Waking up with Lucy in my arms felt right.

Her body was soft to the touch in the morning, and when I licked her skin, she tasted so damn sweet. I had to physically resist the urge to try and get inside her. The way she’d squirmed, begged, moaned for me last night… I was in-fucking-love with the sounds she’d made, the way her pussy clenched around me. The way she cried and almost came so many times. It was addictive.

“Stop staring,” she muttered, her eyes still closed as she moved in my arms. “You’re a creep.”

I laughed out loud and grabbed a handful of her hair, pulling her head back. Her eyes fluttered open and I looked into the beautiful blues of her irises. God, she was fucking stunning. I was never going to have enough of this girl. She’d charmed the pants off of me, quite literally, and I couldn’t think about anything other than burying my cock inside her holes once again.

“Wake up, babydoll,” I told her, and her eyes closed for a second again, her long, thick lashes so stark against the paleness of her cheeks. “We have work to do today. Can’t just lie around sleeping.”

“What are we going to do?” she asked curiously as I pulled her into my arms. She settled into them as easily as if she’d been doing it for years and years. “I don’t know if I have the energy to do anything today.”

“Too fucking bad for you,” I told her sternly. “Because we have shit that needs to be done.”

I explained what I’d done the previous night when she’d been sleeping. I’d stayed awake for hours after she’d passed out, her body frail and small in my hands as she drifted off to dreamland. I thought about what she’d told me, about her sister. I knew now the girl I met that first night, the girl that had danced for me, wasn’t Lucy. It was her sister who had enchanted me with the way she moved. Her sister who had been so fucking scared of me she ran away, and got herself fucking captured.

I was never going to hurt her. I would never lay my hands on a girl like Charli. From the night when she danced for me, I could tell she was sweet, vulnerable. I could tell she wasn’t the kind of girl that enjoyed the pain. There wasn’t a hint of kinkiness in her, even if she was naturally submissive. She would never go for what I wanted.

It was the reason I’d struggled so much with Lucy. I was convinced she didn’t want this, that she was terrified of me. I was convinced she was her sister. But Lucy made it plenty clear that she was nothing like her sibling. She didn’t just want the pain, she lived and breathed for it. The way her body submitted to mine last night, I was surer than ever. Lucy was made to be hurt, and Charli wasn’t. Two sisters, so alike, but so different at the same time.

After Lucy had fallen asleep, I pondered about who her sister could possibly owe money to. I could only think of one group in the whole city who would be this brutal with getting their money back.

I’d heard a lot about them at work. I’d never actually worked for anyone from their group, never defended a man from the infamous gang that ruled our city’s streets at night. They were a kind of mafia, I couldn’t remember the exact nationality, but I knew it was something foreign. Sometimes, when I was walking through the worst part of the city to talk to a client, I’d hear them whispering, the words strange and sharp, spoken in a language I couldn’t understand. I knew there was a whole group of people behind it, from the loan sharks to hired killers, from thieves to murderers, from rapists to men who wouldn’t think twice about hurting a woman, and badly.

It made me fucking worried about Charli. If my suspicions were right, and those were the men who’d taken her, she was probably better off dead.

At work, I’d seen what men like them could do to an innocent woman, and most of it was so horrific, I couldn’t even repeat it out loud to Lucy. But I needed to find out what she knew, the extent of her knowledge about the loan, if we had any hope of finding her sister again.

“You need to tell me everything you know,” I told Lucy. “Every fucking detail.”

“I don’t know much,” she confessed. “It was foreigners, that much I’m sure of. She used to speak to a man late at night, on her cellphone. She called him Grigori… I remember their conversations.”

With that, I knew there was no doubt about the origin of the money Charli had gotten.

“You need to be a good girl now,” I told Lucy. “I’m going to find out more, make some calls. I want you to stay in your room. Don’t check your email anymore. Only check it when I’m around, okay, babydoll?”

She nodded gravely, biting her bottom lip as if she wanted to speak out but was too scared to do so.

“What’s on your mind?” I asked her, my tone so gentle I surprised myself. “You know you can tell me anything. You have to.”

She nodded again, finally looking up at me.

“I just… I feel guilty,” she muttered. “You don’t know, you don’t know the whole story. About my sister and me. You don’t know how much I hate her.”

Even though I was curious as to why Lucy could hate her sibling, I didn’t want to pry.

“Why don’t you write it down for me?” I suggested. “On paper, just write it all down, let it out. It’ll make you feel better, and I’ll read it after I make those calls.”

She didn’t really react, so I tipped her chin back with my index finger and made her look into my eyes.

“Babydoll,” I said gently. “Promise you’ll write it down so I can read it later. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said softly, and I kissed her forehead before getting up and leaving her on the messy bed with the rumpled sheets.

“I’ll be back in a little while,” I promised her. “Put the letter on your bedside table once you’re done.”

She nodded again and I left the room, hesitating as I closed the door behind me.

A part of me wanted to lock her inside. I wanted to make sure she’d be safe, that she wouldn’t fucking run. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I wanted to trust her enough to know she’d stay where I’d told her to without having to actually lock her inside her prison. I left the hallway reluctantly, hoping that she wouldn’t disappoint me. That she’d be a good little girl for me and stay inside, not piss me off even more and make me punish her again.

Although the need to punish her was fucking consuming me. I still remembered the way her body trembled, how she begged me to slap her just so she could follow my orders. She was the perfect abusable little toy and I couldn’t get enough of her. I needed to get so much more out of her tight, young body, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop myself until she begged me to.

Walking into my study, I powered up my computer and opened some files I definitely shouldn’t have had access to. But working so closely with Empire Sin had its benefits, and most of them were stored in a folder on the desktop of my computer. All those secrets, all the shit that I’d turned a blind eye to. I wasn’t going to snitch now, either. I was just using what I had to give Lucy back what she had lost.

The memory of Charli dancing with me ingrained itself in my memory, making me feel guilty as fuck. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, the way her body twisted and turned under my gaze, her motions desperate and so fucking sexy it made my damn head spin. It was such a sharp contest to the person she really was. The shy, quiet girl who got scared at the sight of my scars. So different to her brazen, daring little sister.

I wasn’t having feelings for Charli, I was sure of that. But I was curious about the girl. I wanted to find out more about their lives. And I really fucking wanted to know why Lucy hated her sister so much.

Checking through the files on my computer, I took some notes and made a quick call to an assistant in my office. I knew him well, and knew he did some illegal shit behind my back, not that he knew I was aware of it. I always liked to know everything about my employees, even stuff they wouldn’t put on their resumes. And Bryant was one of those people, with a whole list of illegal activities that could come and bite us both in the ass. Mostly I ignored it, hoping he wouldn’t get caught buying shit off the dark web, but now, I knew I needed his help in getting to the bottom of Charli’s disappearance.

I called him, and he picked up on the seventh ring, when I’d almost lost hope.

“Mr. Wolfe,” he said easily, the hint of a smile evident in his voice, even over the phone. “Anything I can help you with?”

“Yeah,” I barked. “Get off your ass and go to work.”

I could hear his chair creaking as he got up. “How did you know I wasn’t at–”

“I know everything,” I told him. “I need your help, Bryant. There’s a gang I need to know more about, and I need you to find out everything you possibly can about them.”

“What’s this about?” Bryant asked curiously. “Are you taking another case?”

“It doesn’t concern you,” I told him coolly. “Find anything you can about the city’s gangs. Especially the foreign ones. And in particular, a man named Grigori.”

“Grigori?” he asked down the line. “I know a Grigori.”

“Spill,” I ordered, grabbing a notepad and taking notes as Bryant spoke.

“There’s not much to explain,” he said nervously. “I was… I had some gambling debt a while ago. I got it online. I had to repay it all and Grigori gave me a loan. When I couldn’t return it, things got pretty fucking bad. They… threatened my family. My mom had to take a second mortgage to pay for the loan. I’m still trying to pay her back.”

I never knew about this, although I didn’t much care. I just wanted to get to the bottom of Charli’s disappearance.

“Tell me about Grigori,” I said to Bryant, and he went on.

“I think he’s Georgian. Tall, tattooed. Mean guy. He works for other people though, it’s not his money that he’s loaning out. I’m pretty sure he’d be in trouble too if his bosses didn’t get their money back,” Bryant went on. “I don’t know the rest of them, just Grigori. I know there’s a lot more than just loans happening there, though.”

“Like what?” I barked, my pen poised above the notepad.

“Like…” I could hear how nervous he was. “This, I never was involved with. But I know there’s more. Prostitution, involuntary. Child pornography. The darkest, most awful shit there is.”

My blood chilled as I listened to him talk. If this was all true, we were really talking about something bigger than just some lonesome loan shark who’d taken Charli for himself. There was more of the story there, more to unveil. And as I listened to Bryant talk about the prostitution ring they had going on, I worried about the worst.

That Charli had been taken to work for them, forced to sell her body and probably not even see any profit for it. Just a slave for the men that had offered to help her out. Forced to repay her loan.

“I’ll be in touch,” I said quickly, and cut the call.

Before I went back to Lucy, I made another quick call and made sure Bryant’s mother’s mortgage was paid off in full.

Once I came back into the bedroom, Lucy was sitting cross-legged on her bed. She was only wearing my shirt from last night, and underneath it, I could see her bare pussy, red and swollen from what we’d done. Right away, she made my dick react and twitch in my pants. God, she was irresistible. I could barely keep my eyes off her sweet little cunt. We had shit to do, and all I could think about was hurting her, taking her again.

“Are you done with your letter?” I asked her roughly, and she pointed to the nightstand in response.

A piece of paper awaited me there, scribbled on in handwriting that seemed oddly childish. I glanced at her as I took the paper in my hands, and she fluttered her lashes.

“If I read this now,” I said slowly. “Do you promise to do whatever it takes to get your sister back?”

She stared at me for a long time, her eyes full of hurt and regret.

“Yeah,” she finally said in her softest voice. “I promise I will do anything to get her back.”

“Good girl, I said, sitting down on the sofa and motioning for her to come to me. ”Come on, babydoll. Come sit at my feet.“

She didn’t even need to be told to crawl. My girl just swung from the bed and dropped to her knees, and I watched her get closer and closer, her ass swaying seductively and her talon-like nails digging into the floor. She settled next to my legs with her arms and her head on my lap, breathing shallow breaths as I started to read.