Page 172 of The Enslaved Duet

Alexander had watched me laugh, then tucked a lock of hair behind my ear before ushering us back out into the club.

Now, I sat on his lap as many of the other slaves were doing, but I had his shirt covering my body and a blanket a server had unearthed from somewhere that smelled of oak barrels keeping me warm. Alexander cradled me; there was no other word for it. He tucked me into the crease of his body and his right arm, my cheek propped on the bulge of his pectoral, my legs curled up against his chest. I could feel his strong, steady heartbeat against my cheek, and the hard planes of his muscled body bracketing me like armor.

It was an illusion dreamed up in my lingering subspace, but I thought I might never have felt so safe.

We didn’t speak, and I didn’t attempt to. It wasn’t the time or place, and I was desensitized to Alexander’s long, heavy silences even after all these years. He was content to hold me, and I was more than content to be held.

Of all the things I’d missed about being Alexander’s, I’d missed his physical affection the most. In some ways, it was more eloquent than his cultured, highly educated words ever could be.

I was drifting into a post-climax nap when Alexander turned to concrete. My eyes snapped open, instantly alert as someone slipped into the shadowy space beside us.

She was speaking before I could get a sense for who she might have been, but her words made it impossible to mistake her for someone else. “Master Alexander, I-I I am sorry to b-bother you when you are with…s-slave.”

Yana.

Her sweet Russian accent and nervous stutter only highlighted her delicate, almost fragile beauty, like a flower that would be too soon out of bloom. It shocked me how young she appeared given that she had been Noel’s slave almost three decades go. There were scars highlighted on her skin in the blue light of the club, and fear worn tightly in the skin around her eyes, but otherwise, her slight build and ethereal beauty made her seem no less than twenty-five. It was no wonder she was popular with the men of the Order. She looked built to be broken, a clay pigeon constructed just to be shot open.

“Don’t worry yourself, Yana, I asked you to meet me here.”

I looked up sharply at him, jealousy so acute in my chest it felt like a poison dart punctured right through my heart. He placated me with a hand smoothed down my hair, wrapping familiarly in the strands.

When I looked back at Yana, her huge almost translucent blue eyes were trained on his fingers in my hair as if she was witnessing a miracle enacted by God.

I supposed affection from a Master was exactly that to a woman so inured to the cruelty of slavery.

“I-I am happy to s-see you, Master, b-but I do not know what you w-w-would want from me,” she admitted in a timid voice, her eyes trained on Alexander’s neck and never straying higher out of engrained respect for his superiority over her.

I wondered if she even knew how deeply grey and enchanting his eyes could be.

“You are slave to Master di Carlo now, aren’t you, Yana?” Alexander asked.

I stiffened at the name of the Cosa Nostra’s crime family boss. He was part of the Order?

“But he’s an Italian-American?” I accused without filtering myself.

“The American faction of the Order works a little less discriminatingly than its British counterpoint. There are no titles here, only wealth and power. Di Carlo is enough of both now that he warranted an invitation, and as part of his initiation, he was gifted his first slave.” He tipped his head to Yana.

I blinked hard, my mind scrambling to make sense of the pathway of connections. It felt like a significant reveal, but I couldn’t fathom how di Carlo being part of the Order was exactly momentous.

“What the American Council didn’t understand,” Alexander continued as he eyed Yana’s bruised, frail form with hard eyes. “Was that a man built on wealth is not necessarily one of old loyalty or integrity. That a man like that could be bought.”

“By who? You?” I asked and watched as Yana flinched at my audacity.

“Perhaps,” he said, sipping his scotch. “Or perhaps by another. Yana, maybe you can shed some light on the matter?”

She licked her lips, quick and nervous, then did it again. Her entire body seemed filled with quick, brittle energy as if she would break and do so willingly at any provocation. Pity bloomed in my chest, overtaking my previous jealousy.

Alexander might have taken a beating for her as a boy, but he hadn’t been old enough or caring enough to save her completely.

Not the way it seemed he had once tried and might attempt again to do for me.

“H-he was sponsored by a man,” she admitted, eyes rolling around the club like loose marbles, searching for someone who might spot her betraying her new Master. “He and his n-nephew. He wanted badly to be in Order, b-but he waited a very long time. H-he had to d-do something f-f-first for this man.”

She swallowed hard and leaned forward to look right into my eyes, her own filled with almost savage apology.

“H-he had to k-know you and r-report on you,” she admitted.

Alexander turned to stone beneath me, so it felt I was entombed in concrete.