“She hasn’t fucking run,” I snapped.
Cosima never would.
I’d broken her the way God had broken his fallen angels, tearing the wings from their backs and blinding them to the light of heaven. But she had endured. More than that, she’d bloody well thrived, taking to my sinful explorations and tainted lifestyle as if she had been born for it.
She was the bravest person I knew. No brand of adversity would take her from my side. Not unless she didn’t want to be there.
And she did.
At least, some voice in my chest that I’d never listened to before whispered to me that she did. That she was made for me in a way that had to be cosmic.
It was appropriate that her name meant beauty of the cosmos because, to me, that was exactly what she embodied.
The beauty of all living things.
My chest ached and burned as I thought about all the times I’d wanted to say something like that to her but refrained. Poetry and emotion were for the poor and the uneducated, my father and tutors had always preached.
It was only with Cosima that the idea of being impoverished and stripped of my massive wealth and considerable influence seemed almost preferable if it meant I’d be free to… to be with her.
“She wouldn’t run,” I repeated, stepping up to my father again and pushing my hand against his heartless chest to keep him pinned. “Not unless someone made her.”
“Women are weak. You think she could handle the kind of man you are? Women are for using, Alexander, not cherishing. Have I taught you nothing?” Noel sneered.
“You taught me everything about the kind of person I don’t want to be,” I said through my gritted teeth. “If you think your manipulations will keep me from finding out who took my wife from me, you’re sadly mistaken. Not only will I find them, but I will also end them with my bare hands.”
To highlight my point, I wrapped my hands once more around his throat, squeezing so tightly that I could feel the bones in his vertebrae grind together.
He let me.
Ominous premonition rolled down my spine.
For my entire life, my father had always been one step ahead. I’d seen him put into impossible positions with his creditors as a boy, with testing, power-hungry members of the Order as I grew old, and somehow, each time, when it seemed the end was near, he’d slipped out of their hold and come out on top.
If he was letting me punish him now, it was because it served his purpose.
Disgusted, I let him drop to his feet, then kicked them out from under him with a lazy sideswipe so that he fell to the grass against the house.
He glared up at me, more disturbed by the effect of the dirt on his Spencer Hart suit than by any violence I’d done to him.
“It’s pathetic how much you’ve let this woman get under your skin.” He sneered at me as he adjusted his cuff links. “No son of mine should be so affected by a woman, even if she is comely.”
Comely?
The word was entirely too meek to describe her. She was magnificent from the ends of her midnight black hair to the tips of her thick, dark lashes. She was the most beautiful creature anyone in her life had ever had the good fortune to clap eyes on, and all of that, that considerable glory, was mine.
Not just because I owned, broke her, and used her.
But because intrinsically, fucking elementally, she belonged with me.
I growled low in my chest. “You’re clearly no help to me. I’ll find out who took her if I have to threaten every person of influence at this wedding.”
“This sham wedding,” he reminded me. “You only married her in a misguided effort to dig yourself out of the deep, dark hole you’d gotten the both of you into, correct?”
I gritted my teeth and gave him a terse nod.
He didn’t deserve to know how I felt about my slave.
My topolina.
My wife.
“They’ll kill you for loving her,” he told me as he languidly gained his feet and flicked a piece of grass off his grey bespoke suit. “They’ll kill you, and you know it, so do us both a favour and don’t get the heir of Greythorn killed for something so idiotic. Stalking around like an enraged bull in a china shop will only get you murdered and your precious slave lost for good. They’re just looking for a reason to take you down a peg or take you out entirely. Ever since you took that beating for Ruthie, they’ve been watching and waiting.”
“Her name is Cosima,” I corrected pointlessly.
He waved his hand through the air as if it didn’t matter.
“If the Order did take her, you’re better off lying low and playing the dedicated soldier so you can figure out who did it.”