Page 6 of The Order of Disorder

Billy laughs and jerks the leash again, dragging me forward.

I don’t know how long we circle the room. Ten minutes? An hour? Time slips sideways in this place. Especially on evenings like this—these nights of punishment, when Billy is determined to debase me as much as he can.

Eventually he pushes me toward one of the couches in the center of the room. Cracked brown leather, stained darker in patches. Men jump up and move aside to make room for us.

“Sit,” Billy says, and I do, grateful to get off my feet.

He drops down next to me, fingers finding the bottom of my mesh top, and then he pulls it up over my breasts, exposing them fully. I exhale and turn my chin slightly away from him. It doesn’t matter what they see. What he does.

I pretend I’m not even here.

Neutral expression. Dry eyes.

“Lift your arms,” he instructs me. I slip my arms through the arm holes as he pulls the shirt off and discards it. He bends down and circles my nipple with his tongue, and despite my dissociation, it tightens. I hate my body for reacting.

He chuckles.

“You’ve always had the most perfect tits, Max,” he murmurs.

I stare into the middle distance, but it’s impossible not to notice how the bodies around us creep closer, eyes glinting in the darkness, bright and hungry.

And then I see him.

Silas. Billy’s VP and second-in-command.

Just across from us, standing near the bottom of the stairs to the second-floor walkway, drink in hand, looking straight at me.

His eyes are locked on my breasts, looking too hard, lingering too long. It turns my stomach.

It’s not the way he’s looking at me that makes my blood go cold. It’s that he’s the one who did it. He shot Ryder.

Ryder’s killer—and his only punishment is that he has to watch Billy licking my skin instead of doing it himself.

My hands curl into fists. My whole body goes taut, frozen between violence and fear.

I hate him with a consuming passion—so much so that it’s almost a relief to feel anything that strongly again.

Rage is cleaner than grief.

I stiffen, instinctively moving to cover myself, but Billy shakes his head and pulls my arms down. He knows exactly what I’m reacting to.

“Don’t be rude. He likes you.”

“No.”

His hands curl around my wrists, holding them down in my lap, and his voice gets hard.

“You do what I tell you.”

I freeze, warring briefly with myself, and then relent, nodding and swallowing down my fight. Not because I want to, but because I’ve learned what happens when I don’t.

Insolence gets punished. He’s made that lesson clear, over and over again. There are worse things than being watched.

I train my eyes on a section of the floor in front of me as his hands slide off my wrists and onto my thighs, now that I’m compliant. He pulls down the zipper of my shorts and slides his fingers under the leather until they’re brushing against my pussy, rubbing against my clit.

I shiver involuntarily, and a man on the couch across from us whistles low. Someone else laughs.

More bodies move in and press around us.