He knew his place better than Cosima did, and she’d had years of acrimony and male dominance under her belt.
I wondered, as I sipped the Laphroaig twenty-eight-year-old scotch, if her inability to break was the reason I had become so enraptured by her. There was nothing brittle or hollow about her submission, nothing that cracked under the force of another man’s will.
She was too warm, too elastic and self-contained to snap like that. Instead, she bent, twisted, and swanned into the shapes dictated by my domination. It made the beauty of her submission utterly heady and shamelessly intoxicating because it was not just a random, broken woman I had at my control, but one of substance and verve who chose to obey my commands.
There was mutual respect for the power each of us yielded in the exchange.
If you had asked me years ago, the first time my father had forced me to whip one of his slaves, if I would ever revere a woman the way I did my wife, I would have thought you were crazy.
But secretly, the truth of it would have resonated.
I hated the way Noel treated his slaves, and as soon as I was old enough to withstand a beating in their place, I’d taken it.
My entire life, I’d believed that I was hardwired to be the exact replica of my father. That my nature would always outweigh the nurture my mother had displayed.
As I sat in the dark of the hedonistic club drinking scotch, planning to dismember the man who stood beside Cosima like her false god, the relief that coursed through me felt like a baptism.
I wasn’t fool enough to think that my feelings for Cosima washed away the blood on my hands or the countless shady dealings I’d been made to witness as part of the Order. I was still, intractably and always, the villain, characterized that way before birth by my father.
But if I’d had a heart, I would have loved Cosima with every facet of it.
If I could be a hero, in any way for any stretch of time, it would be to save the woman I’d been calling my own since the moment she saved my life in a Milanese alleyway five years ago.
The lights dimmed across the club as one of the hanging slaves was unbound and led to the main stage for the first exhibition of the night. The men lingering around the room in groups found their seats for the show, but not before taking their last lingering touches of the displayed slave girls.
One man, ruddy like an Irishman, cupped Cosima between the legs and then licked off his fingers one by one.
The rage churning in my gut was not hot or volcanic. It was glacial, colossal shards of ice cracking off into frothing arctic waters. It cast a clear, cool light on my thoughts as I mulled over the way I would kill that Irishman for touching my beauty.
She might have run from me—and she would pay for it—but no matter the distance or time between us, Cosima Lombardi Davenport was mine.
I did not want her to have a life with others, dialogue or even monologue separate from me or my name. I didn’t want to spend one single moment more without her understanding that my ownership had nothing to do with money changing hands or contracts signed, and everything to do with the way one soul could possess another.
Call it witchcraft, call it enchantment, but whatever it was, I had surrendered to it a long time ago.
She would too, just as soon as I extracted her from the perilous situation she was tangled up in with Ashcroft.
Riddick appeared silently beside me, feet braced and hands clasped behind his back like a soldier awaiting orders.
“She’s up next, milord,” he murmured as he stared with dark rage at Ashcroft running a hand down Cosima’s inner thigh.
“Patience, Riddick,” I told him even though a shard of icy rage pierced my throat painfully as I tried to swallow it down. “You know what to do with him when the time comes?”
He nodded curtly, blatantly unmoved by the sexual display of dominance and submission taking place on the stage. The echo of the slave’s sobs throughout the room were nothing to the man who had stood by my side for years.
Only the quiver of Cosima’s thigh as she struggled away from Ashcroft’s lingering touch made the tin man fill with feeling.
I knew because the same feeling echoed within myself.
Finally, the first lord finished with his slave, and there was a smattering of applause. No one was enthusiastic about the performance. It had lacked screams, blood, and begging, the three cornerstones on The Trial’s grading rubric.
“Now, gentlemen and slaves, I know we’ve been waiting to see what Ashcroft will do with the supermodel, and I am sure it will be delectable. Ashcroft and slave, please take the stage.”