Finally, she’d secured a large pendant around my throat, the heavy carved ivory resting in the hollow of my neck. It depicted a red flower and a design that resembled a keyhole, as if the bloom was the key to unchaining some ancient sect’s secrets. Combined with the dress, it made me look occultist, like a sacrificial virgin offered up to some mythological sea monster.
She’d stepped away from my face in the mirror, beaming like a proud mother at the way she’d gussied me up to be paraded in front of a dining hall filled with men.
Now, I was waiting like a good little slave for Master to summon me into the hall. I’d been waiting over an hour if the grandfather clock by the sideboard was to be believed.
It wasn’t the waiting that bothered me, though I wasn’t a particularly patient person. It was that I could not fully grasp how I felt about my life or even in my body.
I’d set out with the intention to understand Lord Thornton. If I could understand him, I could humanize him. Strip away the gentlemanly artifice, the cold mask of domination, and the clinical rules of ownership to truly understand beneath it all.
Only, I felt as if I’d fallen down a rabbit hole. Not only had I failed to master the mystery of Alexander Davenport, but I’d lost sense of myself.
If someone had asked me four months ago if I would ever love to kneel for a man, to take the pain he gave me and thank him for it as a worshipper thanks God, I would have laughed.
Even two months ago, when I’d first arrived and been stripped so thoroughly of my liberties, I would never have imagined I could find a drop of compassion for the man who owned me.
But I did.
I thought of the awfulness of his mother’s death and the mystery that lay in its wake like an open, festering wound. I remembered the criss-cross of whip marks between his shoulder blades from an unknown incident that couldn’t have been pleasant for a natural Dom to take. I knew that he worked ceaselessly to increase the family fortune, not for greed, but in order to preserve a house and history he felt he was the custodian of.
He could be kind and tender, as he had just proven after the vile Lord Ashcroft defiled me. Ruthless too, as was evident by the way he punished him, screams ringing throughout the house. Mercilessness was not normally a characteristic to admire in a man, I knew, but I also understood that we lived in a merciless world and only the truly ferocious could survive it.
I startled from my thoughts when the butler, Ainsworth, pushed through the side door and stopped before me.
His eyes were gentle in his big face as he studied me. “Lord Thornton will see you now.”
Merda.
I straightened my shoulders but ducked my head to the proper respectful angle and then walked through the door Ainsworth held open for me.
Immediately, the cacophony of the dinner party fell flat.
I could feel dozens of eyes on me as I stepped through the door and waited to be called by my Master.
“Crawl to me,” Alexander’s hushed voice still resonated in the large, quite hall.
I sucked in a deep breath to steel my spine, to lock away my dignity into a very small box inside my soul, and then I melted to the ground.
Unlike the first time I had crawled for Alexander, I was not aroused. I could feel the strange eyes of many horrible men on my body, slipping and sliding over my curves until I felt covered in grease marks. There were a few whispers and dark chuckles as I made my way to the head of the table where Alexander sat, but they otherwise seemed committed to the ceremonial silence.
“Rise,” Alexander ordered when I reached the left side of his chair.
I stood gracefully, my head still bent. I hoped I presented a picture of calm because I had the very awful feeling that these men were the predators that would dare to prey on a man like my Master, and I didn’t want to toss either of us at their feet with the stupidity of my actions.
I tried to find subspace and failed. Instead, I took deep breaths, counting as I did to settle my mind.
Even that didn’t work.
The entire dining room was filled with Britain’s finest men dressed tight to the throat in designer finery, their spines starched with noble titles and lips pressed tight against the threat of their many dark secrets. I could feel their countless eyes on me as they looked at the head of the table to the man who hosted them there for this society gathering.
“Gentlemen,” that man announced, standing up with all the authority of a born aristocrat, a learned man, a Master. “May I present slave Davenport.”
I stepped forward at the same time I bent my knees, sinking into a kneel before I could finish moving in line beside Alexander. My head was ducked, my hair curled and tied loosely with a red ribbon down my back so that I couldn’t hide behind the thick curtain of it, so that all the men could see the way my face was composed into careful, pretty blankness.
“A demonstration is in order, I think, Lord Thornton,” a creaking old voice said from somewhere down the table.
“Yes, after the reports we’ve had and your little tantrum with Lord Ashcroft, I’m of the mind to take the slave away from you and transfer her into the care of another, more capable Master. Perhaps Mr. Landon Knox.”
My head jerked up as my heart nearly flew out my throat.
Instantly, my eyes found his.
Landon Knox.
The man I’d known since I was a prepubescent teenager, the man who had launched my modelling career and driven me to anorexia was sitting at Alexander’s table.
The clash of my two worlds meeting resounded like crashing symbols in my head. I swayed as I blinked hard, trying to process.
Alexander’s stern voice severed our connection. “No one will be taking her away from me. I own her. The papers were signed, her virginity was taken, and she bears my gold at her tits and clit. She is mine.”
“Careful, Thornton, your caveman is showing,” Landon drawled.
“And caution to you, Mr. Knox, your lack of pedigree is obvious,” Alexander retorted.
“Gentlemen.” A man with steel grey hair stood up, long and thin as a reed but with the bearing of a king. “There is one way to settle this. The girl must be put through her paces.”
“I don’t believe it should be Thornton who does it,” Landon argued, his eyes over bright and overeager as he stared at me. “Let it be a new Master.”
“Agreed,” a voice said from the very end of the table.
I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but Alexander tensed beside me so viciously, I thought he was having a heart attack.
The man spoke again, his voice strong but oddly accented, a hop and a skip of something Latin in his tones. “If we are trying to prove whether the girl is being properly trained and if Thornton has neglected his duties because he is enamoured with her, we must separate them. Make him watch while one of us does the deed.”
“You take things too far by letting that man into my bloody fucking house,” Alexander said, each word sharp as a bullet casing tearing through the air. “Show yourself, Edward.”
My heart tripped and then raced through my chest.
Edward, the long-lost son and brother?
The slowly, cringeworthy sound of a chair screeching against the parquet floor was the only sound in the ominously silent room.
I risked Alexander’s wrath by lifting my chin to see the man Noel and his son had excommunicated from their lives.
I didn’t know what to expect from Edward Davenport.
My only knowledge consisted of his betrayal when he chose Salvatore over his own family. I’d never wondered what he would look like, how he would hold himself, or what I would feel if I ever met him.
I simply wasn’t prepared.
Because if Alexander was a golden prince, King Arthur or Emperor Augustus, some shining example of leadership and male beauty, Edward was his rival.
They could have been two sides of the same coin, contrary though they were, they had the same colossal bodies packed with muscle, Edward’s perhaps ev
en more quilted, and broad faces so beautiful they made my eyes ache in their sockets.
Yet that was where the similarities ended. Edward was coloured not in precious metals like his brother, but in shadows, his hair as ink stained as my own, his eyes so deep a brown they seemed to swallow the light, and his skin tanned and polished to a glossy bronze. The bearing of his broad shoulders was not regal but forceful; his hands large and blunt tipped like some medieval weapons of torture.
He seemed more weapon than man.
His eyes slide to mine swiftly, and our gazes collided like two cars on an icy road. I felt the crash in my gut and shuddered as it passed through me.
I blinked, and his eyes were still there, watching me as though he knew me and even more, held some bizarre degree of familiarity and affection for me.
I gasped quietly when he had the audacity to throw me an almost imperceptible wink.
“How dare you show your face in this house after what you have done?” Alexander asked in his quiet voice filled with fury that boiled so hot and deep within his chest he seemed like a living volcano.
“He is a member of the Order of Dionysus, Thornton. He has a right to be here,” Sherwood stated implacably.
“Whatever right he had was stripped along with his surname and inheritance the moment he joined sides with the villain who killed my mother.” I had never seen Alexander so wholly still. He was on security lockdown, every vault spun shut, every door coated over in titanium so that not one of his vulnerabilities could escape or be plundered by the ruthless men in the room. “I hope you brought him to take responsibility for his actions.”
“We brought him here to test you, if you must know,” Landon drawled, his eyes wicked as they darted between Alexander and myself. “You will watch from the gallery as we put slave Davenport through her testing, and you will not intervene in anyway. Will you, Thornton?”
Alexander stood mutely for a moment, but despite his quiet stillness, it was evident he was struggling internally with a cyclone of emotion.
My Master might have been a cruel one, but he had never hurt me, not irreparably, not more than my body could stand or my mind couldn’t translate into pleasure.
The other men of the Order, I knew, would have no such boundaries.
My skin went suddenly very cold.
“If we find you’ve developed feelings for the girl,” Sherwood said coldly, peering at Alexander as if he was a turncoat of the highest order. “Not only will the girl be taken from you, but we will have to consider your punishment. You remember what happened to Baron Horst, do you not?”
“Crippled,” a man sitting to Alexander’s right leaned over to sneer quietly at me. “Couldn’t take the whipping like a real man.”
“Of course, you’re familiar with the Order’s punishments. You were only twenty-two when you stood up for the Russian slave, weren’t you?” Sherwood continued.
My mind immediately conjured up the thin white scars dissecting Alexander’s otherwise flawless back. I kept my eyes focused on the ground as they burned with tears.
I didn’t know who I was more sorrowful for. Myself for my upcoming ordeal, or Alexander for being raised and ruled by such a barbarian group of men.
The room hung in animated silence as they waited for Alexander’s verdict, and even though I knew the impossibility of his decision, my heart still turned to ash in my chest when he spoke the words I knew he would say.
“Take her, beat her, flay her, and bring forth her tears. She’s just a slave to me. It’s only her body that brings me pleasure.”
They set up in the gymnasium. It was clear orders had been given before dinner to arrange the space for their intended show because a strange apparatus shaped like a massive X was settled beside a wheeled table filled with sex toys and equipment. They had known Alexander would capitulate to their demands.
Alexander’s cryptic threats about predators more powerful than himself suddenly made blood-curdling sense.
Two men carried me in.
Alexander was not one of them.
They had parted us immediately after he acquiesced to the demonstration, but I caught sight of him on the small set of bleachers, sandwiched between two stocky men who looked ready to rip his head off if he made one wrong move.
I swallowed thickly as the men dragged me over to the huge cross and bound my limbs to each branch of the X, facing away from the gathering crowd and the Master who would test me. The cuffs weren’t leather as they usually were, but cold, sharp metal that bit into my skin too tightly. The man on my left laughed under his breath as I gave my wrists a little jerk and winced.
He liked me in pain.
They all did.
I was the lone masochist in a room full of cruel sadists with no one to temper their lust.
My mind buzzed and whirred as I tried to mentally prepare myself for the coming onslaught.
Then Landon stepped forward in all his finery with a long, thin whip coiled over his knuckles, and I knew no meditation or platitudes would prepare me for what was to come.
Landon had controlled me for years as a girl, flagellating my independent spirit for petty transgressions until I was as mentally submissive to him as I was now to Alexander.
If he was so well trained in Dominant mental warfare, I didn’t want to even imagine how he might be at the physical act.
“This is a black snake,” he explained to me as the two men attending to me melted away, their job done. “It’s my preferred whip for punishing unruly subs. It makes this sound, you see, this slash through the air and then a cutting crack as it bites into the arse. Then the sound of the sub as they scream and beg through their tears for me to stop… well, it gets me so hard.”
I wanted to rally against him. To spit in his face and tell him he was a coward, not a Master. A real Master shared trust with their slave. They promised to braid pleasure with the pain as it whipped against their skin, to reward them with praise or orgasms if they followed the rules of their game. I knew without having to know the particulars that Landon did no such things. He was a pathetic excuse of a man who hid behind BDSM to make him feel more of a man, to falsely prove his thesis that men were the better gender.
I closed my eyes as he pressed forward into my body, running his tongue along the edge of my jaw in a possessive move that made me shudder.
“If you were anyone else, I might be soft,” he told me as he savagely bit my ear. “But you need to be punished for leaving me in Milano.”
“Isn’t my life now punishment enough?” I whispered.
He paused for such a moment, I thought maybe I’d reached some dusty corner of goodness in his head.
“In the Order, we believe in punishment by blood,” he said, and then he thrust his erection against my ass and ground hard into me. “So I’m going to make you bleed.”
“Mr. Knox will serve slave Davenport twenty-five lashes,” the man named Lord Sherwood declared in his dry, professor tone. “If the girl has been trained in pain, she should be able to thank Mr. Knox for each one through to the very end. If, on the other hand, Lord Thornton has been too soft with the girl, and she breaks before then… Lord Thornton will be flogged and taxed for his inability to Master.”
There was a murmuring of agreement.
I loathed that I could see what was happening behind me. It felt as if my naked body was prostrate before a gaggle of hyenas, yipping in sinister laughter at the idea of eating me through to my bones.
“Ready, slave?” Landon asked from a few feet away.
He didn’t give me any time to answer or brace myself. There was the slicing whistle of the whip through the air and then a sound like a gunshot as the thin, braided leather connected across my upper back.
A scream tore from the fabric of my lungs, leaving the delicate tissues ripped and bloody in my aching chest. I cried out so loudly, I could feel the sound in my hair and my toes as I tried to use the noise to force out the devastating pain I felt reverberating in every inch of my
body.
Somewhere, in the deepest pit of my psyche was a small chained and locked box of reasoning that rattled with a reminder.
I had to do something.
There was an order amid the hellfire of pain, something I had to do to avoid more of it. For myself and my Master.
“One,” I said as my scream morphed into a shout. “Thank you, Mr. Knox.”
“Master,” he seethed. “Call me Master.”
“I am within reason to protest that,” Alexander’s voice called clear and strong through the gym. I felt the cool, aristocratic syllables slide down my painfully hot skin like ice cubes. “Slave Davenport knows only one Master, and that is me.”
“I’ll allow it,” Sherwood declared after a moment of thought. “The slave will address you as Mr. Knox.”
It was a small boon, but every gift felt like a miracle.
I was strung up before a secret society of Britain’s wealthiest, most tilted gentleman, being tested because they worried my cruel Master was being soft on me.
If it hadn’t been so horrible, I could have laughed at the improbability of my own life.
I knew the next strike was coming, and that it would be harder than the last because Landon would be angry and jealous of Alexander’s title, but the pain was still impossible to brace against.
It burst across my back and then sank spikes of skin-sizzling heat deep into my spine, impaling me with pain.
“Two, thank you, Mr. Knox,” I gritted through my teeth.
On the tenth whiplash, I felt my skin part like butter under the knife of the leather whip. Blood trickled down my spine and pooled in the twin dimples over my ass, tempting Knox to thrash me harder, the colour inciting his bull-like wrath.
By the fifteenth score, I couldn’t breathe through the mess of snot and tears clogging my nose and the air through my mouth was metallic with blood. At some point, I had bitten clean into my cheek and pink-tinged saliva slid out over my chin.
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