by Danielle Monsch, Cate Rowan, Jennifer Lewis, Jeannie Lin, Nadia Lee, Dee Carney
It was nearly too much and he hadn’t moved.
His lips brushed her cheek. His mouth found hers and teased. Then his hips pumped. Hard. A frenzy took them and his thrusts were short, intense. His hands stroked all over her. He babbled. Saying things.
“Feel perfect.”
“More, just like that, but deeper.”
“Hips. Tilt your hips up. Yes, just like, I have to give more.”
“Touch yourself.”
The last is what sent her over. Her hand barely fit between them, sliding between their slick bodies, but she got a finger just where she needed it and rubbed.
Her body lurched and her breath stopped as pleasure and completeness overtook her. Her brain completely shut down as shock waves rippled bliss from her center to her toes.
It’d been fast but effective. Gasping, she tried to calm her trembling.
Her awareness finally came back to her and her stomach lurched.
A man, a stranger, pulled out of her body and tucked himself back into his pants. His shirt was still buttoned. With a brush of fingers through his hair, he blinked, stumbled to his feet, and frowning, strode quickly from the room.
Dazed, she stared at the ceiling while her body cooled. With a shiver, she adjusted her dress and swung her legs to the floor. Sitting on the cot, she rubbed at her temples, trying to avoid the building headache.
“What the hell?” Her question echoed in the small cell.
It was a cell. No question.
The walls were nearly bare, but there was one window, unguarded.
Climbing to her feet, she shuffled to the opening. At least the sex had gotten her body to throw off whatever drugs had made her immobile.
Her crazed laugh unsettled her, but not nearly as much as the view from the window.
She was above the clouds.
The sun shone bright and warm. A sun she rarely saw. Below, at quite some distance, was the thick layer of smog that shadowed the ground. She was on a floating island, in a tower of one of the megacorps mansions that flew in circles above the massive sprawl of New Castle, the city that seemed to cover the planet.
No going out the window.
Unable to think about being held by a megacorp, she tried to calm the rapid huffs of breath. No time to hyperventilate. Crossing to the door, she grasped the handle.
“Locked. Of course it is.”
She kicked it.
Her foot got caught. Something dug into her skin and she knelt awkwardly to feel her ankle. A slot in the door near the floor had given way and closed around her foot. She pushed the flap and was freed.
The slot looked just big enough for her head to fit through. On her hands and knees, she pushed the flap and glanced around. A dark hallway that led to stairs remained empty. She crouched and put her head out. Shrugging, she got a shoulder through, but no matter how she twisted and turned, she couldn’t get the other to fit.
“Damn it.” She snarled and managed to extricate herself. No escape. Nothing to show for it but some scrapes and bruises.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she stared at the door and calmed her rising anger. Then she remembered the medi-analysis machine. She returned to the bed and swiped her hand over the machine.
It didn’t respond.
Crossing her arms, she sat there and tried not to remember why the room smelled of sex.
Chapter Two
‡
Yesterday, Langley had managed to stay away from the bewitching bio-creation, but she’d haunted him. He didn’t understand the immediate and all-consuming desire he’d had for a complete stranger.
He hoped he hadn’t hurt her, but if he’d gone back to check, his mère would have discovered the weakness and used it against both of them. But Mère had sent word that she expected him in the lab this morning. Often, he’d defy her wishes, but today, he couldn’t contain his urgency.
Sending his valet away, he dressed himself meticulously, carefully. He hadn’t been this alone in years and didn’t understand his need for it. After a check in his seldom-used dressing mirror, he walked to the part of the mansion he hated the most. Dress shoes echoing in the empty marble corridors, he let himself into the research area, security checkpoints opening simply by detection of his presence.
The outer area was empty. The usual scientists, assistants, and interns were nowhere to be found. Mère had gone so far over the line this time, she’d hidden this project from even her usual trusted partners.
The lab equipment still ran, other research being maintained with automatic updates. One in particular, one he usually ignored, made him stop today.
At a corner station, an old experiment—Mère’s favorite pet project—cycled through pictorial evidence and stats that still curdled the blood in his veins. Mère bought a dozen males for the purposes of vaccination trials to cure a deforming disease that had evolved in the past dozen years and spread through the poorer lander populations. She’d infected those men and gave them dose after dose of painful injections. They no longer resembled humans by the time they were put down, their skin a jumble of scars and melted flesh. Twelve lives, deformed in pain, and killed. But she’d found the cure and in return, had become the most successful bio-researcher of their time, a position she held more dear than anything else, including her lone son.
She’d raised him in her wake, to believe bio-creations weren’t human, but the day he’d learned of this experiment, he’d started to pull away from her. He’d decided that bio-creations weren’t just not human, they shouldn’t exist, even to fulfill research. And this was the experiment he’d honed in on.
It led him to NOMBIO.
Bio-creations had no future in the world of the rich on the floating cities. Their purpose was as a product, a tool, a slave, and the eradication of them was the guiding principle behind NOMBIO—No Mods or Bios. The organization worked to end the practice of bio-tech and would’ve forbidden Zel’s very life before her creation. Beings such as Rapunzel Denmark were not human.
When he’d joined NOMBIO, he’d decided to use this Gothel research project as the catalyst to bring Gothel down. For months he’d painstakingly dealt with Mère’s state-of-the-art security measures. The encryption codes changed every fifteen minutes, making it a slow process to piece together evidence to show the misuse of bios, the cruelty, and the fact they weren’t the same as natural-born.
Now there was Zel. And his mother was obviously obsessed. He could use this. This new project could be used to distract Mère from her paranoiac guarding of her lab, allowing him to copy other, more readily available research.
Keeping Zel in that tower was quite a landfall. It’d take no time for him to gather what he needed to sabotage the Gothel megacorp.
Langley suppressed the shudder that threatened when he entered the main lab. The air in here had always bothered him. The antiseptic smell clung and the white of the polished floor blinded.
The space had been altered. Mère usually customized for each new research focus. Now, only one hospital bed stood in the middle of the floor, and instead of a variety of surgery tools lining the walls, toolboxes with saws, lasers, and other power implements took their place. Zel stood, legs slightly apart, and hands secured in front of her. Her shoulders were straight and her chin raised.
On both sides of her, armed guards glared. They held tightly onto her forearms. It had to hurt, but she stood defiant.
Mère frowned and ordered one of the guards. “If it doesn’t stop wiggling, punch it in a kidney. It doesn’t need both, or any, for use of its hair.”
One guard chuckled. The other gave a shrug as if this was nothing to think of. It wasn’t really. They’d done worse. Langley started forward but a sense of caution stopped him mid-step. Zel leaned in a sudden backbend and broke the hold of her subduers. She dropped to the floor and spun her leg out.
“Ooof,” the nearest guard uttered as he hit the floor.
She shuffled away from them and ran into a cart. Instruments scattered and fl
ew all over the floor. Her hand closed on one.
Both guards landed on top of her. The bigger one drew his arm back and punched her in the side. She grunted and went wild, body bucking and striking out. Langley winced and stepped forward.
“Wait there, Langley, until they secure it to the table. No sense in getting in the way,” his mother called to him.
Frowning at his mother’s order, he defied her and moved into the room. He hadn’t realized he’d been frozen in place with warring instincts. The first, to help a creature in pain who had no say over what happened to her. The second, to leave them to it and do what was best for the world—to steal the data he needed. They’d been absorbed in controlling Zel and the other part of the lab had been wide open. He’d wasted precious minutes he could’ve been downloading material while the bio-creation had a fit of rebellion. Mère would drain that spark from Zel within days.
Zel made trapped-animal noises. Growls came from her throat as they punched her in the side again. With brute force, one grabbed her hair, the other her crotch, and lifted her in the air. She went rigid and her face went completely red.
“Assholes,” she panted, clearly suffering from the struggle.
Langley shifted his stance and shook out his hands.
They stretched Zel between them and plopped her on a table. She still wore that same thin hospital gown, and the man-handling caused it to ride up and exposed her naked mound.
His cheeks burned. Both for the way the other men treated her as meat, but also because he’d been with her, a captive, and given the chance, he’d do it again.
Frowning, striding to her, he avoided looking at her face. The accusation lit clearly in her eyes as he carefully flipped her gown down.
“Such modesty. It doesn’t care.” Mère shrugged and then, brow raised, she turned her attention to Zel. “Do not cause trouble again. I will kill the hair to remove it and discard the carcass. I do not need a rebellious bio-creation in my way.”
“I need my hair. For Bovine,” Zel jerked her arms then snapped her mouth shut.
It was obvious she hadn’t meant to talk and it was practically written on her face that she wouldn’t again. Lips firmly closed, she glared at Mère.
“Bovine.” Langley drawled, but she didn’t look at him. She ground her jaw and stared at the ceiling. “Who is this Bovine?”
“What?” His mother asked in distraction as she leaned over a monitor. One of the guards yanked a fistful of Zel’s hair and shoved it into the attached scanner.
Zel’s face blanked. It was amazing how completely erasing emotion could resemble death.
“We can speak later,” he replied to his mother but she didn’t answer, absorbed in whatever she found in her scans, but the guards remained rigid, no longer distracted. There was no reason to stay here and suffer the glares from Zel. None at all. Especially since whatever her reasons for calling him here, Mère no longer seemed to require his presence.
When he returned to his suite, he cleansed his body, scrubbing it until he was numb.
Zel had gotten used to waiting, had gotten past the numb monotony of it. She’d become more aware, noting even when the air shifted. Like it did now. Her skin prickled. He was here again. For weeks, he’d come, try to remain remote, but they’d talk. Then they’d tear each other’s clothes off.
At first, she didn’t understand how she could sleep with him, the son of her kidnapper, but she’d quickly realized he was as much a prisoner on Gothel Island as she was.
Today, she’d spent the morning running on the exercise equipment until her legs burned then she ran some more. She ignored him though she felt his presence in every bio-created cell.
“I brought the only image display I could find. Let me know what you want on it and I can load it for you.” He broke the silence after he must have stared at her for five minutes or more. It was a peace offering, a way to spend her time that couldn’t be used to escape. Shrugging, she kept going, pushing herself as much physically as to see how long she could hold out before she needed to speak to him.
Dressed in conservative, corporate clothes again, he stepped in front of her and attached a flat panel on the wall. Images flickered, but she couldn’t focus on it with him here. He watched and waited. The man she was having regular, passionate sex with. Langley Gothel, veritable prince of this forsaken floating island.
Madame Gothel had taken Zel from her home and wouldn’t let her go. She kept her in the tower, under guard. It’d been months and Gothel still hadn’t found a way to replicate Zel’s hair. It didn’t break down, even enough to analyze the individual cells.
So far, Gothel hadn’t been able to do any more than Bovine. She’d been unable to gather useful data as the hair proteins didn’t allow sampling. Bovine. She missed him.
A tray of food slid through the door. The slot was too small for her to fit through, but she’d tried before. Several times. When had she stopped seeking to escape?
“Get me out of here, Langley.” She’d tried countless times to ignore him, not speak, not give in to the desire, but she always broke. And always with the same request.
“You know I can’t.”
She sighed.
His dress shoes scuffed on the cement floor. “I won’t be here tomorrow. I have a conflict.”
“Yeah?” She kept jogging. The lurch in her step pissed her off.
“It’s necessary. I can’t skip another bio rally.” His frustrated huff made her laugh and leap off the machine.
“You didn’t intend to tell me that, did you? You’re as bad as I am, unable to keep my mouth shut around you. But you take the cake, don’t you? Fucking me whenever you want, claiming you’re not a part of keeping me prisoner, then going to slum with the landers and protest my very existence.”
“Not your existence,” he started.
“Right. Just that I was born.”
“It’s not that, and you know it. You were created and you should be treated as a living being, but you never should have been.”
The air buzzed with the quick flash of his guilt and her self-hatred. In a moment, it dissipated but it could never be completely gone.
“Why do you come here?” She’d never dared ask. “If you go to that rally, you shouldn’t want to be here, should you?”
“It’s not personal.” He ran a hand through his hair and she turned to watch his unusual break in decorum.
“Of course it is. If bio didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be here. Then who would you be visiting in this tower?” She shook her head and stepped closer to him. He stood four feet away as if frozen in place. “I may have been created in a lab, unlike you, but you came from a womb that must be as cold as those frozen specimens of skin she’s taken from me. Your place of birth was as hospitable as the dish my donor’s egg inhabited.”
“Deriding my mother isn’t the answer.” He glared at her and took a step toward her.
“The hell it isn’t. She is a monster, no matter your relation to her. She kidnapped me. She treats me like a slab of meat. She treats you like a recalcitrant child.”
She shuffled closer, poking her finger in the air toward the window. “That’s the only way I can see outside these walls. Landers may never see the sun, but at least they can walk where they will.”
“This is bigger than me. Than you. Than anything that goes on here on Gothel Island.” He leaned toward her, his own finger pointing, brushing across her cheek. “Would you wish your life on anyone else? These types of experiments in human life must stop.”
“But am I human?” She jerked toward his caress and bit his finger.
“More than I am,” he breathed and yanked her into his body. His urgency, the break in his calm, excited her in a rush of passion.
His lips found hers and despite the physicality of his response, his kiss was gentle, apologetic. Arms around her, he pulled her closer until they stood tightly against one another. His arousal lay hard against her and she wiggled, trying to get even closer.
; “Bed,” he murmured against her mouth.
They found the cot. Before her back hit it, she was naked. He stood there, between her spread legs, and yanked his shirt over his head. Lean and defined, his body was beautiful. The pained expression of lust in his features was even more gorgeous. His glasses glinted when he carefully removed them, placing them on the floor near the head of the bed.
“You need furniture,” he groused.
“Why? To hold your glasses when you come here for a fuck?” She laughed uncontrollably until he dropped to his knees and ran a finger over her slick opening. Her eyes stung as he pushed his finger inside her.
“Don’t.” He panted as he started the immediate and sure rhythm that would bring her to climax with nothing more than a stroke of his thumb over that bundle of nerves. “Don’t think of anything but this.”
Coming over her, he positioned himself and slid inside. He held still, keeping her pinned to the cot by the pleasure, by the want. She wanted him. Not just this way, but the way he seemed to look at her as real, even while his mind tried to convince him she wasn’t.
“Poor tormented Langley. Maybe I have the better of it? At least I understand how the world sees me.”
“People see Zel,” he whispered and the strain of his movements made his neck cord, his hands grow rough on her hips, and his cock even harder as he became more forceful.
“Take it. Take it from me. But watch. See me.”
She licked her lips as he stared at her from his position, knees on floor, between her legs. Giving both her nipples a pinch, she gasped. Her vision blurred as she kneaded her flesh with one hand and trailed down her stomach with the other.
His gaze tracked her movements. When she searched her folds, rubbing against his cock working in and out of her, his cheeks heightened with red and his mouth dropped open. His stare stayed there, where they joined, as she circled her clit.
“Mmm. This is good,” she panted and finally, finally, unable to wait, brushed over the sensitive nub.
With a moan, she erupted. Body jerking, biting her lip, she slid into a sweet climax. Langley shoved inside her and shaking, he tensed. She felt it. Floating in the clouds, she accepted it, wanted it, trembled when he came inside her. Like they were one, like nothing else mattered, they hung there. Her heart racing, she let her touch trail along the arms bracketing her body until she calmed.