Enthralled (The Enslaved Duet 1)

I’d been running through the dense cover of frost-coated pines for hours. My feet were ripped to bloody shreds by roots and rocks, so bloody and slimy from brackish puddles that I fell more often than I could afford to, cutting up my hands and my face.

Acid burned through my tired muscles, pulsing in time with my cantering heart until I felt I would burst apart at the seams any minute and die.

Still, I didn’t stop.

I’d seen four girls taken by riders in the mist, heard their blood-curdling screams as they were raped against trees, taken in the mud, or flung like carcases over the saddle.

I didn’t want to be them.

In a way, I was lucky because Alexander had been teaching me self-defence and given me free rein to use the gym, which I did nearly every day. My previously thin body ripe with soft curves now had lean lines of muscle running through it, muscles I was using to race and dodge through the thicket of trees as agilely as the fox I was named after.

The howl of hounds pierced the thick night air to my left. I went careening in the opposite direction, my feet tramping loudly over debris, my breath like gunshots in the silence as I burst into a small clearing.

“There you fucking are,” a man crowed from the inky dark immediately in front and to the right of me.

I spun in the opposite direction and cried out as two strong arms banded around my hips. The man lifted me into the air as I kicked and screamed, my fingernails scratching at his arms until they bled.

“There you fucking well are,” the first man crowed in delight as he appeared in front of me, highlighted silver in the moonlight.

It was Ashcroft, the same man who’d used my mouth in Pearl Hall.

My scream doubled over, exploding through my lungs like a train speeding off the rails.

“Shut your fucking mouth,” the man holding me­ ordered as he fell into me, pushing us both to the ground.

I choked on the mulch, the earthy soil filling my mouth as I sucked in another lungful of air to scream.

The stranger wrapped his arms and legs around mine and flipped over like a beetle so that I was strapped down on top of him.

“Take her already,” he jeered in my ear as Ashcroft undid his trousers.

“Should’ve shagged you when I had the chance.”

“You take me, Alexander will find you and murder you!” I screamed.

God, was there ever any end to this madness? Was I to be ordered around, assaulted, and manipulated until my dying breath?

Ashcroft bent over to ruck up my muddy shift, and I spat in his eye.

“You fucking little bitch,” he roared, going to one knee and roughly pulling out his cock.

There was a flash of movement in the dark behind him and then a bass thud. Ashcroft trembled slightly and then fell to the side, out cold.

“What the—” the man grunted as two hands reached out of the dark and wrapped tight around his neck.

I could feel the fight go out of him, his limbs loosening around mine until they fell off. Adrenaline flooded through me, and I shot to my feet before the other man could grab me.

“Cosima,” a steady voice said into the wind.

The sound of my name warmed me like a velvet cloak.

I paused, tense and ready to spring forth.

“Cosima, settle, tesoro, I just want a word with you.”

I recognized the skipping lilt of his muddled accent, the crisp cut of an upper crust English accent made lyrical by the sounds of my homeland.

“Edward.”

There was a pause, then the soft, sucking tread of boots through the muck. I spun to face him with my hands raised and my legs bent, the muscles shaking with exhaustion.

His hard-cut face, so like Alexander’s but darker and carved a tad more crudely, went soft as he looked at me.

“You look knackered.”

I realized my breath was coming too fast, wheezing in and out of lungs like a billow. “What do you care?”

“I care very much.” He raised his hands out to the sides, palms up in surrender. “You don’t know me, but I care very much indeed.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said wildly, my eyes searching for an exit as he moved closer. “Stay away, Edward!”

“Pace, Cosima,” he murmured. “And please, I don’t go by that name anymore. I haven’t in a long while, and if I had it my way, I wouldn’t again during my lifetime. My name is Dante.”

My laughed burned through my ravaged throat. “Which circle of Hell is this, then?”

“The very worst,” he agreed, pausing just out of arm’s reach. “I’m so sorry you have to go through this. Your father is sorry too.”

I blinked.

“If he could see you now,” he murmured as his eyes tracked every cut, scrap and bruise painted and punched into my body. “He would cry. And Salvatore is not a man prone to tears.”