Seamus stared at me, more ruined by my revelation than he ever had been by my sale into sexual slavery. His own ego was the root of his misery. I was beautiful and clever, and Seamus had taken pride in the creation of me.
I battled the urge to take out my horrible anger in violence on his flesh and instead lifted my chin and ordered imperiously, “Let me out here. And Seamus, if I see you again, I’ll give Alexander free rein to end you in any way he sees fit.”
After a brief hesitation, he knocked on the partition behind him with two knuckles. We stared at each other, watching the bond between us disintegrate into ash.
“I love you,” he told me, as if it mattered.
To him, I supposed, it did.
“Do you love me enough to stop trying to instigate this mob war? I have people I care about on the other side of this, and I don’t want to see them hurt. Would you save me from that pain?” I asked, not hard, just curious even though I already knew the answer.
He pressed his lips together, flatlining the conversation. “Love has nothing to do with something like that. It’s a business decision, Cosima.”
“You don’t know this, and it almost makes me sad for you,” I admitted softly as the car cruised to a stop, and I opened the door. “But this, this isn’t anything close to love.”
“And I assume you think what you have with the lord is?” he snapped back.
I knew that very moment Alexander was finding a way to get to me, hunting me down as a surely as any predator faced with the imminent loss of his prey. Seamus raised a good point, though. What made his wrongdoings so much worse than Xan’s?
I decided, as I looked at my father’s frustrated confusion, that the difference was choice. Alexander had been given very little rein to make his own decisions over the years, but when he could, he made the right ones even if they still seemed horrible given the dark circumstances. Seamus had liberty all his life, and he squandered it because he was selfish and weak.
Alexander had made the choice to take care of me no matter what.
Seamus had made the choice to use me for his own gains, proven even further today by his decision to steal me away from my friends in an attempt to start a mob war that would benefit him and his.
Pathetic.
But I didn’t explain any of that to the man in front of me, the man who had been my father for most of my life but who I was determined to leave behind as a stranger forevermore. I didn’t explain because he didn’t deserve it, but also because, tragically, he was incapable of understanding it.
Instead, I smiled sadly at him, and said pointedly, “There is a difference between saying something and doing it. You do one, and Alexander does the other. Love is so much more than words, Dad. I hope one day you understand that.”
Cosima
I stood alone at the mouth of an alleyway between two brick buildings somewhere I thought vaguely might have been Queens for only five minutes before he found me. The moment the sleek black car turned the corner onto the street, I knew it was him, and I braced.
Which was prudent, because the moment the car was close, the vehicle not even stopped yet at the curb, Xan was opening the door and swinging out gracefully, powerfully onto the walk. My breath caught in my throat as he stalked toward me and then expelled in a sob when he caught me up in his arms and crushed me to his hard frame, one hand sank deep in the hair at my nape and the over banded around my lower back to pin me exactly where he wanted me.
No matter how much wealth or status I accrued in this life, I knew there would never be anything more luxurious to me than the feeling of being secured in Xan’s confining embrace.
“Mine,” Alexander growled into my hair before moving forward, striding farther down the dark throat of the alley.
“Yes.”
I gasped as he pinned me against the rough brick with his hips and a hand cradling the back of my head so that it was protected from the wall while the other dipped down to ruck up the silk of my dress so he could reach my sex. He pressed his entire palm to my pussy, cupping it as to confirm his mastery over it, and then in one breathless moment, he tore the scrap of satin from me. The lines of the thong cut into my hips, abrading my skin as they pulled away, but I arched into the sting and found Alexander hard as a steel pipe between my legs.