Especially after the way I’d turned her away in Milan. The look of her priceless, stunning face breaking into thousands of fine cracks and fissures when I’d so ruthlessly dropped her heart to the roof of the Duomo and crushed it beneath my heel would haunt me for the rest of my life. It was a necessary evil. The Order kept minute track of Cosima for the first year of our separation, delving into her internet history and the habits of her new life in New York. So did I. And it was obvious to both parties that Cosima was still hung up on me, her endless therapy appointments, Amazon book orders, and the one ill-fated visit to a BDSM club were more than evidence of that.
So to ensure that she was safe, I had to crush her.
There was no greater torture than loving a woman and being unable to have her. The only thing that had alleviated any of the pain over the past four years was making progress against the very Order I’d come to infiltrate that night.
I had enough information on most of the Order to put away some of the most powerful men for life, including Noel, who was on house arrest in Pearl Hall for his corrupt dealings with the Falmouth Port Authority.
The end was nigh and a better man, a stronger man, would have stayed away from Cosima until it was over.
But I wasn’t a stronger man.
I was completely wrecked by the weight of Cosima in my chest, the anchor and chain that pulled taut across the time and distance between us.
There was no way she was marrying another man.
No way, now that I’d have her submission and her reluctant capitulation, that I could go another bloody, agonizing day without her.
Which brought me to the door of the Order’s New York City hub, Club Bacchus, to flagrantly thumb my nose at the society and take back what was mine.
Women hung like ornaments from the ceiling, strung up in gold chains, diamond ropes, pearls on strings of reinforced carbon fiber so that the beauties didn’t fall to the floor in a tangle of riches. They were suspended in shapes, each bound in a different pose by beautiful loops of Shibari bondage. A redhead dripped from the air upside down, her hair a flaming arrow, her feet cuffed to a wooden bow with her knees out turned and bare pussy displayed. They had made her into the symbol of a bow and arrow, the hunter’s classic weapon.
Another spun slowly with her neck bowed, back arched until her head nearly connected with her pointed toe like a ballerina twirling in a music box. She was caught up in a yard of shimmering pale pink chiffon, three lengths of which wrapped around her throat and kept it strained backward in a fruitless attempt to meet her raised right thigh.
They would have been beautiful strung up like that if they had consented to it. As it was, I could read the fear in their glassy eyes, smell the metallic tang of their stress sweat undercutting the leather-tainted air of the club.
There were fifteen girls festooning the lavish interior of Club Bacchus, trapezoids of light from the gently swaying chandeliers cutting their skin into fragments of gold. Men traced those yellow shapes over their skin as they mingled throughout the cavernous room, drinking scotch and chatting amiably with their companions as they ogled and molested the women on display.
I had no desire to join them.
Most of the men wouldn’t know me by sight, but some would, and my entire plan rested on remaining anonymous until the last moment.
I slipped through the shadows at the edges of the blue brocade walls until I found a velvet upholstered chair with the perfect vantage point of my target.
My beauty was strung up in gossamer chains of gold, thousands of them that bound her breasts into swollen peaks, wound over her belly and between each thigh so that her legs were bent under and spread, exposing her pussy to the cool air of the room and the hot eyes of its patrons. Her arms were folded over her head and covered so completely in gold, it seemed she wore them like a crown.
She was the only woman in the entire room who stared boldly from her bondage, who tipped her chin as much as the ropes allowed so she could look each of her lecherous admirers in the eye and damn them all silently to hell.
A goddess in chains was still a goddess.
No amount of maneuvering or lording over her would change that.
My God, but she took my fucking breath away.
I snapped my fingers at one of the blokes walking around with a drink tray and snatched someone else’s whiskey for myself. The boy pursed his lips but didn’t utter one word of protest as he pulled away and resumed his duties.