Enamoured

by Darling, Giana

  My hand snapped up before I even realized it and wrapped finger by finger around Mrs. White’s fleshy, pale throat. She choked against my hold, her spit flying in my face. I rubbed it off with one hand and then sneered nearly against her lips, “I don’t care if you didn’t have a choice. I don’t care if you were only trying to survive. You took me under your wing while I was enslaved here, you made me think I could trust you, and then you took advantage of that. Maybe I could forgive you for that, but I can never forgive you for taking me away from Xan. I can never forgive you or your son for k-killing him and my family.”

  Mrs. White sputtered, her face ripening like a tomato on the vine from sickly green to pink then vermillion red.

  Still, I squeezed.

  It wouldn’t be the first time I’d killed someone, though it would probably be my last.

  I knew I didn’t have much longer to live, and if it was the last thing I did, I would be happy I’d ended Mary White’s life myself.

  The door behind me banged opened just before I was ripped away from her by an arm belted across my chest and shoulders. I could tell by his scent, musky and contrived, that Noel was the one dragging me away from his old slave. He pushed me into the chair before a vanity and then backhanded me so hard on my already sore right cheek that I felt the skin split over my cheekbone.

  Then he was in my face, caging me in with his arms braced on the chair, looming over me like a vengeful God. “I gave you liberty, and I have no compunction taking it away again. If you can’t behave, I will make you.” He looked over my shoulder at the door where I could see Rodger in my periphery, bouncing on his toes as he watched his father take out his anger on me. “Son, fetch me my toolkit.”

  It turned out that Noel’s version of a toolkit was like something out of Dr. Frankenstein. He had hammers, nails, and a nail gun, whips, floggers, and chains, raw ginger and cayenne pepper, clamps with teeth and weights with hooks to attach to genital piercings. First, he buckled a red ball gag around my head, securing it between my teeth so that I sat before the mirror looking like a suckling pig roast ready for devouring.

  Then he opened that vicious kit and began to apply his tools to my body in punishment for attacking Mrs. White.

  My arms were bound from shoulder to wrist with rough rope to the chair back and my legs from groin to ankle against the chair legs. There was ginger paste painted onto the delicate skin of my clit, igniting it with itching, burning discomfort even before he clamped it with hard metal teeth. Then Noel taught Rodger how to use adjustable c-clamps to pinch my nipples between the metal bracket and the screw head.

  The worst part of the entire ordeal was being forced to watch them truss me up like a doll in the beautiful gilt mirror I’d once loved in a room that Alexander had helped make into a home.

  Tears streaked down my face even after they finished, photographed me, and left with a warning to let Mrs. White ready me for dinner or else…

  Her hands shook as she painted my pried open lips blood red and dried my tears as well as she could to apply bronze and blush. Sometimes, her breath hiccoughed as her eyes strayed to my bruising nipples or pained sex, but she continued diligently to pretty my face for our shared dictator.

  “I know you don’t want to hear it,” she said finally in a voice so quiet, I had to strain to hear her even in the silent room, “but I want, no, need to explain myself to you…When Noel took me as his slave, I was elated and horrified. My father was one of the last unsuccessful tenants farming Davenport land, and he owed Noel a great debt. Much like you, I was given as payment. I lived close enough to know the village gossip, so I knew what Noel did with his slaves. He went through so many, you see, and even though outsiders weren’t allowed into the Hall, delivery boys could sometimes hear the wails and then some of the servants, well, they nattered when they shouldn’t have. I wasn’t the prettiest lass, and I wasn’t very charming or classy the way I figured a lord would want, but I was clever.”

  She chuckled sadly to herself as she finished my make-up and picked up the brush to run through my hair. Her eyes locked on mine in the mirror, and even though I wanted to look away, I became mesmerised in the distressed denim of her gaze.

  “I was clever enough to know I had to give more than just my body and submission to Noel if I wanted to survive him. Remember I told you before the night of the ball in London? Beauty fades, darling girl, and I needed something that would last. I almost wish now that I hadn’t endured. Twenty years is a long time to be beaten by a man with endless creativity…but I made the choices I made to survive, and then when I had a son, so that he would too.”

  I glared at her, writing my own monologue in gold ink so that she might read it in my eyes.

  She stared right back, her lips twisted with a conflicting mixture of pride and doubt, before she hesitantly unbuckled the gag and gently removed it from my stretched mouth.

  I worked my jaw to relieve the ache before I said, “You’re right, I don’t care. You sacrificed a woman you should have empathised with. There were other ways to win the game, other moves you could have made.”

  She bit her lip and then opened her palms to the air in benediction. “It was the most direct way I could find to checkmate.”

  “Well,” I told her ominously because her fishing expedition for pity had not hooked me through the mouth or reeled me in. If anything, it made me hate her all the more. “The game isn’t over yet.”

  I watched as she read the acrimony carved into my features, and then as her own face curdled like bad cream.

  “Fine,” she whispered. “If you want another enemy while you’re here, I’ll be one. But you should know, the choice was yours.”

  “I have never made my own choices under this roof, and I won’t be allowed to now,” I countered.

  She pressed her lips together in a flatline as she realized just how dead in the water her efforts to sway me to her dark side were, and then with narrowed eyes, she put the ball gag back around my head.

  Cosima

  I found the kitchen the same way I’d left from the beautifully refurbished wood paneled walls to the old AGA cooker and every single kitchen servant I’d known before. Straight down to Douglas O’Shea.

  The knife wound of his betrayal radiated through my back.

  It might have been slightly ridiculous to think Douglas would abandon his position as head cook at Pearl Hall after I’d gone, but it wasn’t a stretch to think he would have resigned after Alexander openly renounced his father.

  Yet there he stood at the long worn wooden table at the center of the room with a red apple in his hand, the peel curling over his many-freckled hand like the body of snake. The sight of his brightly glinting copper hair, red as the tip of a flame, and the ruddy collection of freckles splashed across his pale skin made my heart ache with nostalgia.

  “Ducky,” he breathed, the sound of it like air leaking from a punctured lung.

  He looked ruined by the sight of me. Tears pooled in his eyes, and his usually steady hands trembled as he put the apple down to brace himself against the tabletop.

  “Out! The lot of you,” he ordered shakily.

  I realized the entire kitchen crew had paused in their efforts to stare at me. The young servant I remembered was named Jeffery scuttled toward me on his way out the door and astonished me by tugging gently on my hand in a small sign of solidarity.

  The gesture brought the tears haunting my throat out onto my tongue.

  When I looked back at Douglas, he was blatantly crying.

  “I’m in bloody shambles. I so wanted this to go a certain way,” he started between sniffles. “I wanted to be strong for you because I know how cocked-up this whole thing is, but ducky, the sight of you like that…” He waved a hand at my collared, shackled, and white corseted body. “It’s gutted me.”

  “You and me both.”

  He flinched at my cold tone, and then his eyes widened as he dashed around the table only to crash into the invisible wall of my rancor
a foot before he reached me.

  His hands fluttered like birds without a perch as he tried to explain, “I almost stormed out the second that tosser told me you’d up and left us. There was no way my sweet ducky would just run away without saying goodbye unless he’d done something to deserve it. Had my bags packed and everything when the great lord of the manor himself graced my doorway and explained a few things to me.”

  He took a risk and clasped my hands in his, the chains between my shackles clicking like the tongue of a scolding Italian mother. I let him, not because I felt any less betrayed, but because after so long in the dark and lonely cold, I craved tender physical affection.

  “It was Lord Thornton who asked me to stay on at Pearl Hall,” he whispered frantically as voices sounded in the hall. “You see, marra, I’m a proper spy now. Alexander’s eyes and ears in his enemy’s home.”

  Relief sluiced over me like the cleansing rain of a spring shower. My knees trembled under the weight of his truth, and I was crying before I could stop myself, flinging my arms around Douglas in an inescapable hug.

  He held me, and together, we cried for a good long moment.

  “Have…have you heard from him since I’ve been here?” I choked out through my tears.

  I knew before he stiffened in my arms what his answer would be. “No, love, I’m sorry. I heard about the explosion, and well, his grace seems to think both his eldest sons are dead.”

  Anguish roar up my throat and spilled forth like water breaking through a dam. I clutched Douglas to me so tightly, I could feel the shape of his bones beneath his skin.

  When I finally had control of myself, I stepped back, but only enough to look into his dear face, and say, “Thank you.”

  His face juddered as he swallowed a sob, then smoothed into a tender smile as he collected one of my tears with his thumb. “You look cream-crackered. Sit down and help me with this pie while we plot your escape.”

  Over the sweet scent of apples, Douglas explained how he had been using Alexander’s hawk Astor to send handwritten missives about Noel’s goings-on to a man Alexander paid and trusted in Manchester. Sometimes, Douglas would receive notes in reply, but mostly it was an endless stream of information about the Duke of Greythorn’s whereabouts, who visited at Pearl Hall, and anything to do with the Order.

  “I have to say I was chuffed as a mother when I heard you’d done it,” he said with a cheeky grin when we spoke about the dissolution of the Order of Dionysus. “Thought the man was mad for taking them on, but then, what better reason than you to do it?”

  The other kitchen staff returned after that, so Douglas and I were forced to keep our chatter superfluous, but as we put the finishing touches on dinner, he pulled me close under the guise of needing my help with the after-dinner tea service preparations.

  “You know, of course, that your favourite flower is used to create the infamous opium,” he said softly, conversationally.

  The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, but I gave no outward sign of discomposure as I hummed my response.

  “Well, it’s a little-known fact that the seeds of the poppy…” He pulled a basket of the blooms off one of the windowsills and showed me the small bowl full of seeds he had harvested. “Can be used to make a tea that mimics the effects of morphine. They call it a ‘twilight slumber.’”

  I chewed my lip as I watched him crush some of the seeds and then mix them with some herbs before putting the mixture in a sieve on the mouth of a teapot.

  “So, your master plan is to put Noel to sleep at the table?” I asked.

  He shot me a look. “No, ducky, my plan is to make him a wee bit more pliable. They’ve used morphine in studies for truth serums, and it’s been found to loosen the tongue. Not to mention, it’ll make him a little loopy and out of his senses. Hopefully, it’ll make whatever he has planned post-supper a tad more tolerable.”

  I laid my hand over his on the pot and gave it a squeeze. “Thank you, Douglas.”

  “Anything for you. Now, I won’t tell you to break a leg because I’m afraid Noel will actually do that, but I shall wish you the best of luck, love.” He pressed a kiss to my cheek.

  His affection and loyalty shone through my dreary future like a crack of light in the dark. As I followed the butlers up the stairs with the platters of food, I tried to keep my sight focused on that sliver of hope and not on the sucking black abyss of dread that threatened to overtake me.

  Alexander and I had rediscovered each other, committed to our relationship for the first time, and taken down an entire corrupt secret society.

  I refused to believe this was the end of our story.

  The hero dead before the happily ever after, and the heroine murdered by the villain.

  I had to believe everything I’d learned over the course of my ordeals had led me to this moment, a moment when I would outwit the smartest, cruelest man I’d ever known and—I looked down at the tea tray I held filled with poppy seed tea—give him a taste of his own poison.

  Cosima

  The dining hall was darker than ever before, limed only in the weak golden glow cast from dozens of gleaming candelabras set throughout the room. The effect made the entire gilt room feel like the inside of a tarnished treasure chest filled with priceless trinkets and diamonds accumulated over the centuries of Davenport canon. The way Noel looked at me as I entered the long, narrow hall made me feel like the most expensive treasure of them all.

  There was glory in his eyes and a smug tension to the set of his shoulders beneath his customary bespoke suit that conveyed his wicked excitement.

  He was eager to play the final moves in this game of his. I was the last piece remaining on the board, a pawn who had somehow returned as a queen. He would take such deviant delight in cutting me down, and I knew the feeling surpassed his annoyance at my resiliency.

  Rodger wasn’t present, and his absence concerned me. Like a mother with her child, I felt more at ease having him within sight because who knew what he would get up to without supervision.

  “Ruth,” Noel called out just to hear his voice echo through the high hall. “Come to your Master and present yourself.”

  Each step was leaden with dread, but I made it to his side without vomiting. He was so insidiously clever, Noel was, to recreate every scene of my capitulation to Xan. It confused and sickened me enough to have my body and mind swaying nauseatingly off-balance as a neophyte on a ship.

  “She looks like a queen, but she is a pawn,” Noel murmured happily as he looked down at me by his side, knees bent, head bowed, hands pressed together as if in prayer to him. “Now, feed me.”

  So, I did.

  I tried to empty my mind of thought, to focus on the sound of my breath flowing in and out of my body, but Noel made sure I was an active participant in his dinner. He hummed around my fingers, sucking on the tips and biting into the pads as I passed food from the plate into his mouth with my hands. At one point, he pressed my free hand on the burgeoning swell of the erection trapped beneath his suit pants, and I shuddered so hard in revulsion, I dropped Cornish hen on his trousers.

  He made me eat it off his lap without the use of my hands.

  As I recovered, knees quaking and eyes leaking tears, the dinner plates were taken away and the tea service was placed on the sideboard. I swallowed the thick bile on the back of my tongue and made to get up to retrieve the tea.

  “Crawl,” Noel demanded as he leaned back in his throne-like chair to watch me.

  I crawled.

  My mind clung to questions I would ask Noel once he’d imbued the tea.

  Answers Alexander had deserved his entire life and never received.

  If he was truly gone, the very least I could do was glean them for both of us.

  The antique blue and white Spode tea set rattled on the silver tray as I stood and clutched it in my shaking hands. I was so filled with a violent cocktail of reactions that I couldn’t decipher my own emotional landscape.

  The only th
ing I knew was this.

  If I had to live one more day bound in the chains of Noel’s servitude, I would kill myself.

  But not before I killed him.

  I smiled prettily into his face as I laid the tea set before him, my breasts exposed to his lecherous gaze in the flimsy white lace and chiffon corset I wore. With the black shackles at my wrists, throat, and ankles, I looked like a virginal whore.

  Noel loved it.

  His eyes went black with pleasure, pupils blown open to reveal the cold, depthless center of his depravity.

  He liked to see me shake and tremble.

  He loved to watch me move, every one of my actions puppeteered by his words.

  I rolled my hips toward him, presenting the curve of my ass and the dip of my spine for his hand to sluice down. His eyes narrowed as he took advantage of my position, suspicious of my increasingly servile nature.

  I fluttered my eyelids at him as if I was nervous but pleased by his attentions.

  A smile pin tucked his lips into his left cheek.

  “You know, Ruthie,” he began pleasantly as his hand smoothed up and down my back, dipping between my legs to pat my sex before repeating the movement again and again. It was a proprietary touch, one meant to degrade me from woman to object. It didn’t work because I was pouring the tea into the pretty little cup and watching as he lifted it to his lips and swallowed. When I next smiled, it was genuine. “Women have been marginalized throughout history for a reason. You see, you are the weaker sex. Men are stronger mentally and physically. The argument that women ‘feel more’ and that makes them strong is rubbish, complete and utter drivel. Emotionality is the failure of the weak, and you, my dear Ruthie, are a prime example of that weakness.”

  “Yes, sir,” I allowed with a meek bow of my head.

  I watched through my eyelashes as he took another long sip, then another.

  My heart rammed against the cage of my chest, threatening to break a rib. Cold sweat broke over my forehead, and I silently willed him to drink more.