Page 121 of The Enslaved Duet

I wanted to rip him apart with my bare hands just for touching her, for even thinking about caring for her when she was my responsibility.

But then I looked over at the minion across the street and saw him watching my car, squinting across the distance into the dark interior.

He couldn’t see me, but if he did, the work I’d done to convince Sherwood I was indifferent to Cosima would be undone.

And it couldn’t be.

If I really wanted the best for Cosima, I’d leave her alone to carve out a better life for herself. One that didn’t involve my dark tastes, my sadistic father, the cursed Order, or the past four years of a debt that should never have been hers to settle.

She’d helped me enough.

Salvatore was dead. The Order was appeased now that I’d taken part in their twisted games. They had ammo for blackmail should I choose to go against them, which was really why they participated in things like The Hunt and The Trails in the first place. To get dirt on the wealthiest, most powerful men in the United Kingdom and save it for a rainy bribe-ridden day.

Cosima was only ever meant to be a tool, and she’d fulfilled her purpose.

It should have been easy to let her go.

So why did my chest feel on fire?

Why could I hear the bones snapping and cracking as flames ate away at them, as my organs shriveled up to soot and ash?

Why couldn’t I fathom a life without her?

I hit my head against my hands wrapped around the steering wheel and knew in the way I normally instinctively knew about changes in the stock market and trends in media that I’d never be able to get over her.

How did someone get over a person who had fundamentally changed their life?

I was strong. I’d been made into a man of intellect and steely determination. I could quit any addiction if I set my mind to it, maybe even my obsession with the girl with gold eyes.

But I didn’t want to.

And that made all the difference.

I thought about that as I got out of the car, slipping silently through the small crowds down the street toward the man stalking Cosima. As I passed him without drawing his notice and then doubled back when another tram arrived to obscure us from the street to catch his thick neck in a chokehold and drag him farther into the alley. I thought of her silken skin as I wrapped my hands around his neck while he struggled and went red, then white with the effort and failure to breathe, and then I thought of her beautiful sorrow as she stood in the rain, rejoicing in the drops as I sharply turned my gloved hands to the right and felt the Order’s sycophant’s spine snap between my hands.

After I threw him into an overflowing dumpster, I took one last glance at my wife sitting in the small coffee shop drinking tea with her new strange savoir and a woman I’d called only hours before, and somehow curtailed my possessive rage and encompassing grief enough to get back into the car and drive to the airport.

Then, I thought about her still as I caught my private jet back to London, as Riddick picked me up in the Rolls and drove me straight to 10 Downing Street. Security tried to detain me before Prime Minister James Caldron himself stepped through the famous lacquered black door and crossed his arms over his chest at the sight of me.

“Alexander, you git, what brings you to my hovel?”

I stared at my old uni roommate with the familiar comfort of my implacable mask affixed to my face, and said, “I have something of a story to tell you, James, and at the end of it, you’re going to help me take down one of the most corrupt organizations in the U.K., and you’ll go down in history for it.”

James stared at me for a long moment, his stare almost as aloof as my own. He didn’t come from money the way most of my Cambridge compatriots in Trinity College had, but he was all the sharper for it.

It was just that razor wit that had driven a wedge between us after graduation when James had tried to recruit me to help his mechanisms in parliament, and I’d told him, quite honestly, I wasn’t a man who did something for nothing.

“Why now?” he finally asked.

I felt the wedding ring I’d taken off, thrown into the lake behind Pearl Hall and then had retrieved after the Order had left, burning a hole in my pocket as I locked eyes with him, and said, “They took something from me. One thing that might have meant everything.”

Cosima

I saw him. A year into my separation, a full twelve months into my self-imposed rehabilitation project to rid myself of his influence on my mind, body, and soul, I saw Alexander Davenport at Bulgari’s annual Fashion Week party in Milan.

I stepped into the gilded room and felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up in the oddly static air. There was a ripple of awareness down my spine as I descended the marble steps into the crowded ballroom, that animal awareness I’d learned to hone like an alarm bell to tell me when I was being watched.

I was alone, unaccompanied by one of the few men I kept on rotation as potential dates to such functions. It was more impactful, I’d found, to enter the room as a beautiful woman unencumbered by the weight of a man at my side. It took confidence and power to arrive as an unaccompanied female, and I’d learned to take every opportunity to show power when the occasion arose. So, when I wanted to make an entrance, as I did that night because I was the star of not one, but three fashion house catwalks that week, I did it solo.