Saved by His Submissive (3 page)

“Says the chump who smells like ass.”

Zeke knuckled him in the shoulder. “You sure you got everything in that pack? Did you get your Jane Austen novel off the back of the toilet?”

“I’ve got your Jane Austen at the end of my dick.”

“Hawkins, your dick is probably blue as your balls by now.” Z snapped his fingers. “Hey! Maybe that’s where you should secure your tags, yeah?”

He rolled his eyes before scooping up his pack again, and discreetly adjusting the body parts his friend had just insulted with screaming accuracy. His cock was still doing its best to relax, and his balls throbbed in frustration, sending shots of erotic what-the-fucks at him. They were supposed to be enjoying some post jack-off serenity right now, and the bastards were hitting the target damn well at reminding him of that every two seconds.

Get used to it, guys.
He sent the dismal promise as he and Zeke made their way out into the sultry Bangkok afternoon.
Life isn’t going to change anytime soon.

Chapter Two

Day 433

The paper’s running low. Soon it will be gone. I’m not sure how I’ll hang on after that, without the words to write each day…the few seconds that I have to look at them and remember that I’m real. That somewhere in the world,
you’re
real, and what we had was real. I think they might be moving us again today. I don’t know what will happen, but I think we’ll be sold again or killed. This time, I’m praying for the strength to leave this packet behind—and in doing so, to leave part of my heart behind with it. These pages will tell you everything. They’ll explain where we’ve been and who’s held us, and maybe help you guys catch the assholes. I have to believe that someone will find this. I have to believe that they’ll get it to you somehow, and that you’ll read it all, and know I never stopped loving you. I never—

“Sage! Put it away!”

Rayna’s hoarse whisper resounded through the cave, or whatever this place was, that the two of them had been transferred to and kept for the last two weeks. Sage didn’t waste time minding her friend. She slipped the note into the hidden pocket of her small pack as her friend turned to keep watch again, flipping her russet ponytail against her thin shoulders and peering through the barbed wire wall that functioned as the front of their cell.

She and Rayna had stayed free for over a year because they’d depended on each other’s strengths, like her crossbow aim and Rayna’s wolf-perfect hearing, along with a hell of a lot of luck. The skills were all still there. It was the luck that had run out. They’d finally been recaptured, drugged, and taken God-only-knew where. This definitely wasn’t Africa anymore. It was moist.
Really
moist. Not as wet as home, but few places were as damp as the American Northwest.

She closed her eyes for a precious moment, conjuring every detail she could remember of the condo that had been she and Garrett’s home in the three months before she’d left for Africa. The giant pillows in front of the fireplace. The cathedral roofs that turned the rain into music. The lake outside the windows, and the egrets that dipped gracefully over the water each morning.

The same way Sergeant Garrett Hawkins had swooped into her life and captured her heart.

“Hellooo, bitches!”

In the space of those two shrill words, her memories were blasted apart again.

Reality reigned once more in the form of the four black-clad gunmen Rayna had heard on approach. They were followed by the source of the greeting, their leader: a coffee-skinned greaseball who referred to himself as “King.” Sage had fast concluded nothing good was due to them because of that, and she’d been right. At first, the man had referred to them both simply as “the investments,” leading to the conclusion that the men who’d recaptured them in Africa were simply middlemen, and King was the bigger player in this picture. Those were the days he’d held them in the warehouse, when somber East Asian women were brought in to wash and style their hair, paint their nails, shave their legs…and other body parts. Outfits were brought in to size on them, if the scraps of fabric could be called that. The treatment had left nothing to their imaginations about the fate for which they were being prepared.

One night, the “spa treatment” had gone differently. The women brought in for them snapped on surgical gloves as King selected body jewelry from a bed of jewels. When they pinned Rayna down, forced her legs open, and pierced her with brute force and an ugly needle, she’d screamed—and Sage had snapped. She’d managed to scatter the jewels, take down two henchmen with head butts to their balls, and get the “therapist” away from Rayna before a hard whack to the back of her head had turned the world dark.

She had no idea how long she’d been out, but she’d woken up here in the cave, expecting to see diamonds taunting from between her own thighs. Instead King himself was positioned there, pinning her legs with his knees as he wrenched at his fly. She’d taken a couple of steady breaths. On the third, she’d reared up enough to squeeze his sorry balls with all the strength in her arms. The action earned her a mixed bag of results. Good news? King got nowhere near her again. Not-so-good news? Her hands didn’t feel like crushing anything after they spent three days shackled to the walls. It was amazing how the pounds came pouring off a girl during a multi-day forced fast. Gee, the spa that thought of everything.

After that, she and Rayna were no longer the “investments.” They were the bitches.

King’s grin slanted higher as he approached the cell. “Have you rested well, bitches?” He cocked his head, looking from her to Rayna and back. “Hmm. Seems so. But do the flowers ever look soiled from the beautiful land of Seattle? I think not. This is a good thing. Tonight is going to be big for you.
And
me!”

A scythe of terror slashed her gut. “Big” could only mean one thing. They would no longer be under King’s thumb. That didn’t mean the next thumb would be any better. Sage focused on the asshole’s leering yellow teeth, along with a fantasy of whacking them all from his mouth, to control herself from glancing at Rayna. The effort failed. It was impossible not to catch Ray in her peripheral, due to the trembles that now commanded every inch of her friend. They both knew the order King was going to issue next.

“The redhead goes first.” Two of the guards moved at once, After releasing the steel gate, they secured Rayna with beefy hands around her shoulders. One of them pulled her wrists together then bound them with the
thwick
of a zip tie. When Rayna let out a pained whimper, Sage surged to her knees, a welcome rush of fury replacing her fear.

“Hurt her and you’ll answer to me, shitheads.”

King rolled his eyes and lifted his hand in a dismissive arc. The other two goons swept into the cell, then shoved her against the wall. One of them stuffed a rag into her mouth. He fastened it in place with a couple of zip ties around her head. He followed by securing her wrists in the same condition as Rayna’s. The other guard hauled her to her feet by pulling on her ass.

As all this happened, Rayna got pulled out of the cell. King stepped over to greet her by raising a hand to her quivering chin, and using the other to pet her long copper hair.

“Eyes of a wildcat and hair of fire,” he murmured. “And yet, you have always been the sweeter of my two special candies.” He used his grip on her chin to lift her face, leaning close as if to kiss her despite the grimace Rayna didn’t hide. “I wonder if your slit is fiery as your hair, my lovely.”

He finished by licking the seam of Rayna’s mouth, making her jerk and whimper against his grip. Sage lunged against her captors, letting out a useless scream against her gag. King chuckled as the guards wrestled her into submission. Because her limbs were constrained, her lungs took over the task of hanging on to the rage. She sucked in huge breaths through her nose, since breathing through her mouth was
not
an option right now. The rag was drenched in a cocktail of disgusting, its mix of tobacco, dirt, marijuana, and sweat making her want to wretch the weak soup and cold chicken legs they’d been fed earlier.

As it had so many times in the last two weeks, her mind pulled from her body and almost hovered, watching all of this like some horrible scene in a movie that gave her an excuse to go for more popcorn. This wasn’t real. This couldn’t be her life. She kept waiting for the shivers to stop, for the dread to go away. She stared at the cave’s cold black stones, yearning for the moment they peeled back to reveal bright stage lights and a director in those funny riding pants, laughing and telling her the scene was a wrap, and she could go home now…

But that wasn’t where she was going. Nor Rayna. Within a few hours, she suspected hell would be a pleasant alternative to her fate. As she finally let herself look over at Rayna, she forced herself to take in every strong feature of the woman who’d been her best friend, her only friend, for the last year. After tonight, she’d never see Rayna again.

Within the next year, she’d be forced to forget who she was, as well.

“
I’m too sexy for my shirt, so sexy it hu-hu-hurts—
”

King answered his phone before the thing could play another note of the nauseating song. Instead of a greeting, the man only grunted into the phone. “What? Already?” he finally said. “So be it, then. Make everything ready. We are bringing the additional sluts now.” He shook his head and re-pocketed the phone. “It seems our buyers are here a bit early, bitches. There will be no time to pretty you up, but I am not concerned.” He turned to Sage and ran an oily finger beneath her shirt, over her nipple. “If our guests want to see what they are paying for, we’ll just let them look.”

A snarl clawed up Sage’s throat as she charged again at the pig, hoping to get in a solid head butt. King swerved, but not fast enough to avoid a spray of her spit, courtesy of the gag. An animalistic sound surged out of the bastard as he glared at the white blobs on his hand and arm. He shook the spit off before raising his hand again, to sweep a brutal backhand into her face. Sage heard the thud of his heavy topaz ring as it connected to her cheek bone, but the sound was eclipsed by the clanging pain throughout her head. 

“Sage!” The shriek was Rayna’s, sounding weirdly muffled as she got pushed in front of her friend. The guards led them down a semi-underground passageway. Though the block rocks of the cave still surrounded them, the walls on their left gave way every five or six feet to bunches of thick tropical foliage. After they’d walked a minute or so, Sage glimpsed lights through the trees. She made out the shadows of low-lying buildings and picked up on the labored sound of clunky compact car engines. Bar glasses clinked somewhere, and an old Bon Jovi song blared from tired speakers. They were in a small village, though they weren’t exactly led into the middle of town square. Across a small clearing lay a dome-shaped Quonset hut. Dim lights burned from the high windows.

She and Rayna were led past more guards then trundled inside through a back door. The room they entered was small and musty, walled-off from the rest of the hut by corrugated aluminum walls. A few strings of old Christmas lights and a half-dozen kerosene lamps were the only light sources in the space, which didn’t help her disorientation as one the guards spun her around and told her to sit. Not that he waited for her obedience anyhow. After throwing her to the hard-packed dirt floor, he grabbed Rayna and hurled her down too. Without their arms to fling out for balance, they both landed in painful heaps, their knees and shoulders taking the brunt of their falls. For a few seconds, Sage even forgot the throbbing in her face from King’s blow.

“Careful, you idiots!” Watching King direct his masochism on someone else, as he stepped over and cuffed both guards on the sides of their heads, was satisfying in a sick way. “We’re not renting those two tonight. Sales will be final on them. The blond is already scuffed up, so take care.”

Sage watched in grim triumph as the two men glared at King’s back. She wished one of them would point out that it was him who “scuffed” her up in the first place, but they both pulled the wuss card and held their cowardly tongues.

Thanks to the prolonged pressure of the gag, her own tongue ached, but she forgot the agony the next second. A shaking cry whipped her attention back down and to the side. She joined Rayna in returning the stares of five women who were caked in gaudy cosmetics, raw fear, and little else. One of the girls, a strawberry blond in a low-cut red leather mini dress and matching boots, scooted toward Sage.

“Dear merciful Lord. You’ve got a shiner the size of Kalamazoo, girlfriend. And that rag must be wretched. Let me—”

“No.” Rayna grabbed the woman’s wrist. Red Mini’s heart was in the right place in wanting to dislodge the gag from Sage, but Rayna set the woman straight in a somber tone. “The bastard is using it as punishment. Take it off, and he’ll give her worse.”

“Who is he?” A curvy chestnut brunette trembled hard as she curled against the curve of the wall. King’s magical makeover team had dressed her in a black tube top and a cheetah print skirt that wasn’t much bigger. “Wh-what’s going on?” Tears coursed down her face, taking trails of her makeup with them. “Why is this happening? We came here to help people! We were on our way to Myanmar. We just wanted to serve. Now wh-what’s going to happen to us?”