by Noah Rain
Of course, the feeling of panic rushed in soon after that. I shouldn’t have had to think about where I was—even who I was—because I didn’t go on week-long benders. I didn’t even drink.
Then the events of the night before—hell, of the last week—came back in a rush. That seemed to be happening to me a lot lately.
When I had last come to, I had found the pleasant memory of Scarlett and I sweaty, slippery and intertwined in the boxing ring sandwiched between images of armored Synners and electrified batons. This time, I remembered being cuffed to a support beam in some underground lair that was a gaudy mix of metal and plush carpeting, with an equal distribution of bean bag chairs and advanced technology.
I sat up in bed. I was in a bed, and found that I was unbound, and quite naked. There was no rope or metal links around my wrists, which weren’t scabbed over but were purple with deep bruising. As I examined my body, I found that my wrists weren’t the only things I had damaged.
My left side still had a large, purple-black splotch that was a result of my very close acquaintance with one of the aforementioned batons. My left pectoral was also bruised and reddened, probably on account of Nina’s needle-led ministrations. Bud the most confusing bruising occurred on my pelvis, where the dip between my hip bones and above the base of my penis was light blue. That was when I remembered Nina’s other ministrations. I suppose I could let those slide.
I rubbed at my head, feeling a mix of sweat, possibly a bit of dried blood, and some more rubbery, slimy stuff I didn’t really want to think about. I had no doubt gone nose blind during the night, being in my own stench for so long, but I knew I must smell like a med ward.
There was no more of the dizzy, swimming, pounding sensation in my head, and my heartbeat felt normal, which is to say, calm considering the fact that I still seemed to be a naked captive in some sort of hidden complex.
I took stock of my surroundings, and found myself in a room that was dark red with a black ceiling. It seemed a little macabre, but also seductive. The walls were bare, and the floor was … was that gym matting? The bed was large and well-stocked with assorted red and black pillows and a pink down comforter.
I heard a latch turn and noticed a tiny spear of light emerge against the far wall as a door I hadn’t noticed before opened. I didn’t have time to cover myself, and found myself in the weird position of hoping to see one captor in particular, and not someone I didn’t recognize, if only so I could make sense of my situation.
Scarlett appeared in the doorway and leaned against the frame. She was wearing blue jeans and a white blouse with a black bra visible underneath. Her hair wasn’t bound back in a tail this time. Instead, she had it fluffed so it curled around her shoulders. The room was dark, but there was bright white light coming from the right side of the hallway, and it illuminated Scarlett, casting orange and ruby ribbons through her hair. It looked like sunlight, which only confused me more, since I had assumed we were underground.
“Where am I?” I asked, or tried to, but my throat just produced a series of rough clicking sounds.
Scarlett pulled a hand from behind her back and tossed a pile of clothes at me. A pair of black shorts and a white shirt. They hit me in the chest and I let them fall to either side. She walked into the room and paused to bend over at the end of the bed, opening some compartment, and produced a bottle of water that she tossed over to me. I caught that, unscrewed the cap and drank greedily, not caring as the liquid splashed over my chest and slid down my stomach.
“You stink to high heaven,” Scarlett said. “But I still can’t say I mind the view. Looks like Nina did a number on you. She’s easily excitable, and much stronger than she looks.”
I remembered that. Remembered Nina’s tight pussy sliding up and down my penis, her cherry-shaped ass slapping against my testicles when Darla released them from her mouth long enough to take a breath. It was Nina’s hips that had done the damage, grinding against my own, which had already been worked hard by Scarlett herself not a day or two earlier.
I drained the whole bottle and laid it among the covers to my left, and looked at Scarlett. She was sitting on the end of the bed, her head tilted curiously as her eyes traced the contours of my manhood. I didn’t mind that, even if I was starting to get a little annoyed at the lack of information.
Scarlett must have picked up on my frustration.
“We’re not underground,” Scarlett said, seeming genuinely sympathetic as to my plight. “We’re in Silk City.” That didn’t answer much. “And … you’re not totally, completely a prisoner. At least, not as far as I’m concerned.”
“Why do I get the impression that it isn’t really up to you?” I asked.
Scarlett shrugged and then nodded at the wall behind me. “It’s up to her.”
I twisted around and saw a five-foot tall painting hanging in an ornate brass frame. The painting depicted Sascha as a younger woman. She had blonde hair pulled back into a severe bun, and she was wearing a dominatrix outfit, her tits augmented and outlined by black leather, exposing the entire center, nipples and all, of the pair. The lips of her vagina were also visible, also outlined by black leather, and there were silver studs in the various straps that made up the getup.
Sascha was facing the camera, or the artist, one muscular thigh planted firm on the ground, while the other foot—complete with a sharp-looking black boot—jabbed into the back of a fat, white businessman. A Suit who had no pants or socks on, but still had a jacket, shirt and red and silver tie. He was blushing, and looked both afraid and excited. He also looked like he was drugged. I stared for a little while, and eventually noticed the spiked black collar around his neck.
“Ah,” I said, turning back to Scarlett, who was still studying the painting. “Now I understand the color choice.” I made a show of looking around the room. “It didn’t seem like you.”
“You hardly know me,” Scarlett said.
“I wouldn’t say that,” I said with an arched eyebrow. “I’d say I know you pretty well at this point.” Scarlett smiled, but I felt an unexpected surge of anger. “I know you’re a Synner, just the same as Vash and his boys. I know you work for a sociopath who gets off on dominating men, even if they do happen to be Suits. I know you kidnapped me, drugged me, and then … well, I won’t lie and say the last part didn’t have its perks. And now here you are, sitting on the end of my bed like a friend coming to me in my time of need, casually threatening me.”
Scarlett swallowed and frowned. She looked like she wanted to protest, but she ended up sighing and looking down in apparent shame. She was right about one thing: I didn’t know her enough to decide if it was genuine or not, but she certainly sold it well enough.
“You’ve got yourself in the middle of something, Konnor,” she said. “You did,” she added before I could argue. I fell silent as Scarlett’s eyes bored into me and held me in place. “If I hadn’t interfered with Vash and the Shockers, they wouldn’t have brought you to a Guild, to be judged by the credit system and placed into a debtors prison, Konnor. They were going to kill you, and that’s something you brought on yourself. The Guilders don’t kill. Not usually. Even if I despise them, I can admit that. They play by the corrupt rules their masters have established. But the Synners will. We’re outside of the system, Konnor—“
“Nobody is outside of the system, Scarlett,” I said. “The Synners in Jaxton are sucking the blood from it like fleas. Just because they’re zeroed out and avoided debtors prison doesn’t mean they aren’t bound to it. They need credit to survive just the same as anyone else. They just take their credit instead of earning it. And then there’s you lot, who dress as … well, who carry yourselves like Guilders but call yourself Synners. You might not be fleas, and you’ve undoubtedly compromised some high-up Suits and maybe their Pearl wives, but from where I’m sitting, it doesn’t look like the Silk City Vixens have done a whole lot for the good people. It lo
oks like they’ve done a whole lot for themselves.”
Scarlett’s tongue worked behind her teeth as a cascade of rebuttals seemed to form and then come undone.
She nodded back up at the wall behind me. “You really think we dress as Guilders?”
I smiled and shrugged. “I abandoned that one, though I have to admit, Sascha’s not half bad to look at.”
“If you feel sore after Nina,” Scarlett said with a bemused shake of her head, “I can’t imagine the state you’d be in after she was done with you. I may come to find out. She did like you.”
That was not what I would have guessed given our first and only exchange. “I don’t feel sore,” I amended. “I only look sore.”
“Right.”
“Nina still frustrated that the serum didn’t work?”
“Of course,” Scarlett said. “She lives for her science, and as much as she enjoyed your little row, what had her shaking was the thought of penetrating your mind, and gaining control. It’s not about you,” Scarlett said by way of clarification. “Controlling you means—“
“You can control anyone,” I said. “And take the system down.”
Scarlett could clearly tell by my tone what I thought of that idea. That pipe dream, but she didn’t seem to be in a mood to argue.
“How are you feeling?” I asked, seeming to surprise both of us with the question.
“About?”
“Well …” I fumbled, feeling ridiculous. “About me and … Nina and Darla. And I guess a bit of Carmen.”
Now it was Scarlett’s turn to arch an eyebrow. “You’re serious?”
I shrugged.
“Konnor,” she laughed. “This is business. You needed something out of me, which was protection, even if you didn’t know you needed it. And when I found out about your immunity to the pheromones—your immunity to pretty much everything, it seems—I knew we needed something from you.”
“You could have asked,” I said, trying to ignore the absolutely nonsensical feeling of betrayal I was feeling.
“Asked if we could take you back to our lair in Silk City, chain you to a beam, jab you with needles, use you as a lab experiment, and see if we could crack into your mind like it was a safe?”
“I mean,” I said, “when you put it like that, it sounds pretty bad. But, me being a guy, and with the way things ended up, I wouldn’t say it was anywhere near as bad for me as you’re thinking. Don’t feel bad about it.”
“Oh,” Scarlett said, her attitude shifting quickly, “I don’t. You should shower. You smell horrible. Carmen’s got breakfast up in the kitchen. Sascha wants you at the meeting.”
“Do I have a choice?” I asked.
“No,” Scarlett said. “But, pain or no pain, I don’t think you want Sascha to come home to you in her bed, fully nude, with your cock winking at the ceiling. She’ll find a use for you, and it, and you might not like it as much as you think.”
Scarlett went to get up and head toward the front door, but then she paused and turned around, her eyes going right down.
“But … out of curiosity,” she said. “Who did you like best?”
“Including you?” I asked with a smile.
Scarlett frowned. “Last night.”
“Hmm,” I tapped a finger to the side of my jaw. “I haven’t really given Carmen a go yet, but she did say something that got me excited about us.”
“Far as I know, she’s planning to spar with you this afternoon,” Scarlett said. She didn’t seem to be using the term metaphorically, and I had a feeling a spar with Carmen didn’t have as likely a chance to end how mine and Scarlett’s did.
“Darla was … very soft,” I said. “And very … she was soft.” I closed my eyes and remembered her tits sheltering my throbbing cock after Nina was done with me. “Nina was … very tight. And her hips. For a small package—“
“Right,” Scarlett said, turning and heading for the door. She jabbed a finger to her left once she was out in the hallway. “Shower’s that way.”
I found myself smiling as she slammed the door behind her.
Afterward, I sniffed the air, and winced. I did stink.
The shower was more difficult to find than I was expecting. When I was out in the hallway, I shielded my eyes from the bright light to my right and went to the left. The hallway was dark, with black tile walls and black tile floors. There were doors all along the way. I must have opened and closed a dozen of them, each leading to dimly-lit rooms whose light switches I didn’t bother trying to locate. Finally, after a few twists and turns, I found an open door to a big, gymnasium-style bathroom. This room had white tiles instead of black, and I left my confusion at the door while I rinsed off under one of the silver shower heads.
I felt better than I had in a week and dressed slowly, letting my muscles drink in the steaming heat of the sauna room, before I walked back into the hallway and made my way through the maze of dark corridors until the reflected sunlight lanced into my eyelids when I passed Sascha’s room.
The light got bright, and my heart started to beat faster as I neared what I assumed was the entryway.
I found myself in a wider hallway. To my right, there were double doors with push bars. I had a half memory of entering through those doors last night, and guessed the workshop/torture chamber the Vixens had me in was on the other side. To my left—after my eyes adjusted to the light—I saw the hallway narrow until it opened up into a wide room. There were women talking in there, and the sound of dishes. Pots and pans. And the smell of … was that bacon?
I followed my nose, and given the events of the past 24 hours, the scene that greeted me when I entered the Vixens’ kitchen left me even more breathless than Nina’s workshop or Sascha’s BDSM chamber had.
I found myself in a typical penthouse. And I say typical only in the way commercials and advertisements told me a Silk City penthouse was typical. The room was larger than any common room I had ever been in. I was standing on a dark, hardwood kitchen floor, with a large island to my right and a long white marble countertop with a silver sink set into it.
Ahead of me, two short stairs spilled down into a white carpeted living room with two gargantuan gray couches that formed a right angle toward a corner of the building made of glass. Outside, Silk City stretched in the mid-morning light, with all its silver and blue towers, and some of the neon signs still polluting the morning with their sinful light. I saw cars glittering in the streets below, but we were too high up to see anything more than the suggestion of people. We must have been in one of the tallest buildings in town, which meant Sascha was renting—or blackmailing—a major Suit for these digs.
The view was so jarring and spectacular that it took me a few blinking moments to notice who was in the room. Carmen was busying herself over the stove, flipping bacon—my senses had outdone themselves again. She was wearing tight green gym shorts and a black sports bra that crossed in the back. In her current outfit, it was easy to see that Carmen was the most athletic of the Vixens. She was strong without looking masculine, but her backside still showed an alluring degree of bounce as she fussed with breakfast. If she noticed me, she gave no indication.
The other Vixens were spread throughout the common area, with Scarlett lounging with a digital magazine tablet on one of the couches, pretending not to notice my dumbfounded expression. Nina was on the other couch. She was wearing a lime green t-shirt and short jean shorts and typing away furiously on her laptop and seeming to make a show of not noticing me, which led me to believe she was still angry at my physiology.
As for Darla, she was the only one of the Vixens who immediately looked my way, and did so with sparkling interest. She was wearing a bathrobe, once again. This one was just a shade whiter than her neck and the tops of the rounded breasts she hardly seemed able to contain. When she caught me looking, she smiled and I swallowed.
“
Carmen …” Nina whined.
“Ready,” Carmen said in a tone that made it clear she had said it several times.
The girls stood up, set their various devices down and made their way around the righthand corner of the kitchen, disappearing into an adjacent section of the grand room. Carmen nodded at me, dumped the steaming pan of bacon onto a wide plate and snatched up a platter with a stack of over easy eggs.
“Be a dear and bring that over,” she said.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I carried the damn bacon over, and found the four women sitting around a medium-sized glass table next to the wall of windows. There were two open chairs, and I hesitatingly chose the one next to Scarlett, who shifted slightly to her left as I sat down and set the platter down. I didn’t know if she was trying to give me room or move away from me.
We ate in relative silence, and I kept expecting one of them to say some snarky remark, or ask me questions, such as what I was still doing here and what I thought I was doing sharing a meal with them as if I wasn’t their hostage. Instead, breakfast took on the same sort of awkward feel it might if you joined your one-night stand partner’s family the next morning at the hotel.
We were in the most domestic setting you could imagine—I mean, excepting being in a penthouse inside of a billion-credit skyscraper—and I couldn’t help but stare at Nina and Darla and picture them from the night before. Nina didn’t react. In fact, she seemed annoyed at my attentions, while Darla giggled, drawing an eye roll from Carmen and a light blush from Scarlett.
The awkwardness stretched to the point of getting funny and then unfunny, until Carmen set her coffee mug down and leaned forward, propping her elbows up on the table and resting her chin in her hands as she looked across at me.
“Want to spar later?” she asked.
I looked at Scarlett, who shrugged.
“Um,” I said. “Sure?”
