Present Tense: Pleasure Times Four (Out of the Fire Book 3)

by Candace Blevins

  “I don’t get a say, Sir?”

  “Do you want a say?”

  She felt as if the question was important. It didn’t sound like it, but in her gut, she felt as if her answer was of great consequence.

  “I do, Sir, but I believe you might be right about bringing my men into this conversation. Still, once we’ve done so, I believe the final decision should be mine.”

  His smile told her he was pleased, and he ran his hand down her hair again. “Then it shall be your decision.”

  “I’m not a warrior, but I work for warriors, and it appears I’m in love with three warriors. If I’m to be of help to my new family, it’s probably best I learn to heal like a warrior.” But she understood that sex games would be harder. Could a masochist truly enjoy pain if she could heal any damage with a thought?

  Aaron pulled a small digital recorder out and showed it to her. “I need to get your statement on record. We call it a debrief, and it usually involves a bit of interrogating when things go to shit, but since I was with you, there shouldn’t be too many questions.”

  It took an hour and a half for her to go through her memory of what had happened from the point they left the helicopter until she lost consciousness. She took fifteen minutes to meditate when Aaron left, she fed from two more wolves, and then went to her room moments before the sun took her.

  Shortly after she rose that afternoon, a vampire and a lion entered and were introduced to her as Venom and Andreas. Kelsey didn’t know lions could be gay, but figured Andreas’s best bet was probably attaching himself to a powerful vampire. Lion society likely wouldn’t accept him. Or, at least what she knew of them meant a gay lion would have a difficult time.

  Venom telepathed her, his inner voice deep, kind, and full of authority.

  You have my permission to drain sixty percent of my lion’s blood, and as much lust as you know to be safe. I can force a change on him, and then give him some of my energy when he returns to his human form.

  She poked into the lion’s head and saw lots of missing time, but also saw permission from the lion for this — and just about anything else, with few caveats. She didn’t bother asking Venom whether Andreas had agreed to feed her both blood and lust. He’d agreed to be the property of a vampire, which meant he’d given up certain rights. His vampire had the right to loan him out in whatever capacity his vampire wished.

  The lion had been brought in completely naked, a leash attached to a device on his cock. Andreas leaned over the footboard when Venom motioned to it, and the vampire pulled an impressive cock from his pants before sinking it into the lion’s ass with no foreplay. No stretching. No warning. She scented pain and distress, but also arousal. The lion hurt, but he didn’t hate it, and he didn’t want to escape. There was... if not love, affection. The men had a connection. Was this how her relationship with her men would look to other vampires?

  Venom’s voice yanked her out of her introspection. “The neck is fine, young vampire, unless you prefer elsewhere.”

  Neck worked for her, and she leaned over, bit, and drank deeply. Lions have a wilder taste than most, and she savored every pull.

  She also pulled both blood and lust into her with every draw.

  Venom gave the lion equal parts pleasure and pain, and kept him on the edge of an orgasm until he was nearly too far gone to be brought back through a change, but Venom kept ordering her to drink both blood and lust, and she couldn’t stop, even though she wanted to. Venom was far, far more powerful than her, and she couldn’t refuse a direct order.

  The vampire did, indeed, know the limits of his lion, because the young man was fine once he was back in human form and had eaten enough for four lions.

  And Kelsey was better. Much better than she should’ve been after feeding from a single lion.

  “You sent some of your energy into him,” she told Venom. “I got your energy along with his.”

  “I did. Are you aware you levitated up, to stay on his neck, when he rose up in orgasm?”

  Kelsey stared at him, running the session back in her head. Slowly, she shook her head. “I can’t levitate.”

  “You can. Might be a few years before you manage it again, but you need to start exercising those metaphysical muscles. I’ll let Etta know.”

  30

  Collosa leaned forward on the desk, ran his hand through his hair, and then stopped before he started tugging at it again. He wasn’t built for riding a desk, but he’d volunteered to read through the analyst’s reports, so here he was.

  The USB drive Kelsey had yanked out at the last second before the explosion had enough of the hard drive on it, the geeks were able to pull a shit ton of information off. Collosa had stayed at the Drake building for days, using the excuse of wanting their client to feel safe. For the time being, the client was in a room on the lowest, most secure level of Drake Security, with two people in the room with him at all times. They were working four shifts of six hours, to make sure the people in the room stayed on point.

  When Collosa wasn’t guarding the client, he was upstairs going through the analyst’s daily reports on the data the geeks pulled from the flash drive.

  Gabby was one of their top analysts, but she was also a rabbit shifter, which meant she was pretty timid. However, she lived with a grizzly, so she was less timid around Collosa than she was around the leopard and the mongoose. Collosa had dinner with her Friday evening, and talked about what she’d found, trying to make sense of it.

  Meanwhile, Eunice was at an alternate Drake property, underground, interrogating the prisoners they’d brought back with them.

  Kelsey had been with Marco two full nights. Fabio had gone home to sleep, but Collosa couldn’t bear the thoughts of returning home when he didn’t know when — or if — Kelsey would be returning.

  So he hadn’t left the Drake Building.

  “You’re troubled,” Gabby told him. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  He smiled at her and reminded himself to speak gently. “Thanks for offering, but I’m trying to bury myself in work. Keep my mind occupied. Who’s following the explosives thread? Do we know who the bastards got them from?”

  Gabby pulled the report up from the explosive residue on Kelsey’s tac vest, and Collosa suddenly couldn’t push it down any longer. He stood and walked to the door before he frightened the little rabbit shifter. “I’m sorry. I need to go work out. Give me an hour and we can pick this up again, please.”

  Fabio hung up from Gabby, made his way to the Drake building, and found Collosa in the gym, pounding and kicking the fuck out of a heavy bag.

  “So who’s face is on the bag?” Fabio asked him from twenty feet away. No need in getting right up into an angry grizzly’s face. He would if he had to, but if it wasn’t necessary, distance was the smarter option.

  Collosa kicked harder, punched harder. Faster. Harder.

  Trying to calm his friend down was tricky. If he pissed the grizzly off, he might decide to pound on Fabio instead of the bag.

  He had to try, though. “She’s going to be okay. She’s a vampire, and now the vampires are helping her get through this. Hey, knowing our girl, she may even come out of this with a new power or skill.”

  Collosa gave the bag two more kicks and then a final, solid punch, and he turned to Fabio. “We didn’t talk about exclusivity. I didn’t think we needed to. She was drinking from the three of us, and didn’t seem to want to have sex with anyone outside of us.”

  Fabio crossed his arms, realized the grizzly was still on edge, and uncrossed them. “She feeds on lust. Once she’s well enough for it, I’m assuming she’ll have to fuck someone powerful.”

  “None of us are monogamous, so what the fuck does it matter?” Collosa asked, and then he turned and hit the bag three more times — right left right.

  “It apparently matters to you, and we’ll need to talk about that with her once she’s back. Have you heard from Eunice?”

  Collosa shook his head. “Information black-ou
t. Only those on the op even know...”

  Fabio turned his back on him with purpose, walked to a weight bench, and sat on it. The idea was to see if what the Drake analysts came up with matched whatever the interrogator could interrogate out of the geeks from the compound. Enemy geeks generally give information up sooner than enemy warriors, but these geeks seemed to have been... hardened. He didn’t envy Eunice’s job.

  “I’ve been analyzing the bullets we pulled out of our people,” Fabio told him. “It’s all Russian, but not top-shelf military.” He sighed. “I’m going to call Etta in a few hours. Ask for an update. Status report.”

  “Yeah. Good.”

  “I mean, I know protocol on this is touchy. Kelsey belongs to Marco, but she’s kind of beginning to belong to us in a different way. Calling and acting like we have a right to her could cause problems, but calling because we’re concerned...” He walked to a different heavy bag and hit it a few times with his fists. “Technically, Aaron or Nathan should be the ones making the call, if we follow etiquette.”

  “You’ll know what to say,” Collosa told him. “You got a problem with me listening in?”

  “No.”

  As it turned out, they didn’t have to call Etta, because Kelsey called them on the encrypted app a few hours later, with video, so they could see her.

  “You look good, Cupcake,” Fabio told her. “How do you feel?”

  “Better. If everything goes as it should today and tonight, I hope to be home an hour or two before sunrise in the morning.” She looked off to the side and then back to the camera. “Based on the things I’ve learned, Etta is going to talk to Aaron about me spending a few days a month with a vampire who has things to teach me.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” Fabio said, speaking slowly. Carefully. “Are you on board with this?”

  “Yeah. There are the things you know you don’t know but then there’s the stuff you don’t know you don’t know, right? I think there’s way too much of the latter, in my case.”

  “Well then,” Collosa told her, “we’ll figure out the best way to make it happen.”

  31

  Eunice was an expert at torture. He didn’t set out to specialize in it, but here he was. Honestly, he figured the same things that made him a good Dom probably made him a good interrogator. He knew how to make people break. He could see it in their eyes, smell it on them. Some, you broke with kindness. Others, you broke with sleep deprivation and uncomfortable conditions.

  But everyone once in a while, the only way to get information was through old-fashioned physical torture with some mindfucks thrown in for good measure.

  And to do that, you had to learn all you could about the person. It’d been easy to learn this man’s greatest fears because his mother had posted about them on social media. The man’s employers didn’t allow social media accounts, but I guess not even a scary military group could stop the asshole’s mother.

  This particular geek was terrified of bugs, and most especially, cockroaches.

  Eunice knew nearly everything he wanted to know, but this asswipe knew who the main contact at the Kremlin had been. As far as he could tell, no one else knew the fuckwad’s name.

  It occurred to Eunice that he could avoid all of this if Kelsey was here, but he swatted the idea away. She wasn’t here, and he didn’t know when he’d see her again. His heart hurt without her around, but there wasn’t time for those thoughts while he prepared to work someone over. He needed his mind one thousand percent on the man in front of him.

  They’d need to turn all of the geeks over to others in the coming days, so he couldn’t beat this asshole, or cut pieces off him. He’d hooked the man’s balls up to a car battery to get the brunt of what he’d managed, but not all of it.

  No. In order to get all of it, he was going to have to use this man’s greatest fears. No, not greatest, that wasn’t it. His visceral fears — the kind that went far past logic.

  The sooner he got the information they needed, the sooner Aaron could get their prisoners out of the country and handed over to the proper authorities. Eunice couldn’t use torture techniques that left too much of a mark, but their countrymen certainly could. And likely would.

  Thirty hellish, soul-dirtying minutes later, Eunice sat down to write his report, with Aaron Drake sitting across from him while Eunice typed and spoke aloud. Aaron helped him get the wording right, helped him decide which information the State Department would need, and which would be superfluous. They worked for two hours, and Eunice saved everything and handed the final report to Aaron on a hardened, secure, encrypted thumb drive.

  “Excellent work, as always,” Aaron told him. “Kelsey should be on her way home in a few hours. Set this aside and go home.”

  Eunice leaned back and scrubbed at his face with his hands. He’d worn gloves while he handled the cockroaches, and taken a blistering shower, but it would take a while before he felt clean again. It’d taken eleven cockroaches, the last one placed on the man’s trapped tongue, before the motherfucker had broken.

  “Yeah. I’ve missed her. The sooner we get these guys off U.S. soil, the better.”

  “Agreed. We were being watched too closely to do this in Europe. They had to think we came home with just our people.” He leaned back in his chair. “If Kelsey hadn’t been injured, I’d intended to ask her to get what she could from their heads.”

  “I’d rather she didn’t look in their minds after I’ve tortured them.” Fuck. She’d never see him the same.

  “That’s a given. No one outside of Nathan, me, and a few of your former commanders know just how good you are at getting information from the enemy. The other two thirds of your trio have an idea of your value in this regard, but they won’t talk about it unless you do.”

  And Aaron would know Eunice was never going to bring this up to anyone. It was his secret to keep. His dark secret.

  “Fabio knows. Or, he has a good idea. Collosa probably does, but he can’t know the things Fabio does.” Fabio had seen Eunice torture a few of the men who’d held them prisoner. He’d seen how quickly Eunice got information out of their former guards and torturers, and how ruthless he’d been.

  “Marco and I had a conversation today,” Aaron told him, thankfully changing the subject. “We renegotiated things a bit with Kelsey. He says she learned enough in the few days they had her, it makes sense for her to spend a couple of days a month in the coterie house once Marco officially takes over the territory.”

  Eunice considered the possibilities. “Even if she doesn’t want to go, she’d have had to seem as if she was on board with it in front of them.”

  “I’m aware. I negotiated for her to go to them three days a month, for three months. If we can see progress, we’ll negotiate for longer.” He sighed. “Honestly? I’m not sure this is something she gets a say in. Keeping her safe means growing her powers and figuring out the best way to teach her how to be a powerful vampire. While the vampires want to teach her, we should insist she let them.”

  Eunice agreed, but he still needed to talk to Kelsey before he could do so verbally. He settled on saying, “Thanks for looking out for her.”

  “She’s ours now, isn’t she? You didn’t see her, working and focusing while a firefight was so loud, with a single door and wall keeping it away. While she didn’t know for certain whether her three men were okay. When I debriefed her, I asked how she knew about the bomb. She heard someone at the keypad, heard the hard drive make a noise, and she went into the head of the person at the keypad — saw he had a death wish. He was too strong of mind for her to take him over quickly enough to make him reverse the command, but there probably wasn’t time for that anyway. Still, she’s going to be working on that. In her mind, if she’d been good enough to take over the twenty or so people you were fighting in the end, she’d have kept anyone from getting hurt. No one would’ve set the bomb off, and she could’ve made them kneel and give up. She has a goal now. I imagine she’ll want to go to a mall or a bar
to practice.”

  Eunice shook his head. “Only the strongest vampires can do that. Thousands of years old!” He wiped his hands over his face again. Fuck, he needed twelve hours of sleep. “Should we have let her into these men’s heads?”

  “Possibly, but I assumed it would take her a month to heal. Not days. As it is, we’ve had them about as long as we dare. We’ll know better next time.”

  He met Aaron’s gaze. “Just so you know, she’s well on the way to becoming mine.” When Aaron gave him an incredulous look, Eunice amended the statement. “Okay. Yeah. Collosa and Fabio would say ours, and they aren’t wrong, but she’s mine in a way she isn’t to them. I’ve never felt this way about any woman. Before this mission, I was conflicted about that. I’m not anymore. She’s mine. That doesn’t mean she isn’t theirs, too — but she’s mine.”

  “I’ll let you work the particulars of that out with your housemates. Meanwhile, Marco tells me there’s a skill she picked up the edges of, but he won’t share what it is, and I agreed not to ask her. You shouldn’t either, but if she volunteers the information, I’d appreciate a heads up.”

  Eunice didn’t agree or not agree. He’d probably tell Aaron because he knew the ancient dragon saw Kelsey as his to protect, and he knew just how far the ancient dragon would go to safeguard those he felt protective of. However, until he knew what they were dealing with, he couldn’t make any promises.

  “It’s coming up on noon,” Eunice said. “The sooner I get into a bed, the better.”

  “It’ll take an hour for me to get you out of here and to the office, so you can leave with Fabio and make it look as if you’ve been at the office the entire time.”

  32

  Kelsey was finally on her way home around three in the morning.

  Home.

  Somehow, the house in the woods had become a safe haven. The cynical parts of her wanted to say it was the Christmas decorations, but she knew that wasn’t it. Well, it wasn’t all of it.