Page 133 of The Enslaved Duet

Sebastian peered at me as the crowd around us laughed at something the famous British comedian and talk show host said in his opening monologue.

“I should have been there,” he said, and it was about so much more than just that one incident. “I never should have left you alone.”

I shrugged and patted his hand on my thigh so he would know everything was fine.

I wasn’t bitter about the sacrifices I had made for my family. Given the choice, I would do it all again in a heartbeat. But I’d learned an important lesson from those martyred choices, and it wasn’t one I would soon forget.

At the end of the day, the only champion I could count on was myself.

So, if Ashcroft was gunning for me, I would have to be the one to stop him.

Cosima

Anyone who says the life of a model is a glamourous one has clearly never woken at the crack of dawn and then spent hours on their feet in the freezing mid-autumn wind in Central Park wearing a leopard print minidress, two pounds of face makeup, and so much hairspray I was worried I’d draw satellites into my orbit. I’d been back in the city for less than twelve hours, and I was already at work.

“That’s it, darling,” Beau Bailey crooned to me as I arched my back and pressed my breasts against a tree. “Let me see those curves. I want tension! Give me tension.”

I kept every muscle in my body snapped taut and focused on keeping my face relaxed, my eyes heavy-lidded and my mouth parted slightly in the unfurling bloom of a newly budded rose.

My spine would ache tomorrow, my feet were already throbbing, and my head pained from the weight of heavily styled hair, but I loved it. I loved putting my good looks to better use than being some man’s pretty face or some Master’s indentured slave.

The money I made from modelling put food on my family’s table. It had sent Giselle to the most prestigious art school in France, Elena to law school at NYU, and purchased a home and a business for Mama.

The thing that had brought me so much misery growing up in Napoli, that had eventually led me to sexual slavery, had become my saving grace. It had taken years of therapy to realize that the tool everyone had used so long against me could be wielded by my own hands.

So I loved it, the endless boredom and rigorous physical exhaustion of modelling.

It wasn’t some great passion of mine to stand in front of the camera or strut down a catwalk, but the things it permitted me to do—the travel and the riches—were enough to make it seem like the best job in the world.

Besides, the tedium of modelling gave me more than enough time to think obsessively over my past or, today, over Ashcroft’s threat to expose a sex tape of me to the world.

I hadn’t had time to tell anyone, and I wasn’t sure if I would.

Dante or Salvatore were the obvious choices, but I hadn’t seen the former in nearly a month, and the latter was supposed to be dead, so I didn’t like to pull him out of seclusion for any old reason.

I supposed if there was ever agoodreason, though, Ashcroft was it.

“Okay, let’s break for a moment,” Beau called out, and immediately, half a dozen aides swarmed the posing models to bring us water and thick wool coats to ward against the chill.

“How’s she doing?” Beau asked, strolling over as his first assistant traded out his camera lens and set up another tripod.

Beau was my sister Elena’s best friend and had been since I first introduced them at a Prada event two months after moving to the city. He was flamboyant, outgoing, and deeply charismatic. My sister was stiff, formal, and unerringly conservative. They were a strange duo but an inseparable one.

“You’d know better than I do,” I told him as I wrapped myself up in an oversized men’s coat and pulled my masses of curled hair out of the lapel. “She hasn’t spoken to me about the adoption in weeks.”

Beau worried his plump lower lip as people flowed around us like a river over rock. “Between you and me, I’m worried Sinclair’s heart isn’t in it.”

I sighed because that had occurred to me many times over the course of the past three and a half years too.

Sinclair was one of my best friends. The man who had changed my life as irrevocably as Seamus or Alexander, but in every way good where they were bad. He’d given me a place to stay in the city while I’d gained my feet, a private reprieve away from the scrutiny of Mama and Elena so that I could get my bearings again. He was the only man in my life who had never wanted anything from me, and the love I had for him because of that was almost fiercer than any other.

I’d only wanted the best for him when I finally introduced him to my gorgeous, driven eldest sister. They were both beautiful, successful, and mad with ambition. When they started dating, it had seemed inevitable.

But the cracks showed early. Sinclair wasn’t a man who smiled much, and neither was my sister. I’d hoped beyond hopes that they would find humour and happiness in each other, but I’d forgotten the concept of yin and yang. They were too similar, and those likenesses canceled out the right things and emphasized the wrong.

In the years they had been together, they’d only become more professionally driven, more emotionally distant.

But Elena was too steeped in her desire to have a baby to see that Sinclair wasn’t right for her, and my dearest friend was too inured in the mundanity of his life to realize he wasn’t reallyliving.