Enthralled (The Enslaved Duet 1)

I blinked at him. “That doesn’t sound like any childhood fairy tale I’ve ever head of before.”

“It wouldn’t.”

“Listen, I understand that you think Noel is a cruel man. In my personal experience, I haven’t seen much of that. He was kind to me when I lived at Pearl Hall. Alexander obviously has his own issues with his father and in the end, we weren’t allowed to spend time together, but I don’t see him as this awful villain. And I do not believe that he killed your mother. Not when she was at Salvatore’s house with you when she died.”

Dante’s amiable façade vanished like the plume of smoke out the open window. His eyes went black as sin and his rough-hewn faced went taught with rage.

“I was there so I should know what really happened. Mum had taken me with her to Salvatore’s to plan how we might get away from Noel. Alexander wasn’t there because he was the heir, mum worried he felt too much of the family obligation and was already too much like him to understand how dangerous it was to stay at Pearl Hall. We weren’t kids anymore. He was twenty-six and I was twenty-one, we didn’t have to blindly follow anyone anymore. But I followed her, and Alexander stayed at home.”

“Why did she decide to run after all those years?” I asked, invested in the story despite myself.

This was the great mystery. This was the reason Alexander had allied himself with a father he hated and was using the Order to find answers to his mother’s death.

If I could find the answers for him, maybe everything would be different.

The car slowed and I realized we were stopping. Outside my side window a field of poppies stretched as far as the eye could see and before us stood a huge stucco home the colour of daffodils.

The door opened for me but I didn’t get out because Dante was staring at me, his face so solemn I wondered if we were arriving at the place of my own death.

“She ran because she knew discovered what Noel had been doing all those years with the slave girls he took and didn’t hide from her.”

“What did he do?” I asked as Salvatore appeared at the opening to my door and stoically offered me his hand to help get out.

I didn’t take it.

“He killed them,” Dante said. “Just like he killed my mum.”

After a brief reprieve to wash my face and gather my thoughts in a spare bedroom in Salvatore’s home, I was led by a man with a gun strapped to his arm to a red flagstone patio off the back of the villa. Salvatore and Dante sat at a round wood table laden with a charcuterie feast and a huge flagon of red wine, talking animatedly in hushed voices. It was dark, the stars blazing in velvet blue sky as they can only do in the countryside. The air had cooled enough to feel gentle against my skin and the sweet scent of acacia blooms lingered on the breeze as it swept through the outdoor kitchen.

They both paused when they noticed me in the door, their eyes sweeping up and down my body in simultaneously.

Dante’s gaze was filled with male interest and admiration.

Salvatore’s was harder to discern but there was a slight smile on his lips that he couldn’t quite compress that made me think he liked to see me standing in his home.

I frowned and stalked forward, taking the seat the gunman pulled out for me and crossing my legs in a business-like manner.

“Well gentleman, the hour for explanations has arrived,” I declared.

Dante didn’t even try to curb the boyish delight in his smile, but Salvatore bit his grin back and nodded solemnly.

I pointed a finger at him. “Don’t mock me. You may not have killed Chiara Davenport, but you abandoned my mother, brother and me, then to makes matters worse, you sold me. So, you are still the villain here.”

Any humour or pleasure lingering in Salvatore’s patrician face snuffed out and when he leaned forward to speak to me it was in the low, unspeakably powerful voice of an Italian mafia capo.

“Don’t speak about something you know nothing about, girl. If you want to cast stones before you know the true story, I’ll send you back to your mother and you can return to England empty-handed.”

I felt like a chastened child as I sat there struggling not to pout and glare in equal turn. Finally, I crossed my arms tightly over anxious chest and tilted my chin at him to go on.

Dante chuckled. “She looks just like you doing that.”

We both shot him glares that made him hold up his hands in surrender even though his eyes danced.

Salvatore turned back to me, his eyes scouring my face like an artist ready to commit me to paper.