Beastly Beautiful: A Bad Boy Billionare Dark Roleplay Romance (Beasts of Prey Book 1) Read online

  Table of Contents

  WARNING

  I: FIRST BLOOD (ROURKE)

  II: SHATTERED DREAMS (SILVER)

  III: BROKEN LIVES (ROURKE)

  IV: TATTERED SEAMS (SILVER)

  V: CAN’T TOUCH THE GROUND (ROURKE)

  VI: TOO FAR AWAY (SILVER)

  VII: TEN FEET APART (ROURKE)

  VIII: BEG YOU TO STAY (SILVER)

  IX: BLACK AS YOUR BLOOD (ROURKE)

  X: DARK SO BRIGHT (SILVER)

  XI: GOING DEEP (ROURKE)

  XII: STARK AND WHITE (SILVER)

  XIII: SECOND ROUND (ROURKE)

  XIV: LOSING TIME (SILVER)

  XV: TRIPWIRE (ROURKE)

  XVI: PLEASE STAY MINE (SILVER)

  XVII: LAST SHOT (ROURKE)

  XVIII: KILL GAME (SILVER)

  XIX: FINAL BLOW (ROURKE)

  EPILOGUE (SILVER)

  ABOUT NOELLE CROSS

  FREE BOOKS FROM NOELLE AND MORE

  ABOUT GLISSANDO PUBLISHING GROUP

  BEASTLY

  Beautiful

  BEASTS OF PREY BOOK 1

  NOELLE CROSS

  -

  GLISSANDO

  PUBLISHING GROUP

  Copyright © 2018 by Noelle Cross

  Kindle Edition

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  First Edition 2018

  Noelle Cross

  www.noellecross.com

  [email protected]

  Cover design by Noelle Cross

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  The author acknowledges the copyrighted or trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

  Ford Fusion, Rohypnol, Tom and Jerry, Neiman Marcus, McDonald’s, Chapstick

  WARNING

  This book contains mature 18+ content, including graphic ultra-violence and gore, portrayal of violent and disturbing thoughts, strong language, explicit sex, kidnapping, sex slavery, child sex slavery, shame/humiliation kink, actual kink/sex-shaming portrayed in a negative light, rape/non-consent, and depictions of non-consent roleplay fantasies. Please read at your discretion.

  I: FIRST BLOOD (ROURKE)

  Some men are heroes.

  Some men are saints.

  And some men aren’t men at all.

  Some men are monsters.

  Some men are born warped into the wrong shape, a creature of fangs and claws and violent urges with its legs bent the wrong way and its hide stripped and tanned, forced to walk upright in the shape of a human thing.

  Some men are sheer wildness, and when we smile it’s all teeth and blood and no heart but the heart of a beast.

  Some men are animals.

  And those men are me.

  Tonight I’ve shed my human skin: the three-piece suit, the tie, the carefully glossed hair. No titanium cufflinks; no watch worth more than the mortgage on your house. Just the smell of sweat and blood and grit, tape wrapped around my knuckles, cold air on my skin—the particular chill of air caged inside old, dank concrete, the gray-white walls telling histories in old graffiti and ever-shifting shadows.

  Some of those shadows have faces. A glint of grinning teeth, a flash of greedy eyes. These men are animals, too, but if I’m a beast they’re craven jackals, howling and whooping for first blood. They don’t know who I am. They don’t recognize my face.

  They just want to see me bleed or draw blood, and the hot hard edge burning in my veins is only too ready to comply.

  The shadows form a ring, packed around the open center of the deserted parking garage that’s tonight’s meeting place, texted in secret only hours ago from someone’s burner phone. Their bodies are a wall, to stop anyone from getting in. To stop me from getting out.

  To stop my opponent from running, when he realizes only far too late…

  Exactly what he’s in for.

  He’s a brute. I’m big, but he’s bigger, that kind of thickly puffed bulk like he unzipped his skin and stuffed a few extra well-built men inside for a little added padding. Ropy scars snake over skin stretched so thin over bulging sinew that it’s turned an odd shade of tanned gray. One particularly thick scar twists his face into a permanent leer, one side of his mouth drooping. He’s wearing nothing but basketball shorts, clenched fists, and the attitude of a bull ready to charge right at the red flag that is me.

  I’m already looking for the right points to hit to take him down in a matter of seconds.

  He's got money riding on this fight. I’ve got nothing but my reputation, and the need to hurt something.

  Only one of those really matters, right now.

  The crowd is alive with bloodlust. With a strange and twisted mockery of desire. They want to see this behemoth take me down and destroy me. They want to see me broken, my pride ruined. Even though I shed the trappings of my world, they know:

  I am at once above and beneath them.

  I am less than human, more than man.

  And it’s time.

  The referee is a scraggly man in more tattoos than clothing, his torn A-shirt clinging to his ropy body and his arms snaked with ink. He raises those arms now, turning, shouting, flashing his gold-plated teeth like they’re a war cry and raising roars of anticipation, salivating things framed by rolling eyes and pumping fists. I shake my arms out, rolling my shoulders to ease out any tension. I need my body loose, for this. Loose, relaxed, and fast. I suppose anyone else would be keyed up right now, hot on anticipation and nerves and adrenaline. My calm is probably odd, but this is how I am.

  I don’t get high until I taste first blood.

  The ref lowers his arms and escapes the ring, edging to the side. I drop my hands to my sides, fists loosely clenched, and circle to my right. In response, my opponent—we’ll call him the Titan—circles left as we eye each other, sizing each other up. I’m deliberately leaving myself open. I want him to look at me and think I’m not rough enough, not strong enough, not smart enough. That I’ve got a trumped-up rich boy ego and he’s going to knock it out of me. He’s as big as he is for a reason. He doesn’t trust himself to fight smart, so he’s got to make himself big enough to crush anyone without finesse or technique.

  I see him moving before he even realizes he’s doing it. It’s the way the muscles around his neck bunch, the way he sinks down slightly on his calves while rising up on the balls of his feet. He’s coming at me: a juggernaut of flesh, this train bolting out of control and leaping the rails, jolting and charging and filling the world with his lumbering roar. In half a second he’s across the ring, swinging toward me in a powerful roundhouse jab. His knuckles whiff past my cheek, almost kissing my skin with the rush of air, as I dip to the side, ducking under his arm and jabbing straight upward with the hard spear of my elbow.

  My elbow slams into his armpit so hard I feel something soft and fleshy under his skin go pop, yielding. He lets out a little strange scream, choked, that’s more surprise than anything else, and at the sound I feel the first hot throb in the pit of my stomach, in the base of my cock. He’d been expecting me to go for the obvious places—the solar plexus, the face, the jaw. But I want th
e soft places. The vulnerable places. The tender underbelly that bleeds at the slightest touch.

  I want all the places that will hurt the most, until he’s weeping long before I go in for the kill.

  He reels back, staggering around. I’m out of range already, darting quick, feeling the power sing in my body as I swing out of his reach. His right arm his hanging at his side, the entire shoulder bruised and purple and swelling rapidly. I tore something inside, probably a ligament, maybe his rotator cuff. But his dominant weapon’s out of commission, and that bull’s seeing more than red now. That bull’s seeing raw hot rage, and he’s not even thinking as he lowers his head and charges straight at me with his teeth bared and gnashing wild, fueled by the rising tideswell of the jeering, screaming voices around us.

  He hits me square on, and I let myself drop; instead of trying to resist him I let the impact strike like a drum shaking its beat through my body, and roll down until I’m sliding underneath him and he’s passing over me. My arms hook around his legs, tangle, twist…and he falls, creaking and wailing like a great tree giving up its life.

  The dirty concrete of the parking garage shakes with the force of his impact. He rolls, grapples at me with his good arm, tries to pin me with his weight, but I tumble from beneath him and to my knees. His bad arm is mine, caught by the wrist and wrenched back, and he lets out another animalistic, bellowing shriek as I pin it behind his back. He’ll be lucky if he uses it again without months of intensive therapy.

  The crowd is booing, sneering, cursing. They hate me. They hate me for being too calm. They hate me for not even breaking a sweat. They hate me for making it look too easy, for letting it be over too fast. They hate me for taking away the pleasure of seeing someone like me get beaten into the ground by someone they understand more, someone more like them, someone they want to be. The Titan is a coarse man of earth, someone they identify with, someone they’d hoped to see smash my face in just to remind me that I don’t belong here. I’m not one of them.

  I can’t give them that.

  But I can appease them with a little blood, at least.

  Might as well put on a show.

  Rising to my feet, I jerk on the Titan’s arm, levering it forward until it’s done almost a full one-eighty in its socket. The crunching sound that rises is almost drowned out by the horrified gasps from the crowd, blending with the sound of his scream. It’s an almost pathetic sound, but there’s nothing pathetic about the way he heaves under me. He’s hurting. He’s furious. He wants to kill me, murder a red light in his eyes as he manages to rip free and roll over onto his back.

  Good.

  I step back. Flick my fingers.

  And barely get a chance to drop back into a defensive stance before he’s on me.

  He slams into me like a wrecking ball, his good arm locking around my waist. I smash down hard onto my back, while he scrambles up to try to pin me. He straddles me, panting heavily, saliva spooling down from his thick lower lip in a glistening thread. Our eyes lock.

  I have half a second’s pleasure in the moment when he realizes his mistake. His eyes widen. His already-gray skin turns ashen.

  And then his breath comes out of him in a sort of billowing wheeze, wet with spittle, as I lock both fists around each other and smash them into his lower abdomen.

  It’s a calculated hit. He’d already been tensing his solar plexus for impact, but I go lower, in that vulnerable place right above the groin. That’s the one rule in the ring; groin shots aren’t allowed, but I’m just far enough away that it won’t be called. He bows over me, only to topple to the side as I crash my forearm into his throat. There’s a gagging wheeze as his trachea collapses. He sprawls on his back. I drop down on him, bracing my knee against his stomach, and crush the heel of my palm into the underside of his jaw in a single sharp jab. His head snaps back, blood fountaining as he bites down on his tongue, even as he sucks in a great gasp as the shift opens his airways. He won’t die, at least.

  Not yet.

  I want him to feel this.

  Because now I’m feeling it—finally. Now that deadness inside me, that emptiness, that blankness, takes on color, and that color is red. I taste the blood on the air. I feel it humming in my veins, keying my body up into a raw hot rush of tension that pulls in my inner thighs, tightening the muscles from my gut down to the tips of my toes, throbbing down the length of my cock. It’s not for him, not really. I haven’t swung that way since a few experimental nights in university.

  It’s about what he represents.

  My prey is vulnerable, and I’m ready for the kill.

  His throat is bared, his pulse racing against his sweat-slimed skin, his breaths working in big lumps against his neck. I draw back, letting that singing tension flow into my arm, into my tight-locked knuckles.

  Then bring my fist down hard, right into the center of his face.

  Blood explodes out in a bright, splattering blossom, punctuated by the shouts of the spectators. His nose flattens, crushing into his skull. His entire face seems to crumple in on that one point as he grunts out a roar of pain, his entire body jerking. I pull back, shaking my hand out, then clenching it again. The fight’s not over until he’s knocked out, but if he’s still even conscious after this I’m going to need a hard one to really lay him out. His skull looks like it’s made of titanium, and even though I’m pretty sure I’ve broken his nose, the impact was enough to send aching reverberations up my arm that shook me down to the bone. Another man would be out cold.

  Just as I start to pull back for that spring-loaded tension again, though, something catches my attention. Something still and small and pale, out of place when the crowd is a riot of motion and ferocious energy. A woman. A girl, and what makes her stand out is the pale moonglow silver of her hair, tumbling down around her face and shoulders—the hair of an old woman, shining and pure, yet framing such a smooth, delicately unlined face. Her skin is white and fragile, her eyes wide and haunted and just a touch frightened, and she’s watching me as if she’s never seen anything so brutal, so cruel, so awful in her life.

  She’s small, so small I wonder if she’s old enough for the man at her side—thick-set, crude as unfinished building blocks, his jaw a granite lump, his name one we know but never speak when he is the king of this motley court, and usually comes alone—to have his hand curled so possessively around her hip. Her throat is encircled by a skein of tiny pearls, a loop of them tight against her skin and the rest spilling down her chest in a long trail almost like a leash.

  She watches me without blinking. As if she’s fascinated, torn between being utterly mesmerized and utterly sickened.

  As if she sees me for the monster I am, in this moment when I stand poised to destroy a man right before her eyes.

  It’s that moment’s inattention that nearly undoes me. One second I’m staring at her, caught by the look of fear in her eyes that rouses a hunger in my belly, the scent of prey on the air.

  The next I’m seeing flashes of white and black as pain explodes into me, rough and bursting over my skull.

  Fuck.

  The Titan just jerked himself up and smashed his forehead into my face.

  It’s time to end this.

  I rock back for half a second, sucking in a breath and shaking my head fiercely to clear my vision. Pain only makes me sharper, faster, survival instinct kicking in, and before he can even pull back to do it again or gather himself, I let the momentum of that rocking motion catch, peak, reverse, sending me forward again to drive my fist downward with all the power of my weight and gravity and strength behind me. It’s a loaded thing that makes me feel like a torpedo crashing to earth, all screaming power and fury and friction propelled by the surge of adrenaline scorching in my pounding bloodstream.

  Crimson splashes out from the center of his face like a splatter of paint, radiating in ripples out onto the concrete. The hyenas howl, scenting the kill, but I’m the lion going for the vulnerable underbelly, and all I can taste is the sc
arlet that splashed onto my lips. Hot, fresh, copper and iron and that perfect sweet-salty tang of the kill, and I dart my tongue out to taste it, to let it burn through me, to electrify me with a heat like sex that coils low in my belly and shoots through my groin and ripples up my arm to come pouring out in another burst of power, fire, ferocity, rage.

  I’m only alive in the moment of the kill, and I breathe in every wild thing shrieking on the air, let it pour into me, let it make me a god bringing down judgement as I crash my fists into his face again and again and again and again.

  It’s no longer a face but a sort of inward-mashed pulp of flesh inside a thin and puffy skin: his nose skewed sideways, his cheeks swollen round bags of meat, his eyes purple and bloated into mounds bisected by slits, his jaw a darkly mottled lump, his mouth split open and his teeth twisted all wrong-ways and falling into the gaping hole of his mouth. That mouth emits a sort of low whining sound coming up from the cavern of his throat, this constant steady wheeze of suffering and pain, and I want to drink that sound from him and let it make me immortal, a tyrant ruling over an endless reign of blood.

  This is the monster inside me.

  This is the monster inside me, and it is as beautiful as it is terrible.

  He struggles at first, but not for long. It’s not long until he’s limp underneath me, his eyes only open because the swelling is pulling them apart in thin, gleaming slits with nothing behind them. He may be dead. The monster inside me hopes he’s dead. Whatever shellac of human I’ve laid over the beast, though, is reminding me of moral codes, social strictures, police, jail time. Laws. All those rules we’ve laid over the animals inside us so we can pretend to be civilized and not tear each other down to the bone day after day in an orgy of bloodlust, sex, and hunger.

  Make no mistake.

  You’re all animals, too.

  Vicious, ugly, cruel, self-serving, driven by hunger and hormones and the desperate need to live. The screaming crowd proves that. They’re on fire, chanting not for me but for the frenzy in the air, the high that burns through their veins and lets them live through me—all the darkest, most terrible fantasies they’re too afraid to act out but crave so much that they’re almost begging for me to kill him, to make that final stroke to satisfy a deep need inside them that would feel just as good as that trembling peak right before you snap and come with your body spilling everywhere and tearing pleasure from inside you like it’s ripping it out by the roots to leave you shaken and torn. Deep down, you’re all as vile and broken as I am.