Enamoured

by Darling, Giana

  He knew his place better than Cosima did, and she’d had years of acrimony and male dominance under her belt.

  I wondered, as I sipped the Laphroaig twenty-eight-year-old scotch, if her inability to break was the reason I had become so enraptured by her. There was nothing brittle or hollow about her submission, nothing that cracked under the force of another man’s will.

  She was too warm, too elastic and self-contained to snap like that. Instead, she bent, twisted, and swanned into the shapes dictated by my domination. It made the beauty of her submission utterly heady and shamelessly intoxicating because it was not just a random, broken woman I had at my control, but one of substance and verve who chose to obey my commands.

  There was mutual respect for the power each of us yielded in the exchange.

  If you had asked me years ago, the first time my father had forced me to whip one of his slaves, if I would ever revere a woman the way I did my wife, I would have thought you were crazy.

  But secretly, the truth of it would have resonated.

  I hated the way Noel treated his slaves, and as soon as I was old enough to withstand a beating in their place, I’d taken it.

  My entire life, I’d believed that I was hardwired to be the exact replica of my father. That my nature would always outweigh the nurture my mother had displayed.

  As I sat in the dark of the hedonistic club drinking scotch, planning to dismember the man who stood beside Cosima like her false god, the relief that coursed through me felt like a baptism.

  I wasn’t fool enough to think that my feelings for Cosima washed away the blood on my hands or the countless shady dealings I’d been made to witness as part of the Order. I was still, intractably and always, the villain, characterized that way before birth by my father.

  But if I’d had a heart, I would have loved Cosima with every facet of it.

  If I could be a hero, in any way for any stretch of time, it would be to save the woman I’d been calling my own since the moment she saved my life in a Milanese alleyway five years ago.

  The lights dimmed across the club as one of the hanging slaves was unbound and led to the main stage for the first exhibition of the night. The men lingering around the room in groups found their seats for the show, but not before taking their last lingering touches of the displayed slave girls.

  One man, ruddy like an Irishman, cupped Cosima between the legs and then licked off his fingers one by one.

  The rage churning in my gut was not hot or volcanic. It was glacial, colossal shards of ice cracking off into frothing arctic waters. It cast a clear, cool light on my thoughts as I mulled over the way I would kill that Irishman for touching my beauty.

  She might have run from me—and she would pay for it—but no matter the distance or time between us, Cosima Lombardi Davenport was mine.

  I did not want her to have a life with others, dialogue or even monologue separate from me or my name. I didn’t want to spend one single moment more without her understanding that my ownership had nothing to do with money changing hands or contracts signed, and everything to do with the way one soul could possess another.

  Call it witchcraft, call it enchantment, but whatever it was, I had surrendered to it a long time ago.

  She would too, just as soon as I extracted her from the perilous situation she was tangled up in with Ashcroft.

  Riddick appeared silently beside me, feet braced and hands clasped behind his back like a soldier awaiting orders.

  “She’s up next, milord,” he murmured as he stared with dark rage at Ashcroft running a hand down Cosima’s inner thigh.

  “Patience, Riddick,” I told him even though a shard of icy rage pierced my throat painfully as I tried to swallow it down. “You know what to do with him when the time comes?”

  He nodded curtly, blatantly unmoved by the sexual display of dominance and submission taking place on the stage. The echo of the slave’s sobs throughout the room were nothing to the man who had stood by my side for years.

  Only the quiver of Cosima’s thigh as she struggled away from Ashcroft’s lingering touch made the tin man fill with feeling.

  I knew because the same feeling echoed within myself.

  Finally, the first lord finished with his slave, and there was a smattering of applause. No one was enthusiastic about the performance. It had lacked screams, blood, and begging, the three cornerstones on The Trial’s grading rubric.

  “Now, gentlemen and slaves, I know we’ve been waiting to see what Ashcroft will do with the supermodel, and I am sure it will be delectable. Ashcroft and slave, please take the stage.”

  I watched, not breathing, not even blinking as the man untangled Cosima briskly from her chains and then hooked a leash through the leather collar at her throat before forcing her to crawl after him up onto the raised dais at the back of the room.

  My body moved like smoke through the shadows, silently making my way up the stairs to the left of the stage where I lurked behind the navy-blue curtains. A hand slipped into the silk lined pocket of my blazer and carefully grasped the syringe between my knuckles.

  Ashcroft said something to the crowd that made them laugh as Cosima folded to her knees in the perfect submissive posture.

  I uncapped the plastic lid and shifted deeper into the cover of the velvet drapes.

  Ashcroft’s shoes clicked like the timer of a ticking bomb as he crossed the black lacquered stage toward me to retrieve some of the plethora of tools laid out on the sideboards backstage.

  Click, click, click.

  He appeared parallel to me; his profile sharp with excitement for what was to come. There was a smile on his lips, twisted like his lust into something ugly.

  I wiped it from his face in one smooth swoop as I stepped from the blackness, wrapped my arms sinuously around him, and then squeezed like a python. My prey froze in fear before the struggle began, but it was really no struggle at all.

  I hooked my leg around his feet so that I could leverage his stumbling step forward back against my chest, holding him closer, suffocating him harder.

  “You dare to touch what is mine, Ashcroft?” I hissed into his ear, just loudly enough to be heard over the thundering rush of blood to his head.

  “Not yours…anymore,” he managed to wheeze.

  My god, but I wanted to rip him apart right then and there, twist his spine until it cracked and everything inside him spilled open like candy from its papier-mâché holding.

  “Cosima is and will always be mine,” I told him calmly, focusing on my breath so that I didn’t kill him too quickly, and end all the fun I’d planned for him. “But even if she wasn’t, I would kill you all the same for blackmailing her as you have, for daring to touch a woman so much better than your pathetic self.”

  Then, before he could infuriate me to murder, I plunged the tip of the needle I held in one hand deep into his neck and pushed the drugs into his system.

  Ten seconds later, he was out.

  Riddick stepped out of the dark to catch him as I let him fall forward out of my arms.

  “Keep him in the Iron Chair until I get there,” I reminded my manservant and friend. “Somehow, the bastard retained his ability to get an erection after the last time he sat on the spiked throne. See to it that the same mistake isn’t made again.”

  I turned on my heel before Riddick could respond. The crowd outside the stage was beginning to murmur at the delay, and I didn’t want to give them any reason to investigate. Quickly, I gathered my tools and strode into the light of the stage.

  There was a collective gasp at the change of Dominant, but no one rushed the stage to stop me from continuing the show. Things like this happened. We were all lions in a cage filled with a limited supply of meat. There were no rules to curtail our natural aggression and need for dominance, so only the strongest thrived.

  And I was strongest of them all.

  Cosima knelt with her head bowed, her veil of glimmering black hair almost blue under the spotlights. She didn�
�t know why the audience had gasped, but the tight set of her shoulders and the bracing set of her toes against the floor spoke to her readiness to prepare for the worst.

  Nearly naked and bound, my beauty was still a gladiator.

  Music pulsed like a heavy heartbeat over the speakers as I wrapped the leash around my palm and used it to force Cosima up onto her knees to lessen the strain on her neck. Bowed into me, mouth parted like a split cherry, I felt myself get hard at the sight of her.

  “Are you ready for your punishment, wife?” I asked against her damp lips before running my tongue down her jawline and sinking my teeth hard into her neck.

  Her gasp punched into the air like an exclamation mark as her body swayed even closer to mine. I watched her golden eyes turn up to mine and go black with shocked relief and dark desire.

  Yes, I told her with my eyes, this was what she deserved for locking me to the bed and running away from me.

  Again.

  She deserved to be punished in whichever way I saw fit, and I deserved to watch her struggle to meet each demand as recompense.

  Her eyes flared, hot as the center of a flame. I could read the angry question in that heat as easily as ink from a page.

  Why are you not rescuing me from this place?

  My answering grin sliced through the left half of my face and filled my chest with a different kind of cold.

  Not one of rage, but the cool metallic edged precision that comes from stepping into Domination.

  I dragged her closer by the leash instead of leaning down myself because every action from here on out was meant to emphasize the power discrepancy between us.

  I led, and she followed.

  “Because, topolina,” I responded to her unspoken demand, “I am not your saviour come to take you away to a fairy-tale land. I am your Master, and this? This is my domain.”

  Her shiver ran through the leather leash into my hand, a steel rod transporting the lightning current of her desire straight through my flesh.

  The power of the moment was so tangible, I could feel my very skin hum.

  Without warning, I released the tension on the leash, but instead of collapsing to the ground in a tangle of ungainly limbs, Cosima floated like silk to the ground in the perfect pose of obedience.

  Her composure was the only response I needed to know she wanted this, needed this, as much as I did.

  In the complicated dance of our recoupling, this was the main combination of moves. All I needed to do was lead, and my beauty would, always, inevitably, follow.

  A small silver table on wheels like you might find in an emergency room was set up to one side of the stage where I’d deposited my toys as I walked past, and I returned to it then. Ostensibly, I organized the implements there as if musing over the scene I planned to see out with my slave. In reality, I needed a moment to look at her again, folded into submission so impactful that it seemed to hit like a flaming arrow through my chest.

  I took in the heavy weight of her perfectly formed breasts, the ruddy brown tips of her nipples puckered in the deliberately cold air. They were large breasts, edging toward profane on her slight frame, her tiny waist and flagrant dip beneath the swells, her hips rounded but slight as they narrowed into the longest legs I’d ever seen. She was perfection. Not because she met the standard definition of beauty as measured by media and modern ideals, but because there was a painfully attractive duality to her form; confidence and power stamped into every dip of her curves while every hollow held the youthful vulnerability of someone much less seasoned than her tragic experiences had made her.

  Looking at her like that reminded me in acute ways I’d been blind to see before, that tending to her the way I would was the greatest of all my considerable gifts and responsibilities.

  Carefully, I removed my suit jacket and laid it over the table before methodically rolling up the sleeves of my dress shirt.

  “Who may we say is performing?” one of the judges asked from their long table at the center of the room.

  I could see a slave bent over under the table servicing him, his cock glistening and alien in the blue light of the club.

  As carefully as I folded my blazer, I collapsed the vibrancy of my affection for Cosima into a small, pressed package and tucked it into the farthest reaches of my mind so that when I turned to face the room full of men I planned to eviscerate to ash, all they would see was one of their own.

  An arrogant lord who believed that everyone should bend the knee to his powers and persuasions.

  “I am Alexander Davenport, Earl of Thornton, heir to the Duchy of Greythorn. And this,” I said as I crossed to the woman I planned to spend the next hour breaking apart and the next century putting back together, “is my slave.”

  Cosima

  He had me trussed up and tied down in a series of complicated knots by rope as silky and black as my hair. It slithered over my skin and then constricted; a snake wrapped unerringly around its prey. It provided the same curiously meditative euphoria that a near-death experience lends; that clarity and almost morbid anticipation that can give dying men an erection. I was naked but for those ropes, and they seemed to confirm my nakedness and highlight the utter exposure of my body to the masses.

  I was panting by the time he finished methodically binding me into position, breasts cinched so tightly they were ruddy swells like desert rock, feet trapped wide apart with only my toes braced against the ground, arms bound in a single plait over my head, connected to a lowered hook from the ceiling. My cunt was utterly exposed, the frigid air like pointed teeth on my delicate flesh, the greedy eyes of the men in the club hot as a branding iron against my clit.

  It was wrong to be aroused by such blatant humiliation. I was made up like a doll for the pleasure of my Master, to be flaunted like a prize in front of spectators and panelists who would judge me for my sexuality, my obedience, and the gradation of my submission.

  It was wrong to so easily—no—greedily submit to his domination when only hours ago I’d convinced myself I would never capitulate to his attentions again, but a small part of me knew even then how wrong I was to cast that intention in stone. An unassailable symbiosis existed between us, like the moon with the tides. Everything I was seemed tied to his will. I wondered dazedly if the fight I’d been waging against my baser instincts for the past four years, struggling to live again after years of survival, had been a hoax I’d concocted for myself. There was never any question in my heart that I would ever defy the inexorable pull of Alexander Davenport if he should call for me, but I’d thought he never would again, so I’d fooled myself into thinking I wouldn’t heed the order if it came. My body on the ground, pliant and ready as wet clay to be moulded into the shapes of his desire underscored the wrongness of my thoughts over the last near half decade.

  It was wrong, but it felt deliciously heavy in my sex, as heady as a drug through my bloodstream. If I wasn’t tied down to metal spikes skewered into the stage floor, I would have drifted away into subspace before he’d even really begun to reclaim me.

  No, it wasn’t the spikes that kept me secure.

  It was my Master, the weight of his gaze on my body like hands at my throat and on my hips, spurring me to submit harder, please him better.

  It wasn’t about The Trials, about proving to anyone else that he was the best Master and I the best slave. I still didn’t know exactly what he wanted from me outside this reunion of flesh, but I was too relieved by his dismissal of Ashcroft, too overwhelmed by my continued thirst for him to focus on anything but the rich intent in Alexander’s gaze.

  Whatever his end goal was, this scene was about beginning to re-establish the expired trust between us in the most elemental way he knew how—by showing me with his cutting words and cruel hands how far he could take my body into pleasure so powerful it splintered into exquisite pain without taking me over the edge into true embarrassment and hurt.

  It was a game and also not a game because his talent was a calling, and my respo
nse was as intrinsic as the natural turning of the tides. It seemed so trivial to the men watching us, judging us, but in the small bubble of close air that surrounded my Master and myself, nothing had ever felt so poignant.

  I was finally back where I belonged.

  Finished with his Shibari masterpiece, Alexander appeared before me, his body partially shielding me from the audience at his back. I knew it was deliberate, as was the marked absence of a blindfold. He wanted me to feel seen because the beauty of my submission to him was worthy of notice, but not be totally exposed because the sight of my intimate folds and creases was for my Master’s perusal only. He wanted me to see, but only so that I would watch the way his eyes changed from smoking gas to liquid cold waters straight to punishing stone.

  He was accentuating our connection even in a room full of people I abhorred.

  I stared into those pewter grey eyes and watched as his firm, full mouth pressed into a grimly pleased line.

  The touch of his fingers to the outside of my groin startled me because I had been so enthralled by his gaze, and I shuddered as he drew a path down the sensitive crease where my thigh met my pubis to the tender skin of my inner leg. His skin was colder than the frigid air, as if he was carved from ice, and as his fingers slid down my inner thigh, goosebumps flourished in their wake.

  I swallowed thickly as he pulled his fingers away and brought them between us to show me the way they glistened wetly in the light.

  “So wet and I’ve yet to really touch you,” he taunted me as he smeared my juices against my breasts like I was a human rag. The degrading touch sent a sharp throb of pleasure through my core. “You love being used by me, but let us not forget, this is a punishment.”

  Sharper than bee string, harder than a slap to the face, Alexander’s palm connected with the fragile inside of my thigh. Pain burst in small shards through my senses, fracturing then pooling in my groin.