Page 26 of Voracious

The back of my head hits the wall, and burning pain sears through my face. Chris keeps his fist raised, readying to punch me again.

I wipe the blood from my mouth, glaring at him.

Pretty soon, he’ll drug me, and I can float around by his side and not understand what’s happening.

If I’m lucky, he’ll make me overdose.

9

STACEY

Chris keeps his hand low on the small of my back as he ushers me to the front entrance of an extravagant-looking building. It looks like it’s worth a billion pounds – even the front doors are gold. Chris’s friend is a rich dickhead whose family works in this place, and he got VIP passes for us.

Chris hasn’t told me which friend we’re meeting – he just smirks when he mentions how great the night will be. I’ve to behave, do as he says, and if one of them wants me to sit in their lap, I sit.

My eyes are cast down, but I glance up just before we walk through the entrance, and my gaze clashes with Barry’s for half a second. And just to make things a million times worse, while we stand, Chris talking away to someone I don’t recognise, I see someone else.

Through the crowd, among the chattering people and laughs and drunks waiting to get their seats in front of the dancing women, is Archie Sawyer. The sight of him has my heart dropping.

I tug at Chris’s sleeve, making him look at me mid-conversation. “What?”

“Can we leave?”

He frowns like I’ve just asked him to jump off a building. “No.” It’s a simple, straight-to-the-point response that has my bottom lip trembling.

Archie doesn’t see me – I’m too far away, and I can only just make him out through the shoulders of tall people. He’s smiling as he talks to a woman with wine-red hair, a younger, slimmer blonde woman beside her. I can barely see them, but I see enough to tell me the woman could be his wife.

The reason for Kade’s entrapment.

Someone shifts in front of me, revealing them fully, and my insides twist when I see who else is here – his hand on the older woman’s back, her hand on his chest as she smiles at Archie. In a black fitted suit and shirt to match his hair, his tattoo peeking out from his collar, Kade stands completely still – a statue – as his companions chatter.

The lady with red hair leans up and whispers in his ear then takes his earlobe between her teeth.

“Are you okay?” Chris asks me, his voice filled with concern even though he’s a fucking psychopath. “You’ve gone pale.”

“You threatened to sell me to your friends the entire drive,” I grit, dragging my eyes elsewhere. “Don’t expect me to be in a good mood.”

“Such a fucking brat,” he replies, shaking his head. He takes my hand and pulls me into the room on the left, away from Kade and Archie and who I assume is the wife. The younger one might be the daughter? Or maybe another poor soul trapped in their web?

However, all my thoughts stall when Chris leads me to where we’re sitting, a mini stage in the middle of a semi-circular leather booth. But that’s not my issue – my issue is that I recognise the faces of the men waiting for us.

I try to stop walking, but Chris crushes my hand and drags me. “If you thought what happened the other week was bad, you’re going to wish you were dead. Now fucking walk.”

The last time I saw them was when Chris drugged me, sold me and ultimately destroyed my entire life by having each of them beat and rape me while I was in a relationship with Kade.

Chris pulls me down on his lap, wraps his arms around me as he greets his friends then slips pills into my hand. “Take them,” he orders. “Unless you want to make a scene where I force them down your throat followed by my cock? No one will help you here.”

I gulp, folding my fingers over the little white pills before swallowing them. The dryness of my throat makes them catch, and Chris offers me a drink to wash them down.

I’m not sure how much time passes, but I’m hot, a layer of sweat on my skin, trying to stay conscious as Chris laughs with his friends, who keep asking me if I remember them.

They want me to dance. They want me to cry their names. They want me to show them between my legs again.

“How much for an hour?”

“Fuck off,” Chris replies, laughing and shaking his head. “She’s mine tonight.”

“She’s yours every night. Three grand? I can wire it across right now and we’ll be back with her in thirty minutes.”

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