He waved his hand through the air as if it didn’t matter.
“If the Order did take her, you’re better off lying low and playing the dedicated soldier so you can figure out who did it.”
I exhaled roughly, side-eyeing Riddick where he stood off to one side, ready and waiting for any directive. He looked pissed right off but also conflicted.
We both knew Noel was right.
As much as I hated my father, as much as I’d had to live with him and be groomed by him as dictated by British upper-class social mores and secret society directives, but mostly because someone had fucking killed my mother, I knew life was a game.
A complicated game of chess that only the very best could succeed at.
And if I wanted to beat the Order when they had the most powerful pieces on the board, then I’d have to play the long game.
Which meant doing exactly what Noel said.
Playing nice until they cocked up well enough for me to capitalize on it and end them.
For fucking good.
“Happily, I have a solution that won’t end in your execution,” Noel offered blasély. “Wentworth has petitioned for divorce from his wife and plans to run away with his slave. I’ve known this for some time, but I was waiting for the right time to make it known.”
“Of course.” Noel never gave an inch of himself or his knowledge away unless it would earn him a mile of leeway and influence.
“Unfortunately for the poor chap, he’s grown careless as the date of his departure looms, and he made an error. An error that I happened to catch on film.”
I stared into my father’s eyes and noted how empty they were, like a steel room filled with stale air just waiting for someone to accidentally wander into. A holding cell. A torture chamber.
The eyes of a man without a heart.
I wondered painfully if those were the eyes Cosima had seen staring back at her in my face as I broke her into submission those first few weeks in the ballroom.
“Wentworth was one of the men who tried to claim Cosima at The Hunt,” Noel mentioned casually, only the sly cast of his eyes sweeping in my direction gave away that he knew he was putting the final nail in Simon Wentworth’s coffin with his words.
“Why would he do that if he’s as in love with his slave as you claim he is?” I retorted.
“Why have you done so many horrible things to your slave? You know as well as he did that you are constantly watched for misconduct. They’ve been keeping tabs on him since he sent his wife to live on their Irish estate so he could be alone with the slave. It was the right call to capture and bed someone else at The Hunt, a call you should have been smart enough to make yourself. I believe he was almost successful in claiming your little mouse before another man knocked him from his horse and nearly beat him to death in a stream… think about what the man would have done with her if he hadn’t been interrupted?”
It was sheer manipulation.
Grossly obvious, crude as a prehistoric tool chipped roughly out of stone.
Yet it still found its mark.
“Set it up.”
Growing up, I’d always been drawn to the study of the classics, the great epic poems by Homer and Virgil, the Olympic gods, and the tragic, heroic stories.
I’d always identified with Hades the most, a hero who’d drawn the worst prize and been stuck as king of a dark, desolate kingdom he wanted no part of yet still ruled fairly over.
But it was the relationship and difference between the two gods of war that had always seemed most apt for Noel and me. I was quick to anger, though I’d curbed my impulsive actions over the years, a man of rapid decision-making and immediate execution like Ares. My father was like the Goddess Athena, studied and patient, with the ability to formulate a plan and implement it over years, even decades.
When it came down to it, there were very few times Ares beat Athena.
I knew I had to change and adapt in order to best him.
The resentment that had been planted and germinated as a boy, taken roots through the cruel teachings of my adolescence and been only temporarily stunted after the death of my mother when I was eager to make peace with the only parent I had left, burst into riotous bloom.
Finally, I had a fully formed reason to take down my father.
That reason had eyes the colour of gold bullion and a soul purer than freshly driven fucking snow.
So, I smiled sharply at him as he wiped the blood I’d spilled from his cruel mouth. “Set it up,” I repeated. “I’ll show the Order just how loyal I am, and I’ll enjoy doing it.”
They strung him up between two trees. I wondered idly why they didn’t use the dungeon or the exercise room as they had in the past, but I was too blind to the cold flurry of my own rage to think fully on it.
Maybe I should have.
I wasn’t a man of feeling. I’d been raised to think emotion was akin to a normal man’s sin, and that sinning was my right as an earl. I was better than petty sentiment but worthy of satisfying my every need, no matter the cost.
And my need at that moment was violence.
I wanted to channel all my considerable devastation at the sudden loss of my wife on our wedding day by decimating the bastard strung up between two ash trees.
He was a poor bloke without the intelligence and artifice to pull off his greatest crime against the Order by loving his slave. A crime we shared.
I studied his defeated posture as I slid the end of a cat o’ nine tails whip through my hand. His dark head was bowed between his shoulders, a gash on his cheek dripped blood to the grass from where one of the brothers had beaten him into submission enough to get him strung up like a Christmas goose.
In years past, I wouldn’t have spared a thought as to whether he deserved what was coming to him. My fundamental apathy had always extended to the Order. It was my father’s domain, and only his will kept me tethered to it.
Now, the heart of me had woken from its lifelong slumber, and I felt moved by the wretched bugger hanging from his wrists. No doubt, his slave was already dead, taken care of by one of the society’s discreet and deadly acolytes who only ever operated from the shadows and never showed their faces at the Order’s social events.
There were so many paths that could have led to me between those massive ash trees, broken by love and punished by people who could never understand such a feeling.
It was ironic that I was to be the one to punish him for it.
“Are you sure you’re up for this, old chap?” Martin Howard asked me affably with a chummy pat on the back.
He was not a friend.
He was the brother to Agatha Howard, a woman the Order and Noel, more specifically, had urged me to marry for years.
They were part of the most ambitious and callous family in British noble history, and I’d always found the lot of them incredibly distasteful.
Anyone that hungry for power was never going to achieve it, at least not for long.
Like the ouroboros, they would only end up eating their own tail.
I shot Martin an impassive look and continued to slide the whip sensually across my palm. The feel of it in my hands was right, like a pitcher with a baseball or an artist with a brush. This was my tool of trade, a weapon I wielded with both precision and passion to create a masterpiece on a woman’s body.
Like the many I had made on Cosima’s golden brown skin.
Wrath burned any lingering misgivings I had clean from my mind.
I had to show the Order I was just as heathen and unfeeling as they were.
I had to prove I was on their side until the bitter end so that when I discovered which one of the motherfucking men took Cosima from me and went after them, they wouldn’t see it coming.
“Of course, you’re ready,” Martin guffawed. “You were born ready for this society, with a father like Noel.”
“Acta, non verba,” Sherwood proclaimed as he stepped away from the masses of Order men at my back to speak with me.
&
nbsp; The wedding was long over, the guests sent home without explanation for why the bride had suddenly retired early for the night.
“Action, not words,” Sherwood translated like the haughty arsehole he was even though he knew both Martin and I perfectly understood Latin. “Prove yourself as one of us after this disgrace of a wedding, Davenport. This man flagrantly disobeyed the primary rule of this society. Do not fall in love with your slave. They are meant to slake the temptations of your body and purge the demons from your mind, but they are never worthy of our regard.”
“I’m aware of the rules,” I said drolly.
Sherwood and Howard shared a quick look.
My unflappability in the face of my own transgressions that almost directly mirrored those of the bugger to be punished confused them.
Was I an idiot, they wondered?
No, Alexander Davenport, Lord of Thornton and heir to the Dukedom of Greythorn, was one of the wealthiest men in the United Kingdom and had amassed one of the highest-grossing media companies in the world.
Dumb, I was not.
So what other explanation could there be for my bone-deep calm?
Well, he clearly hadn’t loved his slave.
Not if he was this unruffled by the disappearance of the slave and by his punishment of one who had committed that very crime.
I could see my manipulation snare them in its web, and I moved in for the kill.
“I married the slave as the final nail in the coffin of my contempt for her father. He killed my mother, but before I killed him, he knew what it was to have someone he loved wholly and completely taken from him.”
They didn’t know Amedeo Salvatore wasn’t dead. I doubted even Cosima knew I was aware of her ruse.
No man as clever as the Napoli capo went into a situation unarmed out of concern for his estranged daughter.
It was a set-up, and though amateurly thought up, it was fairly well-executed.
The fact of it was, I didn’t much care.
There was very little to make me believe anymore that Salvatore was the one who killed my mother. There was little motive, and my own gut coiled at the idea.
It was wrong.
I had more important things than Salvatore on my mind at the time, but I knew where he was when the time came to confront him.
Now that Cosima was gone, finding her was my only focus, and Salvatore was at the bottom of my list of suspects based on one simple fact. Not even her birth father could have convinced Cosima to run away from me hours after we’d married.
Snapping the whip forward with complete accuracy, I broke a branch arching above Simon Wentworth’s prone form and watched as leaves fell over him like macabre confetti.
“Let’s begin,” I intoned, just as mightily as Sherwood, striding forward and taking my place behind Wentworth’s back.
Unlike mine, his was smooth and unblemished. He had never been punished for defending a woman as I had for Yana and Cosima.
Unbidden, I wondered what kind of man he was, and remorse scored through me like talons over my innards. Then I remembered that he had tried to claim Cosima in The Hunt, and anger blazed through me, eradicating the wounds.
“Just do it,” he whispered brokenly. “She’s gone, and I don’t…I don’t want to be anymore.”
“Disgusting,” someone called out.
Another spit at him.
“Pathetic wanker,” someone else shouted.
“Silence,” I ordered, the boom of my voice like a sonic bomb quelling every noise in the vicinity.
Even the wind died suddenly, and the animals obeyed, frozen in the trees like ornaments.
I let the banked rage at losing Cosima overcome me as I lifted my arm and brought the deadliest whip in my arsenal down on Simon Wentworth’s back.
His screams exploded in the silence, louder than my command, filling the quiet like a waterfall into a cup, his agony so forceful it seemed to tear through my eardrums.
I continued ceaselessly.
My mind focused not on the wet thwack and thud of the whip on his torn back or his banshee wails but on the face of a woman who was young enough to be a girl but wise enough to be a goddess.
I thought of the way she slept curled in my arms as if I was her protector. For a girl with a life filled with monsters, the idea that she thought I could keep her safe from harm was so heady, it made my head fucking spin.
I thought of her hair wrapped around my fingers as she babbled on about her day cooking with Douglas, attempting needlepoint with Mrs. White, and fencing with Riddick. How those words gave life to my house, to Pearl Hall, in a way nothing ever had before. How her words made my house a home.
I thought about Cosima until my arm was weak with strain and my white shirt was stained with red like a Jackson Pollack painting. I thought of her as Simon Wentworth’s breath turned to a wet rattle, and then I thought of her as my mind seized with the knowledge that this person she had turned me into could not live with beating Wentworth to death for committing an act I was guilty of myself.
“Davenport?” someone called.
I realized that my arm had dropped, and I was heaving for breath as I stared at the mutilated mess I’d made of the man before me.
“Can’t stomach it?” Sherwood asked smugly.
If I couldn’t, I would be signing my own death warrant.
I looked up at him, trying to veil the hatred I felt for him and his well up like a spring river over the protective banks I’d erected over the years.
“I have a better idea,” I said softly, dropping the whip, ignoring the way my hand cramped into a curled position from holding it so tightly for so long.
The Order watched wearily as I moved around Wentworth, dropping to my knees before I called to Noel, “Bring me a knife.”
My father strode forward as if he had been prepared all along for this exact eventuality, a gleaming hunting knife with an ivory and golden handle already brandished in his hand. It was the knife passed down the Greythorn line since its inception in the 1500s.
The handle was warm as he passed it over to me, his eyes cold with violent pride as he placed his other hand on my shoulder, and said, “That’s my boy.”
That’s my boy.
Proud of me for one-upping the Order’s prescribed punishment to one even more cruel, even more steeped in the society’s brutal history.
I cut my gaze from my father and looked up at Simon Wentworth, whose face was pale as a blank page and just as undone.
“Do it,” he mumbled. “End me.”
“I won’t,” I told him, my voice strong enough for the Order to hear it. “Because you don’t deserve it. For the crimes you’ve committed against the Order of Dionysus, you’ll be gelded.”
There was collective gasp and hum of approval from behind me, but Simon Wentworth’s eyes only widened as he panted and gaped at me.
“This is for trying to rape my wife,” I said quietly, just for him.
And then I fit the knife up behind his balls and cut.
Blood poured over my hands, wet and warm like a Satanic christening while Simon’s screams rent the fabric of the air again and again until they stopped with a whimper, and he fainted in his bonds.
I stepped back, turned with the bloody knife, and wiped it on my father’s shirt before he could move out of the way.
He bared his teeth and growled at me, but I was already stepping away, handing both the knife and the offender’s wet mass of testicles to Sherwood.
“Your price for the crimes committed,” I told him, layering my voice with meaning as I pinned him in place with my glacial regard.
I took primal satisfaction from the way the rail thin older man paled.
“The price is paid,” he murmured. “Welcome back to the fold, brother. We have many plans for you.”
And I—I thought darkly, mind racing—for you.
Cosima
“You don’t have any experience,” I heard for the dozenth time in less than two weeks. “I’m
sorry.”
I blinked at the man wearing the regulation visor and polyester vest. My mouth was twisted into something between a sneer and a smile, misaligned by bitter humour at the idea of a pimply faced teenager telling me I had no experience.
I wanted to lean across the table and wrap my hand around his throat as I recounted just how much experience I had with nightmares he was too pure to even dream up. I wanted to watch his eyes bulge, the whites redden with fireworks of burst blood vessels as I squeezed and said my dirty words. As I told him about my rape, The Hunt, my wicked beating at the hands of the world’s wickedest man.
Then I wanted to sit back and watch him gasp for breath, scrubbing his hands over his face as if he could erase the images I’d implanted in his mind, and ask him calmly if he still thought I was lacking in experience.
I didn’t do any of that.
Defiance wasn’t me, it was the Cosima of before. Before my father sold me, before Alexander bought me and wholly owned me, before his father ruined me.
I was too well trained to lash out against the bonds society had strapped me in, too tired to execute the violence boiling in my heart, and too desperate to waste my energy on another rejection.
So, I smiled at him, knowing it was the most beautiful thing the boy would see in his day as a cash register attendant at a cheap chain restaurant.
He blinked hard at the sight of me, and it gave me a sliver of comfort.
“Thank you for your time,” I said softly before I pushed back from the table and left the cramped restaurant.
Sometime during my failed interview, it had begun to rain over the streets of Milan. I stepped out into the elements, tilting my head up into the knife sharp spray of water, loving the way it hurt, needing the way it grounded me to my new reality.
I wasn’t a slave anymore, but I didn’t feel free.
I had more obligations than before.
Dante and Salvatore had uprooted their organization to restart in America, and their money was spent establishing their hold in the city. They didn’t have extra to support a family of five, though they tried.
I’d left England without the assurance of a continued allowance for Mama and my siblings. There wasn’t even an account for my ex-owner to deposit into anymore. Dante had worked his illegal, technological wizardry and dissolved the Lombardi family of Naples from the anvils of Italian history. If anyone in Mama and Elena’s new life in New York, or Sebastian’s in London, or Giselle’s in Paris decided to look into the Lombardi clan, they would find nothing.
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