Page 72 of The Enslaved Duet

I scrambled backward as Landon shouted in agony and tried to bat the falcon away. Frantically, I tried to look for a way to get around him easily and back into the night woods.

Only, there was a shifting of the darkness in the trees behind Landon, a parting of night as if Hades himself was breaching the veil from the underworld.

And then there was Alexander, walking calmly, silent as a spirit across the leaf laden turf.

There was a glint of something in his hand, something red flashed in his hand, silver at the bottom.

A ruby hilted knife.

I gasped, but Landon didn’t hear me as the bird of prey finally unlatched with a sickening wet slide and took off into the night again. Free from his tormentor, Landon finally pried the stick out of his cheek with a moistpopand spat bloody saliva on the ground.

“You little whore, I am going to hurt you until you sing like a fucking bird,” he promised me.

Alexander dropped to his knees behind him, so much taller that he loomed over the other man even like that. The knife went to his throat smoothly, his other hand hard in Landon’s hair as he tugged his scalp back and jutted his neck into the blade.

“I am the only one that hurts her,” Alexander stated as his falcon let out an almighty screech of primal victory from somewhere above us.

And then he slit his throat.

I watched like a camera lens devoid of bias as blood, black in the darkness, spilled like a silken shroud over Landon’s front. He twitched as Alexander held him, and then moments later, his eyes rolled up then closed, and he was dead.

Alexander stood, hefted the body in his arms, and walked some ways away into the black until I heard a heavy splash that had to have been Landon’s body sinking in the stream. My ears strained for the sounds of his boots in the mud, and I felt such an immense sense of relief when he returned, I almost dissolved into sobs. I looked at my muddy, torn up knees, my naked torso riddled with scratches, and tried to compose myself.

“Look at me, Cosima,” he ordered in that hushed, Dominant voice I couldn’t disobey.

A shiver wracked through me because I hadn’t listened to those delicious, dulcet tones in weeks.

His eyes glowed brighter than the moonlit fragments filtering through the trees. I swallowed thickly at the way they owned me, the wayheowned me even with one look, even five feet away.

“You’re okay,” he told me. “Hush,bella, I’m with you.”

I realized I had been making a keening sound like a lost kitten and the moment he told me tohush, I stopped.

“You shouldn’t have killed him,” I said hoarsely. “You’ll get in trouble again.”

And then what would I do?

What would I do if I had to go to a new, crueler Master?

What would I do withouthim?

The moon disappeared behind a cloud, and Alexander’s eyes went dark.

“People die in The Hunt each year. We don’t even look for the ones who don’t return. We just cover up their deaths as if nothing’s amiss. No one is taking you from me.”

“Grazie a Dio,” I whispered, thanking God.

I wanted to ask him to hold me because I was cold, and hurt, and defenceless, in need of comfort. But also, because he hadn’t touched me in so long that I wore my ache for his touch like weights between my legs.

I couldn’t put that into words. I didn’t want to and given my current mental state, I couldn’t even try.

But I reached a hand out into the blackness and I felt Alexander lean in to it from where he kneeled.

His stubble roughened jaw fit into my palm like a puzzle piece and something deep within me that only he could reach, clicked on.

I lunged for his mouth, my lips hitting his awkwardly, mostly on his chin, my tongue in the slight cleft there.

He held still, surprised.