Five Card Studs

by Madison Faye

  “Don’t.”

  I bit my lip.

  “Whatever you’re thinking, don’t. This is…” He sighed. “This is more complex than you’ve been led to believe.”

  “More complex than you buying me and keeping me in this room?” I spat bitterly.

  “Yes,” he growled. “Much more complex. And whatever you’re thinking — whatever place you’ve gone where you think this is Stockholm Syndrome or something—”

  I froze. What was he, a mind reader?

  “It’s not that, I can promise you.” Oliver sighed, his hands stroking my skin. “I think it’s time we talked.” He started to stand from the bed, and I shivered at the absence of his body against mine.

  “Why don’t you take a bath, refresh yourself, and then come down to the library.”

  I whirled my head around to stare at him.

  Oliver grinned. “Before you ask, no, this isn’t a test, or a trick, I assure you. Take your time, get dressed, and when you’re ready, come down. We’ll explain everything.”

  I swallowed as I slowly nodded.

  Oliver finished getting dressed, and he turned for the door when he paused. His fist clenched at his side, and his shoulders tightened, as if he was wrestling with something. And I was about to ask, when he suddenly whirled and strode back across the room towards me so intensely that I gasped in fear.

  “Wait! Please! I just—”

  And then Oliver Blackwood grabbed my face in both his hands, and kissed me.

  Hard.

  He kissed me like something you see in a movie, at the edge of a cliff, or on the docks before someone goes off to war. He kissed me until my toes curled and my heart almost jumped out my chest.

  He pulled away, and our eyes locked.

  Whoa.

  That kiss had been a world apart from the raw, intense fucking from earlier. It was…more than that. A lot more. And for the first time since I’d laid eyes on him, I saw something in Oliver’s face that I hadn’t seen before.

  Doubt, and worry.

  Quickly, it was dashed away though. Replaced with his usual dark, guarded look.

  “When you’re ready, Mia,” he whispered, kissing my cheek.

  “We’ll be waiting.”

  15

  Ash

  I paced the floor of the library, jaw clenched, eyes focused on the floor in front of me.

  Nervous.

  Me.

  The fuck was I nervous about? I didn’t get nervous, not even a little. I got angry, I got cold-blooded in my need to get things done, how they needed to get done.

  But I sure as hell didn’t get nervous.

  And it was her, if course.

  Mia.

  Mia who’d changed fucking everything I knew when she’d walked into that club. I’d looked at her that night and known she was out of her element. No girl like that should have had anything to do with that club. And she definitely shouldn’t have had anything to do with Ryan fucking Cunningham.

  But it was later, seeing her at the auction house that almost broke me.

  I mean that.

  Seeing her walk out like that, despite how fucking incredible she looked, almost killed me. A woman like that at the old action house? Fuck yes. The new one though? The one that’d been twisted from its original purpose to the fucking horror it was now thanks to the Cunninghams?

  Yeah, no way.

  Two and a half million — it was a fortune. Well, or at least it had been, back before. But now? Now it was nothing. I would have paid fifty times that to get her off that auction block and away from Ryan.

  And now she was here, and we’d crossed a line. She was supposed to be safe here, and she was, from him.

  But from us? And from the darkness we brought with us? Us and our desires to take her and make her ours?

  Apparently not. Apparently, she hadn’t been safe from that here.

  Big shocker.

  I ran my fingers over the stubble of my jaw, shaking my head. I could still remember her sweet moans, and the way her body had quivered for me. I could remember the way her sweet pussy tasted. Fuck, I’d been hard ever since thinking about it. I remembered the way she’d moaned when I slid in, and how fucking tight she’d been around my thickness.

  How she’d felt when she’d come on my cock.

  Telling Oliver had been tough, though not for the reasons you might think. There was no jealousy between us all — fuck, we’d left that long ago. Just the same, though we’d shared plenty of girls, I knew Mia was different — to all of us.

  So yeah, telling him that Erik and I had given in to our desires and tasted her? Without him there?

  Yeah, I’d been worried. But then there’d been that spark in his eyes, and I knew things were okay. Because that spark wasn’t jealousy — not at all.

  When he’d stormed off, Erik swore and tried to follow, but I’d grabbed him, shaking my head.

  I knew that look in my friend’s eyes, and it sure as hell wasn’t jealousy. He wasn’t mad, he was just going straight to Mia’s room to finally give in to what he’d been holding back. He may have been stronger than us, but even he was human. I’d gotten the gist of what happened later, while Mia was bathing and resting up.

  And now here we were, in the library waiting for her. We’d crossed the biggest line with her, and now there was no turning back. Because now?

  Now she meant too much.

  She mattered too much, and she was in too deep with all three of us.

  Our decision to say what we were about to say to her had been unanimous, but it was still going to be hard to explain it all.

  But she had to hear it.

  There was a slight cough, shattering my thoughts. I whirled, along with Erik and Oliver, to the door to the library, and there she was.

  Damn.

  She was dressed now, and shit, I mean, that sucked, but it was probably a good thing. We’d had Martin, our house manager, bring her some clothes to choose from after she’d washed off. Having her come have a talk with us in that damn robe she’d been wearing and nothing else would have—

  Well, it wouldn’t have been much of a talk that’s for sure.

  She was in a short skirt, stockings, and heels, with a formal, but gorgeous button-up top. She wore her hair up this time, which gave her this sophisticatedly sexy look — maybe the opposite of what she’d been intending, but there it was.

  Long story short, her walking in — even fully clothed — had my cock raging hard in seconds.

  “Hi,” she said softly, her cheeks going red as her eyes darted between all three of us.

  I cleared my throat, stepping forward, my eyes locked onto her.

  “Nice clothes.” Erik grinned, obviously also taken by how amazing she looked.

  “You picked ‘em.” She smiled back.

  Her eyes darted to Oliver, and her face reddened.

  I grinned wolfishly — yeah, I knew what happened in her room earlier this afternoon. Oliver had told us of course. And as I said, I wasn’t a jealous type. But Jesus, Oliver taking her anal virginity?

  I shook my head; a man was allowed some jealousy.

  “Why don’t you sit,” I said quietly, gesturing to the couch by one of the floor-to-ceiling shelves full of old books.

  She nodded stepping past all of us, and I swear her breath caught as she did. She took a seat in the middle of the couch, smoothing her skirt down. Erik sat to one side of her, while Oliver took a seat in his favorite wing-backed chair across from the couch. Me, I just stood, arms crossed.

  “You need to know about the other night — about us…” Oliver looked down, trailing off.

  “About us buying you,” I growled.

  She looked up, eyeing me. “What is that place?”

  “It’s what you think it is,” I spoke evenly. “It’s a place for men like us — men with means and with certain, I guess you could say tastes to buy what we need.”

  “Girls.”

  I nodded, watching that fire roar behind he
r eyes.

  I could have sugar coated it, but I wasn’t going to. Because Mia struck me as the type to want things straight and honest.

  “Yes,” I said evenly. “To buy women.”

  Her jaw tightened, but I held a finger up.

  “But, it’s not what you think it is.”

  “Enlighten me how that could possibly be,” she hissed.

  “It used to be different,” Erik said quietly. “Look, there are women to whom the idea of being auctioned to a man of means, and to be controlled and disciplined is quite appealing.” He raised a brow at her. “Apparently, some women don’t know they like having the control taken from them until they experience it.”

  She blushed, and he grinned.

  “The Auction House used to be different,” Oliver tapped his fingertips together. “It used to be, well, consensual.”

  Her brows perked up.

  “It was a show of a sorts — a stage. Yes, there was an exchange of money, and we’d go home with a woman—”

  I noticed Mia’s face glower with jealousy, and I smiled to myself at the flash of emotion there.

  Oliver continued.

  “It was all a façade, because the whole thing was two willing parties. But things changed. Power shifted in the upper parts of the world we belong to, and—”

  “And what world is that?”

  “The criminal one.”

  Again, I wasn’t going to sugar coat for her.

  Mia’s eyes went wide, her lips tight.

  “Nothing sinister,” I said. “No murder or mayhem or any of that. We sell arms.”

  She barked out a laugh. “Oh, nothing sinister at all.” She narrowed her eyes at me.

  “No, not—” I shook my head. “Not to the streets, or kids or shit like that.”

  “To who then?”

  I shrugged. “To who the US Government can’t be seen selling guns to. And they pay us handsomely for it.”

  “So what changed?” she said quietly. “With the…” she trailed off, shaking her head. “The Auction House,” she said icily.

  “Cunningham,” Erik spat. “Ryan, the man who dragged you there, and his father Johnson. Power shifted, they took over, and they also took over the Auction House, and that’s when things went bad.”

  “Things stopped being consensual,” Oliver muttered. “At first we didn’t realize — we’d go and the girls would just be extra…I don’t know, like they were better at playing the role. It set off an alarm with us though, and we stopped going.” He gave her a hard look as she scowled. “No one else besides you has come home with us after the change, Mia.”

  She managed a small smile at the floor.

  “And then, something happened,” Erik said gruffly. “Something we couldn’t ignore anymore.”

  Mia frowned. “What?”

  “Amy,” I said quietly.

  My two friends looked at me before glancing away. Mia seemed to sense the sudden cloud in the room, and her face fell.

  “Who is she?”

  “Was.” I looked away, glancing out the window at the trees and gardens of our estate.

  “I’m so sorry,” Mia whispered from behind me.

  “We came up in the foster system,” Erik said slowly. “The three of us coming up together. We were always bickering, always fighting each other.” He smiled and shook his head. “Then we met Amy, at one of our new foster houses. She was a little younger than us, a tiny little thing, but it was like she was the missing piece for all of us. She was the calming factor, the one that got us to stop getting at each other. Basically, she was the sister we never had — a kid sister for all three of us to care for and watch out for.”

  Erik’s shoulders slumped as he slowly shook his head, his hand clenching on the arm of the couch next to him.

  “We stayed together after that, through growing up, through getting out of the foster system, through us building our fortunes, all of it. Amy did her own thing though. She was off on her own a lot, sometimes in with the wrong crowds. But we were always there to protect her, and keep her safe.”

  “Until we weren’t,” I whispered bitterly.

  Oliver pushed his fingers through his hair. “We don’t know how it happened, but she was taken, sort of like how you were, and brought to the Auction House against her will. We weren’t there, of course, but we heard about it later.”

  “Did you save—”

  “No,” I husked out, “No we didn’t. Ryan got her that night.”

  My voice sounded like it was coming from outside my body, my heart shattering like it always did when I thought of Amy.

  “He took her home, he beat her senseless, he forced himself on her—”

  My voice broke, and I watched Mia’s hands fly to her mouth.

  “She died that night,” I said coldly. “He killed her.”

  Silence took over the room, until Oliver finally spoke.

  “After that, we had a new mission,” he said quietly. “After that, it was about getting back into the Auction House scene, putting things in place, getting Ryan to slip up, and making a move.”

  “What’s the move,” Mia said in a hushed voiced.

  I took a deep breath, leveling my eyes at her. “To burn him, his father, and everything they have to the fucking ground, and then sweep away the ashes.”

  16

  Erik

  The room was quiet for a minute after that, Mia just shaking her head in the silence.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

  “It is what it is,” Ash growled, looking away.

  “Thats awful.”

  We were quiet another minute before I spoke. “We aren’t telling you this to bring you down or anything, Mia. We wanted to tell you because we need you to know why you’re here — why you’re really here. We couldn’t let Ryan do to you what he did to Amy, or any of the other girls he’s hurt.”

  “So you bought me.”

  I grinned, shrugging. “Yep.”

  “Just…because?”

  The three of us glanced at each other before I turned back to her. “We’d have bought anyone we saw that night to save them from Ryan, you need to know that. But…”

  She glanced up into my face.

  “But you were different.”

  Mia blushed, swallowing quickly.

  “You—” I shook my head. “You do something to us, Mia. You walked into the club the other day and you just… fuck, I don’t even know. You make something click in us we’ve never felt before.”

  Her brow shot up, her soft lips parting slowly.

  “We all feel it,” Oliver spoke. “So that’s why it was hard taking you here. Because yes, we wanted to save you, but there’s also some things ingrained in us about women from the auction. Bringing you here was confusing for a moment.”

  She smiled, looking down. “Seems we worked through that confusion.”

  Ash chuckled darkly. “Apparently we did.”

  Mia laughed nervously before shaking her head. “God, I— look I didn’t mean to do anything to get between the three of—”

  We all chuckled at once, and she looked up sharply, frowning.

  “Mia,” Oliver shook his head. “There’s no coming between us.”

  I snorted, and though Oliver and Ash shot me a look at the dirty humor, Mia looked up and laughed.

  My kinda girl.

  I grinned. “What Oliver means is, no, you’d didn’t break anything with us.”

  “So, what now?”

  Ash nodded. “Now, ideally, you stay here until we can make a move on the Cunninghams.”

  She balked. “And how long is that?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s the only way you’ll be safe.”

  “I have friends, and family—”

  “They’re safe,” I said evenly. She looked at me and I met her eyes. “We’ve got people watching them.”

  “Can I call them say least? Let them know I’m alive?”

  Ash, Oliver, and I exchanged looks before I
cleared my throat. “They think you got pulled away for job training. It’s remote, so no cell phones and all that.”

  She stared at us.

  “If they thought you’d been kidnapped, they’d be in much more danger of reprisal from Ryan,” Ash said evenly.

  “So, yes,” Oliver nodded. “We’ll make arrangements. Ryan and Johnson are watching them too, so it’s tricky, but I swear we’ll make it happen. Soon.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Of course.”

  “So I just stay here, locked in your tower?”

  I smiled. “You make us sound like evil beasts or something.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  I glanced back, holding her look. “Aren’t we what? Evil, or beasts?”

  “Either,” she said quietly.

  “Not the first one,” I said evenly, my gaze leveling at her. “The second one though, maybe.”

  She bit her lip, her cheeks reddening.

  “You’re welcomed to stay here — actually, we’d like you to stay here, at least until this is worked out.

  She nodded at Oliver's words. “And at what times will I be expected to get back to my room so you can lock me in?” her brow arched sarcastically.

  I grinned.

  I’m not used to a girl with this kind of sass, that’s for sure. The women we’d had over the years tended to be FAR more…I don’t know, more willing to do as we said. And yes, when it came to domming a woman, you wanted that. When it came to having a conversation though, and being with a woman in a capacity outside the bedroom, it got old.

  There was something refreshing about Mia’s ability to talk back, and I liked it.

  Of course, in the bedroom?

  Well, in the bedroom, she could be damn sure we’d strip her of that sass-back. In the bedroom, we’d have her begging to submit — on her knees, dripping wet, the word “sir” breathed across her lips.

  My cock pulsed between my legs at the thought.

  “I think it’s fair to say you won’t be locked in your room,” Oliver said with a dark smile. “Free range of the house, provided you stay inside of it. The house is alarmed and basically a fortress, but I can’t offer the same protection once you step outside.”