Enamoured (The Enslaved Duet 2)

“And how does this feel, bella?” he asked again, ducking down to plant the words warmly in my ear before trailing his lips over my cheek. He placed a kiss on each of my closed lids like coins in offering to Charon.

My throat ached with the sudden desire to cry at his tenderness, but I swallowed it down, and whispered thickly, “Like I’m yours.”

“And isn’t that the truth?”

It was a real question, not his usual statements masquerading poorly as inquiries. I loved that he needed the words from me, that even though he had decided to reclaim me, I actually had some kind of say in it this time.

I tipped my head back into his softly churning hands in my hair so that I could latch gold to silver, so that he could read the truth in my melted butter eyes.

“I won’t ever belong to someone if they don’t also belong to me.”

He blinked, and somehow, in that small expression, there was a flash of proud, gentle humour. Heedless of his suit pants, Alexander swung his socked feet into the tub on either side of me and leaned down so that I was almost entirely surrounded by the impossible width of him.

“Wherever you are, however far away for whatever length of time, I’m yours.”

My heart clenched into a twisted mass, searing hot and throbbing like a wound. I couldn’t believe him, not the way I desperately wanted to. I’d invested too much in the past four years, reconditioning myself to believe that my love for Alexander was bad, wrong, impossible. That he had never loved me, couldn’t love me, was incapable of loving me.

Four years was a long time to have invested in the wrong option.

I could feel my seams bloat and threaten to rupture around the staples I’d haphazardly used to hold myself together. Faced with change, like any human, I battled against it.

“You don’t even know me. Not really.”

Alexander surprised me by not immediately offering a rebuttal. Instead, he used a pitcher I hadn’t notice he’d brought in from the kitchen to pour clean, tepid water over my sudsy hair, careful to cup his other hand over my forehead so soap didn’t get into my eyes.

Only once I was clean did he cant my chin up with his palm under my jaw, and admit, “You’ve changed since I last knew you, that’s true.”

I snorted so hard it hurt my throat. “I’ve been killed and reborn so many times in my life, it’s a wonder I have any authenticity at all.”

“You’ve changed,” he said calmly, sternly like a parent who would not bear being interrupted by an unruly child. “But you are still fundamentally the woman you let me know in England.”

“I’m not sure it was a matter of letting you know me. Since when have you needed permission for anything?”

He shrugged in the elegant, bored manner of a man who was very wealthy and had never known a moment of doubt in his life. It was almost a condescending gesture; one I shouldn’t have found so very attractive.

“No person is ever wholly under another’s control. You still have free will, Cosima. Yes, I curtailed it, but it was you and you alone who gave me insight into your heart. Every rebellion, every capitulation, every orgasm was a window into your darkly beautiful soul. Do not doubt for one instant that I didn’t take advantage of every single one of those opportunities to know you. Even when it went against my greater plan.”

“To use me against Salvatore,” I filled in, reminded that if I wanted to continue with Xan, I would eventually have to tell him that I’d helped to fake my father’s death.

“Yes, among other things. Truthfully, I think a part of me just wanted to own something that was wholly mine and not Noel’s also,” he admitted with a wry twist of his full mouth. “I could never have known just how much owning you would change my life. That you would so beautifully fill all the empty places in my life until I realized that before you, I had none.”

“You didn’t tell me any of this when I was with you at Pearl Hall,” I accused.

Another shrug limned with ennui. “There were too many things in the way of the truth for me to see it clearly.”

“What changed?”

For me, the answer was simple. I knew I loved Alexander the moment he’d dismissed me in the field of poppies to go to Italy to enact his revenge of Salvatore. I knew I would never be free of the chains from that love the moment he dismissed me on the rooftop of the Milanese Duomo and told me never to set eyes on him again.

It seemed the death of something was when we realized just how much it meant to us when it was alive.