Enthralled (The Enslaved Duet 1)

“It’s you or me, sweetheart,” she admitted quietly. “And I’ve suffered enough.”

“Ready, son?” Noel asked as he circled me behind me.

I felt the air stir with the lift of his hand and the backward moment of the whip.

“Let your father show you how it’s done.”

The leather landed like hell fire across my back and I screamed.

I found Alexander looking for me in the narrow corridor between the chapel and the main house. He hadn’t seen me yet, so I fought to straight the limping gait of my walk. I sucked in a deep breath to fill my hollow chest with air so that I might look similar to how I had before. Before Noel had carved out my heart with a serrated knife and beaten my back black and blue.

I’d found Dante first, lurking at the path to the gardens having a smoke while he flirted with a newer servant I recognized from the house.

He took one look at me and knew.

I’d made the excruciating journey up to my bedroom to fix my mascara-stained face and reapply my lipstick, to flatten the dark, tangled curls and clean up my torn back as best I could before I stepped back into my wedding dress.

Still, Dante saw me across the gravel and knew instantly that I’d been soundly defeated in body, spirit and mind.

He crushed his cigarette beneath his heel and was at my side in a moment, gently holding my arms because he instinctively knew my back would be bloodied.

He urged me to leave immediately, but that wasn’t why I’d taken such painstaking lengths to make myself presentable.

I’d only been married to him for two hours, but I wanted to say goodbye to my husband.

The sight of him peering into through the church doors then around the side of the building as he so obviously searched for me nearly brought me to my knees. It was nothing next to the crippling pain in my back.

It was like gasoline of the ragged hole in my chest where Noel had cut out my heart.

“Xan,” I called, more breathe than voice.

But he heard me, his head swivelling like predator who’s sensed his prey. His nostrils flared as his eyes pinned me to the wall where I stood and then he was stalking toward me.

I was happy for the darkness under the awning of the passageway because it helped hide the dead in my eyes and shadow of a bruise already looming on my cheek.

He didn’t stop before me.

Instead, he crashed me into the wall so that my sensitive back coursed with fire, but his mouth was over mine before I could scream and so he ate at the noise in my throat until it was a moan.

His hand fisted in the veil I’d reattached to hide the damaged the peeked out of the top back of my dress. He yanked my hair back at a brutal angle so that he could plunder my mouth exactly the way he loved to, with lush lips and clever teeth, until my legs shook and the only thing holding me up was that hand in my hair and his hips pinned to mine against the wall.

There was so pain in my body, from the beating and the endless turmoil of my heart breaking, but I clung to the pleasure because I knew it was the last time I’d have it.

He feasted on my mouth as if he knew this was the last kiss we would ever have, as if he knew, any minute I would leave him never to be seen again.

But he couldn’t know because I hadn’t planned to run. Not ever.

I was prepared to live out my days however they came as the new Mistress of Pearl Hall and Master Alexander’s eternal slave.

Only now the choice had been brutally ripped from my hands as so many other choices had.

I wondered wildly as I pushed harder into the kiss and sunk further into the pain if I was strong enough to break my own heart in order to save his.

If he knew what I was planning, he would have flagellated me himself. He would never let me make the sacrifice I was making because he was arrogant enough to trust that he was invincible just because he believed himself to be.

If he knew, he wouldn’t know me grinding his thick cock against my wedding dress covered center as if he could fuck me through the fabric.

No, if he knew my plans to abandon him I would be right back where I started, shackled to the ballroom floor like the slave I’d tried for so long to pretend not to be.

But I would always be a slave.

I wore his brand on my ass, his metal in my flesh and his name in the debris of my sunken heart.

“Lord Thornton,” the manservant Dante had paid to interrupt us said from behind my husband.