“Speculation is the indulgence of the lazy,” I told her coolly, channelling my inner Elena, trying to be as aloof and unflappable as my eldest sister. A little voice told me I was also tapping into the influence of my ex-Master. Only Alexander Davenport, lord of the freaking realm, could deliver such scathing condescension so effortlessly. “Mason is a good friend, nothing more.”
“You speak as if marriage is off the table.”
I pressed my thumb to the bare ring finger of my left hand where I constantly felt the phantom weight of a gold ring I once wore for less than four hours.
“It is,” I said, staring into the camera, wondering if my husband was watching. “I won’t ever marry.”
Not again.
Legally, I couldn’t, not without a divorce to the Earl of Thornton, heir to the Dukedom of Greythorn and one of England’s wealthiest estates. That was something I would never do. I’d left as Noel had wanted, and nothing would coerce me into getting in touch with Alexander.
I’d considered it countless times over the years. At first, I’d wanted to call him for the simplest of reasons. For permission to come when I touched myself at night, desperate for the level of pleasure only he could grant me. For the right to even leave the house and talk to men who weren’t him.
I missed him when I dressed in the morning, hating the way I fit the clothes to my curves instead of dressing his edges. I craved him during the after-work rush, seeing businessmen hurry home and knowing that across the pond Alexander would be doing the same thing only I wouldn’t be there on my knees to greet him.
To say my new life in America had been an adjustment was a gross understatement.
I’d been miserable.
The events of the past four years were indistinguishable, my teardrops running the ink in the pages of a diary I’d taken to keeping just to mark the time.
Before Alexander and after Alexander.
Before, my life had been sad, but I’d had no context to deepen my despair.
Now, now, I knew exactly what I was missing.
And horror of horrors, it was the cold bite of a whip wielded in the ruthless, exacting hands of a Dominant and Lord named Alexander Davenport.
My therapist called it Stockholm Syndrome. She told me I felt the most betrayed by his inhumane goodbye in Milan because I’d grown unhealthfully attached to the cage he’d constructed around me, that my continued melancholy was a side effect that would eventually wear off as I readjusted.
Three years of therapy and nothing had changed.
Sebastian ushered us past the rest of the reporters, greasing our way with his slippery smile and a few well-placed winks. We both stopped just inside the hotel’s luxurious lobby and mutually decided on a recessed corner near the elevators to take a moment of peace before going upstairs into the ballroom.
My brother let out a gusty exhale as he leaned back against the marble wall and drew his collar away from his neck with a hooked finger.
“You’re more on edge than I’ve seen you in a long while,” I told him, frowning up into his face as I noticed the strain around his eyes and mouth, the deep bruises from lack of sleep beneath his golden gaze.
He closed his eyes. “Leave me be, mia bella sorella.”
“Seb…you can talk to me.” I told him something he already knew in his bones.
He peeked at me through one squinted eye. “Oh? Just as you talk to me?”
It was my turn to sigh.
We were still close in a way only twins could ever understand. His presence in a room alone brought me unquantifiable comfort, and the touch of his hand to my shoulder grounded me like lightning through a steel rod.
But things had changed.
We’d only been apart for fifteen months, but those months had been compressed with rapid, irrevocable change. Change so significant it had altered us as individuals and as confidantes.
I was no longer that woman who shared every intimacy with her family, who babbled about her day happily in the carefree manner of a bubbling brook. Now, I was shadows and secrets so dark they were like black holes sucking at everything else light in my life until it was diminished or devoured.
Those black holes ate up the words to describe my particular brand of pain, and the memories that had made it so before I could even think to voice them.
“There’s nothing to say beyond what I’ve told you.” I tried to placate him even though I knew he would frown before he even did, disgusted with my bald-faced lie.
I placed a soothing hand on his arm and tried again. “Really, whatever is in the past can stay there. You can only be haunted by the past as long as you keep the door open into your present.”