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I’m still in the process of waking up. Still trying to understand what’s happening.

One second, I’m a free woman sitting at the last dinner with her boyfriend and his dad. The next, I’m bombarded with information I never asked for while being locked behind bars.

“Yes.”

These things he’s saying—there’s no way I’m hearing them. This whole night has to be a dream. A nightmare. I’m hallucinating this, I have to be.

But since he isn’t moving or offering up any other explanation, I have to ask, “See for yourself if I’m really a virgin?”

“Yes. Lying to our buyers would ruin our reputation.”

This word again. Buyers. I could scream. I could kill him.

I can’t do either, so I spit on his face. “Fuck you. You’re not checking me for fucking nothing. You won’t get away with this.”

James lifts his hand, slowly wiping my saliva off his nose and his mouth. And then—then, holy shit—he licks his tattooed hand clean. While staring down at me.

My traitorous body. Heat pools at my core, and my knees threaten to buckle. I won’t let them. I’ll fight it until the day I die.

“We have.” With little to no effort, he spins me around. I scream while he bends me over and pushes my head onto the bed. “For decades.”

The sheets are dark gray and smell like me. I’ve been here for that long. I don’t want to spend another second here.

Panic clutches at my lungs. “Let me go!”

James’s hand pins my wrists to my back. I hear a bag dragging across the floor. A quick glance tells me I heard right.

It’s the bag he brought here.

“Sage will call the authorities,” I warn. I wriggle. I stomp on his foot again. Nothing deters the big James Hawthorne, who unzips his duffel casually. “She’ll file a missing person’s report. Topher is—was—my boyfriend. He’s the first person they’ll come for.”

“Sage Wright knows what’s best for her, and that’s keeping her mouth shut.”

Is that why she’s been slumming it with me? She’s been hiding from people like James?

She told me she’s trying to rebel against her mom.

She’s just another person who’s been lying to me.

“She’ll file a missing person’s report,” I try a second time.

James’s hand gives my wrists a threatening squeeze. “She’ll never go up against us.”

“Why?” Fear pushes against my ribs. It forces another shiver through my body. Another wave of heat between my thighs.

I’m so sick. So fucked in the head for being turned on by this monster.

This man, who presses his legs to the backs of my thighs while he bends to get something from his bag.

A flash of plastic in my periphery—zip ties. When Topher dangled the cuffs in my face, I almost threw up. Watching James’s large hand gripping the zip ties has the opposite effect on me.

I’m hot all over. I’m breathing fast. I’m humiliated.

Conflicted.

I wish he’d hike my dress up and relieve me of this pressure in my pussy so I can think again.

I wish with everything in me that he won’t. As soon as he sees the dark spot on my cotton panties, he’ll know. There’ll be no hiding my shameful need for him.