Of course, Noel hadn’t heeded that threat, and to this day, I doubted Alexander knew just how much physical damage, not to mention emotional trauma, his dad had wrecked upon me.
“Such a shame Noel can’t be there tonight to watch you perform for me.” He dragged his fingers down the side of my face and sifted them through my hair. I held my breath as I prayed he wouldn’t catch sight of the poppy Alexander had planted under the skin of my neck.
“Though, he would take you away, and quite honestly, I’m not done with you yet. You have all this golden skin I’ve yet to mark.” He hummed contemplatively as if cataloguing all the future ways he would hurt me.
His dispassionate malevolence reminded me of all the other truly vile men I’d met before. It was surprising how intrinsically boredom and evil were linked together. I wondered if the men of the Order were not so wealthy as to be idle and not so emotionally vacant as to need cruelty to fill them up if there would even be an Order to begin with?
“You will stay here until tonight. I have a girl who does hair and make-up coming for you, and before then, you’ll don your sweet little maid’s uniform and see to my house, won’t you, slave?”
“Yes, sir.”
He petted my head again, then twisted his fingers in the locks and yanked me into a standing position again. His sneering face was hot against my own as he plastered our cheeks together and spoke into the corner of my mouth. “Please me tonight and when I bring you back here for a night cap, I might not have to reintroduce you to the bullwhip. Do you remember that, sweet slave? When Landon Knox peeled the pretty skin off your back in long, golden ribbons?”
He felt my shudder and laughed like a drunkard, intoxicated by my fear. I caught myself on the wall as he tossed me away and then struggled not to spin around to attack him as he strolled down the hall to his office with his hands in his pockets, whistling.
I reminded myself that I had a plan, and that plan would one day lead not just to the destruction of Ashcroft himself, but the entire Order of Dionysus.
With that thought running through my mind like a meditative chant to drown out the agony of my anger, I hurriedly donned the ridiculous maid’s costume and started to explore the three-story townhome. The arrogant and entitled were bound to be careless with their belongings, and I was eager to discover what he could be harbouring.
He had a sex room done up entirely in black, the floors polished concrete stained dark in places with what I was sure was blood, the walls covered in slick black paneling that gave the entire place a dark, antiseptic feel like a nightmarish doctor’s room. He had trays of tools, not just the normal Dom’s paraphernalia, but vials of drugs, syringes, thick piercing needles, scalpels, and medical clamps. The entire aesthetic reminded me that Ashcroft was a rather prolific chemist, and it churned my gut to think of all the ways he might torture a woman with this kind of equipment.
There was nothing to be found there but fodder for nightmares, so I quickly moved on, cleaning the rest of the house in my stupid costume with a feather duster, mop, and broom. My hands smelled of artificial lemon, and my body, still aching from Alexander, creaked and moaned as I moved over the huge space.
I was tempted not to clean at all and merely hide away to waste time, but the criminally bland servant who had picked me up trailed me through the rooms to ensure I worked.
By the time I reached Ashcroft’s office, vacant while he was dressed by his valet for The Trials, I was depressed by my lack of findings and weary enough to weep.
I wanted to give into self-pity and curse God for continuing to heap trial after trial on my heart. It pained me to admit that the worst of those lately was spending the day and night with Alexander in London knowing that it was goodbye.
But something in the memory clicked in me like the shutter of a camera, and I realized with giddiness exactly what Ashcroft’s blackmail gave me in opportunity.
“I have to use the toilet,” I told the servant as I hesitated at the office and began to wander down the hall to the last door at the end of the hall by the back door. “I’ll just be a moment.”
He scowled, but remained where he was, ostensibly organizing Ashcroft’s life on an iPad.
I was careful to control my gait as I walked into the bathroom and locked the door, only letting a smile break through the crust of sorrow on my face when I was alone with myself in the mirror.
Hurriedly, I took my phone out from where I’d wedged it into my garter belt and dialed a number I knew by heart.
“Tesoro?” Dante asked. “You are returned from the isle of the beasts?”
He always had a derogatory nickname for his homeland, and it usually made me smile, but I had too much on my mind to find him charming.
“Listen, could you do me a favour?”
“Anything,” he replied resolutely.
His readiness did something funny to my heart, a palpitation of glee.
“Good, I need some kind of small camera. Like a nanny cam? Those exist in real life, correct?”
Dante laughed, warm and loud. “Yes, Cosi, those exist in real life. Dare I ask why you need one of these?”
“More than one. Ideally, I’d like six or seven.”
“Does this have something to do with Ashcroft?” he demanded, and there was a murmur of voices in the background in response.
I bit my lip. It wouldn’t do to lie because Dante could sniff out dishonesty like a police dog did a bomb, and honestly, I couldn’t think of another viable reason I would need hidden cameras.
“Yes, it does. I need you or one of your…men to meet me in the next hour and a half with the cameras at this address,” I said, rattling off Ashcroft’s information. “Can you have them meet me by the back entrance? Just text me when they arrive. I won’t respond, but I’ll feel the vibration on my thigh and find a way to get to him.”
“Cosima, are you in his house right now?” he growled.
“Well, obviously.”
“Don’t be fucking smart with me right now. Fuck your cameras, I’m coming myself and bringing some guys. We’ll take care of that figlio di puttana ourselves right now.”
“Dante, no,” I said sharply. “If you want to come wait outside the door, I can’t stop you. But I have an idea here, one that could lead to ending the Order, and that is important to me. Not just for myself because of every single way they’ve tried to ruin my life, but for other women too. No one deserves to be sold into a society that will use, humiliate, and harm them for their own amusement.”
He hesitated, the puffs of his angry breath blowing heavy through the phone.
“Fine, I’ll send Frankie. If you need any help at all, though, you call me. Even if you can’t talk, you call, I’ll answer, and I’ll be there before you know it, okay?”
“Agreed,” I said before lightening my tone in an attempt to keep him from worrying about me. “But really, Dante, you don’t need another bullet wound. At this point, I think you are more metal than man.”
“Understand this and understand it well, Cosima,” he said in a voice like Alexander’s, in a way that reminded me the big teddy bear I knew he could be was also one of the most dangerous mafia men in the country. “I would take a hundred more bullets for you until my blood ran lead if it meant you were safe from harm.”
“Dante,” I exhaled as his words found purchase in my chest. It was only one word, his name, but I thought it relayed how very much I loved him and how very awed I was that he loved me that way in return.
Noel hadn’t ruined the hearts of all his sons.
Only Rodger and, maybe, Alexander.
The thought made my heart pinch, but I forged on.
“I have to go. I’ve been in here too long. Send Frankie and I promise I’ll call you when this is all over, si?”
“Si, tesoro mia,” he agreed in the same tone I’d used with him, one that ached with tenderness, vulnerable as a bruise. “Be safe.”
I ended the call, flushed the toilet, and ran the faucet before I
slipped out the door and returned to the office. The unimpressed servant gave me a narrow glare, but I smiled jauntily at him as I resumed my cleaning duties.
Later, when I was finished my chores, and I was seated in front of the vanity being beautified by a woman who spoke only Russian, my phone vibrated, and I excused myself once more to the restroom.
No one stopped or spotted me as I crept down the stairs and out the back door.
Dante’s right-hand man and the only member of his crew that I was ever allowed to interact with greeted me with a large, boyish smile.
“Frankie,” I greeted, kissing both his stubbled cheeks.
“Cosima. These are ready to go. They record video until they reach their max storage point. I didn’t have time to set up a live feed, so these will have to do for now. Will you be able to retrieve them at some point?”
I nodded, taking the dime-sized cameras in my hand. “Thank you for this, Frankie. Tell Dante not to worry.”
His lips twisted in a grimaced smile. “Yeah, that’s not gonna happen with you in the lion’s den, but I’ll pass that along to give the other boys a good laugh.”
“I know what I’m doing.” I’m not sure why I felt the need to tell the almost stranger that when it was really every single other man in my life who needed to hear it. Still, Frankie respected me enough to go somber for a moment and scrutinize me with his wet, black eyes. Eyes that had seen death and blood, corruption and greed so big it swallowed people’s entire lives.
It was those eyes that blinked, then smiled at me. “Sure, babe, I believe it.”
I swallowed thickly, surprised by how much I’d needed someone to have faith in me, and then punched him lightly in the shoulder before heading back inside.
I planted one in the bedroom I’d been given to use to get ready for the night. Another in the hallway on the second story and another in the open doorway of Ashcroft’s room. There was one pressed to the wall behind a ficus plant in the entryway and then another, finally, in Ashcroft’s office in the eye of black marble carved wolf.
I placed it there as I moved toward Ashcroft where he sat leaned back in his chair like the entitled lord he was.
“You look beautiful,” he praised as his hot, greasy gaze smeared over all the skin exposed by my gold satin lingerie.
I smiled at him with words in my eyes only Alexander had ever been able to read; I am so much more than my beauty, and one day soon, you will find that out.
Alexander
Eighteen hours after Cosima had abandoned me for the second time, my anger had yet to abate. I could feel it coursing through my veins as thick and chemical as opium in my bloodstream. Even Riddick, whom I had finally identified as my closest friend in the last four years, was careful around me in the hours after she’d left, barely speaking a word unless it was to confirm travel plans.
To say I was royally aggravated by her flight was a gross understatement. I was both angry with her for running and with myself for believing she would obey out of hand.
It had been four long years since Cosima had come to heel for me, and she’d spent countless hours in therapy, in meditation classes, reading self-help books written by self-aggrandizing gurus to get over her compulsion to serve me.
I should have known.
But my elation had made me sloppy. I was a virgin on her wedding night, knowing I was finally going to receive the gratification I so deserved, the union I’d worked toward for years, and I’d underestimated the fact that my bride was still a reluctant one.
She did not know the myriad of ways my life had changed since she had up and left me the first time.
She didn’t know the sacrifices I had made.
The men I had extorted, threatened, and maimed to achieve my goals.
The estate I had given over to Noel like a gift and a prison so that I would know where the Devil lived even as I sought to end him.
She didn’t know anything, my little mouse.
As per usual, she had been kept out of male mechanisms for her own safety, and it had led to a less than satisfactory ending for us both.
It appeared I had to learn that lesson one more time before I vowed never to repeat it again.
By the end of this night, Cosima Davenport would know exactly where I stood, and therefore where she did too because whether she cared to admit, we were unequivocally linked; two planets locked in orbit.
I’d had a plan, a damned good one that had been cooked up in the Prime Minister’s office in the middle of the night after returning from finding Cosima in Milan so many years ago over godawful coffee and endless conversations about politics, morality, and revenge.
In that precise plan, I was not to contact Cosima until it was all over.
She was my reward at the end of my hero’s journey.
Unfortunately, though I had undertaken the path of a hero, I was still drawn to villainous tendencies, and the moment the tabloids had splashed her supposed impending union to the git Mason Matlock, my good intentions had crumbled to ash.
There was no way, even over my dead body, that I would allow anyone to lay claim to the woman I’d already made my own. I would kill every single man who so much as dreamt of making her theirs. Cosima was and always would be mine. Even if she didn’t know it.
I hadn’t planned to approach her so brutishly at the charity ball either, but my Cosima had been so utterly ravishing, there was no other proper course of action but to publicly—perhaps stupidly, given the covert nature of my life for the past four years—buy her once more.
It was largely symbolic, exchanging money for a date. I had no desire for one measly night with her, nor did I feel the need to ask or barter with anyone for the privilege, but I thought it made a very nice, if somewhat dramatic, gesture.
Especially after the way I’d turned her away in Milan. The look of her priceless, stunning face breaking into thousands of fine cracks and fissures when I’d so ruthlessly dropped her heart to the roof of the Duomo and crushed it beneath my heel would haunt me for the rest of my life. It was a necessary evil. The Order kept minute track of Cosima for the first year of our separation, delving into her internet history and the habits of her new life in New York. So did I. And it was obvious to both parties that Cosima was still hung up on me, her endless therapy appointments, Amazon book orders, and the one ill-fated visit to a BDSM club were more than evidence of that.
So to ensure that she was safe, I had to crush her.
There was no greater torture than loving a woman and being unable to have her. The only thing that had alleviated any of the pain over the past four years was making progress against the very Order I’d come to infiltrate that night.
I had enough information on most of the Order to put away some of the most powerful men for life, including Noel, who was on house arrest in Pearl Hall for his corrupt dealings with the Falmouth Port Authority.
The end was nigh and a better man, a stronger man, would have stayed away from Cosima until it was over.
But I wasn’t a stronger man.
I was completely wrecked by the weight of Cosima in my chest, the anchor and chain that pulled taut across the time and distance between us.
There was no way she was marrying another man.
No way, now that I’d have her submission and her reluctant capitulation, that I could go another bloody, agonizing day without her.
Which brought me to the door of the Order’s New York City hub, Club Bacchus, to flagrantly thumb my nose at the society and take back what was mine.
Women hung like ornaments from the ceiling, strung up in gold chains, diamond ropes, pearls on strings of reinforced carbon fiber so that the beauties didn’t fall to the floor in a tangle of riches. They were suspended in shapes, each bound in a different pose by beautiful loops of Shibari bondage. A redhead dripped from the air upside down, her hair a flaming arrow, her feet cuffed to a wooden bow with her knees out turned and bare pussy displayed. They had made her into the symbol of a bow and arrow, the hun
ter’s classic weapon.
Another spun slowly with her neck bowed, back arched until her head nearly connected with her pointed toe like a ballerina twirling in a music box. She was caught up in a yard of shimmering pale pink chiffon, three lengths of which wrapped around her throat and kept it strained backward in a fruitless attempt to meet her raised right thigh.
They would have been beautiful strung up like that if they had consented to it. As it was, I could read the fear in their glassy eyes, smell the metallic tang of their stress sweat undercutting the leather-tainted air of the club.
There were fifteen girls festooning the lavish interior of Club Bacchus, trapezoids of light from the gently swaying chandeliers cutting their skin into fragments of gold. Men traced those yellow shapes over their skin as they mingled throughout the cavernous room, drinking scotch and chatting amiably with their companions as they ogled and molested the women on display.
I had no desire to join them.
Most of the men wouldn’t know me by sight, but some would, and my entire plan rested on remaining anonymous until the last moment.
I slipped through the shadows at the edges of the blue brocade walls until I found a velvet upholstered chair with the perfect vantage point of my target.
My beauty was strung up in gossamer chains of gold, thousands of them that bound her breasts into swollen peaks, wound over her belly and between each thigh so that her legs were bent under and spread, exposing her pussy to the cool air of the room and the hot eyes of its patrons. Her arms were folded over her head and covered so completely in gold, it seemed she wore them like a crown.
She was the only woman in the entire room who stared boldly from her bondage, who tipped her chin as much as the ropes allowed so she could look each of her lecherous admirers in the eye and damn them all silently to hell.
A goddess in chains was still a goddess.
No amount of maneuvering or lording over her would change that.
My God, but she took my fucking breath away.
I snapped my fingers at one of the blokes walking around with a drink tray and snatched someone else’s whiskey for myself. The boy pursed his lips but didn’t utter one word of protest as he pulled away and resumed his duties.
Enamoured Page 16