The Assassin's Salvation (Mandrake Company) (32 page)

Soft clacks sounded. Sergei didn’t lift his head. He didn’t need to. He could identify a woman in heels, or perhaps they were boots tipped with some metal or lacquer. Either way, he could tell the owner wasn’t heavy enough to be a man. The scent of some musky perfume hung in the air. Did that mean that Laframboise herself had locked him up?

The heels came closer, then stopped in front of him. Inspecting her prize, was she?

The smokers’ warning floated into his mind, that most men didn’t apply for jobs here. With reason. Sergei supposed he was about to find out that reason. Anything was better than being shot, and even if he was about to be tortured, he might find his opportunity to escape, especially if Laframboise had dismissed her servants and was alone.

That was what the logical part of his brain told him. But this setup made him nervous. It was too familiar, and he feared Laframboise would become a specter out of his past. Oh, his “counselor” hadn’t used anything so antiquated as chains to hold him—between the controller and her concoction of various drugs, she hadn’t needed to chain him to render him helpless—but she had enjoyed inflicting pain.

Sergei told himself he could handle whatever Laframboise dealt him. He had survived two serious torture sessions in his career, and he had killed the people who had dared yank out his fingernails in addition to using everything from fists to high-tech tools to inflict pain upon him. But those tormenters had been men. He worried that Laframboise’s gender would affect him more than it should, that he would, once again, be the boy-playing-at-being-a-man that he had been back during those first couple of years in the Fleet, that his mind would fling itself into the bottom of a dark well from which he couldn’t claw his way out. Or even worse, he would betray Jamie and Mandrake, spilling every secret simply because Laframboise asked.

Stop it, he growled inwardly. No need to give himself away to her before she even spoke to or touched him.

As if Laframboise had been reading his thoughts and waiting for the right moment, a cool, soft hand wrapped around his penis.

Sergei kept his chin down and his eyes closed, forcing himself not to react, though he groaned on the inside. The men had never started their torture there—funny how a man would kill another man without a thought but never consider castrating him. The fact that she chose to start there set a tone he didn’t like.

“Nice size,” she said, still gripping him. Something cool and metallic came to rest on his abdomen. “Though we’ll have to firm it up a bit, eh? I’ve only had one man come out of the sedative stiff. He was amazing.” The metal—some kind of bar or baton?—traced the muscles of his stomach. “I hope you won’t disappoint.”

Sergei couldn’t imagine what use she might find for his penis while he was in this position, but he supposed she had something in mind. The counselor had always made him lie on his back on a bed—or, when planet-side, on the ground—and had ridden him like that, but not until she had fully aroused herself by tormenting him. Maybe that was something they taught in counselor school, and this woman had similar plans in mind.

The metal heated against his skin, and Sergei got a sense of how his torture might be delivered.

“Who are you, anyway?” Laframboise asked. “I know you’re awake, by the way. You might as well talk to me. Not that talking is necessary, I suppose.” She stroked his penis, almost lovingly, though the heat coming from that baton was growing to a painful level. Intense throbs hummed from its tip and into him, the strange and unpleasant sensations undulating through his body like ripples across the surface of a pond. Ripples he suspected would only become more intense. He took deep breaths, trying to still that sensation of encroaching panic in the back of his mind.

“I was expecting Viktor Mandrake, I must confess,” Laframboise went on. “I must kill him—I owe Felgard that—but Mandrake is quite handsome in his pictures, isn’t he? I was looking forward to enjoying him first. Alas, the handsome men don’t come to me willingly anymore.”

Sergei lifted his head, less out of curiosity as to what she looked like and more because he needed to assess his situation more thoroughly, to see if there was any hope for reaching some tool to free his hands—at least one hand. Also, the pain pulsing through him, while controllable so far, was making his breaths quicken as he struggled to manage it. As she had said, there was no use pretending he was unconscious. Even if the vibrations from that baton were growing so intense that they were rattling his teeth, so that he would have preferred to be unconscious.

“Ah, there’s my pretty boy,” Laframboise crowed, still rubbing him. “You’re a handsome one, too, aren’t you? Younger than Mandrake. Were you there when he killed Felgard?” Her hand tightened around him.

To his chagrin, her ministrations were making him hard. Ridiculous, given the pain the rest of his body was in, but he had never been able to stay soft for the counselor, either. It was as if some secret treacherous part of him found the pain arousing and was eager to respond to it.

Laframboise smiled, her full lips painted a lush red. She wasn’t young—as Jamie had reasoned earlier, the woman had to be in her sixties, at least, to have made it to her rank—but she must have had plastic surgeries done, because there weren’t any crow’s feet at the corners of her sharp green eyes or any creases around her mouth. She wore a tiger fur robe, the front open to reveal that other parts of her body had likely been enhanced and augmented over the years, as well. Those were not the breasts of a sixty-year-old woman.

“Nice, aren’t they?” she purred, clearly following his gaze.

“I…” He almost said that he had seen better recently, but it would be wiser to cooperate—or at least not openly fight—until he figured out a plan. She might be more lax if he wasn’t openly defiant. Besides, if he spoke with the scalpel still wedged into the corner of his mouth, he risked her figuring out he had something in there. He nudged it with his tongue, wondering if he could work that glue loose—or rip off the flesh of the inside of his cheek if he had to. Whatever it took to make it so he could spit out the scalpel. Not that he had figured out how to catch it if he did. He might be able to cut the iron shackles with it—provided they weren’t as reinforced as that damned flap—if he could get it into his grip.

“Big talker, aren’t you?” Laframboise stroked his penis, rubbing her thumb across the tip, sending a sensation of arousal through him that was somehow only intensified by the pain. “It’s all right. You can tell me if you were there. I won’t punish you too much.” She smiled. “I know Mandrake is the captain and that he’s the one sleeping with those women, doing their bidding, the weak-willed simpleton.”

Not
all
of the women.

Struggling to keep his mind off the pain—and off Jamie and any thought of talking about his comrades—Sergei tried to see the rest of the suite. A bed bigger than his entire cabin on the
Albatross
floated in the center of the room, a control panel with all manner of settings visible at the top of it. He wondered if shackles came out of it, as well. No, he didn’t want to know.

A table on the other side of the room was set with platters of snack food, as well as a decanter of wine. A squat robot sat powered down near the table, as if awaiting an opportunity to serve its mistress. Though it looked more like a floor-cleaning robot than a servitor. Odd that it was sitting there. Sergei wished he could send a message through it to Jamie, to let her know that he could use a little help. But what if she had been captured too? It might be up to him to rescue them both.

His gaze returned to the wine. Alcohol. Would it be enough to loosen the bond of the glue? Jamie had surely meant something like paint thinner when she had mentioned alcohol, but maybe if he could swish a mouthful around for a while…

“If you’re not going to regal me with stories of Mandrake, I suppose we can get to the rest of the night.” Laframboise thumbed a button on the baton.

Sergei gasped as the pulses of heat shifted to something akin to a lightning strike. Bolts of current scorched through his veins, and his entire body stiffened in response, his back arching away from the wall.

“Oh, that’s very nice.” Laframboise leaned forward and bit one of his nipples.

The pain was laughable in comparison to what the baton was inflicting on him, but he still wanted to strike her for her audacity. Maybe shove that metal stick into some hole of hers and turn it on.

But all he could do with those bolts of energy tearing through him was buck and try to twist away from the baton. He tried to jerk a knee up, to knock it away, but the shackles didn’t give him the leeway. As she bit at him, he felt a flush of irritation at the fact that his body responded to her. She chuckled, as if she had known it would all the time, biting him harder as she kept the baton pressed against his abdomen. Unfortunately, whatever energy poured into him didn’t conduct into her the way electricity would, and somehow, she kept the torture implement from brushing her
own
skin. Lots of practice, no doubt.

Sergei yanked his chin down, trying to crack her in the head, but she had that measurement down. His nose brushed her hair, but that was it.

Finally, the baton left his skin, and she backed away a step.

After being tense for so long, his muscles could have melted out of the shackles at the cessation of pain. Too bad his wrist bones ensured his hands remained secured. His relief was short-lived, for she was merely selecting another button on that torture stick.

He stared at it through blurry eyes. What next? Thoughts of using it on her sprang into his mind again, though he feared he wouldn’t be able to, that even if he was released, he would cower on the floor and let her continue brutalizing him. Already, he could feel his mind hiccuping whenever he tried to think, to come up with a plan for escape. His brain wanted to shrink to the back of his skull to hide from her.

No, he had a plan. What had it been? The wine. Alcohol. Yes.

“Cruel of you,” he rasped, “not to share a glass of wine with me before…”

“Phase Two?” she suggested.

“Uh. Sure.”

“I don’t know. Alcoholic beverages can cause erectile dysfunction.” She gave his erectness a frank look. He wished he could make it dysfunction so she would lose interest. No, that might not be a good idea. She might simply have him killed after that.

“So can being tortured,” Sergei said. “But I’m thirsty. I forgot to hydrate before climbing up your laundry chute.”

She chuckled again. “Ah, not only can my intruder speak, but he even has a sense of humor. Delightful.” She rubbed herself, drawing his attention, once again, to the fact that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath that open robe. Also to the fact that she had shaved off—or more likely had a surgical procedure done to—the hair of her pussy. Odd woman.

“Maybe the robot can bring it if you’re busy.”

Laframboise frowned at the robot. “It shouldn’t be here.” She shifted her frown to him, eyes narrowing, and Sergei wished he hadn’t mentioned it.

“Don’t look at me,” he said. “If I knew how to program robots, I’d have them shooting people, thus saving me the need to crawl into ducts full of neurotoxins.” He was talking too much. She was sure to notice something was causing his voice to sound off.

“Hm.” Laframboise strolled to the table, her fur robe swishing about her bare calves, the heels of her shoes clacking on the wood floor. If she thought there was anything strange about wearing a robe and heels without anything else, she didn’t share it with him. She set down the baton—dare he hope she was done with it for the night?—and poured a single glass of wine, then took a sip.

There was a second glass. He eyed it hopefully. If he had a hand free, he could probably rip the scalpel out of his mouth, torn flesh be damned, but he didn’t and he couldn’t. He needed a solvent.

Laframboise watched Sergei while she sipped, then walked over, the baton in hand again. She touched the tip of it to his stomach, and he flexed everything, anticipating the pain. But it wasn’t turned on, and only the cool metal pressed against his skin. She smiled, her lips moist from the wine, and ran it across his abdomen again. His groin twitched toward her, and it annoyed him to no end that an image of her jumping him ran through his head. Somehow, he doubted Jamie would envision having sex with any of the meatheads who had tormented her in her life.

“If you try anything,” she murmured, her cold eyes locking onto his, “I’ll turn it up to the maximum setting.”

A morbid part of him thought to ask what it was set at currently, but with her this close, he didn’t want to risk speaking. She might see a suspicious bulge in his cheek.

“Medium-low,” she said, apparently anticipating the question. She lifted the glass and leaned into him, the bare flesh of her abdomen pressing against his penis. Tall woman. They would be the same height if he were standing on the ground. Something that wouldn’t happen anytime soon if that wine didn’t help.

She touched the glass to his lips, wariness in her eyes—she clearly expected him to try and bite her or knock the wine away—but she tipped the glass and let him drink. The strange kindnesses of one’s enemies. Or maybe she hoped he would loosen up and enjoy her torture more under the influence. The thought made Sergei want to spit the wine out all over her face, but he held it in his mouth instead, swishing it around on the left side. The better to critique the vintage, of course. It turned out to be port, rather than wine, and he hoped the higher alcohol content would do the job.

“Good, isn’t it?” Laframboise asked. “Not the usual swill you’re used to as a mercenary, I imagine.”

Sergei was trying to keep too much of it in his mouth, to inundate the scalpel handle, and when she grabbed his cock again, it startled him into sputtering a few precious drops. They dripped down his chin and onto his chest.

“Now, now, mustn’t waste such as fine vintage,” Laframboise said and licked the drops off.

He wanted to point out that a napkin would be tidier—and also that his penis wasn’t a handle, damn it—but he took advantage of her distraction, letting his head tip back as far as the wall would allow and working the scalpel handle with his tongue. Was it giving? Loosening its hold on his flesh? He thought so. He swallowed the port, so she wouldn’t wonder why he wasn’t doing so, then pushed against the handle with all the strength in his tongue. Which wasn’t as much as he wished it was. Maybe he should start doing barbell curls with tiny weights. Still, the scalpel handle seemed to loosen slightly. Maybe it was only his deluded imagination.