Tears stung my eyes as he dropped me on the ground like I was a bag of garbage. I groaned as my shoulder hit the wooden planks, overcome by an intense pain that traveled up and down to my lower back, settling into my bones. The handkerchief muffled my cries.
“She’s awake,” one man said with a thick European accent I could not place.
Another man’s laughter filled the air. “I can’t wait to break this one in.”
“Keep it below the neck,” another man said. “The auction is in three days.”
My heart clambered out of my chest, beating so hard and fast my head spun. I struggled to catch my breath with the cloth over my mouth. The nasty smell did not help.
A million horrible thoughts raced through my head as a boat approached the pier. Luca had once told me how much he hated working with human traffickers and that sometimes it was necessary to work with the underbelly of the criminal world to get shit done.
They were going to sell me at Il Circo. Luca had mentioned the online auction. But I had faith he would stop his enemies from listing me for sale. Maybe I should have listened to him, stayed in my damn room. I shouldn’t have drugged Marcello and rendered him useless.
A phone ringing cut through the noise of the boat’s engine. The man beside me raised the phone to his ear, his voice husky and with what sounded like a New York accent. Who the hell were these people? They all spoke with different accents, though they all had the same dark hair and olive complexion.
“Ten million?”
A beat passed where he listened, muttered a few words in another language, and then hung up.
“Put her back in the trunk,” he said to a burly man behind me.
The other man didn’t respond, just followed orders. He lifted me in his arms, the woodsy smell of his cologne burning my nostrils. When I closed my eyes, I listened to the waves.
Luca loved the sea. Every night he opened the doors that led to a private veranda off his bedroom suite, sipping his favorite scotch before he drifted to sleep. He’d done that for as long as I had known him. The sound, the smell, everything about the sea reminded me of my Devil.
As the man dropped me into the drunk, I closed my eyes and envisioned my Knights coming to my rescue. Someone slammed their hand into my shoulder and rolled me to the side. A needle jammed into my neck, and before I could count to five, I lost my will to fight.
Luca
Pacing back and forth across the helipad, I gritted my teeth as I stared at the lost signal on the tracking app on my phone.
I was losing my mind.
I was losing control.
Knowing I had put Alex in this situation made every sensible part of me shut down. I was becoming the thing I feared most—the uncontrollable psychopath who craved blood. Without Alex here to level me out, I was ready to explode from all the rage bubbling up inside me.
Marcello cupped my shoulder, snapping my attention back to reality. “We’ll find her. Give it time.”
I threw my hands in the air. “We don’t have fucking time, Marcello! They will sell her to the highest bidder. And that person will kill her to spite me.”
The sickos in our world never kept women long. They either hurt them so badly they died from their injuries or put them out of their misery. The men that held the private auctions did not reveal the identities of the buyers. So we had one option—find Alex before they moved her to the Il Circo location. My fingers itched as I waited for a text message with the details. They didn’t hold auctions in the same place more than once, making it harder for us to anticipate their next move.
“They must know there’s a tracking chip in Alex’s necklace,” Marcello said.
I nodded.
The local Knights gathered on the helipad at my estate, waiting for me to issue an order. Aiden stood beside his grandfather, who shot me a stern look. The Wellingtons had every reason to blame me.
All of this was my fault.
I should have told Alex the truth about her brother. What difference would it have made? She was going to be our queen and had every right to know. If I had been honest with her, she would have sat with Marcello and sketched a new Devil painting for me. My girl would still be here. We didn’t have a solid lead on Alex. If we moved in the wrong direction, we could lose her forever.
“I knew we would regret working with the Kurtis,” Marcello said through clenched teeth.
“I looked into their operation before I went to Berat,” I told him. “Even I didn’t see this coming.”