by Vivian Gray
“Yes,” Laurie hissed out, her hands squeezed into fists that she had somehow ended up sitting on. “I want that.”
It was a want she’d never felt before. It wasn’t in her brain, it wasn’t in the parts she’d forced to lead her through life for the past fifteen or so years. She’d never let her body direct her towards anything. It was too important that she get somewhere safe. Somewhere she couldn’t be hurt again. Her life had become perfectly sterile in trying to keep it clean.
It had never occurred that she could maybe, just maybe, trust a person to keep her safe. It seemed alien. Terrifying. But she wanted it. Somehow she wanted it.
He let her go, but she saw how he was rock-hard all over again. She thought of wrapping her mouth around his cock to show him how grateful she was, but no. Not right now. Not unless he unzipped and pushed her down. Then she’d do it, happily. But right now? God, she needed a shower.
“Eat up,” he said, and she did. The sandwiches were good, and her stomach felt just full enough. She drank most of the water, and when he gestured, she stood up and took the clean clothes with her.
He led her through a long hallway and into a bathroom which wasn’t fancy, but it was clean. He pointed out the basic toiletries and then went to shut the door. Laurie’s heart started to race; she reached out and grabbed Jacob’s hand. At least it made her heart race for a different reason. He looked from her hand up to her, his eyes smoldering.
“Please don’t go,” she said. “I’m – this sounds incredibly stupid, but I don’t want to be alone. Please?”
He nodded, slowly. He pulled the door shut behind him, flipped the lock, then leaned back against the wall.
Laurie reached into the shower and turned the water on, pushing the faucets all the way to hot. She leaned back out and pulled the filthy slip off and tossed it into a corner. If she had her way, it would be burned. And then she noticed how Jacob was looking at her, and she realized he hadn’t seen her fully naked before.
She had a pretty good idea what he was seeing. She wasn’t an athlete or a porn star, so her body wasn’t the kind you’d see on magazine covers, but she looked pretty decent for a regular person. She didn’t have tattoos or piercings or even really scars. She’d kept her body blank. Just like her heart, just like her head, really. Just like her life.
Had that even really been living?
She spread her thighs just a bit, rubbing her fingers between her wet lower lips, giving him a little smile. His reaction was the opposite of what she expected. He took two steps towards her and slapped her hand away from her cunt.
“That’s mine,” he snarled out. “I own you, and I own your cunt, and you don’t touch it without my permission, understand?” Laurie whimpered, the snarl in his voice making her wetter. “You come on my cock, on my fingers, on my face. No one else’s, not even your own. Understand?” There was something soft under the harsh look on his face. It was hard to explain, hard to quite understand. But he wasn’t being cruel. She knew that, somehow.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, and his eyes went wide at the honorific.
“Get in the shower before I fuck you again right here,” he said.
She toyed with the idea of not moving and seeing if she could provoke him into using the belt again. Mmm, no. She had an idea that if she turned around and showed him her ass and asked for the belt, he’d give it to her happily. And she really did want the shower.
She stepped into the steaming spray and felt stress and sweat and fear run down the drain in moments. She soaped up her hair twice, knowing it would be dry and stripped for a few days, and not caring. She had woken up in that dark room, surrounded by frightened and weary girls, and when the water hit her, that image was overwhelming. Something in her tightened. She heard a noise, heard a sound, felt something hard under her knees. She had fallen? There was water everywhere, and she couldn’t breathe.
And then big arms encircled her, pulling her tight against a strong chest. Hands stroked her hair until she could breathe again. Jacob had stepped into the shower, fully dressed, to hold her until the flashback passed. She was crying. It was hard to tell because her face was still wet from the shower. That passed too, after a while.
She got herself together before the hot water ran out, so either she was still good at not falling apart, or the water heater here was amazing. Laurie didn’t care which. She pushed herself up to standing and Jacob moved with her. He tried to step away, though, and she wasn’t all the way better; she swayed on her feet, and he reached out to catch her gently.
“Hey,” he said. “What do you need?”
She thought. “Someone to hold onto.”
He didn’t hesitate. He stripped off his shirt and his jeans. He went for his boxers, then left them on. It was a sight, the way he was tenting them out, but she didn’t want to tease. She just wanted to be fucked. But in the shower, dizzy and slippery? That sounded like a terrible idea.
He helped her condition her hair and wash her body down with a cloth. She waited until he was running it up her inner thighs, and then she spread her legs wide. She heard his breath catch, and he ran the rough cloth over her pussy. She sighed happily, letting her weight fall back on the shower wall. He made a low sound, and the cloth slid over her again, pressing her lower lips apart so that the cloth rasped over her clit.
She hissed soft, and managed one soft word: “More.”
“Gladly,” he said, and then his mouth was closed over her pussy, harsh and cruel and punishing as he nipped and pulled at her clit. His fingers pressed into her, widening and fucking her while she cried out at the sensation. She came in moments, the tension in her mind bleeding out of her through the pulsing in her cunt. He nursed her through it with his tongue and his fingers, and then caught her when her knees started to buckle.
“Do you need?” She ran her hand lightly over his cock, but she could barely hold herself up.
He kissed her forehead. “Later. I think you need to get dressed and either get back to bed or get something else to eat. Lady’s choice.”
She ran through a checklist in her head. She was hungrier than those sandwiches, and she wanted something to drink that wasn’t water. Yeah. Dressed and food sounded good.
Chapter Seven
Jacob
Jacob watched Laurie getting dressed and found himself both impressed with her fortitude and worried about her stamina. The girl had been through so much, and she was sure she was fine. She’d fallen apart so hard in the shower though – he knew a PTSD flashback when he saw one – but she’d put herself back together almost as fast. That sort of recovery only happened when a person was terrified of being vulnerable. She talked a good game, but there was something else going on with her, something a lot darker than what she’d told him. Given that what she’d told him was being kidnapped and sold as a sex toy, that was pretty disconcerting. It got darker than that, sure, but mostly you only heard about it on the 9 o’clock news. Even when you walked mostly on the darker side of things.
Contradicting the things she said she wanted right now wasn’t a good idea though. The girl needed to feel like she had power so she could settle in and reclaim herself a bit. That was the best thing he’d ever seen in situations like this. Much as he hated to admit it, he’d seen more than one girl raped and hurt, crawling to the club for justice. The Talons dispensed it whenever they could. There was a difference between darkness and evil.
Leading Laurie out of the back of the clubhouse into the active club area felt strange. He’d never brought a girl here before. Girls were for fucking in the back; this was where business was done. Sometimes business looked like meeting with other club or gang leaders to sort out dealings. Sometimes business looked like meeting with suppliers to get product ready on time and distributed where it needed to go. And sometimes business looked like goofing with his men, showing them that he was one of them, that he could be trusted.
Jacob couldn’t remember a single time in his life when he wasn’t looking down
at himself from a place where he analyzed, considered and maneuvered his thoughts and actions. But this girl. This girl undid that in him. She pulled him down to the ground and locked him there. It wasn’t just her sweet cunt – although that was very, very sweet – or her bright eye; it was the way she moved, the way she laughed, the way she’d snapped at him when he’d said that it would have made a difference if she’d told them right away what had been done to her. Was he proud of admitting that she was right? Of course not. But also, she was. And one thing Jacob Lee had learned in his life was that when you found out you were doing something wrong, you goddamn fixed it.
Laurie looked around the room with an inscrutable expression. It was a busy night; the club girls were hanging on men, the bikers were loud and rowdy, there was at least one couple in a dark corner fucking like the world was ending, and frankly, on a night like tonight, Jacob was surprised there weren’t more.
“What did you do with the other girls?” Laurie asked, out of the blue.
He led her to a table a little away from the noise. “Beer?”
She nodded, and he caught the eye of Sherri who was working the bar. She’d bring around drinks and something to eat in a few minutes. For now, he could answer Laurie’s question.
“Depends. Some of them wanted to go home; we got them there safe. Some of them wanted to go to friend’s places, or just get out of town. We did that too.”
“Did anyone go to the police?”
He shook his head. He’d tried, in a couple of cases – pretty white girls like Laurie, the kind who would get attention in a case like this. All the brown girls in the world didn’t get people paying attention in the same way, and he hated it, but it was true.
The only thing getting him through the moment right now was that he and his men had never picked up girls from the Weapons’ auctions before. He’d been more careful with the others, making direct deals with women that the club was familiar with, being sure that they wanted what they were in for. The sex or the money or both; he didn’t care, so long as everyone was happy.
This had been something different. He’d put the club at risk, and he’d hurt women who hadn’t done a goddamn thing wrong.
“No,” he made himself say out loud. “No one was willing to take the risk.”
He thought she’d be upset, but she just gave a soft smile. A little sad. “I can see that.”
Sherri brought over a couple of opened long necks and a plate of nachos. “Wings too?” Sherri asked. Jacob pointed at Laurie who considered, then nodded.
“My brother kidnapped me,” Laurie said, then picked up a huge, cheesy chip and filled her mouth. It made it impossible for Jacob to ask her any questions, which both impressed him and pissed him off. She was clearly buying herself a minute to collect her head while she chewed. “For drug money,” she added, after she swallowed. He was grateful she hadn’t made him ask. “I hadn’t seen him in a decade, and he sold me to men with a van, and they gave him a bag as they tossed me in so hard I blacked out. I could have died, and he wouldn’t have cared.”
“Do you think he knew?” It was a fucking naive question, Jacob knew it as soon as the words were out, but he’d asked it all the same.
She scoffed. “Of course he did. Fucking son of a bitch.” She started to shake, and he watched her take a long, slow breath, followed by a steady pull of the beer. She smiled appreciatively; the club ran their own microbrew in the back. It was one of the few legal operations they had. “I can’t go back to my apartment. He knew I was there and – you know how it is. It worked for one fix, he’ll try something else next time, if he finds out I’m – whatever. I can’t go back there.”
Jacob nodded. “Where do you want to go?”
Laurie looked shy, nervous. “Can I stay here?”
Something inside of him buckled hard. This girl who made him feel like a person, staying here? He’d seen how her eyes lit up when he’d described the harshest version of how rough he could be with girls, and he’d had to stop himself from turning her over and fucking her right there. The urge came back, hard and insistent. Pull her up, push her down into his lap, fuck her screaming here in the club where everyone could see.
Later.
He pushed the thought away hard.
Find out how much of an exhibitionist the little slut was and then fuck her just like that.
Later.
He’d never spent so much time fucking throbbing as he had the past twenty-four hours.
“What would you do here?” He made his tone a little cold. Everyone in the club worked for their keep. Being the president’s girl would be more than enough, but still. She’d get bored if she were just his fuck toy for more than a few days; he could see that in her eyes.
“I’m... not sure.” She didn’t look insecure; that was intriguing. She looked like she was running numbers in her head, trying to work out the best combination that would get her what she needed. The girl had grown up rough, he knew it then. Maybe rougher than him, in a lot of ways. He’d had a tough time, between his mother leaving and his dad in deep with a biker gang, but he’d had a family. What kind of brother sold his damn sister? No matter how long they’d been estranged, no matter how hard he was craving… Asshole. “I can do a lot of things. I just don’t know what you need.”
It was the kind of play an undercover cop in a movie would make when they wanted to find out more about something that was none of their damn business. The only reason he believed her was that he wasn’t sure she was crafty enough to try something like that. Clever, yes, crafty, no, he didn’t think so.
“The club has a lot of different businesses. Not unusual ones, in a city like this. We manufacture high-quality pharmaceuticals.” He smiled at her snort of derision. “We provide protection to those who require it. We deal with local problems when we’re asked, or when it endangers us. We try to be a – well, force for good is overselling it by a lot, but we try not to be out and out evil. We don’t hurt people who don’t bother us, we don’t deal to kids or pimps, and we do our best to be on the right side of history. It’s about all we’ve got.”
If he’d had any doubts about her history, they were gone when she nodded calmly at all of that. “You do sell as well?”
He nodded.
“Everything?”
“Molly and pot, mostly. Molly, we make ourselves, and the recipes are sound. Actual MDMA, not that cheap Chinese knockoff shit that gets people killed.” He chuckled to himself. “Our weed business is practically legitimate these days. Sell to a bunch of people with prescriptions. Make brownies, tinctures, all that crap.”
“How do you sell? Not on street corners, clearly?”
He shook his head. “We distribute to vendors, some. We have direct customers. I’d like us to do more direct. Fewer middlemen mean better prices for our customers, fewer potential leaks for us. But we don’t have the communication network in place to get people what they want when they want it.”
She laughed. “You need an app.”
He blinked. “A what?”
“An app. You know, like the errand ones, or the ones where you buy your groceries and someone delivers them. Make it something innocuous. Bringing coffee or tea or something. And then you bring them their coffee and the rest of their order. Simple.”
It... it really was. “You said you were going to that boot camp thing. You can do this?”
Laurie took a moment, clearly considering. “Yeah. If I had the equipment, the resources. I’m an okay programmer, I’ll need to learn more. This has to be really secure, or you’re just putting yourself and your customers at risk. But yeah. I can do this.”
He grinned. “Then you have a place with the Talons, as long as you want it.”
She took another long pull of her beer and flashed another smile. “Just with the Talons? I thought I was earning a place in your bed, too.”
His cock leaped to absolute attention. It took everything he had not to just fuck her on the table right there. It would ruin the
nachos though. The wings were on their way. Sherri made amazing wings.
Jacob could fuck Laurie when they were done eating. He would. She’d taste spicy and sweet, and he’d fuck her until she clawed his back to ribbons.
Chapter Eight
Laurie
A month passed before Laurie realized what was happening. Jacob let her loose on the Internet with a credit card, telling her to spend what she needed to in order to get settled and have the equipment she needed to start building them an app. She now owned a top-end laptop. Jacob had told her to get some clothes while she was at it, and she’d realized for the first time in her life that she could just choose things she liked without needing to worry about if they would make her look professional enough, middle-class enough, anything enough. She’d been slowly getting to be friends with some of the other girls in the club – Delilah, among others, had decided to hang around for a while – and many of them came from rougher backgrounds than hers.