Enamoured (The Enslaved Duet 2)

In order to do that, I had to face the monster who’d made me.

A butler answered the door for me, unsurprised by the sight of me because the warden at the gates had clearly forewarned him. He ushered me mutely through my unchanged house into Noel’s favourite library, the very one with the chess set placed before the black marble fireplace. He sat in the same leather high backed chair he always occupied there, his fingers held in a steeple over the chess set, his face carefully void of expression. He was still handsome, even at sixty-eight years old, and it made me sick to look at him and know I would likely appear just like him at that age. His carbon copy, he used to say admiringly, as if gazing into a flattering mirror that reflected a much younger version of himself.

“Sit down,” Noel ordered.

I remained standing, but I strode into the room and stopped with my thighs pressed to his palatial desk, looming over him from across the mahogany surface. Balancing on my fingertips, I leaned forward, hooking his eyes with the force of my expression.

“You’ve made a deal with the Devil, have you?”

My father tipped his head slightly to the side in mock shock. “Me? Why, Alexander, it’s not like you to be so daft. I’ve been under house arrest for twenty-nine months. What do you possibly insinuating I’ve done from the cage of my own home?”

“You know exactly what I’m referring to you. I didn’t come here to faff about, Noel. How did you know about the take down of the Order?” I demanded.

“Semper paratus,” he drawled. “Always prepare, son. I taught you that from a young age.”

“I want to know how.”

“And I want out of this bleeding house,” he countered, finally stirring from his impassivity like a dragon from enchanted slumber. “Sometimes, we simply don’t get what we desire.”

“Perhaps,” I agreed, righting myself to smile at him the way an executioner might smile at their hapless victim. “Though lately, I’ve been getting exactly what I want. The Order is disassembled. After centuries of abuse and flagrant perversions, your precious society is over, and there will be no recuperating from it. I’ve cut at the heart of the hydra. James is using the dissolution as a political feather in his cap. It’s all over the global news. You and yours are done.”

“It seems, as I’m sitting here and not behind bars, that I am, in fact, not done,” Noel retorted. “And once again, son, you forget the primary theory of chess. This is a game of mental Darwinism. If you blunder about as you have, gallivanting all over the globe trying to take down a group of monsters and save your damsel in distress, you’ve forgotten an important fact.” He leaned forward with a sneer, revealing eye teeth pointed enough to be termed fangs. “The worst enemies are often closer to home.”

Ominous foreboding rolled through the room like pastoral fog over the moors, and I couldn’t bite back the shiver that crept spider soft up my spine.

“What have you done?” I asked, wanting to weaponize the words so he would feel the threat in them but feeling as if I held an unloaded gun.

He sat back in his chair, a placid smile on his face, eyes inanimate as marbles. The same butler who had open the door for me swept into the room with something glinting on a pillow and headed for the roaring fireplace. I stood still as Noel unfolded from his chair and went to the servant, plucking a familiar gold necklace hung with the massive heart of a glowing ruby in his fingers. It caught the firelight as it dangled off one fire, the burnished thorns turning red in the glow as if tipped with blood.

Cosima’s collar.

The same collar I had taken from Pearl Hall when I had abandoned it to my father years ago. The same collar, until I moment ago, I believed had been locked in my safe at the Plaza in New York City.

And Noel had it.

He had sent someone into the hotel room, broken into my safe, and knowing I would visit, had prepared this portentous ceremony to drive a lance into the shield of security I had felt the past few years.

Noel might have been caged, but even a caged monster finds a way to let his evil spread.

My father smiled at me the way he had when I was a lad, gently condescending, potentially proud if only I could accurately comprehend the lesson he was about to deliver upon me.

“Love is the ultimate weakness, Alexander. The moment you foolishly fell arse over tit in love with your slave was the moment you put yourself in check, dear boy. And this?” He swung the necklace over his finger, back and forth, building speed until it flew off and spiraled into the fireplace, sinking into the flames like a boat lost at sea. “This is checkmate.”