Saving Briar

Harlow opened her eyes and wondered how long it would be before they realized that she’d woken up again.

Hux hadn’t bothered to hide the needle the second time he injected her, moments before the plane began its descent into the arid landscape below. He’d brushed a lock of hair back behind her ear and shook his head, and for a moment she almost believed that he felt regret for what he and Poe were doing.

“Should have stayed out of this, Sweetheart. If you’d stayed away from Theon you wouldn’t be here now. You’d be home, taking care of our little girl. Now we can just hope that your mom does a better job with Kayla than she did with you.”

She’d opened her mouth, about to tell him that he could go fuck himself, when Hux plunged the needle into her neck, putting one hand on her forehead to pin her in place as she struggled to move.

“It’ll be better this way though. Kayla will never have to know what a whore her mama was.” Hux dropped his voice as he said the words, glancing over his shoulder as the room had begun to spin around Harlow, her vision blurring even as she tried to force herself to stay awake.

If she had any chance of getting out of the situation that she found herself in, she needed to be awake and alert at the very least. But there was no fighting against the pull of whatever drug he’d injected her with, and as the sound of the plane had drifted further and further away she’d been pulled down into the darkness, the terror she felt for herself nothing compared to the fear she felt for Kayla, and what might happen to the little girl if she never made it back home again.

When she’d woken up, she had been laying on a downy white comforter, on the softest bed she’d ever laid down upon. Her hands were bound tightly behind her, and her legs were still tied up as well. Sometime while she was asleep someone had gagged her with a thick white cloth that made it hard to breath. She told herself to breath through her nose, that the only reason it was difficult to breath was because she was getting so upset, but that thought did nothing to calm the dread that was building up in her chest as she listened for the sound of Poe or Hux, or anyone who might come into the room, whether a possible friend or, more likely, someone with plans for her that couldn’t mean anything good.

She didn’t have much time to think about her situation though, or how she might get out of it, when she heard a door open somewhere behind her, followed by the footsteps of at least three people.

“Here’s our sleeping beauty. And it looks like she’s awake. Can you hear her heart just hammering away in her chest?” Harlow ground her teeth at the sound of Hux’s voice as his footsteps drew closer and closer to her. “Time to get up, Harlow. We’ve got a guest here to help you get ready for the big meeting we have in two hours.” He crouched down beside the edge of the bed, one hand gripping the back of her neck hard as he forced her up into a sitting position.

“I’ve decided that in order to help motivate you to cooperate, I’ll make you a deal.” He lowered his voice so that only she would hear what he had to say next. “If you’re a good girl, and you go along with what we’re doing here, I won’t tell Kayla that you ran off with some scumbag you met at the strip club, abandoning her to live with her grandmother. In fact, I’ll tell her you got a good job down here in Nevada, and once a year I’ll set something up where she and I can come down and visit you. Otherwise, it will break my heart, but the picture I’ll have to paint for our little girl won’t be pretty at all. And you know how that would break her heart.”

Harlow stared at the man sitting in front of her and wondered what the Hell she’d been thinking when she climbed into his bed. Had he always been this evil? Had the ruthlessness just been hiding under the facade he presented to the world? She didn’t think so, but she really couldn’t be sure. She suddenly felt as if she didn’t know the man in front of her at all, and the fear that gripped her mind and heart was that this might not be the worst that he was capable of doing to get what he wanted.

It went against every instinct that she had, but Harlow forced herself to nod rather than putting up the fight that a small part of her was pushing for, knowing that if she did it would only earn her more violence, and that it would make it even harder for her to escape if she was ever given the opportunity. She wasn’t going to be able to get out of this room at the moment anyways, not with Poe and Hux hovering over her, and so she made the only choice she felt she could make, that might later give her a chance to get away.

Taking a deep breath she managed to nod once, fighting down the desire to scream when Hux began to reach up for her gag.

Hux leaned forward until his mouth brushed against her ear before he whispered a threat about what would happen if she dared make a sound. As he pulled away he raised his voice so that everyone in the room could hear what he had to say next.

“This is Harlow. Harlow meet Brielle. She’s here to see if you’re a good fit for the job we’ve got lined up for you, so play nice and she’ll help you get ready for the meeting we have later on with her boss.”

“Why is she tied up?” Harlow felt the cuffs that had bound her hands fall away as Hux turned the key in the lock, before bending and slicing through the ties at her feet with a blade that appeared in his hand.

“She likes it rough, don’t you Baby. She likes to be tied up and left to sweat it out, like she’s been kidnapped. It’s just a little game we play. It gets her wet and ready for what happens next.”

Harlow stared at the dark haired beauty who was watching her with slightly narrowed eyes, begging her not to believe a thing that Hux said.

“You look just like someone that I know.” Brielle didn’t say one way or another whether she believed what Hux had just said or not, but she was watching Harlow with an intensity that surprised her. “And you said she’s half werewolf? But she’s never shifted? How does that work?”

“You weren’t supposed to mention that in front of her.” Beta Poe’s voice on the other side of the room held barely concealed anger.

“Does it matter if she knows anymore, Poe?” Hux turned around and stared at the older man for a long moment. “She won’t be our problem for much longer.”

Harlow’s eyes stayed on Brielle and saw the other woman’s jaw clench at the men’s words.

“But this is what you do, right? Your boss buys girls?” At the look Brielle turned on him midway through his second sentence Hux’s voice faltered for a moment, and for the first time Harlow felt a small sliver of hope that maybe she could make an ally of this woman.

“He doesn’t buy them. He hires contract workers for our establishment, who come from all over the world, willingly, to work as a modern day courtesan.” Harlow heard the way the woman stressed willingly, before turning her gaze away from Harlow and pinning Hux with an angry stare.

“Oh she’s willing all right. I’d say she’s downright eager. Aren’t you, Sweetheart?” Harlow could see the rage flaring behind Hux’s eyes, and she had no doubt that he would make good on his threats to keep her far away from her daughter if she didn’t play along, at least while she was in the same room with him.

When her voice failed her Harlow simply nodded, but she didn’t meet the other woman’s eyes.

“You know that we only hire shifters to work at The Dragon’s Lair. If she’s never shifted, even if she’s a half-breed, how do you know that she can?” Brielle’s voice was hard now, and Harlow felt the hope that had begun to take root in her heart begin to ebb away.

“She can shift. The doctor who’s made the medicine that she takes assured us that she could. He said it’s an old recipe, wolfsbane and silver, that’s been used for this purpose for centuries. He said once it’s been out of her system for a fortnight she’ll be good as new, and able to shift. Once she hasn’t taken it in more than forty-eight hours she starts to get stronger and her senses get sharper. Her mama had to keep on her about not missing a dose, because after even a couple days of missing it, you can start to smell her wolf.”

Brielle nodded, continuing to watch Harlow appraisingly, as Hux’s words finally began to sink into her brain.

When Hux had first said she was half werewolf she’d thought he’d misspoken, meaning to say something in reference to the daughter that they shared, rather than meaning that she was a wolf shifter. Her mind had only been half focused on his words at that moment, as she’d been trying to plot ways of convincing the other woman to help her, rather than joining in to whatever evil Hux had planned.

Now, hearing him give the longer explanation, Harlow felt her heart pound out of control in her chest. Was it possible that what he’d said was really true? And if it was, then who was her father?

Even as she asked herself the question, Harlow’s eyes slid a few feet to Hux’s left, landing on Beta Poe who was sitting on a small couch in the sitting area of the suite, only a few yards further away than Brielle and Hux. Harlow’s eyes widened as the pieces snapped together in her mind, and she saw the man on the couch look quickly over at her before looking away again.

Beta Poe. Her mother’s “boyfriend” had been a part of her life as long as she could remember, but she’d never liked him. Her mother told her that she met him not long after her father had left town and headed down south, running the moment he’d heard she was going to have his kid.

That hadn’t been true though, and as Brielle and Hux continued to speak, Harlow rubbed the raw skin on her wrist and stared across the room at the man whose blood she was suddenly certain coursed through her veins. She thought she’d been angry at Hux, but as she sat on the bed, she became more and more certain that her guess was right, and a white hot anger swept through her body.

Her own father was willing to bring her here, to be trafficked and she swore to herself that there was no way she would allow her own daughter to grow up with a father who was every bit as evil as the man that she now wished she’d never met.

“Well, why don’t you boys head out? Enjoy what our hotel has to offer. Be back here at six and we’ll all head over to Mr. Rose’s office so he can meet the beauty that you’ve brought us and you all can iron out the deals. I’ll help Harlow get cleaned up and dressed for the appointment. We can’t have her looking like she’s been kidnapped and beaten before she meets the head of Rose Industries, now can we?”

Harlow could tell that what Brielle had said had just pissed him off, but he clamped his mouth shut and nodded, giving Harlow a hard look as he headed for the door.

“See you ladies at six. And you better be ready, Harlow. Kayla’s counting on you.”