“Your biggest campaign was in June with Mila Cosmetic,” Willa Percy confirmed. “And most recently Intimissimi lingerie?”
“Yes, I was lucky enough to work with some of the most talented people in Italy.” The memory of my time with Intimissimi warmed me, and I felt my usual confidence return, straightening my spine.
“Yes, well, this isn’t a dinky little national campaign.” Freida Liv stared at me with her glacier eyes. “Things are done differently here at St. Aubyn. You have some good runway experience…” She flipped carelessly through the photos of my runway walks for Dolce & Gabbana and Valentino. “But that isn’t what St. Aubyn is looking for.”
“What Freida means to say is”—Jensen shot his colleague a look that spoke volumes—“St. Aubyn is an international fashion house with a cosmetic line, ready to wear and fragrance. You will have to be as adaptive as a chameleon and as strong as a jungle cat. We want someone women envy, Miss Lombardi. We want St. Aubyn to transition from staid, formal wear to sophisticated sex.”
“You’ll need more than a new face to do that,” I said before I could help it. My hand flew to my mouth, but I lowered it just as quickly. Not thinking before I spoke had always been one of my greatest flaws. They might as well know it before hiring me.
Jensen’s white eyebrow rose in his caramel face. “True, it starts with the designers, the creative directors, and the company, but it will end with you, and that is all consumers care about.”
I opened my mouth to ask another question but stopped myself. This was not the kind of environment when it was appropriate for a run of the mill model to make inquiries. Jace Galantine noticed my hesitation and nodded to prompt me.
“Why not hire an actress then? It’s the standard now and I’m sure you’ve been approached by some of the best to represent your revamped brand.”
Jace nodded like a professor pleased with his student even though Freida Liv glared at me viciously. “The new CEO wanted to go another way.”
“It’s a test really,” Jensen explained gruffly, excitement flaring in his tired eyes. “Of the brand. Can we take a no-name beauty and propel her to stardom?” Freida scoffed delicately, but the two men ignored her. “If so, it would do more for the brand than an actor with an identity separate from the brand. Brooke Shields and Calvin Kline Jeans, Adriana Lima and Victoria Secret.” He opened his palms. “A new image calls for a new face.”
“Enough.” Freida cut in, her eyes cold on my face. “Renna will take you to try on a few items.”
I nodded, my heart beating heavily in my chest. My hands shook as Renna helped me pull on the assorted items, a white organza dress that moved over my body like sheets of luminous fog and a brilliant red suit made of individually cut lace panels cut in a sharp V to my belly button. This was the opportunity of a lifetime and I had no idea what to do in order to stand out. I thought of the beautiful women outside, just as capable as me if not more so, and of my family back in Napoli. Fierce determination flooded my blood, hot and vibrant. When I returned to the room in each outfit, I could feel the strength shine like gold lamé against my skin. When I entered wearing the white gown, even Willa Percy seemed impressed.
After three dresses and four separates, I once again faced my panel of judges, but somehow the atmosphere had changed, iced over, and they each stared at me apathetically. It took only a moment for me to discover why.
“Ciao, Cosima.”
Landon Knox lounged in the doorway, his salt and pepper hair and beard melding with the shadows to creature the allusion of a man with no face. But I knew what he looked like in the sun, the shade, at night and noon. I knew because the agent who stood before me had been the reason I became a model in the first place.
A brutal shiver raked my spine. “Mr. Knox.”
His smile was thin on his pretty face as he stepped forward into the light. “I should have known you’d be here, scratching your way up the ladder like a starved cat.”
The contempt in his voice made me nauseated, but I tilted my chin. “I work hard.”
“Oh, I know.” He was close now, almost directly in front of me, and I glanced uneasily at my judges to see if they would interfere. Though the two men and Willa looked uncomfortable, Freya smiled prettily at me. “But you won’t be here, not for St. Aubyn.”
He leaned close and lowered his voice so that his breath passed over my face in a sickly hot wave. “I told you when you left me, you wouldn’t work in Roma again.”
I swallowed the sob that rose in my throat and glared up at Landon, a man I had not so long ago thought I desperately loved. “That’s your loss then, Mr. Knox.” I turned to my panel of judges and smiled demurely even though my eyes were hot with anger. “Thank you for your time, I won’t waste any more of it.”
With my head held high and my fists furled tightly at my sides, I left the room. It was only when I passed the dozens of beautiful faces in the outer room, when I was safely out on the anonymous streets of Rome that I leaned my head against the brick building and fought the urge to cry.
Sweat beaded on my forehead even though I stood concealed in the shade of the alley next to the building, but I was grateful for the familiar heat and constant cacophony of Milanese traffic at midday. I pressed the back of my head to the cool stone of the building I had just emerged so unsuccessfully from and fought the crushing sense of failure that threatened to rob me of breath. We needed the money that job could have brought. I was the primary breadwinner for my family of five, and though I had been modelling since I was fourteen, the blow of rejection still hit particularly hard.
I gritted my teeth at the thought of Landon ruining the go-see for me. He was an Englishman and an editor at Italian Vogue. His special interest in me when I was just a girl was the very reason I was a model now. Once, when I was young and impressionable, he had been more of a paternal figure than my own biological father. He wasn’t that old, in his mid-forties now, but compared to a fourteen-year-old me, he seemed ancient and safe in his old age. In a sense, he was. He never tried to sexually manipulate me, but that is where the line was drawn in the sand.
It didn’t stop him from dictating what I ate, how much I slept, what I wore to go-sees and then even at home with my own family, and how I comported myself around others. I was always to defer to him.
It was a relationship doomed to fail from the start.
You see, I’d never been very deferential.
Our relationship ended seven months ago, the same day I’d been admitted to the hospital for complications from anorexia.
I pushed off from the wall and tugged at the hem of my slightly sheer blouse and smoothed a hand over my hair, ready to head to the metro and back to my tiny shared apartment on the outskirts of town. The only reason I noticed the person passing by was because his earphones had become unplugged from his iPod and the tin-like sound of his music made me look over as he walked up the alley toward me. He was a handsome boy, not much younger than myself, but it was the expression on those features that worried me. His eyes darted quickly between the cars crawling along the street and when a sleek black Town Car pulled up in front of the building, blocking the entrance to the alley, he shuffled almost excitedly from foot to foot.
Cautiously, I moved closer to him, wondering what he was so obviously waiting for. My eyes were on him, but I could see someone emerge from the car and move towards the building I had just left. The boy bounced on his toes—once, twice—and I recognized the giddy fear in his stance as he launched forward.
Before I could consciously debate the decision to do so, I was following him. I swallowed a second of terror when I saw the unmistakable gleam of a gun in his hand as he took three looping strides forward, his fingers white knuckled over the butt. He held it uneasily though, and I drew confidence and conclusion from his shaky grip.
Just as he was about to reach the unsuspecting man from the car, I caught up to him and took a firm grip on his shoulder. I waited for the hesitation in his stride, when one leg was locked straight
, and the other remained hovering in the air, remembering one of the defensive moves Sebastian had drilled me and my sisters on for hours as young girls. I held my breath for that instant and brought down my foot hard against the outside junction of his leg, where the kneecap connects the leg muscles. There was a sickening crunch followed by a gurgled scream as he fell to the ground. I looked up from where he lay, deeply disorientated, my heart pounding brutally against my chest, into grey eyes as varied and intense as a mid-summer stormy sky. For a moment, less than a second, those eyes were the center of my swirling world and gave me the confidence to take one deep, trembling breath.
In the span of that breath the two men from the car burst into motion, the driver practically diving out of the car to detain the would-be-attacker on the ground, a knee pressed into his spine as he wrenched the assailant’s hands painfully behind his back. I watched as he produced a pair of zip ties from the inside of his expensive blazer and secured him.
Not a second later, the man with the grey eyes was on me.
My breath escaped my body in one hard whoosh as his colossal build slammed unforgivingly into mine, and my spine cracked then compressed against the brick wall behind me. I tried to inhale and choked on the shock as his thick forearm came up to press against my neck in a punishing hold.
His eyes were all I could see. Those huge irises like brushed steel framed by dark brown lashes under a heavy, furrowed brow. I could read the threat in each stroke of those pewter eyes, in every inch they scored over my face like a scalpel through soft flesh.
He was threatening me not because I was the original threat, but because he didn’t know me. Even more, he didn’t understand my motivation.
Why would a stranger compromise herself for some unknown man unless she had an agenda?
I tried to convey with my eyes—metallic too, but gold, warm where his were cold—that I had no agenda but to escape his clasp and flee the scene of a crime I hadn’t even committed.
Still, I didn’t struggle against him. Something base that lived in the pit of my gut like a primordial creature stuck forever in a dark cave told me that if I resisted him, he would put me down.
And not gently.
Because this threat was about even more than my circumstance or the suspicious question mark I posed. This man simply was dangerous. It radiated from him like a gravitational field, an added pressure against my already bruised body.
There was death in his dark eyes the same way it was in the eyes of the many Made Men that had been vultures circling the carrion of my life since its inception.
“Who the fuck are you?”
The crisp edge of his British voice cut through the fog of my receding adrenaline, strong and clean like the snap of a whip.
He spoke in English, and I wondered if he couldn’t speak Italian or if he’d momentarily forgotten where we were.
“The woman who just saved your life, signore,” I replied breathily because his arm was still belted across my throat. “I think that should earn me the right to breathe?”
“I will repeat myself once,” he clipped out. “Who the fuck are you?”
Constellations of white stars were bursting at the edge of my vision as I struggled to breathe so I gave the bastard what he wanted.
“Cosima Lombardi.”
Commotion from the other side of the car drew my attention, the brassy shouts of Italian police arriving on the scene and the low British accent of the driver who’d incapacitated the assaulter.
“Cosima.” He tasted my name, rolling the vowels together the way Italians did. “What did you just do?”
“I saved your life,” I repeated, my hands going up to grip his suit clad forearms.
His soft scoff blew his minty breath over my lips. “That may be a bit overdramatic. Riddick was standing by, there was security in the building, and I know how to defend myself.”
“I saw the gun,” I gritted out between my clenched teeth, irritated that I was on the defensive when I’d acted the good Samaritan. “It seemed like the only thing to do.”
“Next time, beauty,” he said, leaning in even closer so his firm, full lips tickled my cheek. “Consider this. If someone is under attack, maybe it’s for a good reason. Maybe, they even deserve it.”
“Deserve to be murdered? Are you kidding me?”
He leaned back enough so that his eyes caught mine in a hold as fierce as the one he had against my neck. “I am not a man who kids. I am a man whom, unlike yourself, understands the causality of nature. There is no effect without cause, no act without provocation.”
“So… you deserved to be killed?”
A grin sliced through his left cheek like a weapon. “All animals, deserving or not, die eventually, but some are powerful enough to warrant a hunt. And you just interfered in such a hunt, bella. Do you know what happens when a predator is under attack?”
“He turns into a stronzo?” I asked, insulting him and struggling against his tight hold yet again to no avail.
“He turns feral and will attack anyone in the vicinity, even an innocent.” He leaned closer as his scent swelled in the warm air between us, fresh and cool like damp forest air. I could see the pulse throb strongly in his tanned column of his throat and felt the odd animal compulsion to press my tongue there. “Be careful where your good heart may take you, for it may be straight into the arms of a predatory beast.”
“Ragazzi,” a police officer called, shattering the strange energy between myself and the stranger as he jumped over the hood of the car to reach the criminal and the bodyguard who held him.
The strange blond man pressed tightly into me as if imprinting himself into my skin, then stepped back abruptly and dropped my hands. The darkness his features retreated like night creatures into the shadows, only the glow of his silver eyes giving away his wicked intentions.
“This is the last time I try to save a life,” I muttered, smoothing my slightly trembling hands over my bodice.
“Oh, I should hope so,” he parried even though he was already turning, his eyes on the policeman, his mask affixed. “Though I very much doubt it will be the last time you become involved in a situation you shouldn’t. You have no preservation instincts, and such a failing will be the end of you.”
I watched him greet the policeman, how the officer winced at the firmness of his handshake and the unconquerable power he wore like a mantle over his broad shoulders. In under thirty seconds, the Brit had established his dominance over the lawman. I remained preoccupied with him even when a man came to interview me about the crime. Even when I was released from questioning after giving up my contact information and an officer was leading me toward the metro.
He lingered like the thought of a monster under a bed, like a creature lurking in the dark of my dreams ready to corrupt them into nightmares, and when I looked over my shoulder before descending into the underground, he was watching me with hawkish intent that blistered my skin.
I knew in the same way I’d always known my father would be the end of my life as I knew that this wouldn’t be the last time I would see the predator I’d so foolishly saved from slaughter.
Present day
My brain was too heavy and hot in the confines of my skull. It throbbed like a pendulum between my ears, setting off a series of raw nerves throughout my body so that I pulsed with pain all over. I couldn’t open my eyes or drag enough air through my lungs. I was paralyzed, stuck in what felt like the fetal position on ground so hard it had to be stone. I wanted my sight back because without it, consumed by hurt and wretched with loneliness, it was all too easy for my imagination to conjure up my setting as the pit of Tartarus, the last circle of Hell.
I thought about karma and fate, kismet and destiny. The mythical constructs we created to explain away the unexplainable things that happened to us. The absurd notion that if something bad occurred, we were somehow deserving of it.
I was a good person, but not the best maybe. I was too busy focusing on my own family to be al
truistic and too devoted to my career to eschew the necessary level of vanity it demanded. There was nothing I could have done in my short eighteen years in the pockmarked pit of Naples to deserve being sold into sexual slavery by my own father.
I didn’t deserve this, but it was happening to me.
The lack of poeticism, of justice or even hope, weighed on my sore bones like dense gravity.
At one point, I felt cool fingers thread through my hair brushing it off my damp forehead and aching shoulders. A while later, a straw was placed between my lips and I sucked without thought, pulling the delicious, cold stream of water down my parched throat to my empty belly where it sloshed like a churning sea.
“My beauty,” I heard dimly from deep within my submerged mind. “My sleeping beauty, it’s time to wake up. It’s time to play.”
I wanted to obey that clinical, sharp-edged voice, but my eyes were hot stones in my skull, and my brain was waterlogged earth.
As if sensing my struggle, my willingness to concede to his demands, the voice hushed me softly, and the fingers retuned one last time to pass through my hair. Cold pressure parted my lips, an unwanted kiss from an unwanted prince.
“Why?” I asked, barely awake, but desperate to understand.
“The blood of my enemy, however innocent, is still my enemy,” he whispered against my ear so that the words rooted deep into my wakefulness and my dreams. “You cannot hide in unconsciousness forever. I will be here when you wake.”
And then he was gone, and I floated again for endless hours until a nightmare about Hades breaking through the crust of the earth’s surface to grab me by the ankles and drag me down to hell woke me up with a gasp.
And my eyes opened.
The light spilling in through dozens of massive windows lining either side of the long room nearly blinded me; the reflection of the sun off the gleaming, waxed marble floors stabbed my corneas violently before I could look away.
I squeezed my eyes shut and focused on my breath and not the horrifying pain in my head, my breasts, and between my legs, then opened them again.
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