Enamoured

by Darling, Giana

  There was no doubt in my mind that Noel had dragged me back to this place to remake the hell of my initiation into the games of the Order. I knew cameras were placed throughout the ballroom, trained on me twenty-four hours of the day, watching me for any weakness they could possibly exploit.

  They.

  It seemed the spare had taken over as Noel’s heir and was being probably groomed to take his place as Satan’s living incarnate.

  As if conjured by my thoughts like the devil himself, the door opened with an insidious hiss over the polished marble floors and the clack of expensive shoes echoed throughout the cavernous hall.

  I didn’t raise my head when the two pairs of shoes came to a standstill just inside my view. They were polished black leather loafers, the same style, but one pair smaller than the other.

  Twin horrors.

  Before I could even blink, one shoe lifted backward and then slammed into my stomach.

  Pain erupted like an overripe fruit bursting in my middle, and I choked on my scream as I curled further into myself.

  “She’s not so pretty anymore, is she, Father?” Rodger asked as he lifted his foot again and aimed it at my chest.

  “Settle, boy, we don’t want her to lose consciousness before she understands just what is happening here, do we?”

  “No, Father,” he agreed with quiet, sinister delight.

  He couldn’t wait for what was to come.

  He was only a boy, barely on the cusp of manhood, yet the joy that should have been reserved for Christmas or his first co-ed dance was displaced. I had no doubt he would take more pleasure in whipping me than he ever would from what Santa might bring.

  It hurt my heart to realize that you were never too young to be a bad human.

  Noel stepped forward into a crouch the very same way Alexander had the first time he’d visited me in the ballroom nearly five years ago. I watched him pinch his slacks to accommodate the muscles in his thighs, the way he flicked a piece of lint off the flannel and onto my leg. He had a broad, handsome face with a strong square jaw and thick hair he’d given to all three of his sons.

  His was not a face of evil. He was handsome, charm etched into the lines beside his eyes that hinted at a life filled with smiles.

  It was all such an elaborate lie.

  I knew he must have studied the tapes of my time being broken in the ballroom, and this re-enactment was all part of his master plan.

  And at every stage of that plan, he’d intended to administer the maximum amount of pain on Alexander and on me.

  I collected the thick, metallic bile on my tongue and raised my head enough to look him squarely in the eye while I spat into his face.

  The wet clot landed on his cheek and slid slowly to the crease of his mouth. I watched with acid in my gut as he merely parted his lips and licked the sludge away with his tongue.

  A second later, he had lunged forward, his hands locked in my hair and twisted at such painful angles, I cried out helplessly in pain.

  “Disrespect me again and I’ll let Rodger skin you alive and then nurse you back to health only to do it all. Over. Again.”

  I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t look away, but he read my capitulation at the backs of my eyes.

  “Now, I want to welcome you to your new home. At the moment, it consists of these four walls. This ballroom is all you will know until you earn the right to more.” A wide, toothy smile crossed his face as he recited the same lines Alexander had. His hands wrenched harder in my hair like a sticky light switch flipping on my stream of tears. He licked one and then bit into my cheek before pulling back to finish his speech. “You know, Ruthie, how to earn the right for more because this is a game you’ve played before. Only this time, I will break you, and in the end, the only thing you will know is the sound of the word Master on your lips as you beg me to let you tend to my needs.”

  “You can keep me chained in her until the day I die, and I will never call you by that epitaph,” I vowed.

  “Well then,” he said with a vague smile as his hands slid out of my hair and he patted my cheek, once more the docile older gentleman. “Maybe the day you die is closer at hand than you thought.”

  Noel straightened and turned on his heel to walk back across the expanse of the room. Rodger stayed, his foot tapping out an erratic rhythm as he looked lustily down at me. Then he too crouched in the manner of his brother and father, so close I could smell the sweet cotton candy scent of his breath on my face. It was a deeply disturbing reminder of his youth contrasted to the ancient evil that had been passed down from his Davenport ancestors and transplanted in his eyes.

  “If you fail,” he told me eagerly, his big eyes grey and unfeeling as concrete burying me alive. “He said I get to kill you myself and bury you in the maze with the others.”

  He stood quickly, made to run after his father, and then quickly delivered a hard, swift kick to my exposed face that caught me right in the mouth. My lip split open like an overripe fruit, weeping so much blood I thought for a moment he had dislodged my tooth. I didn’t cry out with the pain, but my body contracted tighter as if taking up less space might minimize the hurt.

  Rodger laughed as he looked down at me. I tried to evade his foot as it went for my face again, but I was caught up in the chains and dazed from the first blow. He planted his loafer on my face and ground it into my wet, broken mouth with another little chuckle of glee before he finally turned away.

  I licked at the blood as it trickled out of my mouth onto the black marble tile and watched as his bloody foot squicked against the floor on his way out the door.

  With a groan to release the tension of pain in my body, I rolled to my back and stared up at the mural of Hades bursting through the crust of the earth in his black chariot led by undead horses to spirit away the beautiful spring goddess Persephone.

  I tried to breathe through the pain in my gut and jaw as I sought solace in my favourite myth. Many scholars believed that Hades had abducted Persephone against her will and that of her mother, and that, if any deals had indeed been struck, it was between Hades and Persephone’s estranged father, Zeus.

  Why wouldn’t Zeus believe Hades was an excellent choice of husband? He was the ruler of one of the three kingdoms, the eldest child of Rhea and Cronus, and a war hero.

  How was he to know what happened in the shadowy moors of the Underworld, where demons roamed and the undead toiled away their eternities?

  No matter how the abduction happened, I chose to believe the unpopular view that Persephone had been stolen away against her will, but it was she who had decided to eat the pomegranate seeds to ensure she would have to return to the Underworld for six months of the year. After years of manipulation, she had taken her own destiny into her hands and decided to have the best of both worlds in order to satisfy the duality in her soul.

  Of course, the whole thing was a creation myth to explain away the seasons, but it was also an allegory for my life in a way I never would have thought it could be.

  Salvatore had manipulated me into being sold into slavery.

  Alexander had wrenched me from my world as I knew it into the dark domain he’d been forced to reign in since birth.

  Yet I didn’t blame either of them for their actions.

  They were only trying to survive the lot life had given them.

  And in the end, their actions had led me to a wealth of opportunities I might not otherwise have known.

  I found the love of a good father, one with the defective morals of a Made Man, but with a wealth of loyalty and love for his family.

  I’d discovered how utterly devastating true love could be, how it razed your soul to the ground and from the ashes, you were reborn as a new version of yourself, one with a heart made up from pieces of someone else.

  Mostly, I’d learned to be the kind of woman I could be proud of; totally resilient, completely unafraid in the face of her enemies, and wholly willing to offer her heart despite the scars accumulated on it.


  Tears pooled at the corners of my eyes, blurring my view of the vibrant ceiling painting. I closed my eyes as the wet raced down my cheeks. I didn’t need to look at the mural to see it in my mind. It had brought me peace the first time I’d been prisoner here, and it brought me a measure of consolation now.

  A sob bubbled up my throat, wet and full of muck.

  I released it into the air and curled onto my side in the fetal position as I finally allowed myself to release the truth.

  The explosion that had rocked Osteria Lombardi had most definitely killed some of my loved ones. There was no way everyone could have survived unscathed.

  I thought of Sebastian and Mama, of Giselle and Sinclair newly married and so in love, of Elena so bitter and so in need of a new start.

  They couldn’t be dead.

  Not my family.

  Not Dante with his roguish grin and tender smile crafted just for me.

  Not Salvatore so soon after I’d found him and began to love him.

  It couldn’t be possible, yet I knew in my bones it was.

  I could contemplate the death of my family, though each thought scored through me like acid poured over a knife wound, but I could not bring myself to acknowledge the last possibility.

  The one that proclaimed Alexander Davenport as dead.

  It just couldn’t be possible.

  How did someone kill a man like him?

  He was taller and stronger than anyone else, padded with dense muscle like a suit of armor worn beneath his skin. A bomb couldn’t take that down.

  Could it?

  But he was smarter than everyone else too. His predatory talents would have clued him into the wrongness in the air; the feel of the room suddenly without me and the faint, ominous pressure in the atmosphere like the sky before a storm. He would have gone searching for me, maybe even roping Sebastian or Dante into it. They could have all been outside when the bomb went off.

  It was possible.

  I realized too late that I was hyperventilating. The air seized in my lungs and turned too quickly to carbon dioxide. I couldn’t get enough oxygen, and then I couldn’t remember how to move my chest to get air into the chambers.

  My vision swam as I looked blindly up at Hades, silently, insanely pleading with him to burst through the floor of the ballroom and save me from this hell so he could drag me to his own.

  It was my last thought before my body gave up, and I passed out.

  Cosima

  Time passed. I knew it only by the faint intrinsic sense my body had of the sun rising and falling outside the closed brocade drapes over the windows in the ballroom. They fed me at odd hours and visited at random intervals to ask for my submission, sometimes days apart and other times repeated every hour on the hour.

  Noel didn’t just starve me, keeping me alive—barely—on stale bread, moulding cheese, and tepid water. He employed tactics as if we were playing war games.

  Bright spotlights were set up in a circle around the diameter of my chain length, and they pulsed with blinding light on timers so that I was only ever guaranteed a handful of hours asleep.

  The room was glacial cold. It was late spring in Britain, and it shouldn’t have been so arctic across the peaks and valley of the district, but somehow, the ballroom became a refrigerator, and I the bone-chilled meat.

  I was beyond misery, but I didn’t break because Noel didn’t understand one basic principle.

  If my family was dead—as by then I had convinced myself they were, especially because no one had come to break me free—I had nothing left to live for.

  I knew that Noel’s patience would run out and Rodger’s excitement would kick in. That my days were numbered as long as I continued my quiet, painful rebellion.

  But I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my pride and my poise by consenting to be the slave of the most sadistic man in England.

  I refused to desecrate the plethora of golden memories I had of Alexander as my Master by calling any other man, let alone the man who took him from me, the same title.

  It was blasphemy.

  Sacrilegious.

  I didn’t care if that meant my religion was chains and whips, Dominance and submission, consent and rebellion.

  I had prayed too long at Alexander’s altar to be ashamed now.

  It was those memories of him that buoyed me in the dark, turbulent hours of solitary confinement in that frozen cage.

  When Rodger grew tired of my apathy and his adolescent fists landed adult blows on my prone body, I thought of Alexander gently washing my hair, running the strands like ink through his fingers.

  When Noel tried to degrade me by taking away my toilet bucket and then again when he spent his seed on my face while Rodger held me down to remind me that I was already his, I thought of all the ways Alexander had made me his from the inside out. How he had stamped my ass with his brand, my mind with his language of power, and my heart with the duality of his actions and intent.

  I reminded myself, chanting for hours every day that I was his, his, his.

  Not theirs.

  Maybe not even my own.

  Being his provided me with a mental shield I was desperate to hide behind. I couldn’t be responsible for my actions because Alexander was, and if he couldn’t be there, then mentally, neither was I.

  I knew the moment the double doors banged open one day that Noel’s patience was at an end. The air gathered around him, sucked to the magnetic force of his fury as he prowled across the marble to my side where I lay curled on the ground with my chains looped over my arms for something to cuddle in cold comfort.

  I peered up into the shadows of his face, his frame entirely backlit by the oppressive light of the spotlights encircling us. He’d never looked more sinister or more apt.

  “You will get up,” he promised darkly.

  My mouth was too dry to part with words, so I answered with my stillness and my silence.

  “You will get up, Ruthie, because I know your hamartia is your good little heart. You can’t stand to see people suffer, can you?”

  My throat clenched and rubbed like sandpaper as I swallowed hard.

  “No, you can’t,” he agreed with arrogant satisfaction. “So, you will get up because if you don’t…” His sly, smug contempt plumed in the air between us as thick as cigar smoke. “I’ll kill the servants one by one.”

  My eyes widened before I could school my expression.

  He couldn’t be serious.

  Only I knew well enough by then to understand the extent Noel would go to in order to get his way. He was a psychopath who had murdered countless women in cold blood, including his wife and the mother of his children.

  Of course, he would kill the servants. They were nothing more to him than automated responses to his basic needs.

  He would probably take pleasure in killing them.

  The urge to cry waterlogged my heart and set my pulse to a heavy, drowning beat.

  I refused to give into the impulse.

  If I was going to capitulate, I’d do it strong until the end.

  Alexander had taught me that.

  My body ached as I maneuvered myself onto my feet, legs wobbling as they attempted to hold my weight for the first time in days. Noel reached out to slap at my breast so hard, I hissed.

  “Your skin is blue. Bathe and dress in the clothes I’ve left with you, then go below stairs to help the servants prepare dinner. I want you serving me everything with your bare hands,” he instructed with dark amusement before lifting one of my hands and sucking a finger into his mouth. “I want each course seasoned with the taste of your flesh.”

  “You disgust me,” I told him.

  I was on the floor the next instant, my cheek blasted with pain so bright it rendered me momentarily blind. Before I could recover, Noel’s hand was on my chin in a punishing grip I knew would leave a bruise as dark as blackberry juice.

  “Talk back to me again, Ruthie,” he warned almost idly, a direct contrast to his
words and his grasp. “And I’ll make sure no one ever calls you beautiful again. Understood?”

  I nodded, rebellion so hot on my tongue it burned.

  Impossibly, his hold on my face cinched tighter. “Answer properly.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said with the utmost respect so that he wouldn’t hit me again for saying sir when he would have liked Master.

  He made a short noise of approval in his throat and then released me with a light push so that I went falling back onto the floor. “Go to your old room. Mrs. White is waiting for you there.”

  My throat seized up as I thought about the woman who had taken part in every single step of my torture at the hands of Noel. Anger doused my brittle body, and I went up in flames.

  By the time I made my slow, painful way down the corridor to my old room, my skin was burning with the fire in my blood.

  Mrs. White was waiting in the same black dress and white apron she had always worn, her curls tucked up in a habitual bun. She was older, but her face retained a girlish plumpness that made her seem younger than she was.

  Why was it the worst people I knew wore the most beautiful masks?

  It made it nearly impossible to see past my instinctual love of their beauty to the demons lurking beneath.

  “Good afternoon, dearie,” she greeted me with a genuine if tremulous smile. “It’s so good to see you alive and well again.”

  “Well?” I asked, the air hissing from my body like steam from an overworked engine. “You think this is well?”

  She bit her lip and tittered nervously. “No, perhaps not well, but alive then. I wasn’t so sure after what happened in New York.”

  “As if you didn’t know what he had planned,” I accused as I stalked toward her. She took one step back for every two I progressed until she was backed against the windows, and I was pressed deeply into her soft body. “You knew back then what would become of me, and when that didn’t work out, you still tried to see me killed.”

  She swallowed thickly, her breath hot and smelling of peaches against my face. Irrationally, the fact that she had recently indulged in sweet ripe fruit made me even angrier.

  I hadn’t tasted something fresh for days, and this horrible bitch was gorging herself on fruit in Alexander’s fucking kitchen.