“What are we going to do with her? The last one we took to the hospital ignited a firestorm of questions that we barely got away without fully answering. This little chick could bring down our entire operation,” he said, agitated. “Who the hell would do this?”
“I don’t know but we’d better find out or else we’re fucked. In the meantime, I can take her to my penthouse and have a doctor tend to her. Help me get her to the car,” Vince instructed and Laird snapped into action. It was relatively easy to travel the dark halls of the dungeon without attracting attention and with Laird’s help, they gently placed the girl into the awaiting Towncar idling behind the club’s private back entrance. He climbed in beside the girl and leaned out to give terse instructions to Laird. “Get the security footage immediately. I want to know who went into Dungeon 5 tonight. Someone is using Malvagio as a cover to do fucked up things and I’m not about to let some jackwad take us down like this. You find something, you call me, no matter the hour. Got it?”
Laird jerked a short nod and closed the door.
“Penthouse,” he said to the driver and immediately called a doctor they kept on call for odd emergencies. With a club like Malvagio, it was wise to have a doctor on hand who could step in with medical expertise if the play got out of hand. Although rare because Vince screened all potential members, on occasion people have become injured through play that took things a step too far. Usually, when that happened, the member was barred from the club forever because Vince wasn’t anyone’s babysitter, nor did he relish the idea of policing members who weren’t smart enough to do their homework before embarking on potentially dangerous play. One member — Preacher — had ignored a safe word and had nearly caned his sub to death. “Who did you run afoul, my little dove?” he asked quietly, his stare traveling up her body, resting on each raised welt or bruise, and a growing sense of outrage followed. He didn’t know if the rage was centered on the fact that she’d been so brutalized or that it’d been done in his club.
A grim smile followed. Likely because it was done in his club. Vince was no hero and he didn’t pretend to be. The girl had been stupid to come to his club without a sponsor, clearly standing out like a sore thumb among the jaded and debauched of his membership. Her blonde hair spilled across the black leather like fine yellow silk and he wondered if it were as soft as it appeared. He looked away. She reminded him too much of another blonde he’d once known — Isabel.
He squeezed his eyeballs with his thumb and forefinger, staving off the pounding headache that came from too much liquor and not enough sleep, and made a concentrated effort to empty his mind of anything but the moment at hand. He had a clear set of priorities: Get the girl to the penthouse and medical attention; find the fucker who’d dared to pull this kind of shit, not once, but twice.
Six months ago, another girl had been brutalized in his club. He’d chalked it up to inexperience and had buried the investigation. Once the excitement had died down, it’d been business as usual.
The agitation of his thoughts made it impossible to think straight but one thing was clear, someone was using Malvagio to do bad things.
Very bad things.
And if there was one thing he didn’t abide — it was being used.
By anyone.
#
A parade of pain stomped through Emma’s head and made her teeth ache as she clenched them against the agony. Everything hurt. If it were possible, she was fairly certain the tips of her hair were screeching in time with the symphony of pain throughout her entire body. What had happened? Her thoughts were fuzzy but the taste of terror remained. Beaten – she’d been beaten! There’d been laughter, deep, rumbling laughter with each savage blow as she screamed and wept, finally begging for it to stop. How was it possible that she was alive? Or was she? Perhaps she was dead. No, if she were dead, would she be in this much pain? Surely, she’d done enough good in her life to merit a trip to the pain-free zone where angels floated around on clouds of marshmallows?
Squiggly lint trails wiggled across her blurred vision and she couldn’t focus on anything for longer than a heartbeat. The low murmur of voices, speaking in hushed tones that fairly screamed with concern over her smashed body didn’t fill her with confidence that she was going to make it of this scrape alive.
She’d always considered herself plucky — determined to a fault. Right about now, she was feeling naïve and pretty stupid.
What’d been her plan once she got into that infernal club? Waltz up to the owner and get him to confess his sins somehow? One look from his intense stare and she’d felt stripped to her bones. Of course, it hadn’t helped that she’d been wearing that ridiculous sparkly get up that all the hostesses wore in that little sin cesspool. How was it that she could remember all those details but she couldn’t focus her vision to save her life? Perhaps her brain was damaged. She vaguely remembered taking a hit or two to her noggin. But she mostly remembered the searing, unending agony of being tortured within an inch of her life.
Yeah…that she remembered just fine.
And she’d like to forget that.
Please.
But her brain seemed stuck in a loop, playing the events over and over so she could soak in her own misery and compound it with mortification. He’d hung her like a slab of beef and snipped the clothes from her body. But even as horrifying as that’d been, there’d been more and it took a full moment for her traumatized brain to pull the memory from the locked box it’d been shoved into. She shied away from the knowledge but once known, it couldn’t be hidden again. An inhuman sound escaped her. He’d jammed his fingers inside her, ripping and tearing and laughing as she screamed. Emma felt the burn of tears leaking from her eyes and her shoulders shook with the force of the knowledge that she’d not only been beaten but violated as well. “No,” she uttered with a hoarse, dry whisper that sounded as if it came from the dusty vocal cords of a coma patient. “No. Noooooooo….”
Fear and rage crashed against one another in a bid for control and she shook uncontrollably. She felt hands against her skin and she struggled against the foreign touch. The low voices escalated as she fought them harder until she screeched against the shocking prick of something sharp jabbing her vein. No! No! The incessant throb echoing through her body receded to a dull ache and soon the grasp she had on consciousness went slack and she tumbled into a blissful nothingness.
Her last thought burned with hatred.
Vince Buchanan…bastard.
-3-
“What the hell happened?” Nolan’s sharp question was tinged with horror. “And you say this isn’t the first time? What the hell, Vince? What else have you been keeping from me?”
Vince glared at his twin for the accusation in his tone. “Hey, don’t go all judgmental on me. You’re the one who’s been too busy with your own life to mess around with club details. There was an incident and I handled it. Plain and simple. How was I supposed to know that it was going to happen again?”
“I don’t understand,” Nolan said, beginning to pace. Their older brother Dillon sat in the chair opposite them, nursing a scotch and brooding. Vince had already downed two already but it wasn’t helping. “Who would fucking do this? Every person on the membership has been personally vetted to avoid shit like this. We have to find out who is behind this before the cops get wind of it.”
“I can take care of the cops,” Vince shot back. “How do you think it went away the first time?”
“You can’t keep paying off detectives to look the other way. Eventually, that puts your ass in a sling and by proxy the family,” Dillon warned, his face a mask of control. The only indication he was pissed was the subtle tensing of his jaw. “Maybe it’s time to shut down this little playground of yours until you can figure out who’s been shitting in your sandbox.”
“Screw that,” Vince shot back with a growl. “No one’s forcing our hand. We’re fucking Buchanans. We run this town. No one is going to tell us how to run our operations.”
“It’s too hot,” Dillon disagreed, looking to Nolan for back up. “Maybe it’s time to let the authorities in on this. We could have a bigger problem than bad PR for the club and the family name. What if this sick bastard is a true sociopath? We don’t have the necessary skillset to take down something like that.”
“Says you,” Vince retorted coolly. “I have a gun. Maybe I’ll just shoot the sick freak and drop his body down a mineshaft.”
“Come on,” Nolan exploded, exasperated. “What the hell are you talking about? Killing people? That’s not our thing and never has been. I agree with Dillon, we need to talk to the cops. Let them handle this shit.”
“Do you realize what will happen if cops start sniffing around the club? They’ll do more than shut it down,” Vince argued hotly. “They’d likely arrest us all on a myriad of lovely charges not to mention we’ll likely get sued by every over-privileged pervert on our roster for having their identities revealed in public documents. We promise — no, we guarantee anonymity to our members — if we lose that, we lose more than our reputations, we lose everything.”