I swallowed as I walked over to lift the tiny black and white frilly edged and collared maid’s uniform. “You’re joking, si?”
He adjusted himself obviously as he shifted in his chair and leered at me. “I never joke about sex. Change. I want to see the body Alexander risked his arse for and take pleasure in knowing it’s mine now.”
I swallowed thickly, trying to find that almost forgotten space in my mind where I could block out the nightmarish reality of my life and focus just on my breath, on the peace inside the chaos. It was harder than it used to be, the steps there coated with cobwebs and dark with disuse.
I took deep, even breaths as I shed my clothes and quickly donned the humiliating costume.
“Ah,” he groaned in delight. “Look at those full breasts. Such a delicious thing.”
Thing.
Fuck him.
I breathed deep and tried to remember why I was doing this.
To keep from being blackmailed.
To keep the job I’d come to enjoy that put food on my table and money in my family’s coffers.
To get Alexander back.
To get enough dirt on Ashcroft and hopefully the Order to destroy them.
My spine straightened as I finished buttoning the dress and looked directly into Satan’s greedy eyes.
“Come here,” he ordered, leaning back and spreading his legs, indicating the space between them.
He watched me carnally as I walked over and stopped just outside of his reach.
“On your knees, slave Ashcroft,” he demanded, reaching out to slap me lightly across the face for my insolence. “You know better than that. Knees, now.”
I dropped, my head angled low so my eyes were trained on the ground, my knees folded and my hands palm up over my thighs.
Submission coursed through me like a lightning strike.
I gasped at the sensation of being bent and folded like origami into shape by another person’s orders and then burned with the shame of knowing how deeply it settled something eternally restless inside me.
I didn’t want to feel this way with Ashcroft, and I knew it was only a tremor compared to the quake of rightness and longing I felt with Alexander, but it still disgusted me.
I glared up at him instead of bowing my head in proper submission and watched as Ashcroft laughed.
“You can defy me as much as you want to, little thing. I’ll break you in nice and slow.” He leaned forward to grasp my chin painfully. “After all, we have all the time in the world. No one is here to save you now.”
I didn’t need anyone to save me, but myself.
He didn’t need to know that, though, especially when I hadn’t yet figured out how to work this to my advantage.
“You’ll clean for me now. I don’t have time to play at the moment. Then next weekend, I’ll take you to Club Bacchus for The Trials.”
“The Trials?” I dared to asked.
Ashcroft leaned down further, shifting his hand so that it collared my throat tightly. “Think of it as the Order’s annual Best in Show. Do you want to know what that is, sweet thing? I have a feeling with prime stock like you, I’m in for the ultimate prize.”
I kept stubbornly mute.
He chuckled and then lashed his tongue across my pressed lips before biting the bottom one. “I’ll debut you as my new slave, put you through your paces on stage for everyone to see, and then the council will vote on which slave is the most desirable, the most beautifully broken in.”
“Fuck you,” I lashed out before I could control it. “I won’t be displayed like some kind of dog you trained for your amusement.”
“Ah, but you will,” he reminded me, reaching over to his desk and dropping a folder open at my knees. Glossy sheets of photos spilled out over the floor, showing Alexander and me in the black, white, and gold tiled ballroom at Pearl Hall. Some had him chasing me across the room, others had him pressing me into the floor, my mouth open in shock and then progressing to full-blown desire. They were graphic and horrible, a visual reminder of the first and only time Alexander had taken me against my will.
My heart thundered, and my cunt grew heavy.
I remembered the thick, acutely agonizing feel of Alexander’s big cock between my thighs, sliding wetly through my pussy as he fucked me in the ballroom, in the Hall, in the stables, in the greenhouse, and in the wet crush of poppy at the back of his estate.
I closed my eyes, hating myself for missing it, but mostly for missing him. The man who had bought me to collect me like a token bauble and then forgotten me so easily when I fled.
My shame deepened because it was his complete and utter rejection of me three years ago in Milan that rankled me most and not any aspect of my year of slavery with him.