Wicked Weapon (Dark Hearts Book 2)

by Cari Silverwood

“Fuck you. Why didn’t you say?”

  I hadn’t heard a key in the lock. The guard had seemed rather nonchalant about my imprisonment.

  Because? I followed through on the logic. Of course. Kaage had told me to stay in my room until called for. That alone acted as a prison to a woman like me. To most like me, but maybe not to me. What if I could leave? What a simple way to get out of here. I’d managed to lie to Einar when he was in my face.

  That would put a damn spanner in the works, if I just walked out.

  Then the door behind me opened.

  Footsteps. More than one man. I turned and saw both Einar and Kaage had entered.

  Kaage’s shoulders almost brushed the doorjamb. “We remembered a small detail.”

  His face creased in a copy of a smile. His eyes were intense, deadly serious. Not that I wanted to know what made this man laugh. Torturing squirrels maybe? Or women.

  Don’t go there.

  As I took a small step backward, I asked him, “What detail?” to get it over with. The dread was building, climbing. If I let them eke this out it might smash me.

  “For the training to work well,” he replied. “You need to be in tune with us both. So, although I am mostly only Einar’s and he is mine, we make exceptions for each new girl. Go wash.” Kaage pointed to the side.

  I knew instantly what in tune meant. He wanted me to wash so they could both fuck me. My stomach crawled. Last time, with Grimm, I’d been in a residual drug haze, a slight mesmer-shock haze. It happened when I met new ones.

  The compulsion of his command wasn’t worth resisting. I couldn’t afford for them to see me be other than a good girl, though it sickened me. I headed for the bathroom, my heart bumping erratically.

  “Don’t bother dressing afterward,” Einar purred.

  They might be gay for each other but I’d lay bets Einar was bisexual.

  The bathroom made a safe haven for a very short time. I tucked the towel over the bar and made a note that if I could rip the bar loose, it’d make a good club. Ashamed of where this was going, I didn’t look at myself in the mirror.

  I returned, dutifully naked and clean and saw that Einar was naked also. When I fidgeted and covered my breasts, amusement showed in the crinkles about his eyes. I let my hands fall. It was my way of saying fuck you, I don’t care. Kaage only bothered to take out his cock when I halted before them.

  I expected them to do this on the bed, instead Einar pointed at the bare space next to the bathroom entrance. “Hands on the wall. Butt out. Kaage only likes to ass-fuck women.”

  Vanishing then and there was my dream. Every step made me wish for a wizard’s wand, a portal to Elsewhere, for anything at all that would get me out of here. It wasn’t to be. I raised my arms and waited with my palms flattened to the wall. Every muscle tensed, until one of them placed his hands on me.

  The blast of lust shorted out my brain. When I next had a credible thought, I found he’d already entered me and my asshole was being stretched by cock.

  “Nice.” Einar grunted.

  His touch was a magic that kindled a desire momentous enough to make me shake again, to want him deeper, harder, rougher. His cock and his hands held me rapturous. I groaned through slack mouth and felt drool collect at the corners. My ass almost levitated, as I went up on my toes, striving to get nearer to him.

  Einar laughed and bit the angle of my neck. Then he thrust in a few more inches, carving out his power over me as he slid in all the way to the hilt.

  I lowered my head, panting, caught, and loving it utterly.

  What else had I expected?

  Before, with Grimm, he must’ve held back his mesmerizing powers.

  If Grimm had betrayed me, my own body did so now. As he fucked me, my knees gave way. I hissed and collapsed a little, held up mostly by his hands clasping me firmly. His fingers made dents in my flesh, like talons locking into prey, and perhaps he’d be happy to claw me to pieces. I didn’t know these men. But his cock, ohmigod, I wanted that. Each time he thrust, I rocked back into him.

  There was pain and there were orgasms, plentiful ones, as first Einar then Kaage stuck their cocks into me.

  When they left me on my knees on the floor, still gasping, with tears running down my face, I remembered that I should be disgusted in myself.

  But I wasn’t. I wouldn’t be. I refused to be disgusted.

  The door latch clicked. Alone.

  I was stronger than I had been with Reuben, and I knew how the scripts ran. They thought no woman susceptible could resist them. They were wrong. Soon I would prove them so.

  I levered myself off the floor and summoned up saliva, then I spat where their feet had recently been placed behind me. I swore revenge for this, as I had with Reuben. There would be a day when I would have them on the floor, dead.

  Grimm too, if it came to that.

  Then I stood on my two feet, if wobbly, and I went back to the shower to remove every trace of them from me.

  Cleaner and less mind-fogged, I came out and looked about the room. What use was all that training Mavros had put me through if I didn’t begin to assemble a way to get out and kill Einar and Kaage?

  Bed, burgundy-red quilt. Timber dresser with a mirror. Barred windows that looked out over something one might term a moor? I wasn’t sure what was a moor and what was a field but it was flat and covered in low plants and kind of dreary. Moor would do for now.

  The sun was going down, backlighting the horizon and the tops of the vegetation. That way must be west.

  Einar and Kaage? Who were they really?

  Their business was one of a kind surely. These were mesmers into training women to be sold to men. They were likely to be the same men who had kidnapped Cherie. I had to know for certain.

  Asking them directly, or too obviously, would perhaps endanger us all. Me, Cherie...and Grimm.

  Him. Mr. Perfect. On so many occasions, he’d helped me as best he could – even when he’d handed me over to Mister Black, aka Mavros, that had been a weird form of salvation. I’d been so sad back then – a millionairess with nothing to look forward to except a lonely future.

  Ironic, because now I’d give anything for that future. Who wouldn’t rather be lonely than a plaything for men with disgusting sexual needs? And the end result might be worse, if Mavros’s daughter truly had killed herself.

  Fuck. Struck by a thought, I shut my eyes and counted heartbeats.

  What if Einar and Kaage could make women suicide? Mavros hadn’t seen that command in his own child, though...it must not be so. He would’ve checked her. He must have. People killed themselves for a hundred reasons and she’d had plenty to choose from if she’d been a fucktoy like I’d been for Reuben.

  “God,” I muttered, dragging my hand through my hair. “This is so...so...”

  Forget it. Nothing to be done for her. I had to concentrate on now. On finding Cherie. On getting away.

  I didn’t want to belong to Mavros or to these men, nor to Grimm, though I’d never had a male friend like him before. We’d shared so much over the months after Reuben died. He’d killed for me.

  But had he fucked me because he was told to, or because he wanted to? Or both? I might never find out.

  I plonked my butt on the bed and frowned at the darkening room. “Damn you Grimm.” What he’d done...it made my chest ache. It hurt me more than what the others had just done to me, because of who I thought he was.

  I should give him the benefit of the doubt. How callous would I be, and shallow, to make him out to be evil when I couldn’t stop myself from obeying like the good girl they wanted me to be? It sucked, being made a puppet, but I’d get over it, as long as they didn’t tell me to suicide...again.

  That hole had taken some climbing to get out of.

  Prove me right to trust you, Grimm. And where was Mavros? He’d been with us and now he wasn’t. He might be dead. I was here because of his need for revenge, but I prayed he was alive. He might find us.

  The last of
the daylight sifted into my room. I should flick the light switch.

  Hark, what light through yonder window breaks. I remembered thinking that the morning Reuben came for me. I needed a new quote. One where the three witches brewed up stuff to get rid of people.

  I found the switch on the wall next to the door and turned on the light.

  “Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.” Then I began to circumnavigate the room looking for anything I could use. Anything.

  An antique hatpin was wedged into the crack at the back of one drawer. I had to straighten it after I freed it. The pin was simple, no enameled dragonflies or bees or flowers decorated it, but it was sharp and long. I could blind a man with it, or kill him, if I poked it deep into his ear and entered the foramen of the skull that let nerves through into the brain. It was perhaps the weak point that Sharon Stone had used in that old movie. Only she had an ice pick.

  I pricked my thumb with the hatpin. Blood formed into a red bleb.

  Weapon number one. My list had begun.

  These men had no idea who I was. I was no pushover. I aimed to be their nemesis, no matter how many times they fucked me.

  If I could’ve installed a bear trap up my ass, I would’ve done it just to see the surprise on their faces when it snapped shut.

  A badass bear trap.

  I sniggered then broke into giggles. When I calmed, I wiped my eyes with my fingers. Laughing through the tears was better than being morbid and waiting to be sold to some man with too much money then, afterward, gobbled up like a snack.

  Chapter 10

  Mavros

  Gingerly, I lay back on the bed, taking short, shallow breaths as the pain from the cut ebbed. The heating meant the sheets were warm, at least. I had no PJs and would have to sleep in the boxers I’d left here years ago.

  Emily had done a good job, I didn’t doubt, considering she was a cardiac surgeon at the Royal London. One of the advantages of being a mesmer in London off and on for fifteen years, was collecting a good list of women with various skills. I’d let her be for a long time, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t obey me at the snap of my fingers. And obeying included opening her front door at midnight, when I texted her, stapling the knife wound on my side, and lending me her bedroom for the night.

  Not life-threatening, clean, she’d said, and I had a sample sheet of antibiotic tablets to ward off infection. My jacket had a nice cut in it too. That was nothing. I could replace jackets but not me.

  I’d get back to my apartment tomorrow. This night was for recovering and thinking. Getting the cops in wasn’t an option. Never would be.

  Wasn’t this a damn fine turn-up. Why? How? The fuss in the news, had that drawn his attention? Whoever had taken them must know who she was. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure this had been a mesmer’s doing but Zorie had told me about the visit to Reuben by a mesmer from London. There seemed a high chance that Reuben had told him about Cherie, and that was why she’d been taken. Why had they not used mesmer powers to grab Zorie if that was the case?

  I shifted to the side to try to get comfortable and hissed. “Fuck.” The one thing she couldn’t get me without prescription was a good painkiller. I’d live.

  That she’d also eyed me pitifully in the hope I’d fuck her – that was normal. The acquired lost the ability to love normal men. If I’d not been recently shish-kebabed I’d have done it.

  Though maybe... I mused awhile on the possibilities.

  A few minutes later, her timid knock at the door, had my mouth curling up. “Come in, Emily.”

  She was naked, as I’d willed her to be. Her figure had matured as had mine, but her curves pleased me, and my cock. Her blond hair reflected in the low overhead lighting like waves on a moonlit beach.

  “You want to be in my bed, tonight?”

  “Yes, Mavros. You know that.” Her voice was sultry and tremulous. How must it be to not orgasm for years and yet still desire?

  “Come here.” I pointed at my boxers and the obvious bulge. “Suck me into that hot mouth of yours. Do it right and I’ll fuck you.”

  I grew harder just imagining the touch of her tongue and lips and her moist mouth suctioning me in.

  I huffed out a long slow breath when she did exactly that, kneeling over me on the bed, her breasts swaying as she went down on me. “Good girl,” I murmured.

  Things had gone sideways, a little. If this was them, him, and I still wasn’t certain how many I faced, it was just developing prematurely. The planted news story had made them react faster than I’d thought they would. The big papers hadn’t run the report, but it’d gone viral, from the comments I’d read. I’d meant them to wonder if Zorie had somehow killed her mesmer. They might not have trusted their ability to take her using will alone. They’d used force because it’d seemed safer.

  If so, she was where I wanted her. Grimm was with her and I figured that man would help her if he could. He was like a barnacle. Persistent, thick-shelled, tough.

  If the mesmer bug acted as I hoped, maybe she’d give her captors a big surprise.

  Every time I’d kissed one of my acquired, they’d become difficult to control for a few months. It was the mesmer bug, interfering. What might that do to a woman like Zorie, who was already feisty?

  Maybe she’d be a little fireball. I hoped so.

  The text I’d received, a few days ago, seemed to be my introduction to the murky world of human trafficking. I’d been fishing for that for ages, probing, asking people with links to the higher-class sex trade and elsewhere. That introduction might lead me to her. If I found them, I could probably find a way to kill them. I’d need help but I had a big back catalog of winsome, sexually subservient experts. One or two were in government jobs.

  If Zorie didn’t get them from the inside, I had back-up plans.

  Emily had been bobbing up and down vigorously, making slick, thick sounds. My cock twitched and thought about coming.

  I grabbed a big handful of her blond hair and shoved her onto me, deeper, held her there. After twenty seconds, she drummed her lower legs on the quilt. “Stay still. Make me come and I won’t fuck you. Take care, Emily. Take care.” Her burbling, as she tried to breathe, made me smile. “Soon. You waited all these years, you can hold your breath a few more seconds.”

  She met my gaze and locked on, begging with those blue eyes. When the tears started and she was gasping around my cock, I hauled her off and flipped her onto her back. It was always nice seeing them cry. The staples on my stomach were holding. I’d go slow and tease her. More fun that way in any case.

  “Hold your pussy open with both hands. Let me see my target.”

  When she did that, I studied her, face and pussy. The desperation in her was peaking, so I stuck my cock at her entrance and slid in a smidgen. Tight as hell. Maybe I should’ve done this more often. She squirmed and started begging, again.

  “Do you deserve fucking, Emily? Have you been spreading these legs for anyone else? Hmmm?”

  “No. No. No, of course not. You know that.”

  “I’m not sure I believe you.” I pulled out and taunted her by circling her cunt with the tip of my dick. “Show me how much you want it. Stick your hole on my cock. Work it. Go.”

  We both knew it was ludicrous to suggest she’d fucked anyone else, but it made this far more interesting.

  She pushed her pelvis up and toward me and succeeded in swallowing my cock with her cunt. After she had an inch of my cock, I withdrew and popped out.

  “Tsk. What poor aim. Maybe you don’t want this enough?” Then I planted my palm on her stomach, holding her down, while I slid my cock up and down the groove of her pussy.

  Her screams of frustration made me laugh.

  What didn’t make me laugh was the way I lay beside her afterward, with her in the crook of arm, yet all I could think of was Zorie and her trusting eyes looking up at me.

  I hadn’t exactly betrayed her to the enemy. She knew mesmers. I knew where she was, theoretically. They would
be fucking her, which bothered me, but she could weather it. Soon, I hoped to know precisely where she was, through the tracking device in her tooth.

  The universal tracking app worked for cars and car keys. I’d been told it should work for her. My friendly dentist had been amused when I told him to implant it. All that was needed was a few phones with the app installed to pass by. As long as she wasn’t in Siberia, or a distant cave in the mountains, I’d find her.

  Chapter 11

  Zorie

  They never locked the girls’ doors, I discovered. There was no lock at all, just a normal doorknob. I bluntly asked the guard when he came for me the next morning. “Why don’t you lock the doors?”

  They trust you, were his words. My interpretation: Einar and Kaage knew they had us locked down by means of our minds.

  Leaving required us to disobey their commands.

  I put on the crinkly white dress they’d left me, and the bra and panties. Underwear, gods, how quaint for mesmers. The dress was of that material you could scrunch up tight into a ball and yet when unraveled it would spring to life and hug your curves. Someone didn’t like ironing.

  As I stepped from my room, three other women emerged from theirs on this same corridor. All wore white dresses with skirts that brushed their knees – the same as mine. A bulk order of virginal white, it seemed. Since they were closer to the stairway, I followed them, with my stern-faced guard in tow. Two other men were with us. Though these guards were no uniformed employees, they all wore jeans and shirt and, for the moment, barely showed much emotion toward us. I’d never read The Stepford Wives, but I knew of it and I wondered what was happening in my fellow captives’ heads. In the glance I’d taken before they turned away, I’d seen how docile they appeared.

  I copied them. Being the odd one out would be dangerous.

  Little did the guards know I’d already been outside my room the night before. All the way down this corridor. I’d whispered Cherie at each door, until I realized how stupid I was to do that. Anyone might be behind the doors, even Einar or Kaage.