Enthralled (The Enslaved Duet 1)

I closed my eyes as he pressed forward into my body, running his tongue along the edge of my jaw in a possessive move that made me shudder.

“If you were anyone else, I might be soft,” he told me as he savagely bit my ear. “But you need to be punished for leaving me in Milano.”

“Isn’t my life now punishment enough?” I whispered.

He paused for such a moment, I thought maybe I’d reached some dusty corner of goodness in his head.

“In the Order, we believe in punishment by blood,” he said, and then he thrust his erection against my ass and ground hard into me. “So I’m going to make you bleed.”

“Mr. Knox will serve slave Davenport twenty-five lashes,” the man named Lord Sherwood declared in his dry, professor tone. “If the girl has been trained in pain, she should be able to thank Mr. Knox for each one through to the very end. If, on the other hand, Lord Thornton has been too soft with the girl, and she breaks before then… Lord Thornton will be flogged and taxed for his inability to Master.”

There was a murmuring of agreement.

I loathed that I could see what was happening behind me. It felt as if my naked body was prostrate before a gaggle of hyenas, yipping in sinister laughter at the idea of eating me through to my bones.

“Ready, slave?” Landon asked from a few feet away.

He didn’t give me any time to answer or brace myself. There was the slicing whistle of the whip through the air and then a sound like a gunshot as the thin, braided leather connected across my upper back.

A scream tore from the fabric of my lungs, leaving the delicate tissues ripped and bloody in my aching chest. I cried out so loudly, I could feel the sound in my hair and my toes as I tried to use the noise to force out the devastating pain I felt reverberating in every inch of my body.

Somewhere, in the deepest pit of my psyche was a small chained and locked box of reasoning that rattled with a reminder.

I had to do something.

There was an order amid the hellfire of pain, something I had to do to avoid more of it. For myself and my Master.

“One,” I said as my scream morphed into a shout. “Thank you, Mr. Knox.”

“Master,” he seethed. “Call me Master.”

“I am within reason to protest that,” Alexander’s voice called clear and strong through the gym. I felt the cool, aristocratic syllables slide down my painfully hot skin like ice cubes. “Slave Davenport knows only one Master, and that is me.”

“I’ll allow it,” Sherwood declared after a moment of thought. “The slave will address you as Mr. Knox.”

It was a small boon, but every gift felt like a miracle.

I was strung up before a secret society of Britain’s wealthiest, most tilted gentleman, being tested because they worried my cruel Master was being soft on me.

If it hadn’t been so horrible, I could have laughed at the improbability of my own life.

I knew the next strike was coming, and that it would be harder than the last because Landon would be angry and jealous of Alexander’s title, but the pain was still impossible to brace against.

It burst across my back and then sank spikes of skin-sizzling heat deep into my spine, impaling me with pain.

“Two, thank you, Mr. Knox,” I gritted through my teeth.

On the tenth whiplash, I felt my skin part like butter under the knife of the leather whip. Blood trickled down my spine and pooled in the twin dimples over my ass, tempting Knox to thrash me harder, the colour inciting his bull-like wrath.

By the fifteenth score, I couldn’t breathe through the mess of snot and tears clogging my nose and the air through my mouth was metallic with blood. At some point, I had bitten clean into my cheek and pink-tinged saliva slid out over my chin.

My mind wanted to break through its physical tethers to my body and float away into space, a balloon lost to the atmosphere. It would have been so easy to sever the ties, to evacuate my pain-riddled limbs and lose myself entirely, but I wouldn’t do it.

There was something like losing in the thought of it.

I was tired of the loss I’d suffered.

My family was gone to me, my name taken and replaced by moniker’s men had given me to mark me as their own. I had no skills, no job, no money of my own. My very future was shackled to the whims of others.

I’d lost so much already; I couldn’t stand to lose myself.

So I tried to sink into the pain. Each lash brought a different type of agony, a different way to feel it.

The seventeenth strike was lightning striking the bloody swamplands between my shoulders.