It was my first time back in England in almost four years. I’d always claimed that wild horses couldn’t drag me back to the godforsaken country, but my brother being nominated for his first BAFTA was reason enough to make me a liar. I flew in the day before the awards show, and I had a return ticket for the crack of dawn the morning after. Less than thirty-six hours in the country. Definitely not enough time for Alexander Davenport to sniff me out and punish me for stepping foot in his country against his explicit orders.
Alexander Davenport could go fuck himself.
“Miss Lombardi,” a reporter called as I emerged from the limo and accepted my brother’s hand. “Is it true you and Mr. Matlock are engaged?”
Sebastian wound my arm tightly under his, pulling me so close I could feel the warmth of his hip against my side.
I didn’t like personal questions.
I didn’t take interviews, and I didn’t engage in idle gossip.
Ironically, that made the rumor mill churn faster, harder. Gossip about the mysterious, beautiful Lombardi twins ran rampant across tabloids and celebrity news.
Where had we come from, who did we love, what did we live for?
The only thing that was clear was our futures.
We were rising stars on the meteoric ascension to a permanent position in the sky of fame and success.
“Sebastian, do you want to address the rumors that you and your sister have a more than platonic relationship?”
My twin turned to iron, freezing in our slow progress down the red carpet. I could feel him weaponize with rage, the appalling accusation honing the edge of his ever present but latent anger.
I didn’t attempt to wield or shield him.
Sebastian was a much better actor than I could ever dream of being.
He shot the audacious reporter a smile that was inherently charming, veiling his wrath with the pretty costume of his smile. “You’ve clearly watched too many episodes of Game of Thrones. I’d suggest finding something more worthwhile to occupy your time. Perhaps genuine journalistic research?”
His cutting remark delivered, Seb tugged me forward to the X marked out on the carpet where we were meant to pose for a series of photographs.
He tucked me into his side and stared down at me with a stock issue smile as the click and clack of cameras rattled around us.
“Ignore them,” he told me sternly.
I looked up into his golden eyes, counting the striations in his irises the way I’d done my entire life. His eyes differed from mine only in that minute way, spikes of sunlight instead of my pinpricks of burnished bronze.
“I don’t care,” I said softly, beaming at him so that the catcalls that followed would drown out my words. “It’s them who are sick, not us.”
Sebastian’s smile thinned, his own demons daring him to accept that for the truth.
In some ways, I believed my words.
I certainly wasn’t in a relationship with my brother, nor engaged to Mason Matlock, or a closeted lesbian with my best friend and fellow model Erika Van Bellegham. None of the rumors were true, no matter how fucked up they created them to be.
But I was sick.
Only my disease was terminal. It ate away the marrow of my bones until I was hollow, fragile as a small bird perched on a branch in a gale, but unable to fly.
It infiltrated the chambers of my heart, corroding and calcifying the arteries. The organ still worked, still pumped hot blood through my limbs, but it didn’t feel.
Joy was a glass half empty no matter how marvellous the news or accomplishment because I was a woman half alive.
The other portion of my heart, of my soul, was still buried deep within the underworld, cradled in the cruel hands of a man who had stolen me away years ago but never really let me go. It echoed in the antique rooms of a home on the other side of the Atlantic and ghosted across the landscape of a place called Pearl Hall.
Alexander Davenport had held me prisoner in his dark kingdom and coaxed me to eat of the forbidden fruit so that now, so many years later across so many miles, I was still intrinsically shackled to his domain.
Even after the cruel goodbye in Milan.
Even after extensive hours of therapy with one of the best woman’s trauma psychiatrists in Manhattan.
Years later, an ocean of time between me and the island of my servitude, and I was still empty and indentured to the past.
“I suppose whatever helps us sleep at night,” Seb murmured, pulling me from my thoughts as he turned us into a new pose for the shouting cameramen.
“You help me,” I told him before we shot twin gleaming smiles to our captive audience. “Always.”
Our progress along the carpet was slow and mind-numbing, but I didn’t mind being Sebastian’s arm candy. After years of hard work, my brother had finally established the kind of success usually found in a Hallmark movie. His first film, written and starred in by his truly, had been an international success, first at Cannes Film Festival, and then in America where it was optioned by Sony.
Now, he was one of the hottest commodities in Hollywood.
I smiled blankly at the third woman to interview us about Sebastian’s feelings on his first BAFTA nomination and second Oscar nomination in as many years. I tried to ease the strain from my smile and knew I’d succeeded when the cameraman blinked owlishly at my expression.
“No one special?” the seasoned reporter asked, a gleam in her heavily made-up eyes.
Sebastian flashed her one of his megawatt smiles, the shine making the reporter blink dazedly. “Anyone can be special for a night.”
“A little birdy told me you refused to be tied to Tate and Savannah Richardson’s latest project despite their best attempts to seduce you into taking the lead role.” I watched her swallow hard, her resolve to mine a potential trove of gossip deeper than her desire to bed my handsome brother.
Seb tensed just slightly under my arm. He didn’t like any mention of Savannah Richardson. She’d had many names in her storied life, but despite Sebastian’s superlative charms, she had never worn the name of Lombardi, and now he couldn’t stand the sound of her in his ear.
Before he could respond, the entertainment reporter swung to me with a wide, faux-innocent smile, and said, “Mason Matlock was seen walking out of Tiffany’s with their signature Robin’s egg blue bag just yesterday. Do you approve of your sister’s future husband?”
“Speculation is the indulgence of the lazy,” I told her coolly, channelling my inner Elena, trying to be as aloof and unflappable as my eldest sister. A little voice told me I was also tapping into the influence of my ex-Master. Only Alexander Davenport, lord of the freaking realm, could deliver such scathing condescension so effortlessly. “Mason is a good friend, nothing more.”
“You speak as if marriage is off the table.”
I pressed my thumb to the bare ring finger of my left hand where I constantly felt the phantom weight of a gold ring I once wore for less than four hours.
“It is,” I said, staring into the camera, wondering if my husband was watching. “I won’t ever marry.”
Not again.
Legally, I couldn’t, not without a divorce to the Earl of Thornton, heir to the Dukedom of Greythorn and one of England’s wealthiest estates. That was something I would never do. I’d left as Noel had wanted, and nothing would coerce me into getting in touch with Alexander.
I’d considered it countless times over the years. At first, I’d wanted to call him for the simplest of reasons. For permission to come when I touched myself at night, desperate for the level of pleasure only he could grant me. For the right to even leave the house and talk to men who weren’t him.
I missed him when I dressed in the morning, hating the way I fit the clothes to my curves instead of dressing his edges. I craved him during the after-work rush, seeing businessmen hurry home and knowing that across the pond Alexander would be doing the same thing only I wouldn’t be there on my knees to greet him.
To say m
y new life in America had been an adjustment was a gross understatement.
I’d been miserable.
The events of the past four years were indistinguishable, my teardrops running the ink in the pages of a diary I’d taken to keeping just to mark the time.
Before Alexander and after Alexander.
Before, my life had been sad, but I’d had no context to deepen my despair.
Now, now, I knew exactly what I was missing.
And horror of horrors, it was the cold bite of a whip wielded in the ruthless, exacting hands of a Dominant and Lord named Alexander Davenport.
My therapist called it Stockholm Syndrome. She told me I felt the most betrayed by his inhumane goodbye in Milan because I’d grown unhealthfully attached to the cage he’d constructed around me, that my continued melancholy was a side effect that would eventually wear off as I readjusted.
Three years of therapy and nothing had changed.
Sebastian ushered us past the rest of the reporters, greasing our way with his slippery smile and a few well-placed winks. We both stopped just inside the hotel’s luxurious lobby and mutually decided on a recessed corner near the elevators to take a moment of peace before going upstairs into the ballroom.
My brother let out a gusty exhale as he leaned back against the marble wall and drew his collar away from his neck with a hooked finger.
“You’re more on edge than I’ve seen you in a long while,” I told him, frowning up into his face as I noticed the strain around his eyes and mouth, the deep bruises from lack of sleep beneath his golden gaze.
He closed his eyes. “Leave me be, mia bella sorella.”
“Seb…you can talk to me.” I told him something he already knew in his bones.
He peeked at me through one squinted eye. “Oh? Just as you talk to me?”
It was my turn to sigh.
We were still close in a way only twins could ever understand. His presence in a room alone brought me unquantifiable comfort, and the touch of his hand to my shoulder grounded me like lightning through a steel rod.
But things had changed.
We’d only been apart for fifteen months, but those months had been compressed with rapid, irrevocable change. Change so significant it had altered us as individuals and as confidantes.
I was no longer that woman who shared every intimacy with her family, who babbled about her day happily in the carefree manner of a bubbling brook. Now, I was shadows and secrets so dark they were like black holes sucking at everything else light in my life until it was diminished or devoured.
Those black holes ate up the words to describe my particular brand of pain, and the memories that had made it so before I could even think to voice them.
“There’s nothing to say beyond what I’ve told you.” I tried to placate him even though I knew he would frown before he even did, disgusted with my bald-faced lie.
I placed a soothing hand on his arm and tried again. “Really, whatever is in the past can stay there. You can only be haunted by the past as long as you keep the door open into your present.”
“Don’t feed me fortune cookie cazzate. You don’t want to talk to me, fine, but don’t be a hypocrite and incite me to share with you what you won’t share with me.”
I bit my lip, wondering if I should say what I’d been desperate to say since I’d run into him on the street outside Club Dionysus in London three years ago. “Does your unhappiness have more to do with Savannah and her new husband… or the handsome actor I saw you walking with in London?”
My brother went still.
Goosebumps ripped across my flesh because the threat in that stillness reminded me so much of Alexander.
I knew instinctively, I’d been wrong to go there.
But as I opened my mouth to apologize, Sebastian cut his blazing yellow eyes to mine.
“If you speak to me again about them, I won’t hesitate to delve further into exactly what you were doing with the Earl of Thornton in England when you’d just told Mama, the girls, and me that you were working in Milan. I won’t be considerate of your secrets any longer, and I’ll drag them kicking and screaming into the light for everyone to see.”
“You’re threatening me?” I asked, my voice soft with shock.
Sebastian had never spoken to me like that before. Never looked at me with barely constrained violence in his tiger eyes and fury so quick on his lips.
“No,” he said after a long moment of vibrating rage. I watched him pull himself together second by second, sucking a deep breath through his lips and then exhaling as if performing an exorcism. “No, Cosi, I would never threaten you. Please just…just don’t speak about him, them, and we won’t have any problems.”
“I’d tell you if it wasn’t dangerous,” I confided in him, stepping closer to press my palm to the hard angle of his jaw. “I’m just trying to protect you.”
And myself.
A muscle in his check jumped as he ground his teeth, but he put his hand over my own on his face and then kissed my palm. “That’s exactly the stuff of my nightmares. That my beautiful, sweet sister had to do the unspeakable to get us out of that Neapolitan sinkhole.”
“The past,” I reminded him as we both silently decided to step back into the crowd to find our seats for the ceremony. “Should stay in the past.”
Seb squeezed my hand, and I looked over to see his face exposed like a raw nerve, bloody skin and muscles peeled away to reveal the ugly truth of his own experiences. A second later, someone called his name, and his habitual expression of levity slid into place.
I stood quietly at his side as he introduced me to industry acquaintances and lingered to talk to close friends. They only wanted my smile and a long perusal of my body clad in a red bustier corset lace and silk gown by Oscar de la Renta. I liked to wear red; it reminded me of wet poppies and spanked asses, of strength and lust, and memories that ached in a good way like a massage to sore muscles.
I was happy to play dumb and pretty as I chewed over my brother’s obvious heartbreak regarding a man. He was so easy in his masculinity, in his love of women in whatever shape and size they were packaged in that it had honestly never occurred to me that he may be bisexual. I didn’t think he was gay, not with the obvious way he appreciated females and their forms, but the fact that the mere mention of a man could so clearly unhinge him made me believe he had to have been at least a little in love with him.
I wanted to know the story. I wanted to know why he lusted after Savannah Richardson even as he seemed to revile her very name, and how Sebastian had become attached to her ex-husband, mega-movie star Adam Meyers.
But I wouldn’t press.
It was in my nature to dig and delve past people’s boundaries. I was an emotional archeologist, dissatisfied with anything less than the naked, vulnerable truth of a person. But I would never force my best friend, my brother, to unveil his past when he wasn’t ready.
It would have to be a story for another day.
Maybe a day when I could share my own with him too.
As if my thoughts had summoned him like a demon from hell, a British accent I recognized from years ago though even then I’d only heard it a few times, rang out with wit behind me.
I froze, as if not moving would make me invisible to him.
Without turning around to face him and the threat he posed, I silently but swiftly moved through the crowds of people, mingling amid the red velvet theatre seats to a hallway that led to the ladies’ restroom.
A few women were gathered in front of the mirrors, checking their make-up and gossiping, but I ignored them to wet some paper towel and hold it to the back of my neck in a foolhardy attempt to calm myself.
I wanted to run. Out the door of the theatre, out of the city and straight to the imposing grounds of Pearl Hall where we could lock the gates against intruders from the past. Where Alexander could protect me from men even more evil than himself as he had before.
My back ached with phantom pain as I thought abo
ut those twenty-five lashes he’d taken for me, as I thought about the blood and the sacrifice of that moment.
I’d thought Alexander would do anything to protect me. Cazzo, he’d even married me to do so.
But he wasn’t here.
He couldn’t be, and he didn’t want to be.
It was just me.
So I stared at my ashen face in the mirror, blinked my fake lashes hard over my frightened eyes, and filled them with determination instead.
If I was being hunted, I would fight.
I didn’t need Alexander or Dante or Salvatore to protect me.
I could damn well do it myself.
With a bracing inhale, I bent to part the high slit in my gown even further and took the SOG Salute mini folding knife from my garter belt to palm it in my hand. It had been a gift from Dante, engraved with a quote from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, a book he had forced on me when I first moved to New York.
“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.”
He wanted me to be prepared even though I’d teased him for being paranoid. For once, Dante hadn’t found me amusing.
I was grateful then for his overprotectiveness because if I was going to face a man I’d believed to be dead for the past four years, I wanted to be armed and ready.
He wasn’t waiting for me in the hallway when I emerged from the bathroom, and I wondered if he’d even spotted me in the crowded theatre.
I shouldn’t have wondered.
The disciples of the Order of Dionysus were sharks. They could smell blood in the water.
Sharp pain burst through the back of my skull as a hand reached out and yanked brutally on the strands so that I went reeling backward.
Hot breath fanned across my face as I was turned and then slammed against the wall with a hot body pressed chest to thighs to mine.
Lord Ashcroft’s floppy sand-coloured hair hung in his sneering face. He was shorter, my height, so we were eye to eye, mouth hovering so close to mouth.
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