Page 223 of The Enslaved Duet

They said,I love you.

They said,I will never be without you even if you should go.

They said,we are a closed loop.

And then the searing tip of the brand was pressed directly into the skin over my heart, and it felt as if the emotion she’d poured into my once hollow body erupted from that place, spilling out with agony that tangled so closely with ecstasy I didn’t know where one ended and the other began.

I kissed her hard, fisting a hand in her luscious hair to keep her close while I feasted on her warm, spicy flavour. The burn was wicked, the pain so severe I wondered for a moment if I might cry out from it for the first time in my life.

I didn’t.

I took solace in the woman who was my reward for a being born into such a life, and I continued to do so long after she had pulled the iron away from my body, long after our skin had cooled and the fire had died down. I held her, and I loved with only my hands on her back and my tongue in her mouth, and when we finally parted, I felt filled with a previously unfamiliar emotion.

Clean, bright hope like a bubble expanded from my gut, floating delicately to the surface of my thoughts.

I brought her palm over my wound, gritting my teeth against the pressure on the raw flesh. She dipped her head as I moved it away again, studying the stylized initials “CD” covered in thorns and poppies carved forever into my skin.

“Yours,” I said gruffly.

“Yours,” she agreed.

And I thought maybe, at that one moment suspended between agony and joy, an in-between place that seemed to exist solely in the gap between our bodies, if maybe our happily ever after was achievable after all.

Cosima

We held hands as we walked across the thick grass down the sloping lawn to my father’s large, airy home. It felt so mundane and yet utterly profound to be holding the hand of Alexander Davenport, Earl of Thornton and my Master. After all this time and so many tribulations, it was a simple act I didn’t take for granted.

My fingers flexed locked between his, and he slid me a sidelong look that wasn’t quite a smile but spoke of one. I couldn’t help but look at the space beneath his buttoned shirt where the new brand lay, a brand he had willing offered because he wanted to be owned as equally by me and I was by him. Love and awe rolled through me like a warm breeze, and I felt filled with hope for the first time in a long time as we strolled back to the house where my father and Dante would probably be waiting with some delicious home-cooked meal and a bottle of deep red wine.

Car doors slamming around the front of the house and sudden coarse shouts in Italian had both of us freezing mid-step.

“Vaffanculo,” Tore growled as we broke into a sprint and rounded the house to the front yard. “What the hell are you taking him for?”

I slammed to an abrupt stop as if I’d run into a brick wall when I arrived beside the scene and took it in.

There were police cars in a row of three down the drive, their light spinning pinwheels of red, blue, and white light over the yard and the tableau of two men pushing Dante to the hood of a car in order to cuff him. They were both considerably shorter than the Italian-British man, and they used excessive force to keep him in place even though he lay passively against the car.

They read him his Miranda rights in low, ceaseless monotones that I could barely hear over Tore’s ranting questions.

“As I said,” a third policeman was saying to him, “Edward Dante Davenport is under arrest for the murder of Giuseppe di Carlo. If you continue your tirade, we will be forced to arrest you for police assault and impeding a criminal investigation.”

“Like hell you will,” Tore bellowed, shoving a finger at the younger man. I’d never seen him so angry; his face was flushed like a spill of wine, and his voice was as rough as gravel underfoot.

Alexander stepped forward with confidence to intercept Tore’s lunging body and began to calmly speak with the officer. I didn’t do anything because my body had ceased to function.

I was mired in shock, my feet tangled in the roots of my own self-hatred and the muck of my confusion.

How could this be possible?

Dante hadn’t killed di Carlo.

My hand still burned with the heat of the gun in my hand as I’d turned it on the Cosa Nostra crime boss, as I’d drilled a round into his black heart and one into his corrupted brain. My fingers flexed in the empty air as the memory ran through me like a physical thing, like a car crash breaking every bone in my body.

Dante was being arrested for a crimeIhad committed.

No.

That couldn’t possibly happen.