Page 107 of The Enslaved Duet

No, if he knew my plans to abandon him, I would be right back where I started, shackled to the ballroom floor like the slave I’d tried for so long to pretend not to be.

But I would always be a slave.

I wore his brand on my ass, his metal in my flesh, and his name in the debris of my sunken heart.

“Lord Thornton,” the manservant Dante had paid to interrupt us said from behind my husband.

My husband.

I would never even get to call him that.

“Lord Thornton,” the young chap tried again, louder this time because Alexander only continued to fuck my mouth as thoroughly as he usually fucked my pussy. “Lord Thornton!”

Finally, he ripped his mouth from me like a wax stripe.

“What is it? Can you not see I’m kissing my beautiful wife?”

Wife.

A sob lodged in my throat like a giant splinter, cutting up my esophagus each time I tried to swallow it down.

“You’re needed inside, milord, there’s something urgent.”

Alexander growled low in his throat, his hand tightening on my hip for a moment in a flare of pain.

I studied his handsome face desperately, eager to memorize every line in his handsome forehead, the way every strand of golden hair waved into the next. I needed the perfect description for the unique colour of his gorgeous eyes so that I would never forget what they looked like through mine.

But the moment was gone in a flash, and my mind was too traumatized to take a proper photo.

Alexander leaned forward to press a kiss like a flower between the pages of my lips, a promise for more later.

“Tonight, wife,” he said as he pushed off the wall by my head and turned to follow the servant inside. “Be ready for me.”

I waited until he rounded the corner to cave into my hollow chest and sob. There was no time to wallow, but I cupped my hands over my eyes to collect my tears for a long precious moment before I dropped them like rain filled clouds to the ground and ran.

I ran around the back of the building even though each jarring step threw my body into torment because I didn’t want the guests to see the bride fleeing in her bloodstained white dress.

I ran down the gravel drive, the stones biting into my feet as I picked up speed on the decline and a car came into view at the gates. Dante stepped out of the running vehicle and waved.

I skidded to a miserable halt and caught my breath.

It felt like I was running constantly from the control of one man into the tyranny of another, and I was tired of the cycle.

It was at that moment of fleeing that I made a decision for the first time in my life that I should have been making the whole way through.

I decided this.

I was mine before I was anyone else’s.

I was not my family’s breadwinner.

Not Seamus’s martyred trump card.

Or Sebastian’s twin.

Not the mediator between my rival sisters.

Or Salvatore’s bastard daughter and Dante’s damsel in distress.

I wasn’t even Alexander’s anything.

I was just, quite simply and euphorically, my own.

And moving forward, away from the only dream I’d ever dreamed about a life at Pearl Hall, I vowed to only ever be mine again.

The End