Priceless Diamond: A Billionaire Cinderella Fairytale Retelling Abduction Dark Romance, page 1
PRICELESS DIAMOND
A DIAMOND RING DARK ROMANCE
THE KIDNAPPED TRILOGY
BOOK 3
ALIX KEY
CONTENTS
Word of Warning
The Captive Trilogy, A Recap
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Bonus Scene
Thank You
Also by Alix Key
About the Author
WORD OF WARNING
Priceless Diamond is a dark romance.
It contains hard-to-read scenes, graphic language, and explicit sexual content.
A complete list of potential triggers can be found at:
alixkey.com/books/priceless-diamond
Please don’t read this book if you are sensitive to any of those triggers. But if you believe in the redemptive power of love to overcome near-unimaginable trauma, then this is the book for you.
Welcome to the Diamond Ring.
THE CAPTIVE TRILOGY, A RECAP
Have you read Rough Diamond and Conflict Diamond, the first two books in the Captive trilogy?
You can get started here:
Rough Diamond
(If you have any trouble tapping on that link, please type https://alixkey.com/KI1US into your phone or computer browser.)
And you can continue here:
Conflict Diamond
(If you have any trouble tapping on that link, please type https://alixkey.com/KI2US into your phone or computer browser.)
If you don’t want to read them—or if it’s been a while—here’s a quick summary of the Captive Trilogy so far (minus, of course, the spicy scenes!)
Alix Key and Travis “Trap” Prince enjoy a one-night stand where, against all odds, they bond on an emotional level, each healing a deep wound in the other. But when Alix returns home from the tryst, she is kidnapped.
She wakes to find that her desperate, addicted brother Leo sold her to drug kingpin Klaus Herzog. A sexual sadist, Klaus holds Alix as a slave for three years.
Trap spends that time searching for Alix and building his billionaire’s tax haven, Diamond Freeport. Klaus becomes one of unknowing Trap’s most important clients.
When Herzog brings Alix to a dinner party at the freeport (her first time out in public since she was enslaved), she seizes a steak knife and stabs him to death. Trap and his richest clients cover up all evidence of the death.
Trap and Alix then begin to rebuild their relationship, but that emotional connection is disrupted by blackmail. Klaus’s brothers have video of the murder which they will release if Trap doesn’t pay one billion dollars and provide a freeport warehouse for their illegal drug operations.
While Alix is tormented by guilt that she has put the freeport at risk, Trap attempts to gain the upper hand over the brothers. Ultimately, he hires mercenaries to attack their Long Island stronghold, but the raid fails and the video is released.
Hounded by paparazzi, Alix and Trap are investigated by the police for Klaus’s murder. Trap’s clients remain at risk of blackmail for their roles in the cover-up.
When Trap learns that the brothers will be at a Brooklyn sex club, he forges a plan to kill them, removing their threat to Alix and his clients. Alix follows Trap to the club, where she is forced to play a BDSM scene with the Herzogs. She suffers flashbacks and reverts to her slave mentality.
Trap rescues Alix, but she demands to be taken to Klaus’s mansion. There, she begs Trap to abuse her the sadistic way Klaus did. Repulsed, Trap leaves.
While haunting the house, Alix discovers a stash of videos that show her servicing Klaus’s powerful “special guests”. Realizing she was exploited, she understands why Trap would not treat her in the way that she craved.
Alix and Trap reconcile, returning to the freeport with the videos. When Alix explores the computer files further, she discovers that her brother Leo is actually still alive…and he is working for the Herzog brothers.
1
ALIX
Some nightmares never die.
My hands shake as I stare at the photograph of the man who sold me into sexual slavery. Leo Key. My brother. My twin.
He’s supposed to be dead. That’s what one of the women said, one of the slaves who was tortured with me in Klaus Herzog’s mansion in the Delaware woods.
“Princess?”
Trap stands in the doorway to his bedroom—our bedroom—holding an insulated mug filled with coffee. Given the look of concern on his face, I must have made some noise while I stared at the evidence I just found.
I shut the computer, as if folding down the screen is enough to push Leo out of my life. My hands are shaking. For some reason, I can picture my brother and me playing hide-and-seek in my grandmother’s house. We must be five or six years old, and Leo just jumped out of Granny’s closet, screaming bloody murder and making me cry.
“Princess?” Trap asks again. “What’s going on?”
“Leo,” I say, but my voice doesn’t sound like my own. “Leo’s alive.”
Trap doesn’t call me a liar. He doesn’t question where I got my information. Instead, he crosses the room and forces my fingers around the mug. He tucks his hand under my elbow and guides me to sit on the side of the bed.
I stare at the coffee. It’s easier to talk to a mug than to Trap—especially after having told him the truth last night, the entire truth, that I love him and can’t imagine living my life without him.
Something tugs at me in the morning light. It costs too much to love me, even if Trap is a billionaire.
I killed a man in the most violent way possible. The police investigation into my crime is dragging Trap down too. His most loyal clients are on the hook because of me—targeted by my victim’s brothers.
And now… With Leo still alive…
It’s all too much. I’m dissolving. I’m melting into a ghost of the woman Trap once knew.
I force myself to piece together the facts I know, to tell them to the mug. “Back at Herzog’s house… Lilyana, my best friend there… She said Leo was a… boyfriend to several of Herzog’s women. He raped them, Trap. He brought them chocolates and colored pencils and they thought he was their friend, but he forced himself on them when they didn’t have a choice.”
“The whole place was fucked up,” Trap says. He must think his words will make things better, but I see the cords tense in his wrists. The skin on his knuckles is tender and pink. He’s punched walls and guards to tear down my nightmare, and I have no doubt he’d reduce Herzog to a pulp if I hadn’t already killed my tormentor.
He’d destroy Leo for me.
But I’m still trying to make sense out of the files I just saw on the computer. “Lilyana was so certain,” I say. “She said Leo owed Herzog. Leo promised me as payment of his debt. He told Herzog I was a virgin, and they agreed that three days with me would clear the ledger.”
It’s a good thing I’m still talking to the coffee, because Trap is straining beside me, barely biting back all the things he wants to say. He knows Leo was wrong. I wasn’t a virgin. Leo lied before I spent the most magical night of my life here, with Trap, in this room, in the bed we’re sitting on right now.
“I heard him,” I say. “Leo. I heard him at Herzog’s house.” I don’t know why I need to defend my brother, why I feel the urge to protect him even now. But twenty-six years of living with Leo burned pathways in my brain. He was my twin. I knew him.
He is my twin. I know him.
I force myself to finish my thought. I tell the coffee, “In Herzog’s house. Even before I knew where I was, when I was in the Holding Room, and the drugs they gave me were first wearing off, I heard Leo begging. Pleading. He said, ‘Please. I’m sorry. I’ll do better. Please! Don’t do this to her.’”
Trap’s hand is gentle on mine, even though I can feel the tension in his fingertips. He takes the cup of coffee and puts it on the nightstand. With his other hand, he cups the curve of my jaw. He echoes Leo’s unsuccessful plea. “Don’t do this to yourself.”
“I loved him!” I say, my voice breaking on the second word.
“I know.” Trap wants to make everything right. But the truth is he doesn’t know how. He can’t know how.
I’m not sure I have the words to tell him, but I have to try. “We used to joke about sharing one brain,” I say. “Leo and me. ‘I need the brain for third period. I have an algebra test.’”
“Let it go, Princess,” Trap says. His fingertips are gentle on my cheek, and I’m surprised to see they come away wet.
I dash the back of my hand against my face. I don’t want to be crying. “He followed the rules. We both did, all the way through high school. Really bad things happened to us—Mom died, and Dad married Candace, and she moved in with her daughters so Leo had to sleep in the basement on that horrible creaky futon…”
“It was a long time ago,” Trap says.
He’s right. But he’s wrong, too, because it feels like yesterday. The wounds of childhood and adolescence are deep, the heart-blood way too bright. “We stood up to them together. I watched Leo in Twelve Angry Men when Dad was too busy to go to a school play. Leo went to my choir concert. He brought me daisies! My favorite!”
Trap sighs. But he doesn’t try to stop me. Not anymore.
“Leo and I got drunk together, the night of high school graduation. We stole a bottle of bourbon from the liquor cabinet and went to the park at the end of the street. Neither of us even liked bourbon, but Candace did, and we wanted to take something from her.”
We drank until the world spun around us. Until I puked. Leo held my hair back and told me I would be okay, and I believed him.
“It wasn’t until college that he started using. Adderall first, because his roommate said it would help. Then meth. And ecstasy. And Crash.”
“It wasn’t your fault.” Trap tries again.
“I was supposed to be there for him. He was my twin.” I don’t realize I shouted the last word until the echoes push against my eardrums. “He was my twin,” I repeat, whispering this time. “And when everyone walked away—Dad and all our family, all our friends… I was the only one who could help him. The only one who could save him.”
“Leo could have saved himself.” I know Trap’s tone. It’s the calm reasoning of a group leader at Al-Anon. It’s the detached truth of a therapist. I’ve heard variations on those words dozens and dozens of times.
“He needed help,” I say. I don’t need to be defensive. Trap loves me, no matter what mistakes I’ve made. But I hear the knife edge in my words. I feel the shame. The frustration. The helpless, heartless anger when Leo slipped again and again and again.
Eight trips to rehab. A week here. Two weeks there. Once, the last time, for two solid months.
I thought I could help him. I thought I could heal him.
I was wrong.
“I lost my family for Leo. I lost my friends. I lost my fiancé.”
Trap snorts at that, like he just can’t help himself. I know he thinks Jason Carter wasn’t much of a loss.
Jason wasn’t the man I thought he was. Our relationship wasn’t the dream I believed. If Leo hadn’t driven Jason off, I would have gotten married, would have followed my husband to some small university town in the Midwest, would have sacrificed my career for his.
I never would have had an orgasm. Not once. Not with Jason. Not even when I pleasured myself. I never would have imagined the toys stored in the bottom drawer of Trap’s dresser, just across the room.
My cheeks heat, but that just gives me fuel to name Leo’s worst sin. “I lost you.”
Three years, I could have been with Trap.
Three years, I could have explored the knife-edge of pleasure and pain.
Three years, I could have learned the inner workings of Diamond Freeport, Trap’s billionaire tax haven.
Three years, I could have become me. Become us.
“You didn’t lose me,” Trap says. “I’m still here.”
“But all that time we could have had together…” My voice quivers because I’m nearly overwhelmed by the thought of everything I lived through during those long years. “Instead, I was a slave. I was raped over and over and over again. I killed Klaus Herzog, right here, in this house.”
I can see Trap wants to stop me. He wants to interrupt. But I hold up a hand, because this is my best chance to make him understand. My best chance to make clear exactly what I need and why I need it. “Because of me, because of Leo, we’re waiting to see if the police will charge us with murder. Because of me, because of Leo, the tax authorities may shut down the freeport. Because of me, because of Leo, every member of the Diamond Ring, your best and richest clients, might be blackmailed by Klaus’s brothers.”
He’s shaking his head. He doesn’t want to accept that any of this is my fault. He doesn’t want to agree.
But I know the truth. And I’m almost there. I’ve almost finished telling him what I need. “Bring him here.”
“What?” He’s confused. This isn’t what he expected.
“Bring Leo to the freeport.” I nod toward the computer on top of the dresser. “His address is in there. It’s just in Philadelphia.”
“Why the fuck would I want that piece of shit in my home?”
“You don’t want him. But I do. Because once he’s here, I’m going to kill him.”
2
TRAP
A family of tourists stands outside Philadelphia’s Mummer’s Museum, oohing and aahing over the memories they’re making for a lifetime. “Excuse me! Sir?” the mother says. “Could you take our picture?”
What’s wrong with a fucking selfie?
I think it. I don’t say it. I take their thousand-dollar phone and wonder what they’d do if I tore off down the alley with it. Instead, I tell them all to say cheese. I’m a goddamn upright citizen.
At least, that’s what I hope to project before I slink into the Hare and Harp, a down-at-the-heels bar with mahogany walls, a long scarred counter, and a private office for the captain of Philadelphia’s Irish mob. “He in?” I ask the bartender, who’s polishing a glass like his life depends on it.
“Who’s asking?”
“Trap Prince.”
The barkeep scowls, but he taps out a text on the phone he pulls from his apron pocket. Nice to know organized crime is keeping up with the times.
“You know where the office is?” the guy finally asks.
I don’t bother answering. I just head down the hall, past a storage room and a steep set of stairs that lead to a basement where I suspect things happen that I’m better off knowing nothing about.
I knock twice on the door at the end of the corridor and wait for a shout—“Come in!”—before I turn the knob.
Braiden Kelly sits behind a desk that looks like it was salvaged from some ancient Irish ship. The front and sides are carved with harps and shamrocks and those tall buckled hats that leprechauns wear. A gooseneck lamp stands on top, highlighting a statue of St. Brigid and a fan of mass cards.
Kelly stands when I enter. I tolerate his handshake, snarling at the Beast inside my skull and clenching my other first around my cell phone for a quick five-count. Kelly waves to one of the two massive armchairs that crowd the rest of the office. I take the one angling toward the door, putting my back against the wall.
“My man Liam should’ve sent you back with a pint,” Kelly says.
“He must have realized I’m not staying long.”
Kelly probably figured that out on his own. Sure, Kelly’s in the Diamond Ring, one of my top twelve clients at the freeport. But that doesn’t mean I drop in on a regular basis to shoot the shit.
