Enthralled (The Enslaved Duet 1)

“Why me?” I asked, wiping my wet mouth with the back of my hand. My throat burned from his disuse of it. “Why do this to me?”

I’d saved this man’s life, and he was repaying me with sexual servitude?

It didn’t make sense.

“Why you?” he asked on a callous hiss. “You have done nothing to deserve the answer to the question.”

My skin flashed hot and cold in shame and fear, a potent concoction that disorientated me more than any drug. The situation was too surreal for me to understand. A month ago, I’d been a teenage girl living a poor but pleasant life with her family in Naples.

Now, I was a slave kneeling at the feet of her Master in a country I didn’t know with nothing to my name but whatever he deemed to allot me.

Without another word, Alexander tucked himself back into his trousers and turned on his heel to walk to the door. Only when he reached it did he turn to look at me, my chin still wet and trembling, my knees tightly closed but their insides glistening with my own traitorous arousal, the same arousal that coated the toe of his left shoe.

“I will tell you this, Cosima Lombardi, topolina, my slave,” he said, his words lugubrious. “Your assumption of this role is as vital to your life as it is to mine. Even a predator is prey to something, even me.”

I had the dream again, the one about Persephone being abducted by a cruelly handsome Hades who dragged her into the dank underworld and forced her to take the throne at his side. Only, this time, the Goddess of Spring and Queen of the Dead was not wholly reluctant. She marveled at the beauty of the dark world and found surprising enchantment in the power she’d been granted as its ruler. The only thing she couldn’t find delight in was the cold, mysterious man at her side.

“Who are you?” she asked the dark god. “Who do you want me to be for you?”

When I woke up to the sound of rattling chains, those questions were burned in my psyche.

Who did Alexander Davenport want me to be for him?

It had to be about more than sexual deviancy. He was an Earl, for Christ’s sake. Handsome, titled, and moneyed, I doubted he needed to resort to importing a poor girl from Italy in order to get his just delights. Unless his kink was debasing atavistic, Neapolitan teenage girls.

“Good morning, dear,” a woman’s voice greeted, softened at the edges with a British accent very different from Alexander’s own brisk tones.

I whipped around, rolling uncomfortably over a coiled length of chain to face the first new face I’d seen in my new life at this house.

She was a woman constructed of circles, apples in her cheeks, a robust bosom, and rounded hips like half-moons. Her spirals of pale blond hair framed a face that spoke of gentle, natural aging, and her faded denim blue eyes were entirely kind as they wrinkled into a smile at the sight of me.

“What are you doing in here?” I asked then immediately decided another query was more pressing. “Please, help me get out of here.”

“Oh, don’t fuss, darling girl. I’m to clean you and care for you this afternoon in preparation for dinner tonight. Lord Thornton would like you to join him in the dining room,” she told me as if I was just a normal guest being tended to in times gone by.

I clambered to my feet, chains protesting loudly at my movement. “I would prefer to eat separately.”

Her lips pursed, but the rest of her face remained obstinately cheerful. “Oh well, Lord Thornton can take some getting used to, but it will be good for you to get out of this drafty place. I would have preferred to take you to your room, but apparently, you haven’t been well behaved enough for that boon to be granted quite yet.” She clucked her tongue at me and then gestured to my right where an enormous copper freestanding tub had been placed, the top curling into ribbons of hot steam. “So I had the tub sent up. Let’s get you bathed before it loses heat.”

I wanted to protest the bath because I wanted to rebel against everything in my new existence, but I wasn’t stupid enough to cut off my nose to spite my face.

“You are skin and bones, poor thing,” the woman clucked again.

I peered down at myself, noticing the obscene swell of my large breasts against the concave slope of my belly and the tracks of bones protruding beneath my skin.

“I didn’t have much to lose in the first place,” I admitted softly, more distressed by the sight of my skinniness than I had been by the alien sight of Alexander’s dick or the length of chain connecting me to the floor of an unknown house.