“Careful. You don’t want to piss me off. And being that I’m the co-owner of this establishment and I don’t like you being here because you’re going to be mine, I could have you escorted out right now. Hell, I have no problem doing it myself.”
I could tell when my words registered because her eyes widened. She knew I wasn’t joking about doing it either.
“I haven’t said yes to your arrangement. You’re assuming that I will.”
“I’m not assuming anything.” I folded my arms across my chest. I was enjoying this sparring match a bit too much. The fire in her eyes was a stark contrast to the coolness that her green eyes had given off before. I knew she wasn’t willing to go down without a fight and because of that there would be many good days and nights ahead. “You know what I’m looking forward to?”
“What’s that?” I barely heard the words because she whispered them.
“Tomorrow, Spitfire.” I turned around and took a step forward, back toward the VIP section.
But her words stopped me. “Don’t call me that.”
I turned back around and shifted my body closer to her. “I can call you whatever I want. Do you want to know why you’ll come to me willingly?”
She was forced to look up at me even with the three-inch heels she was wearing.
“Because your father doesn’t have the money and he won’t have it by my deadline. You don’t want to see Monroe Media Agency close. The stakes are too high.” In more ways than one.
This type of deal wasn’t something I usually did because I didn’t have to. This time, I didn’t want to take a chance that she would slip through my fingers. I wouldn’t lie and say that I wasn’t drawn to her when I first saw her photo. I let my gaze wander down her body before it made its way back up to her eyes. I could see that her eyes were staring at my lips when they drifted up to mine.
“But there’s something else, Anais.”
Before she could say anything, I bent my head down to kiss her, giving her a small preview of what it would be like to be mine. At first, she didn’t react, but when she started to get into the kiss, I pulled away.
“You want to know what it’s like to be fucked by me.” I took a small step back and didn’t fight my urge to smirk. “Wear something like this tomorrow.” I turned and walked away, leaving her beautiful swollen lips ajar.
“Hey, Kingston,” I said. “Have your men watch that woman in the gold while she’s here tonight. She should be here with another woman. If she tries to make her way downstairs stop her.” I had no problem monitoring her from my position in VIP.
“Got it. I’ll switch positions and head toward that door just in case.” Kingston leaned away from me and started talking into his earpiece, conveying the message I had just sent.
A smile crept onto my face as I walked back up the stairs to VIP. I knew that in a short period of time, Anais Monroe would be mine.
8
Anais
Coming here had been a bad idea. After Ellie told me about how she suspected Damien might own Elevate, I knew there was a chance that he would be here tonight. Now lo and behold, he was. My phone vibrated in my hand. I looked down and saw a text notification.
Damien: Be ready at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow. My driver will pick you up.
“You still haven’t ordered a drink.” Ellie appeared next to me.
“You almost gave me a heart attack. I forgot to order one.”
“Is everything okay? We talked about it and then I went to the bathroom.”
I leaned over to whisper in her ear, “I was preoccupied. Damien appeared.”
“Wait, what?” Ellie’s voice cracked, causing her to sound almost like a parrot.
If this were an everyday situation, I would have laughed. It wasn’t and I couldn’t bother to try to fake one.
“Yeah, and there’s more that I need to tell you.” It was time to come clean. I would do it once we got home.
“Okay. Do you want to stay here or head home now?”
I admired her for offering to go home with me even though we were in one of the most exclusive bars in New York City. Who knew when or if we would have the opportunity to do this again?
“No, let’s stay. We should also at least get a drink while we’re here.”
“Good plan. This time I’ll do the ordering.”
I rolled my eyes at her little jab and turned to face the bar again. When we had our drinks in hand, I let the coolness of the mojito coat my throat in an attempt to calm down the raging fire that Damien’s presence and words had caused to erupt. Ellie and I continued chatting among ourselves while drinking, but the entire time, I felt as if there was someone watching me.
“Did you want to go downstairs?”
“Downstairs? For what?” I played dumb even though I knew what she was referring to.
“To see what it’s like? Supposedly, there is a lounge of some sort, or maybe it’s another bar where people can meet other people and decide if they want to head farther into the club. I wouldn’t want to go that far but figured the lounge might be a good place to get a feel for the atmosphere.”
My mind drifted back to my interaction with Damien a few minutes ago before I came to a decision. I knew that if he found out what we were doing, it was going to further piss him off and I didn’t care. I didn’t answer to anyone and I could do whatever and whoever I wanted. Well that was what I liked to tell myself, although I never had done anything like this before. “Sure, why not?”
I polished off my drink and followed Ellie as she made her way through the crowd. How she knew where the entrance to the sex club was, I would never know. We made it over to the bouncer, who I didn’t remember seeing when I walked in, and Ellie turned on her charm.
“Hi, we would like to go downstairs.”
“Are you both on the list?”
“Uh, maybe?”
I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. She knew damn well we weren’t on any list unless Ellie had done it without telling me.
“Where’s your coin?”
She looked at me and then looked back at him. “What do you mean where’s your coin?"
He looked at her and shook his head. “If you don’t even know what I’m talking about, I know for sure that you’re not on the list to get in. Please move aside.”
“This is ridiculous. No one needs a coin to get in here.”
“I said what I said. Now move aside.” His stern voice told me he meant business and I noticed when his eyes stayed on her for a moment too long. Still, he didn’t budge.
“Look—”
“Are you trying to start a fight with me?”
I grabbed Ellie’s arm and she looked at me. “This isn’t worth it, E. Especially if it’s an invite-only type of thing.”
“I think you should listen to your friend.”
I could feel the anger in Ellie about to boil over. “You’re being completely asinine about this because there is no coin needed for entry!”
“Big words there and you’re annoying me.”
“I don’t care if I’m annoying you. Listen—”
“No, and now I’m going to escort both of you off the premises.”
I could see Ellie fuming and if we were in a cartoon, smoke would have been coming out of her ears. The bouncer walked us halfway to the door when I paused for a second and looked up and saw Damien standing at the balcony. I didn’t know how long he had been standing there, but the look he was giving me and the small wave he sent my way told me he had something to do with us getting kicked out of Elevate tonight.
“That guy was such an asshole.”
“Ellie.”
“You don’t need a coin to get into the club. I would have known.”
I watched Ellie pace back and forth in front of me. Hopefully her stomps weren’t loud enough to piss off the tenants underneath us.
“Ellie.”
“He kept us out of there on purpose.”
She definitely had that right, but she was giving me a h
eadache on top of the thoughts that were already doing laps in my brain. “Ellie.”
“I can’t stand—”
“Ellie!” My hollering did the trick.
“What?” She stopped walking to look at me. “What’s wrong?”
“There are some things I need to tell you.”
She walked over and sat next to me on the couch and curled her feet up under her. That was when the dam of words broke. I walked her through everything that had fallen in my lap over the last few days. Monroe Media Agency’s impending collapse, my father going to Damien Cross for money to help save the agency from failing, and then Damien approaching me about the deal.
“Oh, honey,” Ellie said for what seemed like the fiftieth time. “I take back everything I said about you becoming involved with Damien. Fuck him, excuse the pun. We’ll figure out a way to get you out of this.”
If I wasn’t worried about the situation, I would have laughed. “I feel like I have no choice but to say yes.” I ran a hand across my forehead and into my hair. I barely stopped myself from yanking the strands.
“No, there has to be another way. We can go to the police.”
“Ellie, we can’t call the police. They probably wouldn’t believe me anyway, and I don’t want my father to know any of this.”
“There has to be some way to get you out of this. Maybe if we both take out loans. I could try going to my parents…”
Ellie’s words made my head snap in her direction. I stared her down for a moment before the words I wanted to use came to me. “There is no way I would drag you into this.”
“Shit,” she mumbled. She kept whatever else she was thinking to herself.
“I know.”
Ellie closed her eyes for a moment and when she opened them, they zeroed in on me and it didn’t take much for me to read the sadness in them. “At the very least, if you go through with it, it’s only thirty days, right? If you could stay strong for thirty days, maybe it won’t be so bad? None of this sits right with me.”
Me either. I thought about Ellie telling me that he had enough money to make me disappear with the flick of his finger, but if he could do that to me, he could do it to my father as well.
Visions of that happening to my father crowded my brain and involuntarily made me shiver. I muttered a cuss word and threw my head back on the couch. I assumed it meant that anyone that was in my family or close friend circle would have a target on their backs if Damien didn’t get either his money or me.
It was a few moments before I sat back up and gasped. “There’s one thing I forgot to tell you!”
“Well?”
“The night I went to have dinner at my parents’ house, some random man shoulder-checked me on the way back to our apartment. He told me to watch myself. I also thought I might have been being watched at Elevate but wrote it off as me being paranoid. After all, it was hard to not have at least someone’s eyes on you when you’re in a crowded place.”
“Based on what we now know Damien is capable of, I wouldn’t put it past him to have you being watched.”
“Me neither. Plus, it would feed into his desire to intimidate me.”
“When is the deadline for having to tell him?”
“Tomorrow. He told me to be ready by 7:30.” I opened his message on my phone and showed it to Ellie. “It’s not even worth me running away.”
“Nope, because he’ll find you. The only way I could see this working out is if you could get all of the money your father owes him by tomorrow, but we both know that’s damn well impossible.”
“Yeah, I know.” I ran a hand through my hair and watched as my tresses fell onto my shoulder.
Ellie grabbed my other hand and squeezed. “Just remember, you need to make it out unscathed. You can’t get addicted to him.”
“That won’t be hard. I hate the man.”
The next evening, I watched as the time grew closer and closer to when I was supposed to be picked up. I could finally admit to myself that I would go to him, but I’d be damned if I was going to wear anything that resembled the dress that I had worn last night at Elevate. I threw my hair up into a high ponytail and changed into a green sweater, fresh denim jeans, and white Chucks that had seen better days. I looked more like a student than a working professional nine years removed from her college days, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t going there to please him; I was doing this to save Monroe Media Agency and all of its employees. And if he didn’t want me this way, that wasn’t my problem.
That pep talk helped energize me for whatever would happen tonight. That was the thing: I didn’t know what was coming next, nor did I know what to expect and I was sure he’d use that to his advantage. When the clock struck 7:28 p.m., I stood up and zipped my winter coat. I double-checked that I had my mace with me and closed my purse. It was better to be safe than sorry.
I shuffled toward the front door, my heart pounding harder with every step.
I watched as a set of headlights appeared at the corner of my street. The car moved past my building and, as I stepped out, the driver made a U-turn before pulling in front of my building and parking the car. A man in dark-colored clothes stepped out of the vehicle and, based on what I could see, he was the man who had picked up Damien from the Project Adoption gala.
“Miss Monroe?” he asked, which was him being polite because I was pretty certain he already knew who I was if my assumptions about Damien were correct. He was wearing what looked to be a black suit, which matched the sedan’s exterior. He looked more muscular than he had the night that Ellie and I saw him, but that could be my fault for not paying much attention to him because Damien had dropped his demands on me.
I rolled my shoulders back and looked him in the eye. I refused to be intimidated. “Yes, that’s me.”
“Right this way. My name is Rob and I’ll be taking you to Mr. Cross’s home this evening,” he said as he opened the door.
I stepped inside, without saying another word and he closed the door behind me.
Something in me was expecting to see Damien sitting inside the car just to throw me off, but he wasn’t there, so I had more time to myself before I had to deal with Satan in the expensive suit. Once Rob stepped into the driver’s seat and closed the door behind him, I heard the locks engage and I wondered if he had done it on purpose to keep me prisoner or if that was an automatic feature of the car.
“Could you tell me where we’re going?” I asked, just as Rob pulled out of the parking spot.
“We are going to Mr. Cross’s home. Let me know if you need anything.” He gave me a small smile and raised the divider between us.
I knew that was done as a way to get me to stop asking questions because he hadn’t given me the answer I wanted. Soft jazz tunes played in the background as we glided through New York City’s streets. Since I was alone, all I could do was think of all the different scenarios that might come about tonight. An idea popped into my head and I pulled out my cell phone to send my location to Ellie just in case something terrible happened. Once I had done that, I put my phone away. At the very least, someone would know where to start looking for my body. The thought of that made me tremble as I tried to ease concerns that something might happen to me.
The ride to Damien’s gave me even more time to think about his deal. Taking this deal didn't mean that he got to set all the rules. There were some hard limits to what I was willing to do and he was going to hear about them tonight whether he liked it or not. Some of the items I wanted to discuss I had been mulling over, but several of them I thought of on the drive to Damien’s. I typed them up on my phone to pass more time on my journey to what I called hell.
About twenty-five minutes later we were pulling up to a townhouse and I was somewhat shocked we were still in Manhattan. Rob carefully parallel parked the car as I held on to my phone like a crutch, hoping that it would calm my nerves because at least I had that lifeline still available to me. “I’ll walk you up to the front door.” With that, he opened the
door, letting himself out.
“Well, at least I won’t be going on my death march by myself,” I mumbled, making sure he didn’t hear me.
Rob stepped out of the vehicle and I watched him walk around the car before he reached my door. Every step he took made the blood rushing through my ears louder. I looked around and found myself on a relatively quiet Manhattan street that was filled with other townhomes that looked just like the one I was standing in front of. I waited for Rob and together we walked up the stairs to the front door.
“How long have you been working for Damien?” I asked.
“I’ve worked for Mr. Cross for seven years now.”
“Hmm. So I’m sure you’ve seen a lot.”
He didn’t respond, which told me all I needed to know. That did little to help my anxiety as we stood in front of the door.
“If you need anything, just press the number one on any phone in his place. I’m sure he’ll tell you to do the same.”
I nodded and he walked down the stairs as I was left staring at the red door. I knocked on the door and took a step back. I held my breath, awaiting what would be my fate.
9
Damien
“And you need to be here at 10 a.m. in order to catch the meeting with Ben Nichols. Information for that meeting will be on your desk and in the calendar invite.”
“That should work. Thanks, Melissa.”
Melissa had been my assistant for about three years, and I admit I would be much more disorganized without her even if it meant her staying at work until after seven to make sure I had everything I needed.
“Is there anything else you needed?”
“That will be all.”
“Have a good evening.”
I hung up my phone and walked into the dining area. I watched as Lucy, my personal chef, finished lighting the candles on the dining room table and I checked my Rolex. Anais and Rob should be arriving in about five minutes. I knew Rob was always punctual so if they were late, it was more than likely a result of Anais being stubborn. It was something I was looking forward to yet was the exact opposite of what I usually went for when it came to finding someone to fuck.
Savage Empire: An Enemies to Lovers Dark Billionaire Romance (Broken Cross Book 1) Page 6