Maybe I should have.
I wasn’t a man of feeling. I’d been raised to think emotion was akin to a normal man’s sin, and that sinning was my right as an earl. I was better than petty sentiment but worthy of satisfying my every need, no matter the cost.
And my need at that moment was violence.
I wanted to channel all my considerable devastation at the sudden loss of my wife on our wedding day by decimating the bastard strung up between two ash trees.
He was a poor bloke without the intelligence and artifice to pull off his greatest crime against the Order by loving his slave. A crime we shared.
I studied his defeated posture as I slid the end of a cat o’ nine tails whip through my hand. His dark head was bowed between his shoulders, a gash on his cheek dripped blood to the grass from where one of the brothers had beaten him into submission enough to get him strung up like a Christmas goose.
In years past, I wouldn’t have spared a thought as to whether he deserved what was coming to him. My fundamental apathy had always extended to the Order. It was my father’s domain, and only his will kept me tethered to it.
Now, the heart of me had woken from its lifelong slumber, and I felt moved by the wretched bugger hanging from his wrists. No doubt, his slave was already dead, taken care of by one of the society’s discreet and deadly acolytes who only ever operated from the shadows and never showed their faces at the Order’s social events.
There were so many paths that could have led to me between those massive ash trees, broken by love and punished by people who could never understand such a feeling.
It was ironic that I was to be the one to punish him for it.
“Are you sure you’re up for this, old chap?” Martin Howard asked me affably with a chummy pat on the back.
He was not a friend.
He was the brother to Agatha Howard, a woman the Order and Noel, more specifically, had urged me to marry for years.
They were part of the most ambitious and callous family in British noble history, and I’d always found the lot of them incredibly distasteful.
Anyone that hungry for power was never going to achieve it, at least not for long.
Like the ouroboros, they would only end up eating their own tail.
I shot Martin an impassive look and continued to slide the whip sensually across my palm. The feel of it in my hands was right, like a pitcher with a baseball or an artist with a brush. This was my tool of trade, a weapon I wielded with both precision and passion to create a masterpiece on a woman’s body.
Like the many I had made on Cosima’s golden brown skin.
Wrath burned any lingering misgivings I had clean from my mind.
I had to show the Order I was just as heathen and unfeeling as they were.
I had to prove I was on their side until the bitter end so that when I discovered which one of the motherfucking men took Cosima from me and went after them, they wouldn’t see it coming.
“Of course, you’re ready,” Martin guffawed. “You were born ready for this society, with a father like Noel.”
“Acta, non verba,” Sherwood proclaimed as he stepped away from the masses of Order men at my back to speak with me.
The wedding was long over, the guests sent home without explanation for why the bride had suddenly retired early for the night.
“Action, not words,” Sherwood translated like the haughty arsehole he was even though he knew both Martin and I perfectly understood Latin. “Prove yourself as one of us after this disgrace of a wedding, Davenport. This man flagrantly disobeyed the primary rule of this society. Do not fall in love with your slave. They are meant to slake the temptations of your body and purge the demons from your mind, but they are never worthy of our regard.”
“I’m aware of the rules,” I said drolly.
Sherwood and Howard shared a quick look.
My unflappability in the face of my own transgressions that almost directly mirrored those of the bugger to be punished confused them.
Was I an idiot, they wondered?
No, Alexander Davenport, Lord of Thornton and heir to the Dukedom of Greythorn, was one of the wealthiest men in the United Kingdom and had amassed one of the highest-grossing media companies in the world.
Dumb, I was not.
So what other explanation could there be for my bone-deep calm?
Well, he clearly hadn’t loved his slave.
Not if he was this unruffled by the disappearance of the slave and by his punishment of one who had committed that very crime.
I could see my manipulation snare them in its web, and I moved in for the kill.
“I married the slave as the final nail in the coffin of my contempt for her father. He killed my mother, but before I killed him, he knew what it was to have someone he loved wholly and completely taken from him.”