Enamoured

by Darling, Giana

  I stiffened, but Dante spoke before I could intervene, “Satisfied with your little display?”

  Xan shrugged, but he wasn’t looking at his brother. His eyes were on mine, dark and turbulent as a storm over the sea. His fingers caught in the hair over my temple and slid through to the back so he could hold my head as he ran his nose along mine.

  “I was having a moment with my woman after thinking the worst might have happened to her. You didn’t factor into it until you made yourself a factor in it.” His tone was bland, his words cutting.

  I didn’t have to look at Dante to know he was scowling, wincing from the blow.

  “If you’re done,” he retorted, his anger getting the better of him in a way it never would with Xan. “Why don’t we get Cosima off the streets and debrief about what the fuck happened to her.”

  “All right, my beauty?” Xan asked me softly, still touching his face to mine, his affection tactile as a lion, rubbing our jaws together, his nose over my cheek. He wanted his scent on me, and more, he wanted his tenderness on me as certain as his violent passion painted marks against my neck made with his teeth.

  I sighed gustily over his lips and slumped in the bracket of his embrace, knowing I was safe and suddenly unbearably tired. “Yeah, Xan. Let’s go home.”

  Still ignoring Dante, Xan pulled back to put my dress to rights and smooth down my hair before seeing to his own trousers. Before I could step forward, I was up in his arms, held with an arm under my back and another under my knees.

  “Xan! I’m not an invalid,” I protested, smacking his chest. “Stop with this Neanderthal act. You’re an earl for Christ’s sake.”

  His mouth twitched marginally, but he couldn’t hide the thread of amusement in his voice. “I am; therefore, I can do as I wish.”

  “It’s unnecessary,” I hissed lowly as we neared Dante, and he turned on his heel to power ahead of us.

  Alexander’s blasé shrug jostled me. “You’re saying that because you’re embarrassed I shamed Edward for watching us, but think of it this way, little mouse. I let him watch because desire anchors you, and you were both literally and metaphorically lost when we found you. His regard made me feel safe to give in to what your body and your mind needed after the trauma. I knew that, and I gave you what you needed. Dante needed to watch us because he is too curious about you, and that needed to be put to bed. He will never have you. It’s cruel for him to waste a single moment on wishing otherwise, so I made sure he knew it. Lastly, my beauty, I needed to take you like that. Submission makes you feel at peace just as Domination does for me. Losing you for even an instant was unbearable. I needed to take you like that, and now, I need to carry you like this because after what happened, I don’t want to let you out of the circle of my arms let alone out of my sight. Can you give that to me?”

  Immediately and without conscious thought, I said, “Yes, of course.”

  He ducked his head to rub his nose again over mine, a new habit that melted my heart. “Good girl.”

  We reached the car, but Alexander didn’t let me go to slide me into the vehicle. Instead, he sat with me cradled gently in his arms and ignored the look Dante gave him when he didn’t put me in my own seat.

  “Now, tell us what happened,” Xan demanded.

  I took it as a good sign that he said “us,” and I could tell by the slight softening in Dante’s shoulders that he did too.

  I didn’t want to ostracize him again.

  Sucking in a deep breath, I related my rendezvous with Seamus to the Davenport brothers, powering through their grumbling growls and clenched fists to finish my story before they went nuclear.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Dante said immediately upon my conclusion. “Don’t worry about him, tesoro, I’ll find a meaningful way to make your message known to him.”

  “I don’t want you to start a war over this. Please don’t do anything stupid, D.”

  His smile was red as blood smeared between his cheeks. “Don’t worry about it. I can handle my own business, and Seamus just told you, he wants a part of that.”

  “He may not be my biological father, but he’s still the father of my two sisters and the man who had some part in raising me for eighteen years. I don’t want him hurt.” I didn’t think I could face Mama or my sisters after that.

  The thought flared a memory, and I groaned loudly, thunking my head back against Xan’s hard chest. “I forgot, I have Thanksgiving dinner with my family tomorrow.”

  My man went stiff as a chair beneath me.

  “You don’t want me to go,” I accused, cluing into his unspoken uneasiness.

  “I don’t want you to go anywhere ever again without me. At the very least, not while the Order and Noel are still active, even if the latter is slightly incapacitated.”

  I understood. I didn’t want to be away from him for any length of time either. But my family was important to me and over the past few months since my reintroduction into Xan’s world, I’d been remiss at taking care of them the way I normally would.

  I couldn’t miss Thanksgiving.

  “Drop me off and then pick me up when we’re done?” I suggested, tipping my head back to look up at him.

  He was so unbelievably handsome, I hiccoughed over my own breath looking at him like that. Even tired and worried, he was beautiful. I traced my fingers over the smattering of silver at the edge of his golden temples and knew that if he asked it of me, I would leave my family behind for him until it was safe for us to see them again.

  He stared down at me, his intensity a palpable current in the air, but I knew the moment he decided against that course of action because his muscles softened slightly beneath me. His sigh breezed over my face as he shook his head. “What am I going to do with you?”

  I smiled drowsily, exhausted from the day. “Nothing at the moment. I know there is more to talk about, but I need to sleep. Is that okay?”

  “Of course,” he said in a voice like a lullaby as his fingers threaded gently through my hair. “Sleep, my beauty.”

  And I did.

  I slept through the car ride home and through Xan carrying me into the building up to my apartment. I slept when he took off my slinky dress and replaced it with his button-up, and I only woke when I heard a raised voice in the living room.

  I froze immediately, then slunk out of bed and crept to the door to peek out, seeing Dante pacing powerfully back and forth in the kitchen, an agitated panther to Xan’s lounging, regal lion.

  “You aren’t good for her, and you fucking know it,” Dante was saying. “You say you’ve changed, but if you were suddenly the better man you claim, you wouldn’t be here endangering her like this.”

  “I didn’t say I was a good man,” Alexander retorted drily, swirling his whiskey in his glass. “I said I had changed for the better.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “For who?” Xan challenged idly. “For Cosima or for you?”

  There was a percussion beat of silence.

  “For her.”

  “No, not for Cosima. You understand this even if you don’t want to, but Cosima is drawn to the dark. Those things which make me less like a hero and more like a villain, she is entranced by like a moth to a flame. As long as I don’t let her burn up, there is not harm for her in my badness, only lust and passion and connection.”

  “Armchair psychologist now?”

  “I believe that is you, Edward. It’s hard to believe you are the same man with a master’s degree in behavioral psychology from Oxford, isn’t it? Tell me, does that degree help you manipulate your Made Men?”

  Ice and fire.

  Alexander and Dante.

  One wasn’t exactly better than the other, but they were both formidable, both with egregious flaws and defining strengths.

  I was trapped in Alexander’s icy embrace, and I was happy there, but I could understand the allure of the other’s heat, especially as he fought for me.

  Going up against Alexander was no
t for the weak hearted.

  Dante sighed loudly, raking his hands through his thick hair so that it clumped into wavy ropes over his skull. “Tore and I could give that to her in small measures. She was happy enough without you.”

  “We both know that’s not true.”

  I swallowed hard at the quiet pride in Xan’s voice. He had missed me too, and that small thought opened a wealth of treasure in my chest. It felt monumental that he should have missed me all that time just as intolerably as I’d missed him.

  “You know,” he continued conversationally, “I knew you’d convinced her to move to America years ago. I had these vivid dreams about finding you and ripping you apart with my bare hands…the only reason I didn’t was because my sources told me how much she relied on you, how much you had done and continued to do for her.”

  There was another vibrating pause.

  “Considering that and the fact that I now know for certain Salvatore did not murder Mum, I’m still loathe to do so, but I must say…thank you.” I watched Xan tip his glass to his lips and drain the liquid. “Thank you for taking care of her when I couldn’t. For keeping her living as much as you could when I wasn’t there to take care of her.”

  Dante seemed struck dumb by Xan’s words, even more so than I was mouth agape crouching at the door to my bedroom. He was suspended in the amber of his brother’s unusual gratitude, his big body lax but utterly still, his eyes glazed as his mind worked furiously behind them.

  Finally, he reanimated, and he did so to look at Xan from under lowered lids and nod once, firmly, slowly. “I didn’t do it for you, and I would do it again, forever. The thanks, though…it’s appreciated.”

  Alexander nodded once in return, noble in his graciousness.

  I loved him so vividly at that moment that even the colours in the dark seemed brighter than ever before.

  “You love her,” he said, and it was not quite a question, but still, Dante hesitated and then responded.

  “I do. Not exactly the way you worry about. Though I have to say, it’s hard to look at a woman like Cosima and not covet her, let alone know a woman like her so filled with love and light despite her dark past and not want to fight every day to be worthy of some significant part in her life.”

  I fell back to my bottom on the ground, rocked by his words.

  “I told her once,” my husband said softly with a tiny smile tucked into the crease of his left cheek. “For the first time in my life, she made me feel like a hero, instead of a villain. She does that to people, makes them feel ten feet taller.”

  “You love her,” Dante said, the words lined with bitterness. “You don’t deserve her, but seeing as she obviously loves you back, I guess I’ll have to live with it.”

  “I’m not capable of love,” Xan admitted with a one-shouldered shrug as if it didn’t bother him. “But if I was…”

  Dante snorted, the burst of sound breaking the tension between them. He walked forward to join his brother at the island and poured some whiskey into the second empty glass for himself before taking a seat. “Not sure what you know about love, brother, but that energy between you and your wife? That’s about the definition of it.”

  They were both quiet, looking down at their glasses before Xan’s face cracked at the edges with condescending mirth. “Dante, the armchair phycologist.”

  I watched in awe and humbleness as the two great men laughed softly, gruffly together at my kitchen table. What I had witnessed wasn’t just a beautiful conversation about two men loving me, but a détente between brothers who never should have been at war in the first place.

  And that made me smile as I picked myself off the floor and went back to bed.

  Cosima

  The auction was held on Christmas Eve—of all places—at a bridal warehouse owned by one of the Order members out on the farthest edge of Queens. The middle of the space had been cleared, but the elegantly clad gentlemen sipping glasses filled with hundreds of dollars’ worth of scotch and champagne were hedged in on all sides by rows of virginal white garments that signified a woman’s hope, love, and happiness.

  The contrast was not lost on me. In fact, I couldn’t swallow the bile as quickly as it rose in my throat, and I had to duck between a chiffon gown and a classy silk sheath to purge my belly of acid before I could continue through the rows to the main event.

  There were half a dozen platforms in the middle of the room, placed in front of a wall of mirrors so that the slaves for sale could be demonstrated from all angles to the gentlemen’s best advantage.

  The auction hadn’t commenced yet, but I could see Sherwood, who had come all the way from England, speaking with an elderly man too old to walk unassisted let alone fuck a poor slave, beside a podium placed in the center of it all. Simon and Agatha had found out that Sherwood, still the head of the council, had come to perform a ceremony to transfer power from the American head of the organization—most likely the decrepit man he now spoke to—to his successor.

  I was happy about this, if you can call the feeling of dark pleasure curling through my gut happiness. I hadn’t confronted Sherwood yet on my crusade to right the wrongs done to me by the Order, and I wanted that chance before we snuffed them out for good. I wasn’t exactly sure when the moment had happened, the switch had flipped, and I’d gone from suffering victim of my circumstances to righteous avenger. However, it had happened I was grateful for it. There was still a balance to maintain. I didn’t want revenge to make me manic and cruel or victimization to make me weak and bitter, but it was an easier line to find now that I knew both could be had. Living four years in the perpetual gloom of my past, fighting tooth and nail to live an ordinary life under that strain had been no life at all.

  Now, standing amid men who had always been predators, knowing that they were currently lambs awaiting slaughter, I felt oddly filled with peace.

  The end was near.

  Alexander hadn’t wanted me to go at first. There was no real need for me to be there when Xan would be the one bugged with audio/visual to document the entire exchange.

  But one look at the resolve hardening my expression like some grotesque Venetian mask had changed his mind immediately. If anyone knew the power of vengeance, it was my husband.

  There were women allowed in the American chapter of the Order of Dionysus, but only a few milled about the warehouse, dressed to impress, haughtier than the men as if it proved their worthiness to be there. In the culture of the Order, I suppose it did.

  They made it easy to fade into the background. I was outfitted in a black leather dress that parted down the front with a single zipper that started at a deep dip between my breasts and over the knee leather boots so that the only visible skin I showed was a square of tanned flesh on my upper thighs. I caught looks from some of the men, but they were wary, assuming from my Dominatrix-style outfit that I wasn’t exactly to their tastes.

  I wandered to the back hallway that led to the room where the slaves were kept and beautified for auction. Apparently, most of the Masters found their slaves this way and had since the slave auctions in England during the 1800s before slavery was—ostensibly, at least—abolished.

  No one paid much mind to me as I snuck a peek, and I noticed some other Masters lingering amid the girls to take a brief preview of their offerings. I searched for one woman, in particular.

  Yana was seated before a small mirror, her pale hair done up in curls and secured with a silly pink bow, her naked body brushed with pink sparkles in an obvious bid to make her look younger than her decades made her. She caught my eye in the reflection and blinked hard before fiddling with the collar at her throat. Something metallic caught the light and winked at me.

  Good.

  Yana was wearing the audio/visual device we had given her.

  Unlike the ones I’d planted in Ashcroft’s house—ones that Alexander had collected to add to his wealth of incriminating evidence against the Order—the one on Yana’s collar ran live directly to monitors set
up in vans waiting two blocks away from the warehouse.

  When they had enough information from Yana’s and Xan’s feeds, they would storm the warehouse and put an end to the New York chapter of the Order of Dionysus.

  A team in London and another in Hong Kong were about to do the same.

  It made it easy to take them down in one fell swoop when they planned their auctions all on the same day.

  I’d just turned on my heel to head back to the main event when strong hands plucked at me from another dark corridor, and I went careening backward into a strong, tall body. I knew by the lemon and green pepper scent of him, who it was immediately and relaxed slightly in his hold.

  Dante’s breath was hot against my neck, one of his big hands eclipsing my entire hip so that I felt bracketed by his body, smothered by the intoxicating heat of his hard chest at my back.

  “If I asked you to run away from it all right now, would you?”

  I swallowed hard, trying to hold my breath so I wouldn’t breathe in his peppery fragrance and the scent of his warm skin. “Why are you asking me that?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It does if you’re asking me to run away with you because you love me or because you just don’t want your brother to have me.”

  A pause, a mushroom cloud of toxicity after an explosion.

  His lips pressed to the tender hollow below my ear, and he whispered, “What if it’s both?”

  “You know I’m broken. He ruined me for other men, and he ruined me for myself. I’m not… There’s a piece of me missing now, and he wears it like a necklace against his heart. He’s never giving that back.”

  “No,” Dante agreed. “He’s not, and even if he could, you wouldn’t ask for it.”

  I wanted to protest, but I’d been fighting the truth for so many long, cold years. We both knew he was right.

  “I don’t love you the way my brother does, tesoro,” he said, shifting slightly in our confined space, brushing his groin against me in a way that had my breath catching. “He is consumed by you. His dark heart sees the temptations of your beauty and your goodness, and he wants to gorge himself on them. He wants to keep you in his orbit tied so close to him that your sun will only shine for him. It’s a selfish and overwhelming love.”