Jess cut an icy glare over to Casper.
“That part doesn’t matter,” Ava said, clearly trying to control her tone. “It’s treason.”
“What part about it is treason?” Casper asked.
“How about the part where you allowed a hostile country to have access to one of the most powerful abilities an exemplar can have? How about that part? Or what about hiding a healer, which definitely goes against our national interest? How about that part? Do you even know where he is now?”
“No idea,” Roman said.
“Centralians were there in the East as well,” Casper chimed in. “They were looking for the healer too.”
“And did you come across any of them?”
“Not that I recall,” Casper told Ava. “But my point remains. Everyone was looking for this healer. He’s just a boy. A little stupid and definitely from the countryside, if you get my drift, but he’s sweet. There’s no reason he should be a rat in someone’s lab for the rest of his life. And as for Nadine, I think someone may have had a bit of a crush on her and wanted to save her. But I can’t confirm that last bit.”
“Fuckin’ hell, Casper,” Roman grumbled.
“Every time,” Ava said, shaking her head at Roman. “Every time I try to give you another chance…”
“I didn’t…” Rowan felt Celia lightly place her hand on his shoulder, the doll trying to calm him. “I didn’t realize at the time what I was doing, and I have since had my memory wiped, not that that’s any excuse.”
“It isn’t,” Miranda said.
Roman was going to tell her to fuck off but ultimately decided against that, realizing it would only exacerbate an already terrible situation.
That, and he was still pissed at Casper.
“I’m going to bed,” Ava announced after downing the rest of her wine. “We can deal with this in the morning. Jess, Miranda, I will be the one that files a report with Rafner, and it will be up to him to send this up the chain of command. Understand?”
Both women nodded.
“Good. Roman…”
“Yes?” he asked, looking at his former teacher.
She turned to her bedroom, mumbling something under her breath as she walked away.
Casper fell, dead to the world.
Roman had the notion of melting her into a little ball of plastic and throwing her out the window, but he ultimately decided against it, keenly aware that it was part of him who had done this, that all of his dolls had borrowed pieces of his personality.
But whatever part Casper had borrowed…
After the tiny doll was in his pocket, Roman also turned to his bedroom, his fists clenched at his sides.
Things were only going to get worse from here.
Chapter Twenty-Two: Plummet
Orange stood on his balcony overlooking the cityscape of Centralia. There weren’t many buildings taller than his penthouse, and being so close to the top floor really was about the only good thing his government had ever done for him.
And he still didn’t know why.
Orange had simply put in the request for the location, and they had opted for this. If he had made a similar request ten years ago, they would have laughed in his face.
But times had changed, the end of the Western Plague nearly tripling the size of their economy. Sure, the border was still war-ravaged, but the rest of the country, especially some of the elite cities on the coast, had really profited over the last decade.
Money flowed into the government and they wasted it.
As he stared down at the streets below, streets he could barely see from his high-rise apartment, Orange couldn’t help but feel a sense of dread.
His time was coming.
He had always known this—everyone’s time was always coming—but he’d had a dream the previous night, one that foretold a coming death, and Orange knew there would be little he could do to stop it.
He took a sip from his glass of wine, noticing something twinkly on the horizon. Probably an exemplar, or perhaps they were working on a new building toward the west. Centralia was always erecting new buildings, the skyline filled with cranes as the space on the ground became increasingly limited.
Orange wished he could see Centralia in a hundred years from now, two hundred even. He imagined it would only move higher, press closer to the heavens, new districts cut out of the sky.
It would be a glorious thing, indeed.
“Enjoying the view?”
Orange didn’t recognize the voice, yet he knew exactly who had spoken to him. Rather than turn, he merely took another sip of his wine, finishing the glass.
“Margo,” he said with his back to the woman.
“I didn’t kill your guards this time,” she said.
“Then what did you do with them?”
“My counterpart is entertaining them for the time being.”
“Counterpart?” Orange asked, finally turning to see a young woman with white hair standing before him. She was petite, wearing a ruffled dress and a red leather jacket that matched the red streak in her hair.
“You didn’t,” Orange started to say.
“How did you know it was a real body?” she asked, taking a step closer to him.
Margo pressed her lips together and looked down at her body for a moment, satisfied with her work.
“A hunch. Margo, what are you doing?”
“You haven’t been very forthcoming with information, and you have yet to supply me with any power amplifiers, which has left me to handle things myself. I started with a trip to the Lottery Council, which I didn’t think was going to be helpful in the end, not until the woman I was interrogating finally gave me the location of Roman’s home. You would have been surprised at how tough she was, and I don’t even know if she actually told me the information at that point or if she passed it on to me subconsciously.”
“Whose body is that?” Orange asked carefully.
“This body? It was the body of an exemplar whore that Roman was fucking. Her name was Catherine. From what I could tell, she was a desperate, horny cunt, but a good lay in the end. Why? Are you interested in borrowing it? I could let that happen.”
Orange shook his head as he heard the howl of a southerly wind tear through the corridor created by the buildings all around him. “Margo, why are you here?”
“Is that an existential question?”
Orange smirked at her.
Of all the people in the world, he was perhaps the closest to Margo, or at least he once had been. While she was generally pretty quiet, Margo always had a strange sense of humor that revealed itself from time to time.
And looking at her in the corpse of some young exemplar made Orange wonder if this was all part of some elaborate joke, if Margo had just wanted to see how far she could take it.
But he knew that wasn’t the case. Orange knew once he noticed her power take partial control of his heart.
“I’ve given you a month,” Margo said, her voice softening. “And you haven’t given me anything.”
“These things take time.”
“Where is Roman?”
“If I knew, I would tell you,” Orange said, glad she wasn’t a telepath.
“You’re lying to me.”
Orange felt a twitch inside his arms as his muscles started to spasm.
“This is how you want to do it? After all we’ve been through…”
“You should know by now that this particular line of reasoning will not work against me,” she said. His knees buckled and snapped, the bones pressing out of his skin.
Orange dropped his glass, holding himself up by the balcony’s railing using his armpit. He winced at the excruciating pain, but his gaze did not falter.
The former member of the Protectorate stared hard into what was left of Margo’s soul, Orange so focused on her that the pain of his split legs became almost secondary.
“Margo, I have known you since we were children…”
“I don’t care,” she said.
&nb
sp; “There are other things I need to tell you…”
“Are these your final last words?”
Orange nodded.
He bit his lip, the pain starting to push through, Orange swallowing it down as he continued to focus on Margo.
He knew he wouldn’t be able to do anything with her lungs because she had possessed a corpse. He also was aware that what he was about to tell her may not mean anything to her anyway.
Still, it was important that she knew.
“Roman is your half-brother,” he managed to say.
“What?” Margo asked, taking a step back as a strange sensation moved through Orange.
The petite zombie looked at her feet, as if the answer was somewhere below her.
“Malus…”
Orange felt an intensity in his chest.
“Don’t do it,” he pleaded with her, “not yet.”
“How did you know?”
“About which part?”
“Malus was my dad…” Margo said, trying to choke back a sob. “How did you know?”
“I found out when I discovered this information about Roman. How did you find out?”
“Cedric told me.”
Orange nodded.
Cedric would have been perhaps the world’s strongest telepath, if the world actually knew of his existence.
He had grown up with them, but he had been trouble from the start, and it was Cedric’s power in particular that had led to the spread of vampirism in the city of Ravja. Cedric had become the leader of the vampires, only to be killed later by Destry and Amethyst, two exemplars Margo and Orange had also grown up with.
“There is a briefcase in my closet,” Orange told her. “It has all the documentation. You’re ten years older than Roman, but you share the same father. Different mothers, obviously.”
“It doesn’t change anything…”
“Why not? What is the point in all this, Margo? What is your end goal? You have already died, and I’m not talking about a month ago—you were dead twenty years ago. Is your new goal to be immortal and wreak havoc on the civilizations of this world for the rest of eternity?”
“I…”
He swallowed hard, the pain now spreading up to his thighs, to his pelvis. Still, Orange held himself up, knowing this would be the only way. “Really, Margo, between you and me, what is your end goal?”
“It doesn’t matter now,” she said, and as Orange felt his heart constrict, he used what was left of his upper body strength to pull himself over the railing.
He knew Margo wouldn’t be fast enough with her power to actually stop him from falling, that this final act would prevent her from exploiting his body and his powers.
No one would be able to see the look on Orange’s face as he plummeted to the pavement below, but if they had, if there had perhaps been an observer, they would have seen a smile.
A cracked smile, but a smile nonetheless.
Chapter Twenty-Three: Snap
Kevin Blackbook had never felt more in control than he did the morning of his company party.
Gone was the bumbling slob of a man who’d never stood up for himself, whose wife had been cheating on him with an exemplar.
Now he was more or less a god, men and women bending over backward for him.
At least that was how he felt after fluttering his eyes open.
Kevin rolled out of bed and patted Obsidian on the ass.
The cat girl yawned and tucked her head between two pillows. Turquoise was next to her, their backs pressed together, the quieter cat girl also sleeping.
Figuring he would check on Sandy the telepath, Kevin put a robe on and stepped out of the room, coming into his office to find her asleep on the couch.
He approached the redhead with the front of his robe parted, his erection starting to solidify.
Kevin grunted, Sandy quickly waking up.
She saw him standing there with his robe parted and started to move away.
But then she stopped, Kevin merely taking a step closer to her.
“What do you want from me?” she asked softly.
“I don’t know,” Kevin lied. “You’re a telepath—what do you think I want?”
“Obsidian won’t be happy.”
“That doesn’t concern me, and it shouldn’t concern you.”
Sandy placed a hand on his proof of manhood and slowly started to jerk him off.
“Are you sure about that?” she asked. “It seems like she cared the last time you tried something with the help…”
“You’re stronger than she is mentally, are you not?” Kevin asked, trying not to make a satisfied groan as she began moving her hand faster.
“Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. Is this really where you want to do this?” Sandy asked, looking around at his office. A bit of sun was coming in through the darkened blinds, dust visible in the air. The couch and the carpet had been replaced, the wall painted over, the scent still lingering.
Kevin smiled. “It’s as good a place as any.”
“And how do you know I want to do this?”
“Your hand is on my cock,” he told her softly.
“This isn’t how it’s supposed to work,” she said.
“You’re the one that started it, not me. I was merely coming in here to…”
“Get something to drink?” She nodded at the opposite door. “The kitchen is that way.”
“To look at you,” Kevin admitted as her hand slowed to a rhythmic pace.
He felt the telepathic creep at the back of his mind, and he was just about to say something about it when he looked down at Sandy and noticed she was grinning at him.
“You really want it?”
Kevin nodded, and as he did so, Sandy twisted her hand to the right. A snapping sound met Kevin’s ears.
He was on the floor in a matter of seconds, silently screaming, his knees tucked together, Sandy able to fully assault his mind.
Images of his dead brother came to him, Kevin overwhelmed with anguish. The floor started to stretch away from him as he clawing at the wood, watching in horror as everything went vertical.
Then his environment flickered back to normal, Sandy seated on the couch glaring down at him, and Kevin was finally able to activate his Zero Ring.
He pulled himself to his feet, wincing at the pain in his groin as he covered himself with his robes.
“You fucking…!” Kevin came forward and backhanded Sandy, the woman letting out a yelp as she dropped to the other side of the couch.
He raised his hand again and stopped, looking from his hand to the telepath, finally able to get control over his breath. “Why the hell would you do something like that?” he whisper-screamed.
“I’m not your little fuck toy,” Sandy said, her eyes filling with anger as they locked on to Kevin. She placed her hand on the side of her cheek, where Kevin had slapped her. It was cherry-red now. “I’m not like that.”
“Fine, but…”
“But what?”
“You were the one that…”
“Are you really blaming me for this?”
“You could have…” Kevin shook his head, not able to really come up with a good argument for what she could have done.
All he knew was that he was both embarrassed and furious.
“I am in control here,” he stammered.
“Then be in control, Kevin. But that’s not how things are going to work out, not when I’m in my right mind.”
Kevin realized at that moment that she hadn’t taken any of the toxin this morning, that Sandy was much less docile than she normally was. She continued, “I might work for you, but I don’t want to work for you in that way. Not like this.”
“You don’t…” Kevin found himself shaking his head.
For a second, he thought it was some telepathic trickery, but then he realized that no, these really were his thoughts. Kevin had pushed the envelope too far, to the point where he had forced himself onto someone he held power over.
�
��Goddammit,” he said as he started to turn away from her, deactivating his ring.
“You know, you can still be a criminal mastermind, or whatever the hell it is you’re trying to become, and not be a low-level thug. Why don’t you take some of those organizational skills you learned in working a desk job, some of that humbleness, and apply it here?” she suggested. “You’ve already turned a profit at the pleasure house, and now you’ve taken over a security company. Of course, there will be paperwork we have to forge, but…”
Kevin looked at her. “No, you’re right. You’re right.”
Sandy slowly moved to the side, giving Kevin a place to sit. “Please,” she said, patting the cushion.
He hesitated, then decided to go along with it, to hear her out.
As he sat, Kevin reminded himself to pay close attention to whether she was trying to do something to his head or not, to always be on guard around the telepath.
“We could do this together,” she said suddenly, her eyes lighting up. “With Obsidian and Turquoise as our enforcers, we could do…”
“There is no we in this equation,” Kevin told her firmly, “but, if you continue working for me and you keep doing well, maybe there is a point where you could become my second-in-command. Not when it comes to enforcing. That isn’t a role for you. But perhaps the business…”
Sandy nodded. “I am well aware of the stuff the girls release, this toxin, and what it does to me, but I am levelheaded right now and…”
“Yes, the toxin is strong,” Kevin said. “I get it right from the source.”
“We should both be careful with it,” she said softly.
Kevin looked down at the front of his robes and saw that he had an erection again. He stared at it with disdain for a moment, Sandy’s eyes also falling onto it.
“It’s enormous,” she finally said, a smirk coming across her face.
“Which only made it hurt more when you snapped it.”
Sandy shrugged.
“I don’t know what to say about any of this,” he finally told her.
“You feel deflated?”
“This really has gone to a place I would have never predicted. You see that, right?” he asked, looking at her. “In my head. You must have seen it.”
House of Dolls 4 Page 19