No one paid much mind to me as I snuck a peek, and I noticed some other Masters lingering amid the girls to take a brief preview of their offerings. I searched for one woman, in particular.
Yana was seated before a small mirror, her pale hair done up in curls and secured with a silly pink bow, her naked body brushed with pink sparkles in an obvious bid to make her look younger than her decades made her. She caught my eye in the reflection and blinked hard before fiddling with the collar at her throat. Something metallic caught the light and winked at me.
Good.
Yana was wearing the audio/visual device we had given her.
Unlike the ones I’d planted in Ashcroft’s house—ones that Alexander had collected to add to his wealth of incriminating evidence against the Order—the one on Yana’s collar ran live directly to monitors set up in vans waiting two blocks away from the warehouse.
When they had enough information from Yana’s and Xan’s feeds, they would storm the warehouse and put an end to the New York chapter of the Order of Dionysus.
A team in London and another in Hong Kong were about to do the same.
It made it easy to take them down in one fell swoop when they planned their auctions all on the same day.
I’d just turned on my heel to head back to the main event when strong hands plucked at me from another dark corridor, and I went careening backward into a strong, tall body. I knew by the lemon and green pepper scent of him, who it was immediately and relaxed slightly in his hold.
Dante’s breath was hot against my neck, one of his big hands eclipsing my entire hip so that I felt bracketed by his body, smothered by the intoxicating heat of his hard chest at my back.
“If I asked you to run away from it all right now, would you?”
I swallowed hard, trying to hold my breath so I wouldn’t breathe in his peppery fragrance and the scent of his warm skin. “Why are you asking me that?”
“Does it matter?”
“It does if you’re asking me to run away with you because you love me or because you just don’t want your brother to have me.”
A pause, a mushroom cloud of toxicity after an explosion.
His lips pressed to the tender hollow below my ear, and he whispered, “What if it’s both?”
“You know I’m broken. He ruined me for other men, and he ruined me for myself. I’m not… There’s a piece of me missing now, and he wears it like a necklace against his heart. He’s never giving that back.”
“No,” Dante agreed. “He’s not, and even if he could, you wouldn’t ask for it.”
I wanted to protest, but I’d been fighting the truth for so many long, cold years. We both knew he was right.
“I don’t love you the way my brother does, tesoro,” he said, shifting slightly in our confined space, brushing his groin against me in a way that had my breath catching. “He is consumed by you. His dark heart sees the temptations of your beauty and your goodness, and he wants to gorge himself on them. He wants to keep you in his orbit tied so close to him that your sun will only shine for him. It’s a selfish and overwhelming love.”
His words should have evoked horror and disillusion. The kind of affection he spoke of was acidic, eating away at the soft linings and inner workings of a body until it was used up and wasted away.
“I love you as the dark loves the stars. I want only to hold you, protect you, and elevate you to the greatest heights of your ambitions. I could care for you, Cosi, love you in a way that was healthy if you’d let me,” he continued.
He didn’t understand.
It wasn’t a matter of choice.
Was it ever?
My body, my spirit, and my heart had decided who I would love long before my mind had a say in the decision.
Alexander Davenport, Lord Thornton, son of the worst man I’d ever known, was it for me.
The one.
The only.
I’d fought against the truth of it for so many years until I was dog tired and weary. I knew better now.
Besides, even if there was a choice, even if I could rewind time so that I never saved Xan’s life in that Milanese alley, so that I was never sold to him, I wouldn’t.
I wanted to be enslaved to him forever.
And now, after all this time, I believed he felt the same way.
“I’m sorry, D,” I said softly, clutching his hands over my belly so he would know just how genuine I was. “You’re a good man, probably one of the very best in this world, and I love you like a brother of my heart. But you and I both know I won’t run away from Xan again.”