WARNING
This Dark Hearts trilogy explores horror and thriller territory. You’ll find some very graphic scenes of violence, torture, death, and sex, oozing from the pages. In the first book you won’t find anything more than hints of romance, as the romance is on drip-feed speed. The main man, the antihero, may not even end up being who most readers expect him to be. With DARK HEARTS, I wanted to step outside conventional romance. I wanted no cliffhangers, yet endings that make you curious about the next story, and a story ARC similar to some urban fantasy series. Zorie, the heroine will seriously kick some ass, but she won’t always be on top, because being on the bottom can be fun...for readers...and maybe for her. The last book, Wicked Hunt, will be a very, VERY twisted romance. There may be sweetness, but there will also be tragedy and torture, and hopefully some screaming readers. |
Release Date: March 25th, 2016
Genre: Dark, erotic, psychological thriller with hints of a slow-burn twisted romance This book is part of a dark erotic fiction series and may disturb some readers. Zorie is lost, again. Friends can become enemies and enemies can become friends. What is a man who declares himself your knight in cracked and bloody armor, when he seems to be leading you to your doom? Mavros, once known as Mister Black, has vanished. Zorie and Grimm are in the hands of unscrupulous men. She will emerge either dead, enslaved, or with revenge in her heart, and a lethal hairpin in her hand to kill those who have hurt the innocent. Hairpin or bullet, dead is dead. |
PROLOGUE
|
We strolled around the corner into the darkened car park area next to the club, with Mavros at my side in his upmarket, party-going attire. The man wouldn’t look out of place at Buckingham Palace. Grimm brought up the rear. From the jingle, he was digging for the car keys in his pocket.
Men, strangers, swarmed us – shadowed faces, hard eyes that promised pain, and the glint of weapons in hands. Six or seven, I didn’t have the leisure time to count. My heart lurched.
My heel caught on a hole in the pavement and someone whipped me face-first toward the wall, slowing my forward motion in time so I barely kissed the bricks. Hands trapped my wrists.
“Fuck! Let me go!” I squirmed and kicked back as some metal nub touched my neck. The pointy end of my stiletto heel connected and the metal slipped away. A scuffle and a few yells behind me said Mavros was resisting. After a fleshy thump, someone gurgled. A soft grunting exhalation lanced fear into me. I heard the slide of a body crumpling.
Who was that?
Again, the cold metal was jammed into my nape. A buzz cracked through me, setting me afire. Muscles crunching tight, I shook then collapsed with my mouth open and drooling, the brickwork scraping my chin as stranger’s hands carried me earthward.
Through the roar in my head, I recognized zip ties being applied to my wrists and ankles. A needle jabbed into my upper arm and pushed some drug into me.
Taser. They’d tasered me too.
“Fuck. Basterrs,” I slurred before tape flattened across my mouth and I could only blink wildly at the enlarging and shrinking specks of dark concrete near my nose.
Lights moved as I was carried somewhere. Blearily, I saw colored metal shapes. Cars. A car door opened. I was laid on a seat and my legs tucked up. More voices could be heard quietly cursing and arguing. I thought one was Grimm.
Someone had me again. Mister Black...no, he was Mavros now? My head had turned into squishy play dough. Mavros was hurt or he’d not let them do this. Surely he wouldn’t?
This wasn’t the plan. Who were these men?
That voice had sounded like Grimm’s.
Had he betrayed me?
Again...
The idea scattered, trailing confetti in my mind.
Engines started and we rolled forward, jolting and driving into the unknown while I sank deeper and deeper into some nothing, thought-blurred place where only the drool under my face mattered and I rocked upon the seat.
Chapter 1
Three weeks earlier
Zorie
I closed the iPad’s leather cover and hugged my knees. Thousands of feet below me the dense, green forests of the Pindos mountain range spread. Trees, more trees, cliffs of pale, ancient rock and the distant sheen of an immense lake. I could imagine myself slipping into those waters, no matter how cold they must be. Calf-high grass swayed lightly in the breeze all the way down the slope, with spots of yellow and blue marking where violets and buttercups grew. The mountainous parts of Greece were as beautiful a country as anyone could find upon this earth.
Mister Black, or Mavros, as he now asked me to call him, had gifted me with the tablet soon after we arrived here, on his estate. Mostly, I kept in touch with my sister, Amelia, who was back in Australia. The internet was as wild and untamed as a bear out here. Getting reception this far from the house was dicey, but I loved this view, and I’d trade it in a heartbeat for freedom.
Freedom. A word that had many meanings when a man could so distort your mind and identity that you believed you were free when you were truly his slave. I’d thought I wasn’t that easily controlled anymore. Mavros had proved me wrong, yet he still thought I would make a fine weapon.
A weapon, me? I snorted.
Fuck this labyrinth of uncertainty.
Mavros, I’d discovered soon after coming here, also meant black. One name was a reflection of the other. Mavros was his real surname. He didn’t care that I now knew enough about him to point him out to police, Interpol, or to other mesmers. The latter would put a nail in his coffin, if they knew what he intended. He didn’t care that I knew because he was sure I would not tell.
The paradox was that he wanted to teach me to resist him and others of his kind.
Mesmer was his word for these men who could control women with words and wishes. I’d hated Reuben for what he’d made me do. I’d been his fucktoy, pure and simple, until he tried to make me commit suicide.
The powers of mesmers could be truly mind-rending.
I smiled, halfheartedly. I’d won that battle by the skin of my teeth, but I had won. I was one of a kind, able to resist and hide my feelings, just not enough to do me any damn good when too close to a mesmer who spotted me coming.
One day, I’d tried to shoot Reuben.
I leaned back, propping myself on my arms while I wrestled with my stupid fears.
I hadn’t shot him. Instead I’d been forced to fuck myself with the gun, in public, before his disgusting friends, on the day of my engagement party to him, to Reuben. The cocksucker. With one hand, I wiped away the tears flooding my eyes.
All he’d wanted was my money and, for a while, my body.
I’d never called anyone a cocksucker ever, out loud. Reuben was a cocksucker, a dickwad, a louse on the backside of the worst of humanity.
“Fuck you,” I whispered.
The beauty and brightness surrounding me lent a bizarreness to my memories.
The scars from what Reuben had done would never go away. I knew that.
Mavros thought I desired this mesmer-resisting training, that I would soon march off and help kill the ones he, Mavros, decided must die. As if the knowledge that I might save other women from degradation would be enough. But I didn’t want to die. Did I feel sad over what others might go through? Of course I did. I just couldn’t do this.
The look in Reuben’s eyes when he’d caught me with the gun. I could see it, see him turning with that smug, evil expression.
I sat up and clasped my hands together to stop them shaking.
Mavros had been trying for weeks to improve my ability. Well, at least I could shoot better, could disassemble a weapon better, and I knew more self-defense. I knew how to kill a man with a thin knife in the ear...or neck...or chest. I twisted my mouth in derision. There was that.
He’d had me checked over thoroughly, made me get dental work and blood tests...all to make sure I was in A-one condition, I guess.
I hadn’t dared say anything to Mavros. He was a better man than Reuben, but he still believed he owned me. I was his weapon, his acquired woman. I was his fucking nothing. Why should I die for his cause? He’d been pushing me to resist his wishes for weeks, and it seemed as if we were barely an inch past the starting post.
Let him find the courage to kill them, all by himself.
I’d been at this house in Greece for most of a month, with Mavros and Grimm. When commanded, the excitement still held me in thrall but when away from Mavros, I came to my senses. I could never know pleasurable sex unless I let him fuck me. It was the uniqueness of how acquired women responded to mesmers. We were locked in, made to be only theirs.
I frowned at the yellow of my dress where it covered my lap. I was a push-button sex thing to him, same as Reuben. This was not love.
I could survive without sex. I could enjoy life.
Some people were asexual... I detested being a thing to anyone. I doubted Mavros could change. He’d been acquiring women for most of his life. Love was not in his vocabulary.
If he taught me well enough and I managed to push away his influence, I was going to run. I might not be able to speak about what mesmers did to women, or of what Reuben and Mavros had done to me, specifically, but I could go somewhere he would never find me.
I’d heard steps on the grass behind me and thought it one of the goats that roamed the meadows, but now a nose nudged at my arm and hot breath warmed my skin. Pelagia, Mavros’s Irish Wolfhound, trudged around me then slowly collapsed, lying down and putting her head on my lap. I grinned. She was irresistible, like always.
“Pretty girl,” I murmured, patting her and tweaking her long ears. Her fur was a soft and shaggy gray of many shades. “Your owner is an asshole, did you know that?”
She twitched her eyebrows as if in understanding, then edged her head further onto my lap, crumpling the material of my dress, and begging for more pats.
I laughed. “Your head weighs a ton, Pelagia.”
Heavier approaching footsteps rasped onto the grass.
It would be Mavros or Grimm. None of the helpers here seemed to be allowed to come near me if I was alone.
“Hello.” It was Grimm then. He crouched beside me, in jeans and woolen shirt, and smiled at Pelagia, who rolled her eyes to track him. She was obviously unwilling to move for anyone or anything.
I looked up at him. As always I was somewhat daunted by his presence. Not sexually, I didn’t respond in that way to a normal man anymore, just to his build, his feralness. His face was as craggy as some of these mountains. His biceps would challenge me to encompass them with two hands. In fact, they looked bigger than before and the wolf tattoo flowing over his closest arm looked stretched.
I’d forgiven him for betraying me to Reuben. “Have you been exercising more or something?”
“Why?”
“Your arms look...” I hesitated but plowed onward. “...bigger.”
“Jealous?” He grinned but studied me in return. A gust made his shaggy blond hair whip about his face and he pulled some from his mouth. Out here in the great outdoors, the man reminded me of a lion – a civilized one, but a lion still. Though Mavros was the master of women and me, undoubtedly, Grimm had this relaxed attitude that said he would happily master all he surveyed – if it was worth it to him on the day.
“Am I jealous of your muscles? Maybe.” When his eyes brightened, I shrugged and smiled. “It’s platonic. You know that.”
He did. The whole mesmer thing had been explained to him in detail by both me and Mavros. Now that he was in on this, I could, thank god, speak to Grimm about mesmers.
His mouth flattened into a rueful line.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“I understand. You know I do.”
I nodded. I’d used him as a bodyguard once then he’d betrayed me and let Mavros catch me.
I’d seen sadness in how Grimm looked at me, as well as a fierceness that spoke of need. The man was in lust with me. Perhaps even in love. If I were an assignment in his biology class, he’d get ninety-five percent for dedication. Giving me to Mavros must have been his good deed of the decade. I was sure he now regretted that deed.
What if...
Dare I ask Grimm to come with me?
“Would you tell me a truth? Are you sorry you brought me to Mavros?”
That was the key.
“A hard question for out here in the beautiful sunlight.” He examined me slowly, as if assessing my worth.
It was a hard question.
If I involved Grimm in my escape, he might tow me back to Mavros, but what if I told Grimm I loved him in a platonic, non-sexual way? It was a lie but it might make him agree to help me. I could do with some help. Would he believe me?
This estate was isolated, with only a few escape routes. Face it, I needed a lot of help.
Could I lie? Should I? Just thinking about doing that to Grimm made me feel ill.
“Well?”
“This isn’t a good time. Mavros wants you inside. It’s dinner time. We’re having some fancy wine of his. Come.”
He rose to his feet then stretched a hand down to me. Pelagia was going to hate being disturbed.
We walked back to the house together. Built mostly of stone and tucked into the side of the mountain, it looked so ancient I often wondered when, not if, it would topple over. There’d been renovations and it looked fancy as hell, but I wasn’t convinced.
The long table in the dining room was set with silver tableware, big white plates, and large, opalescent, glass goblets. Mavros stood opposite, at the end of the table, in a burgundy-colored shirt and neat black pants. Where Grimm was blond and wild, Mavros was dark and formidable, with the Greek complexion and black wavy hair – though it was shorter than it had been in Australia.
“Formal?” I raised a brow, as I again took in the perfect table setting.
“No more formal than we usually do. Sit, we will have a few small courses and then I will tie you to the table naked and see if you can resist commands better than yesterday.” He dragged out his chair.
Men, strangers, swarmed us – shadowed faces, hard eyes that promised pain, and the glint of weapons in hands. Six or seven, I didn’t have the leisure time to count. My heart lurched.
My heel caught on a hole in the pavement and someone whipped me face-first toward the wall, slowing my forward motion in time so I barely kissed the bricks. Hands trapped my wrists.
“Fuck! Let me go!” I squirmed and kicked back as some metal nub touched my neck. The pointy end of my stiletto heel connected and the metal slipped away. A scuffle and a few yells behind me said Mavros was resisting. After a fleshy thump, someone gurgled. A soft grunting exhalation lanced fear into me. I heard the slide of a body crumpling.
Who was that?
Again, the cold metal was jammed into my nape. A buzz cracked through me, setting me afire. Muscles crunching tight, I shook then collapsed with my mouth open and drooling, the brickwork scraping my chin as stranger’s hands carried me earthward.
Through the roar in my head, I recognized zip ties being applied to my wrists and ankles. A needle jabbed into my upper arm and pushed some drug into me.
Taser. They’d tasered me too.
“Fuck. Basterrs,” I slurred before tape flattened across my mouth and I could only blink wildly at the enlarging and shrinking specks of dark concrete near my nose.
Lights moved as I was carried somewhere. Blearily, I saw colored metal shapes. Cars. A car door opened. I was laid on a seat and my legs tucked up. More voices could be heard quietly cursing and arguing. I thought one was Grimm.
Someone had me again. Mister Black...no, he was Mavros now? My head had turned into squishy play dough. Mavros was hurt or he’d not let them do this. Surely he wouldn’t?
This wasn’t the plan. Who were these men?
That voice had sounded like Grimm’s.
Had he betrayed me?
Again...
The idea scattered, trailing confetti in my mind.
Engines started and we rolled forward, jolting and driving into the unknown while I sank deeper and deeper into some nothing, thought-blurred place where only the drool under my face mattered and I rocked upon the seat.
Chapter 1
Three weeks earlier
Zorie
I closed the iPad’s leather cover and hugged my knees. Thousands of feet below me the dense, green forests of the Pindos mountain range spread. Trees, more trees, cliffs of pale, ancient rock and the distant sheen of an immense lake. I could imagine myself slipping into those waters, no matter how cold they must be. Calf-high grass swayed lightly in the breeze all the way down the slope, with spots of yellow and blue marking where violets and buttercups grew. The mountainous parts of Greece were as beautiful a country as anyone could find upon this earth.
Mister Black, or Mavros, as he now asked me to call him, had gifted me with the tablet soon after we arrived here, on his estate. Mostly, I kept in touch with my sister, Amelia, who was back in Australia. The internet was as wild and untamed as a bear out here. Getting reception this far from the house was dicey, but I loved this view, and I’d trade it in a heartbeat for freedom.
Freedom. A word that had many meanings when a man could so distort your mind and identity that you believed you were free when you were truly his slave. I’d thought I wasn’t that easily controlled anymore. Mavros had proved me wrong, yet he still thought I would make a fine weapon.
A weapon, me? I snorted.
Fuck this labyrinth of uncertainty.
Mavros, I’d discovered soon after coming here, also meant black. One name was a reflection of the other. Mavros was his real surname. He didn’t care that I now knew enough about him to point him out to police, Interpol, or to other mesmers. The latter would put a nail in his coffin, if they knew what he intended. He didn’t care that I knew because he was sure I would not tell.
The paradox was that he wanted to teach me to resist him and others of his kind.
Mesmer was his word for these men who could control women with words and wishes. I’d hated Reuben for what he’d made me do. I’d been his fucktoy, pure and simple, until he tried to make me commit suicide.
The powers of mesmers could be truly mind-rending.
I smiled, halfheartedly. I’d won that battle by the skin of my teeth, but I had won. I was one of a kind, able to resist and hide my feelings, just not enough to do me any damn good when too close to a mesmer who spotted me coming.
One day, I’d tried to shoot Reuben.
I leaned back, propping myself on my arms while I wrestled with my stupid fears.
I hadn’t shot him. Instead I’d been forced to fuck myself with the gun, in public, before his disgusting friends, on the day of my engagement party to him, to Reuben. The cocksucker. With one hand, I wiped away the tears flooding my eyes.
All he’d wanted was my money and, for a while, my body.
I’d never called anyone a cocksucker ever, out loud. Reuben was a cocksucker, a dickwad, a louse on the backside of the worst of humanity.
“Fuck you,” I whispered.
The beauty and brightness surrounding me lent a bizarreness to my memories.
The scars from what Reuben had done would never go away. I knew that.
Mavros thought I desired this mesmer-resisting training, that I would soon march off and help kill the ones he, Mavros, decided must die. As if the knowledge that I might save other women from degradation would be enough. But I didn’t want to die. Did I feel sad over what others might go through? Of course I did. I just couldn’t do this.
The look in Reuben’s eyes when he’d caught me with the gun. I could see it, see him turning with that smug, evil expression.
I sat up and clasped my hands together to stop them shaking.
Mavros had been trying for weeks to improve my ability. Well, at least I could shoot better, could disassemble a weapon better, and I knew more self-defense. I knew how to kill a man with a thin knife in the ear...or neck...or chest. I twisted my mouth in derision. There was that.
He’d had me checked over thoroughly, made me get dental work and blood tests...all to make sure I was in A-one condition, I guess.
I hadn’t dared say anything to Mavros. He was a better man than Reuben, but he still believed he owned me. I was his weapon, his acquired woman. I was his fucking nothing. Why should I die for his cause? He’d been pushing me to resist his wishes for weeks, and it seemed as if we were barely an inch past the starting post.
Let him find the courage to kill them, all by himself.
I’d been at this house in Greece for most of a month, with Mavros and Grimm. When commanded, the excitement still held me in thrall but when away from Mavros, I came to my senses. I could never know pleasurable sex unless I let him fuck me. It was the uniqueness of how acquired women responded to mesmers. We were locked in, made to be only theirs.
I frowned at the yellow of my dress where it covered my lap. I was a push-button sex thing to him, same as Reuben. This was not love.
I could survive without sex. I could enjoy life.
Some people were asexual... I detested being a thing to anyone. I doubted Mavros could change. He’d been acquiring women for most of his life. Love was not in his vocabulary.
If he taught me well enough and I managed to push away his influence, I was going to run. I might not be able to speak about what mesmers did to women, or of what Reuben and Mavros had done to me, specifically, but I could go somewhere he would never find me.
I’d heard steps on the grass behind me and thought it one of the goats that roamed the meadows, but now a nose nudged at my arm and hot breath warmed my skin. Pelagia, Mavros’s Irish Wolfhound, trudged around me then slowly collapsed, lying down and putting her head on my lap. I grinned. She was irresistible, like always.
“Pretty girl,” I murmured, patting her and tweaking her long ears. Her fur was a soft and shaggy gray of many shades. “Your owner is an asshole, did you know that?”
She twitched her eyebrows as if in understanding, then edged her head further onto my lap, crumpling the material of my dress, and begging for more pats.
I laughed. “Your head weighs a ton, Pelagia.”
Heavier approaching footsteps rasped onto the grass.
It would be Mavros or Grimm. None of the helpers here seemed to be allowed to come near me if I was alone.
“Hello.” It was Grimm then. He crouched beside me, in jeans and woolen shirt, and smiled at Pelagia, who rolled her eyes to track him. She was obviously unwilling to move for anyone or anything.
I looked up at him. As always I was somewhat daunted by his presence. Not sexually, I didn’t respond in that way to a normal man anymore, just to his build, his feralness. His face was as craggy as some of these mountains. His biceps would challenge me to encompass them with two hands. In fact, they looked bigger than before and the wolf tattoo flowing over his closest arm looked stretched.
I’d forgiven him for betraying me to Reuben. “Have you been exercising more or something?”
“Why?”
“Your arms look...” I hesitated but plowed onward. “...bigger.”
“Jealous?” He grinned but studied me in return. A gust made his shaggy blond hair whip about his face and he pulled some from his mouth. Out here in the great outdoors, the man reminded me of a lion – a civilized one, but a lion still. Though Mavros was the master of women and me, undoubtedly, Grimm had this relaxed attitude that said he would happily master all he surveyed – if it was worth it to him on the day.
“Am I jealous of your muscles? Maybe.” When his eyes brightened, I shrugged and smiled. “It’s platonic. You know that.”
He did. The whole mesmer thing had been explained to him in detail by both me and Mavros. Now that he was in on this, I could, thank god, speak to Grimm about mesmers.
His mouth flattened into a rueful line.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“I understand. You know I do.”
I nodded. I’d used him as a bodyguard once then he’d betrayed me and let Mavros catch me.
I’d seen sadness in how Grimm looked at me, as well as a fierceness that spoke of need. The man was in lust with me. Perhaps even in love. If I were an assignment in his biology class, he’d get ninety-five percent for dedication. Giving me to Mavros must have been his good deed of the decade. I was sure he now regretted that deed.
What if...
Dare I ask Grimm to come with me?
“Would you tell me a truth? Are you sorry you brought me to Mavros?”
That was the key.
“A hard question for out here in the beautiful sunlight.” He examined me slowly, as if assessing my worth.
It was a hard question.
If I involved Grimm in my escape, he might tow me back to Mavros, but what if I told Grimm I loved him in a platonic, non-sexual way? It was a lie but it might make him agree to help me. I could do with some help. Would he believe me?
This estate was isolated, with only a few escape routes. Face it, I needed a lot of help.
Could I lie? Should I? Just thinking about doing that to Grimm made me feel ill.
“Well?”
“This isn’t a good time. Mavros wants you inside. It’s dinner time. We’re having some fancy wine of his. Come.”
He rose to his feet then stretched a hand down to me. Pelagia was going to hate being disturbed.
We walked back to the house together. Built mostly of stone and tucked into the side of the mountain, it looked so ancient I often wondered when, not if, it would topple over. There’d been renovations and it looked fancy as hell, but I wasn’t convinced.
The long table in the dining room was set with silver tableware, big white plates, and large, opalescent, glass goblets. Mavros stood opposite, at the end of the table, in a burgundy-colored shirt and neat black pants. Where Grimm was blond and wild, Mavros was dark and formidable, with the Greek complexion and black wavy hair – though it was shorter than it had been in Australia.
“Formal?” I raised a brow, as I again took in the perfect table setting.
“No more formal than we usually do. Sit, we will have a few small courses and then I will tie you to the table naked and see if you can resist commands better than yesterday.” He dragged out his chair.
Copyright Cari Silverwood 2016. All rights reserved. No part of these publications may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.
