Page 166 of The Enslaved Duet

She didn’t know the sacrifices I had made.

The men I had extorted, threatened, and maimed to achieve my goals.

The estate I had given over to Noel like a gift and a prison so that I would know where the Devil lived even as I sought to end him.

She didn’t know anything, my little mouse.

As per usual, she had been kept out of male mechanisms for her own safety, and it had led to a less than satisfactory ending for us both.

It appeared I had to learn that lesson one more time before I vowed never to repeat it again.

By the end of this night, Cosima Davenport would know exactly where I stood, and therefore where she did too because whether she cared to admit, we were unequivocally linked; two planets locked in orbit.

I’d had a plan, a damned good one that had been cooked up in the Prime Minister’s office in the middle of the night after returning from finding Cosima in Milan so many years ago over godawful coffee and endless conversations about politics, morality, and revenge.

In that precise plan, I was not to contact Cosima until it was all over.

She was my reward at the end of my hero’s journey.

Unfortunately, though I had undertaken the path of a hero, I was still drawn to villainous tendencies, and the moment the tabloids had splashed her supposed impending union to the git Mason Matlock, my good intentions had crumbled to ash.

There was no way, even over my dead body, that I would allow anyone to lay claim to the woman I’d already made my own. I would kill every single man who so much as dreamt of making her theirs. Cosima was and always would bemine. Even if she didn’t know it.

I hadn’t planned to approach her so brutishly at the charity ball either, but my Cosima had been so utterly ravishing, there was no other proper course of action but to publicly—perhaps stupidly, given the covert nature of my life for the past four years–buy her once more.

It was largely symbolic, exchanging money for a date. I had no desire for one measly night with her, nor did I feel the need to ask or barter with anyone for the privilege, but I thought it made a very nice, if somewhat dramatic, gesture.

Especially after the way I’d turned her away in Milan. The look of her priceless, stunning face breaking into thousands of fine cracks and fissures when I’d so ruthlessly dropped her heart to the roof of the Duomo and crushed it beneath my heel would haunt me for the rest of my life. It was a necessary evil. The Order kept minute track of Cosima for the first year of our separation, delving into her internet history and the habits of her new life in New York. So did I. And it was obvious to both parties that Cosima was still hung up on me, her endless therapy appointments, Amazon book orders, and the one ill-fated visit to a BDSM club were more than evidence of that.

So to ensure that she was safe, I had to crush her.

There was no greater torture than loving a woman and being unable to have her. The only thing that had alleviated any of the pain over the past four years was making progress against the very Order I’d come to infiltrate that night.

I had enough information on most of the Order to put away some of the most powerful men for life, including Noel, who was on house arrest in Pearl Hall for his corrupt dealings with the Falmouth Port Authority.

The end was nigh and a better man, a stronger man, would have stayed away from Cosima until it was over.

But I wasn’t a stronger man.

I was completely wrecked by the weight of Cosima in my chest, the anchor and chain that pulled taut across the time and distance between us.

There was no way she was marrying another man.

No way, now that I’d have her submission and her reluctant capitulation, that I could go another bloody, agonizing day without her.

Which brought me to the door of the Order’s New York City hub, Club Bacchus, to flagrantly thumb my nose at the society and take back what was mine.

Women hung like ornaments from the ceiling, strung up in gold chains, diamond ropes, pearls on strings of reinforced carbon fiber so that the beauties didn’t fall to the floor in a tangle of riches. They were suspended in shapes, each bound in a different pose by beautiful loops of Shibari bondage. A redhead dripped from the air upside down, her hair a flaming arrow, her feet cuffed to a wooden bow with her knees out-turned and bare pussy displayed. They had made her into the symbol of a bow and arrow, the hunter’s classic weapon.

Another spun slowly with her neck bowed, back arched until her head nearly connected with her pointed toe like a ballerina twirling in a music box. She was caught up in a yard of shimmering pale pink chiffon, three lengths of which wrapped around her throat and kept it strained backward in a fruitless attempt to meet her raised right thigh.

They would have been beautiful strung up like that if they had consented to it. As it was, I could read the fear in their glassy eyes, smell the metallic tang of their stress sweat undercutting the leather-tainted air of the club.

There were fifteen girls festooning the lavish interior of Club Bacchus, trapezoids of light from the gently swaying chandeliers cutting their skin into fragments of gold. Men traced those yellow shapes over their skin as they mingled throughout the cavernous room, drinking scotch and chatting amiably with their companions as they ogled and molested the women on display.

I had no desire to join them.

Most of the men wouldn’t know me by sight, but some would, and my entire plan rested on remaining anonymous until the last moment.