Prisoned Series Box Set

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Prisoned Series Box Set Page 44

by Marni Mann


  “Don’t wait too long. You know I get impatient.”

  “Yes.” I wanted to laugh, but that wouldn’t be appropriate. “I know.”

  “Until next time, Mina.”

  The call was disconnected before I could say another word.

  I leaned my body into the short wall and looked over the banister. The girls didn’t understand how good they had it. Most of them had stayed in their parents’ houses until they were eighteen, and we didn’t find them until they went to college.

  Not me.

  Arman had been my boss for fourteen years. He had recruited me at the age of sixteen when my mother sold me to him. She’d thought it would be a way to make money for her and my siblings. I wondered if she’d honestly believed I would return or if she’d ever seen more cash besides the lump sum Arman had paid her.

  I sure as hell never gave her a dime.

  And I never got those answers from her, nor had I ever asked those questions.

  I’d slaughtered that bitch on my twenty-first birthday.

  I left the phone on the corner of the furthest chair, and I went back inside. I knew Arman wanted some information, and I would get that for him soon. But there was someone more important that I needed to tend to first—the man who was in my bed, whose tattooed hands I wanted all over my body.

  Twenty-Four

  Tyler

  Four Years and Three Months Ago

  “Yerekha,” Mina said when I answered her call, “I need you to come to my house.”

  I held the cell with my chin and shoulder and stuck the clean laundry into my drawer. “When?”

  “Now.”

  With my hands free, I pulled the phone off my ear and checked the time. As long as I didn’t spend more than a few hours at her place, I’d be able to make it back and get ready without being late to work.

  “I’ll head out right now.”

  “Bring me a coffee,” she barked before she disconnected our call.

  I slipped on a light jacket and a cross-body bag and locked my apartment door. Since there was a bakery on the next block, I walked over and placed an order. This wasn’t the first time Mina had asked me to bring her coffee, and because her tastes were so complicated, I kept her exact request noted in my phone.

  While I waited for our drinks to be made, I clicked on the phone app that would send a car to pick me up. As soon as I paid, the driver was already outside. He helped me with the door, and I climbed into the back.

  When Wynter and I had been looking at places to live, I had purposely suggested a section of town that was close to the university but on the opposite side of the city as Mina. Some of the girls lived in her area and liked it. Even back then, when The Achurdy had meant everything to me and I was unable to see any wrong, I’d still wanted my space.

  I was so thankful for that.

  As I watched the buildings pass by the back seat window, I checked the date on my phone. The number stung when I saw it. Exactly three months had passed since I met Jae at the bar. And, during every hour of those ninety days, besides the ones I’d been asleep, he had been on my mind. I’d made myself so many promises when I curled into a ball on my shower floor. I’d kept almost all of them. But had I scrubbed his memories from my body to the point where I never thought of him again?

  Definitely not.

  I never worried he would show up at my building, that he’d be waiting for me outside whenever I left. I was confident that the way I had left things between us showed him how serious my situation was and how nothing could ever happen between us. Not that he would even have any interest in seeing me again. I’d done nothing but avoid his questions and freak out, and I’d ended the evening with two panic attacks and tears.

  If there was ever a sign to stay the hell away from someone, a giant neon arrow was pointed directly at me.

  But, now, whenever I went out, I’d find myself looking for him. When I passed someone tall and muscular with light scruff on his face, I’d stare a second longer to see if he was Jae. When I saw a pair of tattooed hands, I’d check to see if they were his. When I heard his name mentioned on the street, I’d stop and glance all around to find those familiar black eyes.

  It was never him. I just couldn’t escape the reminders.

  And these thoughts, which went deeper than his appearance, made absolutely no sense. I knew nothing about him. I only had these brief memories to hold on to, yet I clung to them like the door handle in his car with two hands and a squeezing grip.

  God, I missed that stranger.

  I shook my head, realizing I had arrived at Mina’s, and I got out of the car and knocked on her door.

  “Hey, Tyler,” Nix said when he opened it. “Come on in.”

  I never asked, but I was pretty sure he lived with Mina. He was always here whenever I came over, often working on a piece of art or tattooing one of the girls. The deer skulls were mandatory, but the girls would hire him to do lots of other pieces. The ink he put on them was some of the best I had ever seen.

  But tattoo artist wasn’t his only role with The Achurdy. Nix was also in charge of finding the marks. Rumor was, if he liked you, the men he’d assign to you were known to be higher spenders. And he seemed to like the girls he tattooed the most.

  I only had a deer skull.

  I didn’t plan on getting any more.

  “She’s in her office,” he said. “Go on in. She’s expecting you.”

  I walked through the living room and into the hallway, and then I knocked on her office door.

  “Come in, Tyler,” she said.

  I turned the knob and pushed the heavy wood, slipping inside to find her sitting behind her desk.

  “Take a seat.”

  I left the door open and sat across from her.

  She was typing something into her phone and never looked up. When she finally did, she eyed the coffee and said, “Did you remember the sweetener this time?”

  “Yes.”

  I’d remembered it last time, too.

  She could be so moody sometimes.

  She took a sip, her cheeks bulging as she swished it around in her mouth. “We need to talk.”

  “Okay.”

  “Some information has been brought to my attention, and I’m not happy about it.”

  My heart started to pound, my throat suddenly feeling extremely tight.

  Was the information about me? And Jae? Had one of the girls seen me with him and told Mina about it instead of coming to me?

  Three long, lonely months had passed. Why had it taken this long for her to find out?

  The eggs I’d eaten for breakfast were threatening to come up.

  “Sadie will no longer be working for The Achurdy.”

  Wait. “What?”

  She folded her arms over the desk and leaned forward, as though she were trying to get closer to me. “She’s been breaking some of our rules, and I have zero tolerance for that.”

  “Which ones?”

  She turned her head a little to the side and gazed at me. This wasn’t the kind of stare where she was zoning out on my face. This was the kind where she was seeing directly into my soul. “I called you in because I wanted to know if you’d noticed any strange behavior from her lately.”

  I set my coffee down on her desk. I was too jittery to drink it. “What do you mean by strange?”

  “Has she broken any rules that you know of?” I opened my mouth, but she cut me off, “This is a safe place, Tyler. Whatever you tell me stays between us, and it won’t go any further. I asked you to come over because I trust you, and I know you want what’s best for our company. The only way we can ensure that is by having open communication. If one family member is acting in a way she shouldn’t, it will cause an unhealthy environment for all of us. We can’t have that.”

  My skin was tingling.

  Even though she was talking about Sadie, this still felt like a warning. If that was what she intended, I heard her loud and very clear. I wouldn’t be seeing Jae again. And
I wouldn’t be breaking any other rules.

  “I haven’t seen a thing. I swear.”

  Her eyes widened like I’d slapped her.

  “Sadie and I aren’t super close. If something were going on with her, I wouldn’t have noticed, and she definitely wouldn’t have told me.”

  I was telling her the truth.

  Some of the girls I just didn’t connect with, and Sadie was one of them. Her personality was too strong for me.

  “I’m disappointed in you.” She picked up her phone and tapped on the screen.

  I slid to the end of my chair and crossed my hands on her desk. “Why?”

  The way she ignored me was even more of a punishment than what she had said.

  “Mina, why are you disappointed in me?”

  Had I really done something wrong?

  And, even if I had known something about Sadie, which I didn’t, why would I want to be a rat? I’d worked for The Achurdy long enough to know that they didn’t give promotions. So, there was no advantage to getting someone in trouble.

  She looked over her phone and handed me a piece of paper. “Take a look at this.”

  I scanned the sheet. It was a breakdown of my sales for the previous two weeks. Those were then compared to last month’s figures and the ones from the year before. I was down by about twenty-five percent. But, based on what I’d heard, the other girls weren’t doing any better than me.

  “It’s bullshit,” she snapped.

  I slowly glanced at her.

  “You’re not trying hard enough, and your sales show that. You were one of my best, Tyler. Now, you’re at the bottom. Get it together.” She looked back at her phone. “You can leave now.”

  I left the paper on her desk. I didn’t need the reminder. The expression she had given me was plenty, and that glare wouldn’t be leaving me for a while.

  On my way out, I passed Nix. He was sitting in front of an easel, painting a lion so similar to the one Mina wore on her finger.

  “Hey,” I said, getting his attention, surprised by the thought that had popped into my head. “If I ever wanted to get another tattoo, would you do it for me?”

  He wiped his hand over his beard. “Yeah, I’d do it. Do you have a design in mind?”

  I didn’t know where the idea had come from, but I knew exactly what I wanted. Today hadn’t just shown me another side of Mina; it’d proven that there were consequences to breaking the rules. And it’d reinforced that whatever had happened between Jae and me could never happen again. Even though it had almost been nothing, those moments had felt like everything. But that was all they were now—moments and memories.

  God, that hurt. Worse than I wanted to admit to myself.

  I held out the hand that Nix hadn’t tattooed and pointed at my ring finger. “I want a teardrop right here.”

  He checked out the space and the approximate size that I had circled over the spot. His skin was so full of designs, it made mine look boring.

  “Do you want to do it now?”

  I looked at his ink again—the letters across his knuckles, the shapes on his hands, and the ones traveling up his wrists.

  I had to stop searching for similarities.

  I had to stop thinking about Jae.

  All that was left of him were teardrops.

  And, now, one would be permanently marked on my skin.

  “Yes,” I said, “let’s do it.”

  Twenty-Five

  Beard

  I was woken by the scent of sex and a raging fucking hard-on. With the amount of times I’d gotten off last night and early this morning, I was surprised my dick hadn’t been rubbed raw. But it was standing as tall as hell, and the heat from Layla’s and the stripper’s skin was making me want them again.

  Both women had slept on me. Layla was cuddled into my chest, and the stripper had a hand and leg wrapped over me.

  It didn’t matter which way I moved; I had a set of tits on each side, cunts that had curved right around my cock, and asses that weren’t afraid of a good pounding. If it weren’t for work, I’d never leave this bed ever again.

  I rolled toward Layla, reaching down to her bare pussy, running my fingers toward her clit.

  She groaned without opening her eyes. “What time is it?”

  I looked over her shoulder to the nightstand where there was an alarm clock. “Ten.”

  “We have less than an hour before we have to meet with Panig.”

  “It won’t take me that long to eat your pussy. We’ve got plenty of time.”

  Her eyes finally opened. Damn, she was hot after all those hours of fucking. Hair nice and messy, skin a little flushed.

  “I need to get ready and put a few bites of something down my throat.” She smiled back at me, and I knew she was reading my mind. “I don’t mean your cum, Beard, and mine isn’t going to be what you eat for breakfast either. Go get in the shower. I’ll meet you in there.”

  I growled, grabbing both their asses, and slid out of bed. Once I got in the bathroom, I turned on the hot water and stepped into the shower. There were four heads, and they all sprayed on me at once. I adjusted each one to fit my height, and while the water massaged my muscles, I put my arms over my head and used the wall to hold me up.

  My skin stung from all the places the stripper had bitten me and from the scratches they had both left on my back. Sex scars. I fucking loved them. And I loved that my beard felt thick with all the cum that was coated inside it.

  As the steam filled the shower, the smell of sex became even stronger in here. It was gone the second I picked up one of the bottles and poured the soap into my hand. I rubbed the bubbles over my face and down my cock, scrubbing it into my balls.

  “Washing me off?” Layla asked as she stuck her head into the doorway of the shower.

  Her voice was so much lighter now, but it didn’t sound as good as her screams. She’d given them to me last night whenever I’d asked. So had the stripper. They hadn’t been as loud as I’d wanted. Not as piercing, desperate, needy.

  I’d get them there.

  “If it didn’t change the color of my beard, I’d keep you in there all day.”

  She joined me under the spray. “Mmm, let me help.”

  While she scratched her fingers through the hair, I watched the way hers fell over her tits, using the ends of it to rub against her hardened nipples. The second she pulled her hands away from my cheeks, I dipped my lips into her neck and licked all the way to her chin. I circled her waist, holding her steady, as my cock pressed into her stomach. She felt so good. So soft, so goddamn slippery under the water.

  “Got room for one more?” the stripper asked.

  Layla smiled at me. Shit, those lips were fucking powerful.

  We both turned toward the stripper, who stood by the glass door.

  “Hell yes,” I replied. “Get over here.”

  She let out a noise that sounded like a giggle and hurried over to us. Now, I had both women sharing all four showerheads with me. Some of their fingers were soaping my body; some were running over their skin. Shampoo suds were falling from all our heads.

  There were so many fucking hands in here, I couldn’t tell who they all belonged to. I just knew one of mine was inside a cunt, and the other was palming a tit while my lips were on flesh that tasted like an island.

  Shit, these were my kind of lesbians.

  Panig and his assistant met Layla and me in the lobby of the building he had purchased. Introductions were made, we shook hands, and he invited us into one of the units that he had converted into an office. Layla had told me he was based out of Manhattan. He felt really Miami to me. The dude wore his hair slicked back and had on a light-pink shirt. His shoes were fucking white.

  I hoped his construction had more edge than his goddamn wardrobe.

  “I know you were probably expecting an office downtown and a sales center along with some renderings of the building. We’re working on all that. My team is in the process of relocating as we speak, s
o within the next month, we’ll be fully up and running.”

  “It’s all good,” I said, taking a seat on one of the couches. “We’re just here to talk contracts. I don’t require anything real fancy.”

  Layla sat next to me, and Panig and his assistant took the couch across from us. On the table between us were four bottles of water and several different stacks of paper.

  “Layla mentioned you’re heading out of town tonight, so I don’t want to keep you too long. I just want to make sure we’re all in agreement with the latest round of changes.”

  “You gave me what I’d asked for, so yeah, I’m happy.”

  Layla nodded. “I feel the same way.”

  “Perfect,” Panig said. His assistant handed him a pen, and on the right stack of sheets, he initialed the bottom of each and signed his name at the end. “This is to settle the purchasing of the condo. We have to keep things official for the county.”

  “I get it.”

  He gave his assistant back the pen and said, “Any last-minute requests?”

  The terms of the cash loan were exactly what I’d asked for, and I was more than satisfied with the return I’d get. Everything else—the price of the condo, the design, the parking—was about to be finalized once my name was on those documents.

  “Nah,” I said. “I’m ready to sign.”

  He gave me the documents, and I handed them to Layla. She slowly scanned them and finally gave them back, nodding to tell me she liked what she had seen. I initialed right next to Panig’s, and I signed on the opposite line.

  “Let me get you copies,” the assistant said to me, moving over to the printer. She came back with the pages tucked into a sealed folder that she stuck on the table in front of me.

  “Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s discuss the cash.” Panig glanced at the bag at my feet, one that I’d filled with the contents of my safety deposit box after Layla, the stripper, and I had eventually gotten out of the shower. “Layla tells me you’re in for half a million. Once we meet the first construction deadline, you’ll be willing to put in another half. You’re considering two million, max, with a quarter of a point raise after each share is invested, and the interest will be paid to you monthly.”

 

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