“So you see,” Ashcroft said smugly, bringing me back to the present, “you will be my obedient little bitch because you have too much to lose if I let these little photos free.”
I swallowed the knife’s edge of rage in my throat, feeling it slice my insides. “I’ll do it, but I’m warning you, Ashcroft. You won’t live a long and healthy life if you go through with this. I’ll kill you myself before the year is out for doing this to me.”
He laughed uproariously, tossing his mousy blond curls back and holding his belly as he laughed and laughed.
I visualized slicing open that exposed throat with the letter opener on his desk and felt momentarily better.
“Have you not learned this yet, little slave?” he asked, genuinely curious as he looked down at me. “You are less than nothing. The only value you have is the one that is placed on you by men more powerful than yourself. Alexander might have made you feel like his little countess when he married you, but you are nothing but a slave.”
We stared at each other, my breathing hard with the effort to stay calm and not throw myself at him in a violent flurry. His eyes were almost kind as he let his truth settle around my wrists and ankles like the weight of phantom chains.
I knew he was wrong. I wasn’t nothing.
I was Cosima Ruth Lombardi, the wife of an earl, the sister of a famous actor, upcoming criminal lawyer, and incredibly talented artist, daughter to one of the most wanted mafiosos in Italy, friend to the New York Camorra’s capo. I was loyal and brave, beautiful and kind.
And I was smart.
No one had ever told me I was, but I’d learned to believe in myself that way.
I was smart enough to trick Ashcroft into believing he held me in check and then use his arrogant mistakes to execute a Fool’s Mate and defeat him in the end.
All I needed was patience and maybe a little luck.
So I smiled at him beatifically. The smile that Willa Percy had used to launch the second phase of my career, the smile that had once so briefly wooed the most powerful Lord in England.
I watched Ashcroft blink, capitulating to my beauty, letting it make him even dumber than he already was to think he could own me.
I imagined my inner strength like an invisible shield coating my skin, protecting it from the vile man before me who I had to lull into a faux sense of security.
“Yes, sir,” I said because my mouth wouldn’t form the word Master to this false Dominant. “I understand, and I am sorry for my attitude. How can I make it up to you?”
Ashcroft grinned slowly like the cat that ate the canary and widened his stance. “I know exactly how you can make it up to me.”
Cosima
Almost two hours later, I rushed out the door of Ashcroft’s house once again in my street clothes, his semen washed off my chest from where he’d jerked off on me after spanking me with a wicked metal ruler for being late and leaving early. My ass stung, my heart ached, and I’d never felt dirtier, not even after Ashcroft had raped my mouth at Pearl Hall when I’d thought he was Alexander. It wasn’t much, he’d really barely touched me, and I realized that I got away easy. A spanking, his cum on my skin, and an hour of acting the maid with a duster and broom was trivial compared to my previous trials, but it hurt so much more.
I knew why. I didn’t need my therapist to say words like Stockholm Syndrome and PTSD to know that it felt so wrong because it hadn’t been Alexander.
I felt weak and exhausted as I stood on the sidewalk, blinking owlishly as I tried to gather the tattered remains of my self-control around me. All I wanted to do was go home to the apartment I had painstakingly saved for and curated with beautiful things and snuggle my cat Hades from the warmth and comfort of my bed.
But it was Sunday, which meant family lunch at Mama’s restaurant in Soho. It was an unspoken rule that unless Sebastian or I were out of town working, we were all required to attend on pain of death by glare from our matriarch.
So, I stepped to the edge of the curb to hail a cab to Mama’s part of town.
“You look appalling,” a familiar European accent called out from behind me.
I sighed heavily before turning around, both relieved and anxious at seeing Dante again after a few weeks without contact. We were close but only so much as our jobs allowed.
There was hardly a month I didn’t have to travel for a shoot or walk, and even while I was home, I encouraged my agent to book as many go-sees and campaigns as possible. Idleness was not good for my mental state.