“He sampled the goods?” Terry’s tone turned ugly.
“Master?” I glanced up at him, a look of innocence on my face.
“Did he fuck you?” The words were spoken as if to an idiot.
“No, Master. I just had to perform for him.”
“Get up. Hold out your wrists.”
Climbing back to my feet, I kept my eyes staring down at the sidewalk as leather cuffs were locked on my wrists, but they were linked together in front of me, a big mistake on their part. Then the man named Terry lifted my chin to examine my face.
“Yeah, it’s that kid from the billboard, all right,” he said, picking up a wide collar from the front seat of the car and buckling it around my neck. “Monahan is going to be pissed when he finds out that his toy was already played with. Hank, come here and get his hair out of the way for me.”
I cringed inwardly as Hank came around and pulled on my hair, taking the liberty to rub a hand over my leather-covered ass at the same time, saying, “He ain’t got underwear on!”
“He’s a whore, what did you expect?”
I’m right here, asshole, I can hear you, I thought angrily.
“You think he’ll be made available like that other kid, that blond one? He used to cry when I made him suck…”
“Probably not,” Terry said, cutting Hank off abruptly. “Monahan doesn’t share. Plus, they have a history together. This punk here used to be a computer programmer, or some shit like that. He got his hand caught in the cookie jar though, and it was supposed to have been sliced off. Does this look sliced off to you?” He grabbed at my crotch. “Marcus fucked up, and took this boy as his own, personal blow-up doll. Now Marcus is ‘forgiven’, and Monahan gets a new toy.”
“Forgiven,” Hank snickered, laughing at Marcus’s supposed demise.
“Just never get on the wrong side of Monahan, Hank. You might end up begging for forgiveness. I’m supposed to use this…” Terry held up a short rod in front of me. “One end gets attached to your collar, the other to your cuffs. It makes sure you cause no trouble. But I think Monahan would rather like to see that little submissive thing you do.”
“I could get used to that submissive thing,” Hank jeered.
“I will obey the Masters,” I said, biting the inside of my cheek to keep from telling them exactly what I thought of them. Hank especially needed a punch in the mouth and a boot up the ass.
Hank walked to the front of the car, while Terry pushed me towards the rear. “Get in and sit facing the back of the car, cause only decent folks get the good seats facing forward, slut,” he told me. “And don’t make any noise. No whining or crying, begging to be let go, or any of that lame, pussy shit.” He opened the door, and I climbed in and sat down, making sure to keep my face blank and my hair hanging down over my eyes.
Shade, I’ll meet you back home.
Be careful, my Lord Emperor.
I could hear the concern in her voice, and I appreciated it, knowing that I couldn’t have gotten where I was now if she hadn’t taken me under her paw, as it were.
I will, thanks, Nightshade.
Looking out the back window, watching where we were going, I kept my still and submissive posture. I could tell that Hank kept looking in the rear view mirror at me. He was giving off so many creepy vibes, along with feelings of lust, that I pulled my mental shield tight around me. The last thing I needed was to react to someone’s perverted desires and go into Flame. The other guy, Terry, he couldn’t care less about me, his order for a blow job having been nothing more than a show of dominance, his way of showing the little red-headed slave his place.
The drive with the two goons was uneventful, silent, and quick. A brief brush of their minds revealed that they were hired muscle and not very intelligent. That fitted in with what I knew of Silas.
He never liked to have any competition in the brains department. He was the king in his little world, and he surrounded himself with enough dumb pawns to make sure that he remained so. When I’d worked for him, I didn’t bow to him. I was smarter than he was, and we both knew it. That was why he always went out of his way to make my life a living nightmare. The Boss from Hell or The Demonic Dickhead were just a few of the titles he was called behind his back.
The car pulled up in front of a huge security gate, and we had to wait for a moment as it clanked and rolled back. Silas sure lived lavishly for an entrepreneur who claimed five years in a row that he couldn’t afford raises or Christmas bonuses for his staff. Bastard.
I kept my disgruntled thoughts off my face, and what I couldn’t mask, I hid behind my hair as the car moved forward again, smoothly taking us up the paved driveway to the front of the house.
It was a mansion, done in a faux-Tudor style. It seemed like every single light was on inside the building, but even with the manicured lawn and the ornate iron carriage lanterns hanging on the outer entrance, the place didn’t feel in the least bit welcoming.
The sedan stopped, and my eyes flicked a glance out of the side window, noting the man standing guard at the front door. Carefully, I reached out with my mind and swept the area, sensing the presence of a few guards milling around the perimeter.
As Hank set the car into park, I lightly touched the doorman’s thoughts and learned that there were just those four guards patrolling at the enclosing garden wall, and one other who was in the office monitoring all the cameras. Being this late at night, the main contingent of security had gone home to bed. So that meant, aside from Terry and Hank, there were just the doorman and the office guy for me to worry about.
Hank was sitting there, waiting for us to get out.
Come with us.
I implanted the thought into the driver’s mind. I needed to herd them all together. It would only take one of them to sound the alarm, and the other guards would come charging, guns blazing. Claudius had stressed more than once that receiving enough bullets in a vulnerable area such as the heart or the head would quickly send a vampire to his eternal rest. So the goal here was not to get shot at by multiple gunmen.
“My shift is over, I’m going home,” Terry said as he pulled me from the car’s interior and handed me over to the doorman.
“What was that?” Hank frowned, getting out of the car and looking at him. “Mr. Monahan placed you in charge.”
“He wanted Sex here, he’s here,” Terry answered, making a move to leave. I panicked slightly and grabbed at straws to get him to come with us to the office. What was a strong motivator?
You need to go to the bathroom.
“What the hell are you doing? I thought you were going home,” Hank said as Terry turned back around.
“I gotta go to the can. Got a problem with that?”
Hank lifted his hands up in surrender before flanking the other side of me, and then all three of us marched up toward the front door of the mansion. Things were working out good, but I still needed the doorman to come with us, so as he opened the door to let us pass, I dipped into his mind. His thoughts were centered on getting his cigarettes out.
You forgot your lighter in the monitoring office. Come with us.
He mutely joined us on our little march, and Hank looked at him somewhat puzzled as he led the way to the monitor room but shrugged it off. The man was doing his job.
The security guard looked up in surprise as the four of us walked into his monitoring station. “What the hell…”
At that precise moment, I lifted my cuffed hands and grabbed Terry’s gun from the shoulder holster under his jacket and pulled it free.
Four heartbeats later, and I was the last one standing.
Don’t think, I told myself. Do what you have to do. Check the bodies. Don’t linger. Don’t fucking stand there looking down at them. Move!
I used my internal radar and searched for others thoughts and possible alarm, my ears ringing from the sound of the shots I’d fired in the enclosed room. So far, so good. No one had been alerted.
Creeping out from the monitoring room, closing the do
or behind me, I began working my way down the corridor, pausing to mind sweep into any rooms I came across. But I didn’t encounter any more security.
Finally though, I felt someone. He was moving closer, and he walked with a purpose. Arrogance and self importance just radiated off that mind.
Silas Monahan.
I slid the gun I was holding into the covering foliage of a potted plant and dropped down to my knees, adopting a submissive pose, allowing my damp hair to hang forward. It was a chore to get my shoulders to slip out of their stiff line. Relax, I chanted to myself.
“Terry!” Monahan yelled, coming around the corner of the corridor. “Where the fuck are you? You should have gone and picked up that twink by now. I don’t pay you to…Well, well, well. What have we here?”
I felt his hand tangle in my hair, and he jerked my head up. “Edward…Damn, you’re beautiful. Who would have thought something amazing like this was hiding underneath all that fat?” He snapped the fingers of his other hand in front of my nose, and I blinked. “And you can see too! What a bonus for me. Those thick-rimmed glasses you used to wear hid those lovely green eyes of yours.”
He grabbed my chin and forced my face to turn left and right as he continued to stare at me. Then, taking his fingers from my hair, he transferred his hold to the ring on the collar I was wearing. He was strong, I realized as I found myself being jerked upwards. And I had to practically run after him or risk being dragged as he manhandled me back towards his room.
Silas Monahan was a sadistic, opportunistic bully who had always surrounded himself with sycophants and pretty, vacant airheads in order to make himself appear godlike in his own fucked-up empire. He had to be a good, solid six-footer, so hiking his wrist over his shoulder while holding onto the ring at my neck was intentionally done to cause me grief and also made sure I was almost climbing his back to keep up with him.
The newspapers and other multi-media loved him. He was the ideal figure of what an up-and-coming, future corporate giant was supposed to be like. His hair was always coiffed, to the point it looked like he had just emerged from a hair salon. Tall, fit, with perfect, white teeth and blemish-free skin. All of these perfections hiding a rotten, perverted, and twisted soul.
Aside from all that, and him ordering me killed, which was a big enough reason within itself, I hated this man.
Monahan marched us deeper into the bowels of his mansion. I probably should have kept my radar sweep up, but I was too intent on pretending I was a scared, lowly human while keeping my body from making as little contact as possible with him. He never said anything as he continued to drag me along, but the smug satisfaction that rose off him was almost overbearing. It made me want to vomit.
We came into a large room that was fully furnished and obviously decorated as a tribute to the movie The Great Gatsby. I didn’t have time to admire the view, though, because Monahan slipped his hand off his shoulder and threw me over the back of a nearby couch.
I bounced off the padded cushions and slammed into a glass and metal coffee table, catching my breath. I didn’t need to see Monahan’s face to know that he was wearing that same damn, condescending smile he’d always worn whenever he would stop by my desk to belittle me or criticize my work. He’d hated that I knew more than he did.
As big as I was, I must have intimidated him. I might have been fatter, but I was smarter than he was. And I may have been socially inept, but that was a skill that could be learned by anyone. Intelligence wasn’t, and being a dickhead came naturally to him. When I’d been one of his employees, I doubted that he could ever overcome being so intellectually inferior to me. And now, he was out of time to even try.
Tic Toc. Tic Toc. Your time’s just about up, Silas.
“I never thought that if I crooked my finger, you’d come a running, Xavier,” he was saying. “Then again, you wouldn’t have been able to see me beckoning you, anyway, being a half-blind, four-eyed, fat-faced freak.”
Now that I could breathe easily again, and the back of my neck wasn’t getting rubbed raw from the leather collar around it being pulled on, I was able to concentrate on reading his mind.
It didn’t take much more than a brush against his thoughts to feel his dark joy at having me here in his house, in his power…in his bed. Pretty face; tight, little hole.
My back was scraped from hitting the coffee table, and a small groan escaped me as I forced back a shudder and climbed to my knees, assuming submissiveness again. I was stronger as a vampire, and if I wanted to, I could probably kill him here and now with my bare hands. But I had to find out from him first how many more there were after us.
Monahan laughed, and the sound of his laughter sent chills down my spine. “Marcus taught you well. He should have been a trainer rather than a hired killer. I can see that he had an affinity for it,” he said, his voice mocking. “Too bad he decided to take his work home with him. He had a good eye though. I never saw this in you, Xavier. I knew you had a brain, but…” He let out a whistle. “Marcus could do things to people’s heads. Did he fuck with yours? Is that how he got you so skinny and hot? He fucked you in the head as good as he fucked you in the ass. I bet you screamed like a little girl when he bent you over and did you.”
“Yes, Master,” I agreed meekly, thinking about how I was going to rip his contemptuous tongue right out of his head.
There was a pause, and then Monahan let out a loud belly laugh. “Oh my God, this is great. You used to be so arrogant. I couldn’t stand looking at your podgy face, with that brilliant mind trapped inside. I always had to bring you down to earth. Who the hell did you think you were?”
I figured on it being a rhetorical question, so I just bowed my head in answer and counted to ten to keep my temper in check. There was a chinking noise as ice fell into a glass, followed by the sound of liquid being poured over it. I continued to count to twenty.
“Marcus gave you a fuckable frame, Xavier. Phew! I could have swallowed my tongue when I saw that big billboard up by the highway. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I noticed the hair immediately. Never seen anyone else with those shades of reds you’ve got.”
His fingers suddenly raked through my hair, and I barely kept from twitching as his thumb ran along my bottom lip, pulling it down so the slick, moist, inner skin lubricated his fingertip.
“You know what did it? You know what made me realize that it was you, Xavier? It was the mouth,” he told me. “Even when you were a fat son of a bitch, I thought you had the sexiest mouth I’d ever seen. I mean, the rest of you didn’t do a damn thing for me, but if you’d offered to get down on your knees to suck me off, I would have let you.”
I couldn’t contain a dry heave, and Monahan shoved me roughly to the floor with a hand in my face. “I know, the thought repulsed me too. You would have had to pay me to touch you. But that was then. Look at you now, Xavier.” He tipped his glass at me. “Did Marcus leave you that brilliant mind?” he asked.
“No, Master,” I lied. One more ‘master’, and I was going to go postal.
“That’s okay. You can’t have both beauty and brains. It wouldn’t be fair to the rest of us mortals,” he said, taking a sip of his drink and standing over me.
It was hard to read him. The sexual scenarios rising to the forefront of his mind were strong, and they were making me feel ill. I needed something to distract him so I could dig a little deeper.
Claudius had said that mind-delving would get easier the more I practiced. The only problem was I’d been out on the farm when he’d told me, and there was no way in hell I was going to practice binding and persuading skills on my own family. So I wasn’t as experienced at this mind-reading thing as I should have been. How was I going to break through Monahan? Give him what he wants, and how he wants it, I decided.
I couldn’t get back up to my knees with the way he was standing over me so I laid flat on my back, lifting one arm up and brushing the bangs off my forehead. I hooded my eyes and made sure to take a long time licking
at my bottom lip. Yuck, he smoked. The heavy tang of tobacco coated the tip of my tongue as it brushed over where Monahan’s thumb had touched me. My lip tasted ghastly. Quickly retracting my tongue I lowered my other hand and let it rest on my bared strip of stomach, my fingers swirling over my exposed skin.
“Are you going to fuck me now, Master?”
Monahan’s eyes widened, and for a brief moment his thoughts stilled as he watched me. That was all I needed to get inside his mind, and I discovered that there had been just the one team sent out tonight after Marcus, though others were on standby in case the first group had failed. He blinked just as I picked up that he hadn’t issued stand-down orders yet.
“You’re a tempting little slut, Xavier, but not right now,” he said, moving away a little, breaking my mental contact with him. “You aren’t for me. Not just yet. You’re a birthday present for my son. Maybe when he gets tired of playing with his toy, I’ll get a chance. The family that plays together…Ah, here comes your new master now.”
“Jeez, Dad, what the hell is the big idea in waking me up at this time of night?” someone complained.
“It’s morning. And I think I’ll be forgiven when you see your present, son,” Monahan replied, gesturing at me and spilling some of the liquor out of his glass and onto my stomach in the process.
“Present?” A younger carbon copy of Silas stepped around the couch and into my line of view. I shuddered. “You got me a man?”
“A slave, actually,” Monahan corrected. “Sit up, Xavier, and show your master your pretty face.”
I rolled over onto my stomach, drawling my knees up under me, and I purposely pushed my bronze, leather-covered rump towards the boy before kneeling upright and pulling the hair back from my face with a flourish.
“Sex? You got me Sex!”
Oh, how I am living to regret using that name. It’s going to haunt me forever, I know it is.
“His original master finally paid off his debt,” Monahan was saying. “Sex belongs to me, and I am giving him to you.”
“What can I do with him?”
Cake: A Blood Nation Novel (Volume 1) Page 36
