Page 102 of Reckless Seduction
I know it.
Yelena knows it.
This is the last moment I get to pretend I am still me. That I am still the girl who walked into that gala, who argued, who fought, who thought she had control over her life.
Once I step out…
There is no going back.
Yelena’s shriek has me scrambling from the shower to see what had happened. “Get out,puttana,” Giuseppe snarls at her, pushing her toward the door before he stalks toward me. Oh god, is this how my night is going to start? With him?
Giuseppe reaches past me to shut off the water and grabs my towel. “Arms out,” he commands roughly. When I don’t obey, he slaps me and then repeats his order.
This time, I do as he asks, my skin crawling as he starts to dry me. The contents of my meager lunch are beginning to make a reappearance as his hands skate over my body, lingering on my pussy and breasts.
Taking a deep breath, I try to block it out. Yelena said that’s how she manages to get through each night. She picks a spot on the wall or the ceiling and lets her imagination take over. That is sure as fuck what I am going to do. Right now, I am imagining all the ways I can bludgeon this man to death with his own severed arm.
When he finishes, he turns me away from him and then proceeds to drag me against his body, my back to his chest.
“Maybe I’ll take a night with you, little raven,” he purrs in my ear as his hands grip my breasts to the point of pain. I squeal when his fingers twist my nipples. I buck against him, trying to dislodge his hold, but that only seems to egg him on. “Fight me,puttana. I love it when they fight back. Makes me hard for your cunt.”
I still in his grasp. After a few more minutes, he seems to grow bored with my sudden compliance. Pushing me away, he tosses a small negligée at me, barking at me to put it on.
“Let’s go,” he barks. Like an obedient puppy, I follow him from the room. Yelena stands quietly behind the door to the shared bedroom, a large metal pipe in her hand. She puts her finger to her mouth and winks at me before slamming the object down on Giuseppe’s head with more force than a woman her size should have.
With a grunt, Giuseppe falls to the floor, unmoving.
“Yelena,” I gasp. “What did you do? They’re going to kill you.”
The slip of a woman laughs. “Oh, honey.” She smiles at me as she hits Giuseppe in the head again. “Many men have tried, and none have succeeded.”
“Now,” she straightens her shoulders, “let’s get you out of here.”
“What?”
I’m dreaming or drugged. Maybe both. But somehow, I’ve warped into a different reality, because I can’t for the life of me understand what the hell is happening.
“Yelena, you just killed Lina’s right-hand man.” I stare at her in disbelief. “There is no way in hell we’re getting out of here by ourselves.”
Yelena laughs again as if I told her a joke. “Who said we’re by ourselves?”
That’s when the alarms sound.
Cue the lights going out.
I expect screams from the women. There are a few, but otherwise, it’s quiet. Too quiet. It takes a few moments, but soon, the emergency generator kicks in, and the sub lights flash on. It isn’t much, but having some light is better than traversing the brothel in the dark.
“Come.” Yelena takes my hand and leads me down the corridor of rooms. One by one, the doors open. I braced myself for an attack. There are more than a few girls here who havedrunk too much of the Kool-Aid. No attack comes. From each room emerges one of the working girls, a weapon in her hand. Some of them are covered in blood, but all of them looked fierce and determined.
“You see, Bailey, your mother believed in ending the sex trade in Seattle. She fought tooth and nail with her family to make it so.”
“I don’t know anything about her,” I admit sadly. “My entire life, I was told I was raised by a junkie.”
“Fucking Crowe.” One of the women behind me spits his name like a curse. Samala is her name. She is tall, at least six feet without heels, and her ebony skin glows beneath the emergency lights. Her hair is dreadlocked down her back like an Amazonian warrior.
“Your mother was a warrior.” Another woman speaks up from the back of our little procession. “I was sixteen when she rescued me from a shipping container where I’d been left to die with several other girls who were deemed too tainted to be sold because the men who had brought us over from Russia had carved their names into our skin for fighting back.”
“And you still ended up in a brothel,” I scoff.
