Page 93 of The Enslaved Duet

He didn’t return at all that day, and instead of eating dinner alone, I saddled up Helios with the help of the stable boy and took off.

Maybe I couldn’t actually run away, but I could make it difficult to find me if he went looking.

A field beyond the left pastures at the back of Pearl Hall, snug between the forest at one end and the hedgerow maze at the other, was where the ground was covered in a thick carpet of poppies. The bold colour had drawn my eyes two weeks ago when I’d finally ventured far enough in my journeys with Helios to reach the forgotten corner of the estate, and I’d nearly cried at the beauty of my favourite flowers bowing steeply in the breeze.

I sat in their embrace that evening, splayed out over the broken stems and crushed petals beneath me while I played, my fingers gentle in the silky filaments swaying into me with the wind.

The contrast of their bold appearance and secret fragility was all too easy to parallel to my own duality. It seemed I tried so hard to appear strong and resilient, but the moment something powerful slammed into my life, I was powerless to stand up against it.

I wanted to be strong enough to break through the last of Alexander’s titanium shields and win the heart of my complicated Master, but the task seemed nearly insurmountable.

Dark grey clouds the colour of Alexander’s eyes rolled across the sky, but I didn’t move. I wanted the cold English rain to purify my muddied thoughts and leave an easy solution in its wake.

How did I untangle the knotted mess of lies my life had become and smooth out the threads so I could keep the good ones?

How could I keep Xan while still keeping my family and my independence?

The grey veil parted, and the rain rushed forth in a deluge. I propped myself up on an elbow to survey the sweep of water as it fell over the Greythorn estates, but something moving quickly from the stable caught my eyes.

Alexander on Charon, galloping across the rapidly dampening earth like Hades out of the underworld, determined to snatch the goddess Persephone from her field of flowers.

Only, I wanted him to snatch me away and make me queen of his dark domain.

I watched without moving as he cantered up the hill and swung out of Charon’s saddle before he even came to a complete stop.

His face was immovable stone, threatening as the storm breaking through the air all around us.

“I thought you’d left,” he fumed quietly as he fell to the muddy blanket of poppies at my feet and caught my ankle.

He dragged me forward until my hips slid up over his thighs and then he used the pocket knife he produced from him riding jacket to rend a hole in the center of my trousers. He fisted both hands in the fabric and tore it clean in two, so that the rain beat down on my white panties and turned them sheer.

“I thought you’d run away, but you have to know,topolina, I’d never let you go without saying goodbye,” he promised huskily, and then his body was pressing me into the wet grass and blooms as he ravaged my mouth.

There was no finesse in the way he snapped my underwear with his fingers and pulled his breeches down just enough to free the angry length of his cock. There was only animal urgency and primal instinct to mate.

I clawed at his shoulder as he found my wet cunt and thrust inside, biting my neck hard as he pounded into me. I knew the mark he left would bloom red as the poppies trampled beneath us and just as soon gone.

I wanted him to plant poppies all over my skin with his hands and teeth so that I bloomed like the entire field of flowers, more alive than I’d ever been before.

And he did bite me, my neck, my shoulders, the exposed skin of my chest and even my thumb when I brought it to his lips. He fucked me hard like a barbarian claiming the spoils of war, and I loved every moment of his inflexible body driving mine into the dirt.

There was something mean in our sex, some edge of desperate cruelty that had been there even in the beginning.

He fucked me like I was his enemy and he wanted to impale me on his cock and paint me in the triumph of his cum.

“Take my cock,topolina,” he commanded me, pinning my throat with a big hand as he rutted faster, deeper inside me. “Take it and thank me for it.”

I came at the thought, spasming and thrashing against the marshy earth as my mouth formed the chantthank you, Master.

Seconds later, his cock kicked inside me, and his cum splashed against my womb. I held him tightly as I took his cock and his semen, committing the feel of his heavy limbs immobilising me and the smell of the rain in the flowers to my memory forever.

When my hazy brain finally cleared, he was still inside me, hard and thick as a steel pipe wedged between the tight pink walls of my aching sex. I could feel the hotness of his cum against the opening to my womb and the cool trickle of it sliding down my inner thighs into the crack of my ass. He was in me, his heavy weight on me, and his cruel, puppeteer’s hands all around me, forcing me to dance to his dark, malicious tune.

I didn’t want to like it.

The cold, calculating way he sliced me into pieces with the refined edge of his sexual commands until I was a pliable, passive mass of ribbons piled on the floor at his feet.

But after months of conditioning, of relying on him for the very food I ate and the water I drank, some primal part of my brain was programmed to like it. Some instinctual code in my DNA was prepared to lust after it.