Their Virgin Princess by Shayla Black, now you can read online.
Prologue
Nothing could cut the heat of the jungle. The fan overhead turned, but sweat still ran down her forehead. She would have wiped it away, but the f**kers had tied her hands to the bedpost the night before. Poor little kidnappers couldn’t handle one small escape attempt without getting pissy. Too bad she’d only managed to cut one of them before they had captured her again.
Alea closed her eyes. Sunset had shadowed the little room with increasing darkness. They would be back, and she wasn’t sure she could handle another night of watching her abductors use the other women they had caged with her.
They were all in school, the pigs had told her. They were supposed to learn what a woman’s real place was.
Before she’d been taken and sent to this hell, she’d been a graduate student at New York University, studying international politics. Now she was majoring in misery, forced to watch her fellow abductees endure all kinds of sexual deviancy from men who abused them.
From the room beside her, she could hear the high-pitched whimper of a woman in pain and the staccato thud of a headboard hitting the wall.
Alea shut her eyes, wishing she could close her ears to block out the sound. When would this nightmare end? The days were bleeding together. She was losing track of time—and her grip on the carefree woman she’d once been.
When she’d first been abducted, she’d kept a careful count, marking out each day in small scratches on the wall. They were still there, all sixty-some odd lines—proof that she’d once hoped someone would find her. The endless cycle of time and pain had marched on, and she’d stopped carving those stupid lines. With no way to fight the drugs they fed her, time had become meaningless. She merely alternated between being dazed and terrified. When she was lucid, the world around her seemed foreign. Rapid-fire Spanish she couldn’t quite wrap her brain around and unfamiliar men, not to mention a situation so alien and horrific, she still struggled to comprehend. Coping was out of the question. Did it matter if she was here a day or a lifetime? Hell was hell.
And she was quickly rotting in it.
Lately, her captors had taken to doping her up more. Some days, Alea wasn’t sure what was real and what was a hallucination. The worst part was being dependent on that needle. Even now she was sweating, her stomach cramping, because she’d been too long without a fix, but there was no way they would wean her off of it again after her last escape attempt.
Suddenly, the doorknob was turning. Alea frowned, bracing herself. Perhaps this would be the end. Maybe this would be the moment they bound and trussed her up, then shipped her off to some ass**le who would rape her and torture her for the rest of her short life. And it would be short, because she had no intention of being some man’s plaything. She was Alea Binte al Mussad, descendant of the royal family of Bezakistan. She was a princess. She had pride. And she would go down fighting and try her damnedest to take as many of these bastards with her as she could.
A single moment flashed across her mind. A sweet summer’s day at the palace when she’d been a child turning her face up to the sun. The inner garden had been her own private world. Her beloved cousins had been older, but they’d still played hide and seek with her, calling for their little “monkey,” a nickname she’d earned because she climbed the trees and made her nannies insane with worry.
But they don’t know you, little monkey, Talib would say. They don’t know how strong you are. One small tree can’t take you down. Some days, I’m not even certain a small army can.
The door opened with a small squeaking sound that signaled her torture would now continue. There were no trees to climb in this place, no armies to fight, only suffering.
She turned her gaze to see which pig had come to hurt her. An unfamiliar man in all black slid inside the door with a gun wrapped around his chest. He held it the way she’d seen military men grip their weapons, like a mere extension of their arms.
Was this a new torturer? If so, then her end would likely be very soon because this man was a killer.
“Alea?” The words were whispered, but came through loud and clear as if the man who spoke them expected to be understood and obeyed.
No one had called her by her name in…forever. Here, she was “girl” or “puta.” For the briefest moment, she considered denying her name and perhaps avoiding her terrible fate, but her name was all she had left. If she died, she would die as Alea.
“Yes.”
“I need you to stay as quiet as possible. My name is Cole Lennox. Your cousin sent me.”
It took a moment for the words to sink in. Cole Lennox? She’d never heard of the man before. Her cousin? Talib? Or Yasmin? Would Yas even know how to hire a mercenary? It didn’t matter. Someone had come for her. Or had her “keepers” found a new, fun way to torment her and extort money from her royal relatives? Would this man get her hopes up, only to show her a new terror?
Cole Lennox towered over her. “You’re going to fight me, aren’t you? You think you don’t know me, but you do. I saw you once at the palace right after I brought Tal back from his ordeal. You invited me into the drawing room and offered me tea. I need you to understand that if I have to, I will knock you out in order to save you.”
Tears welled, the first she’d felt in months, and she fought them ferociously. Now that he was closer, she remembered. Lieutenant Lennox had saved her cousin from radicals, and now it appeared he was going to save her.
“They don’t allow me clothes. I’m not wearing anything under this sheet.” Shame crashed over her like a wave on the beach.
He shrugged out of the black shirt he wore, revealing a T-shirt. He set the shirt aside and produced a knife. Her hands and feet were free in seconds, and he was wrapping the shirt around her, carefully avoiding looking for more than a cursory glance below her neck.
Alea stood, her hands shaking as Cole Lennox began to lead her out, step by creeping step. In the distance, she heard gunfire and shouting.
“That’s baby brother doing his job.” He winked over his shoulder at her. “Let’s get you home.”
She followed Cole out, but the girl he’d met all those years ago was long gone. They could take her back to the palace, but a part of her would always be trapped here, forever tainted.
Chapter One
Bezakistan – Two years later