Biker Rockstar Billionaire CEO Alpha (Hers to Keep Trilogy Book 1)

by Violet Blaze

  “Yes, of course, my apologies,” the woman-beating asshole said in his smooth, mellifluous voice, his dark hair slicked back, his facial hair groomed and neat to the point of being effeminate.

  I wanted to kill him. Oh God, in that moment there wasn't a damn thing that I wanted more.

  Except … for my brother back.

  Dash Buchanan, you son of a bitch.

  “I'll see you at the auction then?” Mr. Dunham said to Ingram as she smiled and let him slip his arm from her grasp.

  “You will,” she said, continuing to smile until he'd moved through an elaborate archway with a gleaming wood casing, its surface carved with strange images that should've been beautiful but were somehow … ominous, almost creepy. I squinted at them, but then Ingram was grabbing my chin and jerking my face back toward her. “Try that shit again in front of the clients and you really will regret it,” she growled, her nails digging into the side of my face.

  And then I knew—I wanted to kill her, too.

  I slapped her hand away, but she just smiled and let me do it.

  “Oh, I'm going to enjoy seeing them break you,” she told me, and then I spit in her face, lunging for the gun when she reached up to wipe the saliva away. I got my fingers around the grip of the revolver just before a sharp prick teased the side of my neck. I yanked the gun from Ingram's holster and then dropped it just as quick, my fingers loosening as the new set of drugs took hold and almost completely knocked me off my feet. “I'm going to need you the rest of the night, I suppose,” Ingram told the man in the less expensive suit as he grabbed me by the arm and propped me up.

  Ingram's dark hair and pale face swirled in my vision as my head lolled on my neck. Then she smirked at me with her red-red lips before turning and leading the way out of the room, down a long, narrow hallway that curved sharply to the right, and then into a dark space behind a massive curtain.

  My sister was waiting there.

  “Adelaide!” she gushed, rushing up to me and throwing her arms around my neck. If the man on my right hadn't been holding me up, I'd have collapsed from her weight. “Laide, I'm freaking out right now. Where are we? Where are Maverick and the boys?”

  Maverick.

  My knees gave out and I hit the floor in a puddle of purple silk.

  “Laide?!” Layla gasped, following me down, cradling my face between her hands. When I tried to focus on her expression, her features danced and blurred and it took a half-dozen blinks to bring them into focus. She was crying again.

  “Mop those tears up,” Ingram snapped, snatching Layla by her dishwater blonde ponytail and jerking her head back with a sharp wrenching motion that did nothing to staunch my older sister's sobs. “Get up and get back in line.”

  My sister scrambled to do what she was told, swallowing hard, casting fearful eyes in my direction. She was sheathed in a short blue cocktail dress that showed off her long, lean legs. Her shoes were black, laced up to her knee. Looking at her now, I barely recognized her. Layla had this grungy punk style that was all her own. It was always a little off, a little strange, but it was her.

  This … person in front of me was polished and gleaming, almost inhumanly beautiful but in an unnatural sort of way that gave me the chills.

  This wasn't right, none of it was.

  “This is Kelly,” she mouthed, pointing over at a short blonde girl with a rail thin body and a small gap between her front teeth. Her mouth was full and her eyes big, her nose pert. She was cute in a girl next door sort of way. I knew immediately that there was nothing I was going to be able to do to help her. Kelly was just one of a dozen girls lined up in front of me, all of them pretty, all of them polished and done up like Barbies.

  I wondered what Ingram would do if I puked all over my purple dress?

  “I need some water,” I whispered and surprisingly, the man at my side passed me a bottle. After chugging about half of it down, I felt strong enough to stand and he helped me to my feet.

  “Ladies,” Ingram said, gliding along the line and inspecting the women like they were prized horseflesh, lifting a chin here, applying some fresh lipstick there, twirling a strand of hair around her finger until it curled. “Welcome to the Block, Nevada's Premier Auction House for Gentlemen.”

  There was some chatter amongst the girls, but Ingram didn't seem to mind. In fact, she just smiled, her teeth white and her lips the color of freshly spilled blood.

  “My name is Ingram Calhoun, and I am the Mistress. Now, you might be thinking of mistresses as women who … act as madams to houses of ill repute. This is nothing like that. No, my dears, you are not up for rent. My clients have outgrown the rental market and are looking to purchase property of their own.”

  My stomach roiled and I took a deep breath.

  This was my worst nightmare made all the more horrible by the pleading looks for help I was getting from Layla.

  I closed my eyes against the awful memories from nine years ago, from the accident that had led me down the path of the Violet Assassin. This was too close to that for comfort—and a hundred times scarier. I didn't have to kill one man to get out of this one; I'd have to kill dozens.

  “You might be wondering right now why me.” Ingram paused and smiled at the girls, clasping her hands together in front of the plunging neckline of her dress. For a second there, if I squinted, it looked like we were at a beauty pageant. Only, all the contestants were unwilling victims destined for brutality. No matter how this ended tonight, it wouldn't be good. “You are the lucky ones,” she said with a gush, eyes sparkling like she actually believed this crap. “You have been chosen to be Companions to some of the finest men in the United States—the world. Elite gentlemen from all over the planet travel to our little corner of the country looking for feminine comfort—and they pay handsomely for it.”

  “Do we get a cut of the money?” a little redhead in the corner piped up and I felt my mouth twist into a deep scowl. How could they be buying this crap? But then I saw that her hands were shaking and I felt a rush of guilt. She was trying to make the best of an awful situation, an inevitability she'd been thrust into.

  I could not do the same.

  “You get a cut of luxury, ladies. Beautiful living quarters, fancy cars, swimming pools, designer clothing. Your men hold ninety-nine percent of the world's money in their hands and they are willing to share it—with the right girl. When you go out there, I encourage you to put on a show, make them work for it, give them a promise of what they'll be getting when they spend their hard-earned money for a chance to taste what you and only you can give.”

  “Give me a goddamn break,” I said, and then I threw up on the floor, all over the bottom of my long silk gown.

  “For Christ's sake!” Ingram said, snapping her fingers at the man in the suit. “Take her into the dressing room and find her something new to wear. Make it quick; we go on in ten.”

  “Let's go,” the suit said, dragging me by the arm to a door in the back. I let myself droop and stumble even more than the drugs could be blamed for. If I didn't take a chance now, I wasn't going to get another one. “In here.” He practically threw me in the room and started digging through a rack of glittering dresses as I searched around for something to use as a weapon.

  The room we were standing in was small, a row of dressing tables on one wall, their surfaces covered in cosmetics, lotions, and hairbrushes. A few velvet tufted chairs and a chaise lounge faced them, separating that half of the room from the racks of clothing.

  I scooted over to the dressing tables and pretended to collapse on a stool, putting my arms on the flat surface and resting my cheek against them.

  “Don't get too comfortable,” the man snapped at me as I curled my fingers around the handle of a metal hairbrush and buried it in the folds of my dress. “Here. Change into this.”

  “I think I might throw up again,” I said which was a lie, but one I intended to commit to by whatever means necessary. The suit looked down at me with a frown and then steppe
d aside, opening the door to a small bathroom.

  “Don't even think about closing that fucking door,” he said as I sprinted inside, the folds of my dirty dress clutched in my hands, hiding the brush. As soon as I got in there, I fell to my knees and retched over the side of the porcelain toilet bowl until he looked away.

  I changed as quickly as I could, shedding my dress for one that looked almost identical, the color slightly darker, the top slightly lower cut. Otherwise, it may very well have been the same one. I stuck the brush underneath the skirt, tucking it inside the stretchy band at the top of my thigh-highs. I'd have to be beyond careful to keep it from falling out.

  “Brush your teeth,” he commanded next, when I'd stopped making that awful gagging sound.

  I did as he asked, wondering if I should pocket the toothbrush, too. I was glad I didn't when he specifically took it and the toothpaste tube he'd given me and disposed of them in a can near the dressing tables.

  When he opened the door to backstage, I didn't wait for him to grab my arm, and strode through with a calm, even gait that made my headache burn twice as fierce as it had before—but the brush stayed where I put it, hidden in the draping waterfall of satin.

  “Stay on your markers,” Ingram was saying as I noticed each girl standing rigid on white Xs taped to the floor. “We'll present you as a group and then one by one for the bidding.”

  “Why are we here?” one of the girls sobbed, shaking and putting her face in her hands. “I want to go home. Where are we?”

  With a sigh, Ingram grabbed a black cat o' nine tails from a stool and smacked the girl as hard as she could across the back of the knees, dropping her to the floor with a shriek of pain. As I watched, she hit her over and over and over again. The gesture was as meticulous and awful to watch as it was painful. Ingram made sure not to touch the girl's bare skin, hitting her just hard enough to make her scream.

  “I've explained what you're doing here: you were chosen. This is an honor. Once you've been selected by a bidder and we've confirmed that all fees are paid as due, your new gentleman friend will let you know his expectations.”

  “This is slavery!” one of the girls screamed—this one in a bright pink dress and white heels. “You fucking kidnapped me. This is illegal, and I am done with your games. I'm getting the hell out of here and calling the fucking cops.”

  She took off running as Ingram slid her hand under her dress and removed her silver revolver.

  I screamed as loudly as I could and drew her attention over to me, sliding the brush from beneath my skirt and jamming it as hard as I could into the Mistress' right eye.

  “Run!” I shouted … but none of the other girls moved. They were too scared to even fight for their own freedom. I wasn't sure I'd ever felt despair quite like I did in that moment.

  A gunshot went off a second later and shook us all to the core, dropping the woman in the pink dress to the stage in a puddle of blood. I stumbled back and dropped the brush, glancing up to find another man in an expensive suit—a white one this time—standing near the door to the dressing room.

  “We have some very important clients in the audience tonight,” he said, and his voice was the stuff of nightmares. Calm, smooth—like the man that had backhanded me out front—but with this air of privilege and authority that announced he was above us all with every syllable. His words said he ruled over God and laughed in the devil's face.

  “You fucking cunt,” Ingram sobbed, her hands clutched over her eye as she glared at me from the other. “I am going to make you—”

  “Honey, we have an auction to put on,” the man in the white suit said, his blonde hair pale and shiny, his mouth a bland curve that just barely covered up the violence in his expression. He stared right at me as he spoke. “Now, I'm sure the rest of the evening will go peaceably, won't it?”

  As I watched, he stepped up to Layla and used the grip of his gun to push some loose hair off her sweaty forehead.

  The threat was clear.

  “Anymore hairbrushes stuffed up that skirt of yours, Miss Vaughn?”

  So these people did know who I was.

  Not that that fact helped me now.

  “No,” I said, taking the white X next to my sister, the one the dead girl had been occupying just seconds before. As we all watched, two more men in suits came and dragged her body out a back door, smearing a trail of red on the floor behind them.

  The curtain rose up like we were in a play, lifting toward the ceiling in dramatic folds of glistening velvet, revealing us to a silent room of men in suits. All men. Men, men, men as far as the eye could see. All of them as polished and glittering as the girls on my left, wearing clothes whose cost could feed a family of four for a year.

  My heart thundered in my throat as spotlights flicked on above us, bathing us in this hot, white light that made me sweat so profusely that the satin dress clung to my skin like it was glued there. In that moment, I would not have been unhappy to drop dead and leave this world for good.

  Except … Layla.

  I looked out at her from the corner of my eye, so terrified that I wasn't going to be able to get us out of this situation, not this time. I closed my eyes and prayed like I'd never prayed before. I knew it wouldn't help, but what else was left at that point?

  “Welcome gentleman, to the Monthly Companion Auction at the Block, hosted right here in beautiful Las Vegas.” The man in the white suit took his position at the podium up front, the gleaming dark wood stand the only piece of furniture on the stage. It was made from the same polished wood as the archway casing I'd been before, carved with strange symbols and figures that gave me an odd sense of unease.

  Or maybe it was just this whole thing making me uneasy …

  “As you've all been informed as to the rules of this auction, I won't waste your valuable time repeating them. Just remember: any infraction of the rules is subject to possible eviction from the event, a revoking of your membership card, or expulsion by our security team. If you have any questions, please reach out to the nearest staff member and we'd be happy to assist you in any way possible.”

  White Suit turned to look at us as Ingram appeared, a fresh layer of makeup around the black eye I'd given her. But she couldn't cover up the broken blood vessels, the white of her eye soaked as red as her dress. She gave me a special glare as she wandered by and then turned to throw a smile out at the crowd.

  “Basic information about each of the beautiful women on our stage tonight is listed in your bidder's guide. Beforehand, you were given a chance to mingle and drink with the girls. As our merchandise and your time are both incredible commodities, we won't be offering any second chance bids. Purchases are final and lots are limited to two successful bids per auction. Please choose your Companions carefully.”

  The more White Suit talked, the sicker I felt, the more afraid I felt.

  Commodities? Purchases? Lots?

  We were fucking human beings.

  How … how was this even happening? I should've been at home studying drink recipes on my phone while Layla sat on the edge of my bed and bitched about how our sisters had all become boring after marrying into the club and having kids, how they never wanted her at any of their get-togethers anymore because all their husbands wanted to sleep with her. I was supposed to be looking up far away places on my computer and dreaming about what it would be like to leave Ridgecrest forever and move to some exotic locale. I could be lying on the couch watching TV, snacking on Mom's leftover casserole.

  Instead, I was being sold like chattel, like an ear tagged cow at an auction house.

  “My name is Niles Calhoun, and I'm the Auctioneer.”

  He flashed his glitzy Vegas smile out at the crowd and gestured for me to step forward.

  “Stand on the black X,” Ingram told me, turning toward me and speaking in a low venomous hiss that only I could hear. “Give us any trouble and I'll blow your sister's brains out. The gentlemen are used to it; they know what it takes to keep people in
line sometimes.”

  I followed her instructions and strode to the edge of the stage, my chin up, my hands frozen at my sides. I would not shake or quiver or give them the benefit of seeing me cry.

  As I glanced out across the still, silent crowd, I caught sight of Mr. Dunham and felt the edge of my lip curl when he smirked at me and raised his glass in toast. I moved my eyes away from him quickly and continued my perusal of the crowd, looking for a sympathetic eye, a cracked door, a gun hidden not so well beneath the folds of a suit jacket.

  I did not expect to find Dash Dante Buchanan in the midst of that crowd.

  My eye widened and my mouth parted in horror.

  Dash was no longer wearing a purple wifebeater and throwing sex at me with every smile, leaning against the wall of his strange apartment in motorcycle boots and denim. Now, he was clean-shaven, his dirty blonde hair slicked back, his eyes cold and piercing, every inch of him the practiced, perfect billionaire—just like all the rest of him.

  As the auctioneer droned on beside me, I stared at Dash, his muscular body swathed in a jet-black suit that was tailored to perfection. Every crisp angle, every fold, was neat, planned and executed like it had been painted into place. His button-up was also black, but his tie, that was purple. I stared at him in his shining loafers and dark slacks, the front creases so sharp they could cut, and I barely recognized him.

  He was staring right at me, his full mouth in an easy frown, the sharp line of his masculine jaw somehow even more striking now that it wasn't covered in blonde stubble. Our eyes met across the room and I felt this jolt of energy go through me.

  Suddenly, I could feel the weight of his body on mine, his pelvis thrusting between my thighs, the thick hardness of his shaft burrowing into me.

  My chin dropped to my chest and I sucked in a deep breath.

  When I lifted my head up to look at him again, the auctioneer called the starting bid.

  And Dash raised his paddle.