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To see her was to want her, to know her at all was to be enamoured by her. I’d bought her as a weapon to use against my enemies, and she’d become the ultimate tool for my destruction.
“I told you once before, my beauty,” he sneered. “Even a predator is prey to something. I had things to take care of before I could reclaim you, but now you’ve forced my hand. I will not have you with another man. Not even if my body was cold and dead in the ground, would you belong to someone other than me.”
His smile was a weapon thrust into my chest. “Oh, and topolina? If you let that man touch you, I’ll kill him with my bare hands and make you watch.”
“You told me I would have to earn your submission again, but that’s not the truth, is it, my beauty? I need to earn your trust again, your tenderness, and your depthless heart. But your submission? Ah, that is intrinsically mine. The way the moon owns the tide and the sun owns the sky.”
“This is who you are,” he whispered into my ear, tracing the gold thorns around my throat so that I shivered. “Not just a slave, a trinket to own and flaunt and punish, but my slave, my topolina, a woman so beautiful it makes me ache. A warrior so powerful Joan and Artemis would shudder at your feet. Do you know how it makes me feel to make you sweat and cum and cry? It makes me feel like a god, fierce enough to deserve you, and a peasant, wholly unworthy of such a magnificent gift.”
Was it true that whatever souls were made of, two could be constructed the very same? One heart cut into two and pressed into separate chests with the hope that one day, they would find each other.
“Please,” I told him with quiet desperation. “Don’t come for me again. I don’t want a half-life with you. I don’t want to be your secret or your slave. I’m tired of existing in the dark, dismissed to your shadows. I know now that I deserve the light, and I swear, Xan, even though I can’t handle this––you––if you come for me, I might cave, and I will never ever be satisfied with what you have to give.”
“I am Alexander Davenport, Earl of Thornton, heir to the Duchy of Greythorn. And this,” I said as I crossed to the woman I planned to spend the next hour breaking apart and the next century putting back together, “is my slave.”
“If I had a heart, Cosima, I know I would love you with every facet of it,” he breathed with almost violent tenderness, his hands so painful in my hair and his eyes so wonderfully tender on my skin my heart didn’t stand a chance against the contrast. “But I was born without one, and I don’t know if something like that can grow in a man like me. If it could, I know it would for you.”
“You are mine, topolina,” he vowed with the same solemnity he had spoken his vows at our wedding. “I know this because everyone is a slave to something, and I am enslaved by you.”
