The woman’s small lips curved into a bow. “Of course you belong here. You’re built exactly right for our needs.”
A chill ran through her. “What do you mean needs?”
“You’re a woman. Figure it out.”
The statement confirmed her worst fears. “Sex.”
“Of course, and all sorts of variations so you’ll never be bored.”
Angelica shuddered. “Can’t you let me out of these restraints?”
“No, I can’t. You almost blinded one of my workers. You must be obedient while you’re in our care, do you understand?”
The woman slid her hand down Angelica’s chest and began caressing her bare br**sts, moving in slow circles. “You have very full, exquisite br**sts, by the way. Does that feel good?”
Angelica squirmed, trying to get away from the unwelcome touch. “I’m not into women.”
“They all say that at first, but pretty soon you’ll be doing a lot of things you never thought you’d do. And given your spirit, I feel compelled to offer a taste of the kind of pain you’ll experience if you don’t do as you’re told.”
The woman took hold of Angelica’s left nipple between her thumb and forefinger and pinched harder and harder. Angelica twisted, trying to get relief, but the pressure increased.
She looked at the woman’s face and saw a kind of euphoria in her features. She was enjoying hurting her.
“Sorry, precious, but this is gonna get worse before it gets better. Try to relax.”
“It’s bad enough already.” She spoke the words between gasps.
Something that felt like fire began to burn through Angelica’s nipple, a burn that kept coming, kept increasing. She heard screams, then realized they belonged to her.
“Beautiful,” the woman said softly. “I really am tempted to keep you for myself. Let’s see how much you can take. I hadn’t meant to go this far, but you’ve got some chops, my dear.”
The fiery pain broadened, expanding through her breast. She shook, cried out, and wept. The pain was beyond bearing. She was sure it couldn’t get worse, then it did.
“What stamina. I swear I haven’t seen someone of your potential in more than a century. You’ll do extremely well on the block, just wait and see. But you’ll need to rein in your spirit if you want to survive, and don’t ever say I didn’t warn you.”
Her vision began to blacken. As Angelica slipped into unconsciousness once more, she saw the woman smile, a final image she’d never forget.
Chapter Two
On Friday night Reyes straightened immaculate cuffs, held together by black onyx links. His Brioni tux, ordered months ago, fit like a glove and looked like the fortune it had cost. Shoes, Italian leather. Watch, limited-edition Cartier.
He’d left nothing to chance. What he accomplished at the auction tonight would be the final door he’d use to enter the Starlin world for good. He’d worked toward this moment for a long time, building his bad-boy, player reputation and finally gaining membership.
But having access to all the Starlin events was only the beginning and he knew that. There could be no easing off. If anything, he needed to work just a little harder to make sure that the front man for the operation, Damien Engles, totally bought his cover, the reason he intended to purchase a slave tonight.
Once he had Engles’s support, he could begin pushing the boundaries of the corporation to find out once and for all exactly who was behind the Starlin Group. Only then would he know what steps he’d need to take to destroy an organization that had enslaved, tortured, and murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people, human and vampire.
His heart thrummed with excitement and with a familiar deep need to pay-it-back-in-fucking-full. The slavery he’d endured himself for a full century had created his profound wish to change the status quo. Slavery had gone on for millennia and maybe that was part of the problem: Time had given it a certain acceptability and tolerance.
Not that he cared. He had one purpose in his life, and he meant to see it through even if he died in the attempt.
His reasons were personal since he’d never found his captor. She’d eluded him all this time, staying one step ahead of him, living her life in secrecy, perhaps knowing that once he found her, he’d kill her. However, she had a lot of powers in her arsenal, and one of them was the ability to create intricate disguises.
She’d bought him at auction, or so he’d been told. He hadn’t been conscious by the time he’d been taken to the actual bidding block. He’d fought his captors hard, something that had appealed to her sadistic nature. The only way they’d been able to manage him was by binding him with a dozen chains, all enhanced with preternatural power.
Sweet Dove, the only name he’d ever known her by, had offered the highest bid in sex-slave history. Then she’d torn him down, one drop of blood at a time, one inflicted wound after another, depriving him of sleep and of sustenance, until he’d become a mass of incoherent thoughts.
She’d rebuilt him with sex, chaining him up and making him come repeatedly with every part of her body, until his soul shut off and he became the animal she’d craved.
He’d engaged with her then, fully and completely, holding nothing back.
Yet some part of him had remained intact, and began a painfully slow resurgence, a process that took over a century. By the time he escaped Sweet Dove’s cavern lair, he’d had only one thought: to get rid of her kind forever, the sex slavers that used humans and fellow vampires like animals.
Maybe he hadn’t found her yet, but in the meantime he’d undermine the world she’d helped create and no doubt continued to sustain with her wealth and patronage. As far as he knew she had no association with Starlin, but this arm of the sex-slave trade functioned in a way that felt very familiar to him, with layers of secrecy he hadn’t seen since his time with her. Though he believed that a man headed up this organization, somehow he wouldn’t have been surprised to find she was a major contributor, at least on some level.
Half an hour later he arrived at the auction site, deep inside the underground cavern system. The large ballroom-sized space was beautifully decorated with carved slabs of polished black granite embedded in the rock walls and surrounded by intricate carvings. The floor was made of the same granite. The house displayed large photos of each of the slaves on easels spread around the room, so that buyers could look over the twenty women who would be auctioned that night.