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CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

VALE

Drawing a ragged breath, I watch Nash’s brutal fist collide with the man’s defiant face. The snap of bone distinct. The gush of blood immediate. His nose broken and bleeding.

Nadine’s security snatched this man up outside the club. Then they grabbed me, too. Quickly, we were tossed in the back of a white van while her men slapped him into cuffs, and I screamed, “Let me go, you pencil dicks, or I’ll curse you with anejaculation until your cocks explode with your pathetic, pent-up cum!”

One of her men looked at me, aghast. “Is that a thing?”

“Yes!” I shouted. “Open a book instead of Pornhub and read all about it. It can be caused by stress, and I’m about to give you a fuck-ton of it!”

The men were silent until the van stopped, its doors ripped open.

“Let’s kick this off,” Nash snarled, standing there. “Go ahead. Ways I’m going to spank your ass for disobeying me.”

At the sight of his rage, I relaxed. “If you want to worship me, all you have to do is ask.”

But … he wasn’t laughing.

He took my arm, stifling his anger. I knew he wanted to yank a knot in me, but instead, he quickly escorted me, the building a blur as we rushed through double metal doors and down a long, concrete hallway with dusty light fixtures barely illuminating our path. It smelled of pluff mud, meaty mold, and Nash’s sexy deodorant that really deserves a vacation from this.

Behind us, I heard clicking heels and turned around.

Nadine elegantly stalked down the long hallway, flanked by four guards, with two more dragging their new captive behind her.

“What’s going on?” I muttered to Nash.

“You’re about to see the dark side of being a queen,” Nash replied.

And here we are…

Me, watching Nash interrogate the man who was about to nab me and Nadine, standing beside me, smoking a cigar that smells like berries and vanilla.

“Where is he?” Nash holds a pair of pliers poised over the man’s front tooth.

He’s cuffed to a metal chair, spitting through the blood pouring over his thin lips. “Fuck you. We’ll get her one day. You know it, and you know what we’ve done to the others, we’ll do to her .”

Who? Me? Alena?

It doesn’t matter to Nash. Evilly, he sneers. “Oh, I think you’re the one about to be fucked.” He turns to Nadine’s guards. “Strip him!”

I stand by the closed, heavy metal door with Nadine. Beige paint peels off the concrete walls of the room. This must be an old underground bunker in the Naval yard. I can smell the river nearby and the bucket the first man, the one who crawled over the wall at Delta’s, is using for his toilet.

It’s foul. It’s disgusting. But god, their first captive isn’t.

He kneels on a soiled mattress, his chiseled cheek and full lips pressed against it. He’s a hot, muscular brute, sculpted and naked and covered in ink. He’s bound in one of the Humiliators I sold to Nash with his ass in the air, his scrotum stretched taut and squeezed between the bars bound to his inked ankles.

But I grin.

Because, as I warned Nash, the man’s dick hangs huge and hard for his humiliating torture. This isn’t his first time submitting. His ass is too groomed. His eyes are too trained. He’s staring at Nadine with murderous lust in his eyes.

No wonder they can’t break him. He loves this.

But the second man? He must be one of Turner’s preppy golf buddies, all money and perversion, no mass and real power. As soon as he realizes what Nash and the men are about to bind him in?

He fights like a cat getting a bath. “No! No! No!” he shrieks, clawing at his captors.

“Oh, so you don’t like this?” Nash taunts, mashing the man’s bloody cheek against the concrete. “You don’t like being forced? You don’t like being made my bitch?”

Nadine’s guards cuff the man’s kicking ankles. One of them grabs his balls, jerking them as another traps them between two wooden bars, screwing the bars tightly together.

“Fuck you! Fuck you!” The man swears, realizing when he fights, it only tortures his scrotum more.

“Read the room.” Nash laughs. “Who’s the one about to be fucked if he doesn’t tell me where Turner is?”

The man’s penis shrivels, his body sweating, his eyes frantic and scared.

He doesn’t like this. This is his worst nightmare.

Just like the nightmare he’s been to so many children and women. They’ve suffered far worse than the humiliation he’s enduring now.

A little part of me feels sympathy, though I know Nash or any of Nadine’s men would never sexually violate someone.

But the bigger part of me, the future queen in me, wants this intel, too. As a survivor like Nadine … I don’t give a damn. Sacrifice this evil man to save innocent people. We just need a location.

To my point, Nadine approaches one of her guards with her hand outstretched. Quickly, he puts his phone in her palm.

She stands with Nash over the man whimpering with his naked ass presented to her. “You pigs like to take pictures,” she says. “You’re too pathetic to have someone desire you, so you take pictures of people forced to endure your stench. And trust me, you stink.”

Urine puddles beneath him. I suspect he’s about to shit himself, too.

“So what if we take pictures now,” Nadine smiles, “and send them to all of your country club, good ol’ boys? My, my, how they’ll laugh at pictures of your pancake ass in the air and your saggy balls drawn tight. Your picture will spread like a prairie fire in high wind. And don’t you worry a thinning hair on your greasy little head about it. I’ll make sure you barely live to endure the humiliation. Or…”

Nash squats by the man, pressing two fingers against the bridge of his broken nose. The man howls in pain while Nadine roars, “Tell us where he is!”

“County Shed Road,” the man snivels, “the Deliverance Chapel.”

“Of course, he fucking did,” Nash sneers. “Turner’s hiding the most immoral sin in a church.”

Nash unbraids my hair while calming lavender bubbles surround us. I sit between his legs, admiring his muscles and soaking in his love while my bottom still stings from his punishment.

I earned a helluva spanking for my stunt tonight. Whoops. Then I got the most luscious, brutal fuck against the window of The Mercier as Nash fisted my braids like reins, loving how a man watched our silhouettes from the sidewalk below, knowing I was a woman getting railed to orgasmic delight.

Now, the beast is gone, and Nash is quiet.

Too quiet.

“All your talking sounds like white noise.” I joke.

Still, no answer.

“Do we need Jesus to make you talk?” I warn, “I can screech This Little Light of Mine and crack mirrors for you.”

He finishes with my hair, pulling me back to rest my head on his chest. My dark strands fan through the bubbles, falling over his arms that wrap around me.

“If I lose you,” he murmurs, “I’ll die inside. I’ll live for Alena; she’s my soul, but you’re my heart, Vale. If you pull another stunt like that again and get hurt or worse, my heart will die with you, too.”

“But I’m okay.” I reach for his hand.

“But you don’t know everything. There’s more. So much more. Some I can’t even tell you; you have to see it to understand.”

“I understand what you have to do sometimes. I know you don’t want to; you have to. It’s one of the things I love about you. Nash, all you do is fight for the ones you love.”

“Just promise me,” his lips press to my ear, “when you’re my queen, you’ll remember what you saw tonight. You’ll understand the threats we face, the work we do, and the decisions we’ve made. Promise that you won’t hate me for it.”

“I won’t hate you.” I turn around in his arms. I kneel, cupping his clenched jaw. “I promise I’ll understand.”

He takes my promise with a kiss, the kiss he killed for. Then he takes me in the tub with such passion I swear a tear falls from his wet cheek along with our sloshing bath water.

All I can feel is our love.

All I can wonder is…

… what else is he hiding?