by Rawlyns, Nya
CHAPTER SEVEN
Retainer
The vinyl cushion slid against my skin, slick with sweat, her sweat. She straddled me at the knees, my shoulder holster draped across her thighs. Slowly removing the nine, she handled it cautiously, turning it this way and that, the sun’s rays bluing out the steel, the only cool oasis in a furnace of lava heat.
With barrel and finger tips, the girl cum whore expertly maneuvered my jeans low on my thighs, trapping me, exposing my lust.
Why her? Why now?
Eyes narrowing against the glare, I watched as Sasha thumbed the trigger and thanked the gods of good sense that I never carry hot with a round in the chamber. Leaning forward, breasts swaying enticingly close to my belly, she pressed the cool metal against my throat then dragged it whisper soft down my chest. As she traced the line of my hip, pressure increased to the point of pain.
Swallowing hard, I concentrated on nipples pinched to stiff peaks, slim tanned thighs pressing in, holding me hostage. Not touching was killing me slowly, fear and self-loathing coating my mouth, willing her to do it…
We weren’t alone.
She liked to watch, to be watched. Because she liked it, I learned to shut everything out, everything but pure sensation, the greed of lust, the luxury of pain.
She called it discipline…
It was a thing I knew, intimately.
Then there was something else, another memory intruding, overpowering the first.
They say you always remember your first… It came sharp and sweet, a sting that echoed and tingled, leaving my skin raw and hot. His slow smile of satisfaction, liking it, savoring the power. He left without a word and I huddled at the bedroom door, listening to sounds not meant for a child’s ear.
Shielding my eyes against the sun’s glare I begged silently, hips arching as the demoness dragged the muzzle across the weeping tip. Imagining the worst made me harder, thicker, the vein distended in purplish splendor… screaming for release.
Beads of moisture popped and trickled between shoulder blades tensed against the harsh plastic.
The rank stink of lust and sex hung heavy, air too thick to breathe, candles flickering and weaving against shadowed stone. Stretched out on wooden tables shoved together, hands tied above my head, the anticipation was almost better than the first crack…
He’d remove the belt with exquisite care, first the buckle, using both hands, making me watch, building fear and desire. Then the wide, worn leather eased from the loops, one at a time, hand-over-hand pulling it forward and wrapping it around his left hand until only a few inches swung free.
Brushing my hair off my forehead, he’d stare with cold eyes, making me face him, right hand at my throat, thumb stroking with loving strength.
Drop ’em, he’d muttered, eyes hooded with satisfaction. Asking me… how many. Forcing me to keep score. If I was right, his eyes would gleam with satisfaction. If I was wrong…
Time ceased to exist, I ceased to exist, memory and sensation cross-firing, misfiring, until there was no distinguishing past or present. Without being told, I sensed what was allowed, what wasn’t. The only rule… there were no rules.
Nails, blunted and squared, teased, one, then two, then many… cold steel gone, set aside for a more personal approach. If I sighed, if I made any sound at all, it was more with regret than relief.
She hummed a question, guttural and thick, but looking wasn’t permitted… seeing was, an inner vision releasing a floodgate of heat, cascading and pooling in my groin. A touch, one, one only and I’d be gone.
She’d yet to cup the length, preferring to toy and promise, massaging the soft sacs, forcing them to contract. My legs grew numb, her weight, the grip of unyielding fabric, all driving blood and sensation away, upwards, as she directed lust and stole my control.
I whimpered.
Hands clasped my ankles, pinning me in place.
Soft scuffling, chairs being moved, a brush of dreadlocks against my chest, dragging lower, blanketing my tortured flesh.
A voice like an angel, child-like, trilled in my ear, assuring me though the words made no sense.
Hot chill and icy heat spilled over my belly, inching closer, the smell of liquid wax assaulting my nostrils. I opened my mouth to breath and gagged, the taste of copper vicious and unexpected. Bucking against the restraints, twisting, moaning, my body yearned to give in to fear.
They say you always remember the first time. Your first kiss… Your first love…
The first time you face down a bully.
He returned from a teacher conference, face set in hard lines, my mother’s voice anxious.
Acting out. Anger issues. Where did he get that from? He’s a good boy, they have the wrong one…
I loved her for that, the blindness. She’d earned it the same way I had.
I knew it was coming. Small for my age, weak, all I could do was endure and pray someday I’d become the man who would stand up and say no.
That wasn’t the day.
You’re bleeding, he’d said. Flat, unemotional.
Keeping my back to him, I wallowed in the harsh stinging on my thighs and buttocks, the trickle of blood a new feeling, distracting. And unnerving.
I didn’t hear him leave but he returned with a washcloth and gently dabbed at the slices and welts, hand on my hip to steady himself, steady me.
Eyes scrunched shut, I’d yet to succumb to the tears. Then he ordered me to turn around and I dared a stare filled with hate, fists clenched and ready.
His eyes shone with… pride.
He told me to take care of myself. And left me alone. He never used the belt again.
I was a man now. Only fists would do.
Drifting back into consciousness, I became only dimly aware of the long pulls, the wet heat enveloping my cock. I reached for her fine silky hair, wanting to crush the waves between my fingers. To hold her head steady while I pummeled her mouth.
Cold steel bit into my temple and I arched back into the cushion, the taste of iron thick on my tongue. Lip throbbing, swelling where I’d bitten down… in ecstasy or pain I hadn’t a clue.
Gripping the arms of the lounger, I willed my muscles rigid, riding the storm, wave after wave as she sucked me dry and left me quivering.
And then her weight lifted and heat settled on skin sheltered under her sweet cunt. I hissed for breath through clenched teeth, neck aching from bracing against the unyielding plastic. The screen door snicked open and closed.
The muzzle rested a moment longer, making a point. Then Ivan slipped it into the holster and set it on the ground.
Looming over me, he said with a small smile, “That’s your retainer,” and left me to ponder what had just happened.
****
I walked aimlessly for an hour, perhaps more. When my stomach rumbled, I found a Jewish deli and settled into a booth with a Rueben and a side of slaw and dill pickles. They had sweet tea, and I smiled at the anomaly and the mixing of cultures.
Mercifully, Ivan had accorded me enough privacy to dress and gather my wits. I was going to make my escape through the rear gate but the mountain beckoned from the screen door. Too tapped out to consider other options, I nodded and followed him inside to the small living area where I’d first fallen in lust with my Ukrainian angel.
He handed me a large brown envelop. Glancing through I saw some photos and sheets of paper with careful block handwriting. I wondered who was hiring me and for what. Ivan didn’t seem predisposed to fill me in on pertinent details.
If I thought Sasha would make an appearance, I was wrong... and vaguely relieved. At some level I was embarrassed and ashamed, not so much for her pleasuring me out in the open, with Ivan the mountain in attendance, but more for how she’d kick started a memory dump. One set I’d worked very hard to bury, the other one something I’d been digging for over the last sixteen years. That I couldn’t separate one from the other might be fodder for a shrink. When I got back from New Orleans, I had to seriously con
sider calling Dr. Farnesworth for a consult.
If I got back.
I replayed the bizarre conversation in my head…
“Yer gonna shoot yer dick off.”
I was actually surprised he seemed concerned about that.
He elucidated, “Me, I like a Glock.”
Familiar with the argument about decocking versus long trigger pull, I simply shrugged. Chalk it up to taste.
What Sasha wanted was my undivided attention and I had to admit, it was unconventional and very, very effective. A Swiss army knife on the other hand might have been a complete turnoff.
As insane as it seemed, I’d be willing to take that for a test drive, assuming I ever got down and naked with her again. My ego was more than willing to pretend the blow job had been above and beyond just services rendered.
But like Ivan had said… it was a retainer and I held the to-do list in my hot little hands.
“In a nutshell, exactly what am I looking at here?” I waved the envelope.
A board creaked upstairs. Then the house settled. Ivan got twitchy all of a sudden, looking left and right, then leaned forward, his voice a bass rumble, pitched for my ears only.
“We hear shit, me and her. She don’t do the clubs… you gotta understand that. But some of the others do.”
“Svetlana and Nairi.”
“Yeah, coupla others. Not from here.”
I assumed that meant they were safely ensconced in the 7th Street bordello.
“So what’s that got to do with anything?”
He stared at me like I was dim. And here I’d been thinking about asking him to draw pictures because text-wise he was coming up short in the information department.
“They got noticed.”
Pulling teeth had to be easier. “By who?” Dammit all to hell, get to the effing point.
“Manny, he knows this guy in the Council. They asked for our girls so he did a delivery, door-to-door, special services kind of shit.”
“Go on.” I reached for the notebook. Ivan didn’t object.
“It got real regular. Apparently one of the muckety-mucks took a fancy to Svetlana and made an offer.”
“What kind of offer?” My spidey-sense went on full alert. I wasn’t aware that the Council of Gotham ran any side businesses, other than the clubs and keeping tabs on the loonies. Even in subcultures flaunting all of society’s rules, image was still everything.
“Ya gotta understand. The Council’s making big bucks off tourists, but that ain’t all there is.”
“So educate me.”
“It ain’t cheap to use their special services, and even the top doms like to indulge every now and then.”
“I know they handle the festivals and co-ordinate events, skimming off every venue. You’re saying there’s more?”
“That’s exactly what I saying.”
“Forgive me, but I’m still drawing a blank here. What’s that got to do with Svetlana and Nairi getting…” I choked on the words and picked a spot over his left shoulder, praying for enlightenment.
“At first, Manny thought he’d been dealing with just the Council, ya know?” I nodded encouragingly. “But the one who did Svetlana? There was something off, like he was weird. Nobody seemed to know much about him, yet he was the one pulling the strings, doing deals. Like I said, you hear stuff if you pay attention.”
“So what happened?”
“Sasha and me don’t know exactly what they offered Manny, but he said no. He even took a meet with some of his people and they backed him up.” A frown crossed his face. “A couple days later she turned up dead.”
That was interesting and exactly what I suspected. This whole case was looking like whores being drained was just a sideshow. A message. The fly in the ointment was that Svetlana had been victim number three. So who else was involved?
I was looking too low on the food chain, not seeing the forest for the trees.
Ivan worried at a hangnail for a while. I jotted a few things down, then asked, “You think there’s something going on in the Council?”
I was thinking power-play, maybe the BDSM or Goth’s were looking to acquire ready-made assets. The Mafia families had to make do with muscle to keep the peace. It might be a whole new ballgame when it came to manipulating hidden desires and obsessions, something the subcultures catered to quite successfully.
Ivan waited until I looked up and said, “I don’t know how to explain it. The girls seen some stuff… well, nobody believed them.”
“Except for you and Sasha.” He nodded yes. Thinking out loud I said, “They were numbers three and five, the first two happened two, three weeks before Svetlana. Same deal. Drained dry. I need to know who their pimp is…”
“His name’s Jorge. He runs the Haitian connection. His girls are sluts; they ain’t clean.” The man shifted in the seat, clearly debating how much more to share. Finally he said, “Jorge’s been looking to expand. We heard he was taking talks with the Council to see to moving a Haven into his jurisdiction.”
“And…”
“Well, lemme just say his words weren’t falling on deaf ears.”
Curious about the timeline, I asked, “So when did all this start?”
“After the Holidays. We heard there were new players in town, but they didn’t seem to have anything to do with us. But in April was when things got hot.”
Shit. My suspicion about whoever’d been offing the hookers in the Big Easy moving north might be right on the money, just faster than I’d figured. If this was some organizational infighting, I was going to be out of my depth in no time flat. I might have to be a good citizen and share with O’Hearn because as far as backup plans went... it was me, myself and I.
I still wasn’t clear on how Sasha rolled with all this. I took a chance and asked outright.
“You brought it to our door. After your visit on Saturday, Sasha picked up a stalker. And I got a feeling the house is being watched. The girls, they talked to her. She knows what they know.”
Which apparently wasn’t much and seemed all out of proportion to any damage she could do.
I muttered, “She’s a whore for fuck’s sake, who’s gonna listen to her?”
Ivan moved fast, faster than anyone built like him should. The switchblade and his foul breath vied for pride of place on my neck. I mumbled an apology but knew I’d racked up some negative cred that would be tough to work off.
When the testosterone ebbed enough he could back off and give me some breathing space, I asked, “What exactly do you expect me to do here?”
“Make it right. Either you stop what’s going down, or you find somebody who will.”
“And what do I get in return? Free blow jobs? Pity fucks?”
Flipping the switchblade closed, he grinned down at me.
“You get to live.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Power of Three
The girl behind the counter gave me a flirty glance but looked away quickly when the bell above the door chinked dully. That I sat with my back to the door was a good indication of my befuddled state of mind. It wasn’t something I’d do in normal circumstances.
Clarity slid into the booth opposite me.
She was average height, maybe five-six, ten, fifteen pounds over ideal. Business efficient, she wore a blue, pin-striped suit with a pencil skirt, custom-fit to hide the extra pounds, not that the weight detracted from her looks, not at all.
I’d put her mid-thirties at first glance. Reddish blonde, done up in a tight bun that looked positively painful. She removed wire-framed glasses, leveled clear blue eyes on my face and slid a business card across the plastic tablecloth.
Fingering the card, I stared back, waiting.
She let me stew for longer than was comfortable, then decided opening negotiations might be prudent.
“Mr. Shephard, I represent Dark Haven, Inc.” She didn’t give her name. I didn’t ask. “My employer has a proposal that might be of interest.”
I sh
rugged. My flight wasn’t until the next afternoon, leaving me plenty of time to kill. That didn’t mean that she’d piqued my curiosity.
“You’re familiar with my employer…”
“Yes.” I left it curt and leaned back against the stiff cushion.
“Well, then, I have a car waiting.”
“Let it wait.” She arched a thin eyebrow, annoyed, but I continued, ignoring her. “I have questions.”
“Of course, and I am here to answer as many as I can to allay your concerns.”
“Oh, I really doubt that.”
I needed some idea of how many ‘interested parties’ were playing in my sandbox today. I had two in the bag. The legal beagle sitting across from me made it potentially three. But were there more?
Hoping she’d clear the air on one question nagging both me and Ivan, I said, “So, answer me this… have you had me followed?”
Like a shutter clicking on a camera lens, there was that instantaneous flicker of concern. Not for being caught out. No, this was news to her, and the woman clearly didn’t take kindly to being surprised.
Tight-lipped she said, “Not to my knowledge, Mr. Shepherd.”
I took that as an unequivocal ‘no’ because nothing but nothing was getting by her. I had ten solid years of experience to back up that particular hunch.
I threw some bills on the table and slid out of the booth, offering an arm, but the woman ignored me and smoothly moved toward the door. The ride was a black Lincoln Town Car. A bodyguard doubling as chauffeur held the door. She got in first and adjusted the skirt to sit primly about her thighs. I wasn’t a fan of nylons but the sheers she had on encased very shapely legs.
That reminded me of Sasha, coming down the stairs the first time I’d seen her. And then I thought about what she’d done to me in the hot sun. Perspiration beaded on my forehead as I struggled to control my body’s reaction to that memory.
