“Yes, sir,” I allowed with a meek bow of my head.
I watched through my eyelashes as he took another long sip, then another.
My heart rammed against the cage of my chest, threatening to break a rib. Cold sweat broke over my forehead, and I silently willed him to drink more.
“Come sit here,” Noel beckoned, patting his thigh.
I hesitated as he squeezed his hand over his erection, drawing my notice to it.
He wouldn’t force me to sit on his lap, not physically. He wanted to watch me struggle to make the decision myself, to surrender to him when I realized that he had me cornered.
I sat.
But the fire of my rage and my passion was lit deep beneath my placid expression and outward show of subjugation.
I was fire wrapped in ice, and it was only a matter of time before the latter melted away, and I was all heat. All fury.
My fingers itched in my lap as I watched Noel drink more of his poppy seed tea.
He finished the shallow bowl of tea and watched me as I poured more.
“You know he’s dead, don’t you, Ruthie?” he asked casually as he picked up the unused knife at his place setting and began to play the sharp edge up and down my neck. “You know your precious Alexander and Edward died…that they burned to a crisp in the time it would take me to run the tip of this right across your long, golden throat.”
I swallowed hard against the pinch of the blade on my voice box and gave a slight nod to mollify him.
He hummed. “It was such a shame to kill them. The years that went into their upbringing and education, well, it devastates me to think of all that wasted time. Rodger is only thirteen and already more a man than the two of them together ever were.”
“Your definition of man is monster,” I bit out. “You killed your own sons. I don’t know how you sleep at night, brutto figlio di puttana bastardo.”
Ugly son of a bitch bastard.
Only Italian will slack the viciousness of the fury pouring over my tongue like molten lead. I wanted to curse at him, scald him with the hot Latin words until he was impaled by my wrath like a pincushion.
Noel grinned as he scraped the knife’s point over my lace cover nipple, back and forth like an out of sync metronome. “I have a new slave who does wonders with her whore mouth. Sleep is the only option after I’ve finished with her.”
“You’re repugnant,” I said and spat on his face.
He froze as the coagulated saliva adhered to his skin, then slowly creeped down his cheek, leaving a viscous trail. I was close enough, perched on his lap like that, to see how his grey eyes so much darker than Xan’s silver—like mottled mercury or old led, something metallic and lifeless—went hard with displeasure.
“Rodger,” he called out in a pleasant voice completely at odds with the press of the knife to my chest and the toxic heat in his gaze. “Bring your mother forward, will you?”
Noel settled more comfortably in his chair, readjusting me so I sat perched on the rigid edge of his erection, the knife then pressed to my throat so hard, a felt blood form in a crescent moon. Together we watched as Rodger emerged from the shadows with Mrs. White in his hold. At first, it seemed familial, his growing frame just an inch taller than hers, a lanky arm wrapped around her middle, another on her shoulder under her hair like a little boy hiding behind his mummy.
It wasn’t until the low light of the candles cast yellow lamination over something with a dull sheen in the hand resting on her shoulder that I realized Rodger held a gun pressed to his mother’s temple.
Mrs. White’s pale, trembling face was ugly and tragic, the same urine yellow of Napoli, filled with the same inescapable dread. I read what she wrote in her eyes as we locked gazes, the resignation and the terror.
She’d known all along in some dark, irrevocable place in her soul that her own tool of survival would be the death of her.
“I told you I would kill every single servant in this house if you didn’t mind me,” Noel prompted me. “It seems only fitting to begin in this manner.”
“Noel,” I said slowly, surprised by the level of horror I felt. “Don’t do this.”
“Kill Mary?” he asked, his face creased with mild, polite surprise as if I had offended him, but he was too gentlemanly to care. “Why, I don’t intend to.”
My spine softened slightly with relief. I didn’t want her to die like that. No one deserved to be killed by their son and their husband, by the very people who should have loved her most. It echoed too profoundly in my heart.