Enthralled (The Enslaved Duet 1)

I was also horny, bloated with repressed sexual longing that made my breasts swollen and tender, my sex heavy like a pendulum ticking away the time since it had last been touched.

I missed Alexander in a physical way that felt like the agony of detoxing from an addiction. Thoughts of him itched and raced under my skin, swirled through my mind so that a few times, I even hallucinated his presence in bed beside me, in the kitchen watching me chop garlic and, in the shower, as I dared to touch my aching pussy.

It wasn’t easy to act normal around Mama and Elena. The first had given birth to me and could tell in the ways only a mother knows, that I had been changed irrevocably over the past ten months. It was Elena though, who questioned me tirelessly about my life during that time. Where I had eaten in Milano, who my friends were, what it was like to live in and work in London.

Lies fell easily from my lips. I’d learned from master manipulators in Pearl Hall, so I didn’t seize up over the falsehoods or tangle them in my mind. Still, despite my ease, Elena peered at me often as if I was one of her ethics problems.

It worried me enough that after a few days, I had taken to avoiding one on one time with her.

I’d been home for over a week and I still hadn’t found a way to approach Salvatore. The truth was, I didn’t want to lay eyes on the bad who had betrayed his own daughter by selling her into slavery. It didn’t matter that I’d grown to love Alexander or that I’d been on a journey of discovery in the underworld and returned reborn, darker and stronger than before.

He was still the villain of my life’s tale.

There was nothing he could say or do that would earn my forgiveness because he had not only wronged me, but my family.

And that, as always, was where I drew the line between forgettable and unforgiveable.

Somehow, I would have to find a way to swallow my hatred and pretend I wanted to breach the void between us, reunite like some sweet story from a bildungsroman novel. All so that he could be finally brought to justice for the wrongs against Alexander and myself.

“You’re so quiet these days,” Elena noted, cutting through my distraction.

She was studying me as she taped a box of her books closed and I took a moment to let myself love the look of her. She was the most Angelized of my siblings, her body long and lean, her skin white and her red hair so dark it shone like merlot in an artfully tousled mess of curls around her angular face. Seamus was etched in nearly every facet of her face and form, a fact she hated so thoroughly, sometimes I wondered if it tainted her entire perception of herself.

She had changed too since I’d been gone, her porcelain doll’s face had lost is placidity to bitterness that tightened the edges of her eyes and mouth in a way that made her look cruel.

I wanted to ask her about her boyfriend Christopher, but she wouldn’t admit anything was wrong between them, even after he’d so clearly assault Giselle before she left for school two years ago.

Her silence on the matter perturbed me, but at least now I was certain she would never see him again. The promise of America shone on her future like spotlight through the glom of our pasts in Italy. If anyone could harness and tame the wild beast of the American Dream, it was my whip smart eldest sister.

“Cosi?” she asked again.

I shook my head slightly. “Sorry, jetlag.”

“You know, that excuse has almost run its course.” She raised an eyebrow and crossed her arms over her chest. “You can talk to me. I know you’ve done…things so that we can afford to move to America, but cazzo, Cosima, I’m your older sister. If I cannot be the one to make sacrifices for this family, at least let me shoulder some of your burden.”

I stared at her, mute with longing. I’d always shared an incredible closeness with my family, but now I found myself to embroiled in the secrets of another bloodline to be able to converse freely with my own.

I realized with horror that I felt more like a Davenport than a Lombardi.

“It’s nothing, Lena, I really am just adjusting to the time change.”

“Two hours isn’t much of a change, but fine.” She sighed and pushed back an errant piece of hair beneath her black cloth headband. Then, having considered something internally, she moved swiftly across our small living room to where I was packing up Mama’s fabrics, and she pulled me into a hug.

My sister didn’t like physical affection. She had never been very demonstrative growing up, but her aloofness had only honed into a cold blade over the past few years and now she barely allowed you to kiss her in the traditional Italian greeting.