Enamoured (The Enslaved Duet #2)

by Giana Darling

We had won the battle, but it seemed we forgot that we had yet to win the war.

Rodger had never had the innocence that came with childhood because Noel had taught him from birth that the world was a terrible place, and if he wanted thrive, he had to be the most terrible thing in it in order to succeed.

I’d discovered how utterly devastating true love could be, how it razed your soul to the ground and from the ashes, you were reborn as a new version of yourself, one with a heart made up from pieces of someone else.

Alexander and I had rediscovered each other, committed to our relationship for the first time, and taken down an entire corrupt secret society. I refused to believe this was the end of our story. The hero dead before the happily ever after, and the heroine murdered by the villain.

But the fire of my rage and my passion was lit deep beneath my placid expression and outward show of subjugation. I was fire wrapped in ice, and it was only a matter of time before the latter melted away, and I was all heat. All fury.

My dragons had been slayed, my prince resurrected from the dead, but this princess bore scars that would never completely fade. They were battle wounds, badges of victory against the many monsters of my life, but they still ached, and I knew they would periodically, spasmodically in the years to come like an old injury flaring up in the damp British cold.

I understood, as one of the tears slipped over Xan’s mounded pectoral and wound through the maze of his abdominals until it pooled in his belly button, that tears were not the sign of a weak woman. They were the sign of a woman who was unafraid of her own powerful emotions, who was capable of harnessing that power to fuel her passionate ambitions.

It was exactly my deep well of emotionality that had given me the strength to continue loving Alexander against all odds, that had given me a small escape during the times of torture with Ashcroft and Noel, that had shielded me from and armed me for the battle I had just won.

“The tale usually goes, there is a desperate princess locked away in a tower in need of a valiant knight to slay her dragons and spirit her away to a happily ever after, but our truth is different. It was me who needed you, Cosima. I sensed your bravery the moment you stepped in to save the life of a man you didn’t know in a random Milanese alleyway, and I knew it for sure when you refused to break for me, when you promised I wouldn’t win your heart or your spirit unless I could earn them. You saved me from an eternity of hell I wasn’t even perfectly aware I was living. You gave me reason to slay my demons, reason to doubt my own villainy, and now, that part of our lives is over.”

“But hear me when I say that time is over. I don’t need you to save me anymore and neither does your family. You have martyred and battled enough. It’s time to hang up your sainthood and your sword because if something ever comes for us again, it will be me who pays the toll, me who takes up the lance. I will never ever let anyone touch you again. You see, my beauty, you taught me what it takes to be a hero, so I’ll be prepared if the mantle ever has to be taken up again.”

if you persevere through your times of trouble, you can come out the other side with a spine of steel,

He was the hero of my story, but as any good reader knows, the hero would always become a villain if his loved ones were threatened.