seeing someone die that she could never get used to. No matter how many times she’d seen it at this point, it always jolted her when it happened. A normal, moral person would feel shock and grief and disgust and fear. Yet she, possibly because she knew these men were the bottom of the barrel, felt nothing but relief, and even vengeance to a degree. The only sadness she felt was for the families. She imagined a wife wondering why her husband hadn’t come home, only to find out he was out cheating and screwing a sex slave behind her back. That was fucking sad. She felt more for a woman she’d never met than she did for the man in front of her.
The shot came in through the window, through the monster’s hand that had been about to touch her again, blood splattering on the white walls of the hotel suite. The monster screamed, shaking his hand that had a hole in it.
The bullet missed her by inches, and yet her heart never once raced or thought to dive away to save herself like it once had. Of all the things he had and hadn’t done, physically endangering or hurting her had never been one of them.
The man in front of her grabbed her by the other arm, suddenly turning her to the glass window, using her body as a shield, which was frankly stupid because she was short and petite and his head was way above hers.
That was exactly where the second bullet went through.
The man fell down, his eyes vacant, dead to the world in a split second.
He was the fifteenth.
Sighing, Lyla looked down at the blood on herself and went to the bathroom, shutting the door. She knew the drill. She knew a call would go to security and her handler, that someone would come and escort her back to the housing complex the girls lived in and all of it would take about twenty minutes. Those twenty minutes were precious. They were hers.
She threw the damned translucent robe to the side and stepped into the bath. She had never had baths until she started being auctioned and men brought her to the hotel. It was close to the club, owned by whoever ran the whole operation, and just easier for people to slake their lusts at immediately after a purchase.
She didn’t know who ran the operations, none of the girls did. But she knew it was called The Syndicate, only because she had once served at a meeting where they had talked about it and she had eavesdropped. On the ground though, they had handlers who had handlers, who also had handlers, and she didn’t know how high the chain of command went. She was just at the lowest rung of the pyramid, given a hotel to be used at. This was where all short-term purchases were taken care of. Long-term contracts meant moving somewhere else, wherever the buyer wanted.
The hotel catered rooms to every kind of debauched desire, the most rampant being non-consensual sex. But if a fetish existed, it was catered to. There was no concept of consent and legality, no empathy or morality. It was an abyss of nothingness.
She had been to many of the rooms in the hotel, and all of them had an en-suite bath that she always made use of, even if for just five minutes. Those five minutes were special. She cherished that time of being alone from eyes and relatively safe.
The tub filled to the brim and she went underwater, blessed silence encompassing her, her eyes closing, her breathing on pause. She gripped the side of the tub with her fingers, the black hole beckoning again, so close. Over the years, the hole had gotten larger and larger, its pull more intense than it had been. She would not get a chance like this again, the ultimate escape, the ultimate defiance of everyone who took pieces of her, leaving her hollow on the inside, until she could feel nothing.
Under the water, in the silence, she didn’t have to be anything. She didn’t have to know who she was. She didn’t know who she was. She didn’t know what she liked or didn’t like, or what she would choose if she was a normal person with a normal life. Would she be an artist or a doctor or a dancer or something else? Would she have loving parents, brothers and sisters, family that loved her and worried for her if she didn’t return home on time? Would she care for them or would she be selfish? What would her hobbies be? Would she like cats or dogs or none? Would she have allergies? Would she have a partner who loved her? Would sex actually be something pleasurable or something she dreaded? Were people on the outside ever raped? Would she be free?
Her lungs began to burn, the urge to let them burn out filling her, to let it all go, to let it all end once and for all.
It would be so easy to let go.
But she had to live.
For that one answer he held.
One more day. If she made it one more day, she could worry about the day afterward later.
Taking a massive gulp of air, she came out of the tub, her chest heaving as oxygen rushed into her bloodstream, her hair dripping as her eyes moved to the corner of the bathroom. The door she had locked was open.
He stood there.
That gave her pause. Twice in one night?
Why the fuck was he there? He didn’t really make himself known after a kill. This was unprecedented. But she wasn’t going to talk to him, much less give him the satisfaction of a reaction. He was cold and manipulative. Just because he was fixated on her didn’t mean a thing.
Under the muted yellow lights of the bathroom, he was more visible to her than he had been in a while. She took him in, her eyes taking in his vision. He was rich, she knew that much, not just because of his clothes. He was wearing all black like every single time she’d seen him. It probably helped him blend into the shadows—a three piece suit sans the tie, the shirt opened to give a glimpse of his masculine chest.
He wasn’t the best-looking man she had seen. No, she had seen many, many more beautiful men. But he was, without a doubt, the most dangerous-looking. Maybe it was the way his jaw was carved, shadowed with a dark scruff that seemed to perpetually be the same length. Or maybe it was his frame—tall, wide, muscled in the sleek way of a combative panther. Or maybe it was the stillness, his sheer ability to lock and focus on something so intently it made him feel like a weapon of death. Or maybe, it was those eyes—one utter black, the other an odd combination of green and gold—hypnotic, ensnaring, lethal, a duality of death and afterlife within one gaze.
Maybe it was none of those things. Maybe it was just the fact that she had seen him murder people without an iota of emotion for so long, she just associated danger with him.
The reason she knew he was rich, however, was simply because there was no way he could have the access to the clubs and every other part of this seedy underworld that he did unless he had money. Only two kinds of people had that access—slaves or buyers, and he was the farthest thing from a slave she’d ever seen. Though she didn’t know if he was a buyer, if he had his own sex slave or a harem of them serving his every need.
The idea left a rotten taste in her mouth. With everything he did on the side while also stalking her, she wondered if he got the time. And why he did what he did, why no one knew him, or who he was outside of it, she didn’t know. She didn’t know a thing about him despite knowing him for years, and despite being one of the only people to have seen his face.
Feeling older than her twenty-four years, tired to the bone of simply breathing, she kept her face steady, breaking their gazes and looking into the water.
“Eyes.”
The slow, deliberate command of a word speared through her body. She clenched her jaw, not understanding what he was doing here, and why he was speaking to her when he had never said what she wanted to hear.
“I won’t ask again.”
Something in the tone of his voice, like an underside of a blade, cut through her confusion, making the small part inside her that knew he was dangerous instinctively react. It reminded her of the handler she’d had when she’d been fourteen, training her in the art of obedience for the right man. She had learned, not through obedience but through fear.
She turned her neck to look at him again, her gaze locking with his devilish mismatched eyes, waiting, a sliver of fear in her body lingering after the memory of her adolescent training.
He tilted his head to the side. “Afraid of me, flamma?”
The knuckles on her hands turned white with her grip. No, she wasn’t afraid of him. Or maybe she was. He elicited vastly different responses in her.
“Won’t you give me your voice? Even if I give you your answer?”
The question was soft, but effective enough to make her heart begin to thud. Would he answer her? Or was he toying with her? From the look on his face, she couldn’t tell.
“Will you?” she finally gave in, speaking to him for the first time in months, swallowing as the man with her answers stood still against the wall.
“One day.”
Bitter disappointment crashed into her, followed on its heels by rage, her words falling from her lips in a barrage she had been keeping in for so long. “You’re worse than these monsters. You dangle hope and take it away every single time.” She turned her face, her lips quivering, hating the ease at which she cried, the ease with which she felt. “Stay away from me. I want nothing to do with you.”
He stayed still beside the sink, leaning against the wall, casual but alert, his devilish gaze steady on her as she resumed her silence.
“They will be here in a few minutes,” he told her, shifting topics at her continued, deliberate silence.
She already knew that. That wasn’t news.
“I want you to tell them what happened.” He straightened from the wall he’d been leaning against as he spoke. “Tell them the Shadow Man was here.”
Why?
She almost asked but bit her tongue, her gaze wary as she looked at the man almost the entire underworld was terrified of, and for good reason. His entire expression stayed neutral the way it mostly did, but his eyes gleamed. He didn’t answer her silent question, refusing to acknowledge it just like she refused to voice it.
She watched as his hand went to his inner jacket pocket, bringing out a black eternal rose, putting it on the counter beside the sink. “If I stay away from you, you’ll miss me, flamma.”
Fuck him.
She wanted to ask him why he left those for her, why that specific rose, why specifically after a kill. She had fifteen of them now, an entire bouquet worth that she kept hidden in a box lest someone steal it. As twisted as it was, they were the only gift she had ever received, and she was possessive of them, along with the clothes he brought her every time.
She looked around to see where the bag of clothes was, her search coming up empty. Nothing. There wasn’t a bag.
Her eyes went up to him, fire flooding her veins. He was playing with her again. Why? What satisfaction did he get from inciting her reactions, toying with her emotions?
One corner of his mouth slashed up in a half-smirk. He knew she had come to rely on him bringing her clothes, clothes she wore back to the complex, clothes she washed and kept safe because they were the nicest she owned that were only hers. She didn’t know if she was just easy to read and no one had tried it before, or if it was his special skill at deciphering her, but he knew her thought patterns and she absolutely hated that.
Without another word, he left the bathroom, closing the door behind himself, and Lyla got up, wrapping a towel around her body. She was mad at him, mad at herself, mad at the world. And she knew she only had five more minutes to be mad before she had to be docile again, before she would give up on her anger, and that just made her angrier.
Marching out of the bathroom, she came to a sudden stop at seeing a plain paper bag on the bed. Ignoring the corpse on the side of the room, she rushed to the bag and saw a pair of black jeans, a white sleeveless top, a pair of nude cotton bra and panties that looked comfortable. Taking the tags off, she quickly donned the pieces, yet again questioning how he knew her exact sizes for everything. It was a perfect fit. And he had been testing her to see her reaction.
Hair still wet from the bath, she towel dried it as something on the table beside the bed caught her eye.
A phone.
She stared at it for a long minute, a gaping hole in her chest. Someone else could have stolen it and asked for help. She couldn’t. She didn’t have anyone she could call. And calling the police was out of the question. With the kind of people she knew were involved in these operations, she would either end up dead by an organizational assassination or dead by a police encounter. There was nowhere for her to go, not until she got what she needed from the one man who refused to give her answers.
Turning away from the phone, she looked at herself in the mirror. A short, petite frame with ripe breasts, as her handler had told her. Hair so red and wavy, falling to her waist, surrounding a circular face with softness, light freckles on her nose, naturally arched red brows over bright green eyes that looked almost blue in some lights. She was beautiful; she had been told many times. But when she looked at the mirror, it wasn’t her beauty she saw. She saw her only tie to her past, and she saw questions. Did her genetics come from her parents or grandparents? Were they alive or dead? Did they have eyes like hers or another color?
As she continued to dry her hair with the towel, she imagined all the scenarios, and none of them brought her any comfort at all. But her mind rarely, if ever, did bring her comfort.
The sound of the door opening had her throwing the towel to the side as she sat down on the bed, doing her best to appear meek, her hands folded in her lap, her head bent as she watched from under her eyelashes.
Two security guys came in, armed to the teeth, and looked at the dead body before eyeing her.
“What the fuck happened?”
What always happened.
He’d told her to tell them, but these guards were new and she didn’t want to risk their extra attention. So, she said what she always said. “I don’t know. I was in the bathroom.”
They believed her, not that they had any reason not to.
One of the guys, a dark-haired man who looked scary in his seriousness, nodded at her. “Grab your stuff. We have to get you back.”
Taking the bag the clothes had come in, she went to the bathroom to grab the rose and the small bottles of free toiletries. She always took those. The small bottles were pretty and, more often than not, they smelled amazing.
Roving an eye around the bedroom to see if anything else was worth taking, she followed the guys out within minutes. They took her down the elevator straight into the parking lot, and then straight into the unmarked sedan. Within minutes, she was locked in and they pulled out into the city.
“So,” the driver began. “What exactly happened up there?”
His skeptic tone wasn’t lost on her. But she didn’t know him, and there was no way she was talking. She’d learned early on that talking to outsiders got her punishment and nothing more.
“Exactly what I said.”
The guy stayed silent for a second. Something was off about him. She didn’t know what it was. She didn’t say anything else, just looked out the window and watched the city pass as they headed to the outskirts.
It was sad that she didn’t even know what the city was called or where the complex was. They never told any of the girls where they were moved. She could have been moved within the same city all her life or hopped a handful, she didn’t know. She wondered sometimes where she would live if she were ever free. She knew there were mountains and seas in the world, but she’d never seen either. She would like mountains. They would make her feel secure, like tall guards standing all around her, keeping her safe from outside invasion. Yeah, she’d like to see mountains one day.
And she most likely never would.
Blinking the stinging feeling in her eyes, she kept her face neutral.
“I’ve heard guys who bid on you die. That true?” the burly man from the passenger side asked.
She didn’t respond. There was nothing for her to respond. The rumor mill was working as it always did. And it didn’t do shit for her.
Before he could say another word, the familiar fences of the complex came into view, the large gates opening to let them in, imprisoning her once again.
