Enthralled (The Enslaved Duet 1)

I was homesick and lonely without any true company.

No Alexander.

No Noel either, though I wasn’t so sure that was a bad thing after his behaviour the night of the flogging. I hadn’t looked too closely at his motivation for being kind to me previously because I’d been so starved for affection, so used to my prior life where a person was kind without needing a reason to be.

I was different now.

I knew the truth of the world.

No one did anything for anyone unless it benefited their agenda.

I didn’t know what motivated Noel besides his obvious hatred of all things Amedeo Salvatore, but I knew he was playing me across a board I couldn’t see, ready to sacrifice me like one of the pawns he had taught me so much about.

I lifted my chin as Sherwood bade me to rise and rejoin the other girls. My eyes snared on Alexander’s broad frame, seated on a huge white horse that suited his rider’s size and ferocity. My Master’s eyes were on me and inside me, his jaw clenched as he tried to pry my thoughts out of my head across the space between us.

He’d been giving me that look a lot since the ordeal, whenever I caught him leaving early or returning late to the house.

I think he expected me to hate him.

I didn’t.

But I did feel hurt that he had stripped away our rituals together after everything we’d gone through that night.

I was lonely. I missed eating dinner at his feet from his hands, washing his dense muscles and acres of gorgeous pale gold skin before dressing it well, buttoning him up like a present for myself that I knew I would unwrap later.

It was all gone, and it made my slavery feel worse, hollow and cracked like a broken tool.

The five-hour drive from Pearl Hall, which I’d learned was in England’s Peak District, to Glencoe, Scotland, was the first time I had spent any real time with him.

Yet Alexander made me sit in the front with Riddick while he closed himself behind a soundproof partition in the back seat and worked. It was only after we’d arrived, and I was getting out of the car that he’d stopped me with a strong hand on my arm and whispered a few words of wisdom in my ear, including the rules of The Hunt. Before I could reply, he’d turned on his heel and marched inside the stone home, yelling a greeting to someone inside.

A servant began to drag me off the stage, and I shivered as a particularly icy gust of wind raised the hem of my shift. Alexander’s jaw clenched with irritation before he wrenched his gaze away to a man who sat on horseback beside him.

“First time?” the girl with orange hair asked me as I rejoined the others in the corral.

I nodded, wrapping my thin arms around my torso for warmth.

“It’s my third,” she told me, lifting her chin so that I could look into her dead brown eyes. “I have a good hiding place; do you want to stick with me?”

“Gentlemen,” Sherwood boomed. “Welcome to the 76th annual Hunt!”

There was a cacophony of shouts and hollers before a servant in red on horseback raised a horn to his lips and blew.

The trumpet echoed through the small clearing and stirred the dark trees at the edge of the forest.

“What happens now?” I asked the ginger-haired girl.

“Run.”

The doors to the corral were thrust open, and a stampede of terrified women flooded out, nearly pushing me to the ground in their haste. I heard the muffled cry of someone fall behind me and then the crack of breaking bone, but I didn’t turn around.

I ran.

Away from the barking hounds and agitated horses. Away from the predatory men who would spend the entire night chasing us down, one by one.

I ran and a small part of my brain wondered if I could run fast enough and long enough, then maybe I could run away from it all forever.

It was dark as tar and just as sticky, tendrils of night black low-hanging branches from trees ripped across my arms and face. I tasted blood on my lips, the metallic heat of bile at the back of my tongue as my lungs labored like overworked billows to keep my arms pumping and my legs churning. Running. My mind would waste my body away to nothing just to keep on running.

The lord had finally let me out of the manor, but my liberation was a trap I should have known better to have taken.

Why does any master let the fox out of its cage?

To hunt it down…

And I was being hunted, ruthlessly and ceaselessly through the late hours of the night by more than just my Master. I’d already dodged one man’s hands as he’d ridden close by on his horse and kicked another in the teeth so hard I felt them break under my toes.