Collar (Changing Roles Book 3)

by Ellie Masters

  Kevin held it out to me, then picked Lily up and settled her on the counter. “We need to look at the security camera feed from the parking lot.”

  Swallowing down the queasiness in my stomach, I gave a nod. It couldn’t be.

  The smiley face and the hearts of her text telegraphed her love. To me. But I hadn’t sent any of those texts. My cell phone ran out of juice two days ago.

  Kevin and I locked gazes. I needed to see that security feed. To see with my eyes a truth that couldn’t possibly be real.

  Josh was alive. Somehow, he’d hacked my cell phone. And the fucker had Kate!

  Bryce came to stand beside me. Perhaps he’d sensed the atmosphere had changed from a jubilant homecoming to something sinister. His arm fell to my shoulder and gave a hard squeeze. The man might be a submissive within the walls of my club, but right now, I sensed fire in his veins. Kate had been his Mistress long before she’d been my submissive.

  He had a few inches on me and easily saw the text on Lily’s screen. “What the hell does that mean?”

  I gripped the phone hard. “Josh.” It had to be him. Nothing else made sense. But how?

  Kevin covered his mouth, shock showing on his face. “It means a dead man is alive. Jake is innocent. Now there’s no longer any doubt.”

  I shrugged away from Bryce’s angry grip on my shoulder. “Let’s go.” I moved with Kevin toward the administrative offices where our security team was located.

  My molars ground together so hard my jaw hurt. “My brother is alive.” And he was framing me for rape and murder.

  Kevin took in a deep breath and blew it out over a long exhalation. “It’s worse than that.”

  “Worse than what?” Bryce’s frustration blew up, and he clamped a hand on each of our shoulders, stopping Kevin and me in our tracks. “What the fuck does this have to do with Kate?”

  “It means,” said Kevin, “if we don’t find out where the hell he took her, Kate’s not going to survive the night. She’ll become the fourth victim in this killing spree.”

  “How is that even possible? That he’s alive?”

  I peeled Bryce’s fingers off my shoulder. “That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”

  If Josh was here, that meant the sadistic fuck, BlackJack, was alive and kicking too. Josh was intelligent, smarter than I ever was, but there were limits to his depravity. I couldn’t see him orchestrating multiple murders. So my father had to be the mastermind behind all the killings. The only question was why. And why now? After all these years, why would BlackJack resurface?

  Lily stayed behind while the three of us went to examine the tapes. We rewound the current tape and saw Kate leaving the parking lot on the back of my Harley. “That’s my bike!”

  Kevin slowed the playback, and we watched as Kate and a man moved on the screen.

  The helmet of the man never came off, but she appeared to recognize him. Her bright smile welcomed him. Her body hugged him. Her arms embraced him. She looked like a woman in love.

  “There!” I pointed to the screen. “Back it up. He lifted his visor.”

  We backtracked the tape, playing it forward in slow motion. My heart skipped a beat as I stared into my crystal-blue eyes, which smiled at Kate as their owner patted the backseat, urging her to get on and go for a ride. My mind screamed. Don’t do it. But it was too late.

  Josh had Kate.

  Kevin had no words. He walked over and gripped me in a hard man hug while I fought to hold my shit together. The demons from my past had resurfaced. I needed to fucking go. I needed to get out there. Search for the woman I loved.

  “Shit, Jake,” said Bryce. “That guy looks just like you.” Bryce’s ability for understatement made me want to punch something.

  Kevin pointed at the screen. “Josh is your murderer. Find him, we find Kate, and we clear Jake’s name.” He thumped my back. “Come. Lily’s probably beside herself, waiting to know what we found.”

  “She’s not going to take it well. You sure you should tell her?” I needed something to lighten the mood. “I mean, considering her condition and all.”

  Kevin’s step faltered. “How did you—”

  “Congratulations, man,” I said. “At least now you have a reason to smoke those cigars.”

  His grin spread from ear to ear. “Thanks. It’s still really early. We didn’t want to tell anyone until she was further along.” He made a dismissive gesture. “These things aren’t certain so early in pregnancy. Lily’s been dying to tell someone. Give her a kiss when we get back. She’ll love it.”

  Except when we returned, Lily was nowhere to be found. Kevin looked left then right, his brows pinching in confusion. “That’s odd.”

  Bryce moved to the middle of the room and pulled out his cell phone. He lowered himself to one of the couches. “I have some calls to make. This changes everything.”

  “I need to call Kate’s old partner,” I said. “Pete can get the police involved.”

  Kevin paced the room, still looking for Lily. “She was supposed to wait for us.”

  “She probably went upstairs or had to use the restroom,” said Bryce.

  Kevin bit at his lower lip and ran his hands over his bare scalp. “Where the fuck is she?”

  I walked to the reception counter, intending to use the receptionist’s phone. My cell phone had been taken when they processed me. Four days without being plugged in and it was completely dead. A matchbook sat on the countertop. I lifted it, glancing at the Black Lotus motif and Thai script scrawled in red. The bottom dropped out of my world.

  A note lay beside the matches, and I garbled out one harsh word after reading it. “No!”

  “What?”

  “They have them.”

  Blood drained from Kevin’s face. “What do you mean by them?”

  Bryce leaped up from the couch and was by my side in seconds.

  I scanned the message, the words caught in a perpetual loop in my mind.

  Bryce took the Post-it from my fingers and read the words out loud.

  “A life for a life. You took what was precious from me, and now I have taken from each of you. They are mine and will pay for your sins in blood and pain. Only then will I give them the sweet release of death.”

  Bryce’s gaze slanted to mine, his eyes dark and furious. “Who the fuck wrote this?”

  Chapter Eight

  Jake

  I pulled at my hair. I was losing my mind, thinking of Kate in the clutches of my father and my brother. And Lily? Lily and her baby? A glance toward Kevin’s shocked expression brought bile to the back of my throat. We shared the same grief.

  The resurrection of my family shook the foundations of my world. I’d grown comfortable with their deaths, accepted every facet of my role in them. I grieved my brother dying but had celebrated my father’s passing.

  My mind went back to that fateful night in Bangkok. Josh’s ashen-white face had telegraphed his terror as he’d blurted out he’d killed that girl, choked the life right out of her during a scene gone wrong. The girls Kevin and I were with had screamed and ran from the room, barely grabbing their clothes on their way out. Within moments, the cops had arrived.

  I still remembered the shocked expression on Josh’s face—not that he had taken a life, but that the local authorities had had the audacity to arrest him. He didn’t understand how Davenport money wasn’t able to buy him a way out. Even then, all those years ago, my father’s arrogant and depraved mind had begun to corrupt Josh. Josh had been blurring the lines of consent and nonconsent until they saturated more and more of his sexual encounters. If I had known how far his mind had slipped, I never would have left him alone. For that error in judgment, I would always bear my burden of guilt.

  His anger had been palpable that night—at the Thai authorities for taking him and toward Kevin and me for letting them. The look he’d leveled at me when it all became real in his mind had ripped through my heart and, like a dagger, sliced it to shreds. I knew then that he blamed
me.

  I had called home, and my father wired over cash for lawyers and for bribes. The American consulate was no help and, despite our wealth, my father’s connections didn’t extend halfway across the world. Josh was at the mercy of the local authorities who had no reason to show compassion or forgiveness toward a rich foreigner who’d killed a local girl.

  Kevin and I had stayed as long as we could, working the system, feeding bribes to whomever we could, until one morning we were awakened at two a.m. with pistols shoved in our mouths. We’d learned whose daughter Josh had killed, and no amount of bribes was getting him out of that prison.

  Our trio had been irrevocably broken. Our bags had been packed for us, and within the hour, we were escorted to the airport and forced to board a plane back to the States.

  My father never forgave me for abandoning my brother. Josh had languished in that Thai prison for eight years until his death. BlackJack had taken the family yacht overseas, intending to bring his favorite son’s body home. Josh was and had been his favorite; he never let me forget it. A super typhoon had swallowed them both.

  At least, that’s the story I had been led to believe.

  But they had been alive all this time. If this was BlackJack’s idea of vengeance, I was screwed. How long had they been living here, with Josh right under my nose, impersonating me?

  Bryce thumped me on the shoulder. “What are we going to do?”

  A glance to my left revealed Kevin had collapsed in a chair. He held his head in his hands, and his body was slowly rocking back and forth. A slow, low moan escaped him.

  I remembered my original purpose in coming to the receptionist’s area. “We call Pete.”

  “Her cop friend?” Bryce looked to me for confirmation.

  “Yes.”

  I walked around the counter and woke up the computer with a rattle of the mouse. My fingers flew over the keys. After a few moments, I dialed the number to the precinct using the house phone. “I need to speak to Detective Pete Lawry. No, it can’t wait. No, you cannot put me on hold. I don’t care what meeting he’s in. This is an emergency.”

  A few agonizing seconds passed while my heart thumped in my chest. I was surprised I was still on my feet, unlike Kevin, who had curled into fetal position in his chair.

  Shit!

  Pete finally answered the phone. “Lawry here.”

  “Pete, get your fucking ass over to Stripes now. My father and brother have Kate, and they took Lily too.”

  My mind raced with what needed to be done, reminding me of the days when I’d practiced law and prepared for a difficult case. I focused on the problem and began to break it down. We needed to view the security footage of the foyer. We’d been so absorbed in our grief, we weren’t thinking of the obvious. Every square inch of Stripes was monitored for video and sound.

  “I’m on my way.” Pete said and disconnected.

  My voice cracked. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him what would happen before my father chose to release Kate and Lily to the embrace of death. Pete would be here soon. He could read those words for himself. My fingers cramped from clenching the phone so hard. I hung it back on its receiver.

  “We need to view the security footage of the foyer.” I walked past Kevin. “You coming?”

  He glanced up. Tears rolled from his eyes. “I don’t think I can stomach seeing them take her.” He swiped at his cheeks. “I’ll wait for Pete.”

  “Sure thing.”

  I wasn’t sure how good of an idea it was, leaving him alone, but figured the guy needed some space to put himself together for what was to come.

  Bryce and I headed back to the security office, where I braced myself to face living proof my father was alive. All the while, time was speeding by, precious moments we were losing not looking for Kate and Lily. Time my father and Josh were spending alone with them, terrorizing them.

  Kate had spent the last week reinventing herself to slip back into the role of a submissive. I needed her to become a kick-ass Domme again and survive.

  “Kate, I’m coming for you.”

  Bryce glanced at me. “We’re all coming for her.” He opened the door to the security room and held it for me. “At least now, your trial is a nonissue. With this”—he swept his arm out to the banks of security cameras—“we can prove reasonable doubt, and if we get his DNA, it’s an open-and-shut case.”

  “No, it’s not.” My teeth ground together. “I’m still going to jail.”

  “How is that?”

  “I’m going to kill those fuckers.”

  Patricide and fratricide might be sins, but I didn’t care. If Kate didn’t make it out of this alive, I was going to kill them.

  Chapter Nine

  Kate

  I pulled on the restraints binding me to the beam, my stomach sinking with a heavy feeling of déjà vu. I’d been in this position once before and had barely made it out alive. My chest tightened, aching with the surge of memories that resurfaced. A scream vibrated deep inside, eager to be free, but I absorbed the sound by biting down on the inside of my cheek.

  My legs shook, my arms trembled. The unmistakable stench of fear saturated the air. Each breath became a struggle: to hold back tears, to silence my sobs, to fucking kick someone’s ass, to dissolve into a pile of helpless, blubbering flesh. I swallowed down all those emotions and fortified myself to be strong. I had no time to deal with fear even if my body disagreed.

  Wishing and wanting something, however, didn’t make it come true. Terror clogged every pore, and the stink of my fear rose up around me. The heavy pounding of my heart sent me spinning into a dark place, a past I didn’t wish to relive. With each pulse, I fought my inner demons and forced the memories away. My only positive thought was to thank God there wasn’t a camera with its flashing bulb going off. That would have sent me spiraling into oblivion. As it was, I was barely holding my shit together.

  My bindings pulled on my wrists, chafing the skin. Twisting my wrists, trying to free myself or even obtain a more comfortable state of agony, rubbed the abraded skin raw. No matter how hard I tried, my bindings didn’t budge. I glanced up. They’d used Jake’s cuffs to shackle my wrists overhead to a beam. I was inside some sort of industrial building.

  Another swallow and some of my panic receded. My worst fear existed in this moment, being bound and helpless, but I needed to calm down and think.

  Lily’s bracelet would have been my salvation if I still had it on, but Josh had found the flashy jewelry when he toyed with my hands at an intersection. In the stiffening of his body, my first suspicions had bloomed, but I didn’t trust my gut. I always trusted my gut. In my excitement of our reunion, I had denied that which stared me right in the face—or sat before me on that bike. I should’ve vaulted off the bike then, but I hadn’t believed the danger I was in. It wasn’t until we were headed out of town and not toward my apartment that reality had finally intervened.

  The bike had rocketed forward, lunging past the speed limit. We were doing twenty or thirty miles over. I clung to the man I thought was Jake, not with the exhilaration of the ride, but with a growing sense of wrongness. I should have trusted my instincts. I should’ve gone with my gut. Instead, I wrapped my arms around a man who was not my Jake.

  The suddenness with which he’d ripped the bracelet from my wrist had stunned me. The leather of the cuffs protected my skin from the hard yank. Otherwise, the metal band would have cut my wrist. In that moment I could no longer deny that the man I rode behind was not my Jake.

  Josh Davenport lived, and he had me in a vulnerable position. I hadn’t felt fear, not right then, but my stomach had dropped with the knowledge I’d been led into a trap. I’d set myself to strategizing how to get myself off that bike.

  I should have paid more attention to Josh. As my gaze followed the trajectory of Lily’s bracelet and my mind processed the shock of who I sat behind, Josh had been prepared. Perhaps he’d been waiting for the right moment. My distraction gave him what he needed. With a s
nap, he’d locked the rings of my cuffs together around his waist. My hands were now bound.

  When I’d tried to free myself, trying to first jerk my wrists apart, then lift them past his arms and over his head, the bike had swerved onto the shoulder. We were moving at a reckless speed. Josh recovered and soon had us back in our lane of travel. He’d accelerated even more.

  I screamed, but he ignored me.

  He’d brought me to this place, a warehouse somewhere on the outskirts of town. The tall doors slid open, pulled apart by three men. With a low-throated rumble, Josh pulled the bike into the shaded depths of what would shortly become my living hell. Before we came to a halt, before I could react, the men were on me. Josh grabbed my wrists and lifted them over his head, while the men dragged me off the bike. Two of them gripped my arms, while the third held me from behind. I’d been effectively subdued.

  Josh turned the key to the bike, and the roar of the engine died. In its place, my screams echoed in the warehouse and into the sudden gaping silence. He came over to me and lifted the helmet off his face. As I stared at the face of Jake, the face of a stranger glared back at me. His light-blue eyes smoldered with the vileness of his lust.

  He punched me in the gut, stealing my air and silencing my screams. I gagged against the pain, partially bent at the waist and held upright by the two men caging my elbows and supporting me between their large frames.

  Josh removed my helmet, being gentle as he rocked it over my chin and off my head. Then he pressed a cloth over my mouth and nose and held it there until I breathed in the sweet chemical-like aroma. With each breath, I sucked in more of the anesthetic until my vision dimmed.

  Deep, penetrating, soulless blue eyes had stared back at me. “You and I are going to have so much fun. Welcome to your crucible, Mistress of Pain.”

  After the craziness of his words hit me, blackness had followed.