Page 74 of The Enslaved Duet

“Yes,” Alexander agreed, wrapping me up tight and taking the reins as we began to navigate through the forest.

Random shouts still echoed through the dark, but less now since most of the girls already had been captured hours earlier. I knew Astor was scouting ahead and would probably alert Alexander to any incoming hunters, so I allowed myself to relax slightly against his warm body.

“Why do you do this with them?” I asked.

I had to know; my heart was turning into two, one dark and one light, one-part Alexander’s and one-part mine. I needed to know the intricacies of his atrocities before I could allow myself to sink deeper into the darkness.

“I told you, I was born into this and raised by their rules. It should be rote for me to be one of the Order’s disciples just as so many other things in my life are my born obligations.”

“Should be,” I tested as I tucked my head under his chin and pulled the jacket he had placed at some point over my shoulders, closer around me. “But isn’t.”

“I thought for years I was destined to be my father’s son, and I hated the idea of it. Then my mum died, and the man I’d always been unsure how to love when I hated his actions became the only person left in my family. It made the burden of being my father’s son and heir even harder to untangle myself from.”

“Maybe family isn’t everything,” I murmured, unaware of how my words could have applied to myself as I sank deeper into my exhaustion and began to fall asleep. “Maybe it isn’t enough to make decisions based on them. After all, you have to live for yourself.”

It was strange to return home to a place I had never seen from the outside but knew intimately from the interior. I’d spent so many of my early days at Pearl Hall wandering the halls aimlessly, my only distractions the many eccentricities of the architecture and design. I knew my reflection from the many angles in the Mirror Gallery built by one of Prince Regent’s many mistresses, the widowed daughter of the 6thDuke of Greythorn. The faces in the Long Gallery that reached from one end to the other of the second floor were more familiar to me than those of my long-ago friends in Napoli.

It was like falling in love with a man you’d never seen the face of even though you knew all his inner workings, how he ticked and the sound of tock and why he gave pause when he did.

We crested a hill on a little road carved out between thick trees of pine and cedar, rowan and ash and then a gatehouse appeared.

“Welcome to Pearl Hall,” Alexander said from beside me, watching me take in my first sight of the estate.

The gatehouse was long and tall, more like a fortress wall with an archway carved out of the stone for us to pass through to the other side. I wanted to ask if it was manned, but I could see the security cameras winking in the low light and the man who waved to us as we passed through before he turned to close the massive iron gates.

“We get a lot of tourists fancying a tour of the grounds,” Alexander explained. “As you know, this is a private estate, and it would be… dangerous for outsiders to wander about.”

“Hmm,” I said, biting back my smile. “Because of the herd of wild deer?”

“Those… and other predators,” he responded drolly.

I didn’t bother to hide my giggle, and when I shot him a sidelong glance, he was staring at me in the way he had that wasn’t quite a smile but somehow more intimate.

“You continually confound me, yet you refuse to explain yourself to me.”

I tipped my chin at him and then moved my gaze out the windows again. “I may be a slave, but I am also a woman, and therefore I am under no obligation to make sense to you.”

I wanted to talk to him about so many things. About Landon Knox and Edward Dante, about the future of his position in the Order now that he had caught the “Golden Fox” and Sherwood had reluctantly granted him a “boon.” I wanted to ask if I’d already been through enough in the first six months of slavery to warrant setting me free before my five-year term was up at the same time that I wanted to ask him to keep me by his side forever.

I didn’t, though, because he’d been moody and contemplative on the ride back from the Highlands, and I doubted he would answer my questions honestly.

We drove for another few minutes after that along the winding road until we descended into a valley that unfolded between the broad frame of forested hills to reveal the entire expanse of Pearl Hall.

It was breathtakingly lovely, the scope so large it seemed impossible that so many wonderful acres of land could belong to one family.

There was a temple on a small hill, a large pond that stretched in manmade perfection from one end of the grand house to the other beyond the studied maze in the back garden. A large fountain made of black marble burst from the center of the circular drive before the house, a chariot half submerged in the water with the great Greek god Poseidon at its helm.

The Davenports had a thing for Roman and Greek mythology, which wasn’t surprising given their history, secret society connections, and predilection toward sexual assault.

It was the house itself, though, that brought tears to my eyes.

The three-story structure was a study in symmetry even though Noel had told me once it was a hodgepodge of Palladian and Baroque architecture. The roof was steeply gabled over the main house with a decorative and fantastical dome behind that like something I was used to seeing on Italian cathedrals.

A palace.

Every girl dreams of a palace at some point in her life, usually as a child, but I never had.

My dreams had been considerably more pedestrian.