Why not kiss me before this? I opened my mouth to ask and he put his mouth on mine again. This kiss was deeper, prolonged, and glorious, spreading a luscious warmth through me. I squirmed. I closed my eyes and simply felt. No man could affect me so easily. Only him, Mister Black...Mavros. It was a kiss that had me sighing and groaning into his hot mouth, despite the angle my head was forced into. A kiss that left the taste of him inside me. It gifted me with a memory of him taking my mouth and lips so thoroughly that I might never forget this moment.
“Done.”
The real world returned slowly. I blinked and swallowed, opening my eyes in time to see him slide from the table and stand. My rough panting made the ropes shift on my wrists.
From the armchair near the wall, he retrieved two pillows, both of which he jammed between the table and my stomach. There was enough give in the rope that the pillows made my butt arch into the air. He was making me easier to fuck.
I grew wetter at that thought, and more so as the fake knife shifted in me. It was a weird beacon, directing men’s gaze toward my sex.
Mavros unzipped his pants. I watched him climb onto the table between my legs and place his hand on the knife hilt. My breath hitched, and I held it, worried at what he intended.
Grimm was gone. I still wasn’t sure of Mavros’s sanity.
“As much as I’d like to experiment, fucking you while this is inside you seems a bad idea.”
Thank god for that.
The knife was extracted, the hard slide making me wince and shut my eyes, as I dreaded some new accident. Plastic could cut.
My question snapped out of existence at the touch of his cock. It pushed into the circle of my entrance, widening me, slowly. “Oh fuck.” On whispering those words, I melted, letting out a groan and spreading my thighs as much as the rope would allow while he pressed inward. “That’s...nice.” The huskiness in my voice was a dead giveaway.
He only thrust into me further, with his fingers and thumbs clawed into my butt cheeks as if I might escape, or maybe he just liked the view. The stretch was exquisite, the pressure divine.
The sense of being taken no matter what my will...that was incredible. I’d become a deviant of the first order.
“Yes, oh fuck, yesss.” Mindless, I clutched the rope, strangled it. Those words and other small variations, were the only ones I could find to say.
His hands on my body. His cock inside me. His bites on my neck and back.
He fucked me and all else fell away as if nothing bad had happened, ever, ever...ever.
Tomorrow was another day.
Tonight was a night for fucking.
Afterward, when we were quiet and resting on the sofa, with me curled naked in his arms, and his finger drawing circles over where the raven tattoo graced my nape, he murmured two last secrets. He didn’t address me but rather said them to the room. His secrets left me staring rigidly at the dark outside the window, wondering about this man who held me. He’d not said this earlier because they would’ve upset me too much. I figured that out.
I wanted to hit him.
He’d held back so he could fuck me. I wasn’t sure I liked that. Though knowing Mavros, he still would’ve carried through. Fucking was serious business to him.
I guess this was old news.
To me, it was devastating news.
The woman who died, she wasn’t a friend of mine, she was my daughter. Phoebe was only eighteen.
My reaction, in my thoughts: Goddamn.
Chilling. Those words had sent ice worming down through my chest. They made the world seem so wrong.
But the second secret had made me fall utterly silent, gobsmacked, ill, angry...all those at once.
These same men, I’ve confirmed as much as I can that they have someone you know. Cherie Lynn Wolfe. She’s been in their hands awhile but they take their time training women. There was no point in telling you while I was training you.
We’re going to go to London and figure out a way for you to kill the mesmer or mesmers responsible. It’s time.
Chapter 3
Grimm
The last words Mavros had said before I’d levered myself away from the door: this is a fast way, maybe the only way, to give a woman the mesmer bug.
How telling. How tempting. The conclusion I drew from that was obvious. I’d bet a million Mavros had never kissed a man. I doubted he would kiss me even if asked to do it to give me a chance to become a mesmer. I was straight, but I’d do anything to see if I could become like him.
Until I’d heard that piece of news, I hadn’t realized how truly unhappy I was with this situation. Was it just so I had a chance with Zorie? I wasn’t sure myself. My feelings were all over the place. Sometimes I hated her. Sometimes I wanted to simply fuck her. At times, I wondered if I was in love with her in some creepy way. Creepy, because she had killed my stepbrother.
It felt immoral and, laughably, dirty, to want to get into her pants, let alone like her so much it might be love. Romancing a woman, yeah, I’d done that. More, though? Who the fuck knew. All I did know for certain was that I wanted to stick around and see if I could get closer to her and lose Mavros from the picture too.
I admired her guts, her ability to survive what Reuben had done to her, and be sane. Those characteristics were probably why she’d managed to kill Tom. Now that was a sobering thought.
I didn’t expect much to come of this next idea, but I pushed open the kitchen door. To my surprise, the girl who did the cleaning was sitting on the counter top, smoking and texting, rather than doing any cleaning of dishes. She was slow at doing her job, but it suited me.
“Hello, sir.” She stubbed out the cigarette, tucked the phone into her jeans, and hopped down. “Can I help you?”
“Sure.” I looked about. “I was hoping to find some scotch to drink? I figured you’d have a bar somewhere else. The uh dining room is being used.” I shot her a smirk to show I knew what she knew – that the boss was fucking Zorie.
She sucked in her lip, wide-eyed. “I think we have some in storage. Can you wait here? It’ll only take me a moment.”
“Go right ahead.” I gestured and she exited via a door opposite.
In two strides I was at the pile of dishes. One item stood out – a brandy glass that only Mavros could’ve used. With my fingers positioned at the edge of the base, I carefully picked it up, stepped back to the door I’d come through, and hid the glass just outside. Then I went back to the dishes. No sounds of her returning, as yet.
My next idea was gross but I only had a vague idea as to how to get some lab to try to grow a bug from the glass. A mesmer bug, he’d called it. I’d keep the glass cold, like they seemed to on forensic programs. Tomorrow morning I would leave. I’d say I was going to London early, but before I left this country, I’d track down a private company to do this for me.
The plates were unlikely to have what I needed. There were five glasses and several knives and forks that might’ve been used by anyone. I took a deep breath, muttered some curses then licked every surface that might’ve had contact with his mouth.
Yeah, fucking gross, but I’d seen worse, done worse.
Footsteps sounded beyond the opposite door. I sucked clean the tines of one last fork.
Residue of cold Greek stew plus some random germs. Yuck. I swallowed and put down the fork in time, as she backed through the swinging door holding three bottles, each a different brand of scotch. One was Laphroaig.
“Hit the jackpot, I see.”
“Yes.” She grinned. “We have a big cellar. Which would you like?”
I checked them out as she parked the bottles on the counter. “How about...all of them.”
The girl chuckled. “A good choice, sir.”
The chances that this would work might be a million to one. What I really needed to do was figure out how to get Mavros to kiss me. This bug rarely made new mesmers. It must be either terribly short-lived once it left a man, or very few men accepted the infection. Or
it wasn’t a bug at all. Mavros would’ve tried growing the bug too. He must’ve. Maybe he already had a big vat of germs somewhere?
No. If that were the case he’d merely have injected Zorie. The bastard probably would’ve enjoyed that. Even if she liked it, I couldn’t get over how he gloated on those few times I’d seen him cause her pain before or during sex. The man was a bloody sadist. Sick, it was a sick thing to like.
Even if she liked it too? Yeah, it was.
Or was it?
I tossed the thought around some more.
Up in my room, I poured myself some scotch, settled into an armchair, and watched flurries of snow come in across the fields and ice up the window. I had no one to debate with and all I could decide was that I didn’t actually understand the appeal of making someone hurt.
While I drank, I remembered what I’d done in the kitchen. Strange bouts of queasiness tormented me. The bug multiplying? More likely just me being a pussy. Could it work? I should stay a few more days and do that again – lick more plates. I curled my lip.
No. Fuckit. Even I had limits. I’d pray this once would be enough.
If I were a mesmer, what would I do with that power? I knew the quote from history, even if I didn’t know who’d said it. I swallowed another mouthful of the pure liquid fire that was Laphroaig.
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
There was such a charm to this idea of being able to control women, some women. It would be like being a depraved superhero. No wonder most of the mesmers were bad men.
I shifted in my seat, then draped my leg over the squishy arm of the chair and swung it while watching those snowflakes.
I had time to think this through some more. Time and patience, I had loads of. If I became a mesmer, there was no guarantee I’d still want her – Zorie. That sweet woman with that sweet ass and a mind full of things that had awed me many times over. She was too smart for me.
She was only one though...one woman.
Sexual attraction must seem a whole other ball game once you had a world of women at your feet.
Chapter 4
Zorie
It was time. Or so said Mavros. Even though I’d made no progress. I had no clue what gave him the idea that I, or we, were ready to take on this man who had driven his daughter mad and kidnapped Cherie, but how could I refuse to at least go? Escaping had been a perfectly sane solution until the bottom fell out of the world.
Some faceless man had Cherie, my ex-student, the girl on the verge of adulthood, though I knew I was being all silly there – she was adult. She had a new boyfriend, had been going off to help the poor, and was doing shit I would never have done at her age. Brave. I had to at least match that. I had to try to see if I could help her.
Except, how the fuck would I? Mavros was delusional. I actually, truly, was beginning to wonder if he was crazy.
Nevertheless...
The theoretical deaths of theoretical people I’d never known, that was awful. Cherie in the hands of that same man – that had crumbled my intent to ashes.
We flew to London. Grimm had gone ahead by a few days.
I stepped off the plane and breathed in the fog of a city so distant and different from the mountains of Pindos in Greece that the shock reverberated from my head to my feet.
What the hell was I doing here?
I knew why. I had to at least think about trying to rescue her, even if I was no superwoman as Mavros believed. I couldn’t simply walk away and abandon her. Trying appeased my moral consciousness, though my efforts would be either useless or dangerous, to me or to Mavros, or perhaps even to Grimm.
I could no longer just walk away.
But I should have.
Grimm had scouted out London, the dark places where this criminal supposedly held sway. Nothing was certain. Mavros refused to say where he was seeking information. We ended up in a high-rise apartment I suspected Mavros had owned since forever, looking down at the lights.
Luxury, safety, distance. The scent of soap. The cleanliness of modern living miles above the mess of the average human being. We ate food that people in Thailand, for one, would find either ridiculous or amazing. Surreal.
Where was Cherie?
Whatever contacts Mavros had, had pinned down the likely areas that women were being abducted. Mesmer-susceptible women, of course. The police had not yet realized the disappearances Mavros highlighted were connected. Perhaps that was because the women ended up with different men. He believed they were trained then sold and sometimes released after they’d satisfied the needs of their buyers. The unique ability of mesmers to prevent one from talking about what had happened, about the compulsion...it made release possible.
It was one of the pluses of being a mesmer running a human trafficking market. The victims stayed silent, even when they ran away.
Missing for weeks, months, years, made to do someone’s bidding, then they would turn up whole, if psychologically shattered and say nothing?
I hated to think of all those messed-up women out there.
There would be cases that followed the breadcrumb trails of female abduction, with the women silent in the face of questioning, resulting in non-prosecution due to lack of evidence. Mavros must know of them.
I had no doubt that baffled the police. The anguish such women must feel, I knew it intimately, because it was mine also.
That spidery ooze creeping through your mind, leaking cruelty, every single day of your existence. My main consolation? I knew Reuben was dead.
As for Grimm, I couldn’t forget how easily he’d led me to that dinner when he knew Mavros was about to stick a knife into me, into my cunt – the nasty word was so apt here. A fake knife, but still. I’d lost more trust in him that night than I had in Mavros, who I already knew was obsessed with taking down this criminal. By twisted logic, I guessed Grimm thought he was protecting me. A real caring person would’ve warned me. He’d sat there and bloody well watched.
*****
London grew old, for me. It was another city with problems, beauty, history, but that was nothing remarkable when you were looking for a kidnapped friend. For weeks we had investigated and I had been, yet again, tested to see if I could resist commands. The results were dubious. If I were to become some female version of a mesmer, the event was taking its time in manifesting. I only stayed because of Mavros and because I owed it to Cherie.
I grew impatient, snappy; I wanted to bite off Mavros’s head even though he still controlled me.
The night before we went out to a nightclub for some pure relaxation, my agitation became so extreme, I wondered if there was a concrete reason.
I adjusted the tights on my legs and smoothed down the super-short pink, slinky dress. The material liked creeping upward at unexpected times, and revealing all my underwear seemed a bit much even in the flashing lights of a nightclub. Strange, perhaps, to be so innocent in my dressing but I treasured my privacy when I could. The stilettos with the crazy death’s head motifs were my one big fuck-you to anyone staring at my figure.
I swung my head up and stared at Mavros where he stood checking the fit of his suit. The man had enough suits to be a lawyer or a CEO. He was going to stand out in the crowd. From hints, I suspected he was a psychologist. If he had a functioning practice, he must’ve had the best employees or partners to fill in for his absences. Perhaps they were all his acquired women? Life must be so easy when you could find slaves so easily.
The man was rich anyway. Did I care if his business took a dive? No.
“Is there a reason I want to bite someone’s head off every five minutes?” I picked up my clutch purse. “I’m suspicious.”
He only turned his head to look over his shoulder, but a smile was there. I’d guessed right. Mavros liked me to think.
“Yes. I thought it was affecting you.”
“What is it?”
Now he came to me and held out his hands. He wanted mine and I placed them in his grasp. One, he
kissed. A prince with his princess. As sometimes did, a peace suffused me. I liked being wanted, being his in those moments.
“Better?” His eyes damn near twinkled.
I cleared my throat as my pussy warmed. Squeezing my thighs together would make his smile bigger, and elsewhere. I resisted that temptation, stood there thighs spread enough that my clit was unhappy at the lack. “I think so.” Another wave of warmth hit me and my knees gave, a little. “Stop that.”
“Stop what?” he kissed the back of my hand again, drew me closer until his face was all I could take in and his legs bumped against mine.
My eyelids fluttered but I kept my gaze on him. “That. Making me want you.”
“Hmmm.” Oh the sexiness of that raised dark eyebrow. “It’s my favorite hobby, making you want.”
I knew that.
“Especially when you’re so fidgety. You want to know why?” He put his hand and mine near my mouth and I licked at his forefinger.
I eyed it, dearly needing to suck it into my mouth.
“Do it.”
And so I did, licking over his finger, sucking, tasting him and getting so turned on that I did indeed squeeze my thighs in, only to find he’d pressed his leg up there a millisecond before. Instead I squeezed on his thigh.
Lust jolted through me and I shook once, with a hint of orgasm there, before it faded.
“Fuck.” I moaned quietly, still eyeing him, and watching him study me in return. My nipples were scrunching in tight and my whole status of bitch was dissolving rapidly into wanton slut.
“You want to hurt me sometimes, Zorie. I see that. It’s good. It’s part of the mesmer bug affecting you. It will help you resist but...” He pulled away his hand and instead forced me to the floor until I kneeled before him. “I like fucking with you even more when you’re angry.”
When he unzipped and pulled out his cock, I found I’d opened my mouth for him before I registered his wish.
“Such a good girl.”
He fucked my mouth awhile, and at no time did our gazes break. He watched me with my mouth being his hole to fuck and I watched him watching me.
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