I am ashamed.
PICK UP the comm, Kel. Pick it up, pick it up. Fuck! Another wave of arousal heat crashes through me, harder and stronger than the last. Cate’s no longer massaging my breasts, but I feel lips and tongues on my nipples, swirling, teasing, tugging, biting. Against my will, my eyes remain fixed on the stage where Saarah/Cynthia is doing exactly those things to Hodei, who thrashes her head from side to side in apparent torturous bliss.
Beneath the table, Kelly has my trousers unzipped, the waistband folded downward to give her as much access as possible without revealing me to my tablemates, not like they’re paying any attention anyway. My enhanced hearing picks up the buzzing of the comm signal I’ve sent via the implants. If I can hear it, she damn well should too. Why doesn’t she fucking answer?
Her thumb slips beneath the elastic of my underwear, slides lower, lower, then brushes my clit. I jerk upright, banging one knee on the underside of the hard wood table. Damn, that’s gonna leave one helluva bruise, but the pain brings more clarity. I blink and focus. I can’t fight, but my flight response is kicking in with full thrusters. I need to calm the fuck down.
“Vick.”
Kelly’s lowered, sultry voice carries over my internal speakers, fills my head with a warmth that has nothing to do with whatever drugs Jacks has given me.
“Breathe, Vick. You’re okay.”
I want to shake her. “I am definitely not okay,” I subvocalize, my teeth clenched. “I need you to—”
“I know what you need.” She gives a soft laugh. “Believe me, I know.”
Right. Everything I feel, she feels. Muted, yes, especially if her shields are fully up, but I’m affecting her too. “I’m sorry. I fucked up.”
“Not your fault. You didn’t know.”
No, but I shouldn’t have eaten or drunk anything without having VC1 check it out first. I’ve grown too dependent on the AI’s skills, counting her to neutralize anything harmful to my system. I need to remember she is not without limits.
Kelly’s other hand slides up my trouser leg, over my thigh, then splays across my bare hip, applying pressure to hold me better in place. Well, at least I shouldn’t be banging my knee again. It’s still throbbing from the first time.
It’s not the only thing that’s throbbing.
My pulse seems to have settled between my legs, the low, steady beat of raw want pounding and echoing in my skull. Kelly’s thumb shifts lower, between my folds, finding the slick wetness there and spreading it over my lips, my clit, making everything so sensitive I want to squirm out of my own skin.
I need this. I just wish I didn’t need it here.
I tear my gaze from the stage, amazed at how much effort that takes, and study first one exit tunnel, then another, judging distances, traffic flow, how many people between me and the nearest dark corridor. I’d have to zip up, move my heavy chair, navigate around servers. Hell, my leg muscles are trembling to the point where I’m not certain I can even stand, let alone powerwalk my way out of here. I can’t run away to some dark hallway with her.
Kelly’s thumb moves in circles over my slick clit. I bang the other knee.
Yay, they’ll match.
I swallow a sob of frustration. “Kel. You’re making me—”
She pauses, her thumb no longer in contact while I hear her shift her position.
All hell breaks loose in my body.
A wave of aching arousal rolls through me. My hips jerk, trying to force the connection between me and her hand, then jerk again like I’m having some kind of erotic seizure. The drugs tear at the layers of my inhibitions, stripping them away like paint remover on a weathered fence.
I have about a half second to wonder where that analogy came from, a flash of a childhood memory of me helping the landscaper outside our Kansas home. So weird to have access to everything now.
Then another pleasure-pain wave hits and I can’t think about anything else.
Do something! I beg my symbiotic partner.
Still analyzing, she returns, and I swear she sounds strained. The toll on my body is affecting her too.
I feel like I’m dying.
“I’m here, Vick. I’m here for you. Don’t fight it,” Kelly says over our still open comm connection.
The pleading in her tone comes through loud and clear. She wants to do this. I’m not forcing her actions. She’s not embarrassed. Of course, she’s also hidden from almost everyone. Still, I can’t help feeling like I’ve put her in this horrible, degrading position, treating her like all the other enslaved men and women in this cavern.
I’m responding when a third figure steps onto the stage, a male this time, wearing tight black briefs and nothing else. From the bulge, he’s large there like the rest of him—tall, muscular, deeply tan… and carrying an actual whip.
A combination of boos and cheers ripples through the audience of slave buyers—those who enjoy this sort of thing and those who don’t. I accept that many find it arousing, tantalizing, but I fall firmly into the don’t category.
A surge of mixed emotions: hope, worry, confusion rush through me. I’m not into BDSM. Never have been, especially after my ex-girlfriend surprised me with it on our last night together, followed a few years later by Rodwell’s rape.
Pain incurred in the line of duty, helping others, bringing criminals to justice or ending them altogether, is welcome pain. But I get enough of that. Off duty, I want gentleness. There’s so little of it in my life.
A twinge of panic and a quick flashback to that awful rape leave me panting, the blood draining from my now chilled face, but it stops there. I remember the assault with the remaining organic pieces of my brain, but I’m no longer tortured by the sight-sound-smell-feel clear-as-if-it’s-happening-now replay that my implants used to subject me to before VC1 transferred that memory elsewhere.
“Vick. Don’t go there,” Kelly whispers over the comm.
I won’t. It’s not my unconquerable tormenter anymore. I owe VC1 more than I can articulate.
My current worry is what kind of effect watching a whipping will have on me, factoring in Jacks’s see-it-experience-it drugs.
The male flicks a switch on the whip’s leather grip, and I realize it’s no ordinary variety. It’s vibrating, electrified, a crackling blue aura of energy tracing down the long leather tail. I’m analyzing the voltage when he flicks his wrist, a minimal movement up/down, the rest of his arm held straight and still. The sizzling leather licks out like a serpent’s tongue, landing squarely on Saarah’s exposed hip, molding itself to her curves. Its tip reaches just between her legs before he snaps it upward and away.
The effect is immediate and intense—a combination of mild electric shock and vibrating heat curling across my skin, causing all my stomach muscles to tremor, then ending at the juncture of my thighs, right beneath Kelly’s waiting hand. Not painful, but so stimulating. And oh god it’s good.
I suck in a sharp gasp, releasing the breath on a shuddering exhale. “Now, Kelly,” I subvocalize. “Touch me now.”
She doesn’t argue. Her thumb retakes control of my center, moving faster and faster, applying more and more pressure.
It isn’t enough.
The need builds, pounding at my walls, growing and growing with a force I have never known before. Yes, Jacks does need to do something about the female variety of this fucking drug. It’s building, but it isn’t releasing, like thousands of gallons of water rising behind a floodgate with nowhere else to go. I get a mental image of metal holding it in, straining and bulging outward, expanding and stretching but not breaking through, and this visual is mine, all mine, not something VC1 is using as a metaphor.
I can’t stand it. I squirm in my seat, unable to keep still even if I wanted to, but no matter how much I concentrate on Kelly’s tantalizing actions, I can’t let it go. Something won’t allow me to let it go.
The mixture is imbalanced, VC1 supplies. My analysis suggests that it works in male chemistry but is not as effective with feminine biology. It will continue to arouse you, but you will need more than the drug to achieve the relief it forces you to seek.
Oh, that’s just great.
“Kel,” I whisper into my internal comm, “I need more, Kel. I can’t—” The pressure rises higher. I hiss out a breath. “Fuck, it hurts.”
“I’m not sure what else I can do,” she answers, voice out of breath and bouncing around in my skull. It’s an echo chamber in there, all other thoughts driven away except Kelly and my physical responses to the drug and her touch. “For more, I’d have to reveal you, and I know you don’t want that.” She pauses. “At least you won’t want it later, when whatever you took wears off.”
She’s right. I know she is. I’m already in for it with my insecurities and self-esteem issues, and Lyle is watching this entire display, for fuck’s sake. He has to have some idea of what’s happening between my legs where the tablecloth hides my partner. But at this moment I’d let Kelly strip me naked and take me on top of the fucking table, I’m so hot.
There’s more shuffling and shifting at my feet, Kelly maneuvering into what I hope will be a position to push me over the edge. “I’m going to cut this connection,” she says. “I have an idea. Trust me.”
“Okay,” I growl back. I trust her. I do. With everything I am and will become. There’s no one else I trust the way I trust Kelly, even after what she did to me all those years ago. A faint click sounds as she drops the call.
I take slow, even breaths, or at least that’s what I try to do, but they shudder out of me in audible gasps. I make the mistake of glancing up, the whip holder bringing his weapon down once more between Saarah’s legs. Jacks stares at me from the side of the stage, watching, evaluating my responses. I’m a test subject, an experiment.
I guess I always have been. Why not once more?
Kelly’s fingers find my waistband again and pull it out from my body, then slip something cool, hard, and plastic into my underwear, parting my lips to let its smooth surface rest against my most sensitive parts.
What the hell?
My inner eye recreates the shape of it, forming a picture of it in my mind, identifying it just as the comm unit vibrates between my legs… and doesn’t stop.
Oh.
Kelly’s got it on some kind of constant alarm, set to vibrate only, no sound, though I can just make out the buzzing with my enhanced hearing. It’s intense and everywhere, large enough to hit all the places I need it to where her fingers couldn’t reach.
As hot and aroused as I am, it doesn’t take long.
My eyes close. I lean back in my chair and struggle to take deep breaths. When this happens, I don’t want the attention of the entire cavern on me.
Even so, when the orgasm hits, it hits so hard I go rigid, my neck and buttocks the only parts of me in connection with my seat. It’s a fight to remain silent, teeth drawing blood as I bite my lower lip. I don’t quite manage it, letting out a faint whimper of relief while the aftershocks course through me.
I drop down and slump over the table, barely aware of the cessation of the buzzing sound and Kelly removing her comm. She crawls out from her hiding place, straightens her tight skirt, and retakes her chair, carefully not making eye contact with me.
My fingers fumble across the table, wrapping themselves in a trembling grip around the now-full glass Cate must have dropped off at some point. I dart a look over each shoulder before downing the pricey whiskey in a couple of shaky gulps. No sign of the servant-slave. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t see my response to the entertainment before giving me a modicum of privacy.
When I glance at the stage, Jacks is still watching, a smug, knowing smile on his lips. No pretense of privacy there.
Before this ends, I am going to wipe that grin off his face. Permanently.