Cosima
The dining hall was darker than ever before, limed only in the weak golden glow cast from dozens of gleaming candelabras set throughout the room. The effect made the entire gilt room feel like the inside of a tarnished treasure chest filled with priceless trinkets and diamonds accumulated over the centuries of Davenport canon. The way Noel looked at me as I entered the long, narrow hall made me feel like the most expensive treasure of them all.
There was glory in his eyes and a smug tension to the set of his shoulders beneath his customary bespoke suit that conveyed his wicked excitement.
He was eager to play the final moves in this game of his. I was the last piece remaining on the board, a pawn who had somehow returned as a queen. He would take such deviant delight in cutting me down, and I knew the feeling surpassed his annoyance at my resiliency.
Rodger wasn’t present, and his absence concerned me. Like a mother with her child, I felt more at ease having him within sight because who knew what he would get up to without supervision.
“Ruth,” Noel called out just to hear his voice echo through the high hall. “Come to your Master and present yourself.”
Each step was leaden with dread, but I made it to his side without vomiting. He was so insidiously clever, Noel was, to recreate every scene of my capitulation to Xan. It confused and sickened me enough to have my body and mind swaying nauseatingly off-balance as a neophyte on a ship.
“She looks like a queen, but she is a pawn,” Noel murmured happily as he looked down at me by his side, knees bent, head bowed, hands pressed together as if in prayer to him. “Now, feed me.”
So, I did.
I tried to empty my mind of thought, to focus on the sound of my breath flowing in and out of my body, but Noel made sure I was an active participant in his dinner. He hummed around my fingers, sucking on the tips and biting into the pads as I passed food from the plate into his mouth with my hands. At one point, he pressed my free hand on the burgeoning swell of the erection trapped beneath his suit pants, and I shuddered so hard in revulsion, I dropped Cornish hen on his trousers.
He made me eat it off his lap without the use of my hands.
As I recovered, knees quaking and eyes leaking tears, the dinner plates were taken away and the tea service was placed on the sideboard. I swallowed the thick bile on the back of my tongue and made to get up to retrieve the tea.
“Crawl,” Noel demanded as he leaned back in his throne-like chair to watch me.
I crawled.
My mind clung to questions I would ask Noel once he’d imbued the tea.
Answers Alexander had deserved his entire life and never received.
If he was truly gone, the very least I could do was glean them for both of us.
The antique blue and white Spode tea set rattled on the silver tray as I stood and clutched it in my shaking hands. I was so filled with a violent cocktail of reactions that I couldn’t decipher my own emotional landscape.
The only thing I knew was this.
If I had to live one more day bound in the chains of Noel’s servitude, I would kill myself.
But not before I killed him.
I smiled prettily into his face as I laid the tea set before him, my breasts exposed to his lecherous gaze in the flimsy white lace and chiffon corset I wore. With the black shackles at my wrists, throat, and ankles, I looked like a virginal whore.
Noel loved it.
His eyes went black with pleasure, pupils blown open to reveal the cold, depthless center of his depravity.
He liked to see me shake and tremble.
He loved to watch me move, every one of my actions puppeteered by his words.
I rolled my hips toward him, presenting the curve of my ass and the dip of my spine for his hand to sluice down. His eyes narrowed as he took advantage of my position, suspicious of my increasingly servile nature.
I fluttered my eyelids at him as if I was nervous but pleased by his attentions.
A smile pin tucked his lips into his left cheek.
“You know, Ruthie,” he began pleasantly as his hand smoothed up and down my back, dipping between my legs to pat my sex before repeating the movement again and again. It was a proprietary touch, one meant to degrade me from woman to object. It didn’t work because I was pouring the tea into the pretty little cup and watching as he lifted it to his lips and swallowed. When I next smiled, it was genuine. “Women have been marginalized throughout history for a reason. You see, you are the weaker sex. Men are stronger mentally and physically. The argument that women ‘feel more’ and that makes them strong is rubbish, complete and utter drivel. Emotionality is the failure of the weak, and you, my dear Ruthie, are a prime example of that weakness.”