“Of course I won’t, Master.” She ducked her head, allowing him to study her without her knowing.
“Why this Romeo and Juliet?”
“Um.” Now she looked at him. The flash of seeing those pupils was like a shock sometimes. “It’s unrequited love. Unfulfilled love, and so that makes the story have more conflict, more tension between what is possible and their desires. That makes it a powerful and poignant tale.”
“Poignant,” he mouthed the word. It came out in human, as if there were no Mekker equivalent, and he didn’t quite get its meaning.
“Yes. Means, very sad? Tragic?”
He nodded, aware the talking had become a conversation and that was off center for him. He shouldn’t set a precedent, and fixing that imbalance could be pleasing.
“Spread your legs, slave. Show me what’s between them.”
Blushing, she did so, if slowly. Except her dress was in the way.
“Dress!” he snapped.
“Sorry,” she whispered, gathering the dress higher.
What a pretty pussy. The epilation procedure had worked well. Not a hair to be seen. The sorry had shot to his cock too.
“Lean back and open yourself with one hand.” If she didn’t understand what he meant by opening herself, he’d enjoy teaching her.
Though her hand shook and she hesitated at first, she did it impeccably, putting her right hand between her legs, splaying the fingers, and showing the pink inner entrance to her cunt.
“Good girl,” he murmured, studying both her cunt and her facial expression. Though he regretted the girl a moment after. Slave, remember. “Stay as you are until I say to take away your fingers.”
Though she seemed unfazed by that, the flush on her cheeks may have deepened. He shouldn’t touch her but then again, it was his right.
Mako went to one knee and put his knuckle to her reddened face, drawing it slowly over to her mouth. Asking her to open there was an option too. Instead he wriggled his knuckle deeper between her lips until he reached her teeth, amused at the confusion in her eyes and how her breathing hastened.
“Am I making you hot though you’d rather not be? Don’t answer. I can see it’s true. You’re too succulent for a mere blood slave. Most men would want to eat you whole, and not for your blood. For this.” He moved his finger, stroking her lips then he pulled away and looked downward. “And that.” From the lower limit of her cunt to just below her clit, he trailed his finger up through the dribble of cream-like wetness.
He stood, leaving her looking flustered, though she kept her fingers in place. The focus of her gaze flicked to his pants where his cock strained at the buttons. Her eyes stayed on him there, her chest rising and falling with great deliberation.
Her lips parted.
What a hungry little female.
If she’d licked those lips, he’d have contemplated turning her over and doing the most he was allowed to – masturbate between her ass cheeks and come all over her back. He might’ve. He wouldn’t. He preferred control and not to let his desires rule him.
He turned and pretended to examine the mechlings then strode to the hatch that led the stairs.
While waiting for it to open he tossed over his shoulder: “You can stop showing off your cunt.”
Then he left her. The tap of his boots on the stairs faded from his ears as he contemplated more pressing things – her arousal and the tightness of his cock in his pants. Not shoving it into her mouth had left him with an erection worthy of a landbeest, and he still hadn’t found a whore to fuck.
This should have left him unhappy, but instead he found himself smiling.
Chapter 16
Jesus H. That visit of Mako’s had been mind-boggling. She hadn’t appreciated until then how easily he could orchestrate her lust.
She hadn’t moved much since he’d left, except to sit and extend her legs rather than kneel. Being naked under her dress somehow made her arousal worse. Every whisper of wind cooled her there, yet made her hotter, made her appallingly aware of the swelling of her clit and pussy. She placed her hand over the dress at the juncture of her thighs then removed it immediately. The wetness might seep through if she accidentally pressed the cloth to herself.
But then again...
She studied her surroundings. Sometimes other mechling herders came close, but mostly not. Today the nearest one was on the adjacent ship and a mere dot among the rain of simmering blue threads.
She sneaked her hand under the dress then moved aside the cloth entirely, found herself fascinated by how wet she was. Mako was her crack, it seemed. Ridiculous to extremes, considering what he’d done to her.
That man, oh god. She’d fantasized about him fucking her but had tried to ignore it.
No one would know.
She let her forefinger slip to her entrance, sank it a half inch in, found herself tight around her finger and that made it feel exquisite. The sensation rippled outward, livening her so she simply had to arch. Her butt lifted from the hull and she fingered deeper, deeper, then out, sighing when she pushed another finger inside.
He’d be bigger than this.
No one would know whatever she did up here on the roof. She rarely had enough privacy to masturbate.
Wait, the mechlings. Her eyes snapped wide open. They’d be recording.
Are you giving the mechlings a human anatomy lesson? JI-mech interrupted.
Shit. No. I am not.
I thought so. Just masturbating then. I’ve had many years to think about the sexuality of people and still I cannot fathom it.
Awakened mechs were nothing if not straightforward.
She was so shocked she still hadn’t moved. She should stop this. Mako would see. Oh my. Her toes curled.
I think this is a good idea, if you also intend to attract Mako. You need to get rid of him before our escape day. He watches you too intently. I see this in the mechling feeds and here. Have you thought on this?
Fuck no, she had not. Get rid of him? Yes. Because of them escaping? No.
It might make sense, though. If she could get him to break Basteer’s rule, he would be fired, most likely. She slid out her finger but left her palm covering her throbbing pussy. Who knew pussies could throb this much? Clearly she’d done this wrong for years.
Why do you need this? To have Mako gone.
We should escape at night, which means your house needs to be in disarray, confused, without guidance – ergo Mako must go on that day.
Damn close timing then, and already she almost felt sorry for Mako. Fucking him, she now knew, would be a pleasure for her, as long as he curbed his sadism.
Masturbating in front of a camera was so last century. Her friends would’ve been horrified and amused. Probably they’d have told her to do it, if they knew she lusted after the man on the other side of the camera.
Man or Mekker, it no longer seemed to matter so much which was which.
Don’t look.
She would swear she heard a laugh from JI-mech. You will not persuade me. I need the data.
Oh great. A perverted voyeuristic robot.
That is probably me. I think therefore I never refuse a chance to see something new.
That wasn’t quite what she meant.
If a man was going to be watching this, and the mechlings, what did JI-mech matter?
She took away her hand and stared at her opened legs; already she was certain she’d have a puddle under her by the end. So she moved her dress from under her ass, pulled the gathered cloth to the rear, and sat on the bare metal with the pole base at her back.
Exhibitionism had never been her thing, or so she’d thought. Until today.
Feeling her two fingers push into her, the curved hardness inside the front of her pussy, then her thumb on her clit – ecstasy incarnate doing it with a potential male audience...him in particular.
She pulled aside the neck of her dress, found her breast and wondered if she might come sooner from thinking about Mako watching. Fucking
herself slowly at first, with her nipple and clit under her thumbs, then devoting both her hands to pussy and clit, then back to nipple, then rising into the fingerfucking, pushing deep, wishing dearly she had a dildo, and the wrench and stifled scream as an orgasm rocked her whole body, and her cunt squeezed down onto her fingers.
God. Sweat trickled between her eyebrows.
Panting, thighs and arm shaking, she stared over the top of the recharging mechlings. Fuck. If that didn’t make him want to bury his cock in her, nothing would.
Chapter 17
For the first time ever, he kept a copy of the mechling feed and watched it daily, for a while. Only a while. It was deliberate. He needed to rid himself of his obsession with Slave Twelve. Watching her masturbate daily did cure that, to a degree. It wasn’t as if the sight was completely novel – other slaves had been recorded. Emery might have attracted him more but the same thing over and over did jade a man. He still turned it on occasionally.
What he found he couldn’t get enough of was the simple daily show of her up on the roof telling stories and strolling about. That was fresh and simply her.
When she was the storyteller, he ate it up, and began to wish he could take her to see some of the grander entertainment on the ships – the plays, the wrestling, the cinematic spectaculars, the singing and music shows. None of that was going to happen. Basteer might choose to take a slave with him to a show, or to a sporting venue, such as the Great Lake, but not he. As House Master he had priority in many things but to take a slave to some recreational frivolity would get him fired.
If you didn’t own someone, of course you couldn’t do what you wanted.
Limits. Limits to freedom. He’d always known of them, but the bars were invisible until you wanted to go past them.
After the visit to the roof, he’d stayed close and made sure she was trained properly, made sure she had all the lectures and that she learned them. Her failure to understand sun madness had demonstrated a gap in her education. After that, he’d weaned himself off being near her. For the best.
He lay on his bed and stared at the feed still playing on his desk screen. She hadn’t done much today except wander about looking perfect with the wind playing with her brilliant red hair.
There’d been a form of freedom out on the plains doing reconnaissance missions with his patrol. No one, not even the king, was entirely free of responsibility and limits.
If he could reverse time, he’d go back to before the massacre and even further – before his patrol died. And what? He’d use hindsight and not get them hung up and gutted like a hunter’s kill. Then he wouldn’t have been so crazy angry that he would go off and wipe out that Scav warband. He wouldn’t have recovered the missile as he wandered through the litter – the dead warriors, the kids he’d not seen as he strafed them. Half blind with tears he could’ve missed it.
Then someone would’ve fired it and a ship might’ve crumpled into the ground, depending on luck and their aim. Catastrophe. Thousands might’ve died.
Maybe his patrol would still have found the DRAC missile? The Scav warriors had left a hole where they’d unearthed the old silo.
Maybe.
Either way, the past was done. What was it he wanted now?
Emery. He wanted her.
He’d come full circle. No freedom to do what he wanted. No money. He needed patience. In ten years he’d be married to someone respectable, be re-instated in the army, and everything would be fine. Even his parents would accept him then.
Why did that sound so dull?
As House Master, he could make Slave Twelve do almost anything for him. Almost.
What did he truly want with her? Owned slaves were for fucking and working. Wives were for breeding. Men were for companionship. He and Shay had been closer than most married couples, though they had only been promised to each other. They’d talked.
He sat up, put his head in his hands. He couldn’t want that from a slave, because it was impossible.
Chapter 18
JI-mech’s manifesto turned out to be a list of things Emery had to collect, and because one mistake might mean discovery and severe punishment far beyond anything she’d yet experienced, she had to go slowly.
Though he could recharge his power cells when fully healthy, the mech was so ancient that everything had the potential to fail, and much of him was in need of some sort of repair. He was self-repairing but his self-repairing machinery was itself unsound. Her list included quantities of oil, metal, a type of rubber, power cells, certain chemicals, and ammunition.
She blew a raspberry at the ammunition.
I know, JI-mech whispered in her head. I was joking. You won’t be able to get that and the power cells I will have to strip from mechlings the night we leave.
Won’t that kill them?
That depends on how many I have to choose from. Everything else you can find in small quantities at the markets or in the house you live in. You will have to be careful to take small amounts.
Yes. How do you know so much about what I can get?
I can tap into the system of the royal ship. I have to be sneaky but I can link to the mechlings if they happen to also be plugged into the main system.
That sounds risky.
Not as much as you are thinking. The main ship system is not just one entity; it is many. The Mekkers control much of what is done manually. They don’t trust such an important task to a mech brain.
So JI-mech could talk to the mechlings too.
What if you get the mechlings to get some of these things, then when I bring them here we can take what they’ve gathered.
Brilliant. I will do this.
Over a number of months, she slowly accumulated what JI-mech needed, surreptitiously leaving the gathered components and chemicals in a small hatch in the roof, or rather, in JI-mech’s roof. It was out of view of the mechlings, if she settled them in the right place.
Everything was going fine, except for how Mako was mostly absenting himself from wherever she might be. He seemed only around enough to make sure the house was happy.
It was happy, or at least it was quiet, until the day a Scav slave at another house tried to kill his master. She returned from the market to find the house bubbling over with rumors.
There was a rumor that all slaves were to be searched for weapons and that a lockdown on leaving their houses was going to be declared. Either of those could mean discovery of Emery’s purchase of oil at the market that she hadn’t been told to buy. The money had not been hers either, though she had no way of finding out where it came from – JI-mech arranged for coins to be left in certain spots and she picked them up on her way through.
“Lockdown order has come through,” Nik announced pompously to the slaves, where they’d been assembled in their room. “Whatever task you have can only be done within this house for the next day. Lawgivers may be conducting a search later.”
Today she even had a few coins left over in her bag – suspicious to anyone who asked her questions. She needed to get rid of everything soon, but couldn’t.
Emery sat on the nearest bench, one that ran alongside the table they used for meals, doing crafts, and small tasks.
“Do you know what they’re looking for or why?” she asked the slave nearest her on the bench.
It was Cenwyn, or Slave Ten, a young girl with curly black hair. She’d been here longer than Emery and had been captured in a raid on a Scav camp. Like the others, she gave her blood weekly.
“Not exactly.” Cenwyn propped an elbow on the table and scratched her head. “I’ve heard someone stuck a knife in their master.”
“A knife?” Slaves weren’t allowed knives, though mechlings were. “And what happened after? Did the rest of the house rebel or something?”
There had to be more, for the lawgivers to shut everything down and want to search all slaves. A mass protest?
Cenwyn’s mouth opened and stayed open.
“Like a rebellion, you know? You
know what that is?” Her mind ran a little wild at the prospect of a slave rebellion.
She leaned closer. “Emery, you don’t want to be saying that out loud. It’s called sedition and they –”
Something behind Emery had startled her.
Oh Christ. Was Nik here? Weln? Had her words been that bad? They weren’t, were they?
“What?” Slowly she turned.
There were often a few mechlings in the room, and all three of the ones she knew to be currently here had frozen in place, with their sensory receptors pointing at her.
“Why are they doing that?” she asked Cenwyn.
“I’m guessing...that word you said. The big one.”
Rebellion. It was possible they were programmed to halt and record whenever that word was said.
“Why do I not remember this?”
“We were all told things not to do or say, when we arrived here.”
There had been a long lecture. She’d ignored some of it. Even when Mako had drummed it into her again. She’d tried so hard to attract him and failed. He’d stayed away after that – teased her, been fascinated by her stories, lectured her about duties and so on, then he’d wandered off and barely noticed her at all.
“How could you remember all that?” Anxiety was gnawing at her. If he found out, would he be royally pissed off, or mildly? She didn’t want to see either.
Cenwyn shrugged. “When you need to, when your life and health depends on it, you do it.”
Smart ass. It was also possible the Scavs had a better memory for lists than her.
“Putra,” Cenwyn whispered, “I shouldn’t have talked to you.” Her eyes were round. She slipped off the bench to her knees and the other slaves did the same. Leaves falling from the tree.
She almost complied but needed to know who was behind her. Her goose bumps were an ominous hint. She hadn’t seen him for weeks.
Mako. Fuckitty.
He walked another few steps in from the entrance and gave her the most severe stare-down before his gaze swept the room.
Acquired Possession (The Machinery of Desire Book 1) Page 9