Page 66 of Vicious King

“This may come as quite a shock to you, Elias, but…” Davenport left another theatrical pause before speaking again. “The women we keep at the Finishing School and the Lodge are not exactly willing.”

“Huh?” I widened my eyes just the right amount to simulate pure shock. “You mean they’re captives?”

His lips curled upward. “Yes. All of them.”

My stomach lurched. I already knew this, and yet it still hit me like a ton of bricks when they confirmed it for me this casually, as if they were simply handing out a coffee order.

“Including my slave?”

“Yes. Every single sex slave in the history of our organization has been an unwilling hostage.” Davenport narrowed his eyes. “You made it clear during your trials that you shared our vision. I hope we weren’t mistaken.”

I forced a smirk. “Hell no. You have no fucking idea how happy it makes me to hear that.” I paused and held my hands out wide, palms facing them. “Knowing it’s actually real, not just some hooker putting on a performance for me… fuck. It’s amazing. It’s exactly what I always wanted.”

Even saying the words hollowed me out, made bile rise in my throat.

“See?” My father smiled. “I knew he was one of us.” He looked right at me, pride glimmering in his eyes. “You’re just like me, son.”

I leaned back and rubbed my chin, pasting on an expression of casual interest. “Can I ask how exactly we get away with it? What’s stopping a rogue third-level member from telling everyone what’s happening here before you can get to him and kill him?”

Van der Veer smiled. “Think about it. Once you’re in, you can’t really tell anyone, can you? Why do you think we let all the second-level members have access to the Finishing School and the Lodge? It’s so they automatically become complicit before they even make it to third.”

“I see.” Clever.

“You could never try to tell anyone, because then you’d have to admit you fucked a girl—or many girls—against her will,” he went on. “No one would ever believe you if you said ‘I didn’t know, I thought they were just prostitutes’. So you become one of us, sharing our many secrets. You can never reveal them, because you are just as guilty as the rest of us. If you ever tried to go public, you would be branded as a torturer and a rapist the same as everyone else. Even in death, that is how you would be remembered.”

“So why kill or heavily monitor the ones who want to leave, if they’d be too ashamed or scared to admit it anyway?”

“Just in case. Who knows? Maybe one of them wouldn’t care what people thought of him, and he’d just want to get the information out there despite the stain it would leave on his name.”

“Ah. Makes sense.”

“It’s very rare we get anyone like that, though. We pick the third-level members very carefully.”

“Of course.” I leaned forward, intertwining my fingers. “So how are the girls selected?”

“You’ll get to know the more intricate details as we go along, but basically, most are from poorer families who are given compensation in return for giving up their daughters. They can’t tell anyone either, if they change their minds, because then they’d be seen as ‘that family’ who sold their own child. Shame is a wonderful tool to keep people complicit.”

“You said most. So not all?”

“Not all,” my father confirmed. “Sometimes, one of us will spot a girl they want, but her family aren’t the sort who would give her up. So instead of purchasing her, we will arrange for her to be abducted for him. A cover story will usually be put in place. Rumors will be spread that the girl was a drug addict, for example. Or that she was mentally unstable and planning on running away.”

“And my slave?” I raised my brows.

“Her parents sold her to us. I approached them myself to broker the deal,” Dad said with a smug grin. “I wanted her for you as soon as she came onto my radar, with the Ben Wellington case.”

I gritted my teeth. “I see.”

He mistook my expression for annoyance. “I really am sorry that I had to lie to you, son. I couldn’t let you in on the truth before you made it to the third level.”

I waved a hand, arranging my features into a neutral expression again. “I understand. You did exactly what I’d do in that situation.” I paused for a few seconds. “Anyway, what happens with the slaves once they are no longer wanted by anyone?”

Davenport cleared his throat. “They work at the School and Lodge in various capacities. Maids, kitchen staff, gardeners, makeup artists for the girls. And…” He hesitated and glanced at my father, who nodded. “This is actually a good segue into the next topic we wanted to discuss.”

My heart thudded. “What is it?”

“The girls who we consider to be the most physically in shape are used as surrogates once they hit their late twenties or early thirties,” he said. “Sometimes members have fertility issues with their wives. In other cases, their wives simply don’t want to be pregnant because they are afraid it will ruin their bodies, or their husbands worry about that. So we’ll use IVF procedures to implant a fertilized egg into the captive woman we’ve chosen for the surrogacy, and they grow and give birth to the baby for the couple. Of course, this isn’t a common thing. Only a few of the women will be used for that every year.”

My mouth hung open slightly. Aside from the shock and disgust of hearing about the forced surrogacies, the supposed logic behind it alone was unbelievable. I’d never really thought about kids or pregnancy that much, given my age, but the attitude that it would ‘ruin’ a woman’s body seemed incredibly juvenile and rooted in the dark ages, even to someone like me who’d admittedly never considered it in great detail.

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