Enamoured

by Darling, Giana

  “Trust me, I’ve met men much more powerful and much crueler than you.”

  Mason made a noise of protest, and I noticed in my periphery—because there was no way in hell I would be stupid enough to take my eyes of Giuseppe—that he was wringing his hands together.

  I wouldn’t do as Mason silently begged me to. I’d been docile and caged up for too long in my life, and some smug crime boss wasn’t going to make me cower. My chin lifted, and I looked down at him over my nose.

  He laughed again. “If I wasn’t bein’ paid a pretty penny to take you to the duke, I might just be tempted to keep you for myself. Already got a mistress or two, but I have a feelin’ you’d be worth the high maintenance.”

  “Aww, shucks,” I said with a thin slice of a smile served up on my cold, immovable face.

  Giuseppe’s smile dissolved like a pearl in vinegar, revealing the emotionless heart of him. “As it is, you’re goin’ to the duke, and I’m goin’ to pocket the small fortune he’s paid me to use to go to war against your man, Dante Salvatore. Howdya like that?”

  “You hurt him, and I’ll kill you,” I told him calmly. “In fact, you threaten him or anyone else in my life again, I’ll kill you.”

  “Cosima,” Mason barked out, reaching across the table to squeeze my wrist painfully. “Shut up.”

  Something cold and hard pressed to my knee under the small, circular table, and for a moment, I was confused by the misdirection. Then I realized, Mason was offering up the butt of a gun against my thigh, unseen by his uncle.

  We locked eyes so quickly, it was just a flash, a lightning strike of connection, but it offered up a wealth of information.

  Mason didn’t want this.

  He was just another pawn pressed into service in a greater game being played by Giuseppe di Carlo, and he was done being controlled.

  He was done because even though our friendship was based on betrayal, it still meant a lot to him, and he didn’t want to see me pressganged back into sexual slavery.

  So Mason had a heart then, even if he didn’t have a spine.

  On the table, I wrenched my hand out of his grip even as the one below it wrapped fingers around the small firearm and pulled it up into the bowl of my lap.

  “Fuck off, Mason,” I snarled.

  Pain exploded in my right cheek so bright it robbed my vision. When I was able to blink away the black spots and turn back to the men, Giuseppe was fixing the angle of one of his gold rings on his finger, clearly having been the one to deliver the blow.

  “Talk back again,” he said without looking at me, instead taking the Chinotto Neri I’d bought for Mason and drinking from it. “I will kill you and screw the duke.”

  “Do you really think I’m just going to go quietly with you into the good night?” I demanded, indicating the busy streets outside and Ottavio behind the counter. “People will notice. The cops troll the streets of the Bronx like ants, and they’ll come guns blazing if they think you’re committing a crime they can pin you for.”

  “Clearly, your experiences in the motherland didn’t teach you much.” Giuseppe held up a hand and the door chimed open the next instant, a suited man stepping up to the counter to speak hushed Italian with Ottavio before blatantly handing over a thick roll of cash. The shopkeeper’s eyes shot to me, his mouth a wavy line of worry.

  After a moment, though, he pocketed the cash and went into the back.

  I allowed myself a slow blink and a moment to swallow back the bile rising in my throat before I reaffixed my game face.

  “Here in New York,” Giuseppe told me with great relish, “we own everybody. Don’t you worry that pretty head about anything but coming with us nice and easy so we don’t have to deliver you broken up to your new master.”

  “In your dreams.”

  “No.” Giuseppe leaned forward to speak into my face, spittle flying over my cheeks. “Not in my dreams. In yours. Because if you don’t do what you’re fucking told, I will hunt Dante Salvatore and Alexander Davenport down, tie them together so they can die as brothers, and then I will beat them into mulch so you can’t tell where one guy starts and the other ends.”

  “You could try,” I seethed, moving even closer so that my nose was nearly pressed to his bulbous, porous nostrils. “But they would take you down.”

  “For that, I think I’ll kill them anyway,” he decided, licking his wide, rubber smile.

  I’d had enough.

  There was no way this man was taking me away from everyone I knew and loved after we had finally taken down the Order and happily ever after or something like it was finally in my sights.

  I pushed away from the table with my thighs, still leaning into Giuseppe to obscure his view of my lap so I had time to raise the gun and push the barrel of it to his chest. It happened so fast and without any deliberate thought running through my mind, only the survival instinct that curled my finger back over the trigger.

  I smiled at him as I pulled it, as the gun jarred back into the junction between my index finger and thumb so hard I thought my hand fractured. Giuseppe was shocked in that brief pause, his eyes wide, his elastic mouth gaping open like the wound I’d blown clean through his upper left chest.

  I hoped I hit his heart, I thought finally as the echo of the shot began to falter, and Giuseppe collapsed as if in slow motion to the ground beside his chair, clutching at the blood staining his breast pocket like a blooming rose.

  Mason and I locked eyes, his face greasy and crumpled like a used napkin.

  “My God, Cosi,” he breathed in that tiny gap of peace before the calamity. “Run.”

  I didn’t run.

  Instead, I pivoted quickly and shot off at the blur of black I knew was di Carlo’s thug coming toward me. He grunted when I drilled him through the left thigh and fell to the floor, raising his gun to get one off on me.

  I shot him in that shoulder, and he fell back, gun skittering across the linoleum.

  He was done and groaning, so I took a moment to step back to Giuseppe, looming over his body and casting a shadow that turned his pooling red blood black.

  I had never wanted to hurt anyone, but this was what my life had become.

  Kill or be killed.

  So, staring down at Giuseppe as he glared up at me, panting through his pain, I did what I’d been trying to do for years.

  I killed one of my demons.

  The gun was no longer cold, but achingly hot in my hands as I cocked it and leveled the mouth of the weapon at Giuseppe’s head.

  Pop.

  This innocuous sound followed by the wet smacking slap of his brain spilling out over the floor.

  “Cosima,” Mason yelled at me, prompting me to turn halfway toward him before I heard another pop, this one muffled by the glass.

  Seconds later, there was a light, almost musical tinkling as the glass shattered and rained over the floor on either side of the wall, hitting me across the legs in pinpricks of fire.

  Something slammed into my side then and began to burn as if someone had shoved a flare beneath my skin. I looked down dumbly to see a spot of red on my white cashmere turtleneck dress and then reeled back again when something sliced through my shoulder, jerking me off-balance so that I went careening to the floor on one knee.

  I looked up through my curtain of tousled hair to see a GMC black SUV idling at the curb, two men dressed in black aiming at me with perfectly steady handguns.

  And I knew with utter, eerie calm, that I was going to die.

  After everything, I was going to be shot dead in a Bronx deli by the mafia. All my life, I’d run from them, and finally, maybe poetically, they were finally going to get my ounce of flesh.

  I thought of all the things, at that moment of clarity before death, that had brought me to that point. My father’s weakness, my mother’s silence, Alexander’s submission and then defiance to his malicious dad, Dante and Salvatore’s interference…

  The memories surged through me, riding the pain to the surface of my
thoughts so that they were hand in hand. Pain and remembrance.

  I struggled to focus on the one thing glinting gold in the darkness.

  Xan.

  Fuck, I thought as I swayed and another pop went off as Mason yelled something, and I was pushed to the right by an unbelievable force less than a second before fire ripped over the side of my head, and I couldn’t think anymore for the hurt that overtook me as I fell to the ground.

  I blinked blearily at the cracked, yellow ceiling and then Mason was there, bent over me, the sound of a car backfiring tearing through the air as the assailants took off.

  “Fuck, God, fuck. Cosi,” Mason babbled, his hand fluttering around me like carrion over carcass. “Fuck, there is so much blood.”

  “If I die,” I whispered, surprised my voice even worked through the thick surge of blood in my throat. “Tell him I loved him.”

  Mason cursed and tried to collect the ribbons of blood spilling from the gaping wound, but I didn’t watch to see if he succeeded because blackness finally overwhelmed the searing pain, and I was out.

  Alexander

  I hadn’t been back to Pearl Hall in years, but I’d needed to return to speak with my father because against all odds, the incriminating information the FBI and the MI-5 had found on almost every single member of the Order of Dionysus did not included information on Noel Davenport, the Duke of Greythorn.

  I did not understand how this was possible except for the fact that he must have had someone watching me or mine to know what was going on so that he could prepare for it. Even prepared, it was only a matter of time before they uncovered enough evidence to put Noel away with the rest of them forever. I didn’t want to wait any longer for that time.

  I wanted Pearl Hall for myself again. I wanted to take my wife back to my ancestral lands and make that grand house, for the first time in so long I wasn’t sure it had ever been recorded in our history, a fucking home. A haven filled to the brim with our love and our glorious life together.

  In order to do that, I had to face the monster who’d made me.

  A butler answered the door for me, unsurprised by the sight of me because the warden at the gates had clearly forewarned him. He ushered me mutely through my unchanged house into Noel’s favourite library, the very one with the chess set placed before the black marble fireplace. He sat in the same leather high backed chair he always occupied there, his fingers held in a steeple over the chess set, his face carefully void of expression. He was still handsome, even at sixty-eight years old, and it made me sick to look at him and know I would likely appear just like him at that age. His carbon copy, he used to say admiringly, as if gazing into a flattering mirror that reflected a much younger version of himself.

  “Sit down,” Noel ordered.

  I remained standing, but I strode into the room and stopped with my thighs pressed to his palatial desk, looming over him from across the mahogany surface. Balancing on my fingertips, I leaned forward, hooking his eyes with the force of my expression.

  “You’ve made a deal with the Devil, have you?”

  My father tipped his head slightly to the side in mock shock. “Me? Why, Alexander, it’s not like you to be so daft. I’ve been under house arrest for twenty-nine months. What do you possibly insinuating I’ve done from the cage of my own home?”

  “You know exactly what I’m referring to you. I didn’t come here to faff about, Noel. How did you know about the take down of the Order?” I demanded.

  “Semper paratus,” he drawled. “Always prepare, son. I taught you that from a young age.”

  “I want to know how.”

  “And I want out of this bleeding house,” he countered, finally stirring from his impassivity like a dragon from enchanted slumber. “Sometimes, we simply don’t get what we desire.”

  “Perhaps,” I agreed, righting myself to smile at him the way an executioner might smile at their hapless victim. “Though lately, I’ve been getting exactly what I want. The Order is disassembled. After centuries of abuse and flagrant perversions, your precious society is over, and there will be no recuperating from it. I’ve cut at the heart of the hydra. James is using the dissolution as a political feather in his cap. It’s all over the global news. You and yours are done.”

  “It seems, as I’m sitting here and not behind bars, that I am, in fact, not done,” Noel retorted. “And once again, son, you forget the primary theory of chess. This is a game of mental Darwinism. If you blunder about as you have, gallivanting all over the globe trying to take down a group of monsters and save your damsel in distress, you’ve forgotten an important fact.” He leaned forward with a sneer, revealing eye teeth pointed enough to be termed fangs. “The worst enemies are often closer to home.”

  Ominous foreboding rolled through the room like pastoral fog over the moors, and I couldn’t bite back the shiver that crept spider soft up my spine.

  “What have you done?” I asked, wanting to weaponize the words so he would feel the threat in them but feeling as if I held an unloaded gun.

  He sat back in his chair, a placid smile on his face, eyes inanimate as marbles. The same butler who had open the door for me swept into the room with something glinting on a pillow and headed for the roaring fireplace. I stood still as Noel unfolded from his chair and went to the servant, plucking a familiar gold necklace hung with the massive heart of a glowing ruby in his fingers. It caught the firelight as it dangled off one fire, the burnished thorns turning red in the glow as if tipped with blood.

  Cosima’s collar.

  The same collar I had taken from Pearl Hall when I had abandoned it to my father years ago. The same collar, until I moment ago, I believed had been locked in my safe at the Plaza in New York City.

  And Noel had it.

  He had sent someone into the hotel room, broken into my safe, and knowing I would visit, had prepared this portentous ceremony to drive a lance into the shield of security I had felt the past few years.

  Noel might have been caged, but even a caged monster finds a way to let his evil spread.

  My father smiled at me the way he had when I was a lad, gently condescending, potentially proud if only I could accurately comprehend the lesson he was about to deliver upon me.

  “Love is the ultimate weakness, Alexander. The moment you foolishly fell arse over tit in love with your slave was the moment you put yourself in check, dear boy. And this?” He swung the necklace over his finger, back and forth, building speed until it flew off and spiraled into the fireplace, sinking into the flames like a boat lost at sea. “This is checkmate.”

  I stepped forward with a snarl marring my face, rage like an ice storm ravishing my body. “You can throw around metaphors, burn symbols, and taunt me for a perceived weakness that is truthfully a strength. You can do it all, but those are the hollow mechanisms of a fucking monster, Noel. In the end, even if it takes me an entire lifetime, I’ll see you burn just like that collar.”

  I turned on my heel to leave, then thought the better of it and swung back. Noel was already returning to his desk, so he wasn’t prepared for my tackle. He fell to the floor like a sack of potatoes and lay prone as I smashed one of my massive fists into his face. I felt the crunch of his nose under the pressure and knew that, for the second time, I had broken it.

  He coughed and gurgled through the spill of blood flowing down his face, and I leaned close enough to feel the spray of pink tinged spittle against my skin. “I told you once, and I will tell you once more, Noel. You touch one hair on Cosima, and I’ll kill you with my bare fucking hands. And that’s a vow I take much more seriously than any I ever made to your precious defunct Order.”

  I pushed up from the floor and strode to the door, not hesitating even though I wanted to, when Noel whispered wetly, “Too late for that, son.”

  I told myself it was a bluff, that he only needed a way to save face, but I knew the moment I stepped out of Pearl Hall’s massive double doors and saw Riddick pale as a sheet of paper standing beside the car
that something was terribly, woefully wrong.

  “Tell me,” I demanded as I crunched over the gravel on long steps. I slapped the roof of the car beside him, and snarled, “Tell me, man!”

  “Cosima, milord,” was his response, broken up by horror and rage so that his words fell like shards to the ground between us. “She’s been shot.”

  She was in a white bed in a white room in a hospital filled with utilitarian white things. I blinked hard at the sight of my strong, passionate beauty shriveled up and utterly still in such a stark home.

  She deserved beauty around her at every minute of every day. Elegant furnishings, jewels at her slim, long throat, and flowers to scent her air. She deserved to look like the duchess she would one day become as she lay there fighting for her life.

  My chest felt like a cavern of ice as I listened to the monitors she was hooked up to hum and beep with more life than she exhibited herself. I wanted to be able to breathe for her, to give my life in exchange for her own if it came to that.

  But it wouldn’t.

  I’d already put in the calls. The best doctors in the goddamn world were on their way to fix her. Riddick was at the florist demanding poppies and dahlias, exotic tiger lilies and fragrant roses, anything to enliven my sleeping beauty and help her fight even in her unconsciousness.

  I walked fully into the doorframe, ready to claim my place by her side, but a red-headed woman blocked my entry.

  “Excuse me,” I said politely because even though I wanted to forcibly knock her out of my way to get to Cosima faster, I was well bred.

  She spun to face me, her flame gold hair catching the yellow fluorescent lights and gleaming so bright it made me blink.

  Her mouth hung open as she stared up at me, curiously mute. I reined in my impatience and looked over at Cosima again, noticing the two people sitting at her bedside.