Page 55 of The Enslaved Duet

I didn’t look like Seamus or my sisters who had inherited only their golden complexions from Mama and otherwise were replicas of our father.

Sebastian and I were cut from dark cloth, constructed into strong angles and long lines that spoke of different genes.

Ones that harkened back to acapoI’d known my entire life, one that hovered over our small lives like a dark power. He was tall, strong, and swarthy with a smooth, rolling gait that reminded me suddenly of Sebastian’s.

Alexander’s smirk cut like a knife wound across his face. “You see it, don’t you? I took you because your biological father killed my mother, and your faux father was stupid enough to use you to repay his debts. It seems both your fathers’ sins have shackled you to your fate long before you realized it.”

My breath wheezed through my throat like a poorly equipped air conditioning unit, my body hot and cold in strange turns.

“I thought about killing you,” Alexander mused as he resumed stroking my hair, only this time, his touch wasn’t tender; it was perfunctory. The way one might pet their prized hound after he’d passed his prime before he was sent to slaughter. “But that was before I met you and saw those prized money eyes Amedeo had always spoken about so poetically. What a better fate, I thought, to use you, to bend you to my will and then send you back to him. How much more poetic would it be if it was his own sacred daughter that led him to his demise?”

I want to scratch at his hand, desperate to peel his steel fingers away from my windpipe, but I was still tied to the bedposts, helpless as a starfish too high on the shoreline. My mind had lost its tether to my shattered reality and I was beginning to lose purchase on any semblance of my life as I knew it.

It was very possibly that he was killing me.

“It was such a good plan, you see,topolina, and I am loath to change it. Only now, things have changed irrevocably. I,” he pulled in a deep breath and put his face even closer to mine so that his eyes swallowed my vision like a lunar eclipse, and his mouth was against my lips. “I find myself as much in your thrall as you are in mine. The taste of you lingers in my mouth, the echo of your giggle in my ears, and the feel of your satin skin haunts my fingers, so in strange moments, I feel I could manifest you in my hold from out of thin air.

“I don’t wish to use you anymore to kill your father. I don’t wish to be duplicitous about my motivations. I want you to desire to help me. Help me bring justice to a man who left you for poor and gone in the wasteland of Naples for years to fend for yourself until he finally sold you into sexual slavery. Help me send the man who killed my mother out of jealousy and rage to prison for his crimes. Please,” he said with a stroke of his tongue over the top of my parted mouth. The word sat like a pearl on my tongue, a precious gift I wanted to swallow and keep safe in the shell of my belly for all time. “Please, when the time comes, help me.”

I wasn’t thinking rationally.

My whole world had changed that day for the zenith time in the short span of three months, and I needed time to think. Time to be away from a man who radiated a magnetic field to rival the earth’s poles, who drew my eternal moral compass to him like a faulty true North.

I didn’t take that time, and I didn’t want to.

He had manipulated me too soundly. I was filled with anger that had been latent too long, with righteous indignation that needed some end and that end was being given to me.

Didn’t arrogant, destructive Salvatore, who ruled the criminal underworld of Naples that had tormented my family for years, deserve to be punished?

He might have been my biological father, but that only meant I’d been seeded by the Italian devil. In truth, he had done just as much lasting damage as Seamus had, and hadn’t I gotten rid of him?

What was one more wrong righted? Especially if ridding Naples of Amedeo Salvatore meant my family could move forward unscathed.

My passionate mind and heart collided in unity, but it was my gut that churned up a response. “Yes, when the time comes, if it means you’ll let me go back to my family, I’ll help you bring him to justice.”

Alexander’s taciturn face broke open into a full-lipped smile that took my breath away. He’d removed his hand from my neck, sliding it up my neck so that he could cup my cheek and sink the tips of his fingers into the hair over my ear. His eyes were eloquent with pride, relief, and fierce triumph, but he didn’t voice any of it. Instead, he slowly closed his mouth over mine and let me eat them off his tongue.

“You can’t tell your family,” he murmured. “They can’t know.”

I nodded because I didn’t want them to know for my own reasons. I was the first line of defense for the Lombardi clan, so I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to drop a grenade in their mist.

Besides, how could I be the pane of glass in a family of fractures if my entire life was a well-kept lie? Would Elena still confide in me, and Elle still allow me to support her? How would Mama answer for her sins and move on with me to a better place of understanding?

What would Seb do, knowing he was the spawn of the worst man he’d ever known?

No, it would be just one more secret I harbored like a cancer in my cells so that it didn’t infect my family.

“Will you tell me about Edward?” I asked, desperate to take the pressure off my chest and focus on another mystery that had nothing to do with me.

Alexander rubbed his nose against mine. “No, my beauty. That was confession enough for tonight.”

He pulled away his face shuttering until the light of his tenderness was gone and all that remained was the dark shadow of domination. My mouth went dry at the sight of his enormous cock saluting the ceiling as he walked on his knees, straddling my legs and hips, then settled his buttocks on my abdomen. He fisted his cock in one hand and used the other to plump up my breasts like cushions before pushing them together. I shivered as he spat on the steep valley of my cleavage and then slowly pushed his searing hot dick into their fold.

“Now,” he said in a voice like a hand on my throat. “It’s time for you to make your Master come.”

I was waiting for him.

My thighs were wet, the air around me perfumed with my honeyed scent.