Page 181 of The Enslaved Duet

“If I say yes, what then?” I hedged. “Nothing has really changed.”

“Not yet, but it will,” he promised as he lowered himself fully into the bath, sloshing water over the sides while soaking his beautiful silk shirt and destroying his trousers. He gathered me up in his arms until I was wrapped around him like vines. “I stayed away from you for the past four years for a reason, and that reason was to take down the Order so we could be free of them forever.”

My eyebrows punctured the top of my hairline. “Is that even possible?”

“It is,” he promised with the sly, coy look of a predator about to stalk and corner his prey. “Let me explain it to you.”

Alexander

My earliest memory of my father was learning to play chess against him in the second library before the vast black marble hearth. I remembered how large he seemed sitting in the high-backed tufted leather chair, his broad shoulders pressed to either side of the wingback, his head crowning the top like a golden circlet. A cigar curled smoke into the air from the gold ashtray on the side table, resting beside a crystal cut glass sweating from the cold of the iced whiskey within. Everything was so adult and sophisticated. My childhood brain was seduced by the atmosphere and my father’s own elegant aura of power.

I wanted with everything I had to be exactly like him when I grew up.

It was the natural inclination of a boy to admire and aspire to be his father, but looking back on my boyhood, it was obvious Noel had taken particular pains to create a sense of divinity around himself. He succeeded. For years, I worshipped at his altar, studied his philosophies like scripture so that I could recite them verbatim when asked (which he did), and believed wholeheartedly that he had been blessed by a higher power.

I wouldn’t learn until later that the higher power was no God or sacred charter, but the Order of Dionysus.

At that moment, though—no more than four years of age and still the kind of blond only small children can claim, sitting in the twin wing-backed chair to my father’s and struggling not to swing my legs because it would make him angry—I simply loved Noel Davenport.

I loved him so innocently that when he set about to teach me the ways of chess, I took the lessons somberly, as seriously as a monk his vows. I read books by Bobby Fischer and Yasser Seriawan, followed the meteoric climb of Magnus Carlsen, and went to bed with the golden queen from my father’s chess set clutched in my fist instead of the stuffed bear my mother had given me.

Chess was my father’s game and learning its strategies was our primary form of bonding.

Edward Dante didn’t like the game. He had no patience for hours of thought and subtle manipulations. He was a child of action, grass-stained jumpers and ripped trousers, bruises from roughhousing with the servant’s kids, and bloody lips from altercations with older boys who tried to bully the young ones at school. His bonding time with Noel was spent with a cane and his open palms, a beating each time he rebelled from our father’s teachings.

I didn’t rebel. I was not inclined to be different from my father. It was both natural to love the things he loved and beneficial.

My mother loved me deeply, but I didn’t have to do anything to warrant that love, and somehow, it meant more to me that my father’s affections had to be earned.

It became my childhood and adolescent mission to deserve it.

For years, I did. So well, in fact, that on my ninth birthday, Noel began my introduction to the Order.

To this day, I remember every moment of Yana’s beating in the dungeon of Pearl Hall. The wet scent of cold stone and subterranean earth, the heaviness of the damp air, and the creak of the old wood steps beneath my feet as I followed my father into the dark.

Yana herself was cemented in my memory like a headstone memorializing the death of my childhood, a marble angel weeping over the grave of the love for my father.

She was so young, eighteen as Cosima had been when I acquired her, but without any of the Latin passion and fire that made my wife blaze from the inside out. She was as thin as the waifs Edward and I imagined wandered the moors of the Peak District at night in white nightgowns, their mouths wide in eternal screams, their eyes dark with nightmares. I was terrified by the sight of her, slim and wan as she was kneeling on the ground in the middle of the chamber with her head bent and her hands clasped.

She was so fragile I worried the very vibration of our foot strikes against the floor would shatter her into millions of porcelain pieces.

Noel, it became clear, had no such compunction.

“This is Yana, Alexander, but formally, she is known as slave Davenport. You see, our family has been an established member of a very prestigious society since its inception in 1655. We are the wealthiest, most powerful men in the United Kingdom, and together, we run the country from the shadows. We also participate in a game of wits and domination. It is the practice of the Order of Dionysus to acquire a slave to break them and train them to be the best. We have annual gatherings to assess which lord has the best pet.”

His words rolled over me like the morning mist on the hills, cold and opaque. My child’s mind could not begin to comprehend what he was trying to explain to me. I knew the history of England and of the Greythorn dukedom inside and out, but I had never heard of the Order, only of the Greek god Dionysus, the deity of revelry, wine, and a certain kind of madness.

Noel moved with the undulating, feline gait I’d tried to emulate my entire life to the shelves and hooks of bizarre tools lining the stone walls and retrieved a long, coiled rope like the one I’d once seen in an Indiana Jones film.

My mild confusion and unease shattered just the way I’d imagined Yana doing as he stood behind her, cocked the whip, and smiled at me.

“This, son,” he’d said with the paternal, warm grin, “is how you beat your slave.”

What followed was too graphic to put into words. It was the dissolution of my childhood and any purity I might have inherently retained because of my age.

Noel ruined me in that dungeon just as assuredly as he ruined Yana.

My mother noticed the abuse done to my back, of course. She was a caring woman and also an Italian one—she had eyes on the back of her head and a sense for everything that went wrong with her children. She tried to tend to the open wounds, but Noel found her and forbade her from nursing me.