Maybe I couldn’t actually run away, but I could make it difficult to find me if he went looking.
A field beyond the left pastures at the back of Pearl Hall, snug between the forest at one end and the hedgerow maze at the other, was where the ground was covered in a thick carpet of poppies. The bold colour had drawn my eyes two weeks ago when I’d finally ventured far enough in my journeys with Helios to reach the forgotten corner of the estate, and I’d nearly cried at the beauty of my favourite flowers bowing steeply in the breeze.
I sat in their embrace that evening, splayed out over the broken stems and crushed petals beneath me while I played my fingers gentle in the silky filaments swaying into me with the wind.
The contrast of their bold appearance and secret fragility was all too easy to parallel to my own duality. It seemed I tried so hard to appear strong and resilient, but the moment something powerful slammed into my life, I was powerless to stand up against it.
I wanted to be strong enough to break through the last of Alexander’s titanium shields and win the heart of my complicated Master, but the task seemed nearly insurmountable.
Dark grey clouds the colour of Alexander’s eyes rolled across the sky, but I didn’t move. I wanted the cold English rain to purify my muddied thoughts and leave an easy solution in its wake.
How did I untangle the knotted mess of lies my life had become and smooth out the threads so I could keep the good ones?
How could I keep Xan while still keeping my family and my independence?
The grey veil parted, and the rain rushed forth in a deluge. I propped myself up on an elbow to survey the sweep of water as it fell over the Greythorn estates, but something moving quickly from the stable caught my eyes.
Alexander on Charon, galloping across the rapidly dampening earth like Hades out of the underworld, determined to snatch the goddess Persephone from her field of flowers.
Only, I wanted him to snatch me away and make me queen of his dark domain.
I watched without moving as he cantered up the hill and swung out of Charon’s saddle before he even came to a complete stop.
His face was immovable stone, threatening as the storm breaking through the air all around us.
“I thought you’d left,” he fumed quietly as he fell to the muddy blanket of poppies at my feet and caught my ankle.
He dragged me forward under my hips slid up over his thighs and then he used the pocket knife he produced from him riding jacket to rend a hole in the center of my trousers. He fisted both hands in the fabric and tore it clean in two, so that the rain beat down on my white panties and turned them sheer.
“I thought you’d run away, but you have to know, topolina, I’d never let you go without saying goodbye,” he promised huskily, and then his body was pressing me into the wet grass and blooms as he ravaged my mouth.
There was no finesse in the way he snapped my underwear with his fingers and pulled his breeches down just enough to free the angry length of his cock. There was only animal urgency and primal instinct to mate.
I clawed at his shoulder as he found my wet cunt and thrust inside, biting my neck hard as he pounded into me. I knew the mark he left would bloom red as the poppies trampled beneath us and just as soon gone.
I wanted him to plant poppies all over my skin with his hands and teeth so that I bloomed like the entire field of flowers, more alive than I’d ever been before.
And he did bite me, my neck, my shoulders, the exposed skin of my chest and even my thumb when I brought it to his lips. He fucked me hard like a barbarian claiming the spoils of war, and I loved every moment of his inflexible body driving mine into the dirt.
There was something mean in our sex, some edge of desperate cruelty that had been there even in the beginning.
He fucked me like I was his enemy and he wanted to impale me on his cock and paint me in the triumph of his cum.
“Take my cock, topolina,” he commanded me, pinning my throat with a big hand as he rutted faster, deeper inside me. “Take it and thank me for it.”
I came at the thought, spasming and thrashing against the marshy earth as my mouth formed the chant thank you, Master.
Seconds later, his cock kicked inside me, and his cum splashed against my womb. I held him tightly as I took his cock and his semen, committing the feel of his heavy limbs immobilising me and the smell of the rain in the flowers to my memory forever.
When my hazy brain finally cleared, he was still inside me, hard and thick as a steel pipe wedged between the tight pink walls of my aching sex. I could feel the hotness of his cum against the opening to my womb and the cool trickle of it sliding down my inner thighs into the crack of my ass. He was in me, his heavy weight on me, and his cruel, puppeteer’s hands all around me, forcing me to dance to his dark, malicious tune.
I didn’t want to like it.
The cold, calculating way he sliced me into pieces with the refined edge of his sexual commands until I was a pliable, passive mass of ribbons piled on the floor at his feet.
But after months of conditioning, of relying on him for the very food I ate and the water I drank, some primal part of my brain was programmed to like it. Some instinctual code in my DNA was prepared to lust after it.
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, 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, swirled 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 bad 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 of 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 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 myself.
“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, 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 is placidity to bitterness that tightened the edges of her eyes and mouth in a way that made her look cruel.
I wanted to ask her about her boyfriend Christopher, but she wouldn’t admit anything was wrong between them, even after he’d so clearly assault Giselle before she left for school two years ago.
Her silence on the matter perturbed me, but at least now I was certain she would never see him again. The promise of America shone on her future like spotlight through the glom of our pasts in Italy. If anyone could harness and tame the wild beast of the American Dream, it was my whip smart eldest sister.
“Cosi?” she asked again.
I shook my head slightly. “Sorry, jetlag.”
“You know, that excuse has almost run its course.” She raised an eyebrow and crossed her arms over her chest. “You can talk to me. I know you’ve done…things so that we can afford to move to America, but cazzo, Cosima, I’m your older sister. If I cannot be the one to make sacrifices for this family, at least let me shoulder some of your burden.”
I stared at her, mute with longing. I’d always shared an incredible closeness with my family, but now I found myself to embroiled in the secrets of another bloodline to be able to converse freely with my own.
I realized with horror that I felt more like a Davenport than a Lombardi.
“It’s nothing, Lena, I really am just adjusting to the time change.”
“Two hours isn’t much of a change, but fine.” She sighed and pushed back an errant piece of hair beneath her black cloth headband. Then, having considered something internally, she moved swiftly across our small living room to where I was packing up Mama’s fabrics, and she pulled me into a hug.
My sister didn’t like physical affection. She had never been very demonstrative growing up, but her aloofness had only honed into a cold blade over the past few years and now she barely allowed you to kiss her in the traditional Italian greeting.
So, this hug was special and it nearly worked to unlock the massive deadbolt I had across the chamber to my mess of emotions and web of secrets.
Nearly, but not quite.
I was a stronger woman than I had been, so I knew when to take my pleasure when I could, even if it was tinged with pain.
My arms banded around her small waist and pulled her even closer against me so that I could smell her perfume. It was Chanel Number 5, a scent she had lusted over for years even though we could only afford the samples found in the odd magazine. I bought it for her every year for her birthday since my first modelling check came in and I loved smelling it on her.
“Ti amo,” I whispered into her ear, hoping that she would wear the words there like precious gems even when I couldn’t be with her.
She tightened her hold on me for a moment and then whispered the words back, her voice softer than I’d ever heard it before. “Ti amo, Cosima, e grazie.”
I love you, Cosima, and I thank you.
Tears pooled at the backs of my eyes and I opened my mouth to give her something, a gift only Elena could fully cherish, one of knowledge, when the door tour little house burst open with a bang.
We sprung apart to face the intruders, but it was one me who gasped when I recognized who it was.
Salvatore stood backlit by the flaming Italian sun, a great shadow of a beast with thick dark hair and beard that stained his strong, clenched jaw like ink.
“Why the drama?” Elena asked, fisting her hands on her hips as she interacted with a man she thought she knew well enough to be familiar with, a man who had been visiting us sporadically our entire lives. “You nearly broke down the door.”
“Do not speak to capo that way,” Rocco demanded as he stepped through the door at Salvatore’s back, his thugs behind him. “You Lombardi women never are respectful enough.”
Mama appeared in the doorway to the bedroom, her face ashen as she took in the crowd of Made Men in our doorway. Her eyes darted to me then back to Salvatore and she swallowed hard.
How had I never noticed her watchfulness and unease before when it seemed written in the air between us like subtitles.
“We are here for Cosima,” Salvatore told Mama in his gravel rich voice.
Mama’s hands fluttered through the air, touched on her heart and then took flight again like frightened birds. “No, Tore, please…”
He ignored her, lifting a hand that signaled the men behind him to push forward into the house.
My conditioned flight or fight response flooded my body with heady adrenaline. Carefully, I pushed Elena farther out of the way and then faced the Camorra foot soldiers with a cutting grin.
“Let’s see if you can catch me, boys,” I taunted them.
The stupider of the two lunged for me. I hopped onto the low coffee table, landing on one leg while the over swung through the air with the leverage from my leap and crashed into the descending face of the mafia man.
He fell to into the couch with a groan.
“Don’t be difficult,” Rocco called out from the doorway. I tried to keep my eyes on the approaching man, but then the tinkle of bells tickled my ears and pulled my gaze over.
Rocco let the string of tiny bells dance in from his fingers and he laughed at my look of horror. “I brought these for your Mama and sister, Cosima. Do you remember my promise to you if you fucked up that deal for us? I’m going to tie them up with bells stringed to their ankle so that they look like ornaments dangling from the cypress outside.”
A sob ballooned in my throat and turned my voice to helium as the other man grabbed for me and I screamed as hand caught my dress and pulled me into his arms.
“That is,” Salvatore drawled, as if we were discussing the weather and his ex-paramour wasn’t crying across the ro
om while their bastard daughter was being assaulted. “Unless you come with us now.”
“Salvatore, no,” Mama sobbed as she moved forward across the room to grip him by the shirt and mumble pleas in a string of rapid Neapolitan.
Rocco ripped her off and threw her savagely to the ground.
Elena and I made twin sounds of distress in our throats and my sister immediately when to her.
I stopped struggling, hanging in my captor’s arms.
“Fine,” I said with my chin raised high. “I’ll go with you. Just leave the house and my family alone.”
Salvatore was already turning to leave when he said, “Bring her and make sure she does it screaming so the neighborhood knows what happens to those who go against the Camorra.”
The man holding me wrapped a fist in my hair and half dropped me to the ground so that he could pull me, kicking and yelling in pain, out the front door and the down the steps to a waiting black sedan.
Mama and Elena hugged each other in the door, watching as I was thrown into the back of the car and the door was slammed shut in my face. I placed my fingers against my trembling lips and then against the hot, dirty glass in a distant kiss I hoped would bring them some minute degree of comfort.
The car started with a rumble and began to roll away from the house, but still I pressed my fingers to the glass until we were well out of sight.
“What a touching sight,” a familiar voice said from beside me. I snapped around to see the long, broad length of Edward Dante Davenport lounging in the seat beside me. “Now, Cosima, are you ready to have that discussion I told you about?”
Dante lit a cigarette and placed it at the corner of his mouth as he waited for me to respond to his arcane question.
“At least open a window,” I snapped at him, unable to move beyond the image of his insolence, lounging there without a care in the world while my life had once again turned topsy-turvy.
He grinned unapologetically and clicked the button to roll down the window.
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