Chapter Twenty-Six

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“SIR?”

I looked up from a text-heavy email full of theories, formulas, and questions from my scientists on where to go next with my latest concoction. This drug wasn’t for pleasure or control. It wasn’t for personal use or financial gain. This was purely philanthropic: a cure for cancer.

So many of the big pharmas spent more money on lobbying the giant industries that promoted food and lifestyle-causing cancer rather than investing in teams to cure it. In their minds, disease was great for their bottom line. Profit, profit, profit. In my mind...I owed a bit of good karma for everything I’d become.

Cricking my neck from sitting at my desk since dawn, I pinched the bridge of my nose and cursed the faint headache brewing. I couldn’t blame dehydration or screen time because I’d worked much longer hours before. The pain behind my eyes was caused by the knowledge that in a few short hours, Jinx...Eleanor...would step into Euphoria and be fucked by another man.

Not just once.

Not twice.

Probably well over—

Don’t fucking think about it.

He’s paid.

He’s owed.

She’s serving him.

“What is it, Cal?” I dropped my hand and peered at him. He’d taken off his suit jacket, leaving him in a white shirt and ice blue tie. His cufflinks winked with silver stars as he passed me the dossier.

The dossier.

“Markus finished outlining his fantasy. Want me to input the parameters, or will you?”

My hands fisted around the folder. What sort of heathenous, wicked role-play would he have her endure? What world would I have to be the architect of to ensure he got his money’s worth?

“I’ll do it.” My voice came out thick and black.

“You sure?”

I looked up, narrowed eyed and threatening. “I said...I’ll do it.”

“Fine.” He held up his hands in surrender, then his lips twitched into a smirk. “It’s an interesting request. A first, that’s for sure.”

I didn’t like firsts.

I didn’t like hearing about fetishes that I hadn’t come across before. Especially fetishes that included Jinx being the main meal.

Waving him away, I waited until he’d exited and closed my office door before flipping open the file.

Markus Grammer.

Forty-four years.

Sexual health, clean.

General health, average.

Health and safety wavier, signed.

Agreement that he enters Euphoria at his own risk, signed.

Payment, in full.

Programming, ready to begin.

Gritting my teeth, I turned the next page.

A flurry of green and yellow shot through my open driftwood doors, followed by an indignant chirp.

“Ah, great. Just fucking great.” I looked up just as Pika dive-bombed the file and started attacking the corners as if demon-possessed. “Hey! Oi. Stop it.” Flicking the annoyingly energetic caique parrot off my reading material, I shook my hand, trying to dislodge his tight little claws as he wrapped around my middle finger, deciding to attack me instead.

Raising my hand, I huffed as he dangled upside down, his bright black eyes inquisitive, intelligent, and far too naughty to get away with the murder he managed on a daily basis. “Coconuts. Goddess. Sex! Sex. Sexxxxx.”

God, why did I ever teach him how to talk?

“Pika...we’ve had this conversation.”

He honestly laughed in my goddamn face and proceeded to gnaw on my fingernail. His little wings spread out as I shook my hand again, trying to break his tenacious grip. “Let me go.”

He chirped. Then trilled. Then squawked and carried on a conversation as if I could understand every caw. After his noisy argument about why he never behaved nor did what I asked, he let my finger go, plopped onto my desk, and rolled onto his back, giving me his white fluffy belly and yellow chest.

“Hello. Please. Now!” His scaly legs waggled, just tempting me to scratch him.

“No way am I falling for that game again.” Grabbing my pen, I poked him in the stomach, only for him to curl around the expensive limited edition implement and flap and squawk, biting and scratching as if he wouldn’t stop until ink spilled in death.

Despite myself, a smile tugged at my lips.

Pika...was special.

I’d rescued him, like most animals that hid within my jungles on Goddess Isles. Some I brought to this island, so I could keep an eye on them, and others, I let loose on the more uninhabited shores, letting them revert to the way nature intended.

But Pika...he’d been an egg when we met. So had his sister, Skittles. They’d been born in the lab—totally random from the caique parrot my father’s scientists had been testing acne medicine on. The parrot had lost all her feathers. She’d been depressed, lonely, and intensely sick from what humans did to her. No one knew she’d been fertilized before she’d been brought in from another lab.

I’d found four eggs in the bottom of her wire cage early one morning. Two had smashed. Two were whole. For the first time in forever, I’d felt the familiar empathy that’d gotten me in so much trouble in my youth.

Before anyone arrived, I’d scooped the eggs up, placed them in a disease incubator where Petri dishes grew sickness rather than nurtured life, then smuggled them home when no one was looking.

It’d been a full-on job looking after the eggs.

And then the hatchlings? Fuck me, they were even harder. I’d had to take the week off work to feed them every few hours until they left the naked, ugly alien stage and became pin cushions with quill-like feathers.

The week after Pika and Skittles came into my life...my parents died, and the company became mine.

The day I took control, I’d made changes to Sinclair and Sinclair Group. Lots and lots of fucking changes. I reclaimed a piece of myself again. I began to make up for all the shit that I’d done wrong.

Pika hopped away from annihilating my pen, knocked over the stapler, got his talons stuck in the tape dispenser, and ripped a laptop key out of the keyboard before I could stop him.

He was carnage on wings.

A little hurricane of nightmares.

“Pika.” I tried to grab him, only for his cute green wings to snap open, shoot him into the air, and deposit him on the top of my head. There, he grabbed strands of my hair and hung upside down over my forehead, putting our eyes within millimetres of each other.

He squawked and bit my nose.

I gave up.

Slouching in my chair, I spread my hands the way I knew he liked and allowed him to distract me from the fantasy I had to code and the knowledge that Jinx was one hour closer to being consumed.

Pika flopped down my face, kept his wings tucked in total faith that I’d catch him under my chin, then lay on his back in the centre of my palm, rocking on his wings as I tickled his downy feathers. “Had a good few days, little nightmare?”

He blinked as if he understood everything I said. He chirped back with a very clear, “Yup!”

It never failed to astound me how quickly he’d learned to speak. Sure, I’d shared my life with him for almost fourteen years. Sure, his sister wasn’t as friendly as him and preferred to live with the wild parrots in the palm trees with the occasional visit to me. But Pika had chosen me as his mate.

He was never far from my shoulder, disappearing for a few days only if the hibiscus flowers—which were his favourite—were blooming. He’d grow drunk on the nectar, pass out in some tree, and not come home for a while.

Those nights, I tried to convince myself that I didn’t miss the stupid bird. That it would be best for all of us if he just reverted to his wild side and forgot about me raising his scrawny ass.

But...he always came back.

And he always made me a little bit better when he did.

Sighing heavily, I raised my hand until I slipped him onto my shoulder. There he snuggled into my ear, chirping and chattering, content and calm.

Bracing myself, I let my eyes fall unwillingly onto Markus Grammer’s fantasy.

I read each page with my stomach coiled and my cock hard as a fucking rock.

I wanted to kill him but I also understood him.

Understood his fantasy because it was based in the roots of mankind. The need to dominate, manipulate, copulate.

It was a fantasy I could enjoy, if I ever let myself dabble in my creation.

Swallowing away inconvenient lust and violent possessiveness, I picked up my phone and arranged Jealousy to get Jinx ready.

Her vacation was over.

It was time to become a goddess.