“Settle down,princess,” the man sneered. “Your turn is coming up soon. You’re the main event of tonight’s auction.”
Now that the adrenaline had burned off the remainder of whatever drug kept me sedated, the missing pieces of the last day became clear. Elio visiting right before a scheduledauction. His hungry stare as he sat beside me at that small, round table all during dinner. Father’s knowing smirk when I mentioned growing tired suddenly. Then… nothing. I didn’t even remember getting up from my chair.
Those motherfuckers drugged me!
I cursed my stupidity and blind trust. I should have known something was off with so many guards lurking around the restaurant that they were plotting something. It wasn’t like I didn’t have my fair share of enemies, separate from just being a daughter of the Heathens’ mob boss. My online persona as Cyber_Fox was a Robin Hood character, stealing from the illegal auctions run all throughout Europe and doling money out to anti-trafficking organizations while keeping less than half a percent for myself to squirrel away in offshore accounts. Father knew about it, even if he didn’t wholly approve. I was weakening his enemies, both current and potential. Even his allies could turn against him if they reared their heads, so I helped keep him at the top of the ecosystem by slowly draining their finances.
But if anyone found out the hacker who made their lives hell was Ryan McGregor’s daughter, he’d face the wrath of the whole Assembly. The collection of twenty organized crime groups that formed an uneasy truce among each other, and that was shaky at best. For Father to betray me so horribly… did someone find out I was a hacker? Was he being blackmailed?
The lock clattered again. I barely had time to look over my shoulder when a beefy hand tangled in my hair and wrenched my head back at a painful angle. “Come on,princess,” the owner of the hand mocked. “It’s your time to shine.”
Tears pricked my eyes at the pain of being hauled from the metal box by my hair. Throwing my limp body on the floor, he chuckled and planted a foot on my back. Something wrappedaround my neck and cinched tightly. “Looks like she’s still pretty out of it.” A second man fiddled with whatever he put on my neck. It felt smooth and cold against my skin, like it was made of chains… a choke collar.
My assumption was confirmed when the foot on my back moved and tension pulled against the front of my throat, making me gasp and choke with the force. “Get the fuck up!” He jerked on the collar again, hard. “Let’s go.”
I was half-dragged by the end of my leash in his merciless hand, still weak from whatever drug knocked me out. It was dark, but I could make out that we were in some kind of storage room with several other open boxes. That explained why it was so quiet here.
The man hauled me up a short flight of stairs behind him, flanked by the other one who kept the muzzle of a gun firmly planted on the back of my head. Like I was any match for either one right now in my condition. I couldn’t even force a shift despite being an alpha. I might as well be… human.
The top of the landing led into a backstage area of sorts, filled with armed guards holding their own crying wards. Their moans and wails had no effect on the men’s stoic faces. Jesus Christ, there were even children slumped on the floor in chains! I wasn’t completely naive to the skin trade. I knew what kind of trafficking my father specialized in. But knowing about his predilection for snatching up young shifters without families and seeing it firsthand were two jarring realities now colliding with each other. It was my own little act of rebellion to hack into other known traffickers’ accounts and siphon off funds, but unless I wanted a bullet straight to my brain I wouldn’t dare touch Father’s profits. He wouldn’t give it a second thought to kill his eldest daughter for less.
My handler pushed through heavy black curtains, and suddenly my eyes were accosted by a blinding light. I couldn’tsettle on where to put my arms or hands—how do I cover enough skin to preserve some sliver of dignity?—as I was pulled by the leash to the center of a stage overlooking a massive crowd. A well dressed, sophisticated looking crowd, despite the fact they were worse than mangy animals in their suits and sparkling dresses.
“Lot number eighty-four,” an announcer spoke over the low din. “A young female fox shifter, no documented heats or mates, but experienced in sexual acts and confirmed to have lost her virginity. The starting bid on this one is two hundred thousand euros–”
How degrading. To have my value summed up with my age and breeding record in such a detached, analytical way made me want to vomit all over this polished stage. I was under no illusion that I was nothing more than a tight cunt and baby machine in the mob world. But maybe for the first time in my short life, I wished I had been born a man. The horrors that waited for me on the other side of this auction were not for the faint of heart. If I only had to fuck an old man for the rest of my life I’d be lucky.
The announcer’s voice cut through my spiraling dread. “Bidder four-oh-eight wins, with five-hundred-eighty thousand euros. Please use the number on your paddle to collect your winnings at the conclusion of the auction. This concludes the companion segment, after a ten-minute intermission, we will proceed with the art…”
The collar cut off my air supply for a moment when my handler jerked me off my feet, and dragged me on my knees across the stage until my knees burned from the friction, forcing me back onto my feet. “You got a pretty penny, bitch,” he snarled into my ear, the breath brushing against the shell, humid and sour. “Maybe the bidder will be kind enough to let me have a go at you before he hauls you off. To put my dickin the great Ryan McGregor’s precious daughter would be the highlight of my night.”
“Fuck… you!” I spat out. Even those two words sounded garbled to my ears. My head still felt like it was filled with cotton. I barely managed to stay on my feet long enough to make it to some kind of loading dock off the back of the staging area, down another short hallway lined with plush carpet. There was already a truck backing into the ramp with a cage loaded in the bed, the walls of it made with some kind of dark plexiglass.
“Hello again, lovely.” The voice that purred sent a cold wave of shock down my spine all the way to my feet and back up. I was chilled to the bone by the time I lifted my head a few excruciating centimeters to see the familiar owner of it. Just as I met Elio Messina’s cold eyes, one of his beefy hands palmed my naked breast. His fingers dug into the tender flesh hard enough to make my eyes water. “I must say you look even more enchanting without clothes. You will be worth every euro.”
Panic immediately overwhelmed my system, flooding it with adrenaline that burned away the last of that potent drug that kept me manageable. I kicked and thrashed and lashed out with manicured nails, spitting and howling with everything I had left in my weak body. Even as the collar tightened around my throat to a debilitating cinch, I whipped around and lunged for the one who held the leash, going right for his eyes and digging into the sockets. The satisfyingsquelchand agonizing howls as he dropped my leash fueled my bloodlust… until the press of something cold and metallic to my side gave me a moment’s warning before stinging electricity coursed through my muscles. They locked up instantly, dropping me to the ground as I twitched violently in the aftermath. Elio stood over me, a wretched smile on his tanned face as he held a sparking taser in one hand.
“Oh, you will be a joy to break, Lorelai McGregor. There will be nothing left of you when I’m done.”
He lunged faster than I could recover, jabbing the taser into my stomach and pressing the button again until I lost consciousness. As it turned out, that brief reprieve of darkness was the first and last he’d ever allow me to have in my miserable life.
I blinked, the dark fog of remembrance leaving my eyes as I stared up at the plain white ceiling. At some point in the repulsive story I'd flipped onto my back, unable to stand the warm press of Grant's skin while recalling something so disturbing. Not once did I look over to check Grant’s expression as I recounted the whole sordid past that brought me to this point. Quite frankly, I had no interest in the pity or sympathy I was sure he’d have on that striking face. The only other person I’d ever told the details of my time with Elio was Lyre, and she was already buying plane tickets to Italy when I’d been able to reel her back in. Not that I didn’t appreciate the sisterly support. But if anyone was going to fucking kill Elio Messina, it was going to be me. And it was going to be onmyterms. He would know exactly whose hand held the knife running across his throat, when the time was right.
Instead of the tender brushing of fingers I expected, Grant’s hand wrapped around my throat and jaw and he twisted it to face him. The fire that burned in his brown eyes was not soft or commiserating at all. All I saw was rage, even as he lowered his mouth to capture mine in a brutal kiss that was more teeth than anything else.
“Let’s get one fucking thing straight,” he snarled against my lips. “Whatever that bastard did to you means nothing to me,beyond wanting to torture him for weeks until he regretted ever being born. But nothing will ever convince me that you're less than perfect.” Grant’s mouth brushed over my jaw and pressed another hot kiss below my ear that made me shudder hard. “I would mark you, if you let me.” His teeth grazed the side of my neck, the tips digging in the slightest bit and making me shiver in his arms. “And you could mark me. We could belong to each other until we die. Because I’m not letting you leave me, dead or alive.” There was a hitch in my chest, a gasp of breath I tried to hide. Grant must have heard it anyway and buried his face into the wild waves of my hair, the pink wig that hid it during the livestream tossed across the room long ago. I could feel his lips move like he was smiling.
“Stop bein’ so feckin’ corny, pup,” I muttered. He knew I didn’t mean it. I was not-so-secretly loving how wrapped up in me he was. It felt like the kind of love that was robbed from me when I was young, the kind of love I should have had before all the sickening things Elio did to me. I could even feel the tips of my ears burning with how hard I blushed.. But I couldn’t push Grant away. My arms wrapped themselves even tighter around his back and I rubbed my face hard against the curve of his shoulder. “I’m still a mob boss. I can’t give you everything you want.”
“All I want is you.”
A sad sigh left my lips, and I tilted my head down so he couldn’t see my face. “Yeah, that’s the problem. I don’t belong to me anymore, Grant. You would be another liability I can’t afford to have.”
He scoffed. “Ouch! That’s fucking rude. You think I can’t hold my own? Like I’ll be some damsel in distress when someone comes after us?”
I hummed noncommittally. “It’s not that,” I began. “But… you of all people know the bullshit that comes with being closeto a boss, romantically or otherwise. The more people we care about, the more likely those people are to be targets for whatever revenge plot someone has against us. It’s a brutal, bloody, and short life.”
My hand splayed wide and replaced where I’d laid my head on his shoulder, and I pushed myself up to straddle his hips as the silky black sheets slithered off my shoulders to pool behind me on Grant’s thighs. As soon as he'd mentioned marking in his cute declaration of love, my brain latched onto the possibilities with scary intensity. I had zero interest in exchanging the traditional mating bites; my scars were nothing more than a constant reminder of the violations I endured when I was Elio's captive. I wanted something different to represent this… whatever the hell this was between us.
