Page 212 of The Enslaved Duet

Alexander

I hadn’t been back to Pearl Hall in years, but I’d needed to return to speak with my father because against all odds, the incriminating information the FBI and the MI-5 had found on almost every single member of the Order of Dionysus didnotinclude information on Noel Davenport, the Duke of Greythorn.

I did not understand how this was possible except for the fact that he must have had someone watching me or mine to know what was going on so that he could prepare for it. Even prepared, it was only a matter of time before they uncovered enough evidence to put Noel away with the rest of them forever. I didn’t want to wait any longer for that time.

I wanted Pearl Hall for myself again. I wanted to take my wife back to my ancestral lands and make that grand house, for the first time in so long I wasn’t sure it had ever been recorded in our history, a fucking home. A haven filled to the brim with our love and our glorious life together.

In order to do that, I had to face the monster who’d made me.

A butler answered the door for me, unsurprised by the sight of me because the warden at the gates had clearly forewarned him. He ushered me mutely through my unchanged house into Noel’s favourite library, the very one with the chess set placed before the black marble fireplace. He sat in the same leather highbacked chair he always occupied there, his fingers held in a steeple over the chess set, his face carefully void of expression. He was still handsome, even at sixty-eight years old, and it made me sick to look at him and know I would likely appear just like him at that age. His carbon copy, he used to say admiringly, as if gazing into a flattering mirror that reflected a much younger version of himself.

“Sit down,” Noel ordered.

I remained standing, but I strode into the room and stopped with my thighs pressed to his palatial desk, looming over him from across the mahogany surface. Balancing on my fingertips, I leaned forward, hooking his eyes with the force of my expression.

“You’ve made a deal with the Devil, have you?”

My father tipped his head slightly to the side in mock shock. “Me? Why, Alexander, it’s not like you to be so daft. I’ve been under house arrest for twenty-nine months. What do you possibly insinuating I’ve done from the cage of my own home?”

“You know exactly what I’m referring to you. I didn’t come here to faff about, Noel. How did you know about the takedown of the Order?” I demanded.

“Semper paratus,” he drawled. “Always prepare, son. I taught you that from a young age.”

“I want to know how.”

“And I want out of this bleeding house,” he countered, finally stirring from his impassivity like a dragon from enchanted slumber. “Sometimes, we simply don’t get what we desire.”

“Perhaps,” I agreed, righting myself to smile at him the way an executioner might smile at their hapless victim. “Though lately, I’ve been getting exactly what I want. The Order is disassembled. After centuries of abuse and flagrant perversions, your precious society isover,and there will be no recuperating from it. I’ve cut at the heart of the hydra. James is using the dissolution as a political feather in his cap. It’s all over the global news. You and yours aredone.”

“It seems, as I’m sitting here and not behind bars, that I am, in fact,notdone,” Noel retorted. “And once again, son, you forget the primary theory of chess. This is a game of mental Darwinism. If you blunder about as you have, gallivanting all over the globe trying to take down a group of monsters and save your damsel in distress, you’ve forgotten an important fact.” He leaned forward with a sneer, revealing eye teeth pointed enough to be termed fangs. “The worst enemies are often closer to home.”

Ominous foreboding rolled through the room like pastoral fog over the moors, and I couldn’t bite back the shiver that crept spider soft up my spine.

“What have you done?” I asked, wanting to weaponize the words so he would feel the threat in them but feeling as if I held an unloaded gun.

He sat back in his chair, a placid smile on his face, eyes inanimate as marbles. The same butler who had open the door for me swept into the room with something glinting on a pillow and headed for the roaring fireplace. I stood still as Noel unfolded from his chair and went to the servant, plucking a familiar gold necklace hung with the massive heart of a glowing ruby in his fingers. It caught the firelight as it dangled off one fire, the burnished thorns turning red in the glow as if tipped with blood.

Cosima’s collar.

The same collar I had taken from Pearl Hall when I had abandoned it to my father years ago. The same collar, until I moment ago, I believed had been locked in my safe at the Plaza in New York City.

And Noel had it.

He had sent someone into the hotel room, broken into my safe, and knowing I would visit, had prepared this portentous ceremony to drive a lance into the shield of security I had felt the past few years.

Noel might have been caged, but even a caged monster finds a way to let his evil spread.

My father smiled at me the way he had when I was a lad, gently condescending, potentially proud if only I could accurately comprehend the lesson he was about to deliver upon me.

“Love is the ultimate weakness, Alexander. The moment you foolishly fell arse over tit in love with your slave was the moment you put yourself in check, dear boy. And this?” He swung the necklace over his finger, back and forth, building speed until it flew off and spiraled into the fireplace, sinking into the flames like a boat lost at sea. “This is checkmate.”

I stepped forward with a snarl marring my face, rage like an ice storm ravishing my body. “You can throw around metaphors, burn symbols, and taunt me for a perceived weakness that is truthfully a strength. You can do it all, but those are the hollow mechanisms of a fucking monster, Noel. In the end, even if it takes me an entire lifetime, I’ll see you burn just like that collar.”

I turned on my heel to leave, then thought the better of it and swung back. Noel was already returning to his desk, so he wasn’t prepared for my tackle. He fell to the floor like a sack of potatoes and lay prone as I smashed one of my massive fists into his face. I felt the crunch of his nose under the pressure and knew that, for the second time, I had broken it.

He coughed and gurgled through the spill of blood flowing down his face, and I leaned close enough to feel the spray of pink tinged spittle against my skin. “I told you once, and I will tell you once more, Noel. You touch one hair on Cosima, and I’ll kill you with my bare fucking hands. And that’s a vow I take much more seriously than any I ever made to your precious defunct Order.”

I pushed up from the floor and strode to the door, not hesitating even though I wanted to, when Noel whispered wetly, “Too late for that, son.”