“Mary takes care of her sister and her boy, Rodger,” I said, working through it, bringing the image of a dark blond-haired boy to my mind’s eye.
He wasn’t a handsome lad, but I could see, now that it was forced on me, how he shared similarities with Noel.
With me.
“Fuck.” I tossed the bed clothes off me, overheating even in the cool room, even in my black boxer briefs. “Fuck, bloody fucking, fuck.”
Cosima nodded solemnly. “That’s about the gist of it. He told me Rodger was a contingency plan in case you turned out just like Dante.”
“You mean, in case I decided to form my own mind instead of blindly attaching myself to his?”
She flinched at the arctic frost of my words, but my Cosima didn’t back away. Instead, she pressed closer, her breasts softly crushed to my chest, her long legs tangling with mine.
All I could see was her beautiful face and those priceless eyes.
Nothing could have ever calmed me more.
“He beat me because he could see what we had together, and it scared him. He didn’t want you to be punished by the Order or to lose sight of what he wanted for you.”
“He didn’t want to be punished through me, and he didn’t want to lose sight of his own narcissistic, maniacal goals.”
“That too,” she agreed. “I didn’t want to go, Xan, you have to know that.”
I rolled my forehead across hers, brushing our noses together just to feel the luxe texture of her skin on mine, her breath hot and sweet on my lips. If I could have, I would have crawled inside her loveliness and dwelled there, safe and harboured forever.
In her own strange way, Cosima was my safety and my savoir. She might not have been called on to defend me bodily, but her spirit was my shield even when she’d been absent from me for years. She was my inspiration both in that I was driven by the need to be with her again and in that I admired her more than I ever had anyone else. No one was so beautiful, so resilient, and so loving as my beauty.
Case in point, she was comforting me while divulging the details of the wicked beating she had endured at the hands of Noel.
“When did he take you?”
“Just before I found you to say goodbye.”
“How could that be true? I fucked you against a wall…” I read the flashback of pain in her eyes and turned to concrete. “Are you fucking kidding me? I fucked you against a wall whilst you were suffering from a torn up back? A back torn up by my own father not a hundred yards away in my very own home on our fucking wedding day?”
She winced. “Xan, what would you have had me do? I’d just been beaten, and he threatened me not just with my life, but yours! I dare anyone to come up with a better idea than I did in complying. Noel had just exposed how deeply deranged and extraordinarily ruthless he could be. I was not going to test that further.”
“Who is your Master?” I demanded.
“Xan—”
“No, topolina, who the fuck do you answer to?”
I was close enough to see her pupils blow open, the black eating away at the gold until it was only a thin frame for her darkness. “You, Master.”
“That’s right, me. If you think for one moment, I wouldn’t have believed you had you told me what happened, that I wouldn’t have stormed into the dungeon, strung up that monster and skinned him alive for you, woven that flesh into a tapestry that you might use for fucking darts, you are madly mistaken. Have I ever done anything to make you believe I wouldn’t kill for you? Even die for you?”
She bit her plush lower lip, indenting the pink flesh so neatly, I was driven to do the same.
So, I did.
I bit into that lip, hard, until the tang of her blood panged on my tongue. I ate her gasp out of her mouth and then pulled back to stare into her eyes.
“A threat against you is a threat against me. And I think you know this already, bella, but no one, absolutely no one, threatens a Davenport and gets away with it.”
“Even a fellow Davenport?” she asked wearily.
“Especially then,” I vowed. “I’m going to rid our world of its demons, my beauty, and then I’ll show you exactly what kind of life we can have together. A safe life, one filled not just with your beauty, but the beauty we can create together.”
“That feels impossible,” she admitted. “Even though I’ve wanted that for years.”
“The best kind of dreams worth dreaming are terrifying in their enormity,” I agreed, cupping her face in my hands, knowing I held the greatest dream I’d ever had between my palms, feeling it resonate through my chest like a shockwave. “I’m this close to having enough on the Order of Dionysus to take them down. All I need is a way to find out the date of the next auction.”