Page 195 of The Enslaved Duet

Alexander accepted Ren’s bet and pushed his chips into the center and flipped over his cards.

Two queens that matched with the cards on the river, meant he had a full house.

Ren smiled like a shark, all teeth and mean intent as he readjusted his cards, slyly trying to pull the hidden queen from his shirt sleeve.

Only, it wasn’t there.

Of course.

Because I had given it to Xan.

Ren’s frown flashed across his face before he could curtail it, and his eyes cut down to me.

I smiled at him beatifically.

He tensed just slightly as my possible duplicity sank in, and then his jaw flexed as he tossed his cards onto the red felt.

A queen and a ten of hearts.

Without the queen laid out for Alexander, the queen he had meant to play, Ren only had a flush, which was trumped by Xan’s full house.

If he’d had the queen, he would have played the most powerful hand in the game; a royal flush.

Alexander’s smile sliced a red wound between his cheeks as mocking and evil as the Joker’s. “Well, Tarsitani, I believed some information is owed to me. Where and when is the Order holding its next auctions? Additionally, what do you know about the relationship between di Carlo and my father?”

Ren swallowed heavily, obviously attempting to speak through his anger at being thwarted in his plan. He opened his mouth to respond, and a crashing bang resounded through the underground room.

A moment later, the back door, one we hadn’t entered through, slammed open, and four masked men spilled through the gambling den dressed in head-to-toe black. They had automatic weapons in their hands, weapons that started to spit bullets before we could even make sense of the calamity.

I dived to the floor on instinct and started to army crawl around the table to get to Alexander and Dante. A cacophony of grunts, startled shouts, and gunfire ripped the air to shreds, and the poker table exploded into splinters over my head, raining sharply down over my skin.

I shouted as two hands pulled me roughly off the ground under my armpits and began to haul me toward the door.

Not the front door, though, and with gut cramping affirmation, I knew it wasn’t Dante or Xan who had caught me up to save me.

It was one of the masked men.

I screamed as I was hefted over his shoulder, kicking out and punching deeply into his kidneys in an attempt to get free. He didn’t hesitate a moment, spraying bullets over the area of the room where my two beloved men were hidden.

I heard Dante swear loudly in Italian and then Xan call, “You take her now, and I will end not just you, but every single fucking person you have ever loved.”

The man holding me paused for one brief second, his gun silent, his feet heavy in their tread. I thought maybe the dominant, arctic voice of my Master would be enough to halt him, but even Alexander’s power had limits.

A moment later, amid a hail of gunfire, he was running us across the floor under cover from the other men and out the door into an alleyway. He took the steps to the street level two by two and then wrenched open a car door before tossing me roughly inside.

I righted myself quickly, pushing my rumpled hair out of my face with one hand while grabbing the knife from my ankle holster with the other. A flicker of movement across the interior had me moving in a flash, holding the knife up under the throat of my captor, my body spilled like an oil slick over his lap.

Only then did I look up into the face of my abductor.

“Good evening,carina,” Seamus Moore said in mild greeting. “Look how you’ve grown.”

Cosima

Seamus Moore was five years older, and apparently, none the wiser. The moment Alexander and Dante discovered he had taken me, he was a dead man, which, maybe unsurprisingly, did not incite feelings of woe in my heart. Time, it seemed, did not heal all wounds. I found only an astonishing amount of hate and dread toward the man who had acted as my father—however abysmally—since birth.

Unfortunately, it seemed time hadn’t touched Seamus in other ways either. His thick hair was still the gleaming colour of candlelit copper in the low light of the limousine, his handsome features strikingly Celtic to my now trained eye; from the russet freckles on his pale skin, as vaguely sweet and contrasting as cereal in milk, to the perfectly formed small rosebud of his pink mouth. He and Elena looked so much alike, especially in the low light. For some immutable reason, they both looked even more beautiful in shadow.

It was such a shocking blow to see him again, let alone know that he had orchestrated the entire holdup in the backroom just to have a private moment with me. Some other daughter might have thought of him more often, in the moments when his choices on her behalf from the past echoed into her future. But there was more than one villain in my life, and Seamus was the least pertinent and the least malicious.