Enthralled (The Enslaved Duet 1)

I didn’t want to leave. It wasn’t my choice, yet I had accepted the pain of its inevitability easily, my body absorbing the shock without consequence. My love for crumbling, beautiful Napoli was a drop in the bucket compared to my love for my crumbling, beautiful family. I was doing this, selling my body and maybe my soul, for them. I’d get them some of the money they were due or else the sale was dead in the water. The mafia would kill my father; we would still by haunted by the looming shadow of their influence, and we might never get out of that godforsaken city alive, but at least we’d be together.

I drew up their beloved faces in my mind’s eyes, etching them into the black screens of my lids so that every time I blinked, I would be reminded of the reason for my sacrifice.

I knew all too well the realities of our situation. If Sebastian didn’t leave soon, no matter our economic status, he would be forced into the Camorra, who had been nipping none too gently at his tender heels for the past two years. He was now eighteen, old for recruitment when the average age of youth inducement into the mafia was as young as eleven.

I squeezed my eyes shut to distort the vivid image of my male self with a gun in one hand, blood on the other, and money, stacks of it, in his mouth. Sebastian was smart and able, afflicted with a beauty so striking it often brought him unwanted attention. I hoped that he would use some of the money to leave, maybe for Roma, and use his beauty to pull himself out of the stinking hole of poverty we had been born into. Even though I knew he wouldn’t—couldn’t—bring himself to leave our sisters and mother alone, I chose to believe my fantasy.

Just as I hoped that the money would continue to go toward the education of my prodigal younger sister, Giselle, so gifted with a pencil or brush that she could render whole people on a page with their emotions and blood trapped beneath the surface of her painted strokes. I’d been practically living in Milano and Roma for the past year working any gig I could get in order to send back money for Giselle’s education at L’École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She was too talented to be held back by our poverty, and too pretty and soft at heart to deal with the shark-infested waters of Napoli. I knew last year when Elena’s older boyfriend began to take undue notice of our shy sister that she had to leave. Her education was funded on my ability to provide for it with my modelling, and now that I was being sold, I needed to assure she would have the means to continue without me.

Ideally, funds would be left over for my smartest sibling, Elena, so she could attend a real school and earn a real degree. For Mama, a new home with a kitchen well equipped to deal with her delicious fare. And for my father—the man who just then was driving me towards my future as a bought woman? Well, for Seamus Moore, I could only wish for the best his soul would buy him in this life. A quick death.

Nico, one of Abruzzi’s men—not much older than me and the only man in the Camorra who I had any sort of good feelings toward—had shown up at the house last week with Rocco and some others. I was home from Milano for the week to celebrate Sebastian’s and my eighteenth birthday, and I’d been hoping to avoid the Camorra. Mama had been at the market with my sisters, and Sebastian was working at the factory in town, so the men had been able to retreat inside for some grappa, and Nico had stayed outside. “To keep me company,” he had explained, but I knew now it was to keep an eye on their investment.

I had continued to read, my hair falling between us to create a thick obsidian curtain, but the well-loved, well-worn book shook slightly in my hands. My heart seemed to balance on a wire that thrummed dangerously with a staccato beat.

“What’s happening?” I finally asked, unable to maintain the pretense of reading when my body was so attuned to the finality in the air.

The house felt like grounds for a funeral, only I didn’t know who had died.

When I turned to look at Nico sitting beside me on the front step, he was gazing down at me with warm brown eyes. I only allowed myself to like Nico a little because his eyes hadn’t yet turned wet and very, very black.

He spoke in the Italian of Napoli, filled with slang and more Latin notes than other dialects. His voice was hoarse and warm, like the sound of a well-fired furnace, and when I think of my home, my native tongue, it’s Nico’s voice I hear.