by Addison Cain
Her heart started beating again as he retrieved the stubby pencil and notebook. Handed them down.
“Now get up here.”
Buckeye was lurching to her feet, cracking the tiny book open before he changed his mind. A rude grip spun her by the hips, pressed her into the divider. She took advantage of the hard, vertical surface and, paper and pencil in her face, began to scratch out words.
A boot knocked into her ankle. Pencil skewed down the divider. Buckeye swore and August chuckled.
“Gonna have to be more careful than that.”
Blunt, cockhead rooted for position. Jabbed at an awkward angle past her entrance. She forced herself to write. He forced himself inside.
A hand came to her shoulder for leverage. The other curled around her hip, dug in behind the bone. He didn’t wait. Didn’t build speed. Traitor cock started slamming home, no clever words, no preamble whatsoever.
Her wrist jerked against the divider. The muscle pad of her thumb cramped trying to keep the pencil from weaving all over the paper. Vicers in the other cells would be staring, but Buckeye had to ignore them. Had to pour all her focus into getting this done. Legible.
Hips clapped against her backside. Soft tissues tore and stung. August grunted. Fucked her. Words appeared on the page, blocky and childlike under her death grip on the pencil.
Focus. Do it.
She did. Done. Pencil and paper fell from her hands right after she scrawled her name. The side of her face hit the divider. August speared up and in, lifting her onto her toes. Her tits mashed flat to the plastic and he kept coming, pinning her, using her as though the harder he did it, he was going to win something.
And in a few more violent thrusts, he did.
The traitor roared and his cock was gone. Her cunt was on fire. Hot semen splattered the crack of her ass, oozed down over her pucker. Her slit.
She stood there, splay-legged, forehead resting on the backs of her knuckles, trying to breathe. Trying to fucking live.
“Jesus Christ, woman.” She could hear him getting his britches back together. Gathering notebook and pencil. Dice. “Shoulda had that pussy back on the truck.”
She made a face at the divider. Eyes skimmed away from the woman in the next cell, who was staring up at her, aghast. There was no looking at him.
“You gonna take that message, or not?”
“Yeah, I’ll take it,” he said. “Shit. I keep my word. Your asshole’s still puckered tight, ain’t it?”
“Fuck you.”
He chuckled behind her. “Done did,” he said. She heard the clack of a latch, metal on metal. “Best of luck, Gambler.”
If there had been something to throw, she would have. The door swung shut behind him.
Down the row, Wayland was entering another cell. She curled her lip and shoved herself away from the divider. Flopped down on the mattress and had her back to it all before she could see whether August made any more offers of his own. Dull noises suggested at least one of the traitors did.
Just like that.
She pulled the blanket over her head. Fogged the small space inside with her breath.
Just like that you bet every last hole you have. What are you now?
But what was one more? One more in a sea of eager pricks, for even the tiniest chance the double-crosser would make good on his word and take her message where she wanted?
It didn’t matter. Only a small disruption. Routines and priests and service stretched out ahead of her. Forever.
Buckeye closed her eyes.
It was the first time she’d felt clothes on her skin since they’d stripped her out of shirt and britches that first day in Virtue. And these weren’t her old VT clothes. This wasn’t her cell, either. Buckeye gaped, clueless, while people moved around her and fussed.
They’d come for her some handful of days after the troubling appearance of August. Just her. No one else.
For a minute, she thought the guards were herding her to the baptistery again. This time, however, they took a circuitous series of stairs and corridors until they’d brought her to some other part of the cathedral. It was still above ground. There had still been windows along the way, and the quality of light told Buckeye it was somewhere near sunset.
The room she stood in now was called a vestry. She’d learned the word from the guards on her way to the stairs in the crypt. ‘They can work on her in the vestry’, the one had said to the other.
‘They’ were women. The only examples she’d seen since her arrival who weren’t Vicers, and weren’t naked. She stared at a wooden cross that hung over one of two doors to the small room, as the two Covvie women adjusted and fluffed, busy as bees.
They wore skirts that came to the floor, and blouses with long sleeves, black like the priests, but she didn’t think they were any sort of clergy themselves. They murmured to each other over this tweak or that. Buckeye had given up asking them questions; whenever she did, they’d demur and look at the ground.
Her nerves jangled and twitched. The routine was broken. No one would tell her anything, but she no longer fought. The time for that was long past.
A mirror was there, in this room she’d determined was for priests to dress for a service. Buckeye watched the women strip away her cocoon of impersonal nudity to reveal a garish, foreign butterfly.
The clothes they’d pulled and stretched onto her body were like some pre-Delineation caricature of promiscuity. Glossy material stretched over her ass in a short, tight skirt. Stockings with honest-to-god garters ran up her legs from under the hem. The top half was the opposite of what the women wore who dressed her: straps instead of sleeves, breasts cupped high and together on a shelf of a brassiere for display. She teetered on heels that only belonged in a house of Vanity back in the The Vice.
The woman behind her was arranging Buckeye’s hair into curls. Her partner focused on Buckeye’s mouth, staining her lips red with a tiny brush. The person taking shape in the mirror was an uncanny doll version of herself. A doll meant for one purpose, but none of the priests had ever asked for anything like this before today.
When the door behind her opened, she jumped. The woman with the brush clucked her tongue, and moved her thumb to clear away a stray smear of paint.
The guards had returned. One of them had something soft clutched in a fist.
“Ten minutes,” he said, stepping behind Buckeye to shoo the other woman to the side. His left arm came around her waist; the right rose to cover her mouth with fabric. Mint rose in her nostrils. Her eyes went wide.
What? Why?
The other guard stood, arms crossed, in front of the back door. She could see him in the mirror, even as she tried not to jerk away from inhaling The Song. There was always the baton, always a worse alternative.
It had been weeks. Hadn’t she obeyed them every time? Surrendered in every way they’d asked?
“Why?” she blurted when the rag came away. It was the only time Buckeye could remember having questioned a guard.
“Insurance,” said the man in grey. And then to the women: “Finish up.”
The one with the lip brush made a face at the mussed cosmetic. “I’ll have to do this all over.”
“Then do it,” said the guard. “Now.”
The Covvie women moved in on her again with a will. In a few short breaths, Buckeye swayed in place and had to sit.
Christ, how much did they give me?
The first buzz woke between her thighs. She lost sight of the women, eyes tracking the subtle movements of the men. Shifts of muscle under their shirts. The dip of an Adam’s apple, the flex of a jaw.
It was too hot in the little room. Her lips parted. The women powdered and curled, but Buckeye imagined guards’ fingers leaving their batons to take down the straps of her too-tight shirt, to shuck down the stockings and cool her with wet, lapping tongues.
The opposite door creaked open and her attention shifted like she was underwater. Two cassocked priests entered, crowding the room to cla
ustrophobic. One was Brother Raymond, and another she remembered as Aaron. They could help her. Help her get these clothes off. They and the guards all coul—
“Good timing,” said the guard in the back. “She’s about to come unglued.”
Like the envelopes in her truck.
Her mouth curled into an unhinged smile. Raymond looked at her like he wanted to clear the room and smear the red paint back to her ear. She squeezed her new cleavage in his direction.
The women stepped back and the priests moved in to haul her up by the arms. She melted between them, ankles unsteady, but more than happy to lean on bodies she knew all too well by now.
They were walking her back through some of the same hallways. The path looked familiar, and Buckeye cooed, The Song rushing in her veins. “May I serve you today, Brothers?”
A muffled voice grew louder as they approached another door.
“You’ll serve our Father,” said Raymond. “Shh.” His words were gentle, and Buckeye simmered. They moved her through the door and into a space she knew, albeit with much less light.
Here was the back of the altar. The water in the baptistery lay still as glass. Mather stood in the pulpit, a thousand eyes fixed on him from pews reaching back and back.
Buckeye stumbled and the priests caught her. The entire congregation turned to the sound. Watched, mesmerized, as the men brought her to the center of the wide crossing that passed in front of the altar. They released her arms and stepped away to the side, out of the light.
She stood there, dumb, weaving on her feet, The Song hovering, ready to crash in like a wave.
And then Mather spoke again.
Buckeye almost fell.
“And this, my faithful, is the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.” His voice carried out over the nave. Over the heads of rapt Covvie worshipers. Straight between Buckeye’s legs. “This is what sin looks like. What the Territories make of a person; the Serpent making promises.”
Arousal seeped from her lips to dampen the underthings the women had hidden under her skirt. She hated Elijah Mather. Needed him.
God, it’s fucking hot up here.
“Though it may cause feelings of shame,” the head priest went on, “I ask you to look at this woman. Her modesty is gone. Burned out.”
She sank to her knees, panting. Lifted her hair off her neck with a forearm. The lights were in her eyes, but she could feel the attention of the crowd.
“Look at the way she chooses to display her body.”
That voice, oh god.
Her knees slid apart. Eyes closed.
“Look at her behavior, even in a House of the Lord.”
It was goddamn propaganda. That’s what this was. That’s what she was.
She wanted to wail, but her pussy throbbed. Her hand left the back of her neck and slid to the hem of her skirt. Fingers slipped over her crotch, so many eyes, appalled. Buckeye exhaled. Tilted her hips.
“This is what their houses of Sin make of people. Do you see? They cannot help themselves when the demons of Hell whisper in their ears. They become mindless. Whores.”
The last word vibrated down her spine like a tuning fork. Buckeye purred and rolled to her hands and knees, her entire focus on the priest.
“Father.”
The word came out throaty and lurid. The slightest flinch came at the corners of Mather’s eyes, but the congregation was too far away to see it. They were not too far to hear her, though, and a murmur rippled back through the pews. Buckeye began to crawl toward the pulpit.
“The excitement of sin can be a lure,” he went on. “I do not doubt some among us even now have stolen their way past the wall. Traveled west in secret, the search for rumors leading them on.”
If she could get to the hem of his cassock. Lay a hand on his shoe, his ankle … The smooth stone under her knees brought to mind all the cocks she’d sucked. Some right here in this room.
I knew you’d be the one.
Mather’s.
“But the truth is here!” He extended a flat palm in her direction. She wanted to lick between the fingers. “This is The Vice. This is what it makes of people. For the sake of your own salvation, be strong. Temptation is an easy path, but those who put their faith in the Lord will not stumble.”
Buckeye was nearly at his feet. She wet her lips with her tongue. Arched her back. Her eyes glittered in the fever of want.
“Elijah.”
When she said his given name, the congregation gasped.
“I need you.” The words were a ragged breath. “Please.”
The priests were hauling her back before her fingers could close on his robes. Her hips rolled, so close to their goal, even as Mather ignored her and continued to terrify the people of New Covenant with his manicured example of debauchery. One of her shoes slid off and lay abandoned on the floor, another broken truth for the believers.
She was squirming like a cat in heat by the time the Brothers returned her to the vestry. The moment they let her loose, Buckeye’s fingers slipped under the skirt. Her head fell back.
Oh god, right now. Yes.
Raymond made a noise of frustration. “He warned us,” the priest said to his partner.
Hands were gathering her arms away, pairing them behind her back. Her eyes came open and she whined, grinding into nothing while Raymond pulled her against his chest. Leaned against the room’s single table and held her close.
“Shh, don’t,” he said at her ear. “Just wait.”
Aaron stood by, looking like a bundle of nerves. Raymond could admonish her to wait all he wanted; hard evidence that he was having his own problems bruised between her cheeks. Buckeye pushed back, shameless, begging to the purple rhythm of The Song.
“You have to calm down,” he said. “We can’t.” But he was shifting his grip on her wrists to a single hand. The other rose to squeeze a breast, to slip two fingers into her mouth. She sucked, greedy, egging him on.
Brother Aaron watched, breathing through his mouth from a few feet away, his erection obvious through his cassock. “How much did they give her?” he said. “Christ.”
“Blasphemy,” Raymond warned, nuzzling her throat.
“Forgive me, Brother.”
The door opened. So did her eyes.
“Get out,” said Mather.
“Yes, Father,” the priests responded in unison.
Raymond untangled himself and Aaron followed his peer out the opposite door, embarrassment coloring their faces.
Buckeye stood, feverish, weight on the shoeless foot, as the highest priest in New Covenant stripped off his shawl and cast it aside over the single chair.
He stepped forward and instinct made her retreat, even when her pussy screamed for the opposite. The edge of the table bumped her cheeks, but Mather came on, crowding her.
His legs tangled with hers. Blue-grey eyes looked down, apathy burned away with lust. His palm rose to the side of her face again, the same as when she’d taken him in her mouth. In some drunken move that made no sense, she slid her arms around his waist. His face tilted down, intimate, as though they might kiss.
“Obedience without question …” he whispered, eyes on her mouth.
She wet her lips. Finished it for him. “… is rewarded.”
He spun her by the shoulders. Splayed a hand on her back. Pushed.
The side of Buckeye’s face kissed the tabletop. Its edge bent her in half at the hips, the joke of a skirt creeping up over her ass. Her breath came quick when she heard the gathering of fabric. The metal warning of a buckle.
Hands tugged down the flimsy underthings. Trousers lay along the backs of her thighs. He settled over her at the waist, fingers smearing into arousal, painting a wet line up between her cheeks. Slicking her other tight hole.
No.
But the hard was cock already in his fist, bumping and aiming after all this time.
“Father!” The protest bubbled up, even through the drug.
Nested at that pink knot of resista
nce, inevitable, Elijah bent the rest of the way over Buckeye, his weight the price of service on her back.
“You are the perfect servant.”
He pushed inside, closing the circle of damnation.
Buckeye squealed. The burning organ worked up into her bowels, dilating her stubborn ring to its limit, all at once. Her palms tried to wedge under her shoulders, to shove herself up and away, but Mather bottomed out with a grunt, laminating her to the table.
Her body went to war with itself. Even as her legs kicked out like a frog’s, a primitive scrabble to flee pain, her ass lifted to the cup of his hips. The Song made her reckless. She humped against the sear of his cock, loathing and needing at once. Her fingers clawed at the glossy wood, sounds she didn’t recognize coming out of her own throat.
Mather hissed and found her hands. Pinned her wrists above her head.
He began to sodomize her.
A fractured hymn of little cries blistered out over the tabletop, and one of the garters snapped loose against the back of her thigh. The Voice of New Covenant burrowed inside her rectum. Dragged himself out. Rooted again.
Again.
Her mouth was open now, but no more sound came. Only the priest’s breathing at the base of her neck. A part of her drifted free, the pain roaring below her tailbone, somewhere distant and hazy.
Why? Why this? Mather thought he could be better than the rest of the clergy? Some weird idea of chastity?
Or did he just want to see her like this? Degraded like he imagined all VT ‘sinners’. Hurting.
The Song didn’t care.
It knew desperation. Knew where it could find cock. Right at the core of suffering.
Buckeye pushed back, and a new, ragged noise abraded the back of her tongue.
No, don’t!
Mather groaned. Humped. She squeezed around bobbing girth, nerves a crackling hysteria. The drugs in her veins demanded the thing she wanted least in all the world.
She tilted her hips like a whore.
NO!
A voice that was hardly her own came through the crook of her elbow. “Will you do penance, Father? Like the others?”
“Yesss.” He was sheathing, pulling out. Burying himself again, the table bruising her bones as he ground her into it.