Page 66 of The Enslaved Duet

With all my remaining energy, I turned my head against the wood to view the spectacle.

It was Edward on top of Alexander, holding his hands over his head while some of the other brothers of the Order tried to pry him off.

“Please, Lord Thornton, explain your behaviour?” Sherwood asked silkily from where he loomed over Alexander.

“I want to take slave Davenport’s punishment.”

Alexander’s steady words struck me with the force of the snake whip.

“You do?” Sherwood questioned with barely concealed glee. “Because you can’t bear to see her hurt?”

“I submit to the Order’s punishment. Though I haven’t been soft on the slave, I did take my hands to another brother without first going through the Order. I believe a flagellation is the normal punishment for such a misdemeanor.”

“You are correct,” Sherwood mused. “Though it would have to be Lord Edward who wields the whip.”

No, I wanted to scream. There was no way Alexander would take a beating from his own slanderous brother for me. I couldn’t believe it, and more, I didn’t want to.

It said too many things that shouldn’t have been true for us.

“I submit to the Order’s punishment,” Alexander repeated regally, as if he was not being sentenced to a flogging.

“Very well. Prepare him.”

I closed my eyes in sorrow and relief, tears searing through my lids and sliding down my cheeks.

Alexander was taking this punishment so I didn’t have to.

He was going to be beaten by his traitorous brother forme.

My heart set to aching even more than my back.

I gasped as something warm and heavy was draped over my me.

“Hush,bella,” Alexander whispered in my ear as they pressed him to me and shackled him to the contraption with thick, secure leather cuffs. “I’m here, my beauty.”

The urge to cry grew like a thorny thicket in my throat.

“Oh, Xan,” I whimpered as the men jerked loudly on Alexander’s bonds to test their strength and then stepped away. “Why are you doing this?”

“No one hurts you but me,” he claimed fiercely as he used the tip of his nose to wipe a tear from my cheek. “Knox nearly flayed you alive, and he will die for it, I swear to it, but for now, let me save you from this.”

“Begin, Lord Edward,” Sherwood snapped.

“This is the world I was brought up in,” Alexander whispered quickly. “It’s not an excuse, but context, Cosima. If I am a monster, these are my creators.”

A slice and whistle then the sharpcrackas the whip ripped across Alexander’s back. His entire body tensed against mine, trying to keep himself off my tender back.

He didn’t make a noise.

Edward beat him soundly, the thwack of the leather harsher to my ears than it was when Knox went at me, and I realized that because Alexander was a man, he was getting an even more thorough punishment.

After a while, he gave up trying to keep a small gap of separation between us and his sweat-slicked torso stuck to my back, stinging the open sores.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered almost drunkenly.

Another apology from my Master, this one so much more potent than the last. It could have been in tribute to so many of his dastardly acts against me, but my brain was stripped of its ability to nuance and so those two small words seemed to encompass everything.

This Lord and Master, who submitted to no one for nothing, was taking a thrashing from a man he reviled for me.