Enamoured

by Darling, Giana

  “No Thornton to save you now, pet,” he taunted me, pulling on my hair so tightly that tears sprang to my eyes unbidden and sluiced down my cheeks. “No one to tell me I can’t take what I want.”

  “You want the woman who got you strapped to a chair made of iron spikes? The one who got you bludgeoned over the head during The Hunt?” I snapped back.

  The weight of my little knife was cold and heavy in the palm I had caught between our bodies. I tried to wiggle it free, and he pinned me with his hips.

  “Such a little slut, trying to get at my cock already.” He dipped his head and ran his nose along my throat before tracing the same path with his tongue. “I’ve thought about taking you countless times over the years, but I never thought I would be so lucky as to bump into you right here in London. What a silly little chit you are to come back into the lion’s den.”

  “Are you really going to rape me against the wall at Royal Albert Hall?” I asked before turning my head sharply, ignoring the flash of pain at the back of my head, so I could bite savagely into his earlobe.

  He cursed viciously and slammed a knee up against my groin so hard, I doubled over into him.

  “You have no idea how much I would love to do just that. I dream about the memory of your sweet, filthy mouth around my cock, and I cannot wait to test out your cunt. But I have all the time in the world to use you up, pet. Do you know why?” he whispered into my ear as he nuzzled my hair.

  “Vaffanculo!” I spat at him.

  Fuck you!

  He laughed and ground himself against my thigh. “You will, you impatient minx. You will beg me to fuck you because if you don’t, I’ll sell footage of you and your precious ex-Master fucking on the floor of Pearl Hall’s ballroom.” He snickered as I froze against him. “Oh, didn’t you know? Every brother of the Order is made to film the first time he breaks and takes his slave. We have a little friendly contest each year to see who can take them the most viciously.”

  His tongue lashed out against my ear, and then his teeth were there. “Alexander did a good job with you—I’ve jerked off to the footage many times—but I could have done better. I will do better. If you don’t want me to ruin your shining career by showing the world just what a slut you are, you’ll agree to be my new slave.”

  No.

  I was done.

  I was done with men and their power playing, their conceit and barbarity. I wasn’t just a pretty pawn to be sacrificed and passed around by the will of another more influential player.

  I was Cosima Ruth Lombardi.

  Born August 24th 1998 in Napoli, Italy, to Caprice Maria Lombardi and Amadeo Vitale Salvatore.

  I was not a victim.

  I was a survivor.

  And there was no way in hell that I would kneel at the feet of anyone ever again unless it was by my choice alone.

  Schooling my face into the sultry smile that had made me famous, that had graced the covers of Sports Illustrated and Vogue, I rubbed my lower body against Ashcroft’s to distract him from the hand I freed from between us.

  I pressed my lips to his ear and clicked my tongue to cover the snick of the knife unfolding. “You don’t need to blackmail, sir. I’m just a slutty vessel for cock, and I’m desperate to be used like rag to catch your cum again and again.”

  He hesitated over my words, doubting my sincerity even as his hard cock throbbed against my leg.

  That hesitation was his weakness, so I capitalized on it with my strength.

  Men.

  They always underestimated me.

  Quick as a flash, my knife was at his throat, directly under my lips. I slid the blade tight up against his skin and watched blood bleed like a ruby necklace.

  For a moment, I yearned for the weight of my gold and ruby Davenport collar across my neck.

  “You’ll leave me alone, Ashcroft,” I threatened softly as I dug the blade deeper and watched his skin part like butter in an inch-long gash. I felt vampiric, drunk on blood lust. I wanted to lap up the red and spit it in his face to give him a literal taste of his own fucking medicine. “You’ll leave me alone, or I swear to your unholy god Dionysus that I will find a way to gut you like a fish.”

  “You don’t scare me,” he retorted, squeezing his fingers tighter in my hair. “Are you really going to slit my throat at Royal Albert Hall?” he mocked.

  I dragged the blade around the side of his throat, lengthening the wound.

  “Sometimes the worst monsters hide in the prettiest packages,” I sneered at him, then shifted slightly so that I could violently jab my knee into his balls.

  I stepped out from the wall as he doubled over, cupping his groin and moaning like the pathetic sack of shit he was.

  “You’ve been warned,” I said as a parting shot before turning on my heel and somewhat miraculously walking away from him without looking back.

  I made it to my seat beside Sebastian just at the lights dimmed in the colossal theatre and the host of the evening, Graham Norton, stepped out onto the stage to a flurry of cheers and applause.

  My stomach roiled and toiled like the storm over the high seas, and my skin was clammy with stress sweat. I felt sick and giddy with fear and triumph because I knew that even though I’d bested Ashcroft this time, I was on his radar again, and the Order was made up of hunters who never ceased their chase.

  He would find me again, and I had to be ready for it.

  “Cosi?” Sebastian asked softly. “What’s happened?”

  Sebastian could always see my inner turmoil even more than my mother and sisters could. We’d always had the strange ability that seasoned sailors have, to read the stars and find direction in them when no others could.

  “Did someone hurt you?” he demanded, sitting up in his seat so that he could suspiciously scan the dim theatre from visible threats.

  “No,” I said, surprised by the strength in my voice. “Someone tried to get handsy with me, but I know how to defend myself.”

  Sebastian peered at me as the crowd around us laughed at something the famous British comedian and talk show host said in his opening monologue.

  “I should have been there,” he said, and it was about so much more than just that one incident. “I never should have left you alone.”

  I shrugged and patted his hand on my thigh so he would know everything was fine.

  I wasn’t bitter about the sacrifices I had made for my family. Given the choice, I would do it all again in a heartbeat. But I’d learned an important lesson from those martyred choices, and it wasn’t one I would soon forget.

  At the end of the day, the only champion I could count on was myself.

  So, if Ashcroft was gunning for me, I would have to be the one to stop him.

  Cosima

  Anyone who says the life of a model is a glamourous one has clearly never woken at the crack of dawn and then spent hours on their feet in the freezing mid-autumn wind in Central Park wearing a leopard print minidress, two pounds of face make-up, and so much hairspray I was worried I’d draw satellites into my orbit. I’d been back in the city for less than twelve hours, and I was already at work.

  “That’s it, darling,” Beau Bailey crooned to me as I arched my back and pressed my breasts against a tree. “Let me see those curves. I want tension! Give me tension.”

  I kept every muscle in my body snapped taut and focused on keeping my face relaxed, my eyes heavy-lidded and my mouth parted slightly in the unfurling bloom of a newly budded rose.

  My spine would ache tomorrow, my feet were already throbbing, and my head pained from the weight of heavily styled hair, but I loved it. I loved putting my good looks to better use than being some man’s pretty face or some Master’s indentured slave.

  The money I made from modelling put food on my family’s table. It had sent Giselle to the most prestigious art school in France, Elena to law school at NYU, and purchased a home and a business for Mama.

  The thing that had brought me so much misery growing up in Napoli, that had
eventually led me to sexual slavery, had become my saving grace. It had taken years of therapy to realize that the tool everyone had used so long against me could be wielded by my own hands.

  So I loved it, the endless boredom and rigorous physical exhaustion of modelling.

  It wasn’t some great passion of mine to stand in front of the camera or strut down a catwalk, but the things it permitted me to do—the travel and the riches—were enough to make it seem like the best job in the world.

  Besides, the tedium of modelling gave me more than enough time to think obsessively over my past or, today, over Ashcroft’s threat to expose a sex tape of me to the world.

  I hadn’t had time to tell anyone, and I wasn’t sure if I would.

  Dante or Salvatore were the obvious choices, but I hadn’t seen the former in nearly a month, and the latter was supposed to be dead, so I didn’t like to pull him out of seclusion for any old reason.

  I supposed if there was ever a good reason, though, Ashcroft was it.

  “Okay, let’s break for a moment,” Beau called out, and immediately, half a dozen aides swarmed the posing models to bring us water and thick wool coats to ward against the chill.

  “How’s she doing?” Beau asked, strolling over as his first assistant traded out his camera lens and set up another tripod.

  Beau was my sister Elena’s best friend and had been since I first introduced them at a Prada event two months after moving to the city. He was flamboyant, outgoing, and deeply charismatic. My sister was stiff, formal, and unerringly conservative. They were a strange duo but an inseparable one.

  “You’d know better than I do,” I told him as I wrapped myself up in an oversized men’s coat and pulled my masses of curled hair out of the lapel. “She hasn’t spoken to me about the adoption in weeks.”

  Beau worried his plump lower lip as people flowed around us like a river over rock. “Between you and me, I’m worried Sinclair’s heart isn’t in it.”

  I sighed because that had occurred to me many times over the course of the past three and a half years too.

  Sinclair was one of my best friends. The man who had changed my life as irrevocably as Seamus or Alexander, but in every way good where they were bad. He’d given me a place to stay in the city while I’d gained my feet, a private reprieve away from the scrutiny of Mama and Elena so that I could get my bearings again. He was the only man in my life who had never wanted anything from me, and the love I had for him because of that was almost fiercer than any other.

  I’d only wanted the best for him when I finally introduced him to my gorgeous, driven eldest sister. They were both beautiful, successful, and mad with ambition. When they started dating, it had seemed inevitable.

  But the cracks showed early. Sinclair wasn’t a man who smiled much, and neither was my sister. I’d hoped beyond hopes that they would find humour and happiness in each other, but I’d forgotten the concept of yin and yang. They were too similar, and those likenesses canceled out the right things and emphasized the wrong.

  In the years they had been together, they’d only become more professionally driven, more emotionally distant.

  But Elena was too steeped in her desire to have a baby to see that Sinclair wasn’t right for her, and my dearest friend was too inured in the mundanity of his life to realize he wasn’t really living.

  Of course, Sinclair’s heart wasn’t really in to adopting a baby. His heart hadn’t been stirred since we’d met so long ago in Milan.

  “Do you think Elena believes the same?” I asked him.

  He continued to chew on his bottom lip. “I think she’s thrown off by…everything. Sin’s been gone more than not with work, and you know how she feels about Giselle. Now that she’s back, I think she’s a little worried you’ll pick Giselle over her.”

  I rolled my eyes. The rivalry between my sisters had started from such an early age that I honestly couldn’t remember a time when it didn’t exist.

  Giselle was dreamy and sensually beautiful with exaggerated curves like our mother and the deep red hair of our father. She was naïve and pure, gentle and whimsical. Even though she was older than Sebastian and me, we had always taken it upon ourselves to protect her from the more horrific aspects of our impoverished life in Napoli.

  Elena resented our protectiveness. She was a fierce soul who had been broken more than once and who had allowed her fractured heart to calcify in order to guard herself from further harm. She hated Giselle’s wistfulness, her impractical artistry, and her bohemian allure because Elena herself was none of those things, and somewhere deep in the secret recesses of her mind, she wished she was more like that.

  Then, of course, there was Christopher.

  The man who had obsessed over Giselle but settled for Elena and used her up like a snotty tissue before casting her aside.

  As much as I might have wished their relationship was different, because I loved them both indelibly and it was a strain on the rest of the family, I knew nothing would ever change.

  There was too much history there.

  “She’s being ridiculous,” I said finally. “I won’t be insulted by her worry, but I won’t entertain it either. I’ve been there for her through everything”—through Christopher’s abuse, through law school, through Sinclair, and through her miscarriage—“and that will never change.”

  “You’re letting her live with you,” he pointed out.

  I took a deep breath as my irritation mounted and tried to remind myself that he was just looking out for Elena. She had so few friends, and she alienated herself so much from the rest of the family that I was happy that she at least had Beau as a champion.

  “Giselle needed a place to stay while she settled in. She’s been alone in Paris without any family for four years, and I’m rarely at home as it is. It was an obvious solution, and I won’t feel guilty about making it. You know I love them both.”

  Beau sighed and pulled on the perfectly stylized curl hanging over his forehead. “I know. I think she just wishes that for once, someone would choose her feelings over Giselle’s. You’ve always put her first.” At my glare, he amended, “All of you have.”

  “That’s not true,” I said through gritted teeth, feeling the piercings I still couldn’t bring myself to take out flare with the memory of the pain, and the brand on my ass that no amount of expensive skin treatments could eradicate burn like a fresh wound. “I’ve sacrificed for everyone in my family, and I would do it again. Even if that were true, though, Beau, don’t you think she could see it as a compliment? Giselle was never as strong as my steel-souled Elena. If we let her feel the impact of our cruel lives a little more, it was only because we knew she could handle it.”

  Beau nodded reluctantly. I wanted to spit at him, to rage against his guilt trip because who was he to judge? Had he ever asked himself why Sebastian and I were put on the front lines of our family when we were the youngest? Had he ever wondered what we had to do to get Elena out of Italy and into NYU law?

  No. Of course not.

  Because people see strength in a person, and it blinds them to their need to be compassionate with them.

  Just because I was strong enough to handle the worst of things didn’t mean I didn’t want or need help.

  “Miss Lombardi.” Someone interrupted my silent wrath to tap me on the shoulder.

  I looked over at one of the interns for Vogue and smiled instantly. “Yes?”

  She stared up at me as if she wanted to be me. “Um, someone is here to deliver something for you.”

  I frowned at her but followed as she led me to the edge of the cordoned-off area where a man in a suit stood with his hands behind his back. He had the bland look of a servant and the outfit to match.

  A shiver shot through the base of my spine and reverberated in my teeth.

  “Miss Lombardi?” he asked in a clipped, monotone British accent.

  I nodded, unable to summon my voice.

  He produced a silver tray from behind his back with
thick card stock folded and sealed with red wax atop its shiny, unblemished surface.

  I would have recognized the seal anywhere. Sometimes, I actually found it, tucked into architecture in the city, pressed into a pattern on a popular fabric, or hidden in works of art.

  The Order of Dionysus was one of the oldest secret societies in the world, and though they were based in England, their reach extended across the globe.

  I stared at the lock with the blooming red flower caught in its loop and felt my stomach plummet like a runaway elevator to the base of my belly.

  When I didn’t immediately reach for the envelope, the manservant frowned. “Lord Ashcroft instructed me to tell you that if you do not open and obey his summons, he will be forced to send someone for you.”

  Send someone for me meant forcibly take me.

  I gritted my teeth and snatched the summons off the tray, ripping it open with shaking hands.

  Future slave,

  I expect you at my home in one hour. For every minute you are late, you will be punished. Unlike your previous Master, I don’t require that you enjoy that punishment. Trust me when I say you want to be good.

  Wear red. I know he liked you in that colour.

  Your new Master,

  Ashcroft

  I stared up at the manservant, seething and impotent with rage. I wanted to throw the invitation in his face and tell him to go hell, but I wasn’t that stupid.

  Not anymore.

  If Noel had taught me anything, it was that these men played games, and everything was just a move across the board leading them to greater power, greater success.

  Ashcroft hated me for embarrassing him, but more, he hated Alexander because he was endlessly jealous of him. This was about revenge, and honestly, it wasn’t smart.

  I knew that even if Alexander didn’t care about me anymore, even if he never had to begin with, he was not a man who liked to share his things.

  He would end Ashcroft for taking up with me.

  All I had to do was find a way to make the situation known to him.