A sob bubbled up my throat, wet and full of muck.
I released it into the air and curled onto my side in the fetal position as I finally allowed myself to release the truth.
The explosion that had rocked Osteria Lombardi had most definitely killed some of my loved ones. There was no way everyone could have survived unscathed.
I thought of Sebastian and Mama, of Giselle and Sinclair newly married and so in love, of Elena so bitter and so in need of a new start.
They couldn’t be dead.
Not my family.
Not Dante with his roguish grin and tender smile crafted just for me.
Not Salvatore so soon after I’d found him and began to love him.
It couldn’t be possible, yet I knew in my bones it was.
I could contemplate the death of my family, though each thought scored through me like acid poured over a knife wound, but I could not bring myself to acknowledge the last possibility.
The one that proclaimed Alexander Davenport as dead.
It just couldn’t be possible.
How did someone kill a man like him?
He was taller and stronger than anyone else, padded with dense muscle like a suit of armor worn beneath his skin. A bomb couldn’t take that down.
Could it?
But he was smarter than everyone else too. His predatory talents would have clued him into the wrongness in the air; the feel of the room suddenly without me and the faint, ominous pressure in the atmosphere like the sky before a storm. He would have gone searching for me, maybe even roping Sebastian or Dante into it. They could have all been outside when the bomb went off.
It was possible.
I realized too late that I was hyperventilating. The air seized in my lungs and turned too quickly to carbon dioxide. I couldn’t get enough oxygen, and then I couldn’t remember how to move my chest to get air into the chambers.
My vision swam as I looked blindly up at Hades, silently, insanely pleading with him to burst through the floor of the ballroom and save me from this hell so he could drag me to his own.
It was my last thought before my body gave up, and I passed out.
Cosima
Time passed. I knew it only by the faint intrinsic sense my body had of the sun rising and falling outside the closed brocade drapes over the windows in the ballroom. They fed me at odd hours and visited at random intervals to ask for my submission, sometimes days apart and other times repeated every hour on the hour.
Noel didn’t just starve me, keeping me alive—barely—on stale bread, moulding cheese, and tepid water. He employed tactics as if we were playing war games.
Bright spotlights were set up in a circle around the diameter of my chain length, and they pulsed with blinding light on timers so that I was only ever guaranteed a handful of hours asleep.
The room was glacial cold. It was late spring in Britain, and it shouldn’t have been so arctic across the peaks and valley of the district, but somehow, the ballroom became a refrigerator, and I the bone-chilled meat.
I was beyond misery, but I didn’t break because Noel didn’t understand one basic principle.
If my family was dead—as by then I had convinced myself they were, especially because no one had come to break me free—I had nothing left to live for.
I knew that Noel’s patience would run out and Rodger’s excitement would kick in. That my days were numbered as long as I continued my quiet, painful rebellion.
But I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my pride and my poise by consenting to be the slave of the most sadistic man in England.
I refused to desecrate the plethora of golden memories I had of Alexander as my Master by calling any other man, let alone the man who took him from me, the same title.
It was blasphemy.
Sacrilegious.
I didn’t care if that meant my religion was chains and whips, Dominance and submission, consent and rebellion.
I had prayed too long at Alexander’s altar to be ashamed now.
It was those memories of him that buoyed me in the dark, turbulent hours of solitary confinement in that frozen cage.
When Rodger grew tired of my apathy and his adolescent fists landed adult blows on my prone body, I thought of Alexander gently washing my hair, running the strands like ink through his fingers.
When Noel tried to degrade me by taking away my toilet bucket and then again when he spent his seed on my face while Rodger held me down to remind me that I was already his, I thought of all the ways Alexander had made me his from the inside out. How he had stamped my ass with his brand, my mind with his language of power, and my heart with the duality of his actions and intent.
I reminded myself, chanting for hours every day that I was his, his, his.