Enthralled

by Darling, Giana

  I was in a ballroom.

  Or, at least, I guessed it was a ballroom thanks to its grand size and unabashed opulence.

  Crystal chandeliers dripped from the domed, beautifully painted ceilings and gold foil accents curled and unfurled in elaborate detail atop marble pillars and across sconces like expensive moss over ancient tress.

  I was naked, twisted in the fetal position on a floor of white and black checked marble, threads and knotted cords of gold running throughout. My eyes caught on a length of heavy metal chain wrapped around a steel spike nailed in the middle of the ballroom just beside where I sat. As I shifted slightly to look at it more clearly, the hissing slide of metal over marble hit my ears, and the weight of something around my left ankle made me pause.

  Slowly, I righted my left leg and stared at the thick leather cuff shackled to my ankle and the short length of chain anchoring me to the floor.

  Tears sprang to my eyes, molten and painful as they fell down my cheeks.

  I was seated in the most beautiful room I’d ever seen or could have imagined even in my wildest dreams, but I wasn’t there as a guest or even as a stranger.

  I was ornamental as much as the gold foil, immobile as those titan marble pillars. A part of the furniture owned and collected by Lord Alexander Davenport.

  I shifted painfully, groaning in pain as I rolled to my back and stared up at the massive ceiling, then wished desperately that I hadn’t.

  Because painted there in stark relief was a tableau of the Greek god Hades clothed in black on his iron chariot pulled by undead horses bursting through the earth to capture the Goddess of Spring, Persephone.

  I wondered if somehow in my fog, I’d noticed the painting and translated it into my dreams, but either way, the reoccurrence of the myth did nothing to soothe my frazzled mind.

  Trying to focus on something else, I decided to sit up and check out the pain in my breasts and between my thighs.

  With a groan, I sat up and stared down at my chest.

  There was a gold bar tipped on each end with diamonds locked through both of my dusky brown nipples.

  Another, this one curved and placed vertically, pierced through the hood of my clit.

  “Porco Giudo!” I cursed faintly at the obscene sight.

  I was a virgin marked wantonly with sex, a promise my new Lord and Master had punched into my flesh.

  My free will and my body were no longer mine to control.

  They were his.

  As if summoned by the scent of my turmoil, he arrived, a mere shadow in the doorway at the far edge of my gilded cage.

  “Ah, she awakens,” he said quietly, but in the stillness of the ballroom, his voice carried to me as intimately as if whispered in my ear.

  I shuddered.

  “Come closer,” I called hoarsely, full of false bravado. “So I can look you in the eye when I curse you to hell.”

  A low, smoky chuckle. “Oh Cosima, do you doubt that we are already there?”

  I stared at him, struggling to swallow the sobs of desperation that threatened to ravage my throat. He moved forward, his smart leather shoes clicking against the marble like the tick of a clock counting down to my demise.

  When he was only a foot away, he pinched the fabric of his suit pants as he settled into a crouch so that we were almost eye level with each other.

  He should have looked ridiculous—his big body folded like that, his forearms resting on his strong thighs, fingers of one hand dangling so that they could feather over the coil of my chain—but he didn’t. Instead, he was formidable, compacted into a position that called to mind a predator settled in to observe his prey. He had all the time in the world to pounce, and he was confident in his ability to capture so he’d decided to play with his lunch.

  To play with me.

  “I thought to welcome you to your new home,” he began. “For now, it consists of these four walls. This ballroom is all you will know until you earn the right to more. And do you know, my beauty, how to earn the right?”

  I clenched my teeth, felt the grind of enamel and let the pain settle my anger so I could actually breathe. “I’m sure you’ll be happy to tell me.”

  His smile was more a ghost of an expression haunting his face than an actual movement of his lips, but it was all the more sinister for it.

  “Yes, I am happy to tell you. You earn privileges such as freedom from the room, water to drink, and food to eat by obeying me, your Master.”

  “My Master?” I croaked. “You have to be kidding me.”

  He cocked his head, his expression genuinely perplexed. “Tell me, Cosima, why else would a man buy a beautiful woman if not to use her for his own pleasure?”

  “You mean to use me against my will?” I snapped.

  “Ah.” He nodded slowly, running a hand along the steepled edge of his jaw as he considered me. “I see. You don’t seem to grasp the nature of the deal I made with the Camorra and, through them, your father. I bought you to own you, yes, but you agreed to the conditions of this agreement the moment you entered my house in Rome willingly. When you saw your father brutalized at the hands of the mafia, when they threatened to string your beloved siblings up from the tree across the street with bells tied to their ankles and you could practically hear the chime in your ears.” He paused, taking in my horror and shock with the quiet satisfaction of a man used to knowing more than others. “If you want to put your family at risk with the mafia, Cosima, you must know that you are free to leave at any time.”

  “How did you know that about the bells?” I asked, my brain stuck like a broken record on the idea. “How could you possibly know that?”

  “Knowledge is power. Can you ask me that, knowing who I am?”

  “I don’t know who you are,” I told him honestly. “Only that you seem to be all four horsemen of my apocalypse.”

  One golden brow rose, cutting lines into his forehead that had me wondering how old he was. Much older than my eighteen years, it was obvious.

  “At least you are well educated, as a professor’s daughter should be. It’ll make this easier for you.”

  “Rebelling against you?” I retorted, hyper aware of my vulnerability as I sat before him, chained and stark naked.

  Something dark passed over his placid features, the clouds mere shadows on the ground, alerting me to an impending storm.

  “I am Alexander Davenport, Earl of Thornton, and you are playing my game now, Cosima. Be happy that I’m taking the time to teach you the rules instead of making you learn by taking punishments when you unwittingly break them.”

  I spat on the glossy marble floors at his feet, but I was too dehydrated to make much of a statement. “Go to hell, you beast!”

  “This is how things will proceed from here on out, my beauty,” Alexander informed me coolly. “Everything you need to survive is mine to give you. Water, food, the very air you breathe. I own it all. So I suggest you shelf the rebellious spirit and discover a more servile side.”

  I glared at him. No matter that I was tethered to a bolt in the floor by heavy, medieval chains in a gorgeous room made of marble and gold leaf without clothes or possessions, I was not his to own, to set aside when it pleased him or to train like a dog.

  I was Cosima Lombardi and that had to mean something to someone, even if it was only to myself.

  “I won’t be kept shackled to a bolt in the floor in the middle of your ballroom like some wild exotic beast caged for your entertainment.”

  He stood slowly, unravelling the breadth of his torso and the long length of his muscular legs. There was thread and calculation in the exactment of his movements, in the way he kept his eyes locked on me as he loomed above my chained self.

  I watched warily as his hand reached out and stroked softly over my hair.

  “Exotic, yes,” he agreed softly, fingering a lock of my inky hair. “Wild, I’ve yet to see, but I am very much looking forward to it.”

  “I suppose I should be thanking you for not rapi
ng me immediately?” I scoffed.

  He dropped my lock of hair, his lips twisted into a disgusted sneer. “You may feel like an animal, but I don’t fuck them. My cock will be inside you when you earn the right to a bath and no longer stink like livestock.”

  “Let me out of these chains, and I’m happy to take one,” I returned because now that I’d been made aware of it, I could smell myself.

  I must have been kept unconscious for more than a day for them to cart me all the way from Italy to wherever we were in England.

  His smile was thin, creasing his stubble-shadowed cheeks into disgustingly attractive lines. “You will learn, my beauty, that this is a relationship of give and take.”

  He leaned forward, his hands lashing out to snag my nipples in a tight hold and then he tugged, straining my body forward to reduce the burning tension in my recently pierced breasts.

  “You give,” he whispered sinisterly, twisting my nipples until I whimpered. “And I take of your exquisite body. Then, and only then, will I reward you, and even then, I expect you to accept those gifts with overwhelming gratitude.” He paused, his eyes so hot on my lips they felt scalded as if by hot tea. “I can only imagine the lovely sound of the words ‘please, Master,’ and ‘thank you, Master,’ coming from that lush mouth.”

  “Good because it will only happen in your imagination,” I gritted out between my clenched teeth as I squirmed against his hold.

  Alexander’s smile deepened those creases in his face, making him appear both older and younger at once. “That’s it, Cosima,” he practically cooed. “Hand yourself over to me. Let me take you to the precipice of pain and over the edge into the kind of desire your virginal mind cannot even dream of.”

  “Never,” I bit out, wrenching myself out of his hold and crying out at the pain as I fell backward to the floor in an ungainly sprawl.

  When I looked up, Alexander was standing, his huge form clad in an entirely black suit that magnified his sinister charms.

  He stared at me passively in my disgrace, naked and bound, rebelling with no hope of revolution.

  “Have it your way, slave. We shall see how long you last.”

  I’d been in the dark for over two weeks. My sense of time was warped without light or regular meals, without company or clocks. All I had were my own thoughts to pass the time and the savage cannibal sitting in the pit of my stomach eating away at the lining with pointed, poisonous teeth.

  They fed me every two days. Bread and cold ham someone slapped onto a plate that appeared sporadically when I woke up. I’d never eaten so little or been so distressed by it, not even during my days battling an eating disorder.

  There was water too. Dirty and warm poured into a porcelain bowl at the very edge of the circumference of space the chain allowed me. There was never enough, a shallow pool that barely slacked my wicked thirst.

  It was clever.

  I was restless from lack of movement, hungry to the point of constant pain, and near delirium.

  They’d closed the shutters over the massive windows and turned down the heat so that I could see my breath cloud in the wintry air as I curled in on myself, shivering in misery and unable to sleep comfortably.

  I had the use of a bucket as a toilet and, thank God for small mercies, it was regularly emptied whenever I managed to get a few hours of shut-eye.

  Two weeks.

  I wasn’t sure if that was commendable or stupid. All I needed to do was give into my new reality, and I’d be free of this gilded chamber of horrors, free to eat real food and drink more than tepid water.

  Free to be me again.

  I was locked in the dark, but it was more than an absence of light. It was the blackness of my own solitude; the quantum hole at the center of my soul that was slowly sucking away at everything that made me me.

  I tried to write an encyclopedia of Cosima facts to cement my sense of self in the chaos of night that had become my life.

  Cosima Ruth Lombardi.

  Born August 24th, 1998 in Napoli, Italia to Caprice Maria Lombardi and Seamus Patrick Moore.

  My favourite colour was wine red, captured in a glass and held over rich, warm candlelight.

  I loved poppies best, of all flowers, because they reminded me of me in a way that was narcissistic but true. They were bold as blood but stark against the softer colours of the traditional Italian countryside. They demanded notice and received it. But their beauty was short-lived and fragile as the thin silk of their petals fell to bits within a week and scattered on the wind.

  I felt very much like one of those black-centered blooms, falling apart with every breath I took without even one witness to my dematerialization.

  He wanted me like this.

  Lost like decaying particles in a petri dish.

  I didn’t have to hear his British accent clipping the words into neat little explanations to understand why.

  He wanted me broken.

  A beautiful, hollow shell to break open and fuck into.

  It wasn’t enough to own my person and rape my body. He wanted to empty my soul so that the only thing I was filled with was his cock and his cum.

  His words from days ago broke into the blackness of my world and shone blindingly bright.

  “When I drive into that virgin cunt and smear your blood on my cock, you’ll cry. Not because I’m hurting you, even though I am. No, you’ll cry because you are going to be so empty, so useless that you’ll beg and sob to be filled by something. And that something will be me, Cosima. My fingers in your asshole, my thick cock in your spasming cunt, my tongue in your mouth, and your soul crushed right under my heel as I fuck up into you and you cry out the name of your Master.”

  He visited me frequently, hovering in the doorway, a black smudge against the bright hope of light spilling in from the hall beyond. There was always silence while he observed me curled into varying positions like a hermit crab without its shell, pathetically naked and fundamentally vulnerable.

  Then his voice would come, smooth as velvet but violent, a ribbon tied too tight around my throat.

  “Are you ready to kneel and greet your Master?”

  The words played throughout my head like an infinite echo long after I’d rejected him with spitting words or frozen silence.

  They taunted me.

  I didn’t want to kneel for anyone, to rely on my beauty and my body to get me out of yet another bind, but my choices were non-existent, and my spirit was cracking right down the middle.

  I never could have known absence­­—of light, of sound, of food and drink, but most of all, company—could be weaponised so savagely.

  But I felt run through by the steel edge of my lonesomeness, and I knew the next time Alexander stood in the doorway, I would be ready, though unwilling, to kneel and greet my Master.

  The next time he opened the door, I was standing.

  It took energy I didn’t have, and my legs shook, but I faced the door with my hands fisted on my hips and my chin squared.

  It was a longer way to fall to my knees, but I had a point to prove.

  I wasn’t a mindless, soulless slave.

  I was a human, a woman, and an Italian one at that. I had too much spine to crumple without a fight.

  “My beauty,” Alexander said, his accented voice quiet but carrying. “Are you ready to kneel and greet your Master?”

  “I am. Though I’d like to discuss it first.”

  There was cool humour in his tone as he made his way across the long room. “Oh? I’m curious enough to allow it.”

  I bit my lip to keep from raging at him for his arrogance.

  “I want to say first that I understand the bargain I entered into to keep my family safe. I won’t do anything to jeopardize their safety, so yes, I’m willing to kneel and be the sick slave you need to slack your deviant tendencies.” He was close enough then to see his eyes flash like lightning-filled storm clouds. “But I need you to know that I’m more than just your property or a hole for you to stick you
r cock into.”

  I pulled in a shaky deep breath and steeled my shoulders against the tsunami of sorrow crashing over my head. “Each time I touch you, I will be thinking about my hands braiding my sister’s hair, tending to my brother’s scrapes and bruises, and rolling semolina dough with my mama. Every time you ask me to kneel, I will think about sitting in a field of poppies on a Napoleon hillside and running my fingers over their silken edges. When you force me to take you inside my body, I will remember the tender dreams I had of love and romance as a girl before I knew better, and I will hide in those memories until you are done.

  “You may own my body, Lord Thornton, but you will never own my mind, my spirit, or my heart.”

  I stood there with tears on my cheeks, my chest heaving as if I had just completed a race, and I stared at him in pure, joyous defiance.

  The revolutionary had spoken.

  There would be no rebellion, but it felt magnificent to give my anarchist a voice in the face of this tyrant.

  Alexander blinked from where he had come to a stop not two feet before me. Slowly, he raised his hands, and for a second, I believed he would strike me down.

  Instead, he clapped.

  Slow, powerful smacks of sound that took my traumatized mind straight to spankings and red ass cheeks.

  He was clapping for me.

  “Well done, topolina, very well done.”

  I bristled at the Italian nickname. “Little mouse” didn’t exactly denote strength against adversity.

  “I commend your show of spirit,” he praised, and I could see that praise in his eyes, heated and dark like banked embers.

  A shiver ripped viciously down my spine, and instantaneous regret flooded through to my bones.

  He liked my show of spirit because there was more challenge in the squashing of it.

  I held my breath as he stepped even closer, the luxe fabric of his designer suit tickling the bare skin of my thighs, rasping across the sensitive peaks of my pierced breasts. His dark eyes were my entire world as he wrapped a big hand around my throat, curling each finger one by one against my pounding pulse point.