Tales of Darkness & Sin: An Anthology

by Pepper Winters

  “More than just chemistry?”

  He sighed. “I don’t know. But I want…”

  When he didn’t continue, I murmured, “Want?”

  “I want you to stay. Spend the day with me tomorrow. Come and watch me fight.”

  My heart leapt. I nodded without thinking. “I’d love to.”

  “Good.” Tension ebbed from his muscles and almost as if a switch turned off in his brain, he went instantly to sleep.

  My heart glowed while every inch of me burned from sexual use. My lips were sore, my body sticky and sweat-dewed. But I couldn’t remember a time when I’d been happier in six years.

  I lay there in his embrace, very aware of his cock growing flaccid inside me.

  What had just happened between us?

  Did this happen to everyone who met their perfect other? Did you just know? Or was it merely a crazy infatuation between two lonely people who looked for more than what existed?

  I didn’t know, but I wanted to find out more than anything.

  My heart plummeted.

  More than anything?

  More than a career I’d fought for? A new life that I needed?

  Fear cannonballed through my system.

  I looked at the curtains, noticing for the first time a sliver of light as the sun welcomed the dawn.

  You’re leaving tomorrow.

  Forever.

  My heart shrivelled into cinders.

  I’d forgotten.

  Somehow, this singular man had made me forget. Made me forget my grief, my goals, my dreams—all in one night of passion.

  How had I forgotten?

  My skin went ice cold.

  His power over me was too strong. His allure far too dangerous.

  He could ruin my future. Ruin everything I’d run so blindly toward.

  I couldn’t stay.

  I couldn’t spend the day with him tomorrow.

  I had to follow my dreams.

  I have to leave Cas Smith behind.

  That was the first time fate put him in my path.

  But not the last.

  Cas was right about one thing—he’d stolen a piece of me that night—a part I would never get back; something that would forever belong to him, binding us forever.

  So I ran.

  Did I choose the right path?

  Did I follow the right dream?

  I thought I had at the time.

  But in the end, the truth came out, revealing the road I’d chosen—the one glittering with fame and fortune—was the wrong one.

  I chose the road covered in filth and deception.

  I chose the path filled with treachery and treason.

  And by doing so, I made sure I would never deserve the one person who could’ve saved me.

  But fate wasn’t done with us.

  Cas wasn’t done with me.

  Love would ensure we’d end up together, somehow.

  THE END

  About the author

  Pepper Winters is a NYT and USA Today International Bestseller. She wears many roles. Some of them include writer, reader, sometimes wife. She loves dark, taboo stories that twist with your head. The more tortured the hero, the better, and she constantly thinks up ways to break and fix her characters. Oh, and sex... her books have sex.

  She loves to travel and has an amazing, fabulous hubby who puts up with her love affair with her book boyfriends. She’s also honoured to wear the IndieReader Badge for being a Top 10 Indie Bestsellers, best BDSM series voted by the SmutClub, and recently signed a two book deal with Grand Central. Her books are currently being translated into numerous languages and will be in bookstores in the near future.

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  OTHER BOOKS AVAILABLE FROM PEPPER WINTERS

  FREE BOOKS

  Debt Inheritance (Indebted Series #1)

  Tears of Tess (Monsters in the Dark #1)

  Pennies (Dollar Series #1)

  BOOKS IN KINDLE UNLIMITED

  Destroyed (Standalone)

  Goddess Isles Series

  Once a Myth

  Twice a Wish

  Third a Kiss

  Fourth a Lie

  Fifth a Fury

  Sully’s Fantasy

  Jinx’s Fantasy

  Dollar Series

  Pennies

  Dollars

  Hundreds

  Thousands

  Millions

  Truth & Lies Duet

  Crown of Lies

  Throne of Truth

  Pure Corruption Duet

  Ruin & Rule

  Sin & Suffer

  Indebted Series

  Debt Inheritance

  First Debt

  Second Debt

  Third Debt

  Fourth Debt

  Final Debt

  Indebted Epilogue

  Monsters in the Dark Trilogy

  Tears of Tess

  Quintessentially Q

  Twisted Together

  Je Suis a Toi

  Standalones

  Destroyed

  Unseen Messages

  Can’t Touch This

  A PREVIEW

  PROLOGUE

  Scarlett

  The lace veil falls across my face. It’s yellowed over the years and the smell that clings to it is musty. Old. But it’s my mother’s. The one she wore on her wedding day.

  Baby’s breath and discarded lilies litter the stone floor as the woman grumbles behind me. She’s annoyed at having to work with the old veil when a brand new, prettier one sits unused in its box. I move my foot, crush the delicate baby’s breath, impaling the fallen petal of a pale pink lily with my heel.

  Funeral flowers for a wedding. An omen.

  Not that I need one.

  The stink of them turns my stomach. This isn’t how I imagined my wedding day.

  “Finished,” the woman announces.

  I stand, the petal sticking to my heel. I don’t care. I look up to meet my reflection in the mirror.

  “He won’t like the veil,” she says. She’s a blur beside me.

  I shift my gaze, letting my eyes focus on her. She’s plump and short and has a wart on the side of her face with a thick black hair growing out of it. Don’t judge a book by its cover has nothing on this one. She is as much a bitch inside as she looks on the outside.

  “I guess he’ll have to get over it.”

  “You should wear the one he sent.”

  I don’t bother to answer her, although I agree. The veil was a gift from my brothers.

  Gift.

  No, not a gift.

  Just another cruelty to make me wear my mother’s veil for this sham wedding.

  She snorts, turns to gather up the dress, the keys jangling on her belt. I could take them. Overpower her. That part would be easy. It’s the men with the guns outside the door who’d be the problem.

  Noisy footsteps on the hundred stairs announce the approach of soldiers to my tower room.

  A tower. They locked me in a fucking tower. My own fucking brothers.

  From the sound of things, they’re expecting me to put up a fight. They’ll take me kicking and screaming if I do. Besides, I know better than t
o waste my energy on them. I’ll need it after. For the wedding night.

  A man says something, another one laughs, just before I hear a loud crash, like something smashing hard against the wall.

  It’s then that it happens. Gunfire explodes just beyond my room. A bullet splinters its way through the thick wooden door and shatters the mirror, breaking my reflection into a thousand pieces, sending me backward into the stone wall.

  The woman with the wart screams.

  I right myself. Touching the back of my head with one hand, I somehow still to keep hold of the lilies. Suddenly, the door is kicked in, banging against the wall as heavily armed men in military fatigues raid my room. A cloud of smoke follows behind them, seeping into my circular tower.

  They fan out, a dozen of them and I don’t recognize a single one. These aren’t my brothers’ men.

  The woman is on the floor blubbering something, sobbing.

  I just stare at the door as another set of footsteps approach, quieter now. This one isn’t in a hurry. And I know the instant he steps into my line of vision that he’s in charge.

  He’s the one to worry about. The only one who’s masked.

  He stops just inside the room, surveys it, eyeing every soldier, every stone, every cobweb. And when deep blue eyes land on me, a weight drops in my belly, a hundred-pound cement block.

  The woman with the keys stands, tripping over her words as she walks toward him. He looks down at her like he’s irritated, and she doesn’t get far. An echo of bullets shuts her down, splattering blood like paint on my neck, my face. The shots put her back on the floor.

  Fuck.

  I don’t spare her a glance. I don’t need to, to know she’s dead.

  The man’s eyes return to mine. They narrow. And when he takes a step toward me, I take one back, knocking the chair behind me to the floor, panicking then. Animated then.

  I turn to run but see a dozen sets of eyes staring back at me. The masked intruder, the biggest of them all, blocks the only exit. I can’t even jump from the window. They’re barred. Suicide was never an option, not for my brothers. They needed me.

  But something’s gone wrong.

  And before I can decide what to do, before I can make up my mind to try to charge him, to risk bullets putting me down like they did the woman on the floor, he’s got my wrist in his right hand and he’s squeezing it.

  My hand opens. Flowers scatter to the floor. I watch them, then watch him lift my hand to his face. His thumb comes to my ring finger where the hideous diamond catches the waning sun. For a moment I think he’s going to break my finger. But he twists and forces it off. It’s tight but he manages. He pockets the ring then shifts his gaze to mine again.

  I swallow hard.

  He cocks his head to the side, one hand still locked around my wrist. He spins me around.

  I scream as he jerks me to him, his body a solid wall at my back.

  He releases my wrist and bands his arm beneath my breasts. With the other, he pushes the veil off my neck, his hand rough against my skin, fingers digging, bruising. I think he’s going to snap my neck. One quick twist is all it would take. He’s a fucking giant.

  But he doesn’t.

  Instead, the moment I turn my face up to his, he squeezes and instantly, my knees give out. My arms drop uselessly to my sides. He shifts his grip and as I slip, he lifts me up, hauling me over his shoulder, turning the room upside down before it goes black.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Scarlett

  I feel like I’m going to vomit. The smell is musty and damp, like an old basement. Cold is seeping into my body, making my muscles ache.

  “Get up!”

  Pain in my right side. I curl away from it, but it comes again. I groan.

  “Fucking get the fuck up!” It’s Diego. My brother. You’d think I’d know the feel of his boot by now.

  “That’s not going to help,” another voice says.

  Angel. My other brother. The slightly less insane one.

  “There’s no way out,” he adds, voice oddly resigned.

  “There’s a window,” Diego says before digging the toe of his boot into my ribs. “Up you fucking worthless piece of—”

  “Leave her alone, you idiot.”

  I blink my eyes open, roll my head and stop instantly, the pain sharp at the back. I bring my hand up to touch the spot, feeling the bump as I try to remember.

  Lilies and baby’s breath on the floor. Shattered shards of the mirror crunching underfoot as I ran. Or thought about running before he grabbed me.

  I look at my hand. The ring is gone. He pocketed it. I’m glad. My wedding day. My forced wedding. It never happened.

  I push myself slowly up to a seated position. The musty smell, it’s not only the room. It’s the veil somehow still on my head.

  The room spins and I close my eyes until the dizziness passes. When I open them again, a dark shadow looms over me. Leers down at me.

  Diego.

  “About fucking time.”

  I look past him to see Angel sitting across the room, his back against the far wall. Noah’s head is on his lap.

  “Hurry up, untie me,” Diego says. He’s been beaten. His lip is cut and there’s blood and numerous bruises on his face. He crouches down with his back to me.

  I see that Noah’s hands are bound and Angel’s must be too. They’re behind him. I’m the only one they left unbound.

  The white satin of my dress is smudged with dirt and blood, the hem black and the skirt ripped. I reach up to pull the lace off my head, the sound of hairpins dropping to the ground too delicate in this dungeon room. That’s what this is. A cell in a dungeon. With three stone walls, the fourth a wall of bars. The window my brother mentioned is about the size of a shoebox and too high to reach. That’s where the light is coming from. A too-bright square in the otherwise darkness. Daylight. I’ve been passed out since last night?

  I wonder where we are. In the cellar of the compound where I was first imprisoned in the tower? I prefer the tower.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Diego barks, spittle landing on my face as he cranes his neck. I’m sure if his hands weren’t tied, he’d have slapped me a dozen times by now.

  I meet his dark, hateful eyes.

  Without a word, I reach to untie him. Ever obedient. Christ. What the fuck is wrong with me?

  I look over at Angel. He’s younger than Diego by a year. He looks sad, and like I heard in his voice, resigned. He’s also got bruises along his jaw and dried blood by his nose, but his face isn’t as bad as Diego’s.

  “Is Noah okay?” I ask. Noah, our youngest brother, is still passed out.

  “Yeah,” Angel says, looking down at him.

  “Not for long if you don’t get these fucking ropes off me,” Diego interjects.

  I look at the knot, shift my gaze back to Angel.

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  “We were betrayed.”

  “Marcus?” My would-be husband?

  He shakes his head.

  “Lover-boy is gone,” Diego tells me. “Ran away like the fucking coward he is.”

  “He’s not my lover-boy. I hate him.”

  “Well, that makes two of us. Move.” He gestures to the knot.

  I’m about to focus my attention on it, when I hear the sound of a door clanging open nearby. Light falls into the space outside the cell. Heavy footsteps follow and I hear a man’s voice. Another one that I recognize. One that makes my skin crawl.

  “Fuck,” Diego mutters, awkwardly getting to his feet as the men come into view.

  Soldiers enter first, automatic weapons on their shoulders. Three of them, one carrying a heavy-duty flashlight. They insert a key into the lock and open the door of our cage just as my uncle comes into view. He’s grinning like a fucking jackal.

  His eyes fall on me first, skim over me. It would make my skin crawl if I wasn’t so afraid. His gaze bounces off each of my brothers. He’s clean-shaven, hair neatly combed back
slick with gel. I can smell his signature overuse of cologne from here.

  “Fucking traitor,” Diego mutters and spits in his general direction. It doesn’t touch him though.

  My uncle looks at him, his lips turning down in disapproval. “Isn’t that what we all are?”

  More footsteps.

  I look beyond my uncle as he steps aside. Two more soldiers, another man I know isn’t a soldier just from the casual slant to his stance.

  And then him. The one in charge. He’s no longer masked but I know it’s him. I’d recognize his eyes anywhere. I will never forget those eyes or the way they looked at me.

  He stops just inside the cell, big frame taking up the whole of the entry, sucking up more than his share of oxygen.

  My heart races at the sight of him.

  The man I know isn’t a soldier slides his hands into his pockets. He leans toward the one in charge and says something too low for me to hear. He’s speaking Italian from what I can make out. I’d have known these weren’t Cartel men anywhere. He’s wearing a white button down and jeans. Casual beside the suited man who took my ring and somehow knocked me out.

  The suited one scans the cell, taking in each of my brothers in turn and it takes all I have not to shrink away when his gaze fixes on me.

  Instinctively, I touch my neck as I take in his head of dark hair, the shadow of a beard. The scar along his right cheek does nothing to take away from his features. The opposite. He’s dangerous, this man. Deadly. I’d know it even if I saw him out on a normal day in the normal world.

  Not that I’ve ever lived a normal life in a normal world.

  And even though I don’t know who he is, my brothers do. I see it in their eyes. Feel it in the anxiety coming off them, their fear stinking up the room.

  “Look who’s risen from the dead,” Diego starts, taking a step toward the man like the idiot he is.