Page 21 of Taken By the Dark Billionaires

She shut her eyes tight as his fingers crept under her skirt now and onto her naked thigh, then further up.

She couldn’t move. Couldn’t fight him. But even if she tried, Maxim meant to hold her down while he touched her, and there was nothing she could do or say to stop him.

Using his foot, he nudged her legs apart.

A strangled gasp fell from her lips as his fingers inched into the side of her panties.

She was so wet she wanted to die right there.

His soft growl echoed around her as his thumb slid over her clit up to her mons, then over the scar of the branding.

Tears dropped from her eyes.

They were going to kill her. It was over for her.

He released her, and Sutton’s eyes burst open at the sudden drop in her body temperature.

She watched as Maxim sucked the wetness off his middle finger, evidence of her arousal, before he straightened her skirt, slipped his hands into his pockets once more, perused her with his dark green gaze, then turned and left.

She took precious moments to recover from his touch and from the now conclusive knowledge they had that it had been her in their dungeon.

But when the full force of reality hit, she knew she had a small window to escape.

Running out of the office, she ignored her boss, who called after her. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now.

She had to do something to try to save herself. She had an envelope of cash in her apartment, tips from the odd jobs she had taken as a waitress for a catering company. It was her emergency money; mostly, she thought she would be spending it on Laura.

She couldn’t go home to Newhearts Ville; that would endanger her family. Her only option was to take a bus somewhere, anywhere, until she could figure things out.

She flew into her apartment and then rummaged through her drawers for the cash. Finding it, she quickly counted it, and her heart sank when it only amounted to a couple of hundred dollars. How far was she going to get on that?

It didn’t matter. She had to leave. Now, right now.

She threw some clothes into a bag when the creak of her apartment door opening sounded like a bomb going off. In her haste, she stupidly hadn’t locked it.

It was game over for her when standing in her drab, tiny apartment were Ezra Collins, Jensen Flynn, and Maxim Black.

Her worst fears had come through.

They knew who she was.

They had found her.

She didn’t want to imagine how pathetic she looked standing in her one-bedroom studio apartment, where the neighbors on her right were drug dealers and the neighbors on her left were fully invested in a mutually abusive relationship with each other.

It was all she allowed herself to spend on housing; every other cent had to be used on her nieces and nephews, and what was left over had to be saved for when they left the country—when Carl was released from prison.

With everything that she stood to face, she couldn’t help but feel embarrassed that they now knew where she lived and in what conditions. Still, their sheer magnificence, their aura of power, and their wealth drowned out everything that was run down about her home.

Whatever they planned to do to her, she hoped they would have the compassion to allow her to say goodbye to her family. God, what was going to happen to Laura and her nieces Mandy and Penny and her four nephews, Olly, Teddy, and the twins Oscar and Arlo?

Even though Laura was older than Sutton by ten years, it had always been Sutton who had taken care of her thirty-four-year-old sister, time and again. Never the other way around.

She was getting caught up in her thoughts; they were strangling her, weakening her, prompting her to want to drop down to her knees and beg them for mercy. That she would give them back...

What?

They had taken her virginity because they thought she was someone else. Nothing she did could undo that. But if anything, she had a bit of her pride left, and she planned to hold onto it until her last breath.

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