Page 115 of The Enslaved Duet

“The price is paid,” he murmured. “Welcome back to the fold, brother. We have many plans for you.”

And I—I thought darkly, mind racing—for you.

Cosima

“You don’t have any experience,” I heard for the dozenth time in less than two weeks. “I’m sorry.”

I blinked at the man wearing the regulation visor and polyester vest. My mouth was twisted into something between a sneer and a smile, misaligned by bitter humour at the idea of a pimply faced teenager telling me I had no experience.

I wanted to lean across the table and wrap my hand around his throat as I recounted just how much experience I had with nightmares he was too pure to even dream up. I wanted to watch his eyes bulge, the whites redden with fireworks of burst blood vessels as I squeezed and said my dirty words. As I told him about my rape, The Hunt, my wicked beating at the hands of the world’s wickedest man.

Then I wanted to sit back and watch him gasp for breath, scrubbing his hands over his face as if he could erase the images I’d implanted in his mind, and ask him calmly if he still thought I was lacking inexperience.

I didn’t do any of that.

Defiance wasn’t me, it was the Cosima of before. Before my father sold me, before Alexander bought me and wholly owned me, before his father ruined me.

I was too well trained to lash out against the bonds society had strapped me in, too tired to execute the violence boiling in my heart, and too desperate to waste my energy on another rejection.

So, I smiled at him, knowing it was the most beautiful thing the boy would see in his day as a cash register attendant at a cheap chain restaurant.

He blinked hard at the sight of me, and it gave me a sliver of comfort.

“Thank you for your time,” I said softly before I pushed back from the table and left the cramped restaurant.

Sometime during my failed interview, it had begun to rain over the streets of Milan. I stepped out into the elements, tilting my head up into the knife sharp spray of water, loving the way it hurt, needing the way it grounded me to my new reality.

I wasn’t a slave anymore, but I didn’t feel free.

I had more obligations than before.

Dante and Salvatore had uprooted their organization to restart in America, and their money was spent establishing their hold in the city. They didn’t have extra to support a family of five, though they tried.

I’d left England without the assurance of a continued allowance for Mama and my siblings. There wasn’t even an account for my ex-owner to deposit into anymore. Dante had worked his illegal, technological wizardry and dissolved the Lombardi family of Naples from the anvils of Italian history. If anyone in Mama and Elena’s new life in New York, or Sebastian’s in London, or Giselle’s in Paris decided to look into the Lombardi clan, they would find nothing.

I didn’t know what Alexander thought of my disappearance, if he assumed I was dead or hated me enough for my escape that he’d forgotten me entirely, but he hadn’t come for me in the month I’d been gone. I tried not to focus on why he hadn’t and whether he just couldn’t find me or he didn’t want to.

I’d made my decision, and I had to live with it.

So, it was back to work for me. Sebastian was working on a film with the revered movie star Adam Meyers, so I knew a windfall was coming for us, but until then, I had Giselle to put through her remaining two years in art school, and now, Elena’s law school.

We were too poor to even take out a loan. How does someone secure an investment when they have no equity?

The only thing of value we had, that we’d ever had, was me.

I tried to model, but I’d been out of the game for a year, and Landon Knox’s blackmark against me still lingered in Milan and echoed out into the rest of Italy.

I couldn’t secure an agent, let alone a go-see or photo shoot.

Even my beauty, it seemed, couldn’t help us now.

My eyes stung as I blinked up into the rain, and I wondered idly if I was crying.

I could have been, though I wasn’t a crier, but I doubted it.

It seemed that running away from the only man I’d ever loved hadn’t ripped me open like a raw wound as I thought it might. Instead, it had calcified me. Where I was once warmth and light, I was only sinew and blood, stripped of metaphor and emotion, a human vessel without animation.

Oh, my family still gave me comfort. I was free to FaceTime with them every night, to see the small but comfortable brownstone Mama had made a deposit on with the last of the money I’d sent her, to see the tender, excited way Elena handled her new law school textbooks for her first semester at NYU, to watch Giselle as she painted intricate works of art as easily as breathing while she gabbed to me about how much she loved Paris, and finally, most beautifully, to discover the face of my brother as he talked about the woman he had fallen in love with.