Page 230 of The Enslaved Duet

I had no doubt of their resolve and ability to save me.

They had done it before, and they would do it again as long as life demanded that from them.

From us.

There was a nondescript black car idling outside, exhaust curling through the air and wrapping around me, the toxic fumes as sickening as the feel of Rodger’s hand pushing me to the car and then into its dark interior. He grinned at me before shutting the door, a grin so young and excitable it made me cold from the inside out.

He was pure evil, and he was only fourteen. Only a boy.

It seemed where Noel had failed to make Alexander and Dante into men without souls, he had succeeded with Rodger.

It was as repulsive a realization as it was incredibly sad.

Rodger had never had the innocence that came with childhood because Noel had taught him from birth that the world was a terrible place, and if he wanted thrive, he had to be the most terrible thing in it in order to succeed.

I stared out the window at the brick back wall of Osteria Lombardi as my ears rang and my eyes smarted with tears. It was hard to believe that after everything we had been through and fought for, I was finally going back to Pearl Hall.

Not as its mistress as I had dreamed of for years.

But once more, as a slave.

I turned to look at Rodger to find him staring at me, his good humour sloughed off like a snake’s dead skin.

“Was it worth it? Knowing you will die at home with us so your loved ones can live on without you?” He asked the question without inflection or any true emotional curiosity. He asked it because he didn’t understand the concept. He had manipulated me, not knowing why I would ever fall for his mechanism because he himself had no heart, no loved ones he would ever have to sacrifice if called upon to do so.

“Yes,” I said, and it was the truest word I’d ever spoken.

“Too bad,” Rodger said and then with a flash of his little boy grin, he swiped open the screen of his phone and sent off a prepared text message.

I could see what it said from where I sat.

Do it.

My mouth was open like the wound I felt yawning through my chest as I looked up at him to confirm, “Rodger, what are you—?”

My words cut off when I heard the startled shouts begin inside the restaurant, and I forgot what I had been about to say when there was a loud hiss and then a strange hollowpopfollowed by the boom and shatter of breaking glass and crumbling mortar.

My body twisted to keep my eyes on the building as the car moved forward down the alley. I watched as fire blew out through the back door and licked its red tongue toward the sky, incinerating the garbage bagged on either side of the entry.

If anyone was inside that inferno, they would not survive.

There was a loud sucking, wet gurgle and heave of air inside the car as we turned left out of the alley, and the flaming building disappeared. I didn’t know what it was until I tried to speak and realized my mouth was flapping open like a luffing sail caught in the wind, my chest ravaged with sobs so deep the keel of them dug into my gut and ached fiercely.

“Why?” I managed through the tears destroying my body like a fucking tempest.

I tried not to think of all my loved ones fried by the fire, tried not to remember my school trip toPompeiiwhere loved ones lay overlapped in futile attempts at protection, calcified by soot and black rock. I tried not to think of Sebastian and Mama, of my Giselle and my Elena, of Dante and most of all, of Alexander.

I tried to focus on the wealth of rage in my chest instead as I stared at Rodger and forced him to answer with the sheer weight of my gaze.

He licked his lips and shrugged his aristocratic shrug before leaning back in his chair to settle in for the ride. “Because,” he said on a yawn. “Because it was fun.”

And when he leaned over to sink the tip of a fine needle into my wrist, I let him because the only cure for the kind of heartbreak ripping me apart was the blessed relief of medically induced oblivion.

Cosima

My brain was too heavy and hot in the confines of my skull. It throbbed like a metronome set to ticking between my ears, setting off a series of raw nerves throughout my body so that I pulsed with pain all over.

I squeezed my eyes shut tighter, not against the pain but thedéjà vu.