Page 228 of The Enslaved Duet

As I passed Sinclair, his hand reached out to gently ensnare mine. Our eyes met, and I saw all the happiness I’d ever wanted for him shining from his eyes. It made my throat throb with tears.

“Happy?” he asked, simply.

“Almost as much as you,” I told him, squeezing his hand back. “It seems you have a knack for saving Lombardi girls.”

He didn’t laugh with me. Instead, his electric eyes went dark as they looked at his new wife and then back at me. “No, Cosi, the Lombardi girls have a knack for saving lost men.”

I swallowed his blessing like communion wine with closed eyes and a soft smile of thanks before I moved again through the jovial crowd. Something dark moved too low and quick through the edge of my vision, prompting me to look at the shadows in the hallway leading back to the bathrooms.

A boy stood there, his shoulders pressed to the wood, his hands in the pockets of his impeccably pressed trousers. He was oddly familiar even in the low light, the burnish of his flaxen hair, the way it pushed back from his forehead in a ridged crown of gold that contrasted deeply with the dark pits of his shadowed eyes. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen, on the knife’s edge of puberty, but not quite there, still slim in a way that looked gangly and round faced with baby fat that had yet to melt off.

It wasn’t until I was almost upon him that I realized just exactly who he was.

Rodger Davenport.

Noel’s third son, the one masterfully produced by Noel’s secret union with Mrs. White and kept hidden from Alexander and Dante in case, one day, he was needed to usurp his older brothers.

The one and only son I had never and would ever trust with my life because he had proven the one time I had the displeasure of interacting with him, that he would be only too happy to end it.

Alexander and Dante, for all their faults and considerable darkness, were well-adjusted saints compared to the fevered evil that lurked in Rodger.

I saw that malicious intent as we locked eyes, and he grinned like a demon freed from Tartarus to wreak hell on earth. My heart palpitated brutally in my chest as if he’d reached through my ribcage to squeeze it in warning.

“What are you doing here?” I said. Even though I was too far away and the room was too loud for him to really hear me.

He read my lips, though; his thin, starched smile stretched tighter between his cheeks as he caught onto my fear.

“Come see,” he taunted and then ducked down the hall.

A woman came out of the yawning mouth of the hall just as he moved into it, obscuring which way Rodger went. I decided to check the kitchen first and found it empty but for two cooks sweating and swearing under their breath as they hustled out with the last of the food to be served. I winked at Carla as she looked up at me, then ducked back out the door, hesitating in front of the men’s room before I shoved through the door.

Rodger stood by the row of urinals, his hands in his suit pockets, one shiny loafer clad foot tapping a beat on the tiles as he whistled a sharp, staccato tune.

“Boring party,” he noted with a one-sided smirk. “I bet you miss the Order’s soirees, don’t you, slave?”

I tipped my chin high. “We both know I donot. What are you doing here, Rodger? If Alexander and Dante see you, they won’t hesitate, and I don’t want to see a boy your age get hurt.”

“He told me you were soft,” Rodger said with a cluck of his tongue and a shake of his head that dislodged a piece of gold hair from his crown so that it swung into his dark eye. “He also told me he tried to teach you that softness would be the death of you.”

“Noel didn’t teach me anything but pain and regret,” I retorted.

My heel was still pressed to the swinging door so that it was lodged open, the sounds from the party a soothing comfort at my back. I was facing off with the spawn of Satan, but my heroes were close at hand if anything went wrong. I wanted to see why Rodger would take the risk to come all this way just to taunt me.

He cocked his head to the side. “Those are valuable lessons, are they not?”

They were. The pain had unlocked the mysteries of my body’s mechanisms, and the regret had taught me exactly what was important in my life.

But I’d had enough pain and enough regret without Noel force-feeding his own brand of misery to me the night of my wedding.

“Should we bring your older brothers in here and ask them if they agree?” I asked with a sharp smile to match his own.

Rodger was a creature of the dark. He respected boldness, cruelty, and manipulation the way a normal person might honour wisdom, courage, and empathy.

“Or maybe I could teach you something about pain?” I asked, running my hand up my thigh and pulling the fabric as I went so that the knife folded and tucked into my garter was revealed to him. “Just as you did that day with me in the dungeon.”

He licked his lips, fast as a lizard and just as revolting. When he looked up from my exposed leg, he smiled his eerie, boyish grin. “That was a fun day, wasn’t it? I can’t wait to have more of those.”

“You won’t. Ever.”