Page 130 of The Enslaved Duet

I was no longer that woman who shared every intimacy with her family, who babbled about her day happily in the carefree manner of a bubbling brook. Now, I was shadows and secrets so dark they were like black holes sucking at everything else light in my life until it was diminished or devoured.

Those black holes ate up the words to describe my particular brand of pain, and the memories that had made it so before I could even think to voice them.

“There’s nothing to say beyond what I’ve told you.” I tried to placate him even though I knew he would frown before he even did, disgusted with my bald-faced lie.

I placed a soothing hand on his arm and tried again. “Really, whatever is in the past can stay there. You can only be haunted by the past as long as you keep the door open into your present.”

“Don’t feed me fortune cookiecazzate. You don’t want to talk to me, fine, but don’t be a hypocrite and incite me to share with you what you won’t share with me.”

I bit my lip, wondering if I should say what I’d been desperate to say since I’d run into him on the street outside Club Dionysus in London three years ago. “Does your unhappiness have more to do with Savannah and her new husband… or the handsome actor I saw you walking with in London?”

My brother went still.

Goosebumps rippled across my flesh because the threat in that stillness reminded me so much of Alexander.

I knew instinctively, I’d been wrong to go there.

But as I opened my mouth to apologize, Sebastian cut his blazing yellow eyes to mine.

“If you speak to me again about them, I won’t hesitate to delve further into exactly what you were doing with the Earl of Thornton in England when you’d just told Mama, the girls, and me that you were working in Milan. I won’t be considerate of your secrets any longer, and I’ll drag them kicking and screaming into the light for everyone to see.”

“You’re threatening me?” I asked, my voice soft with shock.

Sebastian had never spoken to me like that before. Never looked at me with barely constrained violence in his tiger eyes and fury so quick on his lips.

“No,” he said after a long moment of vibrating rage. I watched him pull himself together second by second, sucking a deep breath through his lips and then exhaling as if performing an exorcism. “No, Cosi, I would never threaten you. Please, just…just don’t speak about him,them, and we won’t have any problems.”

“I’d tell you if it wasn’t dangerous,” I confided in him, stepping closer to press my palm to the hard angle of his jaw. “I’m just trying to protect you.”

And myself.

A muscle in his cheek jumped as he ground his teeth, but he put his hand over my own on his face and then kissed my palm. “That’s exactly the stuff of my nightmares. That my beautiful, sweet sister had to do the unspeakable to get us out of that Neapolitan sinkhole.”

“The past,” I reminded him as we both silently decided to step back into the crowd to find our seats for the ceremony. “Should stay in the past.”

Seb squeezed my hand, and I looked over to see his face exposed like a raw nerve, bloody skin and muscles peeled away to reveal the ugly truth of his own experiences. A second later, someone called his name, and his habitual expression of levity slid into place.

I stood quietly at his side as he introduced me to industry acquaintances and lingered to talk to close friends. They only wanted my smile and a long perusal of my body clad in a red bustier corset lace and silk gown by Oscar de la Renta. I liked to wear red; it reminded me of wet poppies and spanked asses, of strength and lust, and memories that ached in a good way like a massage to sore muscles.

I was happy to play dumb and pretty as I chewed over my brother’s obvious heartbreak regarding aman. He was so easy in his masculinity, in his love of women in whatever shape and size they were packaged in that it had honestly never occurred to me that he may be bisexual. I didn’t think he was gay, not with the obvious way he appreciated females and their forms, but the fact that the mere mention of a man could so clearly unhinge him made me believe he had to have been at least a little in love with him.

I wanted to know the story. I wanted to know why he lusted after Savannah Richardson even as he seemed to revile her very name, and how Sebastian had become attached to her ex-husband, mega-movie star Adam Meyers.

But I wouldn’t press.

It was in my nature to dig and delve past people’s boundaries. I was an emotional archeologist, dissatisfied with anything less than the naked, vulnerable truth of a person. But I would never force my best friend, my brother, to unveil his past when he wasn’t ready.

It would have to be a story for another day.

Maybe a day when I could share my own with him too.

As if my thoughts had summoned him like a demon from Hell, a British accent I recognized from years ago though even then I’d only heard it a few times, rang out with wit behind me.

I froze, as if not moving would make me invisible to him.

Without turning around to face him and the threat he posed, I silently but swiftly moved through the crowds of people, mingling amid the red velvet theatre seats to a hallway that led to the ladies’ restroom.

A few women were gathered in front of the mirrors, checking their makeup and gossiping, but I ignored them to wet some paper towel and hold it to the back of my neck in a foolhardy attempt to calm myself.