She’d stepped away from my face in the mirror, beaming like a proud mother at the way she’d gussied me up to be paraded in front of a dining hall filled with men.
Now, I was waiting like a good little slave for Master to summon me into the hall. I’d been waiting over an hour if the grandfather clock by the sideboard was to be believed.
It wasn’t the waiting that bothered me, though I wasn’t a particularly patient person. It was that I could not fully grasp how I felt about my life or even in my body.
I’d set out with the intention to understand Lord Thornton. If I could understand him, I could humanize him. Strip away the gentlemanly artifice, the cold mask of domination, and the clinical rules of ownership to truly understand beneath it all.
Only, I felt as if I’d fallen down a rabbit hole. Not only had I failed to master the mystery of Alexander Davenport, but I’d lost sense of myself.
If someone had asked me four months ago if I would ever love to kneel for a man, to take the pain he gave me and thank him for it as a worshipper thanks God, I would have laughed.
Even two months ago, when I’d first arrived and been stripped so thoroughly of my liberties, I would never have imagined I could find a drop of compassion for the man who owned me.
But I did.
I thought of the awfulness of his mother’s death and the mystery that lay in its wake like an open, festering wound. I remembered the criss-cross of whip marks between his shoulder blades from an unknown incident that couldn’t have been pleasant for a natural Dom to take. I knew that he worked ceaselessly to increase the family fortune, not for greed, but in order to preserve a house and history he felt he was the custodian of.
He could be kind and tender, as he had just proven after the vile Lord Ashcroft defiled me. Ruthless too, as was evident by the way he punished him, screams ringing throughout the house. Mercilessness was not normally a characteristic to admire in a man, I knew, but I also understood that we lived in a merciless world and only the truly ferocious could survive it.
I startled from my thoughts when the butler, Ainsworth, pushed through the side door and stopped before me.
His eyes were gentle in his big face as he studied me. “Lord Thornton will see you now.”
Merda.
I straightened my shoulders but ducked my head to the proper respectful angle and then walked through the door Ainsworth held open for me.
Immediately, the cacophony of the dinner party fell flat.
I could feel dozens of eyes on me as I stepped through the door and waited to be called by my Master.
“Crawl to me,” Alexander’s hushed voice still resonated in the large, quite hall.
I sucked in a deep breath to steel my spine, to lock away my dignity into a very small box inside my soul, and then I melted to the ground.
Unlike the first time I had crawled for Alexander, I was not aroused. I could feel the strange eyes of many horrible men on my body, slipping and sliding over my curves until I felt covered in grease marks. There were a few whispers and dark chuckles as I made my way to the head of the table where Alexander sat, but they otherwise seemed committed to the ceremonial silence.
“Rise,” Alexander ordered when I reached the left side of his chair.
I stood gracefully, my head still bent. I hoped I presented a picture of calm because I had the very awful feeling that these men were the predators that would dare to prey on a man like my Master, and I didn’t want to toss either of us at their feet with the stupidity of my actions.
I tried to find subspace and failed. Instead, I took deep breaths, counting as I did to settle my mind.
Even that didn’t work.
The entire dining room was filled with Britain’s finest men dressed tight to the throat in designer finery, their spines starched with noble titles and lips pressed tight against the threat of their many dark secrets. I could feel their countless eyes on me as they looked at the head of the table to the man who hosted them there for this society gathering.
“Gentlemen,” that man announced, standing up with all the authority of a born aristocrat, a learned man, a Master. “May I present slave Davenport.”
I stepped forward at the same time I bent my knees, sinking into a kneel before I could finish moving in line beside Alexander. My head was ducked, my hair curled and tied loosely with a red ribbon down my back so that I couldn’t hide behind the thick curtain of it, so that all the men could see the way my face was composed into careful, pretty blankness.