more than just my Master. I’d already dodged one man’s hands as he’d ridden close by on his horse and kicked another in the teeth so hard I felt them break under my toes.
I’d been running through the dense cover of frost-coated pines for hours. My feet were ripped to bloody shreds by roots and rocks, so bloody and slimy from brackish puddles that I fell more often than I could afford to, cutting up my hands and my face.
Acid burned through my tired muscles, pulsing in time with my cantering heart until I felt I would burst apart at the seams any minute and die.
Still, I didn’t stop.
I’d seen four girls taken by riders in the mist, heard their blood-curdling screams as they were raped against trees, taken in the mud, or flung like carcases over the saddle.
I didn’t want to be them.
In a way, I was lucky because Alexander had been teaching me self-defence and given me free rein to use the gym, which I did nearly every day. My previously thin body ripe with soft curves now had lean lines of muscle running through it, muscles I was using to race and dodge through the thicket of trees as agilely as the fox I was named after.
The howl of hounds pierced the thick night air to my left. I went careening in the opposite direction, my feet tramping loudly over debris, my breath like gunshots in the silence as I burst into a small clearing.
“There you fucking are,” a man crowed from the inky dark immediately in front and to the right of me.
I spun in the opposite direction and cried out as two strong arms banded around my hips. The man lifted me into the air as I kicked and screamed, my fingernails scratching at his arms until they bled.
“There you fucking well are,” the first man crowed in delight as he appeared in front of me, highlighted silver in the moonlight.
It was Ashcroft, the same man who’d used my mouth in Pearl Hall.
My scream doubled over, exploding through my lungs like a train speeding off the rails.
“Shut your fucking mouth,” the man holding me ordered as he fell into me, pushing us both to the ground.
I choked on the mulch, the earthy soil filling my mouth as I sucked in another lungful of air to scream.
The stranger wrapped his arms and legs around mine and flipped over like a beetle so that I was strapped down on top of him.
“Take her already,” he jeered in my ear as Ashcroft undid his trousers.
“Should’ve shagged you when I had the chance.”
“You take me, Alexander will find you and murder you!” I screamed.
God, was there ever any end to this madness? Was I to be ordered around, assaulted, and manipulated until my dying breath?
Ashcroft bent over to ruck up my muddy shift, and I spat in his eye.
“You fucking little bitch,” he roared, going to one knee and roughly pulling out his cock.
There was a flash of movement in the dark behind him and then a bass thud. Ashcroft trembled slightly and then fell to the side, out cold.
“What the—” the man grunted as two hands reached out of the dark and wrapped tight around his neck.
I could feel the fight go out of him, his limbs loosening around mine until they fell off. Adrenaline flooded through me, and I shot to my feet before the other man could grab me.
“Cosima,” a steady voice said into the wind.
The sound of my name warmed me like a velvet cloak.
I paused, tense and ready to spring forth.
“Cosima, settle, tesoro, I just want a word with you.”
I recognized the skipping lilt of his muddled accent, the crisp cut of an upper crust English accent made lyrical by the sounds of my homeland.
“Edward.”
There was a pause, then the soft, sucking tread of boots through the muck. I spun to face him with my hands raised and my legs bent, the muscles shaking with exhaustion.
His hard-cut face, so like Alexander’s but darker and carved a tad more crudely, went soft as he looked at me.
“You look knackered.”
I realized my breath was coming too fast, wheezing in and out of lungs like a billow. “What do you care?”
“I care very much.” He raised his hands out to the sides, palms up in surrender. “You don’t know me, but I care very much indeed.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said wildly, my eyes searching for an exit as he moved closer. “Stay away, Edward!”
“Pace, Cosima,” he murmured. “And please, I don’t go by that name anymore. I haven’t in a long while, and if I had it my way, I wouldn’t again during my lifetime. My name is Dante.”
My laughed burned through my ravaged throat. “Which circle of Hell is this, then?”
“The very worst,” he agreed, pausing just out of arm’s reach. “I’m so sorry you have to go through this. Your father is sorry too.”
I blinked.
“If he could see you now,” he murmured as his eyes tracked every cut, scrap and bruise painted and punched into my body. “He would cry. And Salvatore is not a man prone to tears.”
“Who the fuck are you? What are you trying to do?”
“I’m trying to tell you that I am a friend. I’m sorry this had to happen to you, but—”
“None of this had to happen,” I shouted, spittle flying through the air.
I felt rabid, a dog too long without food in a place too cold to bear it.
“None of this had to happen,” I sobbed angrily, dashing at the blood, tears, and mud on my face. “If you are a friend of Salvatore as you say, tell my papa puttaniere to go fuck himself! None of this had to happen, and none of it would have happened if he’d stepped up once in all my life.”
There was a rustle in the bushes, and the heavy rush of breath through the nose of a beast. Seconds later, a horse burst out of the trees into the clearing.
“Minchia,” Edward Dante swore, swivelling to the face the man. “Fucking run, Cosima.”
I turned and ran, the sounds of hooves beating into the ground behind me like the drum of a funeral song.
There was a shout, and a huge splash behind me.
I took a moment to look over my shoulder and see Dante straddling the hunter in the shallows of a stream, beating his huge hand again and again into the dethroned rider’s face. The horse stomped and whinnied restlessly, pawing at the air.
“Cosima, run!” Dante yelled as another rider appeared in the clearing.
I faced forward again and raced as fast as my legs could take me back into the densely woven trees.
The second rider wasn’t deterred; he took the horse leaping over fallen logs, swerving around tight corners until I could feel the breath of the beast at my back and the vibration of its steps on the forest floor.
I was so tired, and I was going to lose.
Hands twisted in the back of my hair, then wrenched so hard, I flew into the air and went sailing over the pummel of the saddle.
A slap rained down against my rump as the rider howled into the night. “Right where you belong again.”
I shivered at the sound of Landon’s voice and wriggled enough to roll over, landing a kick to his shoulder that had the reins falling from his hands. The horse bucked slightly and sent us both falling hard to the root gnarled earth below.
The breath left my body as my head hit the base of a tree and pain exploded in white shards across my vision.
A hand grabbed my ankle and dragged me across the mud. I flipped onto my belly, scrambling with my hands to find purchase in the soft soil.
And I screamed.
I screamed and screamed like a symphony of terrors as Landon used his hand to pull me under him and rip my dress straight down the middle of my spine. He hissed with pleasure at the sight of his pink whip marks on my skin. I struggled, bucking and twisting against him as he took each mark between his teeth and bit down, tasting the symbols of pain he’d branded me with.
A stick was in my reach, the sharp, the pale end of it gleaming dimly in the mist-shrouded, moonlight murk. With an almighty shove, I reached forward enough to grasp it in my hand and then twisted my torso with a warrior’s shout.
Then I slammed the branch into the nearest bit of flesh I could find.
It impaled Landon in the cheek.
He roared as he reeled off me and onto his knees, his hands clambering at the blood wet stem, desperate to remove it.
A high-pitched screech rent the air in two, and with a great flurry of black wings, a bird descended from the sky and reached his dagger-like talon for Landon’s prone face.
I scrambled backward as Landon shouted in agony and tried to bat the falcon away. Frantically, I tried to look for a way to get around him easily and back into the night woods.
Only, there was a shifting of the darkness in the trees behind Landon, a parting of night as if Hades himself was breaching the veil from the underworld.
And then there was Alexander, walking calmly, silent as a spirit across the leaf laden turf.
There was a glint of something in his hand, something red flashed in his hand, silver at the bottom.
A ruby hilted knife.
I gasped, but Landon didn’t hear me as the bird of prey finally unlatched with a sickening wet slide and took off into the night again. Free from his tormentor, Landon finally pried the stick out of his cheek with a moist pop and spat bloody saliva on the ground.
“You little whore, I am going to hurt you until you sing like a fucking bird,” he promised me.
Alexander dropped to his knees behind him, so much taller that he loomed over the other man even like that. The knife went to his throat smoothly, his other hand hard in Landon’s hair as he tugged his scalp back and jutted his neck into the blade.
“I am the only one that hurts her,” Alexander stated as his falcon let out an almighty screech of primal victory from somewhere above us.
And then he slit his throat.
I watched like a camera lens devoid of bias as blood, black in the darkness, spilled like a silken shroud over Landon’s front. He twitched as Alexander held him, and then moments later, his eyes rolled up then closed, and he was dead.
Alexander stood, hefted the body in his arms, and walked some ways away into the black until I heard a heavy splash that had to have been Landon’s body sinking in the stream. My ears strained for the sounds of his boots in the mud, and I felt such an immense sense of relief when he returned, I almost dissolved into sobs. I looked at my muddy, torn up knees, my naked torso riddled with scratches, and tried to compose myself.
“Look at me, Cosima,” he ordered in that hushed, Dominant voice I couldn’t disobey.
I shiver wracked through me because I hadn’t listened to those delicious, dulcet tones in weeks.
His eyes glowed brighter than the moonlit fragments filtering through the trees. I swallowed thickly at the way they owned me, the way he owned me even with one look, even five feet away.
“You’re okay,” he told me. “Hush, bella, I’m with you.”
I realized I had been making a keening sound like a lost kitten and the moment he told me to hush, I stopped.
“You shouldn’t have killed him,” I said hoarsely. “You’ll get in trouble again.”
And then what would I do?
What would I do if I had to go to a new, crueler Master?
What would I do without him?
The moon disappeared behind a cloud, and Alexander’s eyes went dark.
“People die in The Hunt each year. We don’t even look for the ones who don’t return. We just cover up their deaths as if nothing’s amiss. No one is taking you from me.”
“Grazie a Dio,” I whispered, thanking God.
I wanted to ask him to hold me because I was cold, and hurt, and defenceless, in need of comfort. But also, because he hadn’t touched me in so long that I wore my ache for his touch like weights between my legs.
I couldn’t put that into words. I didn’t want to and given my current mental state, I couldn’t even try.
But I reached a hand out into the blackness and I felt Alexander lean in to it from where he kneeled.
His stubble roughened jaw fit into my palm like a puzzle piece and something deep within me that only he could reach, clicked on.
I lunged for his mouth, my lips hitting his awkwardly, mostly on his chin, my tongue in the slight cleft there.
He held still, surprised.
I dragged myself forward with my hands at his neck and wrapped myself around him, moving my mouth to the strong pulse in his neck because it steadied me.
“Safe,” I whispered to myself to soothe the wild terror still gnawing at the back of my mind.
“Safe,” he echoed, his strong arms finally going around me in a tight cinch.
It was strange magic, a hug, especially a hug from that man.
It settled the demons at war inside me, sung them a lullaby and put them to bed. So when Alexander finally stroked his hand over my head and tangled it into the back of my hair to angle my face for his kiss, I was ready for it.
His plush mouth ate at mine as if we had all the time in the world, nibbling my lips with his teeth, rubbing his sinuous tongue against mine, and breathing his sweet mint breath against my cheek.
He seduced me with that kiss into trusting him and needing him. A low fire stoked in my center and flooded my chilled body with delicious heat.
“You’re mine,” he said against my lips, nipping them between his words until they felt tender as bruised petals. “You’re mine to protect and comfort just as much as you are mine to play with and use. Say it, Cosima.”
“I’m yours, Master,” I whispered into his open mouth, planting my words like a decadent chocolate to melt on his tongue.
He savoured it, licking his lips as his eyes darkened. “Good, little mouse. Now, I won this pussy fair and square. Lie back and show me my prize.”
Then the hand in my hair pulled tighter, manipulating my desire like a puppeteer with string. My need flared higher, and I whimpered into his mouth as his kiss turned cruel.
He pushed me down into the mud, but he didn’t have to, my legs were already spread, the cold winter air biting into the honeyed folds of my sex. I wanted him to see me, to watch his eyes burn as his fingers trailed in the wetness, smearing my arousal across my entire pussy and inner thighs like some heathen worshipper.
My mouth watered as he shoved his riding pants down enough to free his thick co
ck and then as he fisted it roughly in his big hand. His face was savage in the dark and with desire as he planted a hand near my face and used the other to notch his dick at my entrance.
“You can scream all you’d like, bella, no one will come to your rescue,” he promised, and then he plunged straight to the end of my cunt.
I screamed, but this time it braided the edges of my torn lungs smooth and felt like honey coating my throat.
I screamed as he rutted into me in the middle of a wintry Scottish night, our combined heat melting the frost on the pine needles overhead so that they dripped over our bodies like a cleansing rain.
I screamed as he bent his head to take my nipples in his teeth, the pain cracking like a nut between his molars into divine pleasure, and I screamed even harder as he used the hand at my sex to slide another finger into my cunt beside his cock, and I became stuffed, deliciously overfull.
I did not scream as I came like a flood over his dick and thighs, as everything inside me that was not beautiful and pure expunged from me in exodus.
Instead, I breathed his name on a sigh and let terrorized mind find comfort in his discipline over my body.
Dimly, I was aware of the hot splash of his cum inside me as he climaxed, holding me close and tight so that I could feel the sharp tension of his arousal jerk then fall lax with satisfaction.
And then, I think, I passed out.
When I opened my eyes again, it was because Alexander was lifting me atop his horse. I blinked slowly when he didn’t mount it himself, instead turning to walk into the near distance.
I blinked again when I saw something hanging there from a tree.
It was the orange flash that caught my eye and pulled my submerged mind into the clear.
I recognized the colour of that hair from the corral, from the poor girl who had offered to share her hiding place with me.
She hung from a tree by the torn and knotted together length of her shift dress, her milk white body glazed in moonlight and speckled with mud as it swung in the cold wind.
There was blood blackening the inside of her thighs, and I had no doubt she’d been used and thrown aside for the third time in as many Hunts.
Enthralled Page 20
