“Exotic, yes,” he agreed softly, fingering a lock of my inky hair. “Wild, I’ve yet to see, but I am very much looking forward to it.”
“I suppose I should be thanking you for not raping me immediately?” I scoffed.
He dropped my lock of hair, his lips twisted into a disgusted sneer. “You may feel like an animal, but I don’t fuck them. My cock will be inside you when you earn the right to a bath and no longer stink like livestock.”
“Let me out of these chains, and I’m happy to take one,” I returned because now that I’d been made aware of it, I could smell myself.
I must have been kept unconscious for more than a day for them to cart me all the way from Italy to wherever we were in England.
His smile was thin, creasing his stubble-shadowed cheeks into disgustingly attractive lines. “You will learn, my beauty, that this is a relationship of give and take.”
He leaned forward, his hands lashing out to snag my nipples in a tight hold and then he tugged, straining my body forward to reduce the burning tension in my recently pierced breasts.
“You give,” he whispered sinisterly, twisting my nipples until I whimpered. “And I take of your exquisite body. Then, and only then, will I reward you, and even then, I expect you to accept those gifts with overwhelming gratitude.” He paused, his eyes so hot on my lips they felt scalded as if by hot tea. “I can only imagine the lovely sound of the words ‘please, Master,’ and ‘thank you, Master,’ coming from that lush mouth.”
“Good because it will only happen in your imagination,” I gritted out between my clenched teeth as I squirmed against his hold.
Alexander’s smile deepened those creases in his face, making him appear both older and younger at once. “That’s it, Cosima,” he practically cooed. “Hand yourself over to me. Let me take you to the precipice of pain and over the edge into the kind of desire your virginal mind cannot even dream of.”
“Never,” I bit out, wrenching myself out of his hold and crying out at the pain as I fell backward to the floor in an ungainly sprawl.
When I looked up, Alexander was standing, his huge form clad in an entirely black suit that magnified his sinister charms.
He stared at me passively in my disgrace, naked and bound, rebelling with no hope of revolution.
“Have it your way, slave. We shall see how long you last.”
I’d been in the dark for over two weeks. My sense of time was warped without light or regular meals, without company or clocks. All I had were my own thoughts to pass the time and the savage cannibal sitting in the pit of my stomach eating away at the lining with pointed, poisonous teeth.
They fed me every two days. Bread and cold ham someone slapped onto a plate that appeared sporadically when I woke up. I’d never eaten so little or been so distressed by it, not even during my days battling an eating disorder.
There was water too. Dirty and warm poured into a porcelain bowl at the very edge of the circumference of space the chain allowed me. There was never enough, a shallow pool that barely slacked my wicked thirst.
It was clever.
I was restless from lack of movement, hungry to the point of constant pain, and near delirium.
They’d closed the shutters over the massive windows and turned down the heat so that I could see my breath cloud in the wintry air as I curled in on myself, shivering in misery and unable to sleep comfortably.
I had the use of a bucket as a toilet and, thank God for small mercies, it was regularly emptied whenever I managed to get a few hours of shut-eye.
Two weeks.
I wasn’t sure if that was commendable or stupid. All I needed to do was give into my new reality, and I’d be free of this gilded chamber of horrors, free to eat real food and drink more than tepid water.
Free to be me again.
I was locked in the dark, but it was more than an absence of light. It was the blackness of my own solitude; the quantum hole at the center of my soul that was slowly sucking away at everything that made me me.
I tried to write an encyclopedia of Cosima facts to cement my sense of self in the chaos of night that had become my life.
Cosima Ruth Lombardi.
Born August 24th, 1998 in Napoli, Italia to Caprice Maria Lombardi and Seamus Patrick Moore.
My favourite colour was wine red, captured in a glass and held over rich, warm candlelight.
I loved poppies best, of all flowers, because they reminded me of me in a way that was narcissistic but true. They were bold as blood but stark against the softer colours of the traditional Italian countryside. They demanded notice and received it. But their beauty was short-lived and fragile as the thin silk of their petals fell to bits within a week and scattered on the wind.