Page 66 of The Diamond Thief
“Bloody fucking hell,” he says, pushing me off him. He gestures to the guard. “Keep him down.”
The man rolls me on my stomach and puts his boot on my neck. My rage is incredible. I grit my teeth, blood flowing down my face. “Do not fucking disrespect her.”
“If you’re lucky I won’t kill her.”
I didn’t worry about that. Jade was safe. She’d get to her father.
I just had to play my cards carefully for the next few hours and free myself from this odious man’s clutches. I was done with the Den. All of it. I had many options, but the most important one would be to find the location of a certain blond, pixie-haired woman.
* * *
I certainly didn’t expectthe location Antony brings me to.
As the limo slows to a stop, the guard lifts me to sit on the seat with a sharp, “Behave yourself.”
We’re at the back entrance to Club Y, Antony’s bondage club. He uses it for many things. Finding the best girls to train in seduction. Locating the best marks for heists. Blackmail. Money laundering. He particularly likes making the female thieves do time here in order to get in his good graces. He likes to watch them fuck clients and then turn the money over to him.
I glance down at my bloodied shirt and shackles and ask, “So am I suddenly into bondage?”
Antony chuckles. “I sure will miss that humor. Shut up and put on a clean shirt.”
The guard next to me scoots closer and unfastens the shackle. A young woman enters the limo, holding out a fresh shirt.
I unbutton the old one and toss it aside. “I hope you consulted my tailor.”
“Shut up,” Antony says. “I’m trying to decide exactly what to do with you.”
I shrug. I’ve been in tighter spots than this one. But I don’t say that. There’s no point in antagonizing him.
The woman cleans my face with a damp cloth as I button the shirt. Antony gives me a nod. “Nobody is setting their guns to stun,” he warns. “Don’t misbehave. It’s my club. I can dispose of a body.”
“Have I told you lately how charming you are?”
Antony grunts. One of his guards exits the limo, and we head out into the early evening light. I wonder about Jade, if she’s awakened yet. I left the bunker in what I affectionately call mutiny mode, which means every action that does not match my typical learned behavior means that the entire bunker will fill with a sleeping agent.
You could technically die in there, continually setting off the sleeping agent until you were too dehydrated to wake up again. There is no failsafe.
But Jade already knows enough to get out, if she uses her head.
As for me, I have to focus on Antony’s endgame. I’m not sure what he’s after exactly. Yeah, he’s annoyed that I won’t give up Jade’s location. By tomorrow it won’t matter. I won’t know where she is.
Two doorman open the back entrance to the club. One of them looks at me and says, “Welcome to Club Y, where we take it further than X.”
He’s about to give me the rest of their marketing jingle when Antony says, “Can it.”
We walk along a red carpeted hallway lined in satin. I’d been to Club Y once before, in the days when I thought it was fun to fritter away all my heists on self-indulgence. And this one could break the bank for sure. The entrance fee alone was five figures.
It changed my life at the time, introducing me to a taste I was unaware of. The thirst for domination. And it provided the means to quench that thirst.
And the girl. I’d never forgotten the encounter. The madam had set me up with a girl far too young and tender and fresh-faced. She had long red hair that fell down her back. A willow-wisp of a girl who seemed like she should break. Green eyes like the name they gave her.
Emerald.
And man, she did a number on me. She did not break at all. She stripped for me. Danced for me. Begged me to spank her, tie her, fuck every part of her. I could not get enough. Twenty-four hours I spent there. The madam had to draw me out, exhausted, dehydrated, completely addicted.
I went back two days later to do it all again, but she wasn’t there. They showed me girl after girl, but it wasn’t the same. I left, and after that I invested my spoils back into real estate. And that’s what got me where I am.
I checked with Sylvester regularly to see if she’d ever turned up in his employ, to no avail. Probably by now she has married some jerk on Wall Street and spends her days raising rug rats. This was all six years ago. She’d be a grown woman, no longer so eager, so tender, such a contradiction.
