“To own this body is enough,” he growled. “For now.”
Then he leaned forward, his thick lashes fluttering closed as he nipped my chin firmly with his teeth and trailed his tongue along the path of a fallen tear over my cheek. His breath fanned over my cheek, his lips against my temple, and his hand even tighter around my neck as he whispered, “But one day, it won’t be, and I’ll come for it all. Your mind, your spirit, and your innocent heart.”
He pulled back just enough to stare into my eyes the way an astrologer might into the star-filled sky. I felt catalogued by him, defined by words I didn’t understand in a language that was dead to everyone but him.
I squeezed them shut and whispered, “I will hate you every day for the rest of my life.”
“Love me or hate me if you will. Either way, I will always be on your mind,” he reminded me. “Now, slave, kneel for me.”
I didn’t want to kneel. It felt too enormous a gesture when previously, I’d never given it much thought. But to be on my knees before such a man felt like readying for a beheading, the axe gleaming in his hands, my neck tender with exposure.
I hated that I had no choice, that I had been condemned to such a fate not by my own actions but by those of my feeble father.
He was not pleased by my hesitation.
Fingers bit into my shoulder, and he slowly forced me to the ground.
“Kneel and get comfortable; you will be spending a lot of time on your knees,” he ordered, shifting his hand to the top of my head as soon as my knees crashed painfully to the marble floor.
I panted slightly, a combination of fear, resentment, and dying pride like two fists compressing my lungs.
“This will be our first training session together. I don’t expect much from you, but I do anticipate complete obedience, is that understood?”
I shut my eyes and licked my dry lips, trying to transport myself to another place, one without a cold Brit trying to tell me what to do.
“You will keep your eyes on me at all times,” he demanded. “Customarily, a slave never looks in their Master’s eyes, so you should thank me for the privilege.”
“Thank you for making me feel so special,” I said, saccharine sweet.
“There is a reason for every single move I make in this life. This is yet another example of that. I want my slave to look me in the eye so she can watch as the animal inside me breaks free to ravage her. Without constraint. Without mercy. Because there is no leash powerful enough to contain it.”
I swallowed thickly, unable to keep back the shiver that played my spine like piano keys. “Understood.”
“Understood, Master,” he corrected sharply.
“Yes, Master,” I ground out between my teeth.
“Mmm, you think your bad attitude dissuades me, bella?” He paused after the question, then used his hand on the back of my head to press my temple against the granite length of his cock beneath his slacks. “It achieves quite the contrary, so misbehave all you desire.”
I could feel the heat of him through the fabric, the pulse of him beat against my cheek like a drum roll heralding an invading force.
“Now, this is how you will present yourself to me,” he coached coldly as he used one leather shoe to kick my knees farther apart.
The cold air bit teeth into the lips of my exposed sex and made me realize with shameful clarity that I was wet.
It was too much to hope that Alexander wouldn’t notice.
He ran the toe of his loafer gently over my bare, pouting lips, then harder over my newly pierced clit hood.
“You look good in gold,” he praised mildly, reaching down to twist one of the gold bars in my nipples. “Golden eyes and golden sex for my golden slave.”
“Happily, you had no hand in giving me my eye colour,” I muttered darkly, hating that the smooth toe of his shoe felt deliciously cool against my heating sex, that the pressure made something in my belly unfurl like a bloom.
“Not the colour perhaps, but the demons that lurk there I now possess just as surely as I do this,” he said, stepping into his foot so that it pressed firmly but not painfully over my pubic bone.
I gasped as he fisted both hands in my hair and wrenched my gaze up to his. He pulled so tightly my eyes watered while his burned, smoking like banked coals with carefully supressed desire.
“I own you, little mouse,” he told me. “But you do not seem to understand how possession works, so let us make it your first lesson. I am feeling uncharacteristically benevolent, so I will give you a choice. You may accept me in your mouth, take all of me into your throat despite your struggles, and drink down every drop of your Master’s cum, or I can hold you down and beat your ass black and blue, then leave you here without a drop to eat or drink for two days. If the former, I will have the chef prepare you one of your favourite meals. Pasta alla Genovese, I believe?”
I hesitated as my mouth flooded with moisture at the thought of the rich, meaty pasta after days of bread and tepid water.
He capitalized on my weakness before I could fortify my mind against him. “And, my beauty, if you truly please me, I will even allow you a shower. I know how much you must long for one.”
My spine tumbled over like children’s building blocks as I slumped under the weight of his bribery.
I wanted a shower.
Cleanliness was next to godliness for Italians as it had been since Roman times, and I was desperate to rid my nose of my own stench.
It was even more tempting than the food.
I wanted to stay strong in the face of his crippling ownership, but I was too realistic not to realize that I was fighting a losing battle. The irrefutable fact was, this man already owned me. Money had exchanged hands, contracts had undoubtedly been signed, my own signature forged, and the deal was more than done.
I was his.
If I didn’t start accepting that, I’d lose my sanity to the cold, dark solitude of the cavernous cage.
“That’s my dolce topolina,” Alexander murmured almost sweetly even as he continued to grip my hair too tight. “Now, open that lush mouth.”
My head tipped back as he urged me with one hand while the other undid his trousers efficiently and pulled out his cock.
I was a virgin, but I had seen penises before in biology books and the smutty magazines the Made Men gave to Papa and even as bribes to my brother, Sebastian.
But I’d never seen or even conceived of something like what Alexander presented to me then.
It was more a weapon than an appendage.
Thicker by far than the circumference of my index finger and thumb with a head the colour and size of a ripe Italian plum, I couldn’t imagine taking it in my hand, let alone between my lips.
But something about the tapestry of veins pulsing down its length made my mouth water and made my tongue itch to trace them like drips from an ice-cream cone all the way down his shaft.
I shook my head dazedly, trying to shake the deviant desire from between my ears like some kind of earwig to the floor.
I did not want to find the weapon of my own destruction appealing.
Yet a small voice in the darkest recesses of my brain whispered to me that I did.
Alexander wrapped his big hand around his dick and pumped it tight and slow to the end so a pearl of precum crested the tip. With the hand on the back of my head, he brought me closer to draw the moisture over my parted lips like gloss.
Unbidden, my tongue shot out to trail the path and taste him.
Brine exploded on my taste buds, and my startled gaze shot up to his at the discovery.
His eyes blazed, so hot they turned the air to steam too thick to breath easily.
I panted.
“Yes,” he acknowledged in his cold British tones, the only hint of his arousal the slight deepening of his voice. “It’s good that you like the taste. It’s the only meal you’ll be getting with any kind of regularity until you learn your place. Now, clasp your hands behind your back, open wider, and
take me inside.”
Tension gathered every single muscle in my body and bunched them into a tangled cord that he manipulated with every tug of his hand in my hair. My shoulders hunched and burned with stress as I opened my mouth to the breaking point and felt the broad head of his cock smooth over my tongue straight to the back of my throat.
He exhaled in relief as I choked on him, then swallowed convulsively, unintentionally taking him past the boundary of my gag reflex deep into my throat. Impaled on his cock, I groaned in protest and struggle to pull myself free.
If his hiss of pleasure was any indication, my struggle only brought him further pleasure.
The flat of his shoe pulsed slightly against my pubic bone, then lowered slightly so that it slid over my wet sex. The pressure felt good against my clit, and I squirmed, trying to focus on that instead of the grotesque sensation of Alexander sunk so deep in my mouth.
Finally, just when spots had started to erupt at the corners of my vision, he pulled me by the hair slowly off his dick.
I gasped and spluttered, dragging huge breaths into my deflated lungs.
“Nothing is worth accomplishing without difficulty first,” he lectured me, some kind of flagrantly perverted prophet spouting wisdom while his cock dripped with my saliva. “Breathe through your nose when I’m in your throat if you don’t want to suffocate on my dick.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but he replaced my unspoken words with the slick slide of his erection pushing down into my throat again. Tears sprung to my eyes as I struggled against the intrusion, my throat working open and closed against him.
“Yes, topolina,” he breathed, looking down at me like a deity. “Earn your reward. Worship your Master.”
I rankled against his title. Hated that I was forced to my knees before him, enslaved to a man whose arrogance and entitlement knew no bounds.
But there was also something dark and curious peeking out from the depths of my soul, something more animal than spirit and not even close to human. It was intrigued by the dynamic between this godlike man and my prostrated person.
There was something deeply arousing about feeling wholly vulnerable and knowing your only power could be found in giving a stronger person pleasure.
Unbidden, a second pulse began to beat in my swollen clit being manipulated shamelessly by Alexander’s expensive shoe.
His hands manipulated my movements faster, slamming his thick length in and out of my throat, uncaring of my inability to breath, my constant gagging and choking.
In fact, I think he enjoyed it.
“One day soon, you will come to love sucking me off so much that you’ll orgasm with one touch to your clit after pleasuring me,” he told me, nothing in his clinical voice giving away his desire even though I could feel his pulse beating hard against my tongue each time he slid down my throat.
He pulled out fully, his dick glistening obscenely as it bobbed angrily in front of my face. I spat some of the excess saliva in my mouth on the ground at his feet and glared up at him with tears in my burning eyes.
“Vaffanculo a chi t’è morto,” I cursed, telling him to go fuck his dead family members.
It was a horrific insult in Italian, one I didn’t think translated well into English, but Alexander’s face clenched with instant fury at my words, so clearly, he understood.
With his furious eyes burning into my own, he pulled me slowly, firmly back onto his cock, tunneling deep into the back of my throat and holding me tightly to his lightly furred groin. One hand slid from my head, down my cheek to rest over my throat where his thick length swelled. I gurgled in protest as his fingers wrapped tightly over my pulse, completely unable to breathe or move past the dual obstructions.
Without leaving my throat, he thrust in and out of my mouth, his grip tightening with each pump until he cursed viciously and came straight down my gullet. I couldn’t taste the brine of him on my tongue, and for one horrifying second, I was disappointed by it.
He held me against him, his cock softening slowly until it lay half-turgid on my tongue. I was surprised and disconcerted when he began to pet my hair, but he continued with it long enough that I started to relax slightly with my cheek pressed to the inside of his thigh.
The moment I did, he wrapped cruel fingers in my hair and tipped my head back so that I could look up into his coldly furious eyes.
“If you mention my dead family ever again, topolina, I will chain you to the wall and flog you until your skin peels off in gold ribbons. Is that understood?”
I felt his threat in my bones. My nod was truncated by the flesh in my mouth, but he took it for the promise it was.
His hands disappeared from my skin, his cock pulled from my mouth so quickly that I nearly vomited on the floor at his feet.
I braced myself against the cold floor as I coughed and then looked up at Alexander with hatred and fear in my eyes like flashing neon signs.
“Why me?” I asked, wiping my wet mouth with the back of my hand. My throat burned from his disuse of it. “Why do this to me?”
I’d saved this man’s life, and he was repaying me with sexual servitude?
It didn’t make sense.
“Why you?” he asked on a callous hiss. “You have done nothing to deserve the answer to the question.”
My skin flashed hot and cold in shame and fear, a potent concoction that disorientated me more than any drug. The situation was too surreal for me to understand. A month ago, I’d been a teenage girl living a poor but pleasant life with her family in Naples.
Now, I was a slave kneeling at the feet of her Master in a country I didn’t know with nothing to my name but whatever he deemed to allot me.
Without another word, Alexander tucked himself back into his trousers and turned on his heel to walk to the door. Only when he reached it did he turn to look at me, my chin still wet and trembling, my knees tightly closed but their insides glistening with my own traitorous arousal, the same arousal that coated the toe of his left shoe.
“I will tell you this, Cosima Lombardi, topolina, my slave,” he said, his words lugubrious. “Your assumption of this role is as vital to your life as it is to mine. Even a predator is prey to something, even me.”
I had the dream again, the one about Persephone being abducted by a cruelly handsome Hades who dragged her into the dank underworld and forced her to take the throne at his side. Only, this time, the Goddess of Spring and Queen of the Dead was not wholly reluctant. She marveled at the beauty of the dark world and found surprising enchantment in the power she’d been granted as its ruler. The only thing she couldn’t find delight in was the cold, mysterious man at her side.
“Who are you?” she asked the dark god. “Who do you want me to be for you?”
When I woke up to the sound of rattling chains, those questions were burned in my psyche.
Who did Alexander Davenport want me to be for him?
It had to be about more than sexual deviancy. He was an Earl, for Christ’s sake. Handsome, titled, and moneyed, I doubted he needed to resort to importing a poor girl from Italy in order to get his just delights. Unless his kink was debasing atavistic, Neapolitan teenage girls.
“Good morning, dear,” a woman’s voice greeted, softened at the edges with a British accent very different from Alexander’s own brisk tones.
I whipped around, rolling uncomfortably over a coiled length of chain to face the first new face I’d seen in my new life at this house.
She was a woman constructed of circles, apples in her cheeks, a robust bosom, and rounded hips like half-moons. Her spirals of pale blond hair framed a face that spoke of gentle, natural aging, and her faded denim blue eyes were entirely kind as they wrinkled into a smile at the sight of me.
“What are you doing in here?” I asked then immediately decided another query was more pressing. “Please, help me get out of here.”
“Oh, don’t fuss, darling girl. I’m to clean you and care for you this afternoon in preparation for dinner tonig
ht. Lord Thornton would like you to join him in the dining room,” she told me as if I was just a normal guest being tended to in times gone by.
I clambered to my feet, chains protesting loudly at my movement. “I would prefer to eat separately.”
Her lips pursed, but the rest of her face remained obstinately cheerful. “Oh well, Lord Thornton can take some getting used to, but it will be good for you to get out of this drafty place. I would have preferred to take you to your room, but apparently, you haven’t been well behaved enough for that boon to be granted quite yet.” She clucked her tongue at me and then gestured to my right where an enormous copper freestanding tub had been placed, the top curling into ribbons of hot steam. “So I had the tub sent up. Let’s get you bathed before it loses heat.”
I wanted to protest the bath because I wanted to rebel against everything in my new existence, but I wasn’t stupid enough to cut off my nose to spite my face.
“You are skin and bones, poor thing,” the woman clucked again.
I peered down at myself, noticing the obscene swell of my large breasts against the concave slope of my belly and the tracks of bones protruding beneath my skin.
“I didn’t have much to lose in the first place,” I admitted softly, more distressed by the sight of my skinniness than I had been by the alien sight of Alexander’s dick or the length of chain connecting me to the floor of an unknown house.
It reminded me vividly of the time in my life I loved myself the least, when I let another person control my body to the point of physical pain and mental ineptitude.
I could feel the cycle starting again, this time with a new man.
At least this one had the decency to outright label himself my Master.
Landon Knox had only ever masqueraded as my friend and mentor in order to use me for his own personal and financial gains.
So far, Alexander Davenport seemed to only want to fuck me.
They were both disgusting.
I wanted to damn all men to hell, but I clung to the goodness I knew was inlaid in Sebastian’s heart. He was the most loving man I’d ever know. The bravest, the most loyal, and by far and away, the most beautiful inside and out.
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