by Sophia Reed
Bevington grabbed me and pulled me down to his level and part of me was still trying to be polite and follow my own beliefs on proper behavior. Pulled close and off balance by the person himself, I still tried not to violate his personal space with my face, my head, my entire body.
He had no such qualms. Despite my tight, locked muscles, he gave another yank and tumbled me into him. His mouth covered mine and he forced his tongue into my mouth.
Instinct rose instantly. No matter who or what Erin Trace was, there wasn't an eighteen year old alive who wouldn't push against the old fuck, trying to free themselves from ancient garlic breath and a tongue that managed to be cold.
I shoved myself back from him and he erupted into a rage, though I couldn't have been the only one to instantly fight my way free. He still had hold of my wrist and now he pulled me off balance across his lap. One hand easily clamped over my wrists, surprisingly strong. I fought, flat out, no holding back and just started to fight my way free when another pair of hands covered Bevington's and his released my wrists.
Twisting, snarling, I looked up into the face of the first security I'd seen in the place. Black shirt. Clean blue jeans. Ex-military look. Muscled. Enormous. Implacable. He met my eyes, blinked one time, cold and uninterested.
Bevington had been moving nonstop. He pulled my skirt up and made a sound of delight. The thong Evie had dressed me in offered nothing by way of protection.
"Oh, their product is always so – " He broke off as if he'd just thought of something. I was still struggling, tears falling, my hands going numb under the guard's grip. Now I redoubled my efforts, gagging as he slipped one finger under the elastic of the thong and felt between my legs.
He sighed. "They think of everything. Clean, smooth. Bare."
I screamed.
He leaned close to my ear. "Music to my ears, sweetheart. There's no one for miles. Best just to enjoy."
Then he ripped off the thong and hit me so hard with one hand I lost my breath. For the next impossible interval he spanked me with his hand until he complained it hurt and a second guard I hadn't seen handed him a wooden hairbrush.
By the time he finished my hair was stuck to my face, my ass was buzzing with pain and more to come when the rest of the feeling returned. He seemed to get pleasure from pulling the thong back up, pulling it into place and then higher and higher and tighter and tighter, twisting the back of it and pulling it up to my waist, until it cut into sensitive places.
He let go of me completely, placed his hands against my ribs, and shoved until I fell to the floor.
"Put her with the others."
"You don't want her services tonight?" the first guard asked.
Bevington rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. "No. Not tonight." He gave me a long look and winked.
I gagged again, sat up and pulled my knees into my chest, arms wrapped around my legs.
"Tell the girls to wash her. I'll take her tomorrow." He reached out with one cowboy booted foot and nudged me hard in the ribs.
My face went rigid. I didn't fall or even waver. My nails dug into my forearms. I kept myself still. I wanted to spit on him but I didn't need to be injured. Instead, I watched him like I'd watch a wild animal, something of the variety that likes to eat things my size.
Without another look at me, Bevington left the room. The first guard started toward me but the second moved past him and helped me to my feet. "Can you walk?" He was also ex-military I thought, but not much taller than me.
Of course I can walk, I thought, but any consideration or care here mattered. "Yes," I said, and still allowed him to put an arm around me and help me up the stairs.
I'd made it exactly where I needed to be.
I'd never in my life wanted to be somewhere I'd worked so hard to get to.
19
Cole
"What if she really was in Las Vegas?" That was Federal Agent Decker. She wore the full gray suit regalia of old school feds and she paced through my situation room like it was hers. "What if it wasn't a malfunction."
April, Charles and Scott instantly responded, gathering around two tablets and a paper map.
I paced out of earshot again. This was something we'd been going over for a couple hours, even before Decker got here. Decker was a friend from earlier years. She liked a good spanking and a thorough fucking after, she liked whisky and strawberries, she'd married a woman I found every bit as attractive as her but we'd become friends then because she wouldn't share.
We went back a few years. She was one of the first favors I called in.
Voices from the blue room: What if they were in Nevada.
Going where?
All of Southern California laid out at their feet. Could be going anywhere. Freighters. Cargo ships.
There's also Mexico.
Yeah, but there's Thailand.
They don't need more girls.
Not funny.
Wasn't meant to be. They've got their own slave trade. If anything they'd bring people here.
Okay, say she was here. That gives us two directions to search. That's what's important. And we don't know where they went from there. Any way to get a fix on the exact frequency?
Of course so, we already have that. But unless we can boost the signal –
I stalked away from them again. I hadn't wanted to call in the feds, friends or not. And I was giving it until morning before I got the mercs onboard.
Thing was, I didn't need to stop her undercover and bring her back.
I just needed to know where she was and that she was all right.
It was an odd feeling. Because everything in me said I wanted her assignment over but I acknowledged that wasn't up to me. She and I had an agreement and I was sticking to it.
I didn't need to do anything with the knowledge of where she was. I just needed to know that I did know where she was.
I just needed to know she was all right.
20
Annie
The guards weren't cruel once we got out of sight of Bevington. There was no groping, no intimidation, no hurrying me along faster than I could walk. There were no threats, there were no inappropriate touches. There was no talk of searching me when so very obviously I'd been searched before I left Arizona and while I was over the asshole's lap.
My ass was on fire and walking hurt. It wasn't just the spanking. The force with which he'd hit me was already causing deep tissue damage, maybe especially because it came less than twenty-four hours after Evie's demonstration. I was stiffening and probably already bruising.
The harem was a suite of rooms on the third floor. Third because probably no one would jump from that height to a concrete apron surrounding one of the area's frequent turquoise blue swimming pools. Once part of the lovely home, it looked like it had been renovated by a maniac with a chainsaw. Doors were hung unevenly in doorjambs that seemed hacked out of the original shape of the house. Floor to ceiling windows were sealed shut despite the iron bars outside so, desperate for air, someone had smashed them in.
The main room was a communal living room decorated with beds, and a kitchen against the back wall with one table and two chairs and a tiny three-quarter sized everything else. From the number of pieces of clothing strewn around everywhere, I guessed one of the bedrooms served as a closet.
There were three other girls in the room, my first confused impression gave me.
"You'll stay here until you're needed," the first guard said.
There was nothing inherently cruel about what he said. It was what had been ordered by the crazy man who thought he collected fragile things and then broke them. Quite possibly the guards were trapped too. But they had guns and I didn't and my sympathy didn't lay with them.
Or with the girls in the room. I turned even as the guards were leaving, shutting the door behind them, and It was everything I could do not to beg to be taken too. Take me back to him. Anything but lock me in here with all these strangers. I backed up, turned back toward the guards, suddenly
as much afraid of the people as I was of being locked in by a crazy man.
"Don't be stupid," the second guard said, not unkindly. He'd only left the door open long enough to hand in the bag Evie had packed. When I continued to stand there, fight or flight clearly playing over my features, he relented, softened just enough to say, "They're not going to hurt you. They're really not – " a long pause while possibly he rethought the trajectory of his life – "They're really not bad people."
He closed the door then, and locked it from the outside.
"And with that recommendation, I'm sure you're just thrilled to be here."
I turned back to find out just what was waiting for me.
21
Cole
Decker volunteered to have one of the trackers implanted in her ankle, and the other inside her, the way I'd implanted to Annie's.
By dawn we understood they probably weren't working because, for one, it wasn't meant to be buried inside flesh. Apparently under the hood of a speeding automobile, yes, it would work, but inside a woman?
"What about her ankle?" I asked. The world tasted old and dirty. The air felt colder than autumn in Vegas should.
"Damaged, probably," Decker said. She held up one very shapely, very pretty leg. "Having it on the outside of the ankle like this I've already run mine into three things just since we put it in. Then there's showers and struggles. I'm guessing it got broken."
I ran a hand over my face. We were in the dining room, where the newest Cook had left platters of everything possible to attract me to eat. Salmon, bacon, kale smoothies, chocolate.
I couldn't eat. Everything reminded me of Annie. The salmon she found vile, the bacon she could probably live on with very little else (other than regular infusions of pizza). The kale smoothies which really were vile but good for her. There was nothing wrong with wanting her to et things that were good for her. Or using such things to punish her.
Dark chocolate. I'd never told her that was my secret weakness. I can't go a week without at least one square of good, very dark, very high cacao chocolate. Now I might never get to share that weakness with her. I swept my hair back from my forehead and paced. Waiting for some signal to try and break through again. Waiting for Decker who was trying to analyze where the last signal had come from. Trying everything but crystal ball magic to find out where they'd taken Annie.
I'd never told her about my secret weakness for dark chocolate.
That meant there were two weaknesses I'd never told her about.
22
Annie
"Sit down. You're shaking."
The girl who rescued me from the door where I'd continued to stand was short and softly round and African American. She gently drew me into the group and sat me on one of the unused beds. Instantly the other four surrounded us, like birds all lighting on the same wire.
I stared at them, trying to comprehend what had happened. I'd come looking for human traffickers with preconceived notions that girls were sold to brothels or to individuals and so far, so – not good, but on target. That was what had happened.
But I'd expected some more logical chain of events, time spent in a brothel no matter what the final destination, and I hadn't somehow expected anything as crazy as Bevington and his harem.
Lettie was the girl who had led me away from the door. Big beautiful brown eyes, equally beautiful brown skin, everything about her including her curves seemed somehow unworldly. Like she was a deputation from faerie.
"Taken from the parking garage at my college," she said. Her abduction was a couple, husband and wife, hadn't bothered with scenarios or trying to attract her in any way. They were dressed in hoods and full body scrubs. They just opened the door of a van and snatched her.
"There wasn't anyone else in the parking garage?" I asked. The cop in me was going to ger a few questions out before I made her stop.
Lettie nodded. "There were other people though not really close. There were cameras. There was regular security and they were making rounds like they were supposed to. It happens."
Nikki, a redhead who had the opposite of Lettie's curves, had been leaving a dive bar after a fight with her husband. They'd been in Chicago. "One minute I was stalking down the street in a huff, too fucking mad to admit it was stupid to be on the street alone so late at night. The next second?" She spread long fingered hands.
"Van?" I asked.
"Nah. Sympathetic ear in the next bar. I figured Richie would know where I was going. Just needed some time to cool down. Met this woman who was all about having been there, done that, so understanding at first it seemed like a gag, y'know?"
I didn't but I shrugged comprehension.
"Then it became flattering and a good thing because Richie texted me not to come home for another two hours, he was packing up as much of his stuff as he could for the night. Just hang out till two and he'd be out of my hair." She paused, clearly still angry. "I don't know where he thought I'd go for two hours."
Mia, ethereally blonde, had stepped out the backdoor of her gym when it was closing behind her. No one heard her scream or no one admitted to it. She was the youngest, only just over eighteen, and she had a daughter at home with her mother.
"She'll think I ran out on her. I would never do that, but my mom ran out on me when I was three and she's so sure."
I sat cross legged on one of the spare beds. From what I could tell, none of the girls had been delivered to Bevington by the group that delivered me. Which was depressing to think there were that many rings of traffickers or even sole practitioners. It didn't change anything that the girls all came from different sources. I'd known 3837 was new to Raven. It was unlikely any of these girls would know anything about Raven even if it had been ultimately her group. On the other hand, Chad seemed unimpressed by where he was, which was only because he was a thug and a lummox, or because he'd been there before.
There was another answer to the mystery of my deliverymen seeming to know their way around Bevington's estate when none of the other girls had been delivered by them. It could mean that other girls had been delivered from Raven, who might find him a new client only in the fact that he hadn't been around for a long time, no matter how high his demand of "product" was.
Best case scenario, those girls had been used up in Bevington's opinion and passed on up the line.
Worst case scenario I wasn't ready to contemplate yet.
But not all the abductions seemed to be by Raven's group. It didn't make sense she'd have so many different ways of doing snatch and grab when the underpaid and overworked boys in blue who had ethics that were gray worked so well for her.
But maybe she did use what she had on time at the moment? All the abductions, including mine, seemed to be about opportunity, not deep planning. Maybe Raven really did use what she had at the moment.
I'd like a chance to do that. And what I had at the moment? It would be really nice if it were a gun.
A really big fucking gun.
23
Annie
We shared our abduction stories. We shared food, which apparently there wasn't a shortage of. Bevington had a variety of unpleasant and innovative ways of punishing his harem, but withholding food and water wasn't part of it.
There was chocolate. I've always been indifferent to it but chocolate has something in it that changes mood, picking up the hormones or something so life seems not so bleak. It's not just the taste those people addicted to it are after. So I ate some after determining there was plenty and I wasn't depriving anyone. This whole situation was grotesque. Anything anyone had to hang on to, I didn't want to take even if it was freely offered.
"What's it like being here?" I asked. The room we were in didn't look like the normal fanciful notions of a harem with barred windows but sweet scented breezes. Even with the windows broken and therefore permanently open it smelled stuffy and like too many people were sharing too small a space. Bevington had the money to outfit different rooms all over the place but hadn't bothere
d. Was that laziness? Arrogance? Or something wrong with him?
Or was it just cruelty?
The guards had said everyone in the room was "mostly nice," but I didn't have any problem with any of them. In real life I have a hard time making friends. I'm standoffish and that comes off as arrogant or rude when really it's just that I hate being hurt – my sisters didn't set me up in life to expect female friendship to come automatically or easily – and I'm shy.
Lettie was a college student. She didn't have any kind of record in the criminal justice system so there was no connection there. The college she'd been snatched from was in San Francisco, which didn't mean anything yet. She was single, had a kind of large extended family but they didn't check in all that often with each other and she didn't live with anyone. If they even knew she was gone, it was just going on a month and no one had shown up to rescue her.
Nikki was from Chicago. Her husband was a tech in a hospital. She herself worked as a secretary, working from home and sending things in digitally. She'd be missed. Her job was used to her communications coming at night because her husband worked night shift. But he was leaving her and wouldn't wonder why he hadn't heard from her. if he he'd really packed up all this stuff and left, and her mother thought she was busy and her father was divorced from her mother and somewhere in the South Pacific – there was no one but her job to really notice her absence.
Mia just cried when it came her turn. Her daughter, what her mother thought of her now… I thought what her mother thought was probably immaterial. Her mother knew in her own heart that she'd abandoned her daughter. That she was back in Mia's life and trusted to take care of Mia's daughter spoke more to the current relationship. People change. And Mia was broken by this kidnapping.