Page 94 of The Enslaved Duet

There was no excuse, though, for what it did to my heart.

How it palpitated to the beat of his shoes striking the marble as he made his way down the corridor to my gilded cage.

How it twisted into vicious knots every time I displeased him and then collapsed back into shape, heavy with pride and elastic with satisfied submission when he praised me.

How I could feel his name etched into the bloody walls of my heart much the same way he’d branded it into the skin of my ass.

The last vestiges of my resistance lay crumbled around me as I held this fierce, brutal beast of a man against my skin and gave myself over to my heart’s betrayal.

I loved him.

The cruel lord of this manor, the beastly man who owned me and ruled my every whim.

And it was exactly at that moment of my capitulation that he destroyed me, as a shark sensing blood in the water.

“Tomorrow, you’ll leave,” he said, in that clipped accent that stripped emotion from every word. “And I’ll finally be rid of him. And, thank heaven, of you.”

My heart didn’t break.

I’d heard about it enough times to imagine the sound of the shatter as it broke under the hammer fist of rejection like delicate glass.

That didn’t happen.

Instead, I could feel the organ grow heavy and slow, the blood through it congealed with unsaid emotions, weighted with bone deep sorrow. It grew so heavy, it sank from my chest to the depths of my belly where it anchored in the mire there and ached dully with my pulse.

I knew in the same way I’d always known my father would be the end of my life as I knew it, that I’d never live again without the weight of my dead heart in my belly.

Alexander was sending me away to be the weapon of his revenge, and I know in my soul, I wouldn’t return to him unscathed.

It felt strange to be back in Italy. The air was too hot against my pale skin, each ray of sunlight like a scalpel peeling back layers of my flesh until I burned red all over. My little family home felt too close, and I kept bumping into lamps and walls, tripping on uneven flagstones.

Other things were strange too, sitting at a table to eat dinner felt wrong after months of eating at Alexander’s feet or in my bedroom with a tray of food over my lap. The cheap sheets over my twin bed in my shared room with Elena and Giselle abraded my sensitive skin and made it impossible to sleep.

I was also horny, bloated with repressed sexual longing that made my breasts swollen and tender, my sex heavy like a pendulum ticking away the time since it had last been touched.

I missed Alexander in a physical way that felt like the agony of detoxing from an addiction. Thoughts of him itched and raced under my skin, swirling through my mind so that a few times I even hallucinated his presence in bed beside me, in the kitchen watching me chop garlic, and in the shower as I dared to touch my aching pussy.

It wasn’t easy to act normal around Mama and Elena. The first had given birth to me and could tell in the ways only a mother knows that I had been changed irrevocably over the past ten months. It was Elena, though, who questioned me tirelessly about my life during that time. Where I had eaten in Milano, who my friends were, what it was like to live in and work in London.

Lies fell easily from my lips. I’d learned from master manipulators in Pearl Hall, so I didn’t seize up over the falsehoods or tangle them in my mind. Still, despite my ease, Elena peered at me often as if I was one of her ethics problems.

It worried me enough that after a few days, I had taken to avoiding one-on-one time with her.

I’d been home for over a week, and I still hadn’t found a way to approach Salvatore. The truth was, I didn’t want to lay eyes on the man who had betrayed his own daughter by selling her into slavery. It didn’t matter that I’d grown to love Alexander or that I’d been on a journey of discovery in the underworld and returned reborn, darker, and stronger than before.

He was still the villain in my life’s tale.

There was nothing he could say or do that would earn my forgiveness because he had not only wronged me, but he had also wronged my family.

And that, as always, was where I drew the line between forgettable and unforgiveable.

Somehow, I would have to find a way to swallow my hatred and pretend I wanted to breach the void between us, reunite like some sweet story from a Bildungsroman novel. All so that he could be finally brought to justice for the wrongs against Alexander and me.

“You’re so quiet these days,” Elena noted, cutting through my distraction.

She was studying me as she taped a box of her books closed, and I took a moment to let myself love the look of her. She was the most Angelized of my siblings, her body long and lean, her skin white and her red hair so dark it shone like merlot in an artfully tousled mess of curls around her angular face. Seamus was etched in nearly every facet of her face and form, a fact she hated so thoroughly, and sometimes, I wondered if it tainted her entire perception of herself.

She had changed too since I’d been gone, her porcelain doll’s face had lost its placidity to bitterness that tightened the edges of her eyes and mouth in a way that made her look cruel.