Page 109 of The Enslaved Duet

Years of latent bitterness sank roots in my gut and gave birth to fury.

I stormed up to him before he could freeze and slammed my fist across the strong line of his nose hard enough to feel the bones break like eggshells under my knuckles. Blood erupted from his nostrils and sluiced down the fine linen of his suit. Before he could recover, I banded my fingers around his throat and pushed him brutally against the wall of the house.

I hefted him into the air so that my hand was an iron bar holding him aloft. His face went pink, then mauve, and shifted into a satisfying shade of purple.

I still had the taste of my wife on my tongue, sweat on my face, and my father’s blood on my fist. Fury had turned me heathen, and I didn’t give a single fuck.

“Where in the bloody hell is she?” I seethed in Noel’s purpling face.

He blinked at me, dispassionate even as I squeezed my fingers tighter around his neck.

“Tell me, or so help me, I will rip you apart with my bare hands where you fucking stand,” I seethed, wishing each hard-bitten word was a bullet in his diabolical brain.

“So”—he wheezed—“dramatic.”

My hand pulsed tighter against his neck. I wanted to snap his spine like a biscuit between my fingers and watch the bone crumble to dust at my feet.

But another stronger instinct urged me to let him breathe.

I spent my entire thirty-plus years being fashioned into my father’s son. I was born, built, and programmed to operate under his system. Despite the abominable way he treated his slaves, the hurt he’d doled out to my mother with his various affairs, and the unethical way he ran his businesses, I felt bound to him elementally, vitally. If I was a great tree, he was the earth that bound my roots. I could never escape him, and to hope for release was to hope for death.

Without consciously deciding to do so, my fingers uncurled from his hot throat.

“You will tell me where my wife is,” I said with my voice in my burning gut. “You will tell me now.”

“You always were impulsive,” Noel scolded calmly as if we were sitting in his office, and I was just a young lad. “I never could find a way to beat it out of you.”

“You never could find a way to do many things. This estate was mortgaged to the gills when I graduated from Cambridge. Your marriage was a sham from its inception. You are a man with a title, but little wealth or real political power.”

“I am a member of the most powerful society in the land,” Noel said, his eyes finally flashing.

I fed off his anger, letting it stoke the flames of my own. “The Order is the mostcorruptpower in the fucking land, as you well know. In large part because of your influence over it.”

Noel went still in a way that was dangerous. I’d always found that stillness could be considerably more threatening than action. It was the fear of the unknown that made the potential energy coiled in stillness so much more frightening than the kinetic.

“Watch how you speak of the Order, son,” he said quietly. “It is not the type of organization that takes lightly to slander, nor is it one that accepts defectors.”

I narrowed my eyes at him and stepped forward to loom over him with my excess three inches of height. “And I am not the type of man who takes rejection or evasion for an answer, especially when loyalty is called into question. I’ll ask you once more, Noel, where the fuck is my wife?”

“I told you not to do this. I told you your enemies would smell your blood in the water if you were so weak to take a slave as your wife.”

“And I told you,” I growled, feeling the frenzy of panicked rage erode my iron shields. “Our name would make Cosima safer than anything else could, even keeping her in the relative security of slavery. It was too late to keep her from their notice.”

I knew the way the Order of Dionysus worked because I’d been pledged to the secret society since birth without my contest, my will signed over by my father in a binding, eternal contract.

They wanted Cosima for themselves, or they wanted her destroyed.

She was a poor choice for a slave, in the end.

I’d wanted her to end Salvatore and my turncoat excuse for a brother, but I should have known she was too glorious not to glint brightly from the shadows. She drew covetous glances, inspired lustful aspirations, and turned me from a player without weakness to a king constantly in check.

To see her was to want her, to know her at all was to be enamoured by her.

I’d bought her as a weapon to use against my enemies, and she’d become the ultimate tool for my destruction.

To mitigate the disaster, I’d married her.

It was against the rules of the Order. They expressly forbade intimate relationships with slaves. They were property. Livestock. Nothing more, and maybe something even less. To marry a slave was to marry the cow you sought to slaughter. It was the worst of all sins and punished mercilessly by the society. A chap I’d gone to Eton with had been castrated for the crime of loving his slave over a decade ago, but it was punishment no one would soon forget.