“My beauty,” I heard dimly from deep within my submerged mind. “My sleeping beauty, it’s time to wake up. It’s time to play.”
I wanted to obey that clinical, sharp-edged voice, but my eyes were hot stones in my skull, and my brain was waterlogged earth.
As if sensing my struggle, my willingness to concede to his demands, the voice hushed me softly, and the fingers retuned one last time to pass through my hair. Cold pressure parted my lips, an unwanted kiss from an unwanted prince.
“Why?” I asked, barely awake, but desperate to understand.
“The blood of my enemy, however innocent, is still my enemy,” he whispered against my ear so that the words rooted deep into my wakefulness and my dreams. “You cannot hide in unconsciousness forever. I will be here when you wake.”
And then he was gone, and I floated again for endless hours until a nightmare about Hades breaking through the crust of the earth’s surface to grab me by the ankles and drag me down to hell woke me up with a gasp.
And my eyes opened.
The light spilling in through dozens of massive windows lining either side of the long room nearly blinded me; the reflection of the sun off the gleaming, waxed marble floors stabbed my corneas violently before I could look away.
I squeezed my eyes shut and focused on my breath and not the horrifying pain in my head, my breasts, and between my legs, then opened them again.
I was in a ballroom.
Or, at least, I guessed it was a ballroom thanks to its grand size and unabashed opulence.
Crystal chandeliers dripped from the domed, beautifully painted ceilings and gold foil accents curled and unfurled in elaborate detail atop marble pillars and across sconces like expensive moss over ancient tress.
I was naked, twisted in the fetal position on a floor of white and black checked marble, threads and knotted cords of gold running throughout. My eyes caught on a length of heavy metal chain wrapped around a steel spike nailed in the middle of the ballroom just beside where I sat. As I shifted slightly to look at it more clearly, the hissing slide of metal over marble hit my ears, and the weight of something around my left ankle made me pause.
Slowly, I righted my left leg and stared at the thick leather cuff shackled to my ankle and the short length of chain anchoring me to the floor.
Tears sprang to my eyes, molten and painful as they fell down my cheeks.
I was seated in the most beautiful room I’d ever seen or could have imagined even in my wildest dreams, but I wasn’t there as a guest or even as a stranger.
I was ornamental as much as the gold foil, immobile as those titan marble pillars. A part of the furniture owned and collected by Lord Alexander Davenport.
I shifted painfully, groaning in pain as I rolled to my back and stared up at the massive ceiling, then wished desperately that I hadn’t.
Because painted there in stark relief was a tableau of the Greek god Hades clothed in black on his iron chariot pulled by undead horses bursting through the earth to capture the Goddess of Spring, Persephone.
I wondered if somehow in my fog, I’d noticed the painting and translated it into my dreams, but either way, the reoccurrence of the myth did nothing to soothe my frazzled mind.
Trying to focus on something else, I decided to sit up and check out the pain in my breasts and between my thighs.
With a groan, I sat up and stared down at my chest.
There was a gold bar tipped on each end with diamonds locked through both of my dusky brown nipples.
Another, this one curved and placed vertically, pierced through the hood of my clit.
“Porco Giudo!” I cursed faintly at the obscene sight.
I was a virgin marked wantonly with sex, a promise my new Lord and Master had punched into my flesh.
My free will and my body were no longer mine to control.
They were his.
As if summoned by the scent of my turmoil, he arrived, a mere shadow in the doorway at the far edge of my gilded cage.
“Ah, she awakens,” he said quietly, but in the stillness of the ballroom, his voice carried to me as intimately as if whispered in my ear.
I shuddered.
“Come closer,” I called hoarsely, full of false bravado. “So I can look you in the eye when I curse you to hell.”
A low, smoky chuckle. “Oh Cosima, do you doubt that we are already there?”
I stared at him, struggling to swallow the sobs of desperation that threatened to ravage my throat. He moved forward, his smart leather shoes clicking against the marble like the tick of a clock counting down to my demise.
When he was only a foot away, he pinched the fabric of his suit pants as he settled into a crouch so that we were almost eye level with each other.