Page 75 of Decadence

In a single fluid motion, Kai shrugged off his dark jacket, folding it over his arm. Then he removed one of his shiny silver cufflinks and folded back perfectly pressed french cuffs to reveal his left wrist.

Serpentine tattoos covered his skin in the form of vivid swirls of inky blues and reds and blacks.

Sienna went very still. “You’re Syndicate.”

“Was,” Kai replied, not missing a beat. “I work for the Darkstar Corporation now. I need to discuss something important with you.”

“How very reassuring.” She shot him an acid-tipped smile.

Arin laughed. “Don’t worry. Despite his checkered past, Kai’s a good egg. Zyara would have kicked his ass to the curb by now if he wasn’t.”

“Zyara?” Sienna stared at the human in surprise. “You guys are…?”

“She is my mate,” Kai said, a hint of some raw, savage emotion entering his voice. Like the Kordolians, he was a little bit scary. “So you should have no doubt as to where my loyalties lie.”

“Okay, point taken. So what’s this all about?”

“You want to do this now?”

“Might as well. Get the unpleasantness over and done with.” Sienna glanced at Arin, seeking an ally.

“Go ahead,” the human replied. “We’ll save the good stuff for last.”

Kai’s expression turned cold. “Connor Ryan is a former romantic interest of yours.”

“Former,” she said bluntly. “Very former. Not for a very long time now. Why are we even talking about him?”

“After he visited your restaurant, he was picked up and questioned by a member of our First Division.”

Holy crap.

These guys had taken Connor?

A torrent of mixed emotions coursed through her. Unease mingled with a twisted sense of satisfaction. Still, Connor might be a jerk, but she didn’t want him to die.

First Division? What is that?

According to Ikriss’s CV, he was Second Division, and she’d seen how he fought.

Like a demon.

With preternatural speed.

What did that make the First Division, then?

She suppressed a shudder.

“Don’t worry, he’s alive and intact.” Kai chuckled softly, as if the image of some lethal silver alien putting the fear of the Universe into an arrogant New York princeling from a prominent crime family was immensely amusing to him. “We let him go. He told us enough. He had an interesting theory about the Syndicate and their involvement in all this.”

“Connor has a lot of weird theories,” Sienna said wearily. She really didn’t want to talk about that guy. He was nothing more than a bad memory from her past, and she wanted to keep it that way.

“Well, there was enough in it for us to test it. Turns out he was onto something.” Kai straightened his loose cuff and replaced his gleaming silver cufflink, hiding his vivid tattoos. He looked up at Sienna, his dark eyes hard like obsidian. “Turns out that every single woman we recovered from that Ephrenian ship owes a debt to the Syndicate.”

“I don’t believe it.” Revulsion swept through her, mingling with bitter anger. “They sold us to the Ephrenians to recover their debts?”

“The Federation’s been cracking down hard on the Syndicate of late. My sources tell me that’s the reason they’re going through a restructuring phase. They’re trying to recover a large tranche of outstanding loans so they can sink their capital into off-planet investments.”

“By selling us out?” A cold emptiness opened up in the pit of her stomach. I went through all that crap because some assholes decided they wanted to move some money? She should have been angry, but she just felt sick.

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