Stilettos, Inc.

by Lexi Ryan

  Then, later, when their relationship was solid and he’d trusted her with all he had, Rider had let her see the worst of it. He’d let her see the tests, the machines, the constant probing needles, after their father had practically sold them to some scientist. No one knew how the scientist knew Collin and Rider would be Specials, but he did, and he ran countless tests on the boys, first pre-puberty, when their powers were nowhere in sight. Then again later. After. They’d been treated like lab rats.

  When the tub had filled, she turned on the jets and stepped in. The water bubbled and churned around her, instantly relaxing her tight and overworked muscles. She closed her eyes, and leaned back, willing her mind to empty.

  The bathroom door clicked, and long seconds later, Rider’s fingers were at her temples, massaging away the stress with small, light circles. A sigh slipped from her lips, and Rider’s fingers moved down her face slowly, moving in light circles at her jaw before dipping behind her ears and working the tension at the base of her skull.

  The water sloshed. Chrissie opened her eyes, and Rider was behind her, sitting on the edge of the tub.

  “Lean back,” he said, lowering her head into his lap again. She did, and his fingers went to work again, kneading the back of her neck, trailing down to her shoulders.

  With every touch, the tension in her body leaked away and took with it the tension between them.

  She rolled to her knees in the tub and looked up at him. She could trace his worry through the lines on his face. His features were identical to Collin’s, save the scar, and yet time and life had made them so different—their expressions, the light in their eyes. Rider had always been the happy one, the smile next to Collin’s always-serious half-scowl. But lately, his face was as serious as his brother’s.

  “I don’t want to fight tonight,” Chrissie whispered.

  Rider cupped her face in his hand and she leaned into it. Turning, she pressed her lips into his palm. He was still closed to her—his walls up. What was he hiding? The thought flitted through her mind and she let it go.

  She traced her fingers down his chest, over the sculpted muscle there. He was strong. Solid, but not massive. Strength he’d first found picking fights on the streets, he now kept from an old-fashioned gym membership.

  The smattering of dark hair tickled her fingertips as she followed its trail over his hard, flat abdomen and to his erect cock. She bit her lip, remembering razzing Paige in the bar about the size of Collin’s package. Chrissie had never slept with Collin, but if his twin brother was any indication, she’d been blowing complete smoke. Rider was long and thick, and just the sight of his erect, slightly curved penis made the muscles between her legs contract. She felt herself going slick in the water.

  She wrapped her hands around his dick and smiled at his quick intake of breath.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, squeezing lightly, “I won’t hurt you.” She slid forward and positioned herself between his legs.

  She lowered her mouth and licked the head of his cock, watching him tense as he prepared for the pleasure of her mouth. She tortured him, licking the tip then the length of him. When a bead of fluid appeared on the head, she drew him into her mouth, wrapping her tongue around him and sucking as she relaxed her throat and let him slide deeper and deeper.

  His hands fisted in her hair, and he guided her, moving her up and down his shaft the way he liked. She wrapped her hand around the base of him, squeezing and twisting as she sucked and licked with her mouth. She knew when he was close, felt his body go rigid as he prepared for the orgasm. She sucked him deeper, harder, cupped his balls and took him into her throat as came in her mouth.

  But with his orgasm came something else. A blip. A wall that was lowered for a single moment. A memory delivered in a single second, wrapped tightly, hidden away from her.

  She backed away, slipping and hitting her back against the faucet. She didn’t try to cover the feeling of betrayal she knew was written on her face.

  * * * *

  Tara watched her sister leave and smiled. Paige had loved Collin once, but she’d never loved him as much as Tara did. And Paige wouldn’t help him change the world, so Tara would do it.

  Then Collin would never let the cancer kill her. He promised to protect her from that. No matter what. She trusted him more than she’d trust any doctor who wanted to put her through another round of chemotherapy.

  She fingered one of the flowers her sister bought her every freaking week—it was like she was already visiting Tara’s grave, paying her respects. A smile curved Tara’s lips as she focused her new power and watched the flower wither and die.

  Chapter Nine

  “Chrissie!” Rider was on her heels as she stormed out of the bathroom.

  “Leave me the fuck alone,” she warned, her voice low. She yanked clothes out of the closet—enough for tonight and tomorrow would do. She could come for the rest later.

  She stepped into a pair of jeans, fighting them over the still-wet skin of her hips. Next came the bra.

  “Listen, I don’t know what you think you saw, but—” he stopped at the don’t fuck with me glare she threw over her shoulder and tried a different tack. “Please don’t storm out of here without talking to me.”

  She rubbed her eyes. “What exactly do you want to talk about?” She took his chin in her hand and glared into his eyes.

  He set his jaw.

  “Do you want to talk about it, Rider, or do you want to know what I know?”

  He wrapped his hand around her wrist and drew her forward, his eyes desperate as they seared into hers.

  He would never hurt her. She wanted to believe it, but if that was true, how come he already had?

  “Let me go,” she whispered.

  His grip softened. “Chrissie—”

  “Don’t.” She shook him off and returned to the process of dressing and packing. She felt him move away, heard his long sigh in the bedroom.

  She threw a few more things in a backpack—some tank tops and yoga pants, a couple sweaters, and a pair of jeans. She had an overnight bag at the office she could use until she could come back for the rest of her things. If she decided it was worth it.

  She slid the backpack over her shoulder and headed for the door. Rider blocked her path.

  “Is there anything I can do to make you stay?”

  She studied him. “Can you tell me what you and Collin are planning?”

  He winced and closed his eyes. “No.”

  “Then you know I can’t stay,” she said, her voice steady, rational, not even remotely in sync with her rioting heart.

  * * * *

  The girls met at their office at too-goddamn-early-hundred hours. Paige went straight to the coffeepot, Josie unrolled her yoga mat in the middle of the office floor, and Chrissie sat behind the computer, the look on her face warning everyone that today was not the day to fuck with her.

  Paige pressed the button on the coffee pot and narrowed her eyes at Chrissie. “How did you beat us here?” They could set their watch by Chrissie: when she arrived, it was fifteen minutes after she was supposed to be there.

  Chrissie tugged on her hair, making it spikier. “I slept here last night.”

  Josie dropped her hands from prayer pose. “Oh…I knew it!”

  Chrissie frowned. “You knew?”

  “I saw you leaving his house hurt—”

  “Who hurt you?” Paige demanded.

  “Emotionally, I mean,” Josie explained. She wrinkled her nose and sighed. “I didn’t see why. You know how screwy my visions are when Rider or Collin are involved.”

  “What did he do, Chris?” Paige asked. Shit. They really needed to be at their best right now, and dealing with this was not helping.

  “Is that coffee done yet?” Chrissie asked.

  Paige poured two cups. Josie, of course, wouldn’t drink any. She’d opt for green tea later if she needed a boost.

  Paige pressed the steaming mug into Chrissie’s hands. “Spill.”
>
  Chrissie took a long drink and sighed. “He’s been blocking me out lately, which was weird, but I could handle it. He does that sometimes. But he slipped last night. I was giving him a BJ and he let his guard down.”

  “Is he cheating on you?” Josie asked.

  “Worse.” Her eyes filled and she stared at the ceiling for a minute. “I saw him meeting with Collin. They were planning to meet tomorrow to discuss the next step in bringing down Winston.”

  “The president,” Josie whispered.

  Paige deflated. She didn’t realize how much she’d been holding out hope.

  She’d blown off what Chrissie told her last night. She didn’t want to believe Collin would have anything to do with threats against the president. The fact that the SIA was suspicious of Collin didn’t mean much to Paige. After all, they tended to watch anti-government citizens rather closely, and Collin was as anti-government as it got.

  But it was worse than she would have imagined. Not only was Collin working against them, Rider was too.

  “And, of course, it flipped me out too much, so I jumped away before I could dig for more.” She stared into her coffee. “Which was real fucking brilliant on my part.”

  “Hey,” Josie whispered. “Don’t do that to yourself.” She came up behind Chrissie and hugged her, wrapping her arms around the front of her. “It’s going to be okay.”

  Paige studied her hands. She didn’t want to tell Chrissie any such thing. She wasn’t sure it was true. If Chrissie felt half as alone right now as Paige had that first month after Collin left, she didn’t want to make any promises.

  “I guess if anyone knew, it’d be you,” Chrissie said, studying Josie’s face.

  “Exactly!” Josie pulled away, beaming. “I see some wild adventures in store for you, chica!”

  Chrissie groaned. “Don’t do that.”

  Paige laughed. Josie had an annoying habit of dropping hints about their futures, and then refusing to tell them what she saw.

  Josie skipped back to her mat and resumed her series of yoga poses.

  Chrissie looked at Paige. “Please tell me I’m not the only one who fantasizes about putting downer pills in that health food crap she eats.”

  Paige laughed. “You’re not.”

  Chrissie cracked her first smile then went serious again. “Were you going to tell us that you saw Collin last night?”

  Josie drew her brows together and looked at Chrissie like she’d lost her mind. “We were there, Chris. Why would be she tell us?”

  Chrissie continued to stare at Paige.

  Paige closed her eyes. “I saw him when we left the inaugural ball. I just...I didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “Did he say anything?” Josie rolled her eyes. “Sorry, of course he said something. Anything you want to talk about?”

  Paige shook her head. “He said he wasn’t behind what happened at the ball. At least not intentionally, whatever that means. And he said he wishes I would trust him and stop working on the missing Specials case.”

  Chrissie sighed into her coffee. “He might say he didn’t have anything to do with the attempt on the president’s life, but the SIA guys aren’t buying it.” She turned to Josie. “I peeked at a little bit of memory from Fernandez yesterday, and the SIA has already decided Collin is behind the threat to the president’s life.”

  Paige looked out the office window and watched the cars zip by below. “He’s never said so directly, and I don’t want to believe it.” She’d loved him too long to believe he could be that evil. Having actual plans to kill the president was so much more evil than a general dislike of the government.

  The three of them worked in silence for the next half hour—Josie with her yoga, Paige checking the firm’s e-mail and voice mail, and Chrissie at her computer.

  When Chrissie spoke, it startled everyone. “I found you, asshole!” She was smiling behind her laptop.

  Josie craned her neck from downward facing dog position to look at Chrissie. “Found what?”

  “Scott—not a first name, but a last name.”

  “Awesome, Chrissie!” Paige said. “What do you have?”

  “The White Rose Gentlemen’s Club,” Chrissie said. “J.L. Scott. He owns the place and pretty much treats his employees like pieces of meat.”

  Josie hopped up and grabbed a towel. “Where’d you get that?”

  “One of the strippers blogs about him. She calls him J.L. in the blog, but talks about how he’s this big real estate guy. I found the blog following a series of links that I got by hacking into the—”

  Josie groaned. “I. Don’t. Care. All I want to know is where I can bust his ass.”

  Chrissie smiled. “You don’t even want to know that I have his picture—which matches the memory from the perp? Or that I have the address of his strip club? And—” she stretched her arms in front of her and smirked “—that the stripper blogger even mentioned a couple fetishes of this J.L.?”

  “Sweet baby Jesus,” Paige said, grinning. Taking men down by their balls was the Stiletto Girls’ specialty. J.L. was just waiting to be had. “What’s the plan?”

  * * * *

  Like little boys called to see the principal, Darian, Fernandez, and Wiley settled into the chairs in the lieutenant’s office and waited.

  Across the desk, he tapped his pen, his body tense, his jaw set. Darian resisted the urge to project calm. He’d been practicing, stretching his ability so he could project an emotion beyond just the person he was touching. Fernandez had been working on the same thing—trying to manipulate people’s actions without actually touching them. Neither of them was very skilled yet, but they were seeing some improvement.

  The lieutenant rubbed the back of his neck, and pushed a piece of paper across the desk.

  Darian picked it up. J.L. Scott. He raised a brow.

  “That’s all our Readers could get out of your man from last night before he disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?” Darian asked.

  The lieutenant sighed. “Vanished. As if he’d never been there.”

  Wiley scratched his head. “He had two abilities? The explosion thing and…teleporting, maybe?”

  “Not according to our records,” the lieutenant said. “But if he teleported of his own freewill, that begs the question: why wait until fifteen minutes into an interrogation?”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Fernandez muttered.

  “We’re looking into it. In the meantime, I’d like you to see if you can find anything on J.L. Scott. He’s a businessman here in D.C. He’s the one who gave the order to your guy last night.”

  Shit. Darian hadn’t realized how much he’d been counting on getting info from the guy they’d sent into headquarters.

  “A name is better than nothing,” Wiley said. “We can bring Scott in. If he gave the order, he surely knows more. We’ll figure it out.”

  The lieutenant looked out his window, stress lines on his thoughtful face making him look older than his fifty years. “There’s more.” He sighed. “President Winston wants to shut down SIA.”

  Darian froze. Surely he’d heard him wrong.

  Fernandez clenched his fists at his sides. “Doesn’t he know there are Specials out there who would love it if he did away with us? Then they’d proceed to tear apart this government and eat him alive.”

  “Maybe quite literally,” the lieutenant whispered.

  Darian winced, realizing how ironically appropriate Fernandez’s word choice had been.

  Radical Specials believed they were being repressed by the U.S. government. Since the government had first learned of Specials thirty years ago, they’d sanctioned all Specials to keep their abilities from the public eye. Darian had met more than a few Specials who believed they should be able to use their abilities openly and, more to the point, that they shouldn’t be governed by humans they deemed genetically inferior.

  Though Darian had yet to meet a Special who was different than the men in this room in terms of th
eir daily routine, there were always rumors of those whose practices were barbaric—who found that sex didn’t recharge their powers nearly as effectively as cannibalism. The legends varied, of course—some talking of Specials who ate human flesh, others were more like the legends of vampires, Specials who sustained their powers by drinking human blood.

  But they were just legends, and Darian wasn’t as worried about some myth as he was about the real threat of radical Specials wanting to overtake the U.S. government.

  Darian focused on relaxing the tightening knot in his stomach. “It would be a terrible mistake.”

  “He trusts the conventional law enforcement agencies to protect him.”

  Fernandez began to pace the small space between his chair and the desk. “How could they? They’d hold them back with, what? Their guns?” He huffed. “Good luck with that.” He stopped. “And if they’re lucky enough to catch the ones who make an attempt on the president’s life, what are they going to do with them? Put them in prison?” He shook his head. “How does he think we’ve kept order this long?”

  “He believes what happened before is irrelevant.” The lieutenant crumpled a piece of paper. “Fernandez, sit down. Now. You’re preaching to the choir. You understand. I understand. The whole damn agency and half of the president’s team understands, but this guy didn’t get elected because he’s some pushover.” He steepled his fingers.

  Fernandez reluctantly lowered into her chair.

  “What can we do to change his mind?” Darian asked.

  “There are some theories.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “First, there’s the ‘he’s a reasonable man’ theory. In that, all it would take is a nice long sit-down where we show him charts, graphs, numbers. Bury him in examples and testimonials.”