Six months ago, he’d appeared in an article in The Guardian because he’d donated two million pounds to STOP THE TRAFFIK, a United Kingdom-based charity to help victims of sex trafficking.
I didn’t know how he got that one past the Order, or if they all thought it was amusing he’d donated so hypocritically.
Despite my righteous anger at his duplicity, reading that article had given me a brief flare of hope.
Maybe he cared.
Maybe he regretted the awful things he had done to me and put me through, enough to scour the globe for me in order to beg for my forgiveness.
“Not a political type of bloke, I think.” The man shrugged. “Though I must say I’m surprised you haven’t met him. He likes to keep his finger deep in all his pies.”
Jensen shot him a disgusted look at the metaphor. “He specifically asked not to be involved with St. Aubyn anymore, beyond the obvious financial obligations.”
A chill started in my toes and worked its way like creeping ice across a pane of glass over my entire body.
“What?” I breathed.
“Davenport,” the man, I thought his name might have been Franklin, clarified. “He owns the House of St. Aubyn. His great-grandmother started it in the 1920s and most recently, his mother ran it before…before her untimely death.”
Alexander owned St. Aubyn.
Dread pooled in my stomach as everything clicked together.
He’d been outside my auditions for the brand when I’d first met him, when I’d unwittingly saved his life and basically thrust myself into his clutches.
The scent. The one I’d been made to wear the entire time I was at Pearl Hall, the one that seemed to smell like me but amplified, the one I’d discovered was a recent, highly popular debut of the company’s first signature fragrance.
It was modelled after me. Alexander had created a perfume based on my scent and named it D’oro, or Gold. For my eyes, my money eyes.
My breath wasn’t moving properly through my lungs. I could feel it waffle and whimper through my parted lips, wavering as it went down so that somehow, I wasn’t getting enough oxygen. I felt precariously light-headed.
What did any of that mean?
Jensen mistook my shock. “His lack of involvement has nothing to do with you being the face of our brand, Cosi. He’s a busy man, and he doesn’t have time to play with all his toys.”
I almost gave myself away at his apt comparison. I almost protested that I wasn’t just one of Alexander’s toys. I was his favourite.
Or I had been.
I thought of prissy, perfect Agatha Howard and wondered if she knew how to take a spanking, if she could make him come with just her mouth and throat as I could.
Possessive rage lit me up like I was dry kindling.
Why the fuck hadn’t Alexander come over to claim me now that he saw me? What other reason could have dragged him from his dreary homeland to mine, to some insipid fashion event when he hadn’t shown up at any before, even for his own House of St. Aubyn?
He must be here to claim me, I thought wildly, my heart beating at the door of my chest, waiting for Alexander to somehow answer the knock from all the way across the room.
“He’s a right arsehole, if you must know,” Franklin said as he sipped his champagne, and I decided that I instantly liked him. “My flatmate went to uni with him and told me he’d never met a man so full of his own bullshit.”
That startled a laugh from me, a loud burst of hilarity that I didn’t bother covering politely with my hand. The moment I did, the air around me went static with electricity, and I knew Alexander had heard me.
I remembered how he’d loved to hear me laugh; how much I’d fought to make him express his humour that way too. I remembered that I’d made him laugh eighteen times on the one birthday I’d spent with him.
My chest felt lighter with hope.
I was one of the most successful up-and-coming models in the fashion industry. I had already saved up enough money for a down payment on an apartment in New York City close enough to Elena and Mama in Little Italy that I could walk to their brownstone, but far enough away to grant me some peace. I had friends. I had autonomy. I’d worked so hard for all of it, sweat and sobbed and made myself sick to secure a better life for myself.
And at that moment, I wanted to give it all up again for the most enigmatic man I’d ever known just on the off chance he’d want me back.
Before I could help myself, I turned around, my gaze unerringly finding his through the mass of beautiful people. He stood at the opposite end of the room, as far from me as he could be in the shared space. It wasn’t an accident. One look at his cold face, his distant eyes as if he was gazing at a stranger and not his runaway wife, solidified my awareness of his contempt for me.
My breath left my body as if I’d been run into by a sixteen-wheeler.
“Cosima?” I was vaguely aware of Jensen touching my arm. “Are you all right, love?”
No.
No, fuck me, but I wasn’t all right. I wanted to close my eyes and curl into myself in a dark place so that I could cry into my knees in peace.
One year of shoring up my defences, one year of speculating how Alexander would have reacted when he’d found out I was gone.
One year of waiting for him to find me and drag me back to his underworld dominion.
And now this.
Indifference so acute it seemed to cut me off at the knees.
Alexander shifted his gaze from mine as if looking through a ghost and then gently leaned down to press a kiss to Agatha fucking Howard’s perfect golden head before he turned on his heel and swiftly made his way out of the room.
Before I could stop myself, I was following.
A few people tried to impede me with polite conversation, but it was like I was underwater, submerged so deeply in my desire to interact with Alexander again that I couldn’t hear anyone else. I rushed up the steps and out the door into the cool Milano winter night, scanning the Piazza del Duomo for a tall man with a crown of golden hair.
I caught the glint of it out of the corner of my eye and watched as Alexander strode purposefully to the massive white cathedral itself even though it was closed and locked for the night. He shook hands with a man who appeared out of the shadows and then pushed through the massive central bronze doors into the holy space.
I wondered how he didn’t catch on fire.
Swiftly, I ran down the steps on my six-inch Gucci heels, thankful that years of modelling had made me sure-footed as I navigated the cobblestones.
I was out of breath when I reached the looming gothic doors, terrified that someone would appear out of the night to stop me from chasing after Alexander.
No one did.
The cathedral was empty and resplendently gothic in the murky moonlight spilling in through the multitudes of windows. I could hear my steps ringing out across the marble, echoing against the vaulted ceilings and depressed altars.
I felt like a sacrificial virgin voluntarily walking toward her own slaughter, but I couldn’t bring myself to give up the chase as I searched the massive structure for him. I stopped before the statue of Saint Bartholomew with his flayed skin wrapped around his exposed flesh like a stole, as if he was proud of his vulnerability, pleased with his sacrifices. I reached out to run a finger over the smooth marble of his skinless muscles and shuddered with empathy.
I half expected to find Alexander behind the altar to the right of the sculpture, a curved knife in his hands and cloak over his head, waiting to kill me and offer me up to the Order’s god of wine and revelry.
He wasn’t.
Instead, the door to the stairs leading up to roof was slightly parted, a cool wind whistling through the crack like a call for me to enter.
I counted the steps as I ascended in the pitch dark, focusing on the 250 footfalls instead of the growing anticipation churning through my system like acid, eating away at me from the inside out.
Would he be happy to s
ee me?
Had he lured me away from the party so that he could claim me properly as his own once more after over a year of frantic searching for me? Would he punish me with his hand against my ass and my knees against the unforgiving marble as penance for my sin of running so we could move on from this place together, cleansed and reborn together again after his punishment?
I didn’t know how that would work. There was still Noel and the Order to consider, still my family and the secret of Salvatore’s continued existence after Alexander had supposedly killed him.
Still so many secrets, ones better off left undiscovered.
I’d unearth them all with my bare hands until the skin peeled and cracked and bled if it meant Alexander would pluck me out of the limbo my life had become and take me back home with him.
The door creaked as I pushed it open, then banged against the wall so loudly it sounded like a gunshot.
Alexander wasn’t startled.
He stood in the middle of the roof on the narrow flat platform between the soaring buttresses and complicated carved spires.
I felt like peasant entering a king’s throne room, and my knees nearly buckled before they could carry me across the roof into his space. The cold window broke my flesh into ripples, and my nipples beaded in the sheer fabric of my dress. I could feel my pulse settle deep and heavy in my groin, a slow beat like a kick drum at a pagan ritual thrumming through my body from my center.
Alexander did not move. He didn’t even blink. He just watched me cross the space to him as if he had known all his life we would one day meet on the roof of the most famous cathedral in Italy under the cover of stars and a yellow moon the same shade as my eyes.
I opened my mouth to say his name, but, “Master,” emerged instead.
Old habits—old programming—were slow to die, apparently.
Alexander blinked then, a slow click of his thickly lashed eyes like the mechanical movement of a shuttering lens.
He’d never seemed less human than he was then.
I stared at the cruel god before me and knew how utterly inane my fantasies of his reciprocated love had been.
“Stop searching me,” he said finally, his voice slicing through the air, calculated as a whip strike against my back. After all this time, he still seemed able to read my mind. “Stop the searches, stop the waiting and wishing like a heartsick fool for me to return to you and bring you back to Pearl Hall. It won’t happen, and it’s frankly pathetic that you’re pining after your abuser like some doleful victim. Honestly, I thought you were better than that.”
I recoiled, my heel catching in the stonework oddly as I stepped back so that I went careening to my knee.
Alexander didn’t bat an eyelash.
“You own St. Aubyn,” I accused him in a stronger voice than I would have thought I could manage. “Did you send Sinclair to me? Willa Percy?”
Had he orchestrated their entry into my life? Was he the reason I’d had a place to stay in New York City while I recovered from my heartbreak, the reason Willa Percy had decided I would be a much better fit for St. Aubyn than the girl they’d hired a year ago after I disappeared?
Alexander crossed his massive arms over his tuxedo clad chest and blinked at him. “You think too much of yourself. Why would I waste my time on a slave? Let alone one who reneged on her contract and disappeared without a trace.”
“You found me now,” I said defiantly as if that changed anything. “You’ve found me, and now what?”
He shrugged, such a casual gesture that it seemed wrong on his broad shoulders.
Alexander wasn’t a casual man, so the mannerism felt wrong.
Contrived.
Hope fluttered again in my chest.
“I could sue you for breach of contract?” he suggested coldly.
“Is that all you want to do?” I asked, eyeing him closely as I stood up and stalked closer to him.
I could see a muscle leap in his jaw, and it made me feel like a queen.
His breath froze in his throat for a brief second as I pressed my breasts to his chest, ran a hand up the silky lapel of his blazer, and then wrapped it around the side of his neck so I could feel his pulse against my palm.
When I looked up into his eyes, the remoteness was gone, replaced with a ferocity that made me hot with want and cold with terror.
“You married me, Xan,” I said, my words landing like soft blows. “You once told me that if you ever felt moved to marry, it would be because you wanted to give your future wife your protection and the promise of your undying love. You said you would always care about her, about me, no matter what happened.”
We were silent as my words glittered in the air around us, wrapping us in their magic, in their complete and utter beauty.
Alexander wasn’t a man of many things, but I knew he was a man of his word.
He couldn’t marry me just to cast me aside.
“I think you’re forgetting the part where you ran from me,” he said, his hand shooting up to catch me around the neck in a firm grip. “I think you are forgetting that you embarrassed me in front of Britain’s elite and made a fool of me when I put myself on the line with the Order of Dionysus to protect you.”
“I had my reasons,” I breathed tightly through the pressure around my throat. “Trust me, Xan, I didn’t want to leave you.”
“Even if you didn’t, I don’t care. You were amusing while it lasted, but you’ve been gone for months now, and I’ve found myself new amusements.” He watched the colour drain out of my face, his words affecting me more than his stranglehold ever could. “You mean nothing to me, Cosima Lombardi. You were a slave, a nothing I made into a momentary something, but your time is done. Stop obsessing over me, move the fuck on, and if I ever hear of you saying my name, ever see you step a single foot in England again, I promise you there will be consequences. None of which you will like as you have before.”
“Xan,” I tried again only to cry out as his other hand fisted at the back of my hair, and he started to drag me to the side of the roof.
I screamed as he thrust me over the balustrade so that I was dangling precariously over the piazza below me, bracketed by gargoyles jeering at me from either side of the spires.
My eyes were wide with shock as I stared up into Alexander’s emotionless expression. I was gripping his wrists where he held me instinctively.
In all our experiences together, he had never threatened me like this. To hurt me just for the sake of hurting me, to scare me enough to fear for my life.
I couldn’t fathom why he was doing it, not with my body flooded with adrenaline and my mind overrun with fear.
The only option that seemed available to me was simple.
He truly didn’t care.
His rejection burned in my heart, but I’d come too far to give up without a fight. I’d hurt him, I’d run from him, and that would have seemed like the ultimate betrayal and rejection. He needed to know I trusted him, that I hadn’t wanted to go.
With my eyes locked on his, silver and gold, I held my breath and slowly let go of my death grip on his wrists so that the only thing keeping me from tumbling back into space was his grasp on my neck and hair and my ankles hooked tight over the balustrade.
“I didn’t want to leave you, Xan,” I told him in a voice like a splitting thread as I bared my entire self to him. “I’ve never felt happier, more complete in my entire life as I did the moment we were declared man and wife. A year later and I still miss you so much it feels like a constant echo in my soul.”
I felt like raw, tenderized meat hanging from a hook in my spine as he held me half suspended over the edge of the Duomo, but I didn’t move.
I didn’t even breathe.
Instead, I watched a flurry of emotions turn Alexander’s eyes from angry smoke to the storm clouds and rainwater of despair and finally, achingly, to wet concrete. I knew any second they would set into stone, and I would be done, locked out of his head and his heart forever.
&n
bsp; “I love you,” I told him, and it was the truest thing I’d ever known. “I love you, Alexander.”
Back to rainwater for one deeply profound moment, where those wet grey eyes fell from mine to my lips in cool trails like drops against my cheek. I saw the agony in his eyes, felt the emotion mirrored in my own, and thought he would crush me to his chest, wrap his strong arms around me, and never again let me go.
And then…
Stone.
Cold, grey intractable granite like the cliffs in the Peak District that rose around Pearl Hall like a sea of rocky waves.
He was gone.
Gone to me forever.
He pulled me back to my feet and dropped his hands from me as if I was toxic.
“Not a word, not one sight of you. Is that understood, slave?” he asked me.
I blinked at him, trying to keep a tenuous hold of the calamity of emotions in my throat that threatened to drown me like a tidal wave.
He took the blink for what it was, shocked acceptance. Then, just when I thought he would stalk away and disappear from my life, he lunged forward, drove his hands into either side of my hair above my ears, yanked my head back and kissed me so hard I knew it would tattoo my lips blue with bruises. I gasped as he bit my bottom lip so hard it broke the skin and the tang of blood erupted between us. He collected it with one searing swipe of his tongue and then thrust it deep inside my mouth as if feeling the cataclysmic amount of pain in my body wasn’t enough, he wanted me to taste my own heartbreak too.
My hand flew to my busted lip as he stepped back and then away, turning on his heel and striding off with brisk intent as if he hadn’t just shattered me open on the roof of Milan’s Duomo, as if he hadn’t left me bloody and irrevocably broken.
He didn’t look back.
And after another hour spent weeping into my knees in the dark of the rooftop’s spires and stone creatures, after I collected myself enough to see through my blurry eyes and walk down to the Piazza to catch a cab… after all that, for the next three years, I didn’t look back either.
Cosima
Three Years Later.
The flash of cameras nearly blinded me, but after over three years in the spotlight, I knew how to dodge the light and duck into the darkness. I tipped my chin down, the silky hair tucked behind my ear slipping out to curtain half of my face from the roped-off crowd of photogs and reporters lining the red carpet.
Enamoured Page 5