She shook her head and quickly sucked him back into her mouth as the guard pivoted toward them.
Luis placed a hand on the back of the head of the girl blowing him and looked at Tomi. “What did you do with my guard?”
“Knocked him out when he tried to rape me.”
Luis laughed. “Of course you did, my little spitfire. Carlos will be furious. He’ll demand retribution.” He stroked the girl’s hair as she continued. Tomi tried to focus on Luis’s face instead of the lurid act.
“I will have to give him something very special to make up for what you did.”
“What kind of special?” Tomi asked shakily.
“You’ll see. I’ll make sure you see exactly what your carelessness caused tonight.” Then Luis gestured to one of his other guards. “Take her to my bedroom. Chain her. If she escapes again, you pay with your life.”
The new guard was already walking toward her. He took her from the other man and dragged her behind him, back down the dark hallway to the last door. He didn’t even give her the opportunity to struggle. He threw her onto the bed and systematically strapped her ankles and wrists to the bed. And then he left and she was alone.
Dark thoughts flashed through her mind in a non-stop collision course of dread. What would he do? Allow Carlos to rape her? Beat her? Worse?
Tomi yanked on the bindings but didn’t manage to budge them an inch.
Luis opened the door. “Ah, good. Sanchez doesn’t mess around. He actually does what I tell him to do, which is why I reward him.” Luis stepped to the side so she could see Sanchez pulling the blonde behind him.
“What are you going to do to me?”
“Nothing at all. I am not going to touch you. I want to preserve you for your buyer.” Luis said in a calm, matter-of-fact voice that left her bones cold.
“If not you, then Carlos…” She shook, her terror taking control of her physical response.
“No, Carlos shouldn’t have touched you either. He will be punished for his disobedience.” As if on cue, two men dragged Carlos into the bedroom. He took one look at her and roared, blood covering his face from the wound on his temple.
Luis strolled casually over to his pissed off guard and pulled a slender silver knife from his tux. “You were told not to touch her.”
“Please, senor, I didn’t. She knocked me out. I—”
Luis held up a hand. “You did. And then you allowed her to disable you and escape.”
Carlos’s red face turned ashen in a second. “No, no, senor, I always obey.”
Tomi saw Luis nod at the two other guards, who then lifted Carlos and held him up for Luis. Her boss moved like a snake, striking before she could track his movements. A thin, bright red line appeared across Carlos’s meaty neck. He gurgled. His face turned red. Blood cascaded down his shirt.
It was like watching a horror movie she couldn’t pause or fast forward.
Luis wiped his blade on Carlos’s arm, then tucked it back into the hidden sheath at his waist. Carlos gave one more gurgle before his head dropped, silent. Tomi let out a horrified gasp. He was dead.
“Carlos got exactly what he deserved for disobeying me,” Luis said. “He’d served me loyally for over ten years, and I didn’t hesitate to slit his throat.” He waved the men away, who dragged Carlos’s limp body between them. When they were alone, Luis approached the bed and Tomi cringed as far away from him as she could.
“You will be kept in this room until the auction. No one will touch you. You will remain cooperative when my crew arrives to clean you and fix your hair and make-up. If they fail in any way, they will meet the same end as Carlos—regardless of whether you caused it.”
“How could you?”
“How could I not? I must protect my investment. I know you want to go back out there and party. Your background history showed you to be quite the club hopper.” Luis leaned down and stroked the exposed flesh of her arm. “But you must resist this time, Tomi. François likes his slaves fresh and unmarked. You see, he prefers to brand them himself. I think you will find he’s quite the sadistic master. The perfect man to teach you a lesson in obedience. And you will be his eager slave.”
Her entire body quaked. “Why do you think I would do anything you say?”
Luis’s dark eyes crinkled, as if he were amused, and he pulled a phone from his pocket, flashing the screen in front of her face. Carrie’s texts including where she was staying were displayed on the screen. “Because if you don’t, my friends in Mexico will scoop her up, too.” Luis swiped across her screen, bringing up the selfie Carrie had snapped of herself in the airport. “She’s not as beautiful as you, Tomi. I can’t guarantee she’d be treated as well as you have.”
Tomi’s entire body temperature dropped to below zero. Her lips went numb and her tongue grew thick with horror. “No.”
Luis straightened and brushed invisible wrinkles from his jacket. “You have my word I will not touch her if you cooperate.”
“Why?” Tomi cried out. “Why do you need my cooperation? You’re selling me!”
“Because Francois doesn’t know it yet, but he is going to die and you are going to help me kill him.” Luis gave her a calculating and cold once over. “You are exactly the type of woman he wants. I’ve been searching for a way to get inside his operation and tonight, you presented the perfect opportunity.”
Luis headed for the door, glancing over his shoulder at her before he left. “Think about it Tomi, your cooperation for your precious best friend’s life. I’ll give you a few days to think it over.”
He walked out without another look, leaving her chained to the bed in a room doused with blood. Oh my god.
3
One week later…
Cole Fury leaned his shoulder against the massive metal column’s running down the center of the cavernous warehouse, separating the bar area from the holding area. The whole place had been cleared for tonight’s event. Cole studied the occupants quietly, appearing bored in his black pants and long-sleeved fitted black shirt, even though his senses were on high alert.
This was his first glimpse inside El Oscuro’s world—and his first chance of getting a glimpse at the inner workings of the man’s operations. No one knew anything about his true identity, not even the FBI. The bastard was as slippery as a ghost and as deadly as the Grim Reaper. His specialty: sex-slave trafficking. He was good at flying under the radar 99% of the time—so good, Cole’s brothers had nearly tripped over their own feet when they’d finally gotten a substantial lead on him.
Fury Security, the private security company he ran with his brothers and former Navy SEAL teammates, was relatively new to the investigation. The FBI had been tracking El Oscuro, the dark one, for months in connection with four missing women, all stolen from BDSM clubs, but their lack of leads and his cash drain had prompted the case to be dropped.
It wasn’t until Adam Wise, Cole’s friend and retired FBI agent, had come to Cole for help that the case had been reopened. Adam’s submissive, Tara, had gone missing. Adam suspected El Oscuro, but couldn’t get his old employer to re-open the investigation.
Cole’s and Adam’s lifestyle had provided the perfect toehold into the underground world. Adam, owner of Shade BDSM Club in the Dallas area, had somehow managed to secure their invitation to tonight’s auction.
“Jesus Christ, Cole, you look like you want to vomit. At least try to pretend like you’re enjoying yourself.” Adam sidled up to him in a custom-cut black suit, his closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair the only sign that the man was pushing into his late forties.
“Just playing the part. Can’t look too eager.” Cole shifted and crossed his arms over his chest, his tight muscles bunching and stretching the fabric of his shirt.
He had to play the part of a restless Dom, one who’d grown bored with the local scene and longed for something darker. The boredom part wasn’t much of a pretense. Something inside of Cole had shifted. He was a favorite of the subs on the circuit, but he’d grow
n bored of their willing attention.
There was only one woman in his life that he’d ever dreamed of holding in his arms forever—and she’d taught him how ignorant those types of dreams were. Cole wasn’t the type of man who needed to be taught the same lesson twice. He’d given Tomi his heart a decade ago, and she’d crushed it. He’d never bothered trying to put it back together.
“Okay, forget what I said. Go back to looking disgusted—you’re scaring the crowd.” Adam’s quietly amused voice drew Cole from his thoughts.
Indeed, the tuxedo-outfitted men closest to them were edging away, casting nervous glances in his direction. “I like my space.” Cole said it loud enough for their neighbors to hear, causing the already scurrying rats to move even farther away. When he had enough clearance, he whispered, “You see our target yet?”
They’d managed to find tonight’s event and location by tracking the whereabouts of a Russian arms dealer with a penchant for buying slaves. This was the third auction Adam and Cole had attended, each time looking for any intel on Tara, but the auctions they’d attended had been completely on the up-and-up. Tonight was different.
The majority of the cultured occupants pretending to be Dom’s appeared completely out of place in the grungy warehouse, but a few men – those Cole recognized as suspected criminals and terrorists – seemed completely at home.
“Not yet,” he said in a tone only Cole could hear. “You’re drawing attention from the guards.” Adam gave a slight nod in the direction of the open archway, where two brutes who wore their tuxedos as naturally as an overweight biker would wear a leotard had zoned in on him. Instead of changing his behavior, Cole gave them a silent nod, as if a salute to their profession.
The men looked just as bored as he did. Cole’s move must have worked because their gazes flickered from him to the rest of the room. “It’s good now.”
“Were your brothers able to dig up anything new?”
Cole shook his head. “Only what we had as of this morning. This appears to be a legitimate slave auction tonight—the women who signed up for ‘sale’ did it consensually. The instructions sent out to most of the attendees were the same we’d managed to get – history, consent forms and minimum purchase price.”
Adam stroked his clean-shaven jaw. “Which is why everyone who’s here is in the millionaire club. You did nail down our cover for tonight, right?”
They’d set Adam Wise up as Adam Devine, wealthy oil baron with suspected ties to illegal arms sales. Cole’s cover had been easy. Dishonorable discharge from the SEALs. Numerous arrests for assault. Sadist.
“Yep. Everything appears to be on the up and up. But Clint was able to get a picture of the invitation sent to Chaplinsky, and his looked different. Different color, different text.” It had taken Cole’s younger brother two days of surveillance to get a snap of the Russian opening the invitation inside his study. Thank god for high-powered lenses. “The image was grainy, but we were able to clean it up enough on the computer to read part of the last paragraph. Sounds like there’s another auction going on here tonight that the rest of the crowd wasn’t invited to.”
And it was that auction that Cole and Adam had to find. El Oscuro wasn’t only hosting a consensual slave and master exchange tonight—he was using this party as a cover for human sex slave trafficking.
A killing glint shone in Adam’s smoky gray eyes. Two of the missing women had disappeared from his club over the past couple of months, including Adam’s girlfriend, Tara. Beyond the BDSM connection, the victims had been impossible to predict. There had been absolutely no distinguishing features or preferences when it came to looks or hair coloring or size and shape. The only consistent marker was that most of the victims were young and relatively new to the scene. The fact that the kidnap victims were so unpredictable was precisely why the FBI had been unsuccessful.
“Tara’s been gone for nearly a month,” Adam said. “I still can’t believe those assholes wouldn’t help me find her.”
Cole restrained the urge to pat his friend on the shoulder; instead, he just continued to look bored and nonchalant. “They couldn’t nail him down before. We will find her. You have my word.”
“Her family is desperate. Her father called me again today at lunch, and dammit, I didn’t have anything to tell him,” Adam said in a voice rough with raw emotion.
Tara Garrett was an aspiring graphic designer, a senior in college from an upper-middle-class family. She wasn’t a nobody. She wasn’t an orphan. She’d gone to the club that night with a fairly large group of friends. Nothing about her had screamed vulnerable victim.
The people who’d taken her had known exactly what they were doing. They’d pulled up in an unmarked black van with no plates and no identifying features, and grabbed her before anyone realized what was happening. For good measure, they’d attacked her in the one corner of the parking lot not covered by the security cameras.
“You will after tonight. You’re better at reading people than anyone I’ve ever met, Adam. Use your skills to help us find her. Stick to the plan.”
Adam was a twenty-year veteran of the FBI as a master interrogator. His natural ability to see through artifice and lies had been honed to pinpoint precision by his experience and training. It was one of the reasons he was such a damn good Dom too—he was able to read his sub’s thoughts and needs without her telling him.
Tonight, it might give them the edge they needed to figure out who else at the party would be attending the private auction. They needed to find the men who were here to purchase real slaves.
“You spot Chaplinsky?” The Russian oil baron, and illegal arms dealer, had put out word on the black market that he was looking for a way into dealing inside the U.S. And Adam Devine just happened to be able to set up that connection.
Adam’s lids lowered over his eyes as he scanned the crowd slowly and thoroughly, like a lethal tiger on the hunt. Cole leaned back and watched the dominant do his magic.
The sophisticated facial recognition processors in the arsenal of the FBI and the military could scan and tag known criminals, but that wasn’t the known Cole Fury needed tagged tonight. He needed the natural intuition possessed by Adam Wise.
“The bald penguin in the suit in the corner. Lacquered finish, white diamond in the center.” Adam’s low spoken warning drew Cole’s attention to the man in question.
He had the round red nose of an old alcoholic, and a pate barely covered by combed over gray hair that screamed for shaving. His broad shoulders spoke of a man once active, but his middle now stretched the white fabric of his button-up shirt. “Yep, that’s him.”
Adam nodded. “Look at his eyes. He’s looking at the rest of the people around him like they’re beneath him. He knows this is a farce. Follow him and we’ll find the real auction.”
“Okay, you know what to do. Let’s go make our introduction.” Cole straightened from his leaning position, lifted his jaw, and assumed the expression of a bored sadist. He followed Adam’s lead, mingling in and out of the small clusters of wealthy businessmen looking for a little fun, drawing closer to their target by the minute. Adam was an expert at manipulating those around him, and Cole hung back, silent and lethal. None of the men they spoke to seemed to be in the know; hopefully red nose was their in.
They passed the Russian. Cole turned abruptly, forcing his friend back a step. Adam bumped into their target, sending a wave of the man’s drink over his hand. “Idiot,” the man said with a harsh, guttural accent.
“My apologies, please allow me.” With the smooth, practiced precision of a man used to hosting a large group of people, Adam lifted his hand in the air and signaled the nearest server. “Would you please replace Mr.—”
“Chaplinsky,” the man filled in abruptly.
“Could you fetch Mr. Chaplinsky a new single malt scotch? And one for me as well.”
Chaplinsky’s bushy gray brows lifted as the butler scurried away. “How did you know?”
Adam lifted his
own eyebrows knowingly. “I can recognize a fellow connoisseur across the room. If I had to guess, I’d say you were enjoying a sip of Macallan 64.”
Chaplinsky’s eyes narrowed in suspicion, but the next moment he let out a guttural laugh and clapped Adam on the back. “It’s refreshing to talk to a cultivated man after spending the night surrounded by swine.”
Playing the role to a T, Adam let out a long low sigh. “Unfortunately, in my country such…false fronts…are necessary to conduct certain transactions.”
“You are here for the auction?” Chaplinsky asked carefully.
Adam lifted his chin with the regal bearing of a king. “Indeed, I am.”
“I didn’t catch your name,” Chaplinsky said.
“Adam Devine. I have a modest family-owned oil business here in Texas.” Cole and Adam had worked out their respective identities before entering the party. Chaplinsky wouldn’t have time to find out if Adam was telling the truth.
“Wonderful,” Chaplinsky said with a hint of delight. “I am in the business myself in the motherland. I’ve been looking for ways to expand into the States. But your government regulations on foreign trading are quite—”
“They are ridiculous,” Adam finished for the man. “Unless you know someone on the inside.”
Cole could practically see the gleam of greed in the fat man’s bloodshot eyes.
“Perhaps we could continue this conversation and figure out an arrangement that would benefit us both.” Chaplinsky pulled a small white card out of his custom tuxedo.
Adam took it and slipped it inside his pocket with a smile. “I look forward to it.”
The server still hadn’t returned, and true to his role as a Dom master, Adam glanced at Cole, all hints of joviality disappearing. “Go find that lazy servant.”
Cole dipped his head and spun on his heel, leaving the two men. Before he was out of range, he heard Adam say, “My bodyguard, I go nowhere without him.”
Looking for all the world as if he were following his boss’s instructions, Cole left the gathering area to seek out the server. He soon found him, already on his way back to the two men with the drinks in hand. Instead of returning to the others just yet, Cole stepped into a dirty black restroom, locked the door and pulled a small thumb-sized tracking device from his pocket and turned it on. A red light flickered on the screen indicated a successful operation. Adam had already planted the corresponding tracker somewhere on the Russian’s body. Even if they weren’t able to use him to secure an invitation to the private auction tonight, they’d be able to find where it was hosted.
Wild Fury_Fury Security Page 3