Page 58 of The Enslaved Duet

He was shorter and slimmer than Alexander, with mousy blond hair that curled floppishly around his ears. It was his cock that perturbed me most though, hanging half-turgid out of his opened trousers and still wet from my mouth.

Bile crashed against my esophagus, and I choked on it once before submitting to the urge to vomit over my shoulder into the massive oriental vase behind me.

From the corner of my eye, I watched as Alexander broke from his terrifying paralysis and stormed across the room, sweeping up the interloper in his cyclone wake. He took him off his feet with one hand fisted in his collar and the other at his shoulder.

I coughed and gasped, my hand over my raging heart as Alexander slammed him brutally into one of the walls. Two paintings plummeted to the ground beside them, the glass shattering into thousands of crystalline pieces at their feet.

Alexander didn’t notice.

He was utterly consumed by his rage. I couldn’t see his face as he pushed it close to my assaulter’s, but I could see the fury in every line of his gladiator’s form as he squeezed a large hand around the man’s neck.

“You dare to touch what’s mine, Lord Ashcroft?” Alexander seethed over the sound of the man choking for breath. “You dare to use the property of a Davenport man without my express permission? I will show you what is done to vile thieves in this house.”

Summoned by the commotion, Riddick appeared in one of the many doorways to the circular room and took the man in a tight grip by the neck.

“Take him to the Iron Chair,” Alexander ordered.

Lord Ashcroft whimpered. “Alexander, old chap, what the fuck is wrong with you? What’s a little sharing between brothers of the Order?”

“I don’t give a fuck about the Order. This is my home, and you stuck your miserable excuse for a cock in the mouth ofmylovely slave. You’ve desecrated at my altar, and you will be punished as the heathens did, in a way that is so unmerciful, you will feel the consequences of your actions for the rest of your life.”

Ashcroft wailed as Riddick turned on his heel and literally dragged him out of the room. I stared after them in mute horror.

I wasn’t just traumatized by the assault of a strange man.

I was fractured by my willingness to submit. A healthy woman would have looked up into the eyes of the man she was going to pleasure; she would have demanded something in return or at the very least, not felt elevated to a spiritual plane the moment a cock was between her lips.

It was the realization that I was a slut that razed me to the ground at that horrible moment. So, when Alexander stalked over to me and bent down to tip my chin gently with his curled knuckles to look in my eyes and study my mental state, he found nothing.

No, courageoustopolina, no atavistic Cosima.

Just a vacant shell.

“My beauty,” he breathed, his voice vaporous as agony punched him in the gut. “My sweet, pure beauty. I am so sorry he defiled you.”

Sorry from the lips of my Master.

It should have been a gift I spent overlong unwrapping, smoothing the ribbons through my fingers, teasing the tape back with the edge of my thumb like a child on Christmas.

Instead, its prettiness felt foreign in my lap. A present I didn’t deserve.

I should be the one to apologize for being such a floozy.

For allowing someone else to use me for their pleasure when it was only Alexander I wanted to serve.

He was horrible in ways I could recognize and understand. If there was a monster under my bed, I wanted it to be him because his was a cruelty I was familiar with.

The idea of being used and terrorized by another completely undid me.

“I will beat him to within an inch of his life,” Alexander cooed to me as he gently used the edge of his sleeve to wipe the tears I hadn’t known were spilling down my cheeks. “I will sit him in the Iron Chair and use the cat-o’-nine-tails on him until he is a bloody mass of stripped ribbons on the spiked throne. How does that sound,topolina? Do you think then he will understand that you were made for no one but me?”

Yes!my mind hissed. I could just imagine Alexander using his considerable force to flay the man for his transgressions, taunting him for his idiocy so that he could break his body and mind simultaneously.

Alexander was a champion at that.

I should know.

“Would you like to watch? Would that make you feel better?” he wondered, skirting gentle fingers along my hairline, trailing his thumb over my swollen mouth.