Page 113 of The Enslaved Duet

The wedding was long over, the guests sent home without explanation for why the bride had suddenly retired early for the night.

“Action, not words,” Sherwood translated like the haughty arsehole he was even though he knew both Martin and I perfectly understood Latin. “Prove yourself as one of us after this disgrace of a wedding, Davenport. This man flagrantly disobeyed the primary rule of this society. Do not fall in love with your slave. They are meant to slake the temptations of your body and purge the demons from your mind, but they areneverworthy of our regard.”

“I’m aware of the rules,” I said drolly.

Sherwood and Howard shared a quick look.

My unflappability in the face of my own transgressions that almost directly mirrored those of the bugger to be punished confused them.

Was I an idiot, they wondered?

No, Alexander Davenport, Lord of Thornton and heir to the Dukedom of Greythorn, was one of the wealthiest men in the United Kingdom and had amassed one of the highest-grossing media companies in the world.

Dumb, I was not.

So what other explanation could there be for my bone-deep calm?

Well, he clearly hadn’t loved his slave.

Not if he was this unruffled by the disappearance of the slave and by his punishment of one who had committed that very crime.

I could see my manipulation snare them in its web, and I moved in for the kill.

“I married the slave as the final nail in the coffin of my contempt for her father. He killed my mother, but before I killed him, he knew what it was to have someone he loved wholly and completely taken from him.”

They didn’t know Amedeo Salvatore wasn’t dead. I doubted even Cosima knew I was aware of her ruse.

No man as clever as the Napolicapowent into a situation unarmed out of concern for his estranged daughter.

It was a set-up, and though amateurly thought up, it was fairly well-executed.

The fact of it was, I didn’t much care.

There was very little to make me believe anymore that Salvatore was the one who killed my mother. There was little motive, and my own gut coiled at the idea.

It was wrong.

I had more important things than Salvatore on my mind at the time, but I knew where he was when the time came to confront him.

Now that Cosima was gone, finding her was my only focus, and Salvatore was at the bottom of my list of suspects based on one simple fact. Not even her birth father could have convinced Cosima to run away from me hours after we’d married.

Snapping the whip forward with complete accuracy, I broke a branch arching above Simon Wentworth’s prone form and watched as leaves fell over him like macabre confetti.

“Let’s begin,” I intoned, just as mightily as Sherwood, striding forward and taking my place behind Wentworth’s back.

Unlike mine, his was smooth and unblemished. He had never been punished for defending a woman as I had for Yana and Cosima.

Unbidden, I wondered what kind of man he was, and remorse scored through me like talons over my innards. Then I remembered that he had tried to claim Cosima in The Hunt, and anger blazed through me, eradicating the wounds.

“Just do it,” he whispered brokenly. “She’s gone, and I don’t…I don’t want tobeanymore.”

“Disgusting,” someone called out.

Another spit at him.

“Pathetic wanker,” someone else shouted.

“Silence,” I ordered, the boom of my voice like a sonic bomb quelling every noise in the vicinity.