I blinked hard, my mind scrambling to make sense of the pathway of connections. It felt like a significant reveal, but I couldn’t fathom how di Carlo being part of the Order was exactly momentous.
“What the American Council didn’t understand,” Alexander continued as he eyed Yana’s bruised, frail form with hard eyes. “Was that a man built on wealth is not necessarily one of old loyalty or integrity. That a man like that could be bought.”
“By who? You?” I asked and watched as Yana flinched at my audacity.
“Perhaps,” he said, sipping his scotch. “Or perhaps by another. Yana, maybe you can shed some light on the matter?”
She licked her lips, quick and nervous, then did it again. Her entire body seemed filled with quick, brittle energy as if she would break and do so willingly at any provocation. Pity bloomed in my chest, overtaking my previous jealousy.
Alexander might have taken a beating for her as a boy, but he hadn’t been old enough or caring enough to save her completely.
Not the way it seemed he had once tried and might attempt again to do for me.
“H-he was sponsored by a man,” she admitted, eyes rolling around the club like loose marbles, searching for someone who might spot her betraying her new Master. “He and his n-nephew. He wanted badly to be in Order, b-but he waited very long time. H-he had to d-do something f-f-first for this man.”
She swallowed hard and leaned forward to look right into my eyes, her own filled with almost savage apology.
“H-he had to k-know you and r-report on you,” she admitted.
Alexander turned to stone beneath me, so it felt I was entombed in concrete.
“By who?” I whispered, so afraid of the answer I barely dared to ask the question.
Yana shuddered violently, then finally, her fear of the name she spoke more than the fear of Alexander, she lifted her eyes to his and said, “Master Noel.”
Cosima
“She didn’t know anything more,” I told Alexander, trying to calm the barely leashed fury that threatened to overtake him as he sat beside me in the Town Car, furiously texting someone.
Yana had disappeared almost immediately after her confession when the council had finally concluded The Trials and announced Alexander and me as the winners. She hadn’t wanted to be punished for being outside her Master’s orders, and I couldn’t blame her for it. In fact, I was sure if it wasn’t for Alexander taking that whipping for her as a boy, she wouldn’t have ever dreamt of slipping out of di Carlo’s house in the first place.
The last thing she had said of any consequence was that di Carlo would be sitting a card game in Little Italy at an underground casino the next night, and only then, after Alexander used his Dominant voice on her.
It wasn’t much to go off, but it was enough to leave me reeling.
Noel had been keeping an eye on me through a spy for years through the Cosa Nostra family, and it made me sick to my stomach to think of all the information he might have gleaned.
“She knows more,” Alexander bit out, the harsh lines of his face made steeper by the bright light of his phone screen as he glared down at a message. “If not, she could if only she wanted to.”
“She risked her safety by meeting you there. You should have asked her to meet you more discreetly,” I chastised him.
His eyes swept from the phone to where I sat beside him, pinning me in place so forcibly I couldn’t even draw breath. “There isn’t much more discretion for a slave wearing an unlockable collar and shackles around her wrists and ankles than Club Bacchus. No one notices slaves there, no one will have noticed one more, especially one as meek and well trained as Yana. It was safe as I could make it and necessary too.”
“It was risky, probably for both of you,” I countered, turning to find solace in the streets passing like blurred, dark watercolours passing out the window.
His scoff was haughty, so condescending I didn’t have to see his face to know how his brows would be raised, his mouth puckered like an exclamation mark punctuating my stupidity. “I shuddered to think how you may react if you knew just how many ‘risks’ I’ve taken over the past four years to see you safe.”
I swallowed the thick swell of longing in my throat and nearly choked on the impossible obstruction. Alexander’s hand collected the spill of hair down my back and wrapped it unerringly around his palm until my head was forced to turn his way to lessen the tension and my mouth parted on a slightly gasp of pain. He was waiting for me, his eyes glittering like the sheen of a knife’s edge as they cut into the heart of me.