Enamoured

by Darling, Giana

  “Come sit here,” Noel beckoned, patting his thigh.

  I hesitated as he squeezed his hand over his erection, drawing my notice to it.

  He wouldn’t force me to sit on his lap, not physically. He wanted to watch me struggle to make the decision myself, to surrender to him when I realized that he had me cornered.

  I sat.

  But the fire of my rage and my passion was lit deep beneath my placid expression and outward show of subjugation.

  I was fire wrapped in ice, and it was only a matter of time before the latter melted away, and I was all heat. All fury.

  My fingers itched in my lap as I watched Noel drink more of his poppy seed tea.

  He finished the shallow bowl of tea and watched me as I poured more.

  “You know he’s dead, don’t you, Ruthie?” he asked casually as he picked up the unused knife at his place setting and began to play the sharp edge up and down my neck. “You know your precious Alexander and Edward died…that they burned to a crisp in the time it would take me to run the tip of this right across your long, golden throat.”

  I swallowed hard against the pinch of the blade on my voice box and gave a slight nod to mollify him.

  He hummed. “It was such a shame to kill them. The years that went into their upbringing and education, well, it devastates me to think of all that wasted time. Rodger is only thirteen and already more a man than the two of them together ever were.”

  “Your definition of man is monster,” I bit out. “You killed your own sons. I don’t know how you sleep at night, brutto figlio di puttana bastardo.”

  Ugly son of a bitch bastard.

  Only Italian will slack the viciousness of the fury pouring over my tongue like molten lead. I wanted to curse at him, scald him with the hot Latin words until he was impaled by my wrath like a pincushion.

  Noel grinned as he scraped the knife’s point over my lace cover nipple, back and forth like an out of sync metronome. “I have a new slave who does wonders with her whore mouth. Sleep is the only option after I’ve finished with her.”

  “You’re repugnant,” I said and spat on his face.

  He froze as the coagulated saliva adhered to his skin, then slowly creeped down his cheek, leaving a viscous trail. I was close enough, perched on his lap like that, to see how his grey eyes so much darker than Xan’s silver—like mottled mercury or old led, something metallic and lifeless—went hard with displeasure.

  “Rodger,” he called out in a pleasant voice completely at odds with the press of the knife to my chest and the toxic heat in his gaze. “Bring your mother forward, will you?”

  Noel settled more comfortably in his chair, readjusting me so I sat perched on the rigid edge of his erection, the knife then pressed to my throat so hard, a felt blood form in a crescent moon. Together we watched as Rodger emerged from the shadows with Mrs. White in his hold. At first, it seemed familial, his growing frame just an inch taller than hers, a lanky arm wrapped around her middle, another on her shoulder under her hair like a little boy hiding behind his mummy.

  It wasn’t until the low light of the candles cast yellow lamination over something with a dull sheen in the hand resting on her shoulder that I realized Rodger held a gun pressed to his mother’s temple.

  Mrs. White’s pale, trembling face was ugly and tragic, the same urine yellow of Napoli, filled with the same inescapable dread. I read what she wrote in her eyes as we locked gazes, the resignation and the terror.

  She’d known all along in some dark, irrevocable place in her soul that her own tool of survival would be the death of her.

  “I told you I would kill every single servant in this house if you didn’t mind me,” Noel prompted me. “It seems only fitting to begin in this manner.”

  “Noel,” I said slowly, surprised by the level of horror I felt. “Don’t do this.”

  “Kill Mary?” he asked, his face creased with mild, polite surprise as if I had offended him, but he was too gentlemanly to care. “Why, I don’t intend to.”

  My spine softened slightly with relief. I didn’t want her to die like that. No one deserved to be killed by their son and their husband, by the very people who should have loved her most. It echoed too profoundly in my heart.

  At least I could die knowing the two people who had loved me most had died loving me, died after saving me.

  “Rodger would do the deed, wouldn’t you, son?” he asked conversationally.

  A shiver ripped out my spine.

  Mrs. White whimpered, but Rodger only adjusted his hold, boyish face obscured partially by shadows, but the wedge of his smile even more white in the dark.

  “Happily,” he responded.

  “Unfortunately, that’s not quite what we have planned,” Noel said, as he adjusted and reached beneath his chair to produce another handgun, this one antique and so ornate it didn’t seem functional.

  “Do you know how to use one of these, dear Ruthie?” he asked.

  I stared back and forth between the weapon and the man with growing horror. “No.”

  “Little filthy liar,” he crowed happily. “You killed Giuseppe di Carlo with a gun. Oh? You thought I didn’t know. I told you knowledge is power, Ruthie, and I have both in spades. Now, get up like a good girl and play this game for Rodger and me.”

  My entire body shook as Noel helped me to my feet, and I gagged as he pressed the cold, heavy weight of the gun into my hand. My stomach ached with sharp agony. My vision swam as Noel stepped to my side and dug the point of his knife into my side over a kidney. Rodger handed his mother a small gun and stepped to the side with the barrel of his weapon still at her temple.

  We were pawns on the board of a father and son chess game. Noel wanted to teach Rodger what it was to sacrifice his queen.

  “What does he get by doing this?” I asked softly, already knowing the answer.

  “Why, my dear,” Noel purred into my ear. “He gets you.”

  I swallowed around my heart where it sat lodged painfully in my throat and tried to steady my hands as they clasped over the handle of the gun.

  “What’s the game exactly?”

  “You have the opportunity to kill Mary right now with no opposition,” Noel explained, his voice almost wispy with delight, a man high on something less tangible than a drug. Something made of pure, distilled evil.

  “What if I don’t shoot her?” I asked.

  He tsked. “Then your poor soft heart will be the death of you, as it is the death of every weak being, because then Mary will kill you to save her own life, won’t you, Mary?”

  Mrs. White only shook harder, sweat pouring down her face like tears.

  “You see, Mary knows what it takes to succeed in life. She gave me her good years, complete access to her body so I could do simply unspeakable things, and she gave me a son. She worked hard to live a long life, and I’ve no doubt, if given the opportunity awarded by your cowardice, she will work hard again to prolong it further.”

  “I won’t kill her for you,” I vowed.

  I wouldn’t.

  I didn’t care that Mrs. White was a traitor to womankind and that she deserved to die for all the horrible things she had facilitated on Noel’s behalf.

  I wouldn’t stain my soul by killing a woman without recourse, even one who was the wife of the devil himself.

  “So be it,” Noel accepted easily. “I’d hoped to play with you for years to come, but that new slave is fresh enough to last for a while. You don’t have anyone left who will miss you, so I can bury you in the maze with the rest of the women.”

  “Rest of the women?” I breathed as my heart started to race with anticipation.

  Was this it?

  The moment before my probable death and the drugged tea or his arrogance was finally kicking in. Was Noel finally going to confess his crimes?

  “Funny, isn’t it? To think that Alexander spent so many years searching for the answers to his mother’s death, and she was buried in the backyard the entire time.�
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  Noel’s wicked laughter echoed through the high-ceiling room. It juddered through me like an electric shock, resettling my brain chemistry and lighting up my nerves.

  “The slaves, I understand,” I said, surprised by the calm in my voice. “But your wife?”

  “She was slumming with the dago and conspiring to run away with my sons straight into his filthy arms,” Noel’s face was twisted up like hot metal, seared with ugly hatred. “It had to end. Just as I had to end the baby Alexander so foolishly planted in your belly.”

  The imprint of the two hands that had pushed me down the ballroom steps and killed our baby burned at my back.

  My body went hollow with despair, and then all of the sudden, filled to the brim with lava-like fury that densified into stone.

  “I’m going to kill you,” I told him through my teeth.

  He laughed. “You can try, but if you don’t kill Mary right now, you’re the one who will be dead.”

  In a flurry of actions almost too quick to interpret, Noel signaled to Rodger with a tilt of his head and the boy took his staying hand off the gun in Mrs. White’s shaking hand. A moment later, it was raised, the dark, innocuously small chamber pointed unerringly at my chest.

  “I’m truly sorry, love,” she whispered with tears falling into the open wound of her distressed mouth.

  I wasn’t.

  Not any longer and not for anything.

  Before I could even consciously decide, the gun in my hands was raised and the trigger was pressed by the firm clasp on my finger. The gun recoiled in my hand, jerking my shoulder enough to jar me to the side just as Mrs. White’s gun went off.

  Her bullet grazed my outer left arm, leaving a trail of fiery agony in its wake.

  My bullet found her brain, dead quiet in the wake of its unflinching connection with her skull. A second later, Rodger let her drop to the ground with a wet, punishing thunk.

  Over the rushing roar of blood in my ears, I vaguely heard Noel and then Rodger laughing lightly, pleased and shocked at the outcome of our outdated duel. Before I could think about it, before I could even begin to grasp the firestorm of heartbreak and fury raging through me, I whirled toward Noel and brought the butt of the gun down hard across his laughing face.

  The crunch reverberated through the dining hall followed by Noel’s grunt of pain as he stumbled back into the table with a crash of plates and cutlery. His arm dislodged one of the candelabras, and the flames spilled to the cloth, lighting the table on fire like a flaming throne below Noel’s prone body.

  He screamed.

  I turned on my heel and ran, Rodger’s following footsteps already ringing out against the wood behind me. The door at the end of the hall opened before I could even wrap my hand around the handle and Douglas appeared, his face pale but set with determination as fierce as a Celtic warrior. In one hand, he held a massive kitchen knife.

  “Go,” he urged, shoving me by. “Get out of here, now.”

  I wanted to thank him, cry and hug him for lying in wait for Rodger so I could get gone, to tell him I loved him for putting himself at risk and that I loved him for being my friend when I didn’t have any left.

  Instead, I ran.

  I ran down the hall, not stopping or even flinching when I heard a crash and scream from behind me where Douglas and Rodger had clashed. I ran through the dark hall harder than I’d even run at The Hunt, so hard my bare feet split against the friction with the glossed floors and my toes threatened to slip in the blood. So hard I went careening into priceless paintings as I turned the corners. So hard my lungs seemed to seize, and I couldn’t really breathe, the tissues clasping around nothing but carbon.

  Still, with an inevitably I felt at the back of my crazed mine like a premonition, Rodger caught me.

  His hands appeared as if out of thin air, wrapping around my middle and hauling me to the ground from behind. I screamed, flipping as I fell so that I landed hard on my hip, but my legs were twisted briefly out of Rodger’s seeking grip. He looked up at me with seething eyes like a rabid dog.

  I reared my leg back and kicked him square in his foaming mouth.

  A garbled growl sounded, but I didn’t stop to watch him recover. I scrambled to my feet and searched manically for a weapon, for anything to use against the boy who was close enough to a man in body and corrupt enough mind to do serious damage to my person. There was nothing but a side table decorated with an antique gold phone, paintings on the wall, and… the stuffed and mounted head of a stag.

  I jumped up to grasp the antlers in my hands, screaming as Rodger crawled forward and grabbed at one of my ankles, pulling me toward the ground. I leaned down into his momentum even though I knew if I ended up on the ground with him without a weapon, I was dead. His force helped me pull the large head from the wall, and I went tumbling to the ground with it, narrowly missing being impaled by one of the grand points.

  Rodger grabbed at my ankle again, tugging me closer as he grunted, “You miserable, filthy whore, I’m going to fuck you with my hands around your pathetic throat until you—”

  I reared up, using every ounce of my core strength to bring the mounted head up over my head and down into Rodger’s exposed, arched back.

  There was a sickening soft sound like something punching into an old couch cushion and then a thud as the tip of the antler broke through his body and knocked against the floor. Rodger stared up at me in disbelief, his face so young, his eyes wide as they began to tear. His hand spasmed, then loosened around my foot.

  I didn’t stay to watch if he would die.

  I scrambled backward on my hands and feet, then spun around to dash off down the hall again on legs wobbly with shock. Still, I ran, almost drunkenly, so fast it hurt, down the narrow corridor that cut straight through the house from front to back.

  Finally, I burst out one of the back entrances to the house and fell into the damp night, the air like ice against my moist, hot skin. I stared at the haloed edge of light spilling from the house into the huge abyss of blackness beyond.

  There was a sound behind me that spurred me forward like a gunshot at the starting line.

  I ran blind, my eyes streaming with tears, my hair a dark cloak behind me the same colour as the intractable night. The dirt ground painfully into the cuts on my feet and shrubs tore at the bare skin of my arms as I pumped them manically at my sides.

  Finally, I could make some sense of the dark, enough to realize with dread I felt like a dropped anchor in my stomach, that I had somehow made it into the maze on the east side of the property.

  The same maze Noel had just confessed to burying the bodies of his slaves in.

  The body of his wife.

  My body too, if I didn’t find a way out of the labyrinth.

  Frantically, as I dodged around a bend in the hedgerows, I tried to recall everything Alexander had told me about the property and about the elaborate maze.

  Constructed by Capability Brown in the late 1700s, it was one of Pearl Hall’s greatest sights and one that had stared at me through the windows of my bedroom during my entire time in captivity. There were two exits, one at either side, with a center spoke where a collection of Grecian marble statues lay. It was a massive maze, thousands of yew bushes used to make up the paths and dead ends in the pattern.

  A sob exploded from my panting mouth as I continued to run blindly through the collection of twists and turns, the branches tearing at all my exposed skin, the ground eating away at the flesh of my feet.

  I ran, and I bled.

  I sweated, and I cried.

  And over it all, I heard the distant lilting call of my name.

  “Ruthie,” Noel’s voice carried faintly over the wind, and the wet air streaming with drizzling rain. “Ruthie, you little bitch, if you come to me now, I promise not to kill you.”

  Fresh panic sluiced through my waning body, kicking my gait into hyper speed. I gritted my teeth, ducked my head into the rain, and ran harder still.

  Only moment
s later, I reached the spoke at the center of the yew wheel and crashed into the back of a statue so hard I saw stars. Reeling, I walked clumsily farther into the middle, at the center of the circle of marble carved Grecian gods, and then fell to my knees as my balance deserted me.

  I pushed my damp, clinging hair out of my face and looked at the six places the maze connected to the center, trying to discern which one might lead me to the far entrance and which one I had just stumbled out of, but my mind was scrambled by the crash and overcooked with terror.

  “I’m going to die here,” I said to myself and the earth beneath my hands, watching the grim glimmer of my tears falling with the rain to the soft, damp ground.

  I curled my fingers into the soil, fighting the urge to tip my head to the heavens and howl like a lost a wolf, crying for the rest of my pack that would never come, crying for the death I knew was close to arriving at my back.

  In all my experiences, I never truly thought I was seconds from dying, not like this. I wanted to press my body into the dirt and be swallowed up in the warm embrace of the soil, die at the hands of nature instead of the hands of a monster.

  And that spurred something inside me, some insanity that reared its head the more I poked at it.

  I started digging.

  Alexander

  The house was lit up like a beacon, but as empty as a tomb. I slunk through the halls, disturbed by the weight of the silence, how it filled the air like amber, pinning everything in place as if it hadn’t been disturbed since my last visit.

  Only when I pushed into the dining hall did I find evidence of life.

  Or, I should have said, death.

  The dining room table was a half-charred, still smoking mess, and Mrs. White lay in a shroud of her own satin red blood beside it, her face tipped up to the ceiling, the faintly surprised set of her mouth open and scarlet like her head wound.

  My blood went glacial in my veins.

  Riddick bent to place his hand on her arm and looked up at me with grim eyes. “Still warm.”