Page 90 of Hell to Pay

It took Jude a little longer to get through. I held my breath as I heard him tell the guy to check again, his tone imperious, the tone of someone used to getting what they wanted.

Rafe and Nolan didn’t look at all nervous, so I tried to follow suit, looking at the floor like the good, docile,submissivesex slave I was pretending to be.

A moment later, Jude stepped into the foyer, tucked his golden notebook into the pocket of his tuxedo jacket, and took my elbow, guiding me deeper into the house.

And that was when it got weird.

58

JUDE

The place was fucking weird.It looked normal at the front of the house, but the deeper into it we got, the more obvious it became that this wasn’t just a house. The place was huge, but we already knew that from the drone footage we’d been studying. Now I could see that like most old houses in Europe, there were a lot of rooms, mostly separated from each other.

No open-concept floor plan here.

We wandered through a library and a hunting room, animal heads staring at us from the walls. There was more than one room with sofas and chairs, living rooms or what would have once been called parlors, men in tuxedos, a variety of masks covering their faces, all of them with different women in evening attire, their faces masked like Lilah’s.

I fisted my hands at my side when I saw that some of the women were collared or cuffed with chained leashes, the men holding on to the chains like the women were pets. Some of the women looked angry and defiant. Others, especially the ones without collars or cuffs, looked so docile I thought they might be drugged.

Every room was barely lit, the lights low, fires flickering from the fireplaces in almost every room. The decor was gaudy and carnal: red velvet and dark wood and giant paintings in heavy gilded frames.

And Ghost had been right about the paintings — they were weird as fuck too.

At first glance they looked like classical art, the paint heavily and masterfully applied, the frames thick and ornate. But a closer look made it clear these paintings had been made for this house.

For this purpose.

People were fucking in most of the pictures, their faces masks of pleasure and pain, but they weren’t just fucking. Men held bloody knives over the slashed bodies of the women they fucked. Some of them were painted biting the women, eating them like cannibals while they were still inside them.

I felt like ice water was dripping down my back, my body shivering in revulsion while my mind raged. There were rich people and there were rich fucks and the people in these rooms were rich fucks.

Sick fucks.

People who used their money to hurt those who were vulnerable.

Like Lilah.

No. I rejected the thought as soon as I thought it, as soon as I turned my head to look at her, magnificent in the green dress that looked like it had been poured over her body, the mask only making her green eyes more vibrant, her lush mouth more sensual.

She was trying to act docile like Rafe had said, but I knew her, knew her body, and I could tell from the straight set of her spine and the way her eyes flashed that she was ready to fight.

She’d been vulnerable once. Rafe, Nolan, and I hadn’t been rich fucks then, just fucking assholes, but we’d taken advantage of her and we’d have to live with that for the rest of our lives.

And Lilah wasn’t vulnerable anymore. Not like she had been.

We snagged champagne glasses off the tray of a passing server and I looked around, trying to get the lay of the land. We needed to find an office, somewhere there might be hard evidence of what was going on here, of what these men were doing.

I couldn’t read Rafe’s and Nolan’s expressions behind their masks, which was probably just as well.

A man with a silver mask stepped close to Lilah, reaching for the tag dangling from her wrist, and I had to suppress the urge to break his fucking arm.

“Careful,” Rafe said, his voice low and threatening. “This one’s our pet.”

The man smirked. “Then you can bid for her like everyone else.”

He removed a small golden notebook like the one the doorman had handed to the Bastards on the way in and wrote down Lilah’s number with the attached pencil.

He leered at her. “Until we meet again.”

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