Microsoft Word - FortunesFool.rtf (26 page)

rub himself against the wall. His skin felt hot and tight over his muscles, and now...oh, crap. No, not now, please. This was not the time for his

dick to take an interest. He closed his eyes and willed the stiffening he felt below his waist to go away.

"Uh oh."

He opened his eyes. "What?"

"Looks like I was right about that injection." She was staring at his cock, which now stood out from his body at full attention. "This is bad."

He felt his face go red. "Not so bad. A little better than average, or so I've been told."

She rolled her eyes. "That's not what I meant, funny guy. The needle they stuck in your arm? Full of the Madre's special stimulant. Things are going to get...um...intense for a while."

She wasn't kidding. The surface of his body glowed with sensation.

His muscles bunched and twisted beneath his skin involuntarily. And his

dick...Christ, it felt like it wanted to turn itself inside out. He closed his eyes and breathed deep, trying to regain enough control to get some

answers.

When he opened his eyes, she was chewing her bottom lip and

looking anxious. The little line between her eyebrows had deepened.

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"You seem to know an awful lot about how they do stuff around

here," he said. "Why is that?"

She shrugged. "I used to work for the Madre, a long time ago. Ten

years now."

He tensed, instinctively defensive. "You were one of them? These

nutjobs?"

"Like I said, it was a long time ago, and I got out before..." She looked away, still worrying her full bottom lip with the edges of her

straight, white teeth. She hugged herself tighter and paced back and forth in front of him. The way her bare legs moved beneath the short hem of

her nightie...it was hard not to stare and wish he could touch her. Harder and harder, in fact—pun most definitely intended.

"Before what?"

She came to a halt right in front of him. He could've sworn he felt

her body heat, even from three feet away. Every nerve in him screamed

to reach out and touch. He leaned back against the wall and enjoyed the

way the pitted surface dug into his shoulder blades. He shrugged his

shoulders, letting the bricks abrade the skin. Ahh...yeah. More. Like that.

"Before I wised up." She narrowed her eyes at him, watching as he moved. "Hey, don't do that. You'll hurt yourself."

He was pressing harder into the wall and rubbing his back from side

to side, as far the short reach of his chains would allow. "Need to. Feels good."

She stepped nearer. "Seriously, you need to stop. You need to fight it. This is what they want."

"They want me to tear up my back on the bricks?"

"That's the whole point of the stuff in the injection. It makes you need...um..." She looked away again. Then she took a deep breath and continued. "It makes you crave sensation to the point where you're

begging them to hurt you. Nothing they do will be enough, and you'll be

crying for it. But then, when the drug wears off—"

"When it wears off, I'm fucked." All at once, what she was saying became all too clear. He remembered the condition of Julian's body when

they pulled it from the Dumpster. The missing strips of skin, the burns.

The deep bruising around the genitals. He shuddered, his gorge rising in his throat. And still his skin burned and ached for stimulation.

He hung his head, letting his shoulders slump, and took a few deep,

slow breaths. A moment later, he felt a soft touch on his hair. Even

that—the bare brush of his fingertips against the dead follicles—made

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his cock quiver and strain.

"What's your name?" she asked. Her voice was soft. She sounded sorry. Sympathetic. Like she cared. He wanted to believe it.

"Marcus Colton. I'm..." He stopped and swallowed. Could he trust her? Was she playing a game? What if she was really one of them?

Then again, what choice did he have? He sucked in a deep breath,

blew it out and said, "I'm a detective with the Santa Rosa Police

Department, working undercover to solve a homicide—"

"Don't tell me any more. I don't want to know." She dropped her hand and backed away from him.

"But—"

"Really, it's better if I don't know. For both of us."

Frustration coursed through him, followed by helplessness. Both of

them were chased by the certain knowledge that'd screwed up royally

and probably deserved what was about to happen to him. "Doesn't

matter. I'm gonna die anyway, and you're probably not even real. Just

some stupid hallucination brought on by the drug."

"Oh, I'm real." She pressed a finger to her chin, and he was suddenly reminded of a teacher for some reason. "I haven't quite got it figured out yet, but I think I teleported—"

"Teleported?" His laugh echoed like the bark of an angry dog

against the bricks.

She shrugged. "You didn't see me come through the door, did you?

There are no other entrances, and I didn't slide down the chimney like

Santa, I promise."

"This is bullshit."

"Whatever, Detective. I don't understand it either. I've never been corporeal in a vision before."

He felt his face harden into a scowl. What the fuck was this dame

babbling about? Visions? Teleportation? They were gonna torture him to

death. That was real—as real as it got.

She sighed and said, "Corporeal? It means to take up space or be

able to affect your physical surroundings."

"I know what corporeal means. I just can't believe I'm having this

frigging conversation." He shifted his weight, keenly aware of every molecule of his own skin. The shackles on his wrists scraped, and it felt like a caress. The bricks gouged his back, and he wanted more. Even the

cramps in his thighs and the sharp ache in his knees from his long-held

position felt good, because it was something. Sensation. Stimulation of

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nerve endings. All of which was bad, because it meant that when the

barmaid returned with her cat o' nine, he might be ready to beg her for it.

Just the thought of it made him groan. In fear? In anticipation? Who the fuck knew?

"Listen, Detective," Leah said. "In about five or ten more minutes, you're going to be in a seriously bad way."

"It gets worse?" He lifted his head and looked at her. She'd bent down to talk to him, and her hair had fallen across her face. The

nightshirt she wore gaped in the front, giving him a view of her goodies beneath. His dick jerked, and a sharp tug of want pulled at his balls. He groaned again.

"Yes, and then it lasts a good six hours without intervention." She looked around the room and dragged a hand through her hair. "I'd like to help you, but I can't take the chance of being caught here. If they can see me like you can...if they could touch me or chain me up—"

He nodded. "Don't sweat it. Just get the hell out and tell somebody where I am. Call the Santa Rosa P. D. and ask for Chief Gustavo

Sanchez. He'll know what to do."
And God help me if the Chief chooses
to be a little slow on the uptake.

She crouched there, in front of him, chewing in her lip again. "I feel bad leaving you this way." Her gaze was on his cock. Or, at least, on something much further south than his face, and he couldn't imagine his

bellybutton held that much fascination for her. "I could just take the edge off, you know? That might help. Give you some defense against the

drug. So when they come back, you could hold out longer."

The way she talked about it...she made it sound so clinical. But his

dick liked it, clinical or not. So much that it sat up and begged. Drooled a little, too. Marcus tried to keep his voice steady and even—the only part of himself still within his control. "What exactly did you have in mind?"

Instead of blushing, her face seemed to grow paler and resigned

behind the fall of her hair. Hard to believe she'd once worked for the

Madre. She seemed so...no, "innocent" was the wrong word. "Reserved,"

maybe. Or "self-contained."

"I think you know what I have in mind, and this is really no time for games, Detective. Believe me when I tell you that you don't want to

be...like this," she gestured at his twitching, straining cock, "when the Madre gets back."

Julian's face—bloody, bruised and contorted in agony—flashed in

his mind. "Yeah. I've seen the final product."

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She nodded. "The Madre always said she found the male anatomy

disgusting. I remember...I mean, someone told me, I never saw it myself

or anything..." She took a breath and bit her lip.

He looked up at her. "What? You might as well tell me."

"The Madre likes to get men...aroused. Like this." She gestured toward his dick again. "And then punish them for it."

"Christ. What's her deal, anyway? I mean, what drives her to this,

besides bugfuck insanity?"

Leah shrugged. "I don't know the whole story. Something to do with

her father selling her to his friends when she was a girl. Which—if you

think about—doing that to your own daughter? Enough to make

anybody—"

"Yeah, my heart's bleeding cherry KoolAid over here." The muscles in his lower body cramped and twisted, making him jerk in pain. Except

it felt good. Really good. He cleared his throat. "So if I let you...uh...help me out, won't she just inject me again?"

Leah stepped forward and pressed two fingers against the pulse-

point in his neck. He drew in a breath, then a deeper one, savoring the

scent of her skin borne on the heat of her body.

She pulled her fingers away and stepped back. "Your pulse is

elevated. You feel it?"

Jesus, yes, he could feel it. His heart felt like it was trying to break down a cement wall. He nodded.

"The drug she gave you—which is essentially Viagra on steroids

with a little extra kick—does bad things to your blood pressure and heart rhythm. It can't be administered more than once in a twenty-four hour

period without risking a massive coronary event." She sounded more like a teacher than ever.

His turn to shrug, rattling the chains and using the opportunity to

scrape his shoulders against the bricks one more time. "She's gonna kill me anyway."

"Yeah, but not yet. Believe me, if the Madre wanted you dead, you'd already be lying in a ditch somewhere." She looked at him appraisingly, which—for some reason—made his cock bob in the air like a Goddamn

puppet on a string. "You're a good-looking guy. I'm betting she wants you for a toy, at least short-term."

"She can't even see me!"

"I guess after all these years she's developed a vivid imagination."

He looked up at her and felt the burn of frustrated rage once again.

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"You really do sound like you sympathize with that bitch. Are you sure you know which side you're on here?"

Her face changed then. Her lips compressed, and the line of her jaw

hardened. She moved forward 'til she could splay her hand flat across his chest. The sweat from her palm stung on the welts from the whip. He

sucked in a breath through his teeth—a noisy hiss. His cock pulsed, and

his hips worked against nothing. Against the air, saturated with tension and the ghosts of agony and fear. He craned his neck back to look at her.

She said, "I know which side I'm on, Detective. Now let's cut to the chase. We have two hours—maybe less. Will you let me help you?"

His gut churned with helpless fury, but that didn't keep his dick

from drooling silvery puddles onto the floor between his thighs.. Pain

shot through him, catching him at odd angles and making him twitch. He

craved more—like licking the serrated edge of a knife coated in honey.

In another minute or two, he was going to lose it and start making noise.

He couldn't let that happen.

It felt wrong—so wrong—to even think about getting off under

these circumstances...but what were his options? He looked down at

himself. His cock curved up against his abdomen, all ruddy purple. He

could see the blood vessels beneath the thin skin. It'd never looked so

angry before.

"Let me help you," she whispered again. "Let me give you some defense against these people. It's all I can do right for you now."

It was the broken note of pleading in her voice that did him in. He

nodded once, closed his eyes and let his head rest against the bricks.

She let her hand slide down his chest. When her fingertips grazed

his cock—like insect wings, maddening and barely there—his whole

body jerked. Then she took him fully in her hand, and the sensation

spiked high and vicious. Not pain, not pleasure—just feeling, intense and way past the edge of comfort. He bit the inside of his cheek and screwed his eyes so tightly shut he could see bursts of green light in the

blackness.

She moved her hand, collecting the slippery moisture from the head.

Her touch was hesitant, as if she feared hurting him. Every stroke seemed to

take

an

hour

as

it

traveled

from

base

to

tip.

Torment...bliss...agony…like traffic lights, they flashed in his brain.

"Is this okay?"

Even the cadence of her voice made it worse. More sensory input on

an already overloaded system.

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"Yeah," he croaked. "Yeah, but...could you maybe..." He cleared his throat and tried again. "Faster?"

Her grip tightened, and her strokes quickened. Became swift and

relentless, yet her touch remained strangely delicate. The contrast made him shiver and yank at the chains. In another thirty seconds, he'd lost