by Noah Rain
“Well … not exactly. I mean, I just thought—“
“Shhh,” Nina said, pressing a finger to my lips. “But if you must know, I was planning on mixing the interleukins-pheromone elixir, along with a stab of synthetic adrenaline, right after climax. That way, we can see if flushing the system at the exact moment of oxytocin release provides better results, and makes you more suggestible.”
She even nibbled my ear after that last bit of foreplay. I would say it dampened the mood a bit, but as Darla licked at my neck and Nina bit at my lips, and the pressure around my cock started to move up and down as wandering hands pulled my boxers down to my knees, I was having a hard time finding anything to complain about.
Just as my boxers hit the floor for what felt like the hundredth time that week, the double doors flew open once again, directly in front of me.
I pulled away from Nina and looked straight ahead, surprised and relieved to see Carmen framed in the doorway with the late afternoon sunlight spilling in behind her through the wall of windows. There I was, fully naked, my arms around Nina and Darla, one of whom—nope, both of whom—had a hand tightly gripped around my cock. All of us right there in full view.
I said I was relieved to see Carmen instead of Sascha. Well, that was right up until she made it clear she wouldn’t be joining us. She didn’t say as much, but when she tossed a pair of black leather boxing gloves across the room, where they struck the polished concrete and slid over to me, I knew she wasn’t here for oxytocin.
Carmen’s eyes slithered down to my waist. She raised her eyebrows.
“You coming?” she asked. “You did promise me a spar this afternoon.”
I did no such thing, but then, I suppose Sascha had kind of promised a bunch of things on my behalf. Who was I to question what they were?
“Not yet,” I said.
“He will be,” Darla purred, biting at my shoulder. She was still tugging up and down, making it even more difficult to pull my attention from sex to violence despite Carmen’s obvious challenge.
“If this fucker cums on me in the ring without my say-so, he’ll have a lot more than Sascha to worry about.”
With that, she turned and cut right, heading down the hallway I hadn’t traveled yet and leaving me to deal with two rabid, half-naked women and a pulsing cock gripped between them. I could ignore Carmen, but I had a feeling that she wasn’t one I wanted to cross. And, while I loved a good roll in the sheets, or on the concrete, I loved a good spar even more.
That wasn’t even mentioning the fact that my last spar had ended up turning out pretty well for me.
“How big is this place?” I asked, remembering that Carmen had just referenced a fucking boxing gym.
“Big,” Nina said, and I felt something slide around the tip of my penis. I looked down, and saw that she had already taken me into her mouth. She was so small, she couldn’t get more than halfway down the shaft, and Darla laughed in a taunting manner.
“I need to go, ladies,” I said, pulling back and managing to extricate myself from their clinging, reaching grips with effort.
I grabbed my boxers and discarded t-shirt, and hastily donned them, painfully aware of the fact that I couldn’t quite fit it back under the band quite yet.
“Your funeral,” Darla called.
“Come back tonight,” Nina called over. “We have more … tests to run.”
I looked back before I exited the lab, and saw that the two women had turned their attention from me to each other. Much as I would have liked to watch, Carmen had me interested, and a little scared at the prospect of making her wait.
Chapter 11
Gloves Off
“Nina got it in your head that you’re some kind of superhero or something?”
I didn’t know Carmen well. I didn’t know any of the Vixens particularly well. But Carmen was the one I’d spent the least amount of time around. She seemed at once the most curious about me, and at once the one who didn’t want me to know her.
“Not sure I’d go that far,” I said.
We were standing in what looked like, but absolutely could not have been, a state-of-the-art combat gym. I only say it couldn’t have been in the awe-inducing sense, seeing how I had only just started to grasp that we were actually in a Silk City skyscraper, complete with its own laboratory, master suites, shower-sauna combo, and probably all sorts of rooms I hadn’t happened upon yet. And now this secret, not-so-secret hideaway of all-female, all-latex Synners had a fucking League-style gym to top things off?
Was that jealousy I felt? Hell yeah. It was.
The room was large—at least double the floor space of Jackie’s Gym. It had cherrywood floors that had been painted black, and piping in the ceiling that matched it. There was a large area of open mats. These were red and spongey. Ideal for grappling training. There were heavy bags, speed bags and all sorts of things to punch, but they were widely spaced. There probably wasn’t a place in the room I would risk breaking a window or a mirror or threatening a support beam with an ill-timed spin kick.
Speaking of mirrors, there weren’t any lining the walls. Just black padding, two-inch thick all the way around the gargantuan box. Mirrors had the obvious effect of making most gyms appear larger than they were. The fact that this one still looked like a lost, ancient pugilistic paradise was even more impressive.
Carmen was sitting on the edge of one of two boxing rings in the room. She was wearing a pair of deep green gym shorts—the kind that left absolutely nothing to the imagination—and a loose-fitting lemon yellow tank top with a green sports bra underneath. She was wrapping her hands with matching yellow threads, and she was even more practiced at it than Scarlett was.
I peeled my eyes away from her rippling stomach, toned, meaty thighs and sweat-oiled bronze neck and watched her at work. All fighters wrapped their hands differently. They might be taught the same, but they all eventually developed their own method. It wasn’t just about getting the right fit, or being the most comfortable. It wasn’t about a fighter knowing his or her body better than the coach or officials. It was about ritual. Fighting—even sparring—was steeped in tradition and even spirituality, and wrapping the hands was to modern athletes what donning sacred armor must have been to knights in the glory days.
“So?” Carmen asked. I hadn’t noticed that she had been looking at me. She was still wrapping her hands, but she didn’t need to stare at them to know where to place every loop of cloth, nor did she have to think twice about how hard to tug and in which direction as she threaded the material over the webs between her fingers.
“So what?”
“What did Nina tell you, about yourself, aside from the fact that you’ve got a big dick?”
It was so blunt and surprising that I didn’t even have time to blush before I was laughing. Carmen looked at me steady, studying me. Apparently, she wasn’t joking, but I didn’t feel as flattered as I felt like I should, given the compliment.
“Um,” I stuttered. “She just ran some muscle tests.”
Carmen rolled her eyes.
“No,” I said, holding out my hands. “Not … not what you saw there at the end—”
“Konnor,” Carmen said with a sly smirk. She had a deep, sultry voice. She was taller, stronger and in some ways less feminine than the other girls, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t an absolute beauty in her own aggressive way. “You don’t have to be embarrassed. You do remember last night, don’t you?”
How could I forget?
Now I blushed, and Carmen smiled wide enough to show her pearly white teeth.
“She had me hooked up to some kind of machine,” I continued. “It was kind of like … kind of like—”
“A truck battery?”
“Exactly.”
“Muscle limit tests,” Carmen nodded, and I frowned. The way she said it let me to believe that she had been te
sted in a similar manner. She nodded at my questioning, dumbfounded look, and I just shook my head, quite unconsciously.
“I’m sure I didn’t take the same currents you did,” Carmen said. It was the closest thing to a genuine compliment she had given me so far. The penis comment seemed to be more of a statement of fact in her mind than an attempt at flattery or appeasement.
“She was talking about propr—”
“Proprioception,” Carmen nodded, leaning over to begin strapping two black, foot-long pads to her shins. “Muscle density. Elasticity. Pliability. Threshold. Yeah. The works.”
The more time I spent among the Vixens, the more surprises they revealed. When I had first come upon Darla doing her business under the Jaxton bridge, with Scarlett running point from the shadows of a nearby alley, I had chalked the Syndicate up to a collection of attractive, manipulative … well, vixens. I wasn’t sure I was ready to dismiss that notion entirely, now that I’d spent a whopping handful of hours with them on their own turf, but it was quickly becoming clear that Sascha was running something more along the lines of an old eastern super spy-assassin ring than a breeding house for harlots and secrets.
“So then,” Carmen came back to her point for the third time. “What were Nina’s conclusions?” She finished strapping the shin pads on, stood up and looked my way. “Are you a super soldier?”
“Something like that,” I shrugged. It sounded incredibly arrogant, even douchey. But there it was. It was the truth. What else were you supposed to call someone who had such a high tolerance to pain it wasn’t a factor, and could withstand enough voltage to stop his heart before he even took a knee?
Carmen smiled. All of the Vixens, save for Scarlett, seemed to look hungry when they smiled in a certain way. Each form of hunger was different. Darla’s was most overtly sexual, as if she couldn’t wait to fill her mouth up with my meat, or the soft space between her pillow tits. Nina’s was mischievous. Even devious. But Carmen’s was almost predatory. Competitive.
I found myself smiling back. I recognized that look. Scarlett might know how to fight, and fight well. And for all I knew, Nina and Darla did as well, and Sascha had certainly killed. But Carmen. Carmen was a fighter, born and bred, and I realized then that challenging me to a spar was Carmen’s way of taking me for a joy ride. Where Nina would strip me down and stick me full of needles, and where Darla would simply cut to the chase, Carmen wanted to know me more intimately. And for a fighter, what better way to get to know someone than in the ring?
Carmen nodded at something behind me.
I turned around, and saw a pile of black cloth with a strip of white sticking out of it. I wasn’t sure what it was at first, but when I took a single step toward it, I felt my heart lift.
“It looks just like my own Gi,” I said, bending over to pick it up. Then I noticed the green clover patch embroidered onto the lapel as I lifted it over my head. I started to tie it on, and I could tell by the particular feeling of the belt that it was indeed my Gi. The same one Jackie had given me when I’d turned sixteen.
I looked at Carmen, and she shrugged. “I guess Scarlett took it with her when she dragged you back to the tower after your fight with the Shockers.”
“Hmm,” I said. It was difficult for me to recall anything after Scarlett had shot me with a metallic scorpion’s claw coated in horse tranquilizer. “Where is Scarlett now?” I looked around, half expecting her to be spying on our exchange. It wouldn’t have been the first time.
“On a mission,” Carmen said.
“What mission?” I asked.
Carmen paused and narrowed her eyes at me.
“Just curious,” I said, holding my hands up in a disarming motion after I pulled the black Gi pants on over my boxers.
“Beats me,” Carmen lied, then felt annoyed at having to lie. “Scouting the Swans, I think.”
“Who?”
“The all-female Guild,” Carmen said, her annoyance growing, although now I thought it was a direct result of the subject matter, and not my prodding. “We won’t have them over a barrel like everyone else. They’ve kept their secrets, their PINs and everything else close to the vest, and away from the Suits. Darla couldn’t get any of them to bite, Nina’s pheromones don’t seem to work on them, and, as far as we know, they’re regular saints in the sin department.”
I doubted that. Innocent-seeming girls always had the most to hide.
“Is she going to attack them?” I asked, trying not to sound like I was worried about Scarlett.
“Not a chance,” Carmen said, checking the straps on her shin guards and the … fit of her shorts. Tight. They were very tight. “She’s just running reconnaissance. Making sure they won’t be interfering with the mission tomorrow.”
“And what mission is that? The one Sascha was referring to?”
Now Carmen really seemed to be losing patience. “Yes.”
“A raid on a Guild,” I said. “But not the Swans.”
“No.”
“Why now?”
“Because I’m tired of Darla and Nina’s approach,” Carmen said. “Sometimes, the best course of action is to take action.”
I nodded appreciatively, and knew my line of questioning had run its course with Carmen. She was short with her responses. Clipped. I didn’t know if it was because she felt a sudden surge of jealousy, or because she didn’t trust me enough to let me in on the Vixens’ movements and operations just yet. I couldn’t really say I blamed her on that count. It seemed rather foolish for Sascha to keep me around, given that I was at least a physical threat, and potentially an intelligence threat if I did try to make a run for one of the Guilds.
Then again, Sascha didn’t seem concerned in the least. I didn’t know much about her. Okay, I knew nothing about her, except for her taste in BDSM gear and her apparent fetish for domination. But my imagination didn’t have to wander very far to picture what might happen to me if I did betray the Vixens, my captors-turned-suspicious teammates. I didn’t think I’d enjoy whatever Sascha had in store for me as much as the Suit immortalized on her bedroom wall.
“She just doesn’t seem like the sentimental type, is all,” I said.
“No, she doesn’t,” Carmen said, climbing under the ropes and bouncing on the balls of her feet as she entered the ring. “Looks can be deceiving, though, don’t you think?”
“I’m not sure,” I said playfully. “I’d have pegged you as a fighter when I first met you. And here you are.”
“Here we are,” Carmen corrected, wagging a finger at me as she bounced. “You might have known I was a fighter, Konnor, but you probably didn’t know I’m the best fighter. The best fighter there is.”
I raised my eyebrows at that one, and Carmen turned around, bouncing the whole time, like a bronze bunny. Her thighs were toned, as was her backside, but that had just enough give to make it a damn fine view.
Carmen went to the opposite corner and unlooped a pair of red boxing gloves from the turnbuckle, and slipped them on, tying the threads with her teeth. It shouldn’t have got my engine going, but hey, we all have our kinks, right?
When I crawled into the ring, Carmen bent sideways and inclined her head toward the opposite corner, where the pair of black gloves she had thrown at me earlier hung. I sighed, making the sound mockingly loud, and went over to the pair, strapping them on.
“Velcro for me and string for you, huh?” I said. “If you’re the best fighter in Silk City, why do you need to give yourself a handicap with the better gloves?”
Carmen didn’t say anything, and I heard the creaking, protesting boards under the squishy canvas quiet. I turned around, confused, and my head snapped back as a red blur drove up the middle.
Lucky for me, while both of the Vixens I’d sparred with thus far were fond of cheap shots, Carmen aimed for the forehead, snapping my head back with a crisp jab without doing any real damage,
or drawing blood.
It was a warning offered and accepted. No more talking. Not for a little while, at least. Well, right after a little bit of good-natured trash talk.
“Best fighter in Silk City, huh?” I said, settling into my stance.
“Best fighter in the world,” Carmen said. It was tough to tell whether she was blowing smoke, or inhaling it. Fighters often had to form psyches made up of a mix of earned confidence and manufactured or projected bravado. Sometimes, a fight between two otherwise evenly-matched opponents came down to who was the better actor.
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
“Come on, then, League boy,” Carmen said, and then she came in like a tiger.
Scarlett had been all precision, at least when she had started out. She had thrown straight punches and kicks, always keeping her body in a blade, feet firmly planted under her unless one was attempting to bury itself into my midsection. She only started throwing circular strikes when she got angry. When she was emotionally compromised.
But anger and aggression was not always a weakness in the ring. As is the case in so many walks of life, and in so many pursuits of passion, there are many roads to the mountain top.
Carmen was not a straight-line fighter, even though she came at me head-on. She was all anger, and frothing rage wrapped up in an almost gleeful embrace of violence. She was chaos incarnate, and she was an absolute fucking handful.
I took a blistering series of hooks as I tucked my elbows in, buried my chin in the tops of my gloves and attempted to wiggle my way out of the corner. Carmen worked me up and down like I was a training dummy. But she wasn’t quite as reckless as she appeared. The strikes didn’t have a ton on them. Sure, every whack was thrown with intent, but none of them had the thudding impact of Scarlett’s strikes, even though Carmen looked to be significantly stronger, if not faster.
I knew she was baiting me. Trying to get me to open up as I tried to slide out of the pocket and establish my range. I knew it because it was one of my favorite strategies. But it wasn’t going to work on me.
