“I know what I’m doing.” I’m not sure why I felt the need to tell the almost stranger that when it was really every single other man in my life who needed to hear it. Still, Frankie respected me enough to go somber for a moment and scrutinize me with his wet, black eyes. Eyes that had seen death and blood, corruption and greed so big it swallowed people’s entire lives.
It was those eyes that blinked, then smiled at me. “Sure, babe, I believe it.”
I swallowed thickly, surprised by how much I’d needed someone to have faith in me, and then punched him lightly in the shoulder before heading back inside.
I planted one in the bedroom I’d been given to use to get ready for the night. Another in the hallway on the second story and another in the open doorway of Ashcroft’s room. There was one pressed to the wall behind a ficus plant in the entryway and then another, finally, in Ashcroft’s office in the eye of black marble carved wolf.
I placed it there as I moved toward Ashcroft where he sat leaned back in his chair like the entitled lord he was.
“You look beautiful,” he praised as his hot, greasy gaze smeared over all the skin exposed by my gold satin lingerie.
I smiled at him with words in my eyes only Alexander had ever been able to read; I am so much more than my beauty, and one day soon, you will find that out.
Alexander
Eighteen hours after Cosima had abandoned me for the second time, my anger had yet to abate. I could feel it coursing through my veins as thick and chemical as opium in my bloodstream. Even Riddick, whom I had finally identified as my closest friend in the last four years, was careful around me in the hours after she’d left, barely speaking a word unless it was to confirm travel plans.
To say I was royally aggravated by her flight was a gross understatement. I was both angry with her for running and with myself for believing she would obey out of hand.
It had been four long years since Cosima had come to heel for me, and she’d spent countless hours in therapy, in meditation classes, reading self-help books written by self-aggrandizing gurus to get over her compulsion to serve me.
I should have known.
But my elation had made me sloppy. I was a virgin on her wedding night, knowing I was finally going to receive the gratification I so deserved, the union I’d worked toward for years, and I’d underestimated the fact that my bride was still a reluctant one.
She did not know the myriad of ways my life had changed since she had up and left me the first time.
She didn’t know the sacrifices I had made.
The men I had extorted, threatened, and maimed to achieve my goals.
The estate I had given over to Noel like a gift and a prison so that I would know where the Devil lived even as I sought to end him.
She didn’t know anything, my little mouse.
As per usual, she had been kept out of male mechanisms for her own safety, and it had led to a less than satisfactory ending for us both.
It appeared I had to learn that lesson one more time before I vowed never to repeat it again.
By the end of this night, Cosima Davenport would know exactly where I stood, and therefore where she did too because whether she cared to admit, we were unequivocally linked; two planets locked in orbit.
I’d had a plan, a damned good one that had been cooked up in the Prime Minister’s office in the middle of the night after returning from finding Cosima in Milan so many years ago over godawful coffee and endless conversations about politics, morality, and revenge.
In that precise plan, I was not to contact Cosima until it was all over.
She was my reward at the end of my hero’s journey.
Unfortunately, though I had undertaken the path of a hero, I was still drawn to villainous tendencies, and the moment the tabloids had splashed her supposed impending union to the git Mason Matlock, my good intentions had crumbled to ash.
There was no way, even over my dead body, that I would allow anyone to lay claim to the woman I’d already made my own. I would kill every single man who so much as dreamt of making her theirs. Cosima was and always would be mine. Even if she didn’t know it.
I hadn’t planned to approach her so brutishly at the charity ball either, but my Cosima had been so utterly ravishing, there was no other proper course of action but to publicly—perhaps stupidly, given the covert nature of my life for the past four years—buy her once more.
It was largely symbolic, exchanging money for a date. I had no desire for one measly night with her, nor did I feel the need to ask or barter with anyone for the privilege, but I thought it made a very nice, if somewhat dramatic, gesture.