Page 119 of The Enslaved Duet

Every drop of blood in her body was tainted by my dark, seething obsession with her, and she didn’t even know.

I hadn’t had a chance to tell her.

We’d been playing a game too dangerous to take for granted.

I’d fought hard, in the only way I knew how, to silently, swiftly move my pieces across the board when the odds were stacked heavily in the Order’s favour.

For a brief shining moment—when Salvatore was lying shot through the chest in a hotel room in Rome, and I was about to wed the woman I knew in my bones was my reward for a life of painful servitude to my father and his demons—I thought I might have even done it.

Outsmarted them.

The shrewdest, wealthiest, most corrupt group of men in Britain.

Of course, I hadn’t.

My hamartia had always been pride.

I believed in myself enough totryto eliminate the problem, but in the end, my failing had come from exactly that pride blinding me with arrogance.

The magic Cosima had brought to my life was just that, an illusion created by the cruel hands of the puppeteers and masterminds who ruled us both.

I stayed seated in my car and watched her through the mirrored streaks of rain obscuring the windshield. She had her chin tipped up as water peppered over her face, lips parted and eyes closed as if she was preparing for a baptism.

I knew differently, though.

She might have been homeless and alone, sodden on some street corner like a forgotten whore, but my topolina wasn’t focused on any of that.

She was glorying in her freedom.

I could tell by the sad but awed tip of her lips and the reverent way she opened her hands to the sky to collect the drops in her palms.

That last time I’d seen her in the rain, I’d fucked her in the mud in a field of poppies my mother had planted behind Pearl Hall.

Seeing her like that again, wet and ruined, made me want to do it again.

Then again, any time I looked at Cosima, no matter the inappropriateness of our surroundings, I wanted her.

I’d never wanted for anything in my entire life yet, I’d neverwantedanything the way I wanted her. I felt her absence from my life like a limb lost in war, blasted away by a bomb, the shards of shrapnel still digging and twisting painfully deeper into the salvaged tissues.

At that moment, after days without contact, I was frankly mesmerised by the sight of her.

She was more alive in the tableau of bittersweet misery and joy than I had been in any moment of my life before and without her.

It was intoxicating enough for me to risk everything for her.

Even my own safety.

I checked the gun hidden neatly under my arm in the holster beneath my bespoke Armani suit, and then did a quick survey of my surroundings to make sure my path to her was clear.

I was taking my wife home with me.

Sherwood and Noel could bombard us with threats like the London Blitz, but I didn’t give a fuck.

I’d shield her with my own body and throw my entire fortune like a golden shield up around us if it meant keeping her at my side, on her knees but proud just as she was meant to be.

Only, as I swung my eyes back to her, I noticed two things that gave me pause.

A man standing on the opposite street corner from Cosima, his copper hair wet with rain, his trench coat drenched in the deluge but still obviously expensive. He stared at my wife with a cocked head, mesmerised as any red-blooded male would be by the sight of her on that street like some queen finally freed from the underworld.