Page 235 of The Enslaved Duet

Why was it the worst people I knew wore the most beautiful masks?

It made it nearly impossible to see past my instinctual love of their beauty to the demons lurking beneath.

“Good afternoon, dearie,” she greeted me with a genuine if tremulous smile. “It’s so good to see you alive and well again.”

“Well?” I asked, the air hissing from my body like steam from an overworked engine. “You think this iswell?”

She bit her lip and tittered nervously. “No, perhaps notwell, but alive then. I wasn’t so sure after what happened in New York.”

“As if you didn’t know what he had planned,” I accused as I stalked toward her. She took one step back for every two I progressed until she was backed against the windows, and I was pressed deeply into her soft body. “You knew back then what would become of me, and when that didn’t work out, you still tried to see me killed.”

She swallowed thickly, her breath hot and smelling of peaches against my face. Irrationally, the fact that she had recently indulged in sweet ripe fruit made me even angrier.

I hadn’t tasted something fresh fordays,and this horrible bitch was gorging herself on fruit in Alexander’s fucking kitchen.

My hand snapped up before I even realized it and wrapped finger by finger around Mrs. White’s fleshy, pale throat. She choked against my hold, her spit flying in my face. I rubbed it off with one hand and then sneered nearly against her lips, “I don’t care if you didn’t have a choice. I don’t care if you were only trying to survive. You took me under your wing while I was enslaved here, you made me think I could trust you, and then you took advantage of that. Maybe I could forgive you for that, but I can never forgive you for taking me away from Xan. I can never forgive you or your son for k-killing him and my family.”

Mrs. White sputtered, her face ripening like a tomato on the vine from sickly green to pink then vermillion red.

Still, I squeezed.

It wouldn’t be the first time I’d killed someone, though it would probably be my last.

I knew I didn’t have much longer to live, and if it was the last thing I did, I would be happy I’d ended Mary White’s life myself.

The door behind me banged opened just before I was ripped away from her by an arm belted across my chest and shoulders. I could tell by his scent, musky and contrived, that Noel was the one dragging me away from his old slave. He pushed me into the chair before a vanity and then backhanded me so hard on my already sore right cheek that I felt the skin split over my cheekbone.

Then he was in my face, caging me in with his arms braced on the chair, looming over me like a vengeful God. “I gave you liberty, and I have no compunction taking it away again. If you can’t behave, I willmake you.” He looked over my shoulder at the door where I could see Rodger in my periphery, bouncing on his toes as he watched his father take out his anger on me. “Son, fetch me my toolkit.”

It turned out that Noel’s version of a toolkit was like something out of Dr. Frankenstein. He had hammers, nails, and a nail gun, whips, floggers, and chains, raw ginger and cayenne pepper, clamps with teeth and weights with hooks to attach to genital piercings. First, he buckled a red ball gag around my head, securing it between my teeth so that I sat before the mirror looking like a suckling pig roast ready for devouring.

Then he opened that vicious kit and began to apply his tools to my body in punishment for attacking Mrs. White.

My arms were bound from shoulder to wrist with rough rope to the chair back and my legs from groin to ankle against the chair legs. There was ginger paste painted onto the delicate skin of my clit, igniting it with itching, burning discomfort even before he clamped it with hard metal teeth. Then Noel taught Rodger how to use adjustable c-clamps to pinch my nipples between the metal bracket and the screw head.

The worst part of the entire ordeal was being forced to watch them truss me up like a doll in the beautiful gilt mirror I’d once loved in a room that Alexander had helped make into a home.

Tears streaked down my face even after they finished, photographed me, and left with a warning to let Mrs. White ready me for dinner or else…

Her hands shook as she painted my pried open lips blood red and dried my tears as well as she could to apply bronze and blush. Sometimes, her breath hiccoughed as her eyes strayed to my bruising nipples or pained sex, but she continued diligently to pretty my face for our shared dictator.

“I know you don’t want to hear it,” she said finally in a voice so quiet, I had to strain to hear her even in the silent room, “but I want, no,needto explain myself to you…When Noel took me as his slave, I was elated and horrified. My father was one of the last unsuccessful tenants farming Davenport land, and he owed Noel a great debt. Much like you, I was given as payment. I lived close enough to know the village gossip, so I knew what Noel did with his slaves. He went through so many, you see, and even though outsiders weren’t allowed into the Hall, delivery boys could sometimes hear the wails and then some of the servants, well, they nattered when they shouldn’t have. I wasn’t the prettiest lass, and I wasn’t very charming or classy the way I figured alordwould want, but I was clever.”

She chuckled sadly to herself as she finished my makeup and picked up the brush to run through my hair. Her eyes locked on mine in the mirror, and even though I wanted to look away, I became mesmerised in the distressed denim of her gaze.

“I was clever enough to know I had to give more than just my body and submission to Noel if I wanted to survive him. Remember I told you before the night of the ball in London? Beauty fades, darling girl, and I needed something that wouldlast. I almost wish now that I hadn’t endured. Twenty years is a long time to be beaten by a man with endless creativity…but I made the choices I made to survive, and then when I had a son, so that he would too.”

I glared at her, writing my own monologue in gold ink so that she might read it in my eyes.

She stared right back, her lips twisted with a conflicting mixture of pride and doubt, before she hesitantly unbuckled the gag and gently removed it from my stretched mouth.

I worked my jaw to relieve the ache before I said, “You’re right, I don’t care. You sacrificed a woman you should have empathised with. There were other ways to win the game, other moves you could have made.”

She bit her lip and then opened her palms to the air in benediction. “It was the most direct way I could find to checkmate.”

“Well,” I told her ominously because her fishing expedition for pity had not hooked me through the mouth or reeled me in. If anything, it made me hate her all the more. “The game isn’t over yet.”

I watched as she read the acrimony carved into my features, and then as her own face curdled like bad cream.