Page 51 of The Enslaved Duet

Shock stoppered my breath.

“In fact, you might know Amedeo asCapoSalvatore. I see you know him,” Noel said with a small, enigmatic smile. “I take it he has rather a powerful hold on Napoli and the surrounding regions.”

“He does,” I admitted as my stomach cramped and my heart stuttered.

I felt like a flailing engine.

“Haven’t you wondered why Alexander chose you when he could have had any woman worth buying in the entire world?” Noel taunted.

“Yes,” I whispered, my hand going up to massage the great stone mass suddenly obstructing my throat.

I had wondered and wondered, and now that I was faced with the ugly truth of it, I didn’t want to know.

“He wants to use you to infiltrate theCamorra. To get close to Amedeo Salvatore and end him.”

The words thrust through my mind like a bullet, tearing apart my brain and spewing everything I was across the beautiful library like lost grey matter.

How had Alexander known my connection to Salvatore? Had he known the day I saved his life and spoken my name aloud or even before that?

How could he expect an eighteen-year-old girl to infiltrate anything, let alone one of the most notorious mafia outfits in the entire world?

I’d been so curious, but now that Pandora’s Box was spilled open at my feet, I wanted to stuff the answers inside because they only led to more questions.

I woke up sometime in the night when the sky was at its darkest and everything felt too close, like ink spilled from the black bowl of the atmosphere and dropped between every crevice.

I shifted slightly, and my hands caught, jerking back against some invisible bonds. I pulled again and unwittingly kicked out my legs to find that they too were bound.

I was spread open and apart in a giant X across the bed, my limbs tied off at each post.

My mouth opened to scream, but a hand clamped down over my mouth before I could emit a sound.

“Hush, my beauty,” Alexander’s crisp words rustled like papers in the still air. “It’s late and the whole house is sleeping.”

I tried to protest behind his hand, but he kept it firmly banded over my lips.

His warm breath fanned over my cheek as he leaned closer to run his nose over my ear and whisper, “There is no need to struggle,topolina. I have you pinned like a butterfly to this bed, and I mean to treat you thusly. With reverence and tenderness, like the beautiful and fragile creature you are.”

I moaned, and he seemed to perfectly translate the words I wasn’t given permission to speak aloud.

“This isn’t about what my father so wrongly told you this afternoon. It was not his place to unlock the doors and secrets in his house. We will talk about the lies he told later. This isn’t an act of forgiveness for my roughness with you last night or the one before that. I will never ask your forgiveness for the things I do to your body.” He shifted in the dark, a great looming monster of shadow like a demon summoned up from hell. The wet tip of his hard cock smeared over my hip as he straightened and reached for something on the bedside table. A shudder of rampant desire went through me at the knowledge that he was naked.

“This is about the other side of BDSM,” he continued in the bland tones of a professor reciting a lecture to a group of inane students. “Our relationship is about control and submission. This means if I want to fuck you until it hurts, I will, and you will let me. It also means, if I want to eat the honey between your thighs for hours until you are an incoherent mass of quivering flesh barely able to think past the pleasure, I will. I do not need to hurt you or threaten you to own you. There is dominance in pleasure too.”

“Does it matter that I don’t want your touch right now? Do you care that I feel torn apart by what Noel told me? You… you want me to put my life in danger for you, and I barely know you, let alone like you!”

“Hush, my beauty,” he coaxed, pressing a finger to my mouth. “I will make this deal with you. If you play with me now, I will answer your questions after.”

“Why does it have to be like this? Why can’t we just talk?” I asked, squirming against the cuffs.

“Because many times in our relationship, you will not want to do something, and I will. You must learn that the only person’s desires that need be met aremine. Lesson three,bella. Now, do we have a deal?”

I wanted to fight him for the right to talk. To take my fists to him the way he was teaching me to do in our sparring sessions and make him bleed for being so pugnacious, but I was immobile and at his mercy, so I nodded tersely.

“Yes?” he prompted.

“Yes, Master,” I hissed.

There was a laugh in his dark voice as he said, “Good little mouse.”