CLAIMED BY THE BAD BOY: A Dark Bad Boy Romance (Bloody Saints MC)

by Zoey Parker

  I was getting curious about the redhead they kept talking about, though. She seemed to have everyone’s attention. Usually, the organizers treated all the girls as if they were fairly unremarkable. They didn’t make a fuss about one or the other of them, not the way they were over her.

  I pushed my curiosity back and stood behind the guy checking guests in. I didn’t make it my business to know any names. I just knew Vlad and a couple of the men in his inner circle. They were the only ones who really mattered. The less I knew about everyone else, the better off I was. It was bad enough I was there at all. I didn’t want to get roped in. As long as I didn’t know too much, I felt like I could distance myself just enough to justify being there.

  I watched as the guests arrived in dark suits. The city’s elite. I was paid not to recognize them from outside the auctions. Each sleazy little shit stopped at the podium and let the doorman check him off. A couple of them arrived with women on their arms, shopping for a new toy as a couple. I didn’t even want to know what they were planning on doing to the girl they purchased.

  They were all dressed to the nines, like they were attending a ball or a prestigious charity event. No charity benefitted from these auctions. This money went right into the pockets of all involved, even mine.

  “Guests are arriving. Has anyone seen Vlad?” a voice asked over the earpiece. I turned my attention away from the arriving guests and listened as the organizers talked back and forth, looking for the Russian.

  “We found him,” Alexander said. Alexander was a whiny little man, but somehow he was the second in command around here. The story was that he was so ruthless he made his boss look like Mr. Rogers. It was hard to believe from his whiny voice, and even harder to believe when he showed up in person. Then again, his boss wasn’t the most physically imposing man either.

  So far, everything was going smoothly and according to plan, which was great for the last auction of the year. I used the money I made from the auctions to help out my brothers in the Marauders MC. I made sure everyone got a little something from the MC to show our appreciation, but I also helped a few guys make sure their kids had a good Christmas. Not everyone did as well as I did for myself. Some of the guys were really struggling.

  This year, my plan was to keep a little extra cash for myself and disappear after handling Christmas at the clubhouse. I was going to take a few weeks off to myself and return in time to work the auction at the end of January. I felt like I deserved it.

  Then, things started to go wrong. The tone of the voices in my ear changed from curiosity to panic. As I listened, I tried to keep an eye on the suits coming in. I knew a diversion when I heard one, and causing a commotion in the gallery was a sure-fire way to distract everyone involved with the auction.

  “She’s spitting at the guests,” someone shouted.

  “I’ve got it,” Alexander said.

  I could hear a woman screaming. I figured it was the redhead they’d been talking about. I had never heard any of the girls scream like that. A few cried when they were bought and carried away, but most were resolved to their fate. They understood what was going on and why they were there. The screams that came over the earpiece were those of someone who had no idea what was going on or who didn’t want to be part of it. Or both.

  “Make sure Vlad is out of the way,” another person said.

  “Get the guests back.”

  “Are we sure those restraints are going to hold?”

  “Man, she’s a fighter. If we can get her to calm down, she’ll probably fetch a good price after this.”

  “Get me the fuck out of here!” That last voice was hers. It pierced through all the other voices and rang out in my ear, causing the earpiece to crackle and pop.

  I ripped it out of my ear violently as the cracks and pops started to turn into feedback. Judging by some of the looks I was getting, I wondered if anyone around me had heard her.

  I went into damage control mode.

  “Keep everyone else in here,” I told our doorman quietly before turning to everyone standing in the doorway.

  “Listen, I apologize, but there have been some technical difficulties. The organizers have asked that we don’t let anyone else in until the guests who are already in can be seated for bidding. We’ll be ready to let a few more people in momentarily,” I told the arriving guests. I had been around long enough to know how to make up believable stories when things went wrong. I certainly didn’t want to tell them that one of the girl was losing her shit and trying to attack anyone who got close to her.

  At the same time, as I was making up my little white lie, I realized we had, in fact, pulled in more people than usual. It was a pretty packed out auction so far. I hoped they had plenty of girls for everyone. No one liked to go home empty handed from one of these events. Then again, more girls meant more competition, which meant higher bids.

  I stepped back behind the podium and put my earpiece back in to check on how things were going when there was suddenly a hand on my arm. I turned and looked to find little Alexander standing next to me. He was short and wide, the kind of guy others picked on when they didn’t know what he was capable of doing.

  “Blade, we need your help with this girl,” he said, pulling me.

  My stomach turned to ice. I didn’t want anything to do with the girls. “What girl, the redhead?” I asked.

  “That’s the one. Come on.” He led me down the hall to the room where they were holding the girls.

  The rest of the warehouse was dimly lit, but the room where they girls were held was bright. I could see each of them clearly. The guests in their dark suits huddled around the door at the other end of the room. I caught a glimpse of Vlad as a couple of guys rushed him out. He was tall and gangly, wiry. Just like his second in command, he didn’t look like one of the most ruthless crime bosses in the city. He looked like he should have been hanging out at the gym ogling the women in their workout clothes.

  The way the auction worked was they allowed the guests to come in and look at the women tied to boards that stood upright to provide the best possible view. Then, after everyone had a chance to peruse the selection, bidding would start. They could have bought small houses and pumped money into poor neighborhoods for what they spend on these young women.

  It appalled me the way they were lined up like cattle. They were tied up naked, completely exposed to the men – and in some cases, women – who were there to bid on them. No one ever talked about what happened to them after the auction, but there had only ever been a couple of women who found their way back to be auctioned off again. Most of them were never seen or heard from after being sold off.

  “That’s her right there,” Alexander said, pointing out the redhead. She was strapped to a board right in front, like she was the catch of the day or something.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked. I had never worked with the women. I didn’t want to work with the women. I didn’t want anything to do with the damn auction. I just wanted to hang out by the door and make sure no one needed to be punted out.

  “I don’t care what you do, just calm her down,” the little man snapped.

  Chapter 2

  Maggie

  The first thing I noticed when I came to was that I was naked. I tried to move but my wrists and ankles were tied, and I felt a belt or something around my waist, holding me up against a table or something.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, looking around the room at the other girls in the same situation. There were so many of us. There were white girls, black girls, Asians, and what looked like a couple of Latinas, a good cross-section of the city. We were all naked, all held against these boards or tables, or whatever they were.

  The room we were in was a nondescript room with a gray concrete floor and gray concrete walls. We were all facing a deep red curtain, as if we were in place for the curtain to be raised at some point to show us off, but we were already being shown off.

  We were held mostly upright, allowi
ng men in dark suits to walk by and examine us. Our bodies were on display like cattle. What the hell had I gotten myself into? I pulled against the restraints on my wrists, but it didn’t do any good. All it did was chafe my wrists and get the attention of the girls around me.

  “Listen, just calm down,” the blonde to my right said. She didn’t seem scared at all. In fact, she seemed comfortable in her restraints.

  “What’s going on? Where the fuck are we?” I hissed at her.

  “Look, just calm down. You don’t want to piss them off,” she said, complacent as hell.

  “Piss who off?” I asked, but before she could answer, a man came by with a clipboard.

  “Let’s pull her forward,” he told two assistants who were with him, and two men dressed in all black, like stage hands in a play, came over to either side of me and pushed me forward.

  “Where am I?” I asked the thin man in front of me with the clipboard.

  He just chuckled and shook his head. “They always want to play dumb when it’s time,” he told his assistants. Then, he flipped through his papers and got a concerned look on his face. He pressed a button on his earpiece. “Hey, can I get an ID on the redhead?”

  Then, while he waited to hear back, he wandered off to make sure the other girls were in good shape. His assistants followed.

  I looked around as more men in suits approached and looked me up and down like a piece of meat on a menu. They were forming a line through the room, moving from girl to girl. A couple of them had women on their arms already. They all obviously had plenty of money. Their suits were obviously tailored. They wore sparkly jewelry – rings and chains. The women had teased hair and fake boobs. They all wore too much makeup and too much perfume.

  They all wore their appetites on their faces, staring at us with hungry eyes and licking their lips.

  “What are you staring at?” I asked one of the men as he leaned in to examine my hairless crotch.

  He looked at the woman with him and muttered something in another language. She laughed and said something back to him, in the same foreign tongue. It sounded like Russian, or possibly some Slavic language. I didn’t know anything outside of the touch of Spanish I picked up in high school, certainly nothing from Eastern Europe or Russia.

  “Keep your cool,” the brunette on my left said quietly after the man walked off.

  “Keep my cool? They’re looking at us like pieces of meat. Why are you just sitting there? What is this?” It felt like we were in a dog show or a cattle auction, being sized up by judges, or men who were going to buy us. No way. Surely, whatever was going on was nothing more than some perverse peep show.

  “We’re being auctioned off,” the blonde said on my right.

  “Auctioned off?” I asked. My veins froze. I didn’t fully comprehend what she was saying just yet – or maybe I didn’t want to.

  “Ladies,” a cautious voice said. It was the man with the clipboard coming back around to look at us again.

  After he passed by, we resumed our conversation.

  “Auctioned off?” I repeated. “How so?”

  “Sex slaves,” said the brunette.

  “Human trafficking,” the blonde added.

  These two chicks had obviously accepted their fate. There was absolutely no concern in their voices as they told me what was going on, as if what they were telling me was perfectly normal. Where the hell did they find women like this? I wondered.

  “How are you okay with this?” I hissed.

  They didn’t say anything else. They looked down and away from me. They didn’t have any answers for that. I pulled against my restraints and writhed against my board. I noticed that as I fought, I was getting more looks from the men and women examining us. Hungrier looks. I was turning them on. The way their eyes looked over my nude body made my skin crawl. I could read their thoughts in their faces and imagine the horrible things they wanted to do to me.

  Finally, after all of my fighting and yelling, and a little spitting, a tall, lanky man was marched up in front of me. He wore a black suit with a black shirt and a striking red tie. His hair was as black as night, and his eyes were gray. He had very strong features, but he was still very thin and wiry. He had a short, stout man standing next to him with dyed platinum blonde hair slicked back and stubby fingers. They were accompanied by the man with the clipboard.

  “What do we have here? Is there a problem, my sweet little one?” the tall man asked me, his accent sickeningly sweet. It reminded me of the couple who had been speaking what must have been Russian. He ran a long, thin finger along my chin.

  My first instinct was to recoil from this man, but then I realized he must have been in charge somehow. He obviously had his little sidekick with him, and the dude-with-the-clipboard’s ass was clenched so tightly in his presence, it was painful to witness.

  “There’s been some mistake,” I told him, rushing out my words.

  He laughed. “There has been no mistake, my dear. Tonight, you will be the prize. You will go to the luckiest man here. You are fiery and beautiful. Any man would be lucky to have such a prize in his collection.”

  Collection? “Sir, I am not an object to be traded or collected,” I told him, trying to keep my voice calm for a change. I knew if I didn’t, all the rage of hell was going to spew forth from my mouth.

  “The men here would beg to differ,” he said, equally calm.

  “Look, pal, I don’t know where you’re from, and I don’t give a shit who you think you are, but you’re in America now,” I started, but he stopped me with a finger across my lips, shushing me.

  He leaned in and whispered, nearly growled, in my ear. “You listen here, you self-righteous cow. You are here now. That makes you my property, and I can do whatever I want with you. You should be thankful I’ve chosen to sell you instead of keeping you for myself. Now, be a good little girl like your sisters here, and tonight will go off without a hitch. But if you keep acting up, you won’t make it out of here alive.”

  It seemed the whole room had gone silent while he was threatening me. The men who had been looking the girls over stood off to the side and watched the scene we were making. The other girls kept their heads down – the ones I could see, since they’d moved me forward.

  He backed away and straightened his suit. To his boy with the clipboard, he said, “Make sure she goes last. I know you just pulled her up front to go first, but let’s let her sit there and watch the whole auction. She’s going to fetch the highest price of the night. I can feel it.”

  “Boss, we’re still trying to confirm her identity.”

  “Fine, but she goes last. And start high.” He looked me up and down again. “If I wasn’t so confident in how much I could make off you, I’d keep you for myself,” he said to me.

  That was enough. I’d had all I could take. I mustered up all the saliva I could get in my dry mouth, and I spat at the tall man. “Fuck you,” I shouted in his face as he wiped the spit off his tie.

  “Boss, let’s get you out of here,” the short one said. Then he called for someone to help remove his boss.

  “Do something about her,” the tall man barked at them as he backed away. A moment later, the stage hands in all black grabbed him and started to escort him through the exit on the other side.

  I screamed and pulled at my restraints, showing my teeth to the man with the clipboard, who stood right in front of me, frozen solid with fear. Good. He deserved to be scared.

  “Let us go,” I cried out, screaming for the other girls, as well. I figured getting myself set free wasn’t going to be any good if I left the other girls behind to be sold into sexual slavery.

  Then again, as I thought about what the tall man had said to me, it seemed that maybe the reason the others were so quiet and resolved was because this was all they had ever known. My heart broke for them. Surely, they hadn’t been brought up just to be sold as slaves, but I didn’t know their stories. I had no idea why they were so complacent, why they weren’t fighting
to be let go.

  The sidekick came back in the room with a giant of a man, and my heart leapt out of my chest. The little guy’s stubby fingers pointed me out to the behemoth standing next to him, and I struggled against my restraints to get free. I knew I was in trouble, but he was also gorgeous.

  Unlike everyone else, who was dressed either formally or like a stage hand for some perverse form of theater, the man who accompanied the boss’s sidekick back into the room wore a black t-shirt under a leather vest and an old pair of blue jeans. His chest tried to break through his shirt. His arms bulged on either side of him. I could see tattoos and scars running up and down his arms.

  His mere presence told a story. He wasn’t someone I wanted to piss off, which also made him someone I didn’t want to talk to. His hair was pulled back under a bandana. He took a quick inventory of the room as he walked in, noticing the guests cowering in the corner and the other women who were behaving themselves.