by Aya DeAniege
Books By Aya DeAniege
Contracted
Contract Taken
Contract Broken
Contract Renewed
Daughters of the Alphas
Masked Intentions
Fragments
Coffee and Blood
At Death's Door
Cheating Death
Death Mask
The Ethereal
His Grace
His Wings
Coming Soon:
Crop
Seed
Harvest
Contract Signed
Contract Sealed
Contract Claimed
Awakened
Being Written:
Contract Delivered
Prototype*
Copyright 2018 Aya DeAniege
Front Cover Design by DeAniege Designs
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
A note from the author:
This story cropped up as a possible novel in my Contracted series sometime in November. It was written as an attempt to keep it as a ‘to the side’ book. Either use it as a one-shot, or as an introduction to the world if you’d like.
For the moment, I am settling with a novella length, and it feels right, but I may expand on it in the future.
For those who are not aware of the world, this takes place some two hundred years in the future after an economic collapse ended civilization as we know it. The world began to fail, which decimated the human population. It takes place in a dystopian science fiction world that is struggling to fix what humans of the past have done.
In the country that rose up in North America, the poor can sign contracts with the elite-rich to pay off debt and better their lives and the lives of their children. The contracts are completely legal and there are laws both enforcing them and protecting those who sign the contracts, within limits.
My thirty-fourth birthday.
I spent my day at the hospital, teaching myself how to use a new machine and then having everyone come to me asking how to use it.
I don’t know. Have you tried reading the instructions?
But did they listen? No.
They complained to the administrator when I protested. Said that I knew how to use the machine, so I should teach them to do it instead of not being a team player like they were.
Which is a ridiculous thing to say, we work in a hospital. It’s not about team players.
We’re commission based, damn it. And if I spend my day helping them then I don’t get my work done, and I only get base pay.
How is that fair?
I wish we were paid the way they paid hospital staff before the collapse. Yes, they weren’t paid nearly enough for what they did, but they got paid more than I did and they always got paid the same. They didn’t choose cases based on the pay, they did it based on their skill and what fell in their lap.
Or maybe I should have just bitten the bullet. I could gone into one of those fancy ‘ology’ doctorates instead of trauma.
Trauma could pay well, but you had to work the floor and take on the real trauma cases. The legs blown off because some idiot decided to play with fireworks or the emergency surgery on a pregnant mother who got in a car accident.
In the new system, they basically reduced us to ambulance chasers. Still, I could make good money.
If I was on the floor.
See, under the new system, the debt one incurred during hospital visits was paid in part to the doctor. If you sewed a limb back on, then you got paid.
And if you happened to be the trauma surgeon who did the intake of a rich elite, you stayed with them the entire visit and made a good chunk because they paid to skip lines and you got the commission on that as well. And if they were happy? Well, you could find yourself with one heck of a tip.
But no.
I spent my entire fucking day explaining how to use a machine, basically a glorified thermometer, to other doctors who went through the same schooling as me. However, none of them could figure out how to use it or where to put it. When I tried to tell them that it was so easy even an idiot could do it, they filed complaints saying that I insulted them and called them idiots.
Of course, I would never say that, but that’s what you get when you’re the only girl in a boy’s club.
Trauma was all men. They still saw me as a nurse half the time, which was fine. That was how I could slip in and snipe the good cases or simply walk away and pick up something more interesting.
That day, however, all I earned was base pay. I had been looking forward to working hard and claiming some commission so I could cash a little out to buy myself a few things.
A bottle of wine, some cake maybe. You know, something for my birthday.
The icing on the shithole of my day?
As I headed for the change room, one of the bastards had the gall to snarl at me, “We were going to get you something for your birthday, but we decided to forgo it since you’re such a bitch.”
“If only emotional barbs could teach me a lesson,” I said in response.
Then I took my leave.
I didn’t like men who wanted me to be that nurse figure. I certainly didn’t put up with them using and abusing me however they pleased.
While I had taught them how to use the machine, I wouldn’t be doing it again. When they whined about not knowing how to use it in the future, I’d throw the manual at them.
Not literally, though. Human resources had been very clear that I couldn’t do that again.
The events of my day led me to stomping into the locker room, yanking open my locker, and pulling out my phone. I read the texts on my phone, my heart sinking as I did.
“Can’t make it. Henry is sick.”
“Stupid children getting in the way of my plans,” I grumbled.
Not because I was upset that Isabella and Nathaniel, two of my best friends, couldn’t make it to my birthday dinner because their seven-year-old son was sick. Seeing that text made me open my email, because for some reason Mr. Wrightworth never texted anymore, only emailed.
He lost his phone constantly, was his excuse, but I think he didn’t like the limitation of the texting system. Even though his emails were often short enough to send in a text.
In my emails, I found a simple rain check notification. Not even an explanation. That kind of rain check came on and off from Mr. Wrightworth when he was distracted by his submissive. It rarely happened on special occasions, but those times were important for his relationship, even if it meant that he got to have hot, dirty sex.
Mr. Wrightworth was the only person who could rain check on me without getting into trouble. He had saved me from an abusive relationship some fifteen years previous.
Without his intervention, I never would have survived as long as I had.
It didn’t hurt any less.
I slammed my locker closed and then kicked the one under mine, which made the others in the locker room move away from me. I snarled at nothing in particular as I stuffed the phone into my pocket and glared around the locker room.
Oh, I saw it.
I saw the smirks and the little hand motions between them.
They knew my plans
had been cancelled.
They knew, and they blamed it on me. Not on a sick child and… a perverted Child.
No, they thought I would spend my birthday alone. It amused them. They hoped I’d end up crying over a bottle of wine and watching movies. That I would lament over the fact that I would spend my life alone and then die sad and have cats eat my face or something.
I headed out immediately, swiping my wrist at the door of the locker room to clock out. As I left, a doctor lifted his hand, and I flipped him off. The moment I clocked out was the moment I checked out. They knew that, and he should have backed off the moment he saw me leave the locker room.
“I wanted to thank you for today,” he said. “And wish you a happy birthday. Not everyone is like the trauma boys. There’s a reason they’re in trauma and not up top with the rest of us. They’re assholes, and they would have dropped the hospital’s rating into the hole years ago.”
“Well, as long as they’re getting paid,” I snapped.
“What happened?”
“They kept me down there all day. For crying out loud, I’m not being paid to be a teacher. I’m being given base pay to work in trauma, and I spent my entire day down there, teaching idiots how to use a machine I just learned how to use myself. That I read a manual for and then had to teach them and lost an entire day of possible commission.”
“Which means you can’t buy anything because you’re single income and still paying down student loans.”
“Whatever, it’s just another birthday. There’ll be yet another next year.”
“Okay, well, if you change your mind, or you want to go for a birthday dinner another night when your day isn’t so bad, and you don’t have that glint of steel in your eyes because someone put a nasty edge to you, you should let me know.”
I sucked in a breath and looked him up and down.
“Fine, I will keep that in mind.”
“Can I have your number? So you can call me if you change your mind, not so that I can drunk text you or ask you about work.”
I pulled my phone from my pocket and held it out. He pulled his and reached out, tapping it against mine. The screen lit up, indicating that it had accepted a new phone number, then went dim once more. I slipped the phone back into my pocket and sighed, trying to find the energy to be polite.
“I don’t work for three days, so don’t worry about waking me up,” he said. “But if you drunk text me I’m only texting back. I will not come over.”
“I have a reputation,” I said.
“I know, I’ve heard. I should probably let you know that I’m not looking to get in your pants. I’ve heard you have no problem being friends with guys without it getting awkward.”
“And my sparkling personality just draws you in.”
“No, admittedly it’s because you can talk circles around half the doctors here, and when you want something done, the nurses don’t roll their eyes at you. I’d love to know the secret. Anyhow, I will let you go because I know you only have a day off before your next shift. You probably have wine waiting at home.”
I watched him turn and walk away, wondering what his angle was in all that. It couldn’t just be that he wanted to get to know me because the nurses loved me.
Being nice to the nurses could get a person far in the hospital. Anyone with a set of eyes or a brain would see that.
That day was a summation of my week.
I was annoyed and wanted out of the hospital. It had been one of those weeks. I questioned why I became a doctor in the first place. Being a doctor had very little to do with helping people for me, I had stumbled into health services.
No one was ever grateful for my saving them. Even the free services we offered, because everyone had to do pro-bono work sometimes, were little assholes about it. Whining about services rendered like they had a right to do so.
I’m sorry that I saved your life but couldn’t save your hand. Maybe next time I’d just let you bleed to death. You ungrateful piece of shit.
But I never believed I liked helping people. Lots of people in health services loved the work they did and got off on helping others.
I did not.
I wanted to smack people and cause more pain, not help them out.
I walked out of the hospital shaking my head and muttering as I headed to my car. New to me, but not new.
I opened it and then slammed the door. Leaning, I placed my head on the steering wheel and struggled with myself as I sat there.
It was my birthday. Everyone had cancelled.
I had a bad day.
Things were overall bad.
But I was alive, I had all my fingers and toes. I had never lived in the slums. My debt was being handled, and I had a soccer-mom-hates-her-family sized bottle of wine sitting in my fridge, just waiting for me to chug it.
I would go home. I would take a nice long bath, drink a glass of wine, and order take-out. Maybe watch a movie and curl up on the couch with that wine and some kind of dark chocolate cake.
Shit, but I’m broke.
I sighed and bounced my head off the steering wheel.
All right, change of plans.
Bath, wine, movie and whatever was left in my freezer. There was little there, because I had been having a bad week and people kept taking my commissions.
My freezer was basically empty. There might have been a freezer burnt piece of fish at the back of the freezer, behind the frozen stock and veggies that were six to seven months old.
There was nothing left in the fridge but milk and butter and eggs.
Oh, and the wine.
I would make up some sad little meal.
I get that regular people have bad birthdays all the time. Not me. If there had been one thing I could rely on every year, it was my birthday. Especially with the family. They always pulled through.
Given our history together I knew it was serious stuff going on.
They wouldn’t just cancel on me because we all knew how important those special dates were to everyone else. We dropped everything. We booked time off. Whatever we had to do to make certain that everyone else was happy.
I dragged in a breath and sat up, looking around the half-empty parking lot. I sighed and slipped my key in the ignition, starting the car. Leaving the parking lot, I turned on the music and cranked it up until I couldn’t hear my thoughts over it. Instead of wandering in circles of self-pity, I focused on the road and drove safely while flicking through the music to get to something a little more upbeat and positive.
Even I didn’t want to deal with me right then.
I was that upset.
I pulled into my parking spot under my building without incident. I hardly realized I was there until I left the car. Then I sighed again and looked around the empty lot.
The community had purchased the building, which was small. Mine was the only apartment actively used. It was located at the back of the building, away from the street and was all but soundproofed.
We were working out the kinks of the soundproofing so that we could rent out the other apartments and make a little more to maybe buy more property. Or set up another ‘church’ in another city.
It had taken a long time, but I had finally earned a spot at the founder’s table. By doing that, I could be a dungeon master.
So, walking into my apartment, I shouldn’t have been surprised. I was, but I shouldn’t have been. I was surprised because some bitch’s shoes were strewn across my floor.
Being a dungeon master meant that I watched over a playroom for community use. They weren’t supposed to use the place unless I was there, but I had taken on an extra shift that day so that I could earn some more commission to get something nice for myself for my birthday.
Not just anyone could walk into my apartment while I was at work. Only other founders had a key, and the door registered which key was used so if I got robbed, I could find the person and beat the shit out of them. Though the community was filled with mainly good people. No one was g
oing to be trying to rob me.
Just because they were good people, didn’t mean that they weren’t idiots. I had told them all that the dungeon was closed on my birthday because I didn’t want to deal with anyone besides family, and the family was supposed to have been taking me out for dinner.
If there were shoes on my floor, that meant that there should have been a founder sitting on my couch waiting for them to finish in the dungeon. That a founder should have been watching over them to make sure nothing went wrong.
Or, alternatively, a founder decided to use my apartment, in which case they were going to get an ass beating because that was against the rules. They’d get a second one for leaving their shit all over my floor.
I snatched up the shoe and glared at it.
The shoe was brand new. It didn’t look like it had been worn at all. A nice little flat something that I had seen in a store and wanted. Except I couldn’t afford it for my birthday. The shoes were black with little satin bows on them.
Clutching the shoes, and annoyed, I walked a little further and found a pair of stockings just tossed on the floor. They also looked new.
Someone decided to bang a gold digger in my apartment on my birthday!
I found a little red dress, a silver necklace, and a pair of earrings on the way to the dungeon. Just outside the door, I paused to collect myself with all the items thrown over my arm and in my hands. I readied for what sort of disturbing kink I would find on the other side of the door.
My annoyance fueled me. I yanked the door open and snarled as I stepped inside.
The only occupant in the room was a man, naked and tied to a chair in the middle of the room. His skin was flush and tan, pulled tight over muscle. Despite being tied, he seemed to be at ease, relaxed and comfortable even.
The bindings were broad leather things with a soft fabric on the inside of them. I was intimately familiar with those bindings, and that made the hair on my arms raise, but not in a frightened way, in annoyance.
Those were my manacles. The ones that no one was supposed to use but for me, or on me.