Present Tense: Pleasure Times Four (Out of the Fire Book 3) Read online

  And then his blood was on fire again, not just in his neck but all over his body. His balls drew up, tensed, and shot off like a rocket to the moon. He came inside her again, and she took another three long, hard pulls of his blood before she extracted her fangs and licked the wounds she’d made.

  And Fabio could only lie on his back, more limp than overcooked spaghetti.

  6

  Collosa exited the shower and smelled the vampire closer than he expected. He walked through his bedroom, dripping water, and opened the door leading to the hallway.

  “What are you doing on this level? Go back down and wait for us in the kitchen. Where the fuck is Fabio?”

  She wasn’t supposed to be on this level. Fucking Fabio should’ve been with her when she left her quarters. They’d removed most of the unlocked weapons from the first floor, but that meant they were up here, sitting out. They didn’t need her to freak the fuck out when she found out how many guns were in the house.

  “He was on the phone when I came out of the bathroom. He told me I could go to the first floor to wait for him.”

  What. The. Fuck. She’d passed the first floor on her way to the second floor. She didn’t smell as if she were lying, nor did he scent guilt, so he didn’t think she’d come to this floor to snoop.

  So why had she walked past the first floor when she’d been told to go there? If she was one of those geniuses at one thing who can’t deal with real life, this wasn’t going to work.

  And he’d scared her — the scent of fear permeated the hallway. He tried his best to speak with a calm voice. “So why did you come to the second floor?”

  Eunice stepped into the hallway in jeans and a t-shirt. “We may all speak English, but we aren’t speaking the same English. To her, it’s ground floor and then first floor.” He turned to Kelsey. “Here, the ground floor is the first floor, and this is the second floor. Go back down a flight. We’ll be down in a minute.”

  Collosa looked from Eunice to Kelsey, and back. “Ya’ll are wearing the same t-shirt. Mordor Fun Run? If you’ve both done it, it must be a nighttime race?”

  Kelsey laughed, and Eunice rolled his eyes. “It’s from Lord of the Rings, asshole. Frodo and Sam did it, not us.” Eunice looked at Kelsey. “You a Tolkien fan?”

  When she nodded, he spoke in a language Collosa didn’t recognize, and it felt like a challenge. Without hesitation, Kelsey said something back in what sounded like the same language, and Eunice smiled. The motherfucker smiled. Collosa had only seen him smile when he hurt people. Never when he was happy.

  And then they gave each other goofy looks Collosa had never seen come from Eunice, and wouldn’t have believed the fucker ever would.

  “What language is that?” Collosa asked.

  They both looked at him, blue eyes and hazel eyes, and said, “Elven,” as if in stereo.

  Collosa had no words for them. He turned around and stalked back into his room to finish getting ready. Great. Now they had two sci-fi geeks in the house.

  Eunice hadn’t intended to have much to do with the vampire. Just looking at her picture had told him she clearly wasn’t his type. He’d agreed to be disciplinarian to a new vampire as needed, but that was it.

  And yet, here she was, flustered and embarrassed over being on the wrong floor, wearing a Tolkien shirt, telling him, “A star shines on the hour of our meeting,” in Elvish, when he’d told her, “I greet you.”

  He hadn’t expected her to understand him, but she had, so what else could he say, except, “You are welcome here,” also in Elvish. And then it was time to move back to English, before they got too corny with it. “I’ll walk you back downstairs. We’ll have our little family meeting in the kitchen. I know you don’t eat, but the rest of us do. Where’s Fabio?”

  “He was on the phone and told me I could go up. The sun’s down. I thought it would be safe to come above ground.” She inhaled deeply when they reached the kitchen. “I couldn’t tell for certain upstairs because it smells like a gun warehouse up there, but you’re wearing a weapon with bullets.”

  “I am, and Collosa told us how uncomfortable it made you last night. I’m sorry for that, but you’re going to have to learn to be okay with it.” He shook his head. “You’re going to know proprietary things about Drake Security, and about the status of ongoing ops. If someone targets you, you’ll need to be able to defend yourself. You’ll be living with the three of us, and we’ll protect you, but I assume you’ll go out without us at least occasionally.”

  She stared at him without responding, and he gave a frustrated sigh before he pulled his H&K from the holster, dropped the mag, cleared the chamber, set the weapon down, and settled the bullet from the chamber on the table in front of her. “Operating on the premise you fear them because you don’t understand them, let’s go through the mechanics.”

  He showed her the primer on the back of the bullet, explained how the hammer in the gun strikes it, igniting the tiny bit of explosives in the primer, which ignites the gunpower mixture behind the bullet, which propels the bullet through the barrel and towards the target. He broke the gun down, showed her the barrel, the hammer, the trigger mechanism by themselves. Isolated. He insisted she hold the pieces, since they didn’t seem to scare her as much once the pieces no longer looked like a gun.

  Finally, he talked her through putting it back together, so she ended up holding the gun once it was reassembled. He showed her how to safely hold it without touching the trigger, and he ended with why it’s so important you never point a gun — even if you’re certain it’s unloaded — at someone unless you intend to shoot them. And how you never put your finger on the trigger unless you intend to engage it.

  Basic gun safety. It had to be done sooner or later, and he’d chosen sooner.

  Fabio came upstairs towards the end, but he sat quietly and didn’t interrupt.

  When Collosa came down, he brought an AR and put it in the corner. Eunice was smart enough to understand he was letting her see it without inviting her to touch it yet. Baby steps.

  Collosa took his seat across from her. “I talked to Aaron about your reticence around weapons. He’ll give you a few days before he wants you in the range, but he’ll want you certified within the month, so the sooner we start, the better.”

  “Certified?”

  Collosa had been warned about her anxiety, but he honestly hadn’t expected it at this level from a vampire. He touched her arm and then rested his hand on it. She met his gaze, took a breath, and settled.

  “You’ll need to pass two tests. The first is a Drake Security test, and when you can pass it, you’ll be assigned a weapon. As soon as possible after this, you’ll apply to the State of Tennessee for your concealed carry permit, which will involve a written test and a much easier range test than the Drake one. Once you have the permit, company policy says you have your weapon on you back and forth to work, and while at work. Common sense says you should also have it on you anytime you leave the house, and handy while at home. You’ll be living with us, where we have lots of guns handy, but you’ll still need it on you when away from home.”

  He caressed her arm again, let her digest that before he continued. Her stress levels had predictably gone back up, but he couldn’t sugar coat it. He could, however, help her deal with the information now that she had it.

  “We’ll go slow. You’ve held a handgun now. Put one together, even. The world didn’t end and no one is dead. We’ll teach you the safety protocols to keep you and those around you safe. It’s going to be okay.”

  He looked to Fabio a few seconds, and breathed in. Fabio gave him a cocky smile, and that told him all he needed to know. He met Kelsey’s gaze. “You seem well fed. Anything we need to be aware of?”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  He looked back to Fabio. “Final count?”

  “Three, but only two count. One was before I explained there would be consequences.”

  Collosa nodded. “And then we had one this morning
that won’t count. However, if she screws up on counting floors in the future, it will count. She knows now.”

  He looked back to Kelsey. “Tell us the consequences that have worked the best for you in the past.”

  Her trainers had given them notes, of course, but he wanted to hear what she’d have to say.

  “It seems cruel to make me tell you. I’m aware my trainers list the whip, time in storage without food, and responsibility for cleaning bathrooms as their primary modes of consequences. I’ll add that one specific trainer was a horse shifter, and he would fuck me in the ass while he was in partially shifted form when he was really unhappy with me. It would’ve killed a human, and it took me weeks to heal.”

  “Tell us about the storage you were put into,” said Fabio.

  “It’s a steel box. There are metal pieces that trap your wrists, ankles, and neck. It’s an inch off your neck, so it isn’t like it chokes you, but you can’t sit up or turn over or scratch your nose. You’re flat on your back in the dark. I spent a month in a box once when I lost control and hurt someone. Usually, I was only in there from one to five days. I was nearly mad after a month.”

  Eunice leaned back in his chair. “We have concrete jail cells downstairs at Drake. Lightproof. Six feet by four feet. No bed or furniture. Nothing flammable. I don’t foresee needing to use one, but it’s there if you do something we deem makes it necessary. So long as you’re under 20 demerits, we’ll stick with more traditional consequences.” Eunice met her gaze and leaned forward, considering. “Ten strikes of the cane per demerit seems a good place to start. So you know we’re all capable, you’ll get twenty-one today. Seven from each of us.”

  “Eunice will dole them out most often,” Collosa told her. “But any of us can, and none of us will take it easy on you. If we can’t discipline you properly, the vampires will want you under their roof. Aaron and Nathan don’t want the coterie to have regular access to you while you work for Drake Security.”

  “You should know that this is the least of what we’ll do,” Eunice told her. “I’m quite partial to a stainless steel meat tenderizer to the clit.”

  Fabio gave a loud sigh. “Part of the deal, bringing you in, was that you need to be dominated. Need to submit. It’s a new-vampire thing, and Marco tells us we run the risk of you needing to be destroyed if your training is interrupted. We talked about safewords this morning. You’ll have one with me during sex because that’s the way I operate. Collosa will explain his rules.”

  “In private,” Collosa told her. He respected safewords for some submissives, but worked without them for others. He hadn’t quite figured out how it would need to be with Kelsey yet. Since she came to them with a contract stipulating she got them, she’d have to voluntarily give it up, if he didn’t want her to have one. No doubt he could manipulate her into it, but he wasn’t certain he wanted to.

  Meanwhile, Fabio was looking at Eunice as if he expected him to join the conversation, and their grumpy mongoose rolled his eyes at them.

  “I don’t fuck vampires,” Eunice told her. “Nothing personal, just not my thing. I sometimes contract with a young lady to train her to be a sex slave. When I do, these two are permitted to use her once she’s a few steps into the training process. Sometimes, the girl’s Master sends her to me to be trained, and in those cases, he frequently sends her back for retraining at intervals. One such former student is due to arrive next week. Your only rule will be that she doesn’t exist. You don’t look at her or speak to her. Even if she’s giving one of us a blowjob while we talk to you, or if she’s leaned over the table being fucked up the ass when you walk into the room, you pretend not to notice her. Break this rule and I’ll punish you.”

  He paused a beat. “I don’t believe in safewords, even for humans. It isn’t likely to be an issue since you and I won’t have sex with each other, but there it is. With humans, I usually at least pause and check in if they forget and say it anyway, but it isn’t like I’m going to accidentally kill you because your airflow is restricted.” He looked at the other two men and then back to her. “We’re all kinky, but we’re different flavors of kinky.” He sat back and crossed his arms. “It’s important you sound American. Do you agree?”

  “I do.”

  “It’s important you acknowledge why you are being punished, and that you submit to it. There’s a pillory in the den, bolted to the floor, designed to hold shapeshifters. Walk into the den, fold your clothes neatly on the bar, lock the pair of shoes on you’ll find beside it, walk to the device, and place your neck and wrists into the slots. Someone will close you into it when we arrive. We’re short on time today, so you’ll stand there between two and ten minutes. In the future, this could be from five minutes to five hours.”

  7

  Kelsey walked down the hallway to the last door on the right, and turned into a huge man cave of a room. Oversized plush, leather sofas faced the largest wall-mounted television she’d ever seen, with every gaming console below, along with storage for controllers, games, and VR headsets. It looked more like a store display than someone’s home system.

  The bar looked like the one from Cheers, complete with the brass bar, except there were only two legs of it to form a square with the walls in the corner, rather than four sides in the middle of the room.

  She walked to it and noted she could use the bar as a ballet barre, but she didn’t try it out. She’d worn trousers and a blouse along with heels, but it didn’t take long to come out of them. She folded all but her trousers, which she doubled over and then looped over the brass bar as if they were on a pants hanger. She straightened her heels below them, picked up the shoes, and — with her heart in her throat — walked to a sofa.

  Her heart fluttered in her chest when she ran her hands over and around the shoes. They were four-inch heels with sharp spikes under where her own heel would rest on the shoe, meaning she’d have to put all of her weight on her toes.

  And the base of the toes also had sharp little protrusions the size of rice pieces.

  She sat on the sofa, put her left foot into the appropriate shoe, and closed the ankle piece around her lower calf. The ratcheting sound of the handcuff-like steel piece made it clear she was stuck with them at whatever rate she pushed them closed. She knew better than to leave them too loose, but she didn’t tighten them completely, either.

  The second shoe went on the same, and she gingerly walked to the stocks. Thankfully, there was a handhold out from the wrist rest. The men weren’t giving her an impossible task, just an extremely difficult one.

  And she had to admit that forcing her to basically put herself into bondage was especially well-thought out. She was one thousand percent submitting to them, and to the punishment.

  She didn’t try to count the minutes. Instead, she counted her breaths. In and out. Calm. Serene. She bent her knees, straightened them. She couldn’t really go from foot to foot because the pain was too intense when she put all her weight on one foot. She noted the pillory was situated just a little lower than waist height, so her ass was high in the air.

  She squeezed her toes together and relaxed them, trying to gain relief for the balls of her feet, but nothing helped. Her calves started to protest. She knew they’d be fine for ten minutes, but after hours like this, she’d be hurting.

  Eunice walked in first, and Fabio paused at the door to turn some spotlights on. She could feel the heat of the one on her ass, and blinked at the harsh lighting hitting her face. Eunice stepped in front of her and put a bowl full of plum-sized glass marbles on the floor in front of her.

  “You will keep your ass and legs relaxed. If you don’t, we’ll start with six of these marbles inside of you, and you’ll be required to stay tense to hold them in. Every marble you drop means two go back in. When I train someone, they’re pierced, so I can lock access to their pussy from them. We don’t have that with you, but we’ll make do, should you prove unable to follow basic commands.”

  He stepped forward and put somet
hing on her forehead, then wrapped it around her head like a sweatband from the seventies. “This will keep you from trying to interfere with mind-control-bullshit.”

  Kelsey had experienced this before, but it’d been a helmet that covered her entire head with tiny slits to look out of. This must be new technology. There’d been a painful feedback signal when she’d tried to get into someone’s head with the helmet on, so she didn’t attempt to do so now. She’d have to try eventually, to be certain it worked as they said, but not now.

  “You don’t need to know who puts the plug in,” Fabio said from behind her. “Relax and accept it.”

  She felt something cool and slick on the outside of her asshole, and she did as ordered.

  And then screamed when she realized it had something on it. Something hot. Spicy hot. She breathed in and scented peppers. Whoever inserted it never paused — they slid it all the way home in one easy motion, and then twisted it once, as if they needed to be certain the pepper oil coated every place possible.

  Eunice nodded to someone behind her, and he met her gaze again. “Seven from Collosa. There will be no warmup. Do not tense.”

  She knew what to expect — this wasn’t her first time being caned — but the burning in her bottom was too much. And then the cane sliced across her defenseless cheeks, and her scream filled the room. She scented her own pain and fear.

  The second cut of the cane landed before she’d fully recovered from the first, and the third came after about the same wait. Perhaps five seconds between.

  In practically no time, the seven were given, and she heard movement behind her.

  “She tensed after the first and remained that way.” Collosa’s deep voice sent her heart beating too fast again, and she breathed in to try to calm it.

  “Please!” She screeched. “The plug, the peppers, it’s too much!”