Page 13 of The Enslaved Duet

I was seated in the most beautiful room I’d ever seen or could have imagined even in my wildest dreams, but I wasn’t there as a guest or even as a stranger.

I was ornamental as much as the gold foil, immobile as those titan marble pillars. A part of the furniture owned and collected by Lord Alexander Davenport.

I shifted painfully, groaning in pain as I rolled to my back and stared up at the massive ceiling, then wished desperately that I hadn’t.

Because painted there in stark relief was a tableau of the Greek god Hades clothed in black on his iron chariot pulled by undead horses bursting through the earth to capture the Goddess of Spring, Persephone.

I wondered if somehow in my fog, I’d noticed the painting and translated it into my dreams, but either way, the reoccurrence of the myth did nothing to soothe my frazzled mind.

Trying to focus on something else, I decided to sit up and check out the pain in my breasts and between my thighs.

With a groan, I sat up and stared down at my chest.

There was a gold bar tipped on each end with diamonds locked through both of my dusky brown nipples.

Another, this one curved and placed vertically, pierced through the hood of my clit.

“Porco Giuda!” I cursed faintly at the obscene sight.

I was a virgin marked wantonly with sex, a promise my new Lord and Master had punched into my flesh.

My free will and my body were no longer mine to control.

They were his.

As if summoned by the scent of my turmoil, he arrived, a mere shadow in the doorway at the far edge of my gilded cage.

“Ah, she awakens,” he said quietly, but in the stillness of the ballroom, his voice carried to me as intimately as if whispered in my ear.

I shuddered.

“Come closer,” I called hoarsely, full of false bravado. “So I can look you in the eye when I curse you to hell.”

A low, smoky chuckle. “Oh Cosima, do you doubt that we are already there?”

I stared at him, struggling to swallow the sobs of desperation that threatened to ravage my throat. He moved forward, his smart leather shoes clicking against the marble like the tick of a clock counting down to my demise.

When he was only a foot away, he pinched the fabric of his suit pants as he settled into a crouch so that we were almost eye level with each other.

He should have looked ridiculous—his big body folded like that, his forearms resting on his strong thighs, fingers of one hand dangling so that they could feather over the coil of my chain—but he didn’t. Instead, he was formidable, compacted into a position that called to mind a predator settled in to observe his prey. He had all the time in the world to pounce, and he was confident in his ability to capture so he’d decided to play with his lunch.

To play with me.

“I thought to welcome you to your new home,” he began. “For now, it consists of these four walls. This ballroom is all you will know until you earn the right to more. And do you know, my beauty, how to earn the right?”

I clenched my teeth, felt the grind of enamel and let the pain settle my anger so I could actually breathe. “I’m sure you’ll be happy to tell me.”

His smile was more a ghost of an expression haunting his face than an actual movement of his lips, but it was all the more sinister for it.

“Yes, I am happy to tell you. You earn privileges such as freedom from the room, water to drink, and food to eat by obeying me, your Master.”

“My Master?” I croaked. “You have to be kidding me.”

He cocked his head, his expression genuinely perplexed. “Tell me, Cosima, why else would a man buy a beautiful woman if not to use her for his own pleasure?”

“You mean to use me against my will?” I snapped.

“Ah.” He nodded slowly, running a hand along the steepled edge of his jaw as he considered me. “I see. You don’t seem to grasp the nature of the deal I made with the Camorra and, through them, your father. I bought you toownyou, yes, but you agreed to the conditions of this agreement the moment you entered my house in Rome willingly. When you saw your father brutalized at the hands of the mafia, when they threatened to string your beloved siblings up from the tree across the street with bells tied to their ankles and you could practically hear the chime in your ears.” He paused, taking in my horror and shock with the quiet satisfaction of a man used to knowing more than others. “If you want to put your family at risk with the mafia, Cosima, you must know that you are free to leave at any time.”