Enthralled (The Enslaved Duet 1)

I clawed at his shoulder as he found my wet cunt and thrust inside, biting my neck hard as he pounded into me. I knew the mark he left would bloom red as the poppies trampled beneath us and just as soon gone.

I wanted him to plant poppies all over my skin with his hands and teeth so that I bloomed like the entire field of flowers, more alive than I’d ever been before.

And he did bite me, my neck, my shoulders, the exposed skin of my chest and even my thumb when I brought it to his lips. He fucked me hard like a barbarian claiming the spoils of war, and I loved every moment of his inflexible body driving mine into the dirt.

There was something mean in our sex, some edge of desperate cruelty that had been there even in the beginning.

He fucked me like I was his enemy and he wanted to impale me on his cock and paint me in the triumph of his cum.

“Take my cock, topolina,” he commanded me, pinning my throat with a big hand as he rutted faster, deeper inside me. “Take it and thank me for it.”

I came at the thought, spasming and thrashing against the marshy earth as my mouth formed the chant thank you, Master.

Seconds later, his cock kicked inside me, and his cum splashed against my womb. I held him tightly as I took his cock and his semen, committing the feel of his heavy limbs immobilising me and the smell of the rain in the flowers to my memory forever.

When my hazy brain finally cleared, he was still inside me, hard and thick as a steel pipe wedged between the tight pink walls of my aching sex. I could feel the hotness of his cum against the opening to my womb and the cool trickle of it sliding down my inner thighs into the crack of my ass. He was in me, his heavy weight on me, and his cruel, puppeteer’s hands all around me, forcing me to dance to his dark, malicious tune.

I didn’t want to like it.

The cold, calculating way he sliced me into pieces with the refined edge of his sexual commands until I was a pliable, passive mass of ribbons piled on the floor at his feet.

But after months of conditioning, of relying on him for the very food I ate and the water I drank, some primal part of my brain was programmed to like it. Some instinctual code in my DNA was prepared to lust after it.

There was no excuse, though, for what it did to my heart.

How it palpitated to the beat of his shoes striking the marble as he made his way down the corridor to my gilded cage.

How it twisted into vicious knots every time I displeased him and then collapsed back into shape, heavy with pride and elastic with satisfied submission when he praised me.

How I could feel his name etched into the bloody walls of my heart much the same way he’d branded it into the skin of my ass.

The last vestiges of my resistance lay crumbled around me as I held this fierce, brutal beast of a man against my skin and gave myself over to my heart’s betrayal.

I loved him.

The cruel lord of this manor, the beastly man who owned me and ruled my every whim.

And it was exactly at that moment of my capitulation that he destroyed me, as a shark sensing blood in the water.

“Tomorrow, you’ll leave,” he said, in that clipped accent that stripped emotion from every word. “And I’ll finally be rid of him. And, thank heaven, of you.”

My heart didn’t break.

I’d heard about it enough times to imagine the sound of the shatter as it broke under the hammer fist of rejection like delicate glass.

That didn’t happen.

Instead, I could feel the organ grow heavy and slow, the blood through it congealed with unsaid emotions, weighted with bone deep sorrow. It grew so heavy, it sank from my chest to the depths of my belly where it anchored in the mire there and ached dully with my pulse.

I knew in the same way I’d always known my father would be the end of my life as I knew it, that I’d never live again without the weight of my dead heart in my belly.

Alexander was sending me away to be the weapon of his revenge, and I know in my soul, I wouldn’t return to him unscathed.

It felt strange to be back in Italy. The air was too hot against my pale skin, each ray of sunlight like a scalpel peeling back layers of my flesh until I burned red all over. My little family home felt too close, I kept bumping into lamps and walls, tripping on uneven flagstones.

Other things were strange too, sitting at a table to eat dinner felt wrong after months of eating at Alexander’s feet or in my bedroom with a tray of food over my lap. The cheap sheets over my twin bed in my shared room with Elena and Giselle abraded my sensitive skin and made it impossible to sleep.