Enamoured

by Darling, Giana

  “You’ll take care of each other for me, right?”

  I watched as my question prompted Dante and Elena to lock eyes, flaring to life an electric almost nuclear frisson between them that made the hairs at the back of my neck stand on end.

  “No promises,” Elena broke the heavy silence to say, her chin at its haughty angle, her voice as English as a true American born.

  “I don’t think I like her enough to look out for her,” Dante admitted, half-joking, half-somber as if even he couldn’t tell where his true feelings about my abrasive sister fell.

  I didn’t blame him. The woman in my arms was more complicated than most by half, and her experiences had only hardened her farther, made her incompatible with the ordinary people of the world.

  It was a good thing, I thought as Dante’s sidelong gaze roved over Elena’s prim but oddly sexy black tuxedo-style dress that Dante was one of the least ordinary men I knew.

  “You’ll be fine,” I surmised with more than a little smugness in my voice.

  “I still think you should consider a long-distance marriage,” Elena suggested. At my narrowed look, she gave an insolent shrug that could have rivaled one of Alexander’s. “What? You did it before.”

  I laughed, but Alexander did not as he turned into the conversation with a heavy frown at my sister. He banded his arm around my hip and tugged me free from her so that I was wrapped around his side like a vine, exactly the way he preferred me.

  “You’ll be grateful that I will allow my wife to visit at all,” he told her imperiously.

  They locked eyes, one alpha to another, both so utterly indignant and so completely assured of their own superiority that I couldn’t help the giggle that burst through my lips.

  I hadn’t giggled like that since I was a girl, since before Xan and Seamus’s downturn, since before puberty when beauty had sliced into me like a double-edged sword, both a blessing and a curse.

  I giggled even harder. When I recovered, they were all staring at me with soft looks on their hard faces that proved just how much they loved me in ways so incredibly tender. It made their affection all the more precious for how elementally it went against their natures.

  I leaned into Xan to press a kiss to the hinge of his jaw and excused myself to the ladies’ room. It was hard not to laugh when, the moment I walked away, the three of them descended into bickering again.

  As I passed Sinclair, his hand reached out to gently ensnare mine. Our eyes met, and I saw all the happiness I’d ever wanted for him shining from his eyes. It made my throat throb with tears.

  “Happy?” he asked, simply.

  “Almost as much as you,” I told him, squeezing his hand back. “It seems you have a knack for saving Lombardi girls.”

  He didn’t laugh with me. Instead, his electric eyes went dark as they looked at his new wife and then back at me. “No, Cosi, the Lombardi girls have a knack for saving lost men.”

  I swallowed his blessing like communion wine with closed eyes and a soft smile of thanks before I moved again through the jovial crowd. Something dark moved too low and quick through the edge of my vision, prompting me to look at the shadows in the hallway leading back to the bathrooms.

  A boy stood there, his shoulders pressed to the wood, his hands in the pockets of his impeccably pressed trousers. He was oddly familiar even in the low light, the burnish of his flaxen hair, the way it pushed back from his forehead in a ridged crown of gold that contrasted deeply with the dark pits of his shadowed eyes. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen, on the knife’s edge of puberty, but not quite there, still slim in a way that looked gangly and round faced with baby fat that had yet to melt off.

  It wasn’t until I was almost upon him that I realized just exactly who he was.

  Rodger Davenport.

  Noel’s third son, the one masterfully produced by Noel’s secret union with Mrs. White and kept hidden from Alexander and Dante in case, one day, he was needed to usurp his older brothers.

  The one and only son I had never and would ever trust with my life because he had proven the one time I had the displeasure of interacting with him, that he would be only too happy to end it.

  Alexander and Dante, for all their faults and considerable darkness, were well-adjusted saints compared to the fevered evil that lurked in Rodger.

  I saw that malicious intent as we locked eyes, and he grinned like a demon freed from Tartarus to wreck hell on earth. My heart palpitated brutally in my chest as if he’d reached through my ribcage to squeeze it in warning.

  “What are you doing here?” I said. Even though I was too far away and the room was too loud for him to really hear me.

  He read my lips, though; his thin, starched smile stretched tighter between his cheeks as he caught onto my fear.

  “Come see,” he taunted and then ducked down the hall.

  A woman came out of the yawning mouth of the hall just as he moved into it, obscuring which way Rodger went. I decided to check the kitchen first and found it empty but for two cooks sweating and swearing under their breath as they hustled out with the last of the food to be served. I winked at Carla as she looked up at me, then ducked back out the door, hesitating in front of the men’s room before I shoved through the door.

  Rodger stood by the row of urinals, his hands in his suit pockets, one shiny loafer clad foot tapping a beat on the tiles as he whistled a sharp, staccato tune.

  “Boring party,” he noted with a one-sided smirk. “I bet you miss the Order’s soirees, don’t you, slave?”

  I tipped my chin high. “We both know I do not. What are you doing here, Rodger? If Alexander and Dante see you, they won’t hesitate, and I don’t want to see a boy your age get hurt.”

  “He told me you were soft,” Rodger said with a cluck of his tongue and a shake of his head that dislodged a piece of gold hair from his crown so that it swung into his dark eye. “He also told me he tried to teach you that softness would be the death of you.”

  “Noel didn’t teach me anything but pain and regret,” I retorted.

  My heel was still pressed to the swinging door so that it was lodged open, the sounds from the party a soothing comfort at my back. I was facing off with the spawn of Satan, but my heroes were close at hand if anything went wrong. I wanted to see why Rodger would take the risk to come all this way just to taunt me.

  He cocked his head to the side. “Those are valuable lessons, are they not?”

  They were. The pain had unlocked the mysteries of my body’s mechanisms, and the regret had taught me exactly what was important in my life.

  But I’d had enough pain and enough regret without Noel force-feeding his own brand of misery to me the night of my wedding.

  “Should we bring your older brothers in here and ask them if they agree?” I asked with a sharp smile to match his own.

  Rodger was a creature of the dark. He respected boldness, cruelty, and manipulation the way a normal person might honour wisdom, courage, and empathy.

  “Or maybe I could teach you something about pain?” I asked, running my hand up my thigh and pulling the fabric as I went so that the knife folded and tucked into my garter was revealed to him. “Just as you did that day with me in the dungeon.”

  He licked his lips, fast as a lizard and just as revolting. When he looked up from my exposed leg, he smiled his eerie, boyish grin. “That was a fun day, wasn’t it? I can’t wait to have more of those.”

  “You won’t. Ever.”

  “Oh!” he said with a little chuckle, rocking back on his heels. “I thought you understood. Silly of me, my father told me you were stupid.”

  “As stupid as your father? After all, he is the one under house arrest for fraud, embezzlement, and money laundering.”

  Rodger’s affable mask cracked and then fell off his face entirely, revealing a curled sneer that showcased his vivid pink gums and bent British teeth. “Do not speak of your betters in that manner, slave, or I will be forced to punish you before I get you hom
e to father.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you,” I told him firmly. “I’m going to poke my head out this door and call for Alexander. Then he and Dante can decide what to do with you. They aren’t as ‘soft’ as me, so I hope for your sake that they’re feeling lenient. Though every time they see my back, cut up with scars you and your father put there, their eyes go black with rage, so I wouldn’t bet money on it.”

  “No need,” he said, jolly once more, bouncing on his toes as if he couldn’t wait to let me in on a wonderful secret. “You’re going to come with me because you want to.”

  I snorted, the Neapolitan coming out in me as indignant rage burned clean through my cultivated class. “In your fucking dreams, kid.”

  “I am no kid. You will refer to me as Lord Davenport.” He ignored my scoff and stepped forward with over-bright eyes as glazed and madly rolling as marbles set loose. “And you will willingly come with me because if you don’t, I’m going to blow up everyone you love right here in this slum.”

  My neck pained sharply as fear hooked into my spine and pulled me taut. “What?”

  “It’s pathetic really, how easy it is to buy items for an explosive. Ashcroft was so mad, you see, that Alexander took away his dick and bullocks, that he was happy to give us a nice and easy recipe for a homemade bomb.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut against the truth I saw in his face, the eagerness in his expression that told me he wasn’t bluffing. I knew Ashcroft was recovering from his injuries, learning to be both a eunuch and a cripple in an expensive recovery home upstate, but I hadn’t thought he would join forces with Noel to get back at us. At least, not like this.

  I was sure it occurred to Alexander and Dante, and that they were keeping an eye, but with everything going on with the elopement and Dante’s arrest, they hadn’t been as vigilant. We had won the battle, but it seemed we forgot that we had yet to win the war.

  “Where is it?” I asked him, desperately trying to figure a way out of the situation.

  “The kitchen, of course. The explosive isn’t very strong, so I’m counting on the gas in the room to really set it off with a proper bang.” He smiled so wide, I thought he could swallow me whole with his big mouth. It felt like staring down a barracuda while I was prone in the water. “If I don’t leave here with you in the next ten minutes, the Order acolyte we paid is going to slink into the kitchen and set it off.”

  He watched me as a bomb went off at the center of my gut, as my internal organs spasmed and collapsed, as my heart erupted in a bloody mess of deceased hopes and dreams. He watched, and he cupped himself through his flannel trousers as my pain made him hard.

  “No time to say goodbye I’m afraid, not if you don’t want to say goodbye for good,” he said, soto voce.

  There was a crinkling, static sort of sound rushing through my ears as if someone was unwrapping a candy beside each ear, and it took me a long moment to realize it was the sound of my panicked heart frantically churning blood through my veins. I wished I was smarter, quicker, just readier to deal with a situation like this.

  I had to go.

  I wasn’t going to put my loved ones in jeopardy and all of them, every single last one of them really, was in Osteria Lombardi that night. If I facilitated, if I called out for help, what would happen to them?

  Surely, Rodger wouldn’t let himself get blown to smithereens.

  “No,” he said, answering the questions that played out over my face. “We’re close enough to the back door that I can make it in time.”

  Cazzo!

  I couldn’t bear the idea of everyone dying because of my willfulness, not when I didn’t have any other plan up my sleeve to save them. My mind wheeled through options, calling the police somehow, flagging down someone after I left with Rodger, leaving a clue as to was going on so that they could at least find me quickly…but there was nothing. Not really.

  “Five minutes left, but we are pushing it, don’t you think, slave?” Rodger asked with wide, guileless eyes.

  He was a good actor, as good as his pernicious father. If I called for help walking down the street with him, who would believe this teenage, beautifully dressed adolescent would be a threat to me?

  “You’re coming,” he told me because he saw the way my shoulders slumped, he saw the way my heart flickered and went out like a flame in my eyes.

  “I’m coming.”

  He nodded and then walked on his bouncing toes to my side where he offered me his arm the way a gentleman would at a ball. His gentlemanly gesture was so flagrantly contradictory to our circumstances that it made me simultaneously want to laugh and cry.

  I didn’t take it.

  Instead, I shoved out the door and went down the hall out the back door into the stagnant, cold air of the alleyway without looking back at the crowd of partygoers. I didn’t know what I would be moved to do if I saw them again and so, I denied myself even that last look.

  Alexander and Dante would find me, as long as I got out of there to keep them safe.

  I had no doubt of their resolve and ability to save me.

  They had done it before, and they would do it again as long as life demanded that from them.

  From us.

  There was a nondescript black car idling outside, exhaust curling through the air and wrapping around me, the toxic fumes as sickening as the feel of Rodger’s hand pushing me to the car and then into its dark interior. He grinned at me before shutting the door, a grin so young and excitable it made me cold from the inside out.

  He was pure evil, and he was only fourteen. Only a boy.

  It seemed where Noel had failed to make Alexander and Dante into men without souls, he had succeeded with Rodger.

  It was as repulsive a realization as it was incredibly sad.

  Rodger had never had the innocence that came with childhood because Noel had taught him from birth that the world was a terrible place, and if he wanted thrive, he had to be the most terrible thing in it in order to succeed.

  I stared out the window at the brick back wall of Osteria Lombardi as my ears rang and my eyes smarted with tears. It was hard to believe that after everything we had been through and fought for, I was finally going back to Pearl Hall.

  Not as its mistress as I had dreamed of for years.

  But once more, as a slave.

  I turned to look at Rodger to find him staring at me, his good humour sloughed off like a snake’s dead skin.

  “Was it worth it? Knowing you will die at home with us so your loved ones can live on without you?” He asked the question without inflection or any true emotional curiosity. He asked it because he didn’t understand the concept. He had manipulated me, not knowing why I would ever fall for his mechanism because he himself had no heart, no loved ones he would ever have to sacrifice if called upon to do so.

  “Yes,” I said, and it was the truest word I’d ever spoken.

  “Too bad,” Rodger said and then with a flash of his little boy grin, he swiped open the screen of his phone and sent off a prepared text message.

  I could see what it said from where I sat.

  Do it.

  My mouth was open like the wound I felt yawning through my chest as I looked up at him to confirm, “Rodger, what are you—?”

  My words cut off when I heard the startled shouts begin inside the restaurant, and I forgot what I had been about to say when there was a loud hiss and then a strange hollow pop followed by the boom and shatter of breaking glass and crumbling mortar.

  My body twisted to keep my eyes on the building as the car moved forward down the alley. I watched as fire blew out through the back door and licked its red tongue toward the sky, incinerating the garbage bagged on either side of the entry.

  If anyone was inside that inferno, they would not survive.

  There was a loud sucking, wet gurgle and heave of air inside the car as we turned left out of the alley, and the flaming building disappeared. I didn’t know what it was until I tried to speak and realized my
mouth was flapping open like luffing sail caught in the wind, my chest ravaged with sobs so deep the keel of them dug into my gut and ached fiercely.

  “Why?” I managed through the tears destroying my body like a fucking tempest.

  I tried not to think of all my loved ones fried by the fire, tried not to remember my school trip to Pompeii where loved ones lay overlapped in futile attempts at protection, calcified by soot and black rock. I tried not to think of Sebastian and Mama, of my Giselle and my Elena, of Dante and most of all, of Alexander.

  I tried to focus on the wealth of rage in my chest instead as I stared at Rodger and forced him to answer with the sheer weight of my gaze.

  He licked his lips and shrugged his aristocratic shrug before leaning back in his chair to settle in for the ride. “Because,” he said on a yawn. “Because it was fun.”

  And when he leaned over to sink the tip of a fine needle into my wrist, I let him because the only cure for the kind of heartbreak ripping me apart was the blessed relief of medically induced oblivion.

  Cosima

  My brain was too heavy and hot in the confines of my skull. It throbbed like a metronome set to ticking between my ears, setting off a series of raw nerves throughout my body so that I pulsed with pain all over.

  I squeezed my eyes shut tighter, not against the pain but the déjà vu.

  My mouth was cotton coated as I opened it in an attempt to gulp in more of the cold, damp air of wherever the hell I’d woken up in. The ground was a frozen, unforgiving bite beneath my hip and leaden legs, but as I traced my quaking fingers along the grooves in the tile, I recognized it for what it was.

  The black and white checkered tiles shot through with gold that composed the floor of Pearl Hall’s ballroom.

  My stomach tossed violently up my throat, and before I could stem the flow, I was leaning over painfully to throw up whatever poison was left in my system. The acrid scent filled my nose and made my stomach convulse until every ounce of liquid was wrung from my body.

  I fell to the floor beside the mess, quaking and sweating as I curled in on my hollow core.