by Sophia Reed
Punished by the Billionaire
Sophia Reed
Contents
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1. Annie
2. Annie
3. Annie
4. Cole
5. Cole
6. Annie
7. Cole
8. Annie
9. Cole
10. Annie
11. Cole
12. Annie
13. Cole
14. Annie
15. Annie
16. Cole
17. Annie
18. Cole
19. Cole
20. Cole
21. Annie
22. Cole
23. Cole
24. Cole
25. Annie
26. Annie
27. Cole
28. Annie
29. Cole
30. Cole
31. Cole
32. Annie
33. Cole
34. Annie
35. Annie
36. Cole
37. Annie
38. Cole
39. Annie
40. Annie
41. Annie
42. Annie
43. Cole
44. Annie
45. Cole
46. Annie
47. Cole
A Message To My Readers
A Dark Mafia Romance Series
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As a show of gratitude for purchasing this book I’ll be gifting you Addicted to the Dark, a book that marks the start of the suspenseful yet steamy dark romance series Deep Cover.
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http://bit.ly/AddictedtotheDark
I’m on the verge of bringing
an international drug cartel to its knees.
But... Cole’s irresistible body
brings me down to mine.
I’m an undercover narcotics officer,
and my job means everything to me.
But Cole’s become an even bigger obsession.
He’s a billionaire. A powerful CEO.
His bulging biceps make my brains melt.
Cole sees the darkness within me.
My own drug addiction.
And he’s the only one who can find me a cure.
Can Cole really save me?
Or will he be my ultimate destruction?
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Synopsis
Annie Knox
Just free of the hospital where her father and fiancé had her involuntarily committed, suspended undercover narc Annie Knox is already on her way back to Southern Nevada and Cole St. Martin when the call comes in. Cole's being held by the psychopathic sexual submissive Kie, whose Master Annie shot and killed after he held her prisoner. Now the flight from Seattle to Vegas takes on a sense of panic. The psycho wants Annie – and she'll hurt Cole to get her.
* * *
Cole St. Martin
In business, Cole St. Martin is hard and controlling; he gets what he wants. In his personal life, Cole St. Martin is hard and controlling and he pays for what he wants: Submissives with nowhere else to go, who will bend to every whim of his sexual sadism. There's a chance that Annie can change him – but only if they both live through the psycho holding a razor to his throat.
* * *
Kie's not the only dangerous player in their lives. There are other billionaires with dark proclivities and Annie's innocence and how new she is to the lifestyle intrigues them. Cole's not the only rich sadist determined to get what he wants at any cost. After a turn of events leaves Annie under the control of another brutal Master, it's up to Annie and Cole to find a way back to each other.
* * *
And then find out if that's where they actually belong.
* * *
Punished by the Billionaire is the fourth book
in the 6-book Deep Cover series.
1
Annie
The helicopter kicked up dust and stones as it settled onto the desert floor. April winds rocked the craft for the second half of the flight from Seattle, making me tremble with nausea and fear. Las Vegas appearing in the distance was a welcome sight.
I spent the flight hunched forward, every part of my anatomy straining in the direction we were headed. As if I could make everything move faster if I jutted my chin forward, strained my neck. We'd arrive what, two seconds faster? It's only a two hour flight between the cities, but two hours is forever when lives hang in the balance. It had taken forever to reach the airport. It felt like forever once at the airport, transferred from hiding in the back of an ambulance, sure at any second a cry would go up and security guards and Seattle PD would race in to apprehend me.
As if anyone cared about one twenty-four year old escaping a mental hospital where she'd been involuntarily committed only because two men in her life found it expedient.
As the chopper landed it was only four hours earlier that I'd been an in-patient in a mental hospital, involuntarily committed by my father and the man who would soon officially be my ex-fiancé. Logically they might have wanted to have me committed for opiate addiction, though a reputable hospital would have redirected them to a treatment facility.
Where I would not have gotten any better. Or at least not permanently better. The return rate and the number of people addicted again is insanely high.
But I had been getting help while committed. Not the help they thought I needed. The hospital dealt with an addiction I no longer had. And while my father was concerned with that opiate addiction, temporarily beaten or not, it wasn't his main concern once he found out the circumstances surrounding my stay in Vegas, and it had never been Mark's first priority.
Because when the addiction first took hold, I'd been "sold" to a billionaire CEO of a pharmaceuticals company by a fellow Seattle cop who had as much right to sell me as I did to sell the helicopter I'd just bailed out of.
Now my feet hit the desert floor, instantly finding the first of the rocks and stickers that would sink into my bare flesh. I'd left the hospital with no shoes, only the shapeless sweats the staff dressed us in. The EMT driver who smuggled me out, someone I'd gone to high school with who believed me when I said I was undercover in the hospital and things had gone wrong with the assignment, had brought me Walmart jeans and t-shirt but he hadn't brought me shoes.
I couldn't blame him. He thought I was Seattle PD, not a – what? - junkie returning to her "Owner" in a rural desert compound outside las Vegas.
Not that the latter sounded any more convincing. It would have been less convincing to anyone why I had remained in the desert if the addiction was cured and the contract binding me to the man who cured it was something I considered illegal and unenforceable.
I didn't believe I'd really been sold to Cole St. Martin. CEO, philanthropist, beautiful long-limbed, tall man with a smile that looked like an inverted triangle, all devilish glee.
Sexual sadist.
His investigations into using rainforest naturals to craft cures for opiate addiction were working. He'd bought me from a crooked cop because he wanted someone who would be indebted to him, someone who could disappear for a long period of time
the same way an undercover, deep cover cop could, or someone going into rehab.
I was all those things, in danger of losing the career I loved and possibly my life. He'd honestly helped me. I was clean, off fet, because of him.
He'd honestly hurt me. His sadism wasn't make believe. His Master/slave, Owner/slave, Dominant/submissive or any other Control/controlled relationship that could be described wasn't a game.
It was serious.
But for a cop who cut her teeth in narcotics and then went undercover by the age of 24, but who looked 17 and sometimes still felt it, maybe a little control didn't hurt.
Insane I'd think that. I was the least likely person ever to bend her will to another's.
Then again, I was feeling panic for him, running as fast as I could because the helicopter hadn't used the helipad on the roof of the compound.
No. It had followed the directions of the psycho bitch who was holding Cole hostage in his own home, threatening to kill him if I didn't come back to Southern Nevada, didn't answer her demands.
Kie. If she had a last name, I didn't know it. If she'd been married to the other man who'd hurt me but who, having kidnapped me, meant for that hurt to end in death, then her last name was Geddes.
I wasn't convinced they'd been married. More likely bound in some bond of blood – hers and that of the people they hurt together. Kie was a masochist, that was certain, and had given herself or been given to Vincent. But she was also a sadist, both sexually and otherwise. What she had done to me during a gathering under Cole's roof had caused massive pain. When she'd been punished for it, a punishment even the masochist in her didn't enjoy, I had no doubt she had become fully invested in Vincent kidnapping me from Cole.
Then once Vincent had me prisoner in Paris, Kie hurt me again, but this time, not held back by any other person, she herself panicked at the amount of pain she put me in and ran for a way to neutralize it.
That one act would have been the only reason I showed her any mercy when Cole rescued me and together we killed Kie's Master. I would have let her live as a fellow survivor of Vincent Geddes.
But Vincent had supposedly left her for us to find. Kie was supposed to be dead.
She wasn't. Just as Cole discovered where I was and was preparing to do something to get me out of the hospital and back to Southern Nevada with him, Kie who was supposed to be a dead body in Paris, showed up as a live bitch in Nevada.
For two hours between Seattle and Vegas I've been picturing all sorts of scenarios. Because it was supposed to be Cole who called the hospital pretending to be my fiancé, relaying a plan to free me and take me back to Vegas via helicopter. If it had worked that way, I'd have been taken out directly and not hidden in a series of ambulances that smuggled me to the airport. Likely I'd have been flown directly from the roof of the hospital to the compound itself. Cole had money and money had a way of getting Cole the results he wanted.
I wouldn't have been dropped barefoot in the desert two miles from my destination.
The Nevada desert is full of ram's head thorns that feel like thick needles when stepped on, full of foxtails which are like the tops of wheat when it's growing, but all hard and sharp and designed to catch on things.
Every growing thing wants to spread itself around, get planted somewhere new where it can thrive, and so every growing thing develops ways of transporting its seeds. In the high desert, that usually involves becoming a thorn.
So running barefoot over the desert floor, everything hurts. But Cole has hurt me more than this and I'm desperate to get to him. The only time I succumb to the pain in my feet is for one thorn too big to run with.
Then I cover two miles of trail-running in just over twenty minutes. I'm flying by the time I come around to the front entrance of the compound where it faces southeast, and the only reason I stop is the guards who draw down on me instantly, assault rifles at the ready, as if one slim, five-five female could fuck them up.
I could. Black belt Survival-trained. Hand to hand combat. And having ridden with the Brotherhood in Seattle when I was undercover with Jesse, the leader of the gang. It was that assignment that led directly to my opiate addiction, after Jesse was killed and I was out from under the assignment, back with my fiancé (ex- fiancé, he has no idea how much it's ex). That was when I found the roll of bills in one pocket of my jeans as home, theoretically, and safe and sound, I started to do laundry. One roll of bills from the pocket of a pair of jeans, and the first sample free, everybody! Baggies of fentanyl.
Everything that followed seemed almost preordained.
Except Kie. Fucking Kie.
The men with the guns trained on me are not backing down. That means they're here with her. They could just have been new guards for Cole's compound. He doesn't get attached to the help. There's a lot of turnover. The most loyal are with him the longest. I'd recognize them, like Jason who laughed at me the first time Kie hurt me and we were under Cole's roof. Cole had him beaten so bad he was hospitalized. He came back, though, and Cole handled all his medical bills. Or like the guards who always stared at me whenever Cole did something to humiliate me in front of whoever was there. Those are the long-term guards and they're exactly as long term as they do what Cole wants.
Everyone else comes and goes.
That wasn't what I was facing, newbies unprepared for my arrival, and my arrival at her demand wasn't a ruse. Kie was truly here, alive, inside, with Cole.
Slowly, I put my hands up.
It only took an instant for the men with guards to pat me down. Clearly I wasn't carrying much. So far no one had spoken, not a word had been exchanged. There was no reason to. Their guns said Stop where you are and that the situation was out of my control and out of Cole's. The very presence of these men said both Your enemy is inside and You're fucked.
They started for the door and I didn't move. When the largest of the men turned to look at me – of the four, he was the only one who had to be six-six or taller – I put my hands gingerly against the siding of the main structure and leaned up onto one leg. The other I crossed over my knee.
"Stickers," I said, and then, "Fucking ram's heads." There were a neat half dozen in that foot. At least they came out easily. Moving slow so as to not freak out the men who were now circling me from behind – not my favorite place to have people with guns – I did the same with the other foot.
The whole time everything inside me screamed to get to Cole. But I had to be as ready to face Kie as I could. I couldn't be hampered by sudden, intense pain from a thorn when I went up against her.
Kie. And not Vincent. Facing Vincent might have made me fall. He had hurt me when he kidnapped me and dragged me to Paris. There was nothing soft about Cole, and his sexual sadism was no joke.
But Vincent. Vincent was pure psychopath. There was not an ounce of kindness in him. So it was important for me to understand that Vincent was dead. Cole had shot him in the head at the same time I had used the palm heel of my hand to drive the cartilage of his nose up into his brain.
Still, digging thorns out of my feet, I took a second to whisper a chant to myself, tenets of TaeKwon-Do – courtesy, integrity, perseverance, strength, indomitable spirit – and when I found that didn't help, because none of them fit for facing off against Kie, well, maybe all but courtesy, which she didn't deserve – I murmured to myself, Kill the bitch.
I stood and nodded thanks to the guard who had given me space to clear my head as well as my feet. Maybe he'd been ordered to do that. I didn't know. Kie was trained in something. Maybe she wanted some kind of grudge match.
If so, bring it.
I nodded again and the guard unlocked the compound doors.
For no good reason, I had some kind of weird post apocalyptic image in my head. I'd go through the doors and Kie would be sitting at the top of some high perch, like high school gym bleachers. There would be guards in weird clothes and the weapon held on Cole would be indescribable.
Or there'd be vast wastelands inside the hous
e. Or wild animals. Clearly I'd been watching too much SyFy in the hospital.
The compound’s main house was exactly the same as it had been. Through the front door, down a short hall on the left was the spacious dining room. The dining room was a normal huge, formal, belonging-to-a-billionaire dining room. It was where once, Cole had sold me in a charity auction to Vincent Geddes, $5.5 million for two weeks of me, then refused to honor the bid because he himself was afraid of what Vincent would do to me.
To the right was the large but comfortably appointed living room where once, in the midst of an orgy with billionaires and their subs, Kie had made me scream and set off the chain of events that brought us here.
Across the living room, Cole was tied to a hardback chair. Kie stood behind him, a razor to his throat.
Other than that, the living room looked pretty normal. I sucked in my breath and held it. I hadn't seen Cole in weeks. Just seeing him alive was a relief.