Enthralled (The Enslaved Duet 1)

Ashcroft wailed as Riddick turned on his heel and literally dragged him out of the room. I stared after them in mute horror.

I wasn’t just traumatized by the assault of a strange man.

I was fractured by my willingness to submit. A healthy woman would have looked up into the eyes of the man she was going to pleasure; she would have demanded something in return or at the very least, not felt elevated to a spiritual plane the moment a cock was between her lips.

It was the realization that I was a slut that razed me to the ground at that horrible moment. So, when Alexander stalked over to me and bent down to tip my chin gently with his curled knuckles to look in my eyes and study my mental state, he found nothing.

No, courageous topolina, no atavistic Cosima.

Just a vacant shell.

“My beauty,” he breathed, his voice vaporous as agony punched him in the gut. “My sweet, pure beauty. I am so sorry he defiled you.”

Sorry from the lips of my Master.

It should have been a gift I spent overlong unwrapping, smoothing the ribbons through my fingers, teasing the tape back with the edge of my thumb like a child on Christmas.

Instead, its prettiness felt foreign in my lap. A present I didn’t deserve.

I should be the one to apologize for being such a floozy.

For allowing someone else to use me for their pleasure when it was only Alexander I wanted to serve.

He was horrible in ways I could recognize and understand. If there was a monster under my bed, I wanted it to be him because his was a cruelty I was familiar with.

The idea of being used and terrorized by another completely undid me.

“I will beat him to within an inch of his life,” Alexander cooed to me as he gently used the edge of his sleeve to wipe the tears I hadn’t known were spilling down my cheeks. “I will sit him in the Iron Chair and use the cat-o’-nine-tails on him until he is a bloody mass of stripped ribbons on the spiked throne. How does that sound, topolina? Do you think then he will understand that you were made for no one but me?”

Yes! my mind hissed. I could just imagine Alexander using his considerable force to flay the man for his transgressions, taunting him for his idiocy so that he could break his body and mind simultaneously.

Alexander was a champion at that.

I should know.

“Would you like to watch? Would that make you feel better?” he wondered, skirting gentle fingers along my hairline, trailing his thumb over my swollen mouth.

I could still taste Ashcroft, and it made me want to retch again. I could feel the shape of him like a phantom in my throat and the weight of his hands in my hair.

No, I didn’t want to watch Alexander beat him.

I needed something else.

Something that my rational mind might consider even more abhorrent.

“I need you,” I admitted on a broken breath.

I reached out to coil my fist in his shirt. He wasn’t wearing a tie. I should have known the moment I saw that garish red tie that it wasn’t Alexander seducing me. My Alexander never wore ties.

I leaned forward to press my nose to the hollow of his exposed throat, breathing deeply of his delicious cedar smell. “I need you,” I repeated again, stronger this time. “I need you to take me and prove I’m yours and no one else’s.”

Alexander made a noise in his throat that was half agony, half purr, and his hand went up to fist brutally in the back of my hair, yanking it so I was forced to look up at him. His eyes scored the wet depths of my own, looking amid the broken fragments of my spirit to see how to make me whole again.

He found the answer he was looking for and groaned again as he angled my head and plundered my mouth with his own.

I used the minty, manly taste of his mouth to cleanse my palate and pressed closer, kneading my hands into his chest like a cat seeking affection.

He gave it to me.

We kissed until my mind spun like a top, until each breath felt wrung from my lungs and my heart was on the precipice of bursting.

There was one thought in my head that drummed out all else, I need him, I need him, I need him.

I gasped when his hands went under my armpits, and he lifted me up so that I was forced to wind my legs around his neck and sit my pussy flush against his face. My hands dove into the silken strands of his hair and pulled him tight to me so I could balance precariously with my ass seated in the wide bowl of his palms.