5. Nora
NORA
Iwoke slowly beneath heavy warmth and soft sheets tangled around my legs.
For a few disoriented seconds, I forgot where I was completely.
Then I became aware of bodies. One pressed solidly along my back.
Another stretched beside me with my leg tangled over his.
A third somewhere near my shoulder, warm breath brushing occasionally against my hair. Memory returned all at once after that.
I felt my face grow hot immediately, thinking about all the times they woke me up throughout the night and all the positions they had me in, despite nobody technically being awake enough to notice yet.
The room sat dim and quiet now except for distant music still faintly carrying from downstairs.
Somebody had turned off most of the lights at some point.
Clothes littered the floor between the bed and the sitting area.
I shifted carefully against the mattress.
An arm tightened automatically around my waist from behind.
“Don’t,” Stryker muttered sleepily against the back of my neck.
My stomach flipped embarrassingly hard at his voice roughened by exhaustion.
“I have to go back downstairs eventually,” I whispered.
“Mhm.”
He made absolutely no move to let me go.
Across from me, Blade looked half asleep still, one arm tucked beneath his head while the other rested loosely across my hip where it had apparently ended up sometime during the night.
Viper lay sprawled beside us on his back, mask gone now and dirty blond hair completely wrecked against the pillow.
Without the masks, they looked younger somehow. Less controlled. More real.
I should’ve felt awkward. Instead, warmth spread slowly through me while I looked at them.
At the tangled sheets. At Stryker’s hand resting heavily against my stomach.
At Blade’s bare shoulder pressed against mine.
At the fact that for the first time in years, my brain wasn’t immediately racing toward consequences and backup plans and exit strategies.
Maybe because none of this felt fully real yet. Like the mansion itself. Like the masks. Like I’d stepped briefly into somebody else’s life where people wanted things and simply took them instead of carefully budgeting every risk first.
I shifted slightly again, stretching one leg beneath the sheets.
Viper made a quiet sound without opening his eyes. “You’re thinking too loud.”
I laughed softly before I could stop myself.
“There she is,” he murmured sleepily.
God.
This was insane. Completely insane. And laying there between them with my body pleasantly heavy and my thoughts slower than usual, I realized something quietly startling.
I was happy I’d done it. There wasn’t an ounce of regret in me about what I had done.
That should’ve scared me more than it did. Instead, exhaustion pulled at me again while Stryker’s arm tightened slightly around my waist and Blade’s thumb brushed lazily once against my hip like he was half asleep and checking I was still there.
I let my eyes close again. Just a short nap, I told myself drowsily. Then I’d go back downstairs before anybody noticed I’d disappeared too long.
The last thing I remembered before sleep dragged me back under was thinking that, for once, letting go hadn’t destroyed anything.
Yet.
Because the next time I woke up, it was to banging and whisper-yelling from the door.
At first, my brain refused to process the sound properly.
I stayed half asleep beneath warm sheets and tangled limbs while somebody knocked again, harder this time, followed by frantic whispering that carried through the suite sharp enough to cut through exhaustion.
Then I heard my name.
“Nora.”
Valentina.
I jerked upright instantly.
The movement woke the room with me. Stryker’s arm slid off my waist while Blade pushed himself up beside me immediately, alert in a way that didn’t match somebody dragged out of sleep. Viper swore under his breath somewhere behind me as another rapid series of knocks rattled the door.
“Nora,” Valentina hissed again, voice cracking this time. “Open the fucking door.”
Something in her tone iced straight through me.
I scrambled out of bed so fast I nearly tangled myself in the sheets, grabbing blindly for clothes scattered across the floor.
My fingers closed around a black shirt that smelled like smoke, detergent, and Stryker before I yanked it over my head without thinking.
Behind me, the men were already moving too.
Blade grabbed his pants from the floor while Viper crossed the room toward the side table where their weapons sat beneath discarded jackets.
Another bang shook the door.
I got there first.
The second I unlocked it, Valentina shoved inside hard enough that I stumbled backward. For half a second, relief hit first because she was physically fine. Alive. Standing. Still in her uniform.
Then I actually looked at her.
Her hair was a mess like somebody had spent hours with their hands in it.
Her lipstick was mostly gone. Hickeys darkened the side of her neck above the rumpled collar of her uniform.
But none of that mattered because her face looked wrong.
Completely wrong. White beneath her makeup, eyes wide and wet and unfocused in a way I had never seen before.
“Val?”
She grabbed both my arms hard enough to hurt. “We have to go.”
Fear slammed into me so suddenly it almost made me dizzy.
“What happened?”
Behind me, the room shifted fast as the men approached.
By the time I fully registered movement, all three of them were there, forming a solid wall at my back without speaking.
Styker came closest, barefoot and shirtless except for low-slung black pants while Blade fastened his jeans beside him and Viper checked the magazine in a handgun with terrifying casualness.
Valentina noticed them then. Her expression flickered awkwardly for one split second, cheeks flushing slightly through the panic.
“You disappeared,” she blurted at me emotionally. “Like the whole rest of the night disappeared.”
I stared at her.
She made a frustrated sound. “I was gonna come tell you I was leaving with—” She cut herself off sharply, clearly refusing to explain the rest in front of the men behind me.
“I went back to the suite first to grab my stuff and find you because you left your bag there and I figured you’d forget it because obviously you were distracted and?—”
“Val,” I interrupted softly, gripping her shoulders now. “Slow down.”
Her eyes snapped back into focus slightly before immediately flooding with panic again.
“I was in the closet,” she said quickly. “Putting stuff in my bag. Dani and Sierra came back and I was about to come out and ask if they’d seen you when the suite door got kicked open.”
Every muscle in my body locked.
“What?”
“I didn’t see them,” she rushed out, words stumbling over each other now.
“I stayed hidden but I heard them. Men. Big fucking men and they had accents or something? Ukrainian maybe? Russian? I don’t know.
They grabbed Dani and Sierra and they said all the bottle girls were being taken for clients.
” Her voice cracked violently. “They said they were looking for us too.”
Silence slammed through the room.
Then dread hit me so hard my stomach twisted painfully.
“No,” I whispered automatically.
Valentina started crying harder. “Nora?—”
Behind me, the atmosphere changed instantly. Not panic. Worse. Focus.
Stryker moved first. “How many men?”
Valentina startled slightly at his voice before answering shakily, “I don’t know. At least three in the suite.”
“Armed?” Blade asked calmly.
“I think so.”
Viper was already pulling his shirt on one-handed while checking another weapon. “The ballroom’s gonna be chaos by now.”
“They said all the girls?” Blade asked.
Valentina nodded frantically.
My brain latched onto one sentence and refused to let go.
Clients.
The word echoed violently through me while I looked at the three men behind me. The clients are taking the girls. The clients.
My eyes landed on the guns in Viper’s hands. On the weapons Stryker was reaching for. On the fact that these men belonged here in ways I never truly understood.
Cold realization slid through me so fast it almost made me nauseous.
They were part of this world too.
Maybe not directly. Maybe not knowingly. But they were still men at this event. Men invited into a place where women were apparently being sold like inventory.
“Nora,” Blade said carefully, noticing my expression immediately.
I grabbed Valentina’s wrist hard. “We need to leave.”
Stryker frowned instantly. “We can help.”
Something sharp and almost angry rose in me at that.
Help.
Like I knew what help from men like this even looked like.
Valentina’s fingers tightened painfully around mine. “Nora?—”
“We’re leaving,” I repeated.
“Nora.” Stryker stepped forward once, voice calm but firm. “Listen to me.”
No.
No, because if I listened, I might hesitate. And if I hesitated, somebody would grab us too. Survival didn’t wait for certainty. I yanked Valentina toward the door.
“Nora,” Viper snapped sharply.
We ran anyway.
Behind us, all three men shouted at once.
I barely processed the words because adrenaline drowned everything out except movement.
Valentina stumbled once before catching herself as we flew down the hallway barefoot, my borrowed shirt hanging halfway down my thighs while her heels clattered unevenly against marble beside me.
We had run track together in high school because it was free and because running made us feel fast enough to outrun our lives for an hour every afternoon. Years later, we still ran every morning through the Vegas heat before shifts.
And now we ran like our lives depended on it, because they probably did.
“Nora!” Stryker roared somewhere behind us.
I ignored him.