When the Dark Wins

by Addison Cain

  This was it.

  Existence narrowed to a tight cluster of truths and imperatives. Buckeye was a set of open holes to serve these cocks. She needed to breathe, but the priests wanted her to wait.

  Complete faith.

  They took from her and she served, dogged at first, but then writhing until they let her up. One huge breath and then down. Fucking. Riding the chaos. Black and red patterns gathered behind her eyelids.

  Water.

  Air.

  Water. Air. Water.

  She choked. Her pussy throbbed on the frantic cock. There was no escape. None until they allowed it. Buckeye jerked. Thrashed. Screamed bubbles around thrusting girth.

  They wouldn’t let her up. Wouldn’t let her anything except surrender.

  When it hit, her body danced like lightning. Hips rabid against Raymond, lips and tongue gulping at Levi. Buckeye came, milking the men in her body, even as they lifted her above the surface.

  Levi splattered her chin and chest. Raymond drove home, pulsing into her body, well beyond her control.

  She was twitching, her bones heavy as they carried her up and out. Laid her on the wet stone, knees under her belly, face down, to work at her bindings.

  Her arms came loose first. Buckeye coughed, spit water as she got them under her, the ache in her shoulders throbbing. When the priests freed her legs, she rose up like a dog, head down, lungs heaving. Warmth leaking along her thigh. More water dripped to the floor from her hair.

  No one was touching her. Raymond and Levi had left her periphery. She brought a hand up to clear semen from her lower lip.

  Some noise happened—a shuffle or scrape over stone—and Buckeye raised her head. Mather was still in his chair, leaning back, his cassock a white mantle over spread knees where his palms rested. An erection tented the fabric.

  Buckeye climbed from shaken stupor to something worse. He’d been doing this. He was the one inside her with those words of his. And this was the first visible slip of control she’d ever seen in the man.

  One of her knees moved forward, pushing her spine. A palm followed. She was crawling toward manifestation.

  When her fingers reached the hem of his robes, Buckeye didn’t stop. She knelt between his feet and began pushing his cassock up over his knees, his thighs. Other than shifting his hands to rest on the arms of the chair, Mather made no move.

  His trousers were white, as well, and water from her hair dropped onto them in darkening little pats. A ridge stood out at his groin. Her palms slid to his fly.

  “I knew you’d be the one,” he said.

  The voice curled in her belly. Intimate. Not a proclamation, at least not yet. Buckeye worked fabric apart. Brought him into the open. The priest sucked air through his teeth when she closed him in her damp fist.

  Mather was hot in her hand. Pulsing after she tested him with a squeeze. He was a man. He was a man under here, and he could preach about service and obedience all he wanted.

  Buckeye raised her eyes to his. She knew. They both knew.

  She dipped her head, never breaking his gaze. Took him into her mouth.

  He made some noise that couldn’t even be called a groan when Buckeye closed on him. Some consolidation of breath released up through his throat. Pupils dilated on those blue-grey eyes as she sank down to suck his cock.

  It was the height of Covvie hypocrisy. Their head priest in a darkened chapel, some VT sinner on her knees, dripping baptismal water and any number of other fluids, servicing his prick.

  The Vices always sell.

  But Buckeye was getting nothing for this. Only sounds, tight and controlled from the priest in white, as she bobbed in his lap. Her hands gripped his thighs, her neck doing all the work. She fell into it, letting her lids drift closed, the soft tissues in her mouth suckling, smacking. Obscene.

  You’re not dead. You’re not dead.

  Mather was breathing through his mouth, now. How long had it been for him? Not ‘never’, surely. A man with his kind of power? She saw his fingers curl into the wooden arm of the chair.

  “S-ervice without prompting is re—” His words broke when she drew her teeth along his length. “Rewarded. Brother?”

  Distraction had him faltering, but the command was still there. Buckeye heard steps behind her. She moved a hand from his thigh to stroke his shaft. Her lips and tongue kept up their work.

  Something was nudging her knees apart. Shoes. Other limbs. A body was wedging in, fabric chafing her calves. Mather’s palm cupped the side of her face, another failure in self-control, just as hot breath fogged between her thighs.

  A mouth closed on her pussy.

  “Mmph!” Cock muffled her squeal. Levi or Raymond, she didn’t know which, was lapping along her slit, even as Mather throbbed into the roof of her mouth.

  She lasted no time at all. The inexperienced fervor between her thighs, a frenzy of lips and tongue over her clit, leapt to join a foreground where her jaw stretched around cock. Where stone bruised her knees and she dragged clergy down by their vices.

  Her body seized a second climax from the mire of hopeless fortune. Even as she gushed on the chin of the priest between her thighs, pussy milking at nothing, Mather worked himself home to the root. Male flesh kicked in her mouth, her profanities burbling as nonsense around pulsing meat.

  Semen spurted on the back of her tongue. Hot, bitter. Again.

  Mather rode roughshod through his orgasm, face a grimace while his base nature coated Buckeye’s throat. She looked up at him, tears streaking from the corners of her eyes, lips stretched in perverse worship.

  “Accept this blessing,” he said as he let her up.

  The strokes at her pussy slowed. Buckeye raised her head and Mather’s glossy cock slipped out of her mouth. Her lips were swollen, parted when she met his eyes again. She caught just enough breath to speak.

  “Thank you, Father.”

  He pushed a thumb into her open mouth. Drew it out and up. Painted two lines of seed and saliva on her brow. They intersected in the form of a cross.

  Days bled into weeks.

  There was time in the cells, and there was time in service. In between, there were cold showers. The Vicers numbed to their routines. One woman’s cell was now conspicuously, permanently empty.

  Buckeye’s world alternated between sleep and black cassocks. Dreamless stupor and time on her knees, her back. Spreading, presenting, receiving. A single partner or complex groups. Writhing collections of limbs, of hot, damp places connecting, working.

  Her compliance had earned her a blanket. A mattress.

  Mather never involved himself again. At least not in body.

  His voice was there. Fading in and out from the edges, along with the white of his robes, encouraging service. Obedience. Thanks. Her eyes and ears would follow whenever he appeared, some sick remaining fragment of her soul hoping he would break again. He would touch her. Force her. Anything,

  When the door of her cell swung inward one night—day? Who knew?—Buckeye’s limbs began to gather by rote. To lift her to stand, to follow the guards.

  It was not a guard who stepped into the tiny space. And it was not a priest.

  She could barely make her throat work.

  “August?”

  “Goddamn, Bucks.” He shut the door behind him, eyeing her nudity.

  She reached back to yank the blanket over her front. A world of Covvie priests and guards accustomed to her nudity was a world apart: August was from the VT. August was real.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” She hadn’t forgotten how to cuss.

  Movement from the corner of her eye. She ticked her head to the side to see a familiar form entering another cell, four doors down. Wayland. More of the Vicers woke and stared.

  “Came to see you, sweet thang.” He hooked thumbs into his belt, and she wanted to slap the drawl right out of his mouth.

  Fucking traitor.

  Buckeye smeared her gaze down to his boots and back up to his lying face agai
n. Just that smirk amid blond stubble made weeks of passivity flee like vermin before a light. He’d sold her. Sold all of them into this.

  “Fuck you,” she said. “How’d you even get in here?”

  His smile only grew. “Now that ain’t no way to treat someone comin’ to offer you a favor.” August glanced at Wayland, who was saying something inaudible to a kneeling VT woman. “ ‘Sides. Vices always sell. You know how it is. Ain’t hardly ever met a guard couldn’t be bribed.”

  Buckeye scowled and backed onto the thin mattress until her shoulder blades came against the wall. “So you came all the way to Virtue just to do me a favor.” She squinted at him, cynic blades for eyes.

  “Not just,” he said, tugging something out of a back pocket. “You think eleven rentbodies is enough for all the hypocrites in the Church? Preacher Man wants another batch. I’m here for instructions.”

  Ideas about Elijah Mather clashed in her head. Rage and climaxes. War and surrender, forever. She wanted it to end. She had just made peace, and now here this asshole was, stirring things up.

  “What do you want, August?”

  “Like I said, gonna offer you a favor.” Something awful glittered in his eyes. “Or maybe I oughta say ‘a chance’.” He stepped in her direction and held out his hand. A tiny notebook and pencil were level with her face. She blinked at him.

  “I don’t really like sellin’ my own people,” he began. She opened her mouth but he flipped the notebook vertical, a gesture for her to stop. “Didn’t say I wouldn’t do it. Payment is payment.” He dipped his chin, acknowledging his flaws. “But I don’t feel great about it.”

  “Yeah?” she said. “Then maybe get us the fuck outta here, you backstabber.”

  He shook his head. “Now that ain’t gonna happen. Bribe some guards for a little time is one thing. Ain’t gonna be no sneakin’ twelve nekkid people out from under Elijah Mather without gettin’ caught. But maybe if you had anyone back home …” He offered the notebook and pencil. “You might wanna send a message? So they don’t think you just up and died on ‘em.”

  Back home.

  The idea wiped every thought from Buckeye’s head.

  New Covenant wasn’t home. Would anyone in The Vice miss her? She had almost no one left back there.

  Almost.

  She narrowed her eyes at the offer. “What’ll it cost me?”

  August grinned. He took the pencil and paper in his off hand, and fished in his front pocket again. Came out with something balled in a fist. A too-cocky saunter took him to the cell divider, and he leaned on it with a shoulder, weight on one leg and the other ankle crossed over the first, toe of his boot on the floor.

  “Found out why you were so worried about payin’ back money.” His smile showed teeth. “Lucky Bucky.”

  The nickname raised hair on her arms. Frozen fingers dove beneath her ribs and squeezed. August opened his fist to show a pair of dice on his palm, bones bleached white as Fortune’s promise.

  Fuck. No.

  “Thought you’d like to play the odds.”

  Her pulse lubbed in her throat. Mouth went dry.

  Who’s this fuck been talkin’ to?

  “See, I figger you roll against me,” he went on, “and if you win, I let you write your little note.”

  Her muscles were a mass of knots. Here it comes.

  “And if I win …” His focus shifted to Wayland. Buckeye followed the look to see a former lustworker peeling back the halves of the other man’s fly. A similar pad and pencil lay on the ground.

  She wanted to scream. Was that all she was goddamn good for? Was there no further purpose for her in this whole fucked up world than to coax men to their sticky ends?

  He looked down at her and gave a tilt of his head to his proffered hand. “Watcha say? Feelin’ lucky?”

  In her head, she called him every name in the book. Smug prick probably thought he was being reasonable, but it didn’t matter. Her old refrain was rising up to drown all that out.

  Come on Bucky, let’s get Lucky.

  And sometimes, she had.

  Sometimes.

  At least take a chance.

  Maybe August was lying. Maybe he’d never deliver the message. But what was one more dick? One more and she could get word back home. Keep him from worrying.

  Come on, Bucky.

  She hated herself. Hated everything.

  Buckeye sneered. “Fine.”

  “Well then come on over here, Lady Luck.” He offered the hand with the dice again, not moving away from the divider. “Let’s see how you do.”

  She flung the blanket back in disgust and stood, ready to be done. Someone who sold their own was worse than any Covvie, no matter how convoluted their ideas.

  In two strides she faced him and snatched a die from his hand. His fingers closed around the other.

  “Ladies first.”

  Let’s get lucky.

  She rattled the die in her fist. Dropped it on the floor, glaring at him without looking down at her roll. He dipped his head with interest, craning to see the pips, and hissed through his teeth.

  “Ooh, five,” he said, dripping enthusiasm. “Good one, Gambler.”

  Buckeye glanced down to confirm, only to see his die tumble down beside the sole of his boot. Half a dozen black eyes stared back at her.

  Shit.

  August hummed satisfaction. “Tough break.” He was already stowing the pencil and notebook back in his rear pocket. A rough hand came to her shoulder. And pressure. “I’m gonna need to collect on this here win.”

  The traitor was already shoving her down, working apart his belt. Her face was hot, as though something like this didn’t already happen nearly every day now.

  But this was different. August knew what he was doing. There was something like innocence among the younger priests. Like they had no more control over their bodies than she did, their eyes glazed and overwhelmed when she met them in service. Only Mather managed to keep above it. And August, well … he was no innocent. Not by a mile.

  He had his cock in hand, pulling it plump, crowding her against the divider even as she scuffled backward on her knees to avoid him. There was nowhere left to go when the back of her head met transparent wall, and August smeared semi-hard cock along the seam of her mouth.

  “Go on.”

  She closed her eyes. Let it happen.

  Lips parted by rote, closing around meat. Drawing the rush of blood, the swelling of muscle with a busy tongue and suction. Her face close to the scrub of hair at his crotch reminded her what a luxury bathing was in The Vice.

  Just get done. Get him off.

  But August was not one of the priests, to just stand there and be serviced. His palm was on top of her head, boots spraddled on either side of her hips. He began stuffing his cock into her face like he was trying to hide it from enforcers.

  Her eyes were wide above a garbled noise of surprise. Hands and feet scrabbled against floor, thighs, hard plastic wall at her back. A fist was in her hair, and her skull thumped against the dividing wall in a dull rhythm.

  “There we go.” His voice floated down, a useless balm that did nothing to smooth the jerk of hips, the onslaught of battering flesh.

  She sputtered around him. Her throat made continuous, percussive glottal noises. There was no way. No way to take more, but he had more. Had more and gave it, holding her head from both sides in splayed palms while her face turned red and her nose mashed into his lower belly.

  When he pulled back, she heaved for air. Coughed. Had a full mouth again.

  Just come. Just fucking come, already.

  Delirium took over. Claws hooked into the cliff’s edge of the assault, taking her down. Survival mode.

  Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

  And then everything stopped.

  She was panting. Blood pulsed into the ache at the back of her head, which would probably bruise beneath the hair. August came down on a knee, inches from her face, one lazy hand jacking his red prick
. She tried to make her eyes focus.

  “Double or nothing,” he said, scooping the scattered die near her left leg with his free hand.

  Buckeye blinked at him. Swallowed to soothe her throat.

  “You win, I let you write this note. You lose”—his eyes ran a hot line down her belly, between her thighs—“I take this pussy.”

  Double or nothing.

  The words were her drug.

  The odds are the same, Bucks. Every time. You know that.

  But there was still a chance. She fumbled for a die, refusing to look away as though he might jump on her. Her fingers found it, Squeezed.

  Come on, Bucky.

  Rolled. Looked.

  Four.

  Her heart pounded. Not bad, not bad.

  August dropped his die. Buckeye about dropped dead.

  “Looks like today ain’t your day,” he said, while they both stared at the five. “Now stand your ass back up.” He was already coming to his feet.

  No!

  “Wait!”

  She grabbed up the dice. Thrust her fist in the air for him to take one back.

  His grin dripped victory. “Honey, you already lost.”

  “One more.” She jabbed the fist at him. “I win, you give me the paper after. You still … get to …” Nodded to his ready prick. Couldn’t bring herself to say it.

  The smile grew. He took one of the die. “You win, you can have the paper during,” he amended.

  “Fine.”

  “I win,” he said, “We’re gonna see how much of this fits in your ass.”

  Buckeye growled and looked at the backs of her eyelids. Took a long, slow inhale.

  Let’s get lucky.

  “Fine.”

  His die clacked to the ground, and he put a foot on it, hiding the top face.

  She grimaced and let hers tumble out of her palm.

  Twin spots, plain as day.

  Fuck. Really? Come on. Come ON!

  August lifted his boot. His grin wilted.

  “Well look at you,” he said, scraping the snake eye he’d rolled out of the way. “Maybe you are lucky.”