My heart kicked and throbbed in my chest, wailing with fresh, incessant terror, terror I’d known from the moment Cosima disappeared into the back of Osteria Lombardi never to reappear. I hadn’t felt any of my own fear when I went to find her and discovered the crude, homemade bomb on the basin instead of my wife. I’d been driven forward by the cold wind of purpose, collecting everyone as I pushed out the doors, calling to Dante to do the same.
Everyone made it out, except for two souls who’d been in the back alley when the explosion went off and caught the debris in their bodies.
I hadn’t felt fear then, nor elation, not for myself or the others who had survived.
I’d only felt the huge, palpitating terror that came from knowing someone had my wife.
It took less than twelve hours to discern Noel had been the one behind the crime, that he had sent Rodger in on the private Davenport plane to retrieve my wife and ferry her away to her own personal hell.
We couldn’t go to her right away.
Not without a plan.
It seemed Noel had used the last of his personal money to hire a team of thugs and trained professionals to seal the grounds. There were so many of them, they looked like ants crawling over the fortified walls of the property from the drone’s video feed.
The police told us to stay in town while they attempted to figure out the crime, and I didn’t waste time. I called in Salvatore and Dante’s crew, I called in Simon’s anti-Order bandits and hired my own security team.
We planned, and we plotted. I saw Dante off back to jail because they briefly wondered if he had been behind the bombing. I kept mum on the truth of the event because I didn’t want the police mucking it up.
And then, thirteen long days after Cosima was taken, I finally boarded a plane with my crew and my plan and set off to get my wife.
Only, after taking out the thugs and scaling the walls, after telephoning in a delayed call to the local police and to the MI-5 unit I’d been working with, Cosima wasn’t there.
And Mrs. White was dead on the floor of the dining room.
Fuck.
I jogged out the other end of the hall and nearly stumbled over Douglas who lay passed out against the wall, a bleeding, but non-threatening wound rounding his forehead. My heart jumped into my throat as I checked his pulse, and Riddick moved after me down the hall. There was blood all over the Persian rug near the termination of the endless corridor, the wet, metallic smell of it still rich in the air.
I swallowed the urge to vomit, the insatiable need to know if it was Cosima’s blood I carefully avoided as I walked by, and pulled the remains of my habitual arctic calm around me like fucking armor.
I would not give in to emotions until I had my wife safe in my arms and our enemies dead at her feet like an offering to a God.
We arrived at the end of the hall, and Riddick pushed open the door to listen briefly to the night air before we continued our search of the upper levels.
Just as the wood swung closed, we heard it, faint as a ghostly moan on the winds of the moors.
Ruthie.
Riddick and I exploded into a sprint simultaneously, guns warm in our ready hands as we took off to the left of the house and plunged into the darkness, predators to the monsters that hunted Cosima through the night.
The cold wind bit at my cheeks, and the rain plastered my black clothes to my body, but I gave them no heed as I entered the narrow mouth of the maze and concentrated on following my memories to its core. I could hear commotion amid the yews, a truncated scream, and a male roar of fury.
I pushed hard, tearing around corners, feet slipping through the mud, catching my hands on branches to leverage myself upright around the tight bends. Riddick called through the radio for backup and we trundled on.
He crashed into my back as I stopped abruptly at the beginning of the last row leading to the center circle because there was a small body at the far end, watching two bodies struggle in the dirt with a gun raised and shaking, waiting to shoot.
“Brother,” I called out, speaking for the first time to a boy I’d never met.
He turned slowly, gun armed and ready but quaking in his hands, and I noticed the gory hole in his abdomen, partially covered by his torn and bloody jumper.
Cosima had got him.
Pride moved through me, eradicating some of the frantic worry in my blood so that I could think more calmly.
“Put down your gun, and I won’t hurt you,” I told him, slowly moving closer with my gun still raised.
Riddick had disappeared like an apparition into thin air.
“Fuck you, slave lover,” he spat. “You and your whore don’t deserve to live.”
I sighed and dropped my gun. “Have it your way, then.”
“You don’t have the stones to kill a boy,” he jeered.
I tipped my head and smiled Noel’s smile at him. “No, but he does.”
Rodger turned his head just as Riddick appeared out of the maze beside him and pressed his gun to his head with a soft, anti-climatic pop.
Noel’s false heir fell to the ground with a wet plop.
I ran and leaped over him the moment he dropped, focusing on the scrambling duo in the middle of the clearing. As I drew closer, I saw the mulch of churned up earth, their feet sank amid the dark soil, shards of white peppered up among them. Noel had his hands around Cosima’s neck, forcing her into the air, her toes dangling.
He couldn’t see her though, his eyes bloody and riddled with long, deep gauges from Cosima’s nails. He blindly squeezed and squeezed, not carrying if he actually saw her die.
I was on him in the next second, hitting him so savagely in a sideswipe tackle that he instantly dropped Cosima and crumpled to the ground. My fists met his face before his head even hit the ground. I beat into him like a hammer to meat, pulverising his face, hating him with every smash, transferring the pain he’d inflicted my entire life through every blow to his despicable head. Somehow, he was able to raise a hand and plunge a small knife from somewhere into my thigh. I grunted and tried to steel myself, but he overpowered me, scrambling to his feet with his back to me, his head cocked over his shoulder to watch me as he started for Cosima again.
I lunged at him, grabbing at his arms and pinning them at his back, opening his chest up. I spun him, thinking to impale his heartless torso on the marble lance of the statue beside me.
Instead, Cosima appeared, dredged in rain and rolled in earth like a goddess newly risen from the bowls of hell. She had something in her hand, long and white, pointed into a danger-like edge.
She planted a palm over the place Noel should have harboured a soul, and then she looked at him with her golden eyes bright even in the dark and she sank that white weapon deep into his side.
He grunted and jerked in my embrace. I cinched my hold and braced my legs, holding Noel up as my wife stabbed him again and again in the side. I held him until his legs gave out. I held him while his breath began to stutter over his grunts and curses. I held him as Cosima killed him, and then when he died, I held him still so that she could look into my eyes as her chest heaved with exertion and her bloody hand shook in the air, the bone still lifted, so that she would know it was done, and I was proud of her for doing it.
She was a vengeful goddess, a righteous warrior, and I never loved her more than I did at that moment as her anger melted into silent tears, and she whispered brokenly, “Please tell me I’ve not gone mad. Please tell me you’re alive.”
I dropped Noel unceremoniously to the ground and caught my wife up in my arms, crushing her to my chest like a human defibrillator, needing the shock of her skin against mine to bring myself back to life after thirteen days of zombified misery.
“I’m here,” I said into her hair as I pushed it back, as I planted a crown of kisses over her forehead and anointed her mouth with my lips. “I’m here, I’m here, and I swear to God and everything holy or unholy, my beauty, we will never be without each other again.”
I chanted the words ov
er and over again, the melody to the harmony of her repeated, Xan, Xan, oh, Xan, until the red and blue lights of police cars cut through the dark of the maze, and it finally occurred to both of us that it was over.
The demons were slain at our feet, and my spring goddess, my dead queen, was in my arms again.
I looked down into her face, into the gold eyes that had ignited my destiny and planted a heart inside my chest, and tipped it further into the air so I could kiss the rain and relief off her lips.
“You found me,” she breathed into my mouth as if awed.
“I promised you I always would,” I reminded her. “I always will.”
Cosima
For the first time in my life, I woke up in Alexander’s black and blue bedroom. My entire body ached from the neglectful abuse it had undergone for the past few weeks as Noel’s prisoner and the fury of the chase through the maze three days before while my mind was its own bruise, tenderized by the pounding relief and turmoil at having killed three humans in the span of two months. I felt fragile, almost brittle like something old and worn you needed to wear gloves to handle. I was only twenty-two years old, but I felt as if I’d lived a dozen lives, a hundred years of sorrow compacted into a little over two decades. I knew it would take a long time before I achieved any kind of normalcy or stability. My dragons had been slayed, my prince resurrected from the dead, but this princess bore scars that would never completely fade. They were battle wounds, badges of victory against the many monsters of my life, but they still ached, and I knew they would periodically, spasmodically in the years to come like an old injury flaring up in the damp British cold.
But at that moment of first waking, when my lids slowly parted and my eyes focused on the long golden slope of torso under my cheek, none of the pain existed. Instead, like the sun cresting beyond the navy velvet drapes, hope and cautious happiness dawned through my chest and warmed my body from fingers to toes.
I was in Alexander’s bedroom, pressed between his arms and legs like a flower eternalized in the pages of a book, sheltered from time and harm by the powerful folds of his body. He was safe and relatively unharmed, holding me like he never again intended to let me go, even in his slumber.
Pearl Hall was quiet outside the double doors, already stripped of servants loyal to the old Davenport ways and waiting for its new master and mistress to fill it with fresh souls. I imagined a lightly concussed Douglas in his kitchen, nattering with the few kitchen staff left while he worked puff pastry through his strong hands to make my favourite breakfast pastry, and Riddick in the gymnasium, already warming up for his morning fencing session with Xan and me.
It was the first morning of my new life, the last life I ever intended to live. This manor and this man were finally, irrevocably mine. I had always been theirs, stamped both metaphorically and literally with their possession, but it was the first time I could reciprocate that ownership and the headiness of tenure settled over me like a heavy crown.
The impossible dream I’d once dreamed of being Pearl Hall and Alexander’s mistress had come to fruition and not through sheer luck or the will of others, but through my brave actions and the relentless pursuit of my goals.
I’d earned this. Earned them.
There would never be any doubt in my mind or the minds of others who might have been inclined to dissent that I deserved to be Duchess of Greythorn, wife of the great Alexander Davenport, doyen of one of the most extensive, beautiful estate in England.
Alexander’s cool silken chest dampened under my cheek, and I realized I was crying. The sweet, cleansing release of tears I should have cried over the years but didn’t allow myself to because I feared it would show a weakness I would never overcome. I understood, as one of the tears slipped over Xan’s mounded pectoral and wound through the maze of his abdominals until it pooled in his belly button, that tears were not the sign of a weak woman.
They were the sign of a woman who was unafraid of her own powerful emotions, who was capable of harnessing that power to fuel her passionate ambitions.
It was exactly my deep well of emotionality that had given me the strength to continue loving Alexander against all odds, that had given me a small escape during the times of torture with Ashcroft and Noel, that had shielded me from and armed me for the battle I had just won.
Lying there in bed with Alexander, I didn’t just feel peaceful, I felt canonized. There would never be many people who knew the true story of Alexander and Cosima, not the way everyone knew the tale of Hades and Persephone, but both of us knew the truth.
Just like the goddess of spring, I had chosen to return to the underworld, not because I was coerced, but because I found in the darkness and beauty of that wild domain that I belonged there more than I ever had above ground.
Alexander stirred under me, his arm banding tighter over my hip, the other crossing over to stroke down my hair and tip up my chin so my face was exposed to his sleep-leaden gaze.
I felt my heart in my throat as he took his time studying me, his grey eyes soft as velvet against my skin as they swept over the edge of my cheekbones, trailed the seam of my hairline and lingered on my lips like a kiss.
“Good morning, wife,” he greeted, his upper crust accent abraded with sleep in a way that made my pussy dampen.
The hand in my hair flexed, then tugged, forcing me closer to his face.
“Good morning, husband,” I said on a slight gasp.
I wriggled against his good leg, stimulating my wakening pussy against the hair roughened, hard panel of flesh. My pulse jumped as I watched Alexander’s eyes turn to smoke with longing.
His hand clamped over my hip and then relaxed as he moved to place his hands behind his head, the muscles in his arms flexing in a way that made my mouth water.
He looked every inch the indolent lord as he ordered, “I don’t have long this morning for idleness. If you’re really so desperate to come, little mouse, you’ll have to ride my leg. I have emails to attend to before I shower and leave for London.”
I pouted at him even though I’d been particularly insatiable since he’d returned from the “dead.” We had spent the first two nights after the maze debacle in a small inn in Whaley Bridge, being interviewed by local police and a few visiting members of MI-5, but every free moment otherwise, we were tangled together in the paisley bedsheets.
There were no scenes, no blatant Dom or sub behavior, just the natural twisting of hips and twining of limbs as we reconnected in the most fundamental way we knew how.
It would have been easy to blame it on the exhilaration of a near-death experience or the high of vanquishing our foes, but it was much simpler than that.
We were safe, and we were free. The worries that had weighed down our thoughts for years had evaporated and left in their place like crystalized salt after the going of the tide were lust and love.
So, we indulged.
We indulged so much my pussy was still puffy, and my skin was riddled with red marks and bruises like the spring fields of poppies and blossoming bluebells exploding over the British countryside.
I couldn’t really complain that Alexander didn’t have time to fuck me when that was essentially all he’d done for the past three days, but I was still put out.
“Please,” I breathed even as I tilted my hips and began to churn against him. “If you have to be gone all day, I need you inside me one more time.”
Alexander ignored me, leaning over to grab his phone from the nightstand and then grabbing a silk grey pillow to prop behind his back before he resettled. His eyes were on the screen, his face utterly expressionless as he finally said, “Either come like this, topolina, or not at all.”
His disinterest lit a box of matches in my groin and before I could censure myself, I was gyrating, grinding against him. The scrape of his leg hairs against my clit and the hard heat of his muscled thigh pressed flush to my wet and blooming sex coupled with his relentless passivity had me orgasming before I knew it. My soft cry punctured the
air as I shuddered against him, arms wrapped tightly around his narrow waist to hold me steady while I spasmed.
While I lay there, my panting breath rippling gooseflesh over his torso, Alexander continued to read his email, fingers moving rapidly over the screen. There was whoosh as an email was sent off, and then all of the sudden, I was under him, his body so heavy it stole my breath.
His face was in mine, his impassive expression broken open with the inflexible cast of his lust. I gasped into his mouth as he pressed it against mine, as his hand found my swollen, achy sex and pressed deliciously hard against it.
“Does your pussy hurt yet, bella? Does it ache from the stretch and thrust of my cock? I think I fucked you fifty times in the last thirty-six hours, and I want you to feel every single one of those fucks in this pretty cunt.”
I was moaning before he’d finished speaking, panting for more like a shameless wanton. There was something extraordinary that happened to a well-used pussy; the more you fucked it, the better it felt, and the more it wanted.
Or maybe that was just me.
And I was finding, as Alexander wedged the crown of his big cock into my nearly swollen closed folds, that I was okay with my insatiable desires because Alexander was an insatiable man.
I walked the entire house three times. The first time was leisurely, touching everything as I passed, feeling the texture of the 15th century tapestries and the smooth curves of the carved wooden antiques, squishing my bare toes in the Persian rugs, and spending long moments gazing into the collection of priceless artworks lining the walls. None of the remaining servants bothered me as I walked like a wraith in my white silk robe through the haunted and hallowed halls of the house that I vowed to make into a home. They seemed to sense that I needed the freedom to roam after so long confined to one place, specific rooms. On my second pass, I delved deeper, finding the keys in the study that opened some of the locked doors I’d always wondered about. I found what must have been Rodger’s room, decked out in antique weaponry and European football posters, and Noel’s collection of rooms, all dark and musky with his scent, a fragrance I associated acutely with evil.
Enamoured Page 39
