Enthralled (The Enslaved Duet 1)

“But you do have to. Tell me about Salvatore.”

His sigh ruffled my hair as he shifted over me, tucking one of my thighs between his legs so that my entire body was plastered to his. I wanted to nuzzle under the right angle of his jaw, tip my nose against his pulse and feel him so strong and sure against me, better than any security blanket could be.

I shouldn’t have felt so close to him or so safe in his arms, but I told myself it was the strange euphoric aftermath of submission that made me unduly needy and nearly weepy.

“When I held you in that alley, I knew who you were before you told me your name. I could see him in your eyes and in the cut of your jaw then when you spoke, you shared the same accent, the long, soft vowels of Neapolitan.”

“What are you saying?” I asked, staring down the edge of cliff, my toes curling around the side for purchase.

I didn’t want to fall, but momentum at my back was pushing me forward, and I knew the drop was inevitable.

Alexander’s hand tightened around my neck so forcefully, I couldn’t breathe. “Isn’t it obvious? Amadeo Salvatore is your father.”

I gasped, desperate to draw air and sense into my body, but Alexander wouldn’t let me. His weight against my chest deepened, and his fingers throbbed over my throat in time with my pulse.

“Your mother had an affair with him over eighteen years ago when your father was held in prison for a time. I only know because Amedeo and my mother spoke of it sometimes over the years, when it was late and they thought little boys should be in bed. It resulted in twins, two babies so beautiful that even though he couldn’t father them, he also couldn’t let them go.”

“Stop,” I croaked as stars exploded in front of my eyes.

I didn’t know if was from oxygen deprivation or the fact that my entire universe was rearranging itself to make sense of this news.

Salvatore wasn’t my father.

He couldn’t be.

Mama wasn’t a zealot, but she was a devout Roman Catholic. It was one of the reasons she had never divorced Seamus even when she should have.

To have an affair with another man when she was married with two other babies at home… it just didn’t compute.

Only, I could call up the haunted longing in Mama’s eyes as she stared out the lone window in our small kitchen and how she would cry sometimes at night, holding her rosary beads and a book of prayer, mumbling about forgiveness and sin. I’d always assumed she was praying for Seamus, our family’s penultimate sinner, but what if I was wrong?

I didn’t look like Seamus or my sisters who had inherit only their golden complexions from Mama and otherwise were replicas of our father.

Sebastian and I were cut from dark cloth, constructed into strong angles and long lines that spoke of different genes.

Ones that harkened back to a capo I’d known my entire life, one that hovered over our small lives like a dark power. He was tall, strong, and swarthy with a smooth, rolling gait that reminded me suddenly of Sebastian’s.

Alexander’s smirk cut like a knife wound across his face. “You see it, don’t you? I took you because your biological father killed my mother, and your faux father was stupid enough to use you to repay his debts. It seems both your fathers’ sins have shackled you to your fate long before you realized it.”

My breath wheezed through my throat like a poorly equipped air conditioning unit, my body hot and cold in strange turns.

“I thought about killing you,” Alexander mused as he resumed stroking my hair, only this time, his touch wasn’t tender; it was perfunctory. The way one might pet their prize hound after he’d passed his prime before he was sent to slaughter. “But that was before I met you and saw those prized money eyes Amedeo had always spoken about so poetically. What a better fate, I thought, to use you, to bend you to my will and then send you back to him. How much more poetic would it be if it was his own sacred daughter that led him to his demise?”

I want to scratch at his hand, desperate to peel his steel fingers away from my windpipe, but I was still tied to the bedposts, helpless as a starfish too high on the shoreline. My mind had lost its tether to my shatter reality and I was beginning to lose purchase on any semblance of my life as I knew it.

It was very possibly that he was killing me.

“It was such a good plan, you see, topolina, and I am loath to change it. Only now, things have changed irrevocably. I,” he pulled in a deep breath and put his face even closer to mine so that his eyes swallowed my vision like a lunar eclipse, and his mouth was against my lips. “I find myself as much in your thrall as you are in mine. The taste of you lingers in my mouth, the echo of your giggle in my ears, and the feel of your satin skin haunts my fingers, so in strange moments, I feel I could manifest you in my hold from out of thin air.