Corrupt

CONTENT WARNING (for the entire series)

CORRUPT is a dark New Adult romance intended for mature readers (18+).

This story contains explicit sexual content, consensual kink and rough sexual themes, strong language, heavy alcohol consumption, recreational drug use, substance abuse and addiction, intoxication, smoking, reckless and self-destructive behavior, dangerous motorcycle riding, physical violence and fighting, blood and injuries, jealousy, possessive and obsessive behavior, toxic and codependent relationship dynamics, and other mature or potentially distressing themes.

Drug and alcohol abuse are significant elements of the story and are portrayed as part of the characters’ increasingly destructive behavior rather than as consequence-free choices.

All sexual relationships depicted in this story are between consenting adults.

Please read with care and prioritize your own comfort.

BOOK ONE

Abby

Thursday night was supposed to be easy.

A couple of drinks with Mia, Lena, and Ethan. Maybe something greasy from the kitchen before it closed. A few hours away from my apartment, my laptop, and the paper I had already reread so many times that I was beginning to hate every sentence I’d written.

That was how Mia had sold it to me when she’d called earlier.

She had conveniently left out the part where Vice would be packed by the time we got there.

By eleven-thirty, nearly every table was occupied, the long wooden bar was surrounded three people deep, and the crowd had spilled into every open space between them. Music poured from speakers mounted near the ceiling, loud enough that conversation required leaning closer, but not so loud that we had to scream at one another. The patio doors opened every few minutes, letting in a burst of cool September air mixed with cigarette smoke and the sweeter smell of weed.

It wasn’t really my scene.

That didn’t mean I hated it.

I’d finished my second vodka cranberry slowly enough that the alcohol had settled into a comfortable warmth beneath my skin. My feet were starting to hurt in my boots, my long hair felt warmer against my back than it had when we’d arrived, and I’d stopped thinking about the things I needed to do tomorrow.

For the first time all week, there was nowhere else I needed to be.

Mia sat beside me with one hand curled around the stem of her margarita glass. Ethan had pulled his chair close enough to hers that their legs were tangled beneath the table, his arm resting casually behind her. They’d been dating for almost two years, although at some point I’d stopped thinking of Ethan as simply my best friend’s boyfriend.

He’d become one of my closest friends too.

Lena was across from us, half listening while she responded to a text, and I was watching Mia steal pieces of ice from Ethan’s drink when she looked at me.

“You look less miserable.”

“I wasn’t miserable.”

“You spent the first twenty minutes looking like you were mentally calculating how early you could leave without offending me.”

I smiled because she wasn’t entirely wrong. “I have class tomorrow.”

“At eleven.”

“Some of us consider eleven morning.”

“Some of us are seventy.”

Ethan glanced at me over his beer. “She spent last Saturday helping her dad repaint a bathroom. Seventy might be generous.”

I gave him a look. “He asked me to help.”

“And you said yes.”

“He’s my dad. What was I supposed to say?”

The truth was, I liked spending time with Dad.

It had always been the two of us. There wasn’t anything strange about going home for a weekend or helping him with something around the house, and I had never understood why being close to my father was supposed to make me boring.

Besides, I wasn’t nearly as innocent as my friends occasionally made me sound.

I’d been drunk before. I’d gone to parties. I’d had boyfriends and sex and mornings when I’d woken up with a headache and enough embarrassment to avoid opening my messages until noon. I wasn’t scandalized by hookups or weed or people making choices I wouldn’t necessarily make myself.

I just tended to know where my line was.

I liked having control over myself. I liked remembering my nights. I liked waking up without needing someone else to explain what I’d done.

Dad trusted me because I’d given him very few reasons not to.

I’d always liked being that person.

Reliable.

Responsible.

Good, if someone wanted to call it that.

It had never felt like a cage.

I reached for my drink again, only to discover I’d already finished it.

“Do you want another?” Ethan asked.

“Not yet.”

He nodded and went back to whatever he had been saying to Mia.

My attention drifted.

There was a group crowded around one of the pool tables. Two girls were dancing beside the jukebox even though nobody else was. Someone near the patio doors laughed loudly enough that I heard it over the music. A couple was kissing against the wall with the particular lack of restraint that suggested they weren’t going to make it much longer before finding somewhere more private.

I was considering whether I wanted another drink after all when the front door opened.

Four guys walked in.

I noticed them because several other people did.

There wasn’t some ridiculous movie moment where the entire room stopped and stared. Most people didn’t even look. But enough did that my attention followed theirs naturally.

Then I forgot about everyone except the guy in front.

He was tall.

That registered first.

Then his face did.

And, Jesus Christ.

Dark hair showed beneath a backward black baseball cap, slightly messy around his forehead and ears. He wore faded jeans, scuffed brown work boots, and a gray hoodie with the sleeves shoved toward his elbows.

Even from across the room, I could see the breadth of his shoulders beneath the sweatshirt and the lean, athletic shape of his body. He had one hand shoved into his pocket while he listened to the guy beside him, and then something was said that made him laugh.

His entire face changed.

The reaction was immediate and genuine, his head dropping slightly as he grinned.

I stared longer than I should have.

Then longer than that.

“Who is that?”

Mia followed my gaze.

Her expression changed almost immediately.

Not dramatically. Just enough that I noticed.

Before she could answer, Ethan looked toward the door.

“Noah.”

There was something about the way he said the name that made me look at him instead.

“You know him?”

“Yeah.”

That was all he said.

I waited.

Ethan took another drink of his beer.

“Are you going to elaborate?”

He set the bottle down. “What do you want to know?”

I glanced toward the bar again.

Noah and his friends had already reached it. One of the bartenders spotted them and lifted a hand in greeting before grabbing several glasses. Noah leaned against the bar while one of his friends said something near his ear.

A woman approached him almost immediately.

She was beautiful. Tall, tan, wearing a black dress that barely reached the middle of her thighs. She put a hand against Noah’s back to get his attention.

He turned.

Whatever she said made him smile.

Her hand stayed there.

“I don’t know.” I looked back at Ethan. “You clearly have an opinion.”

“I know enough to tell you he’s probably not somebody you’d like.”

That interested me more than it should have.

“Why?”

Ethan’s gaze remained on Noah for another second before returning to me.

“Because he lives like he’s trying to find out which bad decision is finally going to kill him.”

There was no humor in his voice.

Mia looked over at him. “Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

I glanced toward Noah again.

Nothing about him fit that sentence.

He was laughing with the bartender now, one forearm resting against the wood. The woman in the black dress had moved closer, and Noah’s hand sat loosely at her waist as though he’d put it there without thinking.

Another girl came up behind him and kissed his cheek.

He turned his head, smiling when he recognized her.

The first woman didn’t seem surprised.

“How do you know him?” I asked.

“We have mutual friends. I’ve been at parties with him. Hung out with him a few times.” Ethan paused. “He’s actually a good guy in a lot of ways. That’s probably why people keep putting up with his shit.”

“What shit?”

Ethan rubbed his thumb over the label on his beer.

“He gets fucked up almost every night. Drinks too much. Smokes constantly. Pills, coke, whatever else happens to be around. I’ve watched someone hand him something without telling him what it was and Noah took it because apparently asking would’ve ruined the experience.”

I frowned.

“You’re serious.”

“Completely.”

Something about that was difficult to reconcile with the man standing across the room.

Maybe I’d expected someone with a life that chaotic to look damaged.

Noah didn’t.

He looked alive.

Painfully so.

People seemed to orbit him. Men stopped to shake his hand or pull him into quick hugs. Women touched him with the casual familiarity of people who either knew exactly what it was like to have his attention or desperately wanted to find out. The bartender poured him a shot without being asked.

Noah lifted it.

Someone beside him raised another.

They knocked them together, and Noah swallowed his in one movement.

The woman in black stole the lime from his glass.

He watched her put it between her lips, then leaned down and took it directly from her mouth.

My stomach tightened.

I looked away.

That was none of my business.

Ethan had noticed where my attention had been.

He didn’t tease me about it.

That somehow made his next words carry more weight.

“He doesn’t really have limits, Abby.”

I met his eyes.

“What does that mean?”

“It means exactly what it sounds like. If everybody’s drinking, he’ll drink more. If somebody starts a fight, Noah finishes it. If there’s something to take, he’ll take it. And don’t ever get on the back of his bike.”

I almost smiled at the specificity of that last one, but Ethan’s expression stopped me.

“He has a motorcycle?”

“A Yamaha R1.”

I knew next to nothing about motorcycles.

Ethan apparently saw that on my face.

“It’s fast,” he said. “Way faster than anybody needs. Noah rides it like traffic laws are personal insults.”

“Has he crashed it?”

“More than once.”

“And he still rides it?”

“That’s Noah.”

I looked across the room again.

This time I understood a little better what Ethan meant.

Noah had already finished another drink.

The woman was still touching him.

One of his friends handed him something small enough to disappear against his palm.

I watched Noah look down.

For half a second, I thought he might ask what it was.

He didn’t.

He tossed it into his mouth and washed it down with his beer.

My stomach gave an uncomfortable little twist.

That should have been enough.

Not enough to judge him—I didn’t know him—but enough to kill whatever fascination had started the moment he’d walked through the door.

Instead, it made me curious.

I didn’t understand someone like that.

I thought about everything. Too much, probably. I considered consequences before I’d even decided what I wanted. I couldn’t imagine putting an unknown pill in my mouth because somebody handed it to me.

Noah had done it without interrupting his conversation.

Mia touched Ethan’s arm and quietly asked him something I couldn’t hear.

Their conversation moved away from Noah.

Mine didn’t.

Not internally.

I kept finding him.

I hated that I did.

Over the next hour, I danced with Mia and Lena. I drank another vodka cranberry slowly. I talked to a guy from one of my classes who recognized me near the bar. I laughed when Lena nearly lost her balance trying to dance in heels she had complained about before we’d even left her apartment.

I had fun.

Real fun.

But Noah remained somewhere at the edge of my awareness.

When he moved to the patio, I noticed.

When he came back inside without the hoodie, I definitely noticed.

Underneath it, he wore a white cutoff shirt that exposed more of his arms than I needed to see. He was muscular without being enormous, his shoulders broad and his arms defined in a way that made it very easy to imagine how strong they were.

I caught myself looking at his hands.

That felt particularly ridiculous.

They were just hands.

Large ones.

Veins along the backs. Long fingers wrapped around a pool cue while he leaned over the table to line up a shot.

I dragged my attention away.

A few minutes later, it wandered back.

By then, someone else was wearing his hat.

A blonde sat on the edge of the pool table with Noah’s backward cap on her head while he stood between her knees. She said something close to his ear. Noah laughed, then put his hand around the back of her neck and kissed her.

There was nothing shy about it.

Nothing hesitant.

Even from where I stood, I could see the ease in the way he touched her. Like this wasn’t an important moment to him. Like kissing a beautiful woman in the middle of a crowded bar was as ordinary as accepting another drink.

The kiss lasted long enough that I felt vaguely intrusive watching.

So I stopped.

At least for a while.

Ethan’s warning had given me context for Noah, but it hadn’t given me an explanation.

That was the part my brain kept circling.

He wasn’t sulking in a corner. He wasn’t angry at the world. He didn’t seem tortured or miserable or particularly interested in proving anything.

He seemed happy.

Maybe that was what made him so difficult to understand.

Noah looked like he genuinely enjoyed being Noah.

He liked the noise. The alcohol. The women. The people constantly calling his name. The joint I saw between his fingers on the patio twenty minutes later. The reckless abundance of everything.

There was no visible apology in him.

I wondered what it would feel like to live that way.

The thought bothered me enough that I went back to our table for water.

It was after midnight now. My skin was warm from dancing, and my hair had started sticking lightly to the back of my neck. I sat down and finished half the glass before I realized Ethan and Mia were having a quiet conversation beside me.

Lena had disappeared again.

I pulled my phone from my purse.

Dad had texted.

Dad: You alive?

I smiled.

Me: Barely. Mia brought me out.

His response came almost immediately.

Dad: Have fun. Be safe. Love you.

Something warm settled in my chest.

Me: Love you too.

I put my phone down.

When I lifted my glass again, something made me look toward the pool tables.

Noah was staring at me.

The realization landed with enough force that my fingers tightened around the glass.

He stood with one shoulder against the wall, beer hanging loosely from his hand while a friend spoke beside him.

Noah wasn’t listening.

Or if he was, he wasn’t looking at him.

He was looking at me.

I’d noticed his eyes earlier.

I hadn’t realized how blue they were.

Even through the dim lighting and distance between us, they were strikingly pale against his dark hair.

For one suspended moment, I forgot my friends were beside me.

Forgot the music.

Forgot the woman who’d kissed Noah and the pill he’d swallowed and every warning I’d been given about a man I’d never spoken to.

I just looked at him.

Noah’s gaze moved over my face.

Then lower.

Not crudely.

Not quickly either.

His eyes traveled down the length of me with enough deliberation that heat climbed beneath my skin before they returned to mine.

I should have looked away immediately.

Instead, I held his stare.

Something shifted in his expression.

Interest.

That was unmistakable.

His mouth curved slightly at one corner.

Not a grin.

Not a wink.

Just the smallest smile from a man who had apparently realized the brunette across the room had been watching him for most of the night.

Shit.

I looked down at my water.

My pulse had picked up.

I suddenly felt stupidly aware of myself. Of the neckline of my top. Of the fall of my hair over one shoulder. Of the warmth already in my cheeks.

I stayed facing the table.

Thirty seconds.

A minute.

Long enough that checking again shouldn’t have looked obvious.

Then I did.

The blonde wearing his hat was in front of him now.

Her hands rested against his chest.

Noah looked down while she spoke, bending slightly to hear her over the music.

She kissed him.

He kissed her back.

His hand went around her waist and drew her against him without hesitation.

Something unpleasant pinched low in my stomach.

I almost laughed at myself.

That was absurd.

I didn’t know him.

He didn’t know my name.

I’d watched him interact with multiple women tonight. Ethan had practically given me a disclaimer.

I turned back toward the table and finished my water.

That should have been the end of it.

He was beautiful.

He was reckless.

He was very obviously available to anyone interested in exactly one thing from him.

And I wasn’t interested.

At least, not enough to do anything about it.

Several minutes passed before curiosity won again.

I looked over my shoulder.

The blonde was gone.

Noah remained against the wall.

And somehow, impossibly, his eyes found mine almost immediately.

This time he smiled fully.

It changed his face in a way I wasn’t prepared for.

There was something knowing in it now.

Something almost amused.

Not because he’d done anything.

Because he didn’t have to.

He knew I’d looked again.

I turned around before my expression could give him anything else.

Ethan had been right.

I should stay away from Noah.

Not because I thought one conversation with him would magically turn me into someone else. Not because I was afraid I’d lose all common sense the second he spoke to me.

I simply knew enough about myself to recognize when something had caught my attention harder than it should have.

And Noah had.

I didn’t know his last name.

I hadn’t heard his voice.

He hadn’t come within twenty feet of me.

Still, for the rest of the night, I knew exactly where he was.