“Someone took you from me.” I noted with a shiver that he hadn’t said I’d run away, that he trusted in my total enslavement to him enough to know I would never have voluntarily fled. His conviction felt like my weakness, a vulnerability I wanted to wrench away from him and protect. “I realized that it wasn’t the betrayal that was driving me mad as it normally would have been. It was the sheer, absolute loss of you that haunted me. I realized, as you must now, that if you were completely and utterly enamoured by me, I was just as powerless to the feeling as you were. You see, my little mouse, somehow over that tumultuous year of ownership, we became a closed loop. What you feel, I feel. Your weakness in wanting me is exactly my weakness in reverse.”
A closed loop.
I could feel it even then, the circle of energy moving through the pressed points of our skin, cycling through him and into me and back. It was how he seemed to always read my thoughts, how I craved his pleasure because his satisfaction was my own. It was Master and slave in perfect harmony.
And it seemed one could not exist, at least not contentedly, without the other.
Alexander brushed his thumb over the cut curve of my cheekbone, patiently waiting as I digested his rich, meaty words.
“I meant what I said. I’m here to reinstall you at my side for good. The only thing I need from you is your permission.”
“I thought you never asked for permission for anything?” I countered because the small acidic fear I still felt in my gut needed an outlet.
Wasn’t this too good to be true?
“Usually,” he agreed. “But for this, I’m afraid, it’s a necessity.”
“If I say yes, what then?” I hedged. “Nothing has really changed.”
“Not yet, but it will,” he promised as he lowered himself fully into the bath, sloshing water over the sides while soaking his beautiful silk shirt and destroying his trousers. He gathered me up in his arms until I was wrapped around him like vines. “I stayed away from you for the past four years for a reason, and that reason was to take down the Order so we could be free of them forever.”
My eyebrows punctured the top of my hairline. “Is that even possible?”
“It is,” he promised with the sly, coy look of a predator about to stalk and corner his prey. “Let me explain it to you.”
Alexander
My earliest memory of my father was learning to play chess against him in the second library before the vast black marble hearth. I remembered how large he seemed sitting in the highbacked tufted leather chair, his broad shoulders pressed to either side of the wingback, his head crowning the top like a golden circlet. A cigar curled smoke into the air from the gold ashtray on the side table, resting beside a crystal cut glass sweating from the cold of the iced whiskey within. Everything was so adult and sophisticated. My childhood brain was seduced by the atmosphere and my father’s own elegant aura of power.
I wanted with everything I had to be exactly like him when I grew up.
It was the natural inclination of a boy to admire and aspire to be his father, but looking back on my boyhood, it was obvious Noel had taken particular pains to create a sense of divinity around himself. He succeeded. For years, I worshipped at his altar, studied his philosophies like scripture so that I could recite them verbatim when asked (which he did), and believed wholeheartedly that he had been blessed by a higher power.
I wouldn’t learn until later that the higher power was no God or sacred charter, but the Order of Dionysus.
At that moment, though—no more than four years of age and still the kind of blond only small children can claim, sitting in the twin wing-backed chair to my father’s and struggling not to swing my legs because it would make him angry—I simply loved Noel Davenport.
I loved him so innocently that when he set about to teach me the ways of chess, I took the lessons somberly, as seriously as a monk his vows. I read books by Bobby Fischer and Yasser Seriawan, followed the meteoric climb of Magnus Carlsen, and went to bed with the golden queen from my father’s chess set clutched in my fist instead of the stuffed bear my mother had given me.
Chess was my father’s game, and learning its strategies was our primary form of bonding.
Edward Dante didn’t like the game. He had no patience for hours of thought and subtle manipulations. He was a child of action, grass-stained jumpers and ripped trousers, bruises from roughhousing with the servant’s kids, and bloody lips from altercations with older boys who tried to bully the young ones at school. His bonding time with Noel was spent with a cane and his open palms, a beating each time he rebelled from our father’s teachings.