Page 54 of The Enslaved Duet

Truth be told, it made my empathetic heart ache for him. What kind of life had he led that made him so removed, so callously reserved?

“I’ve never seen more inquisitive eyes,” he murmured as he looked down on me. “A golden palimpsest of questions. What will you ask the hawk first, little mouse?”

“Why didn’t you come for me?” I asked even though the question burned as it left my throat.

His smile spread slowly over his face, and he was close enough for me to watch how it changed his eyes from pewter to light grey and how it hooked from one side of his mouth and pulled through to the other.

God, but he was such a beautiful beast.

I had thought I’d known beauty before but never like his. Never a handsome so powerful it hurt the eyes, not a man so beautiful he could weaponise it.

“I didn’t come for you because that is not always the purpose of our play. Sometimes, it’s to teach you a lesson, sometimes to reward you for good behaviour, and sometimes, it will be about good old fashioned power dynamics. You just came like an eager little wanton while I was controlled enough to stave off. How does that make you feel?”

I knew the blush wouldn’t show on my skin, but my cheeks burned with shame. “Like a whore.”

“Mmm,” he acknowledged with a very slight, smug grin. “Only ever for me.”

“You seem to enjoy this, being cruel one moment and sweet the next. It’s driving me even crazier than the isolation in the ballroom did,” I admitted to him, staring at his fingers as they twirled a piece of my silky hair.

I watched as his eyes turned over from sun-shaded silver to the dark side of the moon, pocketed with craters and tortured mysteries. He stared at his fingers in my hair as if the strands held the answers to all of life’s questions.

“I was raised to be a Lord and a Master. My father and his… friends trained me from a young boy to be ruthless in my perusal of pleasure and power, in dealings with money, society, and especially women. I’m not sure if I would have been born with the inclination to stripe a woman’s ass with a cane, but isn’t that the endless question of nature versus nurture?”

“I think you like it,” I whispered, because this transparency between us was new, and I didn’t want to tear the paper as I carefully traced his edges. “You like to hurt me.”

“Yes,” he agreed as his other hand slinked up my torso, between my breasts to collar my throat. “I love to see your body exposed and shaking under me like a stripped wire. I would do this to you even if I didn’t have to.”

“But you do have to. Tell me about Salvatore.”

His sigh ruffled my hair as he shifted over me, tucking one of my thighs between his legs so that my entire body was plastered to his. I wanted to nuzzle under the right angle of his jaw, tip my nose against his pulse and feel him so strong and sure against me, better than any security blanket could be.

I shouldn’t have felt so close to him or so safe in his arms, but I told myself it was the strange euphoric aftermath of submission that made me unduly needy and nearly weepy.

“When I held you in that alley, I knew who you were before you told me your name. I could see him in your eyes and in the cut of your jaw then when you spoke, you shared the same accent, the long, soft vowels of Neapolitan.”

“What are you saying?” I asked, staring down the edge of a cliff, my toes curling around the side for purchase.

I didn’t want to fall, but momentum at my back was pushing me forward, and I knew the drop was inevitable.

Alexander’s hand tightened around my neck so forcefully, I couldn’t breathe. “Isn’t it obvious? Amadeo Salvatore is your father.”

I gasped, desperate to draw air and sense into my body, but Alexander wouldn’t let me. His weight against my chest deepened, and his fingers throbbed over my throat in time with my pulse.

“Your mother had an affair with him over eighteen years ago when your father was held in prison for a time. I only know because Amedeo and my mother spoke of it sometimes over the years, when it was late and they thought little boys should be in bed. It resulted in twins, two babies so beautiful that even though he couldn’t father them, he also couldn’t let them go.”

“Stop,” I croaked as stars exploded in front of my eyes.

I didn’t know if it was from oxygen deprivation or the fact that my entire universe was rearranging itself to make sense of this news.

Salvatore wasn’t my father.

He couldn’t be.

Mama wasn’t a zealot, but she was a devout Roman Catholic. It was one of the reasons she had never divorced Seamus even when she should have.

To have an affair with another man when she was married with two other babies at home… it just didn’t compute.

Only, I could call up the haunted longing in Mama’s eyes as she stared out the lone window in our small kitchen and how she would cry sometimes at night, holding her rosary beads and a book of prayer, mumbling about forgiveness and sin. I’d always assumed she was praying for Seamus, our family’s penultimate sinner, but what if I was wrong?