Red Hot Alphas: 11 Novels of Sexy, Bad Boy, Alpha Males (Red Hot Boxed Sets Book 2)

by Jo Raven

  Tryp’s step-father’s house may be a fortress, but it was also a fire trap.

  And there were a lot of very young children up there.

  Elfie didn’t like it at all. She hadn’t even seen stairs or even fire escape ladders on the third floor balconies. This place could be a lot worse than The Station if it went up in flames.

  Tryp’s dark head rose, and he looked up the staircase to the floors above, searching the faces. One woman’s gasp echoed through the silent castle.

  An older man came in the front doors, and women leaned and shoved to close the heavy doors behind him. He glared at Elfie and Tryp and walked over to stand on the base of the stairs like he was presiding on a dais. His brown hair and eyebrows didn’t match the gray stubble on his hollow cheeks, and the cheap suit he wore hung off his skeletal frame.

  He smiled, and his crooked, white teeth bared in a snarl. “Back for Sariah again, Tryfon?”

  Oh, crap. Elfie felt all her hope deflate out of her. His step-father had come home early.

  Tryp stared up at the older man, his eyes narrowed and creased, his generous mouth pressed in an angry line. “How many wives do you have now, Kumen?”

  “Twenty-two, far more than you’ll ever have.”

  “Hell, yeah.”

  Gasps echoed through the dry air up to the vaulted ceiling.

  Oh, mild profanity. Elfie wanted to roll her eyes, but she widened them instead, trying not to react and give anything away.

  “You’ve been talking to a lot of people, Tryfon.” Kumen’s pointed smile was more creepy, and Elfie shuffled closer to Tryp before she even noticed what she was doing. “Now, you’ve brought someone with you, presumably to see for herself. Is she a reporter?”

  Elfie’s wussy hands were shaking, and she pressed them to the back of her head to steady herself.

  “She’s just a roadie,” Tryp said. “No one will listen to a girl like her.”

  Elfie ground her teeth trying to not react on so many levels. Tryp may be trying to save her, but really, roadie? She really, really wanted to leave, and she kept inching toward the front door because she wanted to crawl out of it and into the afternoon sunlight outside.

  Surely, they would threaten her and Tryp and then let them go. Tryp must have been exaggerating about them shooting people.

  “I don’t think she should leave,” Kumen said, resting his hand on the curved railing. “We’ll keep her as a handmaiden.”

  “No!” Tryp yelled, and he shifted his elbow in front of Elfie’s arm like he was trying to shield her. Elfie’s breath caught at the panic in his voice. He said, “She is not a fallen woman to be taken as a handmaiden. She’s a virgin and innocent.”

  Tryp had dropped into the pretentious cadence that preachers used, kind of authoritarian, kind of stuck-up, but Elfie was too busy hiding behind him to analyze it. She wished she could pat her pockets to calm herself, but she eyed the kid and Teancum, both holding their rifles at their waists, trained on her and Tryp.

  Teancum pointed his rifle at Tryp’s temple.

  She really shouldn’t move.

  “She’s a virgin?” Kumen asked, peering around Tryp to lock eyes with Elfie, but he jerked his head back to stare at Tryp. “And how would you know?”

  “I tried to have my way with her, but she fought me off like a virtuous woman. She is an innocent.”

  Behind Elfie, Teancum cleared his throat. “Elder Kumen?”

  Oh, God. His drone had probably seen them necking in the grass. She squeezed her eyes shut because surely he was going to narc and then they would beat Tryp up or something.

  “I didn’t speak to you, Brother Teancum,” Kumen snapped.

  Teancum nodded and looked out the thin window, tapping the stock of his rifle like he was working off bad temper. He muttered, “Fine.”

  Tryp raised his voice to speak over them. “Her modesty is unparalleled, but Elfie is the kindest and most generous of women. I had been sick, and she nursed me to health as tenderly as the sweetest of mothers.”

  Elfie’s thighs were shaking.

  Tryp continued, “She has inspired me to be a better man. I was a drunk and well on my way to being a drug addict, but I didn’t want her to see me like that. When I am with her, I don’t think about worldly things. She makes my thoughts pure.”

  His hyperbole was freaking her out. Her legs were shaking so hard that she sat back on her heels. The kid with the gun glanced at her when she moved, but her terror-huge eyes must have mollified him because he looked back up at Kumen.

  Tryp’s tight voice sounded like he was choking. “She’s beautiful. Her hair is the color of sunlight, and her eyes are cornflower blue. She’s sweet. She’s kind. She can teach ballet to the girls.”

  Teach ballet, her lily-white ass. She could blow this house to the fucking moon if it didn’t have so many babies in it and not enough doors.

  “Any man would be lucky to have her as a wife. She would be an angel in the house for a husband and a loving mother to their children.”

  Kumen asked, “And why is she traveling with you, if she is a modest virgin?”

  “I insisted she accompany me. I was going to disguise her as a wife or a daughter and sneak her into your house to find Sariah and convince her to leave with me.”

  “So she is a virgin?” The avarice in his blue eyes disgusted Elfie.

  “Yes,” Tryp said. “She’s a virgin. She is not to be a handmaiden.”

  “Well then,” Kumen said. “Merridane, Jonquile, take the girl and ascertain if she is a virgin.”

  Two women, both with their blond hair in puffy Gibson Girl buns and wearing prairie-girl dresses in yet more shades of sherbert, walked down the stairs and to a door on the side, and then they stopped and waited for her.

  Three pale faces far above Elfie withdrew from the balcony.

  The boy gestured with his gun for Elfie to stand up and walk toward the women.

  Before she could stand, Tryp grabbed her, his dark eyes frantic, and held her cheek to his, whispering quickly, “I love you. No matter what happens, know that I love you. Remember that. Don’t let them break you. Wait for your chance. I’ll be watching over you. Know that I’m with you in your heart and that I love you.”

  They were going to kill him.

  She gasped around the sob that had been choking her. “No, Tryfon, no. Please don’t leave me. Please don’t let them take you. Please.”

  “I love you,” he whispered. “I’ll always be with you.”

  Teancum grabbed Tryp by the arm and dragged him to his feet, then pushed him at the front doors. Tryp staggered, twisting his head and looking back at her like he was trying to memorize her.

  Tryp turned his head and said to her over his shoulder, “Go with them.”

  Elfie wanted to argue, but she walked with her hands clasped behind her head over to where the women stood. They opened the door and led Elfie into a huge, commercial kitchen.

  Hot tears streaked her face. “They’re not going to kill him, right? They wouldn’t do that.”

  One of the women said, “Through the kitchen, up the back stairs, please.”

  Another woman was waiting for them at the top of the stairs in a small hallway. The new blonde was younger than the other two, a couple years older and eight inches taller than Elfie, and her dry lips were pursed tightly.

  Elfie covered her face and tried to swallow the sobs that choked her.

  Elfie’s guard told the newcomer, “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “I’m the midwife,” the new blonde said. “Would you know what you’re looking for?”

  Elfie’s legs wobbled, and she leaned against the kitchen counter and held on. She couldn’t faint. She needed to be ready to run. She had to save Tryp. She couldn’t imagine a world without Tryp beating on his drums and singing in his rich baritone voice. It would be a hollow and bleeding world.

  Their guard sucked in her cheeks and studied the floor. “Of course not. I would never look between a woman’
s legs.”

  “Okay, then.” Midwife Blonde turned and started to walk away.

  “But if Kumen finds out—”

  Midwife Blonde looked at the other two women. “There are three of us in this room. If he finds out, one of you two must have told him.”

  The other two frowned. Elfie could see every pucker of their skin when they did that because neither was wearing any make-up. After being in the theater for so long, these women in costumes but with naked lips and eyelids looked weird to Elfie. She hated all three of them for standing here and talking when that Teancum bastard was aiming a gun at Tryp.

  Midwife Blonde said to the other two, “If you’ll wait in the kitchen, please.”

  “She might overpower you,” the guard blonde insisted.

  Midwife Blonde looked over at Elfie and then down her nose at her. “Who, this little slip of a thing? At least let her have a little modesty until tonight.”

  The two guard blondes left.

  As soon as the door closed behind them, Midwife Blonde rounded on Elfie, skirt swirling, tugged her down the hallway and into a tiny closet of a bedroom lit by a naked bulb, and closed the door.

  She asked Elfie, “Is he here for me again?”

  It took a moment to sink in what again meant because when she blinked, she saw guns and Tryp’s dark eyes.

  “You’re Sariah?” Elfie asked. “Jeez, he’s been freaking out about you. We’ve got to go save him.”

  “We can’t. They would’ve already put him in a car and driven away by now.”

  “Are they going to shoot him?” Elfie begged her.

  “I don’t know.” The hesitancy in her eyes looked like she didn’t want to tell Elfie the bad news.

  Elfie couldn’t fall apart. If she freaked out, she was no use. She needed to pull it all together and keep calm like when she was setting off the pyros and had made that mistake, nearly incinerating Xan. Being calm meant no one got hurt.

  Elfie took a good look at Sariah, the Midwife Blonde. Here was the first, maybe the only love of Tryp’s life, the one he risked his life for several times. Her heart-shaped face and big, clear blue eyes were pretty. Elfie could see that. Didn’t like it. But she could see it. Elfie’s vision of her blurred as fresh tears welled up and splashed down her face.

  Sariah said, “Every time he tries this, I can’t. I have two daughters now. I can’t take my daughters out of here.”

  How dare this woman not pick up the chance that Tryp had laid down his life for? How dare she? “Why the hell not?”

  “Shhhhh!” Sariah shushed her. “Language!”

  “Hey, I live in the real world,” Elfie said, so pissed that this woman was too fucking wussy to leave and that Tryp had risked his life, evidently, a third time for her and she was still too stupid to do the fucking obvious thing, and now he was going to die for it and Elfie’s chest was a gaping wound.

  Elfie said, “People say hell and shit and fuck whenever the situation calls for it. For example: Hell’s bells, Sariah. You’re in a shitload of trouble if you don’t get yourself and your girls the fuck out of here.”

  “Oh, my word!” Sariah’s wide, blue eyes bugged out like she was having an aneurysm.

  Tryp was going to die, and Elfie was at the very fucking least going to save herself and this idiot and her kids. “Seriously, woman. Pull yourself together. Get your kids. Let’s climb out a window or something.”

  “So, Tryfon did bring you here to convince me to leave.”

  Sariah’s hands climbed over each other, and she looked out the window like a cavalry might be out there to save them, which it most definitely was not. They were just two women, one wearing a skirt—and jeez, was that a petticoat under there?—stuck way up in a fortress with an army of brainwashed blondes between them and the front door.

  Fuck.

  “No,” Elfie said. “I came because he told me that you were in trouble. I came to help, however I could. Tryp thought Kumen was going to kill you and maybe your girls, too, because he was telling people about what was going on here. Leaving you and them here would be—” Elfie could barely think of a word for it, “—evil. Just evil. I’m here to rescue you and your girls. Tryp was my ride.”

  Why was she talking about him in the past tense?

  Sariah said, “Tryfon doesn’t love me. He was fourteen when he left. It was a ridiculous teenage crush.”

  “I don’t know what was going on in Tryp’s head,” Elfie said, “but he’s been trying to get you out of this hellhole for seven years. I know that he would help you get started in life. You’re a midwife. Wouldn’t you rather be a doctor, a real one, who can actually help women in childbirth and not just stand by and watch them die?”

  Sariah’s sharp glance told Elfie that she had hit a nerve. “I don’t know.”

  “Get your daughters. Let’s figure out how to get out of this shithole.”

  “But, if I leave, I’m damning their souls to eternal spiritual prison.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Elfie ground out between clenched teeth.

  “If we don’t follow the plan that Heavenly Father laid out for each one of us, our souls are damned to eternal spiritual prison. My daughters’ paths are here.”

  “And who told you that?” Elfie tried to keep the burning derision out of her voice and may have succeeded in toning it down a little.

  “The Prophet,” Sariah’s blue eyes were very wide, much like she was hypnotized, “and my husband.”

  This kind of shit was exactly why Tryp had never been able to get Sariah to leave.

  Knowing Tryp, he had probably been forthright and honest, like when he asked Elfie to be his wing woman and hook him up with other women, or when he had cracked and shown her his song and his soul and his past, or why he hadn’t made love to her because he honestly believed that he shouldn’t.

  Tryp had probably argued theology with Sariah, and no one but the Prophet or Kumen could win that argument. Tryp’s heart-deep honesty couldn’t sway Sariah any more than it could get him laid.

  “Look,” Elfie said, “I’m not going to argue theology with you. Not at all. I don’t think we’re reading from the same book on that one, but I know this: where I come from, God is Love. I mean, Heavenly Father is love. Whatever. That man, Kumen, out there? He doesn’t love anyone. I’ve never seen someone so greedy for another piece of ass. Tryp loved you. Everything he has done, every time he has come here, every time he tried to get you and your kids to go somewhere safe, all that was out of love. Tryp is Sir Galahad, Sariah. He’s a fucking knight in shining armor. He’s the purest soul there is, and he tried to save you. Maybe God keeps offering you a hand, Tryp’s hand, from a place of love, to get you and your girls out of this horrible place where they rape children, because that’s what He wants their path to be, and all you have to do is reach out and take Tryp’s hand.”

  Sariah’s eyes had widened even further during Elfie’s speech. “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want your girls to have a wedding night like yours?”

  Sariah stared down at her prim, white shoes. “But the world is so terrible, out there. They will be raped and sold into slavery.”

  “No, that’s what happens here. Listen to me. Go get your girls and show me how to get out of this place, and we’ll leave forever. Your girls will be safe. If Kumen kills you, they could end up as handmaidens.”

  Elfie hoped she understood that right.

  Sariah turned a shade yet paler, and she looked around the room. “Oh, not that.”

  Elfie’s eyes were drawn around the tiny bedroom they stood in: the bare, brown-stained mattress, the buzzing bulb overhead, a small dresser listing to the side with a broken leg. It looked like a servant’s room. “Is this bedroom for one of the wives?”

  “No. This is a handmaiden’s room.”

  “And how is that different from a wife, exactly?”

  Sariah shrank back, clearly disturbed. “If none of the elders want to marry a woman as his wife for whatever rea
son, like her innocence has been stolen, or she is not comely and pleasing, she is taken as a handmaiden. They are servants and do the worst of the chores, like scrubbing the stone floors on their knees or cleaning up sick, and our husband goes to the handmaidens when he has appetites that are forbidden for him to demand of the wives.”

  Bitterness hacked up in the back of Elfie’s throat.

  “Wait here,” Sariah said.

  Sariah left, and Elfie covered her mouth, gagging, in that prison cell, which looked like slave quarters and was overheated from the glaring lightbulb screwed directly into the ceiling.

  She composed herself because she couldn’t rescue all of them.

  Not yet.

  But she could rescue Sariah and her two daughters.

  First, they had to get past the army of brainwashed blondes.

  Elfie clutched her chest, where her sore heart slammed hard inside her chest. She tried to reach out, to feel whether Tryp was still alive, but of course she couldn’t feel anything.

  Set Out on the Road

  The yellow light from the early afternoon sun flared through the opening doors, and Tryp squinted as he walked down the front steps with his fingers still laced on the back of his head.

  He didn’t completely close his eyes, though. He wanted to see the sunshine. He had always liked the feel of the desert sun on his arms. Elfie’s last shrieks still rang in his ears, but he wanted to remember her smile, and her laugh, and the way she felt warm and fragile in his arms.

  Right outside the front doors, Teancum told Tryp to cross his hands behind his back and bound them together with a cable tie. The tie hissed that distinctive zip sound as the hard plastic cut into Tryp’s wrists. Teancum told Tryp to walk in front of him as they went down the front steps to the car.

  Tryp stumbled when they reached the car, trying to see if Teancum would help him up and thus aim the rifle away from him for a second, but Teancum was too smart for such an obvious trick. He just stood back and let Tryp get up out of the dirt, glaring at him.