ThroughNeonEyes:Breakthrough

Chapter One

What You Make of It

Trash lined the streets, piles of garbage, the long-dead hulks of rusted-out cars standing as mute testimony to a past no one living in the Liberty City Zone was old enough to recall. Glory days of abundant gas, cheap vehicles, fast food and minimum-wage jobs.

Gone.

All of it gone.

Like the memories of the man who rolled down the deserted street on a two-wheeled vehicle as distinct as the man himself.

Bells and his motorcycle.

Both were one of a kind in the Liberty City Freezone.

They called it the Free, but no one was free.

Not the residents of the Zone.

And sure as hell not the corporate drones on the other side of the Wall.

The Wall that separated them from Miami.

Divided wealth from poverty.

Separated well-fed corporate slaves from their counterparts on the far side of the Wall.

The side where Bells lived.

Bells scanned the street, but felt nothing threatening. No ice-burn liquid nitrogen shocked through him, urging violence.

Do death or die at the hands of another inhabitant of the madhouse they called home, the LCFree.

He expected trouble. Knew it was out there, biding its time, waiting to come for him. A lurking predator seeking prey.

But he wasn’t anyone’s prey.

Once he’d fallen to the rending fangs of a would-be pack of wolves.

Once he’d almost died.

But almost wasn’t the same as dead.

And since his return to the LC, the pack of killers had kept their distance, wary of anything that could survive what he’d lived through.

Mutilation and multiple stab wounds. Enough lead to kill four men.

That which does not kill us... A wry smile twisted his lips; he knew secrets about himself. Dark secrets that no one living knew about but himself. Specters of his past that flitted in the shadows of his thoughts.

A past of violence and pain full of bittersweet memories of a lost love he remembered late at night when ghosts came to haunt him.

But he didn’t have time for ghosts tonight. Not even one that whispered words of love to him.

Story of his existence.

Everything good ended.

Except him. But he was far from good.

He’d long ago learned that happiness was fleeting. A dream from which the sleeper awakened to a life of sorrow and pain.

Bells didn’t want it to be that way with Jessman, but he already knew fate was the most fickle of all bitches, and hard as he might try, his time with David would end. Until then, he was determined to enjoy what he had with the corporate researcher and damn the consequences.

One way or another their affair would end, but it sure as fuck wasn’t going to end because some corporate bastard on the other side of the Wall ordered it.

That left only one option.

Managing the manager, in a very permanent way.

Which was why Bells hadn’t gone to see Katerina yet. He had other business to handle. Information that needed to be gathered. A security patch that he needed to help keep Jessman safe. He knew the perfect person to get both things for him. A netrider named Sierra.

And he knew exactly where he could find her.

The big cycle rolled around a corner, slowed as Bells neared his destination. Stopped at the only clean place by the crumbling curb. His parking spot since he was almost the only one in the whole of the LC with a vehicle of any kind.

Noise spilled out of the open doorway of the nameless bar. Music and laughter, arguing, bargaining, the stink of burning drugs and stale booze. A clot of people clustered around the front of the place. Bulletproof windows let the neon signs glow through the coating of grime.

He dismounted amid the jangle of bells in his hair, the crowd around the door melting aside for him as he approached.

“Bells, how you doin’?”

“Same as always,” he replied to the only person who’d spoken to him as he passed. “How you doin’, Steeltiger?”

“Better than dead,” the young zoner replied. “Nice day, too.”

Bells glanced at the pale grey-brown smog, nodding his agreement. Most days you couldn’t see the tops of the taller buildings in the Free. Today he could actually see some fluffy clouds high over the LC. Clear days like that were rare. “Sure is nice to see the sky.”

“Sure is,” the younger zonewarrior agreed.

Bells started inside.

“Jus’ a word to you, pro to pro.”

He paused. The only time he heard ‘pro to pro’ was when someone was gunning for him, usually some halfwit kid out to make a name for him—or her—self.

“’Sup?” he asked.

“There’s certain wannabe killers roamin’ the LC out lookin’ for you pretty blond head. Think they can make you dead as meat.”

They. Which meant a pack of mad dogs out to take him down.

He turned, cobalt gaze fastening on the young zonewarrior, eyes narrowing. Tiger stripes tattooed into sharp cheeks and golden cyberoptic cat’s eyes met his gaze. He knew Steeltiger because a bunch of kids his stepdaughter hung with ran with the fringe of the other zoner’s crowd of friends. “You got names?”

“You know ’em, they ain’t need no names.”

He regarded the teenager, nodded. “Thanks. Anytime they ready for dyin’, they know where I be.”

“I ain’t running messages for their sorry asses. I got better sense than stickin’ my nose up you ass. I like my face the way it is.” The young zonewarrior showed off chromed teeth in a feral grin. “Shit, we both too pretty to let them do us that way.”

Bells nodded. “That true, Steeltiger. True as true gets. You got color and flash and I’m fuckable gunwhore pretty. Don’t want that ruinated by no street shit scum.”

Steeltiger winked at him. “That true. You is fuckable pretty. Me had the money, you be my firs’ choice for fuckin’, sure as hell’s hot.”

Bells gave Steeltiger a faint smile. “Well, you ever get the money, you got Katerina’s number. Jus’ give her a call.”

The younger zonewarrior laughed. “Way things goin’ round here, be a long time ‘fore anyone in the LC get that kind of money, ‘cept maybe you.”

“Yeah, that true,” Bells agreed and turned to go into the bar.

The edge of ice-burn warning slid along his spine, spread through his body. He felt the bonfire cold expand, felt it go from warning to immediate threat, pinpointing the directions of the danger. He spun around in a jangling cacophony of sound, shoving the younger zoner aside as a spray of bullets hit the front of the bar from across the street. Chips of shattered concrete went flying, showering the bar patrons who were scrambling inside, running for their lives. Two didn’t make it, crumpling on the sidewalk. Dying. Life and death in the LCFree.

No thought, no conscious volition, there was just reaction. The edge he had over his would-be killers assuring he lived and they died.

The .357 in Bells’ left fist barked twice, the nine mil automatic in his right snarling death.

Two targets.

Two hunks of cooling meat hitting the pavement, the gunmen twenty meters apart at the opposite ends of a crumbing building across the street.

Less than three seconds had passed from the time the cold chill hit him to when the bodies of his would-be murderers hit the pavement.

He stood motionless for a few heartbeats, the chill-flame of doom fading away. Threat over.

Already a swarm of people were moving toward the fallen zoners across the street. Vultures and hyenas of the LC. Scavengers making a living by keeping the streets clean hauling meat to the market. Taking it to Ghoul, who’d pay them their scrip, cut out the usable parts and sell it for profit either on the street or to the corpers over the Wall. Bells had taken a few zonewarriors to Ghoul’s meat market himself.

“Motherfuckin’ moron bastards,” Steeltiger snapped as he got to his feet, his own gun drawn, eyes full of awe, mouth twisted with rage as he looked at Bells.

“Drakuls got no sense.”

“Yeah, I know! All them dumbshits got is Euphoria,” the younger zoner agreed as he slid his pistol into its holster.

“Stupid fucks,” Bells muttered as he holstered the nine mil at the small of his back. He reloaded the .357, dropping spent brass into his pocket for reusing later. The younger zoner was watching him, the teen shaking visibly from his near encounter with death. Bells could see it in the kid’s expression; saw the way Steeltiger stared at his face. Watching his eyes the way everyone did. Watching them change from stormy grey to their normal neon blue.

“Yeah, drug-snortin’ idiots. Drawin’ down on half a street full of people tryin’ to get you, and what it get them?”

“Dead,” Bells replied.

“You right ‘bout that. It did get them dead.” He holstered his pistol, eyed the smaller blond. “Damn, boy, you dangerous as them mamba snakes out in the Greenway. Fast and deadly. How you even know they was there?”

“Devil takes care of his own, Steeltiger,” Bells replied and started to go into the bar.

“Hey, Bells?”

He paused. “Yeah?”

“You kept them from doin’ me dead.”

Bells shrugged. “Favor for a favor. You warned me they was comin’.”

“Yeah. ’Kay, that work for me too. Still owe you.”

“I keep that in mind. Mebbe call you on it later.”

“Sure, Bells. You want help, jus’ say it. I do what I can for you,” the teenaged warrior replied with a big grin.

Bells turned eyes that were reverting to cobalt flame on the younger man. “Tell you what, you keep you eyes on the girl of mine.”

“Jayzee?”

“Yeah. Make sure she keep her ass out of trouble. That what I want for what you owe. You ’kay with that?”

Steeltiger nodded. “Yeah, I got you baby g-bitch’s back. I won’t let nothin’ happen to her.”

“Good.” He stepped into the bar.

“You see, I keep her good and safe. Give my oath on that.”

The loud music and the excited chattering of the crowd swallowed any further comments Steeltiger might have made as Bells made his way through the gathered clot of people near the door. People who moved aside for him, his reputation parting the zoners the way a knife parted flesh.

The woman he’d come here to talk with was where he expected her to be, sitting at a booth toward the back, a cluster of men and women surrounding her.

They saw him coming and stepped aside, some with smiles, others with annoyed looks evolving into smiles that didn’t change the wary dislike in their gazes.

“Bells, how it goin’?”

“Good to see you, Bells.”

“Them Drak’s is fools, takin’ you on,” another zonewarrior stated as he stepped well out of the gunwhore’s way.

“Got no sense,” another stated following his companion.

Young like Steeltiger. No older than Bells himself appeared. Sixteen, seventeen, but they already moved with the smooth precision of teched-up killers. He didn’t even bother to look them over. He’d seen them around. Knew them by reputation and name.

More of Jayzee’s associates. Knightzone with his mercury-colored eyes, body encased in chromed armor that looked like metal but was a composite of plastic and fabric that would stop bullets from most handguns. The other was Tib, his white hair and jet-black skin as artificial as the speed of his movements as he stepped farther away from Bells. Nervous. Wary. Neither of them wanting to dance with him.

Smart, the pair of them. They respected him for what and who he was. Deadly danger wrapped in heartbreak beauty. Cold killer who happened to be the foster father of one of their younger friends.

He gave them both an acknowledging nod and focused his attention on the woman he’d come to see.

The woman’s blue hair glittered with silvery strands that glowed at the ends. Pure fiber-optic enhanced vanity, but she was pretty enough to pull it off, and the low cut of her blouse and the high hem of her skirt showed she knew it.

“Sierra, how you be?”

She greeted him with a warm smile that showed off her techfangs. “Good as cashmoney, Bells. How you doin’?”

“Doin’ good,” he replied. “Wanna talk wif you.”

“Figured that. Well, have a sit down.” She gestured to the seat across from her in the narrow booth. “We talk ‘bout it.”

He slid into the seat across from her, a touch of cool-flame dancing along his spine. Not from her, but from somewhere out in the crowd. The threat not immediate but there, lurking, biding its time.

“What bring you over this side of the LC?” she asked, her bright aqua gaze roaming over him, taking in his expensive leathers. “You always was one fine lookin’ man, but you even hotter now you is whorin’ for Kat,” she stated, licking her lips as if she were about to have a taste of something particularly flavorful.

He smiled, but the look on his face was the same cold expression he’d worn since entering the LCFree. “Got biz wif you, Sierra.”

“What kind of biz?”

“I need a man found. A corper at Megalli-Laran who dun called a kill on one of my moneyboys.”

Her smile faded. “That’s big money datatheft, Bells. Gonna cost a big chunk of scrip.”

“Know that for shit sure,” he replied and reached into his armored jacket. He set a much-creased piece of money on the table. The logo of a big corporation glinted in the dim light, a shimmer of gold against black.

She set a finger on it, tongue darting out to lick her soft lips. “That some Polycy money, ain’t it?”

He nodded. “A two hundred note. Worth about a tho’ in z-scrip. That worth you time or no?”

She looked from the corpmoney to the blond, gave him a slight smile and a nod. “Yeah, that be worth some data. But what you gonna do after I get it?”

He shrugged. “Got biz to handle.”

“Gonna kill whoever it is?”

“Mebbeso.”

She nodded, expression turning thoughtful, the tip of one glitter-nailed finger touching her front teeth with a soft click. “Mebbe I come up with a better idea, I get that data for you.”

“What you thinkin’ ’bout?”

“You plannin’ ta kill this corper?”

He shrugged, not committing himself to a course of action one way or another. The less said about his plans, the better. He didn’t want word to get back to the MLC executive that someone was coming for him. He wanted the man or woman who’d ordered the hit on David unprepared for his arrival.

Her eyes narrowed. “Man, I know you. Ain’t no way you gonna go have face to face and jus’ talk to this corper.”

She saw the look on his face, lowered her gaze. “Whatever, Bells. I ain’t gonna push for more info outta you. But man, if that you plan, then mebbe we can work out some kinda dataheist.”

He kicked her under the table and she raised a shocked face to him. He gave a slow shake of his head, the jingling of the bells audible over a pause in the music. Heads turned, eyes peering at the pair of them through the wafting smoke of a half-dozen types of illicit cigarettes, few of which contained any traces of tobacco.

She nodded. “I got you. We talk later, somewhere private.”

“You smart, Sierra. We talk later. Somewhere they ain’t so many ears,” he stated. “You get me that info. An’ I need a security patch for an EnCoSet. Somethin’ to keep it from getting hacked.”

“I get that for you too, but it’s gonna cost you more money for all that.”

He got to his feet, leaving the corpmoney lying on the table.

“You goin’ already?”

“Yeah, I got biz elsewhere.”

“Too bad. We coulda worked out an arrangement for the rest of my payment.” She was smiling at him, and he didn’t have to ask what she had in mind.

“Get what I want and we talk more.” He gave her a measuring glance. She was easy to look at, but she wasn’t what he wanted. the memory of Jessman crying out beneath him that first night was a siren song of passion that he hadn’t wanted to walk away from. Still didn’t, the man’s scent, the feel of his skin conspiring to draw him back.

Bee to flowers.

Moth to the inferno flame.

He never doubted that such a relationship wouldn’t end badly for one or both of them. He knew it would.

But he also knew he couldn’t walk away from what he’d found.

David offered love.

Everything else was just sex.

And sex was part of his job.

He left the booth, felt a touch on his hand. Cool fingers. He glanced at Sierra and she pulled her hand back as if she’d been stung.

“I, ah...” she gave him a nervous smile, face showing fear, worried he’d kill her over that unwanted touch. “I just wonder if you mebbe wanna drink, at my place. We could talk.”

“Got nothin’ to say, and biz to do.”

“Sure, ’kay. Mebbe later?”

“Get what I want, we talk,” he reiterated and strode for the door without so much as another glance at the netrider.

The truth was he did have business to take care of: Katerina, waiting for him to come in, to prove to her he wanted to work.

He didn’t, but he also didn’t have any choice. He couldn’t stay with Jessman. Tempting as the thought was, the man’s corporate masters would question why he was there if he stayed too long. And that was the last thing either of them needed with the kind of trouble such an enquiry could cause for Jessman.

Or for him, Polycyber’s number one lab rat.

* * * * * *

David paused outside the door to his lab manager’s office. Despite having the formula from Bells that he knew was the answer to his problems, he was uneasy about this meeting with Dr. Hartland. His position as a research team leader was on the line. If he lost it, he’d never have the funds to hire Bells for another night. But if he lost his job, he’d have worse things than that to worry about.

He had a plan to keep his job that hinged several factors. First and foremost was the answer to the speed upgrade he’d gotten from Bells. How the blond knew something so complex as polymer gel formula—much less what Jessman was working on—were deep mysteries he wasn’t sure he wanted to solve. The man was an enigma. One wrapped in such beauty, just a glance from the gunwhore’s neon cobalt gaze turned his mind into mush and left him aching for whatever the gunwhore chose to do to him.

He could endure almost anything for the pleasure the blond gave him.

Suffer any indignity at the other man’s hands.

Wear a slave’s collar, beg for the kiss of a whip, the passions of the Sweet Sisters. Pleasure and pain. Under the masterful hands of the zonewarrior, they were one and the same.

Yes, he’d walk through the fires of Hell itself to be with the blond gunwhore.

What he wouldn’t do was walk into the Hell of the LCFreezone. He couldn’t live out there, knew it would kill him as surely as a dose of cyanide.

He wanted the gunwhore, but he wanted him under his own terms.

And those terms were buying out Bells’ contract, bringing him to live here at NeuroTech. Keeping him here in the confines of his own world, where they could both be safe. Him from the dangers of zonewarriors coming to kill him, and Bells from whatever danger lurked in wait for him out in the Liberty City Zone.

The thought of that, of coming home to the blond each night was now the driving force behind everything Jessman would do. He had a goal and he would settle for nothing less than the achievement of that goal.

Jessman shook himself out of his reverie.

Okay, keep your mind on work, on business and you’ll come out of this just fine. He told himself that, but he wasn’t totally certain it would prove true.

He really had fucked up the day before and it was going to take some fast talking and a lot of explanation to convince Hartland that he hadn’t pissed the day away without getting any work done.

And if he kept dithering at the door, he’d be late and get into deeper trouble with Hartland. Taking a deep breath and letting it out slow and easy the way he’d been trained to do in the stress management classes at MLC’s internal university, he cleared his mind of worry and fear. He had things to do. A career to save: his own.

He needed a clear mind if he was going to confront Hartland, not only with the formula but with some bits of information he’d gained this morning. Information gathered in quick conversations with a few researchers working on other polymer gel projects in labs adjoining his own. Men he’d never spoken with except when passing them in a hallway or riding for a few moments with them on an elevator on the way to lunch or home for the night. He’d chosen to drop by their labs for a purpose. Theirs were labs handled by other managers.

He’d suspected things in his own lab weren’t the way they should be from the time it had been given to him, and he’d been right. Some of the equipment wasn’t up to date, like the research computers.

Jessman shoved it all aside and focused on being calm.

When he had his emotions and thoughts under control, Jessman put on a neutral expression, twisted the door handle and stepped inside.

The office was paneled in a tasteful pale woodtone laminate directly behind the heavy bulk of the darker woodtoned receptionist’s desk. The young man seated there raised his gaze from the computer display to Jessman, a doll’s lifeless smile replacing the blank stare of someone concentrating on a task they found difficult.

“Dr. Jessman, Dr. Hartland has been waiting for you. Go right in.” Even the young man’s voice was bland, lifeless as the expression on his face. An automaton going through the motions. Or a young person driven to the brink of emotional collapse by his job.

He’d heard rumors that Hartland went through office personnel faster than most men went through socks.

A shiver went through Jessman; he’d been like that too. Living, but not alive under the crushing workload of his former employers.

“Thank you, ah...” he fumbled for the young man’s name, unable to recall it, not sure he’d been told what it was the last time he’d been to Hartland’s office. “I’m sorry, but I don’t remember your name.”

The man’s pale blue eyes brightened, warmed, a trace of life animating him. He was being noticed by a superior for the right reasons. Being seen by someone important. “It’s Timothy, sir.”

Jessman smiled. “Timothy. I’ll be sure to remember it.”

The slight smile widened. “Thank you, Dr. Jessman. It’s an honor.”

That went through David like an electric shock. Who would be honored simply because another person wanted to remember their name?

But he knew the answer. Being acknowledged, being noticed was as important in the corporate world as breathing. Face time with a superior, being remembered for doing a good job, it all added to the hope for advancement, for a better life.

And a better life meant more money. A bigger place to live.

Getting ahead of your colleagues.

Keeping your job.

“Has that lazy bastard Jessman arrived?” a voice demanded from the surface of the receptionist’s desk. David could see the man’s face, inverted from his viewpoint, in the small screen embedded in the desk’s surface. Tight. Pinched. Just the way he remembered it.

“Yes, sir! He’s on his way in,” Timothy replied promptly, expression changing to one of nervousness and fear. “You’d better go, Dr. Jessman.”

David gave the young man a nod and walked past the desk down a short corridor that ended in a small room with a similar desk behind which sat a woman, her dark hair pulled back and artfully pinned at the nape of her neck into a series of loops and coils held in place with muted gold ornaments. Her form was revealed by the shape-hugging suit she wore. Conservative corporate cut, it showed off her ample bosom, narrow waist and slight flare of hips that turned the dark fabric into a sexual display meant to be as alluring as the artful makeup and hairstyle.

She was seeking a husband and had her advertisement—and assets—on view.

“Dr. Jessman, Dr. Hartland is waiting. Go right in,” her tone tight, clipped and very rude. Dismissive. As if he were beneath her notice.

When he’d first come to meet Dr. Hartland—the day he’d been given his lab—she’d smiled and flirted, seeing him as a potential catch. A man with a good career who was sure to move up and take her with him.

Her attitude told him his status had changed a great deal in the last few weeks.

Or more to the point, he suspected the abrupt change in her attitude had occurred this morning when she’d found out about his lack of diligence yesterday.

He frowned and walked right past her, entered his manager’s office.

Dr. Hartland was a bare suggestion of a man. Gaunt, his piercing grey-green eyes stared out of a face sharp enough to shave with. His tailored suit—far more expensive than anything David himself could afford—clung to him the way a suit would fit a collection of sticks.

There was no greeting offered, no motion for Jessman to take a seat, the man launching right into a reproof he’d obviously prepared well in advance of their meeting. “I’m going to get right to the point. NeuroTech will not tolerate laziness from any of their researchers. NeuroTech will also not tolerate men who are more intent on sexual gratification than their jobs. Consider yourself removed from your duties as the head of a research team.”

The situation was as bad as he’d expected it to be; his lapse of the day before had landed him in serious trouble. Bad enough that his career at NeuroTech was over before it had even really gotten started.

He’d made a mistake. A critical one.

But Jessman wasn’t ready to hang himself—or go live in the LCFree.

Not yet, anyway. He still had a couple of options. Ones that hinged on the formula from Bells and the information he’d learned that morning. He opened his briefcase and reached in.

“There also won’t be any further need for you to return to your lab. You’ve been replaced. You’ll be reporting to Dr. Langston as part of his research team. You clearly don’t have what it takes to head a lab, and I—”

Jessman took out a single sheet of paper. The only things the briefcase held were that sheet of paper and a small silver bell that rang as he removed the page. Lines of neatly printed formula ran across the page. Jessman placed the paper on the man’s desk without a word and closed his briefcase.

“I hope this is your resignation,” Hartland snapped. He glanced at the paper. Frowned, looked up at Jessman, anger twisting his face. “What the hell is this?”

“It’s a polymer gel formula, Dr. Hartland. I thought you’d understand that. It’s what I was working on yesterday.”

The man glared at him. “You didn’t work on a God-be-damned thing yesterday, Jessman! I’ve got the computer and video records to prove you spent the entire day staring off into space. I also have the recorded conversation between you and that whore you hired right before you left the lab. The call that came in right before you ran home to fuck that nilhuman trash you have in your apartment!”

Nilhuman. The word hit Jessman like a fist to the gut. That’s all Bells was to this man. A thing of less worth than the lowliest worker in the tower. Not even a human being in the eyes of the arrogant bastard seated on the other side of the desk.

Anger simmered under his outward calm.

Now or never. He would either remake his damaged career or shatter the already broken remains here and now. At this point he didn’t have much of a career left to lose, so it hardly mattered if he destroyed what scraps remained. He’d worked too hard to let it slip away because of Hartland, or because of his own fuckup. If his suspicious were right and what he’d learned meant what he thought, he would have failed regardless of his indiscretion yesterday. Taking a deep breath, he pitched his voice to let some of his anger come out. “Dr. Hartland, not everyone relies on computers to solve a problem, and frankly, the lab I have isn’t adequate to my needs or the task Director Perez gave me!”

Hartland got to his feet. “Your lab is fine. You are not! A fact that came as no surprise to me, considering you were nothing but a lab assistant from a second-rate corporation. We both know you had nothing to do with them winning that government contract, and yesterday is clear proof of that! Clear proof that I will be sending to the Director’s office the instant I’m done with you.”

Proof that you’ll probably have digitally altered to make my screwup seem even worse. And I’m not going to let you fuck me over that way.

Jessman set his hands on the man’s desk and leaned closer, his body posture threatening, hostile. The pose taken from his time in the simvid he’d liked so much. He was angry, but this was so far beyond any experience he had in the real world that he had to rely on memories of a simulation to know how to act.

Inside he was terrified his plan would backfire, that instead of taking a step closer to his goal he would end any hope of achieving it. That any second security personnel would arrive to haul him out, and shove him into a holding cell to await a hearing. Assaulting a superior was a serious offense, one no corporate born person would dare attempt unless he or she was desperate. Desperate or making a reckless effort to save their career. He’d spend months incarcerated in the corporate prison for such a crime, working at grueling factory jobs for the rest of his life. A life that would be considerably shorter than that of a researcher living in the luxurious embrace of the corporate world.

Or worse, he’d wind up living wherever Bells lived, nothing more than another bit of street debris. Trash discarded by NeuroTech.

And if his plan failed, if what he’d learned wasn’t enough to save him and his career, that was exactly where he’d wind up. In prison, or on the street.

But he wasn’t there yet, and if what he’d found out could be leveraged and used against Hartland, then he’d use it however he could to keep his job. David would use any means to save his career, and damn the repercussions it would generate through NeuroTech’s polymer gel research department.

“That’s enough!” he snapped at Hartland. “You know that lab is out of date! Half the information in our database is obsolete and our software is a joke! I know it, and so does my team! I’m not about to put up with anyone trying to sabotage my work!”

“You’re insane! Get out of here!” Hartland demanded, rage lighting his eyes.

“You aren’t getting rid of me that easy, Hartland!” Jessman didn’t budge, his handsome face twisting into a snarl as he let the knowledge of what the other doctor had almost done to him turn to real anger, let it override his growing fear.

“You’ll be ejected from NeuroTech for this! I swear to God you will!” Hartland snapped. “You’ll be out there with the rest of the nilhuman trash where you belong! You should never have been brought here in the first place! You don’t belong here, and you never will!”

Jessman’s mouth twisted into a snarl of disgust. The man was plainly out to get him for some reason. Whether from jealousy or other motives, David had no clue, but the end result would be the same. Hartland would have made sure his project failed.

“I’m sure your superiors would be very interested to know that you yanked the project out from under me the day I made my breakthrough and solved the problem with the formula! And I’m sure they’ll be very interested to know you planned for my project to fail!”

Sweat trickled down David’s sides. Nervous, scared, yet he was also exhilarated. He realized he did have the courage to confront Hartland, that despite the fear he could face the other man and speak out about a few things he’d noticed. A few things he’d learned. His lab wasn’t entirely out of date, in fact, it was state-of-the-art in most things. But not in all things. A quick check had confirmed that NeuroTech did have better polymer gels, and that they offered a few nanotechnologies—ones that Jessman wasn’t aware of because data hadn’t been provided—to carry those gels through a human body. Nanites geared specifically to bypassing or shortening the distance between nerve clusters.

Paired together those existing pieces of information were solid proof that Hartland had made a deliberate attempt to set roadblocks in the way of his research. And there was only one reason the man would do something like that.

“You bastard!” Hartland snapped. “How dare you try to accuse me of interference in your research!”

Phase two, I have nothing left to lose. Hartland is involved in political scheming of some kind. I know it. He could almost taste it in the air, in the way the other man had failed to summon security. Politics was the only plausible answer to the information Jessman had garnered from his chats with the people he’d spoken with about their labs that morning.

David would be damned if he’d let someone else’s corporate agenda mire him in the quicksand of political maneuvering. If he went down for his own stupidity yesterday that was one thing, but being used as a pawn in Hartland’s personal wars... That was a whole other game. A game he was more than willing to play when the stakes were his own career. When the prize waiting his success was a big bonus that might buy him more time with a sexy bitch of a man he couldn’t get out of his mind.

Furious over being used, he reached across the desk and grabbed the front of the man’s suit. His hands were shaking, the emotions blazing through Jessman giving him the resolve to act, to fight for his position at NeuroTech. To fight for a chance to have what he wanted out of life.

And what he wanted was Bells.

He hauled Hartman partway over the top of his desk. “I’ll have your ass hung out to dry, Hartman! When I’m done, you’ll be lucky to find a job as a sanitation worker!” The tone of his own voice startled Jessman, his words coming out as a growl of rage. Memories of simvids, of playing the role of a zonewarrior filled his mind and he took the final mental step, donning that type of persona the way he put on a suit and tie. “I won’t be played for a fool! Not by anyone, even a superior!”

Hartman’s face went pale and he scrabbled at the top of his desk with both hands trying to reach a flashing red light that showed David the man had shut down his recording system, had turned off his protective office suite EnCoSet. Caught in his own trap, Hartland was trying to call for the security team that would rescue him from David’s rage.

Jessman grinned. “Nice to know all this is off the record,” he said.

“It won’t matter. Who do you think security will believe?”

“Oh, I don’t care if you call security anymore, Hartland, but keep a few things in mind when you do.”

“Oh, I will! I’ll be thinking about how much fun I’ll have when they sentence you to death!” Hartland replied.

“Well, there’s another couple of things you should think about too. After all, you aren’t the one that arranged for me to be brought here to NeuroTech, were you? That came from a lot farther up the food chain than you’ll ever aspire to reach, you sniveling parasite! And if you think I’m going to let you fuck me out of my career and my home here, you’d better think again! I’m no man’s pawn!”

He shoved Hartland toward his chair, snatched the paper off the desk, shoved it into his briefcase, slammed it closed and spun to stalk toward the door with it gripped in a white-knuckled fist.

“You’re done here, Jessman. Done and dead! I’ll see to that! I promise you, you’ve overstepped the bounds of survivability and I’ll see you dead! Dead! Do you hear me?”

David spun around, glared at Hartman. The man sounded so sure of himself, but he saw fear and doubt in the older man’s eyes.

Fear of him.

He gave the man a frosty smile right from the simvid he’d loved. “Your bosses went to a lot of trouble to get me from Megalli-Loran. A lot of expense too. Just who do you think they’re going to side with when I take this formula and my findings about your underhanded political shit to them?”

The man was staring at him gape-mouthed, a skinny little herring who’d just realized he was swimming with a shark. “Perhaps I was a bit hasty.”

“Perhaps you should have thought of that before you decided to screw me over,” David retorted and stalked out of the office, slamming the door behind him.

Jessman knew what he had to do. Knew where he was going.

He was going up the food chain to file a formal complaint against Hartman. A complaint that would cost the man his career.

He found that he didn’t care who he stepped on, what he had to do in order to get what he wanted out of life. Putting his goal at the forefront of his desires, Jessman walked past Hartman’s secretary without giving the startled woman a second glance.

Money and power were the ways to achieve his goals and nothing and no one was going to stand between him and what he wanted.

And what he wanted more than anything he’d ever wanted in his life was a golden-haired angel of death.

A gunwhore named Bells.

Chapter Two

Down and Dirty

Bells stayed close to the wall as he walked up the steps to his fuckbroker’s office, the metal creaking beneath him, chips of rust falling with soft pattering sounds on the cardboard and plastic sheeting of a streetie’s home under the steps.

At the top of the stairs, an open doorway filled by two guards waited for him.

Fire red eyes looked him over from stern faces, male and female.

“You finally bringin’ you sorry ass ’round?”

“Yeah, an’ if you don’t want you sorry ass beat, you be gettin’ out my way,” he told the man who’d spoken. “I ain’t come here to listen to no shit from you.”

The woman snorted. “You jus’ full of youself, ain’t you, Mistah Jingle?” the woman asked as they both took a threatening step closer to Bells. He was a full head shorter than the woman, a head and a half shorter than the man, the pair menacing him with their stances, their belligerent stares. Juro grabbed him.

He sighed. Katerina must be well and truly pissed over the mess he’d gotten her in by not killing Jessman. Then again, that was his business, not hers. “Jus’ cause Kat’s raged up don’t give you a ticket to beatin’ my ass. Bes’ you remember what I be, les’ you wanna be scrap for the Ghoul’s Market.”

“Bit of crap like you? You ain’t scarin’ us, pretty boy,” the man stated as he took another menacing step toward the gunwhore.

Bells was not in the mood to take shit today. Not that he ever took shit from anyone on any day.

His revolver came out in a blur of motion too fast for Katerina’s cybered-up muscle duo to see, the blond jamming the business end of the gun into the man’s left nostril, drawing blood, tearing tender skin. “You forget the mostest important part of what I be. There be a gun before the whore in what I do. Forget that again an’ you ain’t gonna care ’bout nothing after. You got me, bright boy?”

The woman started to make a move on him and he manually cocked the hammer on the revolver. “Come on then, I blow his brains all over the ceiling, then do you just as easy.”

“What in the love of fuckmoney is goin’ on out here?” a sharp voice asked as a sleek woman with coffee-and-cream skin and red as blood hair stepped out the hallway.

“I was havin’ me a polite discuss with you muscle ’bout courtesy and why there’s a gun in the word gunwhore,” Bells replied, his own voice a soft as velvet hiding death murmur.

“You told us to—”

“I told you to watch for him, you shit-brain motherfucker, not fuckin’ get youselves killed by him! Pair of fuckin’ idiots, what you two is. What good he do me if you mess his face? Though, tell truth, be you faces get wrecked. I told both you fools he ain’t just a whore, this be Bells. The Bells, not some halfass jerkwad playin’ at bein’ him.” The woman turned and went back inside. “I gonna have to get me some muscle wif brains.”

Bells holstered his .357 as he followed her inside, leaving her guards fuming.

Katerina went into her office and dropped into the plush chair behind her desk.

Bells just stood there waiting for her to get down to business. He’d already done a quick scan of the place. Not much had changed since his last visit. Same battered and scratched plaswood desk, same faded and threadbare carpet on the floor. There wasn’t much made in the LC, so furniture was hard to come by. Even the old source of discarded furniture out of Miami had almost dried up, the corporations preferring to either recycle materials or destroy them outright rather than let anyone benefit from their trash.

There were a few chairs scattered around the room, but he knew better than to try and sit in any of them. His enhancements made him too heavy for the battered and aging plastics.

Green eyes regarded him. “You comin’ back ta work, or you just playin’ me, bitch?” She was smiling, but there was a sharp edge in her voice that made it easy to tell his fuckbroker was peeved with him over the whole mess with Jessman.

But he’d known that last night.

“I’ll work, you got any, but you said you wanted to see my pretty ass, so here it be, Kat.” He patted his butt and grinned at her. “You still like it, don’t you?”

“Yeah. Very you got a good ass, ‘specially in leather.” She leaned closer, peered at the dull gleam of the leather covering his behind. “That the real shit too, ain’t it?”

“Of course it is. What you take me for, a cheap fuck?”

She grinned. “Never, babe.”

Bells sat down on the edge of the desk, felt it creak as it took about half his weight, the gunwhore leaving one foot on the floor to spare the old furniture. “You got me and my ass here, Kat. Now what you want it for? Or was you jus’ lookin’ to have those shitheads piss on me?”

“Hell no, that was they damned fool idea. You face is too pretty to mess wif, babe.”

“Then you got me a job, right?”

“No. Woulda had one, but you weren’t here to take it last night. Bitch that you is, I lost me some good money. So’d you. Bigger fuckmoney that corper you been foolin’ wif the last two days dun paid for you. They might mebbe call me back. Somethin’ ’bout a pair of Nippie corpers wantin’ a pretty boy bitch for some party time fun.”

He frowned. “What corp?”

“Polycy.”

“You sure?”

“Sure as breathin’.”

“Polycyber’s broker called for me specifically or just for a boy in general?” he asked.

“Oh, they want you, babe. Asked by name.”

He sighed. “They talkin’ money?”

“Yeah. An’ I dun tol’ you they talkin’ big money for your narrow white boy ass.” She put a hand on his leg and started to caress the leather. “Course I prolly keep most of it myself, what with you stayin’ two days over the Wall when you was only paid one. He must be some nice kinda fuck to make you wanna stay.”

“He’s a moneyboy, Kat. That’s it.”

She regarded him, her gaze critical. “So you say, but me, I dunno. You actin’ odd, Jingle-boy. Never seen you stay more’n the time paid for. I’d hate to see you get toasted by a corper, or worse.”

“He doin’ p-gel research. Got hisself a bunch of doctorials. He’s gonna be big money real soon. Kat. You know I can tell stuff like that.” Bells hoped she’d accept his answer. He couldn’t afford for anyone to think he had any emotional attachment to Jessman. Too much danger lay down that path, too many real and potential enemies could find a way to use it to their advantage.

Bells couldn’t let David become a pawn in the death and destruction games of revenge that rolled through the LC like a pollution fog. A zonewar that maimed or killed anything it touched.

“Yeah, you good at smellin’ out moneyboys, I give you that.”

Something in her expression, a trace of disbelief on her face told him she wasn’t buying his excuse. Not totally.

He opted to change the subject, get her mind on something else besides his interest in Jessman. “You said some jerkoff errand boy from MLC was here. What he want?”

“Wantin’ to know if you’d offed the target. Not happy that you didn’t. You got me in a tight spot, I tell you that, Bells. They ain’t playin’ about wantin’ Jessman turned to meat. They deadly serious ’bout it, so how you gonna handle this shit?”

“Yeah, I know.” He shrugged in answer to her question. “Dunno, think of somethin’, I guess.”

“You sure as shit can’t stop it.”

He met her gaze, frowned. “Don’t make no bets on that, Kat. You know me.”

She frowned at him, shook her head. “What you gonna do?”

“He gonna be big money, Katerina. I can’t let him die. Bad biz losin’ that kind of potential.”

“That why you change you mind ‘bout doin’ him dead?” she asked, her gaze resting on him as if she were looking for another answer, some other reason he’d back out of a paid-up-front killjob.

“Yeah, that why.”

She was staring at him as if she could see the real reason he hadn’t killed David written on his face.

“I ain’t gonna call you no liar, babe. This girl ain’t that stupid. But don’t let him play you. Whatever goin’ on in that pretty head of you’s, whatever reason you got not to do him dead, don’t let it be nothin’ gonna get you dead.”

He looked away, heard her sigh.

“I never took you for no damned fool, Bells.” She stood, glitter-dust flash catching the light at the leading edges of her long fingernails as she reached for him. The sparkle like that of captured stars that no longer filled the polluted night skies. Somewhere mixed into the beauty, she probably had something deadly mixed into the polish. Most women in the Free who favored long nails used them as a last line of defense. A lethal defense, if they managed to claw an attacker. He didn’t try to evade her touch as Katerina took his face between her hands. She gazed into his eyes, expression full of worry. “Tell me you ain’t gonna do nothin’ stupid.”

“It’s biz, Kat. Just biz.”

She put a thumb under the line of his jaw and pushed, and he let her force his head up, met her gaze. “This ain’t like you, Bells. It ain’t like you no way no how.”

He turned his head, broke her grip. “And it’s none you biz,” he murmured.

“Fuck.” She sighed it, sat down, her chin resting on one hand, the other tracing a deep scratch in the surface of the desk. “Bad biz what it is,” she muttered, sounding sad, unhappy. “But I keep myself out of it. You jus’ be careful. I ain’t want to hear you got you ass dead from playin’ hide-the-sausage with a corper.”

He grinned, amused by her words and her evident concern. He knew she was just protecting her financial interests, at least that’s what he thought it came down to in the end. Then again, looking at the unhappy expression she wore, it might go a bit deeper than that. Katerina might be developing more than a money-based interest in him.

His amused smile vanished.

More bad trouble looming on the horizon. The kind he didn’t need that came with hot lead jealousy and toxic cloud envy as standard baggage. “Don’t you worry none ‘bout me, Kat. You know I got edge up on jus’ ‘bout anyone when it come handin’ out death.”

“Yeah, I know. But that edge up ain’t always enough, is it?”

He shook his head, the bells in his hair jangling. “Not always, no. But I ain’t who I was then, and edge up’s got backup from highart. Cyber’s what I didn’t have. I got it now, and ain’t nobody gonna get the drop on me. Not no more they ain’t.”

“Bells, babe, you still worryin’ me. You dyin’ would hurt my biz.”

He laughed, dulcet voice raising goosebumps on her skin. Yeah, she was getting too attached, too personally involved. But he couldn’t change brokers. He’d signed with her, and he had to stick with it or gain a rep for deal breaking that he didn’t want. Not on top of what he’d already done by refusing to carry out a killjob on David. “Well, Kat, I’d hate to die and cut down you fuckmoney.”

“You’s such a bitchboy.”

“Don’t I know it? But that’s why all the boys love me, ain’t that right?” He winked at her.

She laughed and nodded. “Yeah, that’s why, all right. But I tell you somethin’, you gonna have shit trouble you keep fuckin’ wif MLC. They ain’t playin’. They pissed is what they is, an’ they ain’t gonna let that man live.”

“Yeah. And I gotta handle that problem soon, ‘fore they do the moneyboy dead on me.”

Someone sent by MLC killing Jessman was an all too real possibility that Bells wouldn’t let happen. Couldn’t let anyone take the best thing to happen to him in, well, longer than he could remember—away from him. He wasn’t about to allow anyone, corper or zoner, to kill anyone he loved. And, stupid as it was, he did love David. Loved him to the point where the thought of Jessman being dead and gone made a hard lump in his chest and sent a flash of quicksilver fury through him that threatened his sanity.

He had responsibilities. Commitments to people in the LCFree. People like Katerina, his foster daughter, Jayzee and her mother Loreli.

But those considerations, those duties, paled in comparison to his desire to protect David.

That depth of emotion scared him in ways he didn’t want to examine. He was too close, going too deep, too fast. Didn’t even know the other man or the things that drove him beyond the touch of the Sweet Sisters. But he couldn’t stop himself, and he wouldn’t try to deny his attraction to the man, at least not to himself.

“How you gonna stop them, Bells? Them corpers ain’t gonna come out where you can turn them into easy meat. Bang-bang-got-you-fucker dead. They gonna do what corpers do. Stay in they own world behind the Wall and send dumbfucks to do they dirty work.”

“I know that,” he replied. “But I ain’t gonna sit ‘round here while they kill the best moneyboy I got, neither.”

“You gonna get you fool head blowed off, that what you gonna do,” Katerina retorted, disgusted with him, if he was reading her right.

“I won’t. Now what that MLC corper jerkoff who come around here makin’ threats look like? I gonna find him and see what I gotta do to get them off my moneyboy’s ass.”

“Well, I’d say killin’ you moneyboy would be smarter than lettin’ him breathe, but you blond, so we gonna have to come up with another plan, ain’t we?”

“Nope.”

“Nope?” she echoed his word as a question, confused.

“We ain’t gonna come up with nothin’, Kat. I’m gonna handle this shit my own self.”

“Bitch, you gonna get youself killed and then where I be?”

“Lookin’ for a new prime piece of ass?” He was smiling but there wasn’t any trace of real amusement showing. He was wasting time talking. Time he could be putting to better use trying to protect David.

“Don’t be talkin’ that way, fool boy. Ain’t no ass come close to you, and you know damned well that be true.”

“Yeah, you call me a stuck up bitch for sayin’ it my own self.”

“True that,” she agreed and sat back in her chair. “So you find this errand bitch of MLC’s, then what?”

“I find out who sent him.”

“And...?”

He shrugged. “Add the numbers and you get the answer.”

“Thought so.”

“Then why ask?”

“Cause I was hopin’ you wasn’t that dumbass stupid, that’s why.”

He laughed, took a braid between his fingers and shook it to make the bells at the end ring. “Look pretty blond to me.”

“Look that way to me too,” she agreed. “You set on this, so I’ll tell you what he like so you can find him easier. Sooner you get you stupidness over with and get back to work the happier I be, Bells.”

“So what he like?”

“Wears him some expensive shit girly stinkin’ stuff. ’Bout strong enough to choke me. And he’s got green hair. Brightest fuckin’ color you ever saw. Can’t miss the bastard. Dresses like he belong here, talk like it too, but shit, he ain’t smell right or act right. Pure corper dumfuck, you ask me. He ain’t no zoner.”

“Workin’ for corpers, prolly not,” Bells agreed as he swung one foot, fidgeting, wanting to be gone and stuck talking while she ran her hand along his leather clad thigh in a slow caress.

“You in a hurry?”

He felt her hand move higher, nails brushing across his leather-guarded crotch.

“Like you said, sooner I get this over the better. You want me back workin’, right?”

The hand moved. “Yeah, that right.”

“Any idea where this zoner wannabe is?”

“Mebbe over to the Jackflash tonight. Said he was gonna look for zonewarriors to go after you moneyboy, Jessman.”

“Then I go there tonight when they open and find him.”

“Damn boy, you is dumber than shit. That were the Drakuls been hanging out. Ice-man and his Drifter scum too. Shit, they dealing Euphoria there, got the whole place for that now, they dun run everyone else out that was dealin’ anythin’.”

He frowned. “All of it’s theirs now?”

“For dealin’, yep. Run the last of the LC Rockers out two, mebbe three days ago.”

The bells in his blond hair whispered a discord as he shook his head. “They sure eatin’ up the biz ‘round here.”

“Yeah, they is, and ain’t no one strong enough to stop them.”

His mouth compressed into a thin, angry line. “Yeah, they is, but...”

“No, they isn’t. You one man, Bells. You can’t take them on alone, an’ you know it.” She touched his cheek, leaned closer to give him a gentle kiss that he didn’t resist or encourage. She broke the kiss, caressed his cheek, brushing a braid aside.

“You stick to your own corner of the LC, babe. Don’t fret ‘bout nothin’ you got no control of. Jus’ stay this side of town and you be fine.”

He nodded. “’Kay, Kat, I do what you say. But I still gonna find Mr. Greenhair. I gotta find out who after my moneyboy.”

“You jus’ be careful. You see them Drifters standin’ guard outside the Jackflash, you get you ass back to this end of town.”

“Sure, Kat. I ain’t ready to dance wif them yet.”

But that wasn’t really true. He wouldn’t run from them or the Drakuls. If either pack of drugged-up gangers gave him shit, he would be happy to dance the flying lead waltz with them and see who was left standing at the end.

“You best get it out you pretty head to ever dance wif them boys. They done messed you up once, Bells. Next time they gonna finish what they started.”

* * * * * *

Nothing left to lose, and a beautiful man to gain if I can get through this without winding up out on the street.

Heart hammering from excitement and stress-induced anxiety, Jessman rode the elevator up to the floor where the Directors of Research had their executive offices. His stomach rolled, queasy from the uncertainty looming in the immediate future.

He’d gone up here before. Once, not so long ago. He’d met with Director Perez, then been assigned Hartland’s polymer gel research department and been given his lab and given his project. His first day working at NeuroTech.

He’d spoken to the Director for less than five minutes.

He was having trouble getting his mind around the fact that he’d been with the company for just about a month. Thirty days.

They’d updated his look. Given him an apartment that was closer to luxury than he’d thought possible. Hadn’t been possible, in his former life at Megalli-Loran. He’d been nothing but a lab assistant, a low-pay worker chafing under the direction of Dr. Orlando, who took credit for polymer gel work he didn’t have the credentials to understand, much less formulate. It still irked David that he’d had to do so much research and get credit for nothing. Dr. Orlando’s lack of proper credentials wasn’t the only issue David had trouble with. The man’s total lack of innovative thought had frustrated him. Jessman remembered arguing with Orlando for hours at a time just to get his ideas past a man who had no clue about polymer gels to start with. There David was with three degrees to his name—all in the field of polymer gels and cybermedicine—slaving away as a clueless bastard’s assistant.

And then he’d been brought here, to NeuroTech. A place where they realized his worth. Knew what he was capable of accomplishing.

David felt as if a lifetime had passed in those few weeks, his five years of employment by Megalli-Loran like some distant half-remembered dream.

Less than thirty days as a researcher with his own lab. His own project.

Three days of being slave to a zonewarrior.

The last three days had flashed by, the touch of the Sweet Sisters changing him even more than his forcible hiring by NeuroTech. In those few days he’d learned the kiss of pleasure to be found in pain, and he’d discovered so much more about himself. He’d found steel under his own skin. A desire to fight for what he wanted in life.

His life and outlook had changed dramatically in the last few days.

And he owed it to a blond gunwhore.

A man named Bells.

The elevator stopped and Jessman stepped out into a gleaming foyer of grey and pink shot marble. He remembered the glossy floor, knew the marble was the real thing. Imported from overseas, he’d been told.

The floor was the same, but the rest of the office had been redecorated, the colors even more evocative of wealth and power. A change that hinted at Director Perez’s increasing influence within the company.

Dark grey sofas and chairs—covered in actual leather—lined the walls, interspersed with tasteful plants. He recognized some of them. Orchids. Elegant. Bright blossoms on delicate stems. Beautiful. Their sweet perfume filled the lavish area with a smell that meant money. Lots of money.

The knot in his stomach tightened. He was risking everything by coming up here. His whole career and life on the line.

And he couldn’t back down. Wouldn’t. Not when it meant so much.

He’d never go back to being a nothing. A man trapped in a dead end job. A drone existing from day to day, only alive when he was lost in a simvid. Absorbed into a game that left him numb to the real world.

His new reality had given him hope. Offered a bright future in a major player among the corporations of Miami—and the world.

And he wasn’t about to let that bastard Hartland take that from him.

Wasn’t about to let Hartland take Bells from him.

He made himself walk toward the reception desk. The young woman behind it matched her surroundings. A gem of femininity with golden hair, creamy skin and bright crystal-blue eyes. The cut of her suit was conservative, flattering, but rendered in a sapphire blue not often seen in the shades of grey palette of the corporate world.

She smiled her perfect white smile. “Why hello, Dr. Jessman,” she said as he stopped before the desk. The fact she knew who he was startled him, until he realized she was probably tapping into the corporate datafeed for the information.

Jessman put on his warmest, most confident smile, hiding his anxiety behind the stock expression of a corporate employee. “Good morning, Ms. Goldstein,” he replied. Unlike the woman, he was relying on his own memory, not an uplink to the local node of the corporate computer system. “I’d like to see Director Perez.”

“Of course, Dr. Jessman.” Her smile didn’t waver, and she didn’t show any sign of displeasure at his arrival the way Hartland’s assistant had. “Please have a seat, the Director will be with you shortly.”

He shouldn’t have been surprised by that statement. By now Hartland would have emailed or phoned the Director in charge of their department regarding his ‘outburst’ in Hartland’s office. The other man could have fabricated any number of lies and deceptions to cover his own political agenda. An agenda that was still unknown to David, his own limited knowledge of his new corporate master a liability that Hartland had obviously counted on to help his plan succeed. “Thank you, Ms. Goldstein.”

She gave him a warm, very friendly smile that spoke volumes. Whatever Hartland might have said to Director Perez was either under suspicion, or hadn’t been passed on to the attractive blonde.

He fervently hoped the former thought was true.

Without conscious volition, he found himself comparing the golden halo of her perfectly styled hair to a paler blond tangle of braids.

The woman was a real beauty, but she wasn’t what he wanted. Not anymore.

Women no longer interested him. Couldn’t give him what he wanted. A hard cock that fucked him into trembling submission.

The very thought made his own cock throb.

He did have it bad for the gunwhore. Really bad.

Bad enough that he’d risk anything for the chance to keep Bells. To make the satin-skinned killer his on a permanent basis.

And that was the real reason why he was there to speak to Director Perez. He wouldn’t have had the courage to confront Hartland, much less come up here to make a formal complaint about the head of his department if it weren’t for his addiction to Bells.

Jessman took a seat in one of the chairs and tried to remain calm. At least on the outside. He had to keep himself professional in order to make the right impression on Director Perez. Inside, he was a mass of turmoil, a seething mess of anger bound with indignation, Hartland’s efforts to undermine his research, to destroy his career leaving him distraught and enraged.

The man had tried to ruin him, and if it hadn’t been for a certain blond gunwhore and the distraction the other man provided, he might not have found out until far too late. He’d have gone on oblivious to Hartland’s plot to destroy his career, and even if he had discovered what was going on, he wouldn’t have stood up for himself. He would have accepted the destruction of his life as a normal outcome of the corporate world. Just business as usual.

He’d have gone down into obscurity, an eternal lab assistant, or just another bit of trash roaming the desolate LCFree. A failure. Dead and forgotten in a few weeks’ time at best. At worst, he’d have existed day to day as nothing but a lowly drone working for NeuroTech the way he’d worked for Megalli-Loran. A warm body to fill a mindless job.

But contact with the gunwhore had changed him. Reforged in the crucible of the Sweet Sisters, heated by passions he’d never experienced, reshaped by the gunwhore’s domination, he wasn’t the same man he’d been even a week ago.

Jessman wasn’t a corporate slave anymore. He was a zonewarrior’s boytoy, and he had a reason to fight for his career, a reason to succeed.

And the whole of that reason was Bells.

“Dr. Jessman, Director Perez will see you now.”

Her voice had a sweetness to it, but it didn’t have the seductive, dulcet tones of his own personal Siren.

“Thank you, Ms. Goldstein.” He got to his feet and followed her down a short hallway that had several works of art hung on the walls. This far up the corporate ladder, they wouldn’t be lithographs. They were the real thing—at least, he thought they were.

The blonde woman opened a door for him and stepped aside. “Go right in, Mr. Jessman.”

He smiled and stepped into an outer office where another young woman of perfect beauty—this one with raven-black hair and very obviously Asian features, Chinese or Japanese, he didn’t know which—stood to greet him.

“Dr. Jessman, Director Perez is expecting you. Please follow me,” she greeted and led him across a thick carpet that muffled their footsteps. He remembered this office too, though it had also undergone some redecorating. He also remembered a young black man being Director Perez’s assistant, not a woman.

The Asian woman’s hips moved in a way that was pure seduction as she walked away from him, a slow and sexy glide accentuated by the four-inch heels she wore. A few days ago he’d have found himself mesmerized by the shape of her behind as it moved beneath her tailored skirt.

But a few days made all the difference.

Now it was a tight, leather-clad ass he wanted to watch.

A zonewarrior’s narrow, gunbelt-draped ass.

She led him to paired doors of polished red-brown wood. It too was different. There’d been a door of darker wood, teak or some similar, and this one appeared to be mahogany or some other rich red-toned wood. Maybe cherry. He wasn’t sure.

She opened the door, revealing a brightly lit corner office that looked out across the skyline of Miami toward the distant sparkle of the Atlantic Ocean.

“Come in, David. Have a seat.” The man was handsome, enhanced to be that way as so many in their world were. A dark masculine attractiveness that showed his Latino origins in the brownish tint of his skin, the ebony black of his hair and the rich bitter chocolate color of his eyes.

And it could just as easily be part of a created look. The human body was mutable as clay if you had the money and time to have it altered.

Perez gestured to a well-padded leather seat in front of a desk that looked as if it were the same sort of wood as the door. It also was new; the old desk had matched the old door. There was a deep polished sheen of real wood, golden glints reflecting the light from within the surface. Another lavish display of affluence.

The man himself was also well polished. The picture of corporate power, Director Perez, clothed in a very expensive charcoal-grey suit, was immaculate, not a hair out of place. His tie alone probably cost more than Jessman’s entire suit.

With power came wealth. Crazy, insane amounts of it.

David took the offered seat. “Thank you, Director Perez.”

The Director’s mouth curled up at the corners, a pure power smile that oozed superiority from a man who was one of the biggest sharks in the sea of NeuroTech. This was the man who’d sent the team that had taken him from his former employers to serve a new master. Perez was near the top of the heap in the huge corporation and he reigned from this office with the power of life and death like some ancient king. The new nobility. Men and women who headed the corporations that ran the world.

All of them were people like Director Perez.

People who’d known a hunger and did what was required to appease it.

And David was becoming one of those people.

One with a hunger to feed.

He just had to get past today. Survive. Learn to play the game. Learn to swim the danger-infested waters of corporate politics. To do that, he had to change. Had to become one of the sharks himself, if he could.

“Call me Carlos, please.”

David caught himself before he wound up gaping at the man. Peons weren’t told to address the corporate heads by their first names if they weren’t considered ‘valuable’ employees.

Does this mean I’ve got a chance to pull this off? Does Perez know what’s going on?

“Of course, Carlos.” He found a smile, stuck it on his face and hoped it didn’t reveal any of his underlying fears. Tight bands of tension constricted Jessman’s chest, wrapped around his throat. He was really here, sitting in Director Perez’s office, about to try and play politics in a game where he had no idea what the stakes were beyond his own pitiful scrap of a career.

“It’s a bit early in the day to offer you a drink.” The man was still smiling, treating Jessman like a coworker, and equal rather than a lowly researcher.

“Yes, it is,” he agreed. He was speaking, but he felt odd, as if he was in a second-rate simvid that couldn’t quite deliver the feel of being real.

“How about a coffee, David? We have it imported to Miami from Ethiopia. Finest single-bean type there is, in my opinion.”

“I’d like that, s....Carlos.”

The man’s smile widened, which sent a knife of unease right through Jessman. This was not the way he’d envisioned this going. He’d thought he’d be pleading his case, begging for his life, trying to prove his formula was good.

“Ms. Goldstein will be right in.” The man folded his hands on the bare surface of his desk. “You look nervous, David. There’s no need for that.”

“There isn’t, sir?”

“Carlos, please.”

“Of course—” he caught himself in time and finished with, “Carlos,” instead of another nervous utterance of ‘sir’.

“And no, you have no reason to be worried about anything I’m going to say to you. Dr. Hartland has been under suspicion of corporate espionage for a few months now, but until recently, I had no solid evidence he’d done anything wrong.

“Now I have my evidence. He wasn’t aware that there was a hidden camera in his office. We have everything that happened in there this morning on vid.”

Vid... The realization of what they’d seen him do, how he’d manhandled Hartland, sent a stab of terror through him.

“I’ll get right to the point, David. You impressed me today. Your willingness to stand up for yourself tells me you’re a man who will go far in this company. I’d gambled on that with you when I ordered you taken from Megalli-Loran. I see that my estimation of your abilities was not unfounded. Not only are you a brilliant researcher, you’re also executive material.”

Perez’s words sank into Jessman the way water sank into dry sand.

Executive material.

Him, an...executive? His brain didn’t want to connect meaning to the words. Wasn’t properly processing them, stunned disbelief dulling his thought processes, slowing them. Somehow he made his mouth work. “I’m glad you feel that way, sir.”

Perez’s smile widened and he leaned forward, dark gaze intent as he said, “I’ve been looking for the right man to take over that idiot Hartland’s job, David. But I don’t think I have to look anymore. I’d say I’ve found the man I’ve been seeking.”

Jessman’s heart started to hammer in his chest.

Him take over Hartland’s job? It couldn’t be a real offer.

“What do you think? Can you head a department?”

Can you head a department? The words drifted through his mind like embers floating on a wind. Sparks that caught fire in his imagination.

“Yes, Carlos, I can,” he heard himself reply, the confidence in his voice coming as a surprise. Not once while he was at Megalli-Loran had he thought he might find himself the head of a lab, much less an entire department. He’d dreamed about it, sure, but he’d never thought it would happen. The opportunity was being offered to him now and he was damned well going to take it, because it put him closer to his goal, his desire to have and keep Bells for his own.

The coffee arrived, the lovely Asian woman personally serving them before she made a silent departure.

Jessman took a sip of the coffee. The flavor was rich, fruity with an undertone of earthiness, a slight bitterness nipping his tastebuds. “This is excellent.”

“I’ll send you a package of beans and a grinder if you’d like.”

Take it easy. Don’t lose control. You’re being treated as an equal because he’s...what? Playing some sort of complicated game? Or is he actually planning on making you the head of a department.

He raised his gaze to Perez, studied the man’s face. He couldn’t read anything but the usual corporate facade of friendliness.

“I’d like that very much, Carlos.”

“I’ll see that the coffee and a grinder are delivered.”

Is he really going to do it? Is he really going to make me the head of the entire department?

“Thank you, Carlos.” He took another sip of the coffee, saw how his hand was shaking, forced it to stop. Too late to back out now. Just keep going forward. You can do this. You’ve got the training, for Godsakes. Three fucking degrees and you’re ready to panic over what you spent almost half of your adult life training for. This is what you wanted all along. And it’s what you need if you want to keep Bells.

Director Perez smiled at Jessman over the rim of his cup. “Now tell me about this gunwhore you’ve been seeing.”

Jessman felt as if he’d been gut-punched. He almost dropped his coffee as he struggled for some sort of response, something he could say if the Director mentioned his inattention to his job yesterday.

Director Perez chuckled, sounding amused. “Oh, don’t worry, David, I’m not going to reprimand you over enjoying yourself a bit. All work and no play is a sure way to crack under the stress. I understand that very well,” Perez assured him. “To be honest, I want to know how to contact his broker. He looks perfectly edible, and I’d like a taste.”

Chapter Three

No Goin’ Home

The bike rolled to a stop in the trash-clogged alleyway between the Shattered Mirror and a crumbling wreck of a building that had housed nothing but rats and streeties. Homeless people as wrecked as the building itself. Rag-clad and ravaged by diseases and drugs, many of them were the remnants of once-productive members of the corporate world. Men and women who, for whatever reason, had fallen from grace and wound up here in the LC.

Grimy faces peered at him from a gaping hole in the wall. Broken remains of a window that fronted the alley filled with the broken remains of human beings. Black-toothed nervous smiles, shy waving hands, begging gazes greeted him.

Angel among the fallen souls of hell.

Existence in the LCFree.

You sure as hell can’t call what anyone out here has a life.

“That be the Jingle-man hisself,” a rasping voice remarked.

“Ain’t that the shit? We living on some prime real estate here, and that be a fact,” a phlegm-clotted voice agreed.

“You’re right, he’s a real beauty,” a softer, no less ravaged voice remarked. A woman’s voice, speaking in the language of the corporate world.

He glanced at them and they scurried out of sight, like rats confronted by a cat. “You got nothin’ to be worried ‘bout from me, long as you don’t give me no shit.”

But there was no answer. He pulled a bell from his hair, pitched it through the open window. Heard it land inside, jangling as it rolled, stopping with a soft ping. Silver against broken concrete. “It’s real silver, buy you lots of good shit at the corner store,” he told them. “They trade fair down there. Know me personal like.”

Knew him because they’d come to redeem the bell from him later like always. He’d get the bell back for the cost of the goods the streeties took.

He’d long ago learned that a little charity bought you eyes and ears. The streets were brimming with them, hundreds of eyes and ears that carried news and information about important shit back to you. Things like the names of people who were trying to do you dead, or who wanted to fuck up your friends. Who was buying info, who had info to sell, the going price of meat at the Ghoul’s Market. Important shit that could make you money, get you what you wanted to know. Keep you alive.

“You is right, he’s a good man,” he heard from inside as he walked away. He left the alleyway, turning the corner that led to the broken sidewalk at the front of the building.

“Daddy!”

The girl’s joyful cry was immediately followed by sixty pounds of lean flesh and bone leaping from the open window of the second floor room above him. He caught her, spun with the transferred momentum, his hair fanning out, bells ringing loud and clear. The girl’s round face contorted into a wide grin, scarring still visible in the twisting of her mouth. Her anime style Mitsuko Rainboweyes swirled in happy shades of blue and violet that contrasted with her cafe au lait skin and dark brown hair.

Jayzee, his adopted daughter. Adopted because after her last erstwhile father had been killed—by the Jingle-man himself— he was her prime choice to fill the role.

He’d been sleeping with her mother at the time.

Still did on occasion, though of late sleeping was meant more in the literal rather than the Biblical sense. When you whored for a living the last thing you wanted to do was fuck after hours.

“Hey, kid, how you doin’?” he asked as she cuddled against him like any other child happy to see a loved parent.

“Good! Missin’ you, though. Where you been?” she asked as she gripped a few of his of his braids and brought them to her nose. Sniffed and made an exaggerated choking noise. “You smell like a corper. Bet you was over the Wall workin’.”

“That’s right, baby girl. I been workin’ over in corpland,” he agreed as he headed for the entrance to their home, the young girl in his arms.

She had on a pair of pink plastic child’s high-heeled shoes complete with lacy frills to match the pink satin and white lace dress she was wearing. A child’s holiday best he’d bought her at a corporate enclave’s shopping mall. For her, they were dress-up and pretend clothes.

Clothes that had set him back almost two hundred bucks in corporate dollars just to give her something to play with. Something nice.

She was already outgrowing it.

Child though she was, she had a knife strapped to her thigh beneath the white frills of the dress’ skirt, and there was probably something else of a lethal nature in the pink plastic unicorn purse slung over her shoulder.

“So what you playin’ today?”

“Mitsuko’s tryin’ to find who did her partner dead,” she replied referring to the anime her eyes were based on. The character she loved. A freelance gunbitch, assassin for hire who took shit from no one.

“Ah. How’s she doin’?”

“Had to turn a corper to meat, but got some info.”

“Bet she gets the bastard.”

“Yep, she gonna get the shithead and do him dead. Ain’t no one do her partner like that. Bad enough he got dead, but they hacked him up and left him to rot in a burned-out warehouse in the Shinjuku Free.”

A wall in his mind opened up at the mention of the most notorious Free in the world: Shinjuku. Corpers called it a Containment Area. A place where the freaks and cyborgs roamed unchallenged. Home to the world’s most lethal dealers of death and destruction anywhere in the world. But why he knew that—or how he’d come to know how to speak and read Japanese—was another of those mysteries he seldom chose to drag out of the dark corners of his mind to investigate. “Ah, well they’re gonna pay blood then.”

“Yep,” she agreed, giving an emphatic nod.

“You been good?”

“’Course I have,” she replied as she wrapped her arms around his neck and held on. “Missed you white ass. Mama miss you too when you gone so long.”

“Sorry, baby girl, but I got to work.”

“I know. You’s like mama, got to work so we can eat.”

“That’s right.”

“Still not sure whorin’ be good work. I ain’t gonna do it. I’m gonna be a gunbitch, like Mitsuko. I ain’t fuckin’ no one ‘less I wanna.”

“You ain’t got to worry ‘bout it no way. Not yet, anyways,” he told her.

“Well, I worry ‘bout you an mama. Workin’s hard. I been thinkin’ I should be helpin’ make us some eatin’ money. I ain’t a baby no more, you know.”

“Yeah, I know, but you ain’t old enough to be a bodyguard yet, neither. Give it some time, Jayzee girl. You be old enough soon, then you can help out,” he told her as he stepped over a prone form on the sidewalk. A doper drooling on the concrete, staring at nothing with dead-to-the-world hazel eyes. Former corp soldier, dumped like trash. Slow death. Not from the pollution, but from despair. Nothing left to live for. No purpose in life.

He held the girl closer, not to protect her from a sight she’d seen every day of her life, but to remind him of the good things he had in his life.

Jayzee. Loreli. Jessman.

Three damn good reasons to keep waking up in the morning.

“You hear me, girl? You ain’t gotta worry ‘bout that shit. You got me and your mama. We take care of you. ‘Kay?”

“Yep, is a hundred percent clear an’ kay, Daddy,” she replied, mimicking Mistuko’s style of talk.

“In the mean time, you keep practicin’ how to fight like I showed you.”

“Every day like you said.” She giggled. “I took High-B down, daddy. Should’a heard that boy screamin’ ‘bout it.”

“Well, don’t hurt him.”

“’Course not. What you think I am? He’s my partner, ain’t gonna hurt my netrunner.”

Bells gave her a hug. “Good enough, baby girl.”

He was still carrying her as he reached the steps that led into the Shattered Mirror. While he worked for Katerina, he lived here, at Loreli’s brothel.

He looked at the cracked and peeling sign. The place had been a tenement house in days gone by. Now it served as one of the LC’s most notorious brothels.

And he’d brought Jessman here, intending to kill him.

“What you do wif that man you brung here, daddy?”

“I took him home, baby girl.”

Half-clothed young women lounged on the steps, offering him smiles as he headed inside.

“Oh, for the love of Jayzuz,” a voice inside said. “Who ’n hell left this meltychew crap in the micro?”

“Oops,” Jayzee giggled. “I been good ‘cept forgettin’ shit in the micro.”

“You better go clean it up,” he told her and set her on her feet.

“Shoulda put a plate under it, I ‘spose.”

“Prolly,” he agreed. “Bes’ go clean it up ‘fore Joanie get all mad an’ start screamin’. You know how that ho get.”

The girl rolled her eyes, the color changing to shades of red and violet, showing annoyance. “Damn bitch. Not like her lazy tattooed butt ever do work ‘round here no how.”

“Go on,” he told the girl and gave her a gentle push toward the back of the building where the brothel’s poor excuse for a kitchen was.

He crossed the lobby, frayed and much faded burgundy carpet under his feet, the smell of spilled liquor, semen and other less pleasant and identifiable substances filling the air. A bullet-scarred and hole-riddled counter stood to his left. To his right were a couple of tattered couches; beyond them was the room they referred to alternately as the conference area and banquet room.

Since the arrival of Ice-man and his ganger companions, the Mirror wasn’t seeing the business it had once boasted about, corporate business with big money customers coming to see how the nilhumans lived. Coming to see the shows Loreli and her girls put on. Coming to find sexual gratifications unavailable in the corporate world.

The bastards that had almost killed Loreli, Jayzee and him too were ruining the LC for everyone, and one of these days he was going to have to settle the account with them. But much as he hated to admit it, Katerina was right. He was damned good, but not good enough to take on that many gangers by himself.

Sighing, he headed for the stairs to the upper floors. He had a place up there. His own room that he didn’t have to share. A room with his own lumpy bed and a pillow he’d been given by a client. A room packed with the crap he’d accumulated since he’d arrived there, unsure of anything but his name. A man with no memory of the past, and no idea how he’d come to be where he found himself, adrift in the deadly sea of the Liberty City FreeZone.

He was tired. Hadn’t realized just how tired he was until he’d gotten those stairs in sight, the lure of the waiting bed drawing him along. The promise of a few hours of oblivion beckoning him.

He was almost to his room when he heard someone come running up the steps in his wake.

He knew who it was, knew what she’d want.

Loreli.

“You came home.”

“Yeah.”

He could detect traces of perfume, cologne and aftershave clinging to her, the smell of sated passions and sweat, liquor and stale smoke mingling with the other scents.

She pressed against him, rested her chin on his shoulder, wrapped her arms around him, hands splayed over his groin. Making her demand. Possessive. “I missed you.”

Bells gave a wordless grunt and gripped her slender hands, moved them from his crotch, let go.

“What’s wrong?” she questioned, her cheek pressing to the side of his head, her warm breath brushing a tuft of feathers against his cheek, tickling him as she wrapped her arms around his waist.

“I’m tired,” he told her as he broke free of her hold. He was tired, but that wasn’t his only reason for pulling out of her embrace. He didn’t want a woman’s company. Wasn’t interested in what she was offering him anymore. He wanted Jessman.

He turned, saw the hurt in her gaze.

“You ain’t got to lie, you know,” she told him, voice soft, full of sadness.

“I’m not. ” But he was, and the lie—necessary or not—lingered like LC brewed liquor, the taste of it sour in his mouth. She deserved better than lies from him. He owed her so much, but she owed him too. He took her hand, led her to his room. He didn’t want sex, and hoped she wasn’t going to try and pressure him into it.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m just tired, Loreli.”

“How about a massage?” she suggested.

“Yeah, mebbe if you want.” He was relenting, letting her in when he wanted to be alone. Alone to think about the stupid things he’d already done. Others he knew he’d do all for some tenuous thing called love.

He had to be a fool for getting involved with a corper.

At the same time he wanted the other man enough to accept the risks.

He shoved his bedroom door open, let go of the woman’s hand, reached for the buckle of his gunbelt.

“Let me,” she murmured and helped him undress, Bells allowing her to help because it made her happy.

On days like today, Bells suspected that Loreli loved him, and while he did care about her, it wasn’t love he felt. Gratitude for her help when he’d arrived on her doorstep, confused, not knowing anything about himself but his own name. She’d offered him shelter, food and time to gain some sense of mental equilibrium, if not any of his memories. If she did love him, she’d never pushed her feelings onto him, never came out and said she loved him.

He wasn’t even sure she felt that way, but sometimes, like now, he could almost feel the emotion coming off of her, potent as a drug. A drug Jessman had given him immunity to, at least for as long as what they had lasted.

But what she felt might be more practical than love. This was the Free and they were both zoners, residents of a brutal winner-take-what-they-could-grab world.

There was no place in their world for weaknesses, and that included love.

She shoved his gunbelt under the pillow, helped him out of the armored jacket, the leather pants and harness he wore. Her hands touched, caressed, sought a reaction. Got nothing but a blank stare.

He turned away, climbed under the ragged blanket, lay face down and closed his eyes.

Tired.

Mentally drained, emotionally numb.

But he couldn’t get thoughts of Jessman out of his mind.

The researcher would be alone in his apartment tonight.

Vulnerable, with nothing but a second-rate out of the box security system to protect him. An EnCoSet was no protection at all from someone like him. And men willing to do a quick money killjob were easy as dirt to find in the LCFree.

Daylight was David’s friend. No zoner would try to enter an enclave with the target at work. Too many people around, too many security people in place among the business floors of every enclave. Twice as many in the research areas of a big corporation like NeuroTech.

For now, Jessman was safe enough.

But tonight might be another story.

Bells had to get to the asshole who was trying to buy a death before he had the chance to send anyone else after Jessman.

Loreli got on the bed with him, her slight weight barely making the reinforced bed move. She poured cool oil on his shoulders, straddled his hips and started to work her magic, massaging the tension out of his shoulders and back. Trying to help him relax.

“Damn, babe, you tense as hell. What you worryin’ ‘bout?”

“I got a moneyboy in trouble wif a corp,” he replied, giving her a half-truth, only half the story. She didn’t need to know the rest. He lived with her, fucked her, but he didn’t trust much of anyone, not even her. Money was a powerful motivator in the Zone, and Loreli was as cash-hungry as anyone.

The ability to trust someone was rare in the LCFree. People you thought of as friends could turn on you if they smelled money. Or blood.

So far Loreli hadn’t done him dirty, but there was the potential there hovering in their relationship, a venomous cloud ready to poison things.

She leaned down, pressed her soft lips to the nape of his neck beside the dataport in the back of his head. “I don’t know what’s bothering you, Jason—” she murmured, using his real name—the one he’d only remembered after the Ice-man’s ganger punks had almost killed him. All traces of the zonespeak were gone from her speech, her own corporate past showing. “—but I swear to you I’ll never fuck you over. I know Ice-man’s pack of curs is putting pressure on everyone, wanting people to pay them protection money, but we’re standing strong. We won’t give in, and we sure as hell won’t betray you.”

He could feel her naked breasts pressed to his shoulder blades, felt the tickle of her pussy hair on his butt. The warm wetness of her slit on his ass.

She wanted him. He could smell the heat of her arousal.

And he wasn’t in the mood.

“Lori, not tonight.”

Her breath tickled through the hair at the nape of his neck, flowed warm and enticing over the dataport, made him shiver as she sighed.

She sat up, returned to the massage.

He knew what she was doing. Biding her time. Waiting for him to give in to what she wanted.

She wasn’t what he wanted. He couldn’t dominate her the way he did Jessman, and she wouldn’t dominate him either. Those weren’t her kinks.

Hell, compared to him, she didn’t have any kinks.

A soft knocking on the door, a whispered, “Loreli?”

Saved. At least he hoped so.

“What is it?”

“Corper client on the phone. Wants to talk about a party.”

“Damn.” She bent down, kissed the side of his face. “Sorry, Bells, got to go do biz.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

“You get some sleep, hear me?”

He grunted a wordless response.

She left the bed, departed without even putting clothes on, none of them body shy. Working in a whorehouse tended to make any semblance of social taboos vanish.

Not that most people living in the LCFree had much in the way of social taboos. Nor scruples, morals or anything else.

He smiled.

Very much like the corporate world, but it was a lot cleaner there.

And the booze and food were much better.

Not that he wanted to go live there. Too many rules. Too much crap to put up with. Bosses. The bosses of the bosses. Upper management boneheaded starched suit types. Regulations out the ass.

Been there. Done that.

Sure of it, but not remembering any details other than he’d given it up for the freedom to make his own way in life.

Live or die. Succeed or fail.

His own choices. Own decisions.

His own fuckups.

Jessman being his most recent brand of fucking up. His own decision to take a risk, do something so stupid he still couldn’t quite accept that he’d done it to himself.

One bullet would solve so many things.

And end all possibilities of other, more enticing things.

Hot, lust-driven things.

His cock went stiff as he thought about the dark-haired man down on his knees at his feet. Head bowed. Submitting.

Delicious things.

He rolled over on his back, stared at the water-stained and cracked ceiling.

He couldn’t go corper.

Jessman couldn’t go zoner.

So where did that leave them?

In a relationship that would be a dead end with no compromise possible.

He should just walk away. Let it go.

But what he should do and what he would do did not coincide, because he wasn’t going to walk away from Jessman.

Boy, you a fuckin’ idiot. A bona fide dumbshit gettin’ youself mixed up in this fuckmess.

He shook his head, the riot of braids twitching, bells ringing.

Fuck it. You thinkin’ this shit round and round in you head and what it gonna get you doin that? Not shit is what.

He closed his eyes, drove the thoughts out of his mind, blanking them down by force of will. Let his body relax, let his mind drift into a dull grey sea of silent nothingness.

Calm.

Quiet.

Dream....

A faint cobalt and aqua glimmer surfaced.

A glint of gold bright as coins.

Or the scales of a gigantic reptile.

Something moved. Serpentine neck. Long, elegant. Graceful.

Arch of wing spreading, collapsing into the obscuring fog like a sale that had lost the wind.

Chains clinking as something huge stirred. As something sleeping tried to awaken.

Gasping, Bells sat up on the bed, beads of sweat standing out on his forehead. He couldn’t breathe, little glimmering stars swimming at the edges of his vision. Cybernetic telltales glowing red and gold.

He took a gasping breath, stared around himself. Confused. Lost. Shaking with emotion, shivering.

“Kimi?”

Tears burned his eyes and he blinked them away, covered his face with his hands, took a deep breath, exhaled, the air shuddering out of him as a barely-heard sob.

Soul-rending grief dug talons of misery into him and he wept silent tears, crying and not knowing why.

There’d been someone he loved. Someone more important to him than life or sanity.

A sweet smile that had meant everything to him.

“Kimiko,” he sighed out the name, moaned it through the agony of loss.

A delicate face framed by raven-black hair.

The words my cherry blossom girl drifting through his mind.

He couldn’t remember who she’d been.

Just a girl.

A girl he found himself crying over. Missing. Wanting. Desperate to hold her, embrace her and never let go.

A beauty with big dark eyes.

Brown eyes that had looked into his soul.

Eyes the same color as Jessman’s.

* * * * * *

Jessman still couldn’t believe it.

He stood at the window looking out through the haze of pollution at the traffic moving along the street. Armored trucks burning six dollar a liter bio-diesel trundling long, loaded with cargo. Luxury goods being transported from one corporation factory to another corporation’s shopping mall. Furniture, simvids, HDTVs, clothing, everything anyone could ever want moving along those traffic-clotted streets. A large truck crept along, the side decorated with the logo of a well known megacorp, the vehicle hauling food from manufacturing companies over seas. Food brought in via huge cargo ships to the Port of Miami.

Dangerous business, corporate trade. Full of risk. High stakes investment that paid big or garnered huge losses. He’d learned that in some of his basic classes in corporate economics even before he’d gone to university. Most shipments were paid for upfront. Some shipments never made it to their destinations, hijacked by other companies in need of goods they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—pay for. Attacked by zoners desperate for the things they couldn’t buy in their own poverty-stricken world, things they usually died trying to steal.

He wondered if Bells had ever engaged in such land-based piracy. The man was a killer, but for some reason he couldn’t picture him attacking a freight hauler. The blond didn’t seem like someone who’d steal for a living. Whore and kill, yes, but David just couldn’t imagine Bells risking his life for a truckload of goods.

Then again, he didn’t really know the gunwhore. For all he knew, the man was out there somewhere hijacking a truck full of luxury goods.

A trio of sleek limos floated along, riding on the grav lifters that were taking the place of imitation fossil fuel. Limos probably taking executives to important meetings at other corporate buildings. Luxurious vehicles accompanied by guards riding gleaming three-wheelers packed with weaponry. Soldiers protecting their employers from the hostilities of rival corporations.

Patrol choppers, corporate logos blazoned on their side cut through the brown-grey smog that wasn’t safe for any human to breathe.

Yet the zoners did.

He wondered what the cancer rates were out there on the street. How many zoners died of diseases caused by the pollutants filling the environment outside the towers.

For him, even a few minutes breathing the air would be hazardous.

He touched the glass, leaned closer and tried to see through the haze and buildings, tried to get a glimpse of the place that Bells called his home.

A strange place so different from what Jessman knew it might as well be on the surface of a different planet.

The ever-present smog was too thick, the buildings too tall for him to see anything but other corporate enclaves looming in the murk. Dozens of behemoths devoted to making those at the top rich beyond the wildest dreams of the people at the bottom, the poorest workers, the unseen maintenance personnel living in underground cubicles smaller than the kitchen in his own apartment.

One step above being a zoner.

Just barely considered human by the rest of the corporate world.

He’d been born one step up from that sort of life.

Two steps away from being what Bells was.

Zoner scum. Human garbage. A nilhuman. Nothing.

But Bells wasn’t a nothing. To David, he was beyond comparison. A being of angelic light to drive away the darkness of his own life. At the same time, the gunwhore was also a being of hellish destruction clothed in heart-stopping beauty.

There has to be some way I can get him and keep him here permanently.

Leaning the other way he could just make out the glint of the Atlantic.

His own office.

He turned around, gazed on the austere setting. Dark wood tones. Gleaming laminate that covered his desk. Real wood instead of the boring plastic top he’d had on his most recent desk in the lab.

He touched the wood, sat down in the thickly padded chair. Fabric, not leather, but still much better than the generic seat he’d had in the lab.

But the room was too bland, too dark. The walls bare of anything interesting. As dull as the man he’d replaced.

Hartland’s office, now his, as head of the department.

Dr. Hartland taken away for corporate sabotage, corporate spying, traitorous actions deemed a threat to NeuroTech. Offenses that carried decades of jail time, even the death penalty.

Not only was Hartland gone, but his entire staff had been taken away, removed from the department for questioning. Anyone found guilty of aiding and abetting Hartland would be headed for the regional corporate prison in Jacksonville where Hartland had already been sent to await judgment.

There were no trials in the corporate world for people caught in the act of committing a crime against the company.

Outside, he had a temporary secretary. Down the hall was a temporary receptionist. Both on loan from the pool of clerical workers that shuttled from short-term job to short-term job within the NeuroTech enclave. Living on the edge of disaster, one step up from the bottom rung of the corporate ladder. Two steps away from the street.

Bottom of the heap workers, little different than he’d been just a few short weeks ago, despite his advanced degrees.

At Megalli-Loran, it wasn’t what you could do but who you knew that gained you advancement.

But that was the way of the corporate world everywhere.

The difference between MCL and NeruoTech was his connection to Director Perez.

He left the chair, started to pace. Too full of nervous energy, the remains of adrenaline-charged excitement making it difficult for him to sit still or concentrate.

There were files waiting for him to review. Employees to select. Decisions to make. An entire office area to redecorate in a style that didn’t remind him of a funeral parlor. Something tasteful but dynamic, like his own apartment. White and clean. Glass and chrome. Elegant in style and efficient in function.

Lots of work to do, and all he could accomplish was pacing around his office, trying to get past the abrupt changes in his life. His meteoric rise from lab assistant to the head of an entire department.

A research department charged with the innovative design of new polymer gels. Gels that would put NeuroTech at the forefront of corporations vying for military contracts. Lucrative contracts.

Big money.

More advances looming in his future if he could manage to pull off even a few modest innovations.

Or prove once and for all he wasn’t good enough for the trust Director Perez had placed in him. The responsibility the Director had given him.

Dr. David Jessman, Head of the Polymer Gel Research Lab at NeuroTech: Miami.

By tomorrow, his name would be on the door.

By tomorrow, he’d be going over employee files. Picking out his own team. Deciding their next course of research.

He would be calling the shots for the whole damned department.

Jessman laughed, shook his head, the elation filling him at his change of fortunes erasing his earlier fears in an emotional high more powerful than any of the quasi-legal drugs he’d sampled during his days at Megalli-Loran.

Party favors passed out by a senior colleague.

For the first time he understood the lure of power. The seductive nature of being in control, of being the one in charge.

And at the same time he felt a tingle of fear too. Being the head of a department meant he was ultimately responsible for results. Good results assured his continued position at the head of the department. Aided his climb up the corporate ladder. Failure meant losing everything he’d just gained.

A chill crept along his spine, doubt eating at the momentary jubilation.

Responsibility.

A whole new level of stress, because the higher the climb up the ladder, the greater the fall if things went wrong.

But even that couldn’t dispel the excitement coursing through Jessman over his rise in the corporate world.

And the bonus he’d just gotten for his revolutionary formula along with the increase in pay grade assured that he’d have more time with the gunwhore.

In fact, he was currently negotiating a deal that would let him hire the man with money from the corporate coffers on the basis that Megalli-Loran had a standing order for his death circulating in the LCFree. Once that fact was established, there would be nothing to keep him from retaining the services of the gunwhore.

And with the vid from the security camera in the hall outside his apartment showing the confrontation between Stone and Bells, he was almost certain to have his request approved.

Jessman couldn’t stop smiling. Couldn’t think about anything beyond the promotion and the idea of being able to keep Bells. Keep the gunwhore not for a night, or a few nights, but for as long as he could justify the expense to Accounting.

The very thought sent a jolt of pure lust straight to his groin. A flash of hot need that stiffened his cock and heated his balls, warmed his blood with the remembered sensations of the whip, of the blond’s hands on him.

He had to stop thinking about Bells. Had to put his desire on hold and focus on work.

Jessman pressed his palm to the surface of the desk, the computer monitor rising from the surface, the keypad appearing as a faint glow within the gleaming finish.

He would concentrate on his job. Go through the personnel files and decide on the people wanted to interview for his hand picked research team. Select a secretary from the available candidates.

That thought brought a face to mind. A name. Timothy.

Attractive. Respectful. And male.

If he was straight with no interest in other men, then he’d be safe as an assistant. Jessman wouldn’t have to worry about a secretary intent on climbing the social ladder by sleeping with the boss.

If not... He sighed. In some ways his life had just gotten easier, in others it had become far more complex.

He stared at the screen, not seeing it, mind mulling over the incredible events of the last few days. Too much, too fast. So many changes he felt as if he were trapped in a simvid because the situation didn’t seem real.

Bells. Waking up in the LCFree. The kiss of the Sweet Sisters. His return to NeuroTech. Blazing sex in his apartment. Stone almost killing him.

Too much. Far too much.

He realized he was exhausted. Drained mentally and physically.

Jessman rubbed his face. Tired. Much too tired to think, mind shrouded in a mire of naturally occurring biochemicals, a cocktail of several day’s worth of over-stimulated senses, a body driven through pain into a new realm of pleasure.

He was a physical and emotional mess.

“Dr. Jessman?”

Voice out of thin air.

For a moment he didn’t recognize who it was, then he remembered. The secretary, speaking him through the vidcomm embedded in his desk.

His desk.

His temporary assistant.

The visuals were off, but he knew her now. Touched the button on the keyboard that switched the vocal aspect of the comm unit on, but left the visual aspect off.

“Yes, Ms. Newberry?”

“It’s lunch time, sir.”

He glanced at the clock, confirmed her comment. One in the afternoon. She was right. “All right, Ms. Newberry, you go on to lunch.”

“Can I bring you anything, Dr. Jessman?”

“No, I think I’ll be going out for lunch.”

“All right Dr. Jessman, I’ll be back in a half hour.”

He almost told her to make it an hour, then stopped himself. She was probably paid by the hour and needed every minute she could squeeze out of the job to pay her bills.

“That’s fine. I’m sure you have lots of work to do.” He had no idea what it would be since he hadn’t done anything to generate work for her in the two hours he’d been the departmental head. He’d been sitting there for two hours doing nothing but thinking.

And most of his thinking hadn’t been about work.

He stood, left his office and paused by her desk. “Have a good lunch, Ms. Newberry. I’ll be back in about an hour.”

She smiled up at him. Hazel eyes. Cheap. Generic issue. Nondescript. She’d never caught the attention of anyone even willing to pay her to have such a minor upgrade. Or maybe they were her real eyes, not even bio-enhanced for perfect vision or to enable her to use a holoscreen more comfortably.

She was pretty, but not the perfect picture of a corporate secretary. Her hair was cheaply styled, her clothes bottom of the barrel off-the-rack corporate wear.

No different than he’d been at Megalli-Loran.

And there was very little he could really do to help her. Anything he did would just serve to give her a false sense of hope. A ray of sunshine in her dismal world that would be taken away.

Yet he felt compelled to do something.

“I’d like you to come back tomorrow,” he told her.

Her smile brightened. “Thank you, Dr. Jessman. What time would you like me to come in?”

The normal start time for his department was eight in the morning. He considered his answer. “I’m going to stay late tonight, I’ve got a lot of work to get done.” He also didn’t have a gunwhore to go home to, so he wasn’t in any hurry to get back to his empty apartment. “I’ll leave you some work, so be here at seven-thirty. Or is that too early?”

“No, sir, I can be here.”

Eager to please, eager to work.

He smiled. “Good. I’ll see you after lunch.”

Her smile brightened a bit, and he felt a warm flicker of satisfaction. He’d helped her, even with so minor a thing as asking her back for another day, giving her a little extra time, extra money.

He started down the corridor toward the elevators. Stopped.

He had the power to change lives.

The realization rocked him.

I have full control of an entire research department!

Me.

He turned around, smiled at the young woman. “In fact, I’d like you to remain here until Friday, at least. I’m sure it’s going to take me that long to find a suitable replacement.”

Her face lit, eyes warming, smile widening. Happy. She was happy. “Oh... thank you, Dr. Jessman! Thank you so much.”

“Go take your break. I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Yes, sir!”

David felt light, as if a great weight had been lifted off his shoulders.

He wasn’t a nobody anymore.

He was calling the shots for an entire department.

Him.

Smiling, he paused at the reception desk. Another temp. Young. Pretty. Lustrous black hair, lush figure, cream and coffee skin, dressed in a suit just as cheap as her counterpart in the back office.

Another pair of hazel eyes. Wide, rimmed with smoky copper makeup, outlined in kohl. She looked like an Egyptian goddess.

“Ms. Jones, you’ll be here until Friday while I look for your replacement. Is that all right?”

“Oh, yes, of course, Dr. Jessman.” Smoky voice, oozing sexuality. Trying hard to gain his attention, his interest. Desperate, ready to do anything to claw her way out of the life she’d been trapped in from birth. Even selling her body, if that’s what it took.

And he understood her. Understood her motivations.

His parents had been temp workers, but he was smarter than they were. Brilliant, he’d been told. He’d clawed his way to the top of his classes, gone through medical school with the same aggressive drive to succeed. He’d paid his dues.

And risen only one rung higher than either of his parents when he’d been at Megalli-Loran.

The only difference was that, unlike his parents and their business school basics education and upgrades, he’d had a huge debt looming over him. Choking him. Crushing him. No matter how hard he worked, he could never pay more than the weekly interest payments. Had lived in a cubicle smaller than his parents own tiny residence.

He’d owed almost a million MLCorp dollars when he’d graduated.

The debt stood at a million point three when he left. Interest mounting and no way to ever pay it back. Wage slave for life. Trapped with nowhere to go.

Here at NeuroTech, his slate was clean. Director Perez had paid for his hiring, ordered the upgrades to his cyber enhancements and set him up in his own lab debt-free.

Life was different here. He could climb, rise to a higher place in life.

Already had just by being brought to NeuroTech.

And now by his own actions—with some help from a gunwhore who knew polymer gels at the same level he did—he’d risen to departmental head.

Jessman realized he could do something good with his newfound power. His newly acquired status meant he had carte blanche to hire his own people. To reward them for jobs well done.

Grinning, feeling good about himself and his life, he got into the elevator thoughts whirling about everything he could do.

Mind humming with the possibility—a very real possibility— that he could justify having a gunwhore, his gunwhore, on the payroll by the end of the week.

Chapter Four

Dancin’ with the Devil

The beat of the music—some local LC band he’d heard too often—hit him like a physical assault the moment he set foot into the Jackflash Club.

Strobe lights arced, cutting through the smoky air. The boom of the bass and the sharp banshee wail of a guitar shearing through the darkness that filled the bulk of the place.

The whole club was a study in damned to Hell and loving every second of it. From the demonic costumes the bartenders wore to the she-devil waitresses moving between tables and patrons to the basalt black columns wreathed with crimson flames of neon, the place was an effort to mimic the depths of the Pit.

Booze and drugs flowing unchecked—so long as the patron had the cash to keep it going.

Bells moved between the columns and people, the faint light from the neon fires not bright enough for anyone with meat eyes to see by, spaced as far apart as they were. Even the flash of the strobes failed to provide enough light.

But no one in the club would have natural eyes, the place a hangout of zoners and ganger punks. Cybered. Bio-enhanced. Living by the edge in the Zone where only the best survived.

He stepped over a body; man, woman, something in between, alive or dead, he didn’t know. Didn’t care. Not his problem. Not his biz. Normal for the Jackflash. By the time he’d reached the edge of the dance floor he’d had to step over more prone shapes, and circle around a couple of men fucking a woman—one of the she-demons of the club—facedown on the top of the table, a cock up her ass, another in her mouth, the trio surrounded by a cheering crowd of voyeurs. Bets exchanging hands, though what was being bet on, he didn’t know. Didn’t really care.

Just your average night at the Jackflash.

Still early for a place like this. Not quite ten at night—early by LC standards—but it was crowded. Busy. The dealers selling, buyers buying, hos doing their thing right out in the open.

Different animal, a ho. Did anyone that offered a few pitiful scraps of zonescrip or a quick hit of fun. Euphoria zombies, most of them. Taking the slow spiral down into the embrace of death. The Dark Lady’s smile welcoming them at the end of their mayfly lives.

Whores were different. Did their work in a brothel, got paid a higher price, earned a better living. Most of them were disease-free. Only did safer drugs, not the get-you-dead-in-a-hurry kind.

Gunwhores were the cream. Top dollar fucks, lethal as they were beautiful.

Cybered highart that could fuck a man into a stupor one minute and blow a would-be killer to bits the next.

Disease and drug-free. Because they had to be. No corper would fuck anyone with a zone disease. And drugged-out gunwhores got their clients killed and did themselves messily dead, suicide by corporate-ordered killjob.

Zonewarriors were another step up the food chain. Professional killers for hire.

And right now, as he moved through the Jackflash Club, Bells was in zonewarrior ‘don’t fuck with me’ mode. Not that anyone could see a difference. He was still simstar beautiful, still in his black leather. Not synth, but the faintly gleaming real deal, the scent unmistakable as the gun oil odor that clung to him. Like the gunwhore smell of sex, faintly sweet and tainted with a bleach aroma. The faint trace of blood that was too subtle for an unenhanced sense of smell to detect.

Scents of a sinner on the move. The fragrance of a predator of the concrete jungle on the prowl.

Scanning the darkness, ignoring the gazes focused on him, the faint nods acknowledging his presence—the couple of Drakul scum who scrambled out of his way and vanished into the bowels of the club—he searched for the corper he’d come to find.

Women smiled at him as he moved through, men gave him appraising stares, summing up a potential threat or taking in his too-pretty face, wondering what it would be like to have his lips around their dick.

He could see it in their eyes, on their faces. Men and women both with a hunger for what his body, his looks promised.

But there was no welcome in his eyes, on his face.

He wasn’t here to party, he was here for business.

Killing-serious business.

And they couldn’t afford him anyway.

Not with the rates Katerina charged for what he could do, what he always did to his clients.

Spent, dazed, wanting more than they could usually afford.

Same as David. But there was a difference there.

Bells didn’t give a rat’s ass about any of the rest of his clients, past, present or future. Not one of them had ever been perked with a freebie.

With Jessman, he didn’t care if he ever made another ragged dollar off the man. He’d do the researcher for free just to have the handsome man whimpering for release under him. Just to see the black leather collar around his throat. To touch the hot stripes of the welts he blazed into the man’s flawless skin with the crop or the cat o’nine and hear the soft moans of ecstasy as they fell from between Jessman’s parted lips.

So much he’d done to the man. So much more he could do.

He paused, glanced across the dance floor searching for the corper shit who’d brought the lure of corporate money into the zone, looking to have his boytoy done dead. A flash of the strobe revealed green hair, but he knew the zoner at the end of it. Small time wannabe zonewarrior. Lowlife trash. He’d made the mistake of beating a whore from the Mirror. He’d never touch any of them again.

Bells made sure of that when he’d broken both of the guy’s arms to make a point. No one touched what he protected, and the whores of the Mirror were under his personal protection.

He moved deeper into the Jackflash, she-devil waitresses smiling at him. Pretty-boy waiters in their stubby black-winged demon costumes gave him the eye, their skimpy loincloths doing nothing at all to hide what lay beneath.

He turned, looked back, wondering if he’d arrived too early. Didn’t spot the man he was searching for anywhere within his line of sight in that direction. He turned and made his way toward the far side of the club where most of the serious biz was conducted.

Spotted the man he’d come to find, bright green hair giving off a phosphorescent light in the gloom. No zoner would make themselves that sort of a target, the dim glow a fast way to get dead in a hurry on the streets. Short on the sides, standing down the middle in a crest which contained most of the glow. Not fiber optics that could be turned off with a thought, it was some type of chemwash the guy had used. Cosmetic that probably washed out easily. Camouflage for his job in the LC that gave him away as a man out of place in their world.

Bells started walking, people clearing out of his way as if to touch him would bring death, sudden and swift.

For a some people, it had.

People who set a hand on him with hostile intent.

People who wanted to die.

And he seldom drew his gun to accomplish the job. At such close range, he didn’t need a weapon to take out an adversary. He had his hands and feet for that and used them to death-dealing effect.

And almost everyone in the club knew it.

Street legend.

It kept him safe, and made him a target at the same time.

The man saw him coming but didn’t make a move to flee. He sat there waiting, a smirk curling his mouth.

Corper in the LC. Clueless and arrogant. Used to respect in his own world. Used to buying it here.

A man about to be educated in the harsher side of things the LC could offer someone stupid enough to rely on money to protect him.

Because money didn’t protect you in the LC, gunwhores and zonewarriors did.

And he had not a single one of either evident at his table.

Even the fact that the crowds parted for him like the Red Sea before Moses didn’t clue the idiot into the danger. Didn’t warn him that something unlike the snarling pack of zoner curs he knew approached him.

Bells stopped at the table. “You the guy been rainin’ piss on fuckbroker Katerina’s parade?”

Zonertalk, corper phrasing.

Driving a point home.

A point that was missed.

Cool indigo eyes regarded him from a pretty-boy face. Bells knew he had the right guy from the scent of the costly cologne wafting his way. He recognized it from the lingering odor that had remained from his visit to Kat.

“Mebbe so. Who’s askin’?”

He was good enough to pull off sounding like a native. But not good enough to convince the man confronting him that he was a zoneborn son of the free world.

“I’m askin’, shit for brains.” Bells regarded the guy, “Now you the corper errand boy givin’ her shit or not?” He knew the answer, but wanted to let the green-haired idiot decide how the next few minutes of his life would play out.

“An’ who in fuck are you to care ‘bout that cunt’s biz?”

Bells drew his revolver and had it to the underside of the man’s jaw before he so much as blinked in reaction. “I be her number one bitchboy, and I is askin’, fuckhead. But I don’t need me no answer, I already know who you sorry ass be. You McElroy, an’ you been shovin’ your dick into biz that you better off stayin’ out of. Got what I’m tellin’ you?”

There was a flicker of nervousness on the man’s face, but no sign of fear. Not yet. But there would be as soon as he understood the new set of rules he was living by now that Bells had arrived in his life.

“Don’t be sticking you shit in my face, pretty-boy. I don’t know who the fuck you think you be, but I tell you, my bosses—”

“I ain’t give a rat’s shit for what you bosses think they gonna do. Corper bitch what you is, they leave you ass to rot you get fucked by me, so you threats got no meanin’ ‘round here.”

“You think you some hot shit, pretty-boy, but I ain’t scared of no gunwhore! Get you shit out my face or I’ll have you ass blown from here to Hell dead as meat!”

Bells’ mouth quirked up at one corner. “You plannin’ to buy youself protection? Bit late, dumbass. Ain’t no one gonna come runnin’ to help you sorry self. You ain’t got enough money to buy help, even if they was a zonewarior ‘round to see you askin’ which they ain’t.”

Someone Bells didn’t recognize—lean, dark-skinned with a dreadlock tangle of techhair in vivid shades of scarlet and a chandelier’s worth of sparkle dangling from his left ear— bent down close to the corper. “That be the one me warned you ‘bout, mon.”

Bells heard the lilt of the Islands in the speaker’s voice. A big offshore Zone, the entire chain of islands a haven of free trade. Most of it based on theft from corporate cargo ships. Pirates roaming the high seas with a hijacked military ship and enough firepower to be a threat to every ship in the area. “Him you don’t wanna piss with, mon. He do you dead and not worry ‘bout nothin’ once he done.”

Bells let a feral grin twist his mouth. He knew exactly what the corper was seeing. He knew what he looked like to corper men, women too. Pretty playtoy, good for a quick fuck and nothing more. Until you saw his smile, watched his eyes change from neon blue flame to stormcloud grey.

McElroy paled, the color draining away, beads of sweat forming over his upper lip, at his emerald-glow hairline.

Bells leaned closer to the man, smelled the fear rising from his skin under the cloying stink of the cologne no zoner would be caught wearing. People could trail you wearing a distinctive scent like that. Trail you to do you dead. No smart man would wear something that strong, that unique unless they were gunwhores.

And this guy wasn’t a gunwhore. Not even close. He didn’t have the looks for it, or the sense of style needed. No flash and a bland forgettable face.

And McElroy sure as shit wasn’t a zonewarrior.

Prey. A tender throat waiting for the rending fangs of a predator who wasn’t interested in money. A predator that had a taste for blood and violence.

He was lucky the Drakuls hadn’t torn him to bloody hash already.

Bells knew them well enough to understand they were biding their time, gathering for the kill. Hyenas ready to take down weak prey.

Yeah, he knew the Drakuls first hand personal, had felt the pain of the death they carried with them. Euphoria junkies, they were unable to feel any injury short of immediate fatality. The only way to deal with a Drakul was with instant death. Wounding did nothing to stop them, maiming only enough to slow them down for an instant, the instant before they were trying to do you dead again.

Bells saw the trip-hammer beat of McElroy’s pulse right beside the business end of his revolver. Heart racing. Panic setting in. Understanding sinking through the layers of corper arrogance and self-important egocentrism.

Power shifting from him to the man with the gun.

The man who could kill him with the barest twitch of a finger.

Errand boy caught with no protection. Vulnerable. Easy meat for the predators of the zone.

“So you know who I be. That good. Now we gonna talk biz, you an’ me,” Bells told him. “I gonna ask questions and you gonna answer them.”

“S...sure...” A bead of sweat slid down McElroy’s forehead, ran over the bridge of his nose, down the side to flow over his lips.

“Who want me moneyboy dead?”

“You moneyboy?”

“Jessman,” Bells told him, nudging the gun into his flesh, making his eyes widen in growing terror.

“Megalli-Loran management.”

He jabbed the gun harder into that soft meat under the man’s chin. “Don’t be playin’ no funny crap wif me, corper boy. That shit me know. You give straight answers, not run ‘round bullshit games if you want to come out of this breathin’, you got me?”

McElroy tried to nod, stopped himself. “Got you. But I don’t know their names! I...”

Faster than most visuals could follow, Bells grabbed the man by the shirt with his right hand and hauled him onto the top of the table, slamming him face down. The revolver dropped into the holster at his side as he jumped up on the table, straddled the corper and gripped the nape of McElroy’s neck. The tip of his index finger rested on the dataport at the back of McElroy’s head.

“You know what shit can happen to a dataport if it get broke free of you skull, corper boy? Cause you pain like nothin’ you ever felt an’ it won’t kill you. Leastways, not right away.”

“You fucking bastard! Let me go, you fucking nilhuman piece of shit!” Words yelled, all trace of zoner accent gone, the man flailing for freedom, driven by a fit of terror induced stupidity.

And in the LC, stupidity was the same as dead.

Heads turned. A ripple like the motion left from a rock dropping into a scummed over puddle spread. Voices whispering, people staring, angry, ready to kill. The ripple reached the band and the music stopped.

Zoners moved in, surrounding the table.

The harsh scent of anger, of blood-mad rage filled the smoky air, drowned out the cloying scent of the man’s cologne, mixed with the stink of fear.

Predators and prey.

Bells laughed softly. “You jus’ fucked the dog, corper man. No zoner’d ever call his own kind a nilhuman,” he laughed, the soft sound loud, menacing, cutting through the silence like a knife through flesh. “That a corper insult, and it get you plenty dead out here.”

“Mon, you be deader than dead,” the Islander told him. “Me don’ know dead men.” Any association the Islander might have granted to the green-haired man was withdrawn, the Island native vanishing into the crowd.

“Oh, God, oh, God...” McElroy whimpered.

Laughter greeted his words, greeted the tears that spilled from his eyes.

“Make him burgermeat for the Ghoul, Bells. Corper shit like him don’t deserve to breathe,” a voice from the crowd urged.

McElroy went several shades paler.

“I’s gonna send this cur dog back to his owner wif a message. That if he tell me who the corperman boss of his be.”

“Novak, Cameron Novak! He sent me out here. Him and his boss Lena Kraus. They’re the ones that want Jessman dead!”

“You singin’ good now, ain’t you? Now you gonna answer me some more questions. Who you hired to kill him?”

“Some zoner named Stone.”

“We he ain’t no bother no more. He got hisself a case of stupid. Dumbfucker tried me and got hisself dead.”

Laughter greeted his comment as if he’d told a good joke. In a way it was, to the crowd. Stone had gone up against a bigger predator and gotten what he deserved for the attempt.

“Anyone else?” Bells asked, wiggling the fingers on the man’s neck to remind McElroy why he needed to answer.

“A pair of guys.”

McElroy’s answers were getting tedious, and were wasting Bells’ time. “What guys?”

“Just two guys. I—”

The gunwhore put pressure on the dataport and McElory wailed shrill as a damned soul in the echoing Hell’s cavern of the Jackflash.

Laughter greeted the man’s cry of pain. Cold and inhuman, the gathered zoners amused by the corper’s terror. By his pain.

Eyes glittered, eager and waiting for Bells to do more to his victim.

Bit of payback for the horrors inflicted on their kind over the years. Payback for the forays of corporate soldiers come to test new weapons on the residents of the Free. Payback for everything that was wrong in the fucked up world in which they lived. A world created by the corporations.

“Boy, you got a real case of dumbshit,” someone from the crowd said.

“Don’ he jus’?” another agreed.

Bells used his grip to bang the man’s face into the table, drawing blood from his lips, nose, making him gasp. “Who you hire? Who you send after my moneyboy?”

“A couple of zoners!”

“Tell me some shit I don’t know!” Bells snarled and smacked the man’s head with his free hand.

McElroy yelped.

“I want names, McElroy!” The dulcet tones were razor-edged, demanding, his anger rising at the evasive answers. Bells wasn’t going to put up with any more, his patience at an end.

“Killight and Zeboo.”

His eyes narrowed. He knew the names. Drakuls. Zone scum. But he didn’t know how they’d be able to get into the NeuroTech enclave. They weren’t zonewarriors, didn’t have the connections to get the entry codes that would get them through the tight security.

“How they gonna get in?”

“I don’t know!”

“Who helpin’ them?” He gave another squeeze, felt the metal plate in the man’s head start to shear away from the bone it was attached to and stopped while the man’s scream echoed around the cavernous room.

McElroy lay there sobbing under him, shaking, the stink of terror filling the air along with the smell of fresh urine.

Bells got his feet under him, resting his ass on the small of the man’s back, moving to keep his pants out of the spreading piss on the table top.

“I ain’t hearin’ no answers from you. Best you start talkin’ to me or I gonna get mad.” Bells laughed, the sound a sweet honey tone that carried into the huge room and echoed back in tones of pure malice.

“Another zoner,” the man beneath him whimpered.

“Name!”

“Some crazy ass bastard who calls himself Katana Blue!”

Zonewarrior. Master of the killjob. Deadly and dangerous as they came. Highart killer like himself.

“Who else?”

“That’s it. No one else wanted the job! They’re all fucking scared of some zonewarrior guy who’s supposed to be protecting Jessman!”

Bells put a touch of pressure on the datajack. “That be me, fool,” he told the corper in a soft as silk voice, “and me is the meanest mutha reamin’ son of a bitch in the Free.”

“Ain’t that the pure fuckin’ truth!” a zoner among the crowd commented.

“Shit yeah, do you dead faster’n you c’n see.”

“Who this dumb bastard think was talkin’ to him? Ain’t no one got hair like that but the jingle-man hisself.”

“Oh God, oh God, the bells...”

“This corper bout the dumbest fuck I ever seen,” one of the crowd commented amid the laughter that rolled through the club like the dull rumble of thunder right before a toxic storm.

“Yeah, the bells, dumbfuck. Bet you know who me is now, huh?”

“Please! Please, I didn’t realize, I didn’t...”

“Bit late, what with you callin’ me a nil an’ all,” he replied. “Now who else in on this little killing party you set up? Who else want me moneyboy dead?”

“No one. That’s it! I swear!”

He squeezed again, listened to the agonized cry without so much as a pang of guilt. Anyone going around paying for murder got what they deserved, especially if they were buying the death of someone he knew.

Or loved.

“Tell me!”

“I swear to God that’s all I know!” the man screamed.

“God doesn’t come here,” Bells told him, voice gone deadly soft, full on menace, “or have you forgotten that we nilhumans don’t have souls? Isn’t that what you corper bastards believe? Your kind have souls, but we don’t.”

“N... No, that’s not it. I didn’t mean to say that! It was a mistake!”

“A mistake? You got that shit right. But I ain’t gonna do you dead for it.” He released McElroy’s head, his weight across the corper’s lower back holding him down. “Lotsa folks make mistakes when they scared. Now you sure you got no more to tell me, corperman?”

“No, I told you everything I know! I swear.”

“Pure positive you done that?”

“Yes. It’s Novak and Krause who want Jessman dead! I swear that’s the truth!”

Bells stared at the man with cold dispassion. He’d spared Jessman because he’d begged for more of the Sweet Sisters. He’d asked for more of what Bells could give, not what he might take.

He felt nothing for McElroy but contempt.

“Oh, please, I told you what you wanted! I don’t know any more! I swear I don’t!”

But McElroy was just the messenger, an errand boy sent by the real bastards after his lover.

Bells let the man go, stood, gaze sweeping the crowd. “He ain’t nothin’ to me no more,” he told the crowd around them and stepped off the table.

It had taken that long for a sobbing McElroy to realize he’d been freed. The green-haired man scrambled off the table, bolted for the exit and vanished beneath an avalanche of hate, a tidal wave of killing fury.

“Dumb fucker.” Bells muttered and moved around the inrushing mob, every one of them intent on getting a piece of the corper scum who’d insulted them.

Bells headed for the door as the band resumed playing, all but drowning out the screams and shouts of the killers and the man they were tearing apart.

He slipped through the crowd, headed for the exit, for his bike parked out on the street.

Fingers of ice laid flame along his spine and he whirled, braids swinging, their sound lost in the jackhammer noise of the band. Both guns out, his hands a blur of motion he opened fire, hit one Drakul’s bleachjob face squarely in the mouth, blowing whatever brains use of Euphoria had left him across one column.

A bite of pain, flare of red told him he’d taken a hit to his shoulder, but the red glow vanished, turned yellow, shifted to green. Tagged but not wounded, the jacket stopping the bullet of the second attacker.

The other Drakul got off another shot, but Bells was moving, rolling to come up right in front of the techfanged punk, the barrel of the .357 slamming into the underside of his jaw and taking off the top of his head.

A third one, female, wide-eyed, gun gripped in her hand, strained to track him. Failed. Too slow. Upgrades not up to the game. Drugs slowing her reaction time. One or both it didn’t matter. Slow was dead. She stared at him with nightglow eyes the color of the blood that spurted from her mouth as he shot her in the throat with three rounds from his 9mil.

Bells came to a halt, threat over, braids swinging to an unheard stop.

Eyes watched him. Zoners. Men and women.

He saw respect. Admiration. Fear.

He shoved the guns into their holsters and turned, braids and beads sparkling in as a flash from the strobe lights painted him with light. Under the scrutiny of watching eyes, he strode out of the place.

He had to reach Jessman. Had to get to the NeuroTech enclave before Katana Blue and his Drakul buddies got to David.

He hit the door running, sped down the street to his bike, the razor fangs of worry gnawing at him. He had to get to Jessman before the three killers did or the man he’d fallen in love with was going to be dead as meat.

* * * * * *

David yawned, stared at the computer screen, the information displayed a jumble he found it difficult to focus on. Tired. He was just too tired. Even cyber-enhanced eyes weren’t immune to the effects of too many hours staring at the screen. But it really wasn’t his eyes. His brain had just gotten too sluggish to process any more data.

He glanced at the time display at the top corner, rubbed his eyes and blinked, trying to bring it into focus.

God, where did the time go? he wondered as he yawned a second time and stretched. Almost ten in the evening. He’d been head of the department for just about eleven hours. He’d been at work almost twelve hours, if you counted his meeting with Hartland and the Director as being at work.

He was used to long hours, his average day at Megalli-Loran had been ten hours more or less, depending on if he stopped for lunch or not. Most days he hadn’t.

Jessman called up his email. Found no new messages awaiting him, shifted his view to the folder of personnel files, debated looking over a couple more and closed it instead.

He was tired, the excitement of the day long since worn off.

Thoughts of strong coffee were discarded.

He’d let Ms. Newberry go home almost two hours ago, the young secretary exhausted from a very stressful first day working in a new department. She’d never worked in the polymer gel sector before, which he supposed was a deliberate choice by Director Perez, since it was easier to make sure she had no connection to Hartland and his people.

When he’d last checked, four people--Hartland, his secretary, another researcher and one of his own former assistants--had been sent to Jacksonville for crimes against NeuroTech. According to the email from Director Perez, more criminal indictments were possible.

Criminal activities. Corporate espionage. Good ways to wind up dead in the corporate world.

With Newberry gone, Jessman’s coffee options were limited to going for it or doing without, since he had no idea where the coffee maker for this part of the department was located.

He debated going somewhere for a late dinner, but the idea didn’t hold much appeal. Neither did going back to an empty apartment.

He gave another glance at the screen, but surrendered to the weariness that dulled his mind and left his eyes out of focus, too tired to handle anything resembling work. He knew it. But he also knew going to his apartment was the last thing he wanted to do.

Not without the gunwhore there to keep him safe and fuck him blind.

He sat back in the soft padded chair and straightened his legs, crossing them at the ankles as he considered his limited options. Sleep in the office? There was a settee, rather short but it looked comfortable otherwise.

But if he slept there, he’d still have to go up to his apartment at some point to change and shower. He couldn’t spend two days in the same clothes now that he was head of an entire department. He had a certain standard of appearance to maintain and a slept-in suit and no shower fell well below the expectation for someone in his position at NeuroTech.

He could go to the lower level mall. They stayed open until about two in the morning. The nightclubs and bars on the level above the mall stayed open even later. Not so long ago he would have taken one or the other option if he been too bored, or lonely. A good-looking man could always find a girl, or another man if he made himself available.

And that held even less appeal than going to his apartment did.

He didn’t want a casual fuck. He wanted Bells.

At least in his apartment he could press his face into the pillow Bells had used and take in the other man’s scent. Leather and gunoil. Sex.

His cock stirred at the thought.

A hand brushed across the desk, shutting it down for the night, everything going dark as the thin panel of the screen slid out of sight.

He pulled out the tiny bud of his cell phone, put it into his ear and activated it. “Dial my sexbroker,” he instructed it.

“Dialing.”

It rang twice. “NeuroTech entertainment brokerage, how can we assist you, Dr. Jessman?” the sexy voice of the routing computer asked. One prior call, but the system knew him. Addressed him by name based on the identity of the incoming signal.

“I’d like to speak to Vivian Carollton.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but Ms. Carollton is no longer with the company. Can anyone else assist you?”

Jessman frowned. “What do you mean that she’s no longer with the company?”

“That is the only information I have, Dr. Jessman. Simply that Ms. Carollton’s employment with NeuroTech has ended.”

The chill fingers of fear gripped him. She’d been the one who’d brokered the deal that brought Bells to him.

And Bells had come to kill him.

Someone at NeuroTech had decided to pursue the incident with Stone outside his apartment.

Or maybe they were investigating the incident with Bells that had taken him outside of the corporate enclave without proper authorization.

A hard knot formed in his stomach and he swiped his hand over the desk, reactivating the computer so he could check for email from the accounting department. Looking for a denial of his request for Bells’ services, for the protection of a gunwhore who’d been sent to murder him and become the most precious person in his life.

“Who has taken over her client list?” he asked as the screen slid out of the desk and came on.

“It is still being redistributed, Dr. Jessman.”

No email. Nothing to show that his request was denied.

He went into the system to check, bringing up the notation about the request itself. It still showed as pending decision of Accounting Department management.

So it might be possible for him to acquire Bells’ services and hope they would approve the expense, give him a refund for the cost of the gunwhore.

“Is anyone available to handle a request for sexual services?” He would ask for someone to contact Bells’ fuckbroker in the Freezone, arrange to pay for the gunwhore’s services from the bonus he’d gotten today. There was more than enough to cover two full days, and by then he should have his answer from Accounting.

“Doctor Jessman may I enquire about the nature of your request?”

“I’d like to hire a gunwhore.”

There was a brief pause. “I’m sorry, sir, but no one on staff at this time has authorization to hire the services of anyone from outside the NeuroTech enclave. There are several brokers who would be happy to provide you with a suitable escort from the company’s pool of service personnel.”

“Thank you, but no.” He remained polite even though he knew he was speaking to an AI. Every call a NeuroTech employee made was recorded, and anything suspicious would be flagged by the security AIs that monitored them. Hartland had assured the destruction of his career with a few such calls to unidentified recipients outside the NeuroTech enclave. The charge of espionage was based on a few recorded calls where only Hartland’s voice could be heard, a sure sign that the person on the other end of the call had used hightech equipment to protect his or her identity and the identity of the place he or she was located. Director Perez was using those calls as the only evidence he needed to send Hartland to prison for the rest of his life.

“I’ve been instructed to offer you a free companion for the night if that’s your wish, Dr. Jessman.”

“No, thank you, I’ll pass,” he replied to the computer and disconnected the call.

He sighed. He didn’t want the sort of bland sex to be had with a corporate service worker. He wanted Bells. He wanted the fiery kisses of the gunwhore, wanted the beautiful agony of the Sweet Sisters. He wanted to show the smaller man he could be the one doing the dominating and give the zoner the things he knew the blond wanted. Pain, pleasure, and the ability to surrender control to another strong man.

He ached to have Bells on his knees. Wanted to see his lover submit.

And he ached to be the one collared, Emotions and desires warring for an outlet.

But it all came down to one thing.

Bells could fulfill his desires the way no one else could. The way no corporate sex worker would be daring enough to even try. Not that he’d be willing to accept domination from just anyone.

It had to be Bells.

He shut down the computer and sat there, worried he’d never see the man he loved again. Worried he’d have to live the rest of his life without the other man’s touch, without the knowing the scorching desire only Bells could awaken.

The knot in his stomach tightened. He felt trapped, caged by the office, by the corporation where he worked, by his new promotion, by everything, as helpless to take what he wanted from life as he’d been at Megalli-Loran.

And that helplessness was much worse here. He’d had a taste of incomparable real world pleasure unlike anything available in his limited world at MLC and if he couldn’t get more of Bells, he didn’t know how he’d cope with the loss.

There were no substitutions for someone like the gunwhore.

Queasy and ill at ease, he left his office, touching the pad by the door that locked it against any unauthorized intrusion and headed through the silent office suite. His temporary staff was gone for the night, the cleaning staff nowhere to be seen. Nothing unusual there. Ten was too late for anyone to be at work and too early for the janitorial people to be out, the lowest rung workers unlikely to be seen before midnight when the majority of the higher grade workers—people in the offices—would be in their beds.

He rode the elevator up to the transitional floor that served as an exchange between the office levels he’d just left and housing levels above and below the office floors. He’d go up as he always did to the modest luxury of a corporate researcher’s apartment, while Ms. Newberry would have gone down to the apartments above the shopping mall and nightclub floors.

He lived in the safe area reserved for the valued higher paid workers. Anything above the fortieth floor was reserved for lower management, anyone above the fiftieth floor were research, development and the staff of corporate executives. Those in the lower income brackets lived closer to the ground. Closer to the potential hostilities of corporate warfare.

Executives like Director Perez worked and lived at the highest elevations in the huge structures two floors below the anti-aircraft defenses and the chopper pad that crowned the enclave. Corporate buildings designed to withstand all but the most powerful bombs, man portable nukes which were not typical of a corporate arsenal. No corporation wanted to risk damaging other corporations not involved in a direct attempt at a hostile takeover or a simple narrowing of the competition.

A company had used a man carried nuke once in Tokyo and the resulting violence almost caused a collapse of the country’s entire economic base and had sent ripples through the world economy that no corporation would tolerate.

By the end of a week Fujimaki Industries had been bombed out of existence, not a single one of their enclaves left standing anywhere in the world. Thousands of survivors—homeless employees—flooded the job market. The lucky few found jobs as service personnel, cheap labor at the bottom rung of another corporation. The vast majority dropped into the morass of the Shinjuku Containment Area, never to resurface in the corporate world.

Nukes weren’t one of Jessman’s fears.

Zonewarriors out to murder him were. And there was a distinct possibility another one would come for him and that further served to pull the knot in his belly tighter.

How in the hell Stone had gotten to him in the first place, he still didn’t understand. Bells, sure, the man had been given access to his apartment through the proper channels. But Stone’s infiltration of the enclave’s security system was an entirely different situation.

Then there was the fact that Bells had gotten him out of the enclave. The way he’d accomplished that had been easy enough to discover. Perez’ investigation of the matter had discovered one security camera that showed he’d been carried right past security in the parking level. The gunwhore had given the explanation that he’d been at a meeting, doing some heavy drinking and passed out, and now it was time for him to go home to his nice corporate masters across town.

The security personnel had believed him. Hadn’t questioned him.

When he’d discussed the entire series of incidents with Director Perez during a brief afternoon meeting—the clean-up call for Stone’s corpse outside his apartment door being of interest to the Director—the executive was as baffled as Jessman. Technically there was no way for an unauthorized person to gain entrance to the building, and now the Director was trying to discover the security leak that had allowed Stone into the enclave.

Perez was also trying to find out how Bells had overridden the identity chip implanted in David’s jawbone that was supposed to prevent kidnapping, an implant Jessman had been unaware existed until the Director informed him that every NeuroTech employee was fitted with a device. By all rights the EnCoSet should have called for help the instant he’d been attacked. And the moment Bells had tried to take him from the building, a set of alarms should have gone off, alerting the security people. But neither the EnCoSet or the more sophisticated building wide security system had so much as recorded an anomaly.

And the only camera that had picked up the gunwhore had been the one in the parking garage.

Maybe that had something to do with Ms. Carollton’s sudden loss of employment and the abrupt cessation of outside contractors being allowed into the enclave. Maybe they were testing the systems and trying to find out how Stone had gotten in, and how Bells had taken him out.

By coming totally clean with Perez, he might have ruined his chances to have Bells, but he didn’t believe that was the case. The Director hadn’t given any indication that anything would come of the incident other than an investigation of the security breeches.

And at the time he wouldn’t consider the idea of being unable to retain the services of his gunwhore lover. If the Director had permanent ban on outside service vendors he’d have already gotten a notification that his request had been denied from Accounting.

But he was worried until he recalled the conversation he’d had that morning with the Director. The conversation where the man admitted wanting some time with Bells himself.

That might be what salvaged the relationship he had with Bells. If Carlos wanted a night or two with his lover—a prospect that sent a pang of possessive jealousy through him—the Director wouldn’t be able to ban all outside contractors.

Then another possibility hit him.

What if the Director planned to buy out Bells’ contract?

What if he had enough interest in the blond to keep Bells for himself?

Anger, jealous rage burned through David.

Bells is mine! What am I going to do if Perez decides to buy out his contract and keep him? He seems to have a keen appreciation for luxury and Perez could sure as hell offer him more of that than I can, department head or not.

Damn! I can stand the thought of sharing him if I have to, but to lose him to Carlos.... Shit what am I going to do?

His stomach churned and he resolved to stop thinking about never seeing Bells again, or somehow losing the gunwhore to his boss. If the first worry happened he’d worry about it and try to find some way to change Carlos’ mind, even if it meant encouraging the man to have a taste of what the gunwhore was capable of.

And if it was the second— Well, maybe he’d get lucky and the fuckbroker that owned his lover would turn the man down.

He stood there lost in mental turmoil, anxious and as unsure of his future as he’d been when he first set foot into Hartland’s office this morning.

He still wasn’t willing to return to an empty apartment with nothing but memories, an EnCoSet and the TV for company.

He needed to kill some time, needed to get so tired he’d be able to sleep.

A cafe, five ethnic food restaurants and a deli, a half dozen specialty shops offering modestly priced luxury goods like Canadian wines and Pennsylvanian chocolates surrounded him in the exchange lobby. He paused, considered getting a coffee but he really didn’t want it, or any of the pastries visible in the display window.

He didn’t want any of the food, had no interest in shopping.

Boring. All of it, boring.

The things he would have done before the gunwhore stepped into his life held no appeal to him, his view on life altered. His entire outlook changed.

He wanted someone to share his life, and the someone he wanted was Bells.

God, it would be wonderful to have him here with me, holding my hand. I’d dress him in soft leathers. Black leather to make him look sexy-hot and menacing all at once. My lover and protection combined in a deceptively small totally delicious package.

We’d come here and wander around the shops and I could buy anything Bells wanted. Then I could take him to a fine dinner, and after we would go up to my apartment and make love for hours.

Italian. Bells had professed an interest in Italian food. That’s where we’d go.

And then he recalled what had happened when he’d ordered Italian food to be delivered to his apartment from the very Italian restaurant that he could see across the lobby.

Stone.

Stone had happened.

And he’d died.

And the Zone was full of men and women like Stone.

Willing to kill for money.

He shuddered and headed for the elevator.

Time to go home and face being alone, because he might have to spend the rest of his life without the reason the man he now was existed. He stepped into a waiting elevator, tears blurring his vision at the thought he might never get to hold his lover again.

Chapter Five

At Any Price

Bells sped down the cracked pavement, going at dangerous speeds, trying to reach Jessman before Katana Blue could get there and do him dead. Take away one of the best things he’d found in his hellish life. Love with a corper.

What a damn fool he’d become.

Jessman only wanted what he could give him. Only wanted the intense pleasure he’d shown him could be found as a submissive under the touch of the Sweet Sisters.

Stupid. Completely stupid.

And he didn’t care, because he loved David.

Loved the tall dark-haired man the way he hadn’t loved anyone in...

How long? When was the last time I felt this way for anyone?

No answer to that question came to him.

But there were those beautiful eyes that haunted his dreams.

Rich brown eyes.

A beautiful face he couldn’t remember clearly when he was awake.

A woman from a past he didn’t want to remember.

Ice ignited in his blood, but he didn’t have time to worry about himself. He shifted gears gave the bike another surge of power, the motorcycle speeding up, hitting close to one hundred miles per hour on a straightaway.

A few bullets spanged off his bike, ricocheting harmlessly off the composite material shielding the engine, none of them hitting him. Drakuls. He caught a glimpse of their chemically whitened faces, the glow of their hell-light eyes from an alleyway. Their cheap nine mils couldn’t breech the metal of his bike, or the armored jacket he wore, not even at close range.

Normally he would have taken the time to trash their sorry asses, but he didn’t have time to waste in a bang-bang-do-them-dead game. Jessman’s life was on the line. He gave the bike more power and it sped by in a roar of rushing air and the faint jangle of his whipping braids.

He could see the turn to take to the Gate. The official way in and out of the LCFree. The way through ‘The Wall’, where heavy weaponry kept the zoners on their side, corralled like cattle. Any zone born person would be gunned down if they tried to leave through the military controlled gateway into Miami. Killed without question, unless they had the proper passcodes, the right identifying chips to get them through. The coveted electronic chip that gave them easy access to both worlds. Few trueborn zoners had those implants, but corper born errand boys like McElroy came and went as they pleased, until they got dead.

Bells didn’t have time to fuck around with identity verification, or answering a bunch of questions over why he was coming into Miami when they didn’t have anything on record requesting his particular services or a call in from the company who’d made him.

And it was hell and gone the wrong direction anyway, taking him out through the warehouse district rather than directly into the city.

With no time to waste, he was headed for a more direct route.

An unofficial route.

The same way he’d gotten Jessman into the LC when he’d thought he’d be killing the man. The same way he’d taken him out when he hadn’t done the job.

Despite restrictions, there were more ways to enter Miami than the local military knew about, and not every corporation disdained the money to be made in illegal activities involving the sales of goods inside a Free.

There were illegal routes through the defenses. Secret underground ways to get into Miami. Most would only accommodate people entering Miami on foot. But there was one route big enough to allow armored trucks through.

The Troll’s Road.

Bells slowed the cycle, but he was still moving so fast that he went around the corner with his knee almost brushing the pavement. He righted the bike and twitched his foot, shifting gears, right hand giving the bike more juice, picking up speed for the last straight run to his destination. A half mile flew by in under fifteen seconds, the blond braking hard, bouncing over the cracked pavement of a long unused parking lot with a crumbling building at the end. A gaping hole loomed like a titanic mouth out of the darkness. The worn state of the pavement in front of it showed the distinct marks of frequent use in the lack of tough pollution resistant weeds clogging the cracks.

He saw AI controlled weapons systems swivel into firing position as he approached but he felt no ice-burn warning so he rolled right into their line of fire through the hole in the wall and entered the Troll’s domain. A sloping passage leading deep underground, it came up in the lowest parking level of the Aoki Entertainment Corporation’s enclave on the Miami side. The same corporation provided a lot of the chemicals that were made into drugs in the LC.

Not so long ago, Bells would have shut them down cold with a few well-placed explosives. He hated what Euphoria was doing to the people around him. To more than half the people in the LC these days.

But he knew hitting Aoki wouldn’t end anything. The drugs would still be made, a new supplier for the chemical components would be found.

And bombing Aoki wouldn’t really hurt them, they’d just make repairs, put an order for a killjob out on whoever hit them, and proceed: business as usual.

Besides, bombing them would also cut off almost twenty-five percent of the food that came into the Free.

He’d long given up trying to be the ‘good guy’, because the last time he’d tried, it had almost gotten him killed.

Bells motored farther into the tunnel, going slow through the thick shadows wreathing the entrance. Deliberate that poor lighting, scanners reading whoever entered with the aid of that dimness.

The Troll, whoever he was, didn’t miss a trick.

No one had ever seen the Troll, but he’d been there as long as anyone could remember, guarding the passage way between the LCFree and corpland. Miami lying beyond the crumbling inner wall and the killzone desolation between the LC and the true Wall guarding Miami.

He slowed the bike, bringing it down to under twenty miles per hour. Came to a stop as he reached the rods of a heavy steel security gate. Bars of metal thicker than Bells’ biceps barred the passageway from side to side. Through the gaps he could see the dim lights that stretched into the distance, large pools of shadow lying between where anything could lurk. But nothing did. Nothing but the Troll himself and the occasional four-footed rat. The Troll didn’t let the two-footed kind loiter in his domain, and if they tried they got messily dead when the unknown ruler of the underground realm gassed them to death.

“Bells, you be going over the Wall again?” a flat, lifeless voice asked. Tiny multidirectional speakers hidden in the walls emitting the sound sent echoes down the shadow-shrouded tunnel.

Down here it was always night, the Troll, it was said, couldn’t abide the touch of daylight.

“Yeah, and I’m in a hurry.”

A slot opened in the tunnel wall, cool sanitized air flowing from the narrow opening. A thin metal box appeared, the arrangement set up for drive through payments that were risk free for whoever—or whatever—the Troll might be. “Pay the toll to pass the Troll,” the same voice droned from all around him.

He shoved a few slips of plastic through the slot. Zonescrip. Hardly worth anything, but they were what he had.

The tray stayed where it was, silent demand for more.

“Fuck, Troll, that all I got.”

No answer, just the wordless demand. The metal box awaiting payment.

He didn’t have time for this.

And he couldn’t get past the Troll unless he’d satisfied the toll owed.

He dug through his pockets, aware of every ticking second of time he was wasting sitting there trying to come up with enough money to pay the fee.

“Call Katerina, she send it epay.”

“Cash only. You know the rule.”

He did but he was desperate. And there also should have been more money in his jacket pocket. Should have but wasn’t.

Jayzee and her friends must have taken it. That’s the only explanation.

And it left him no closer to reaching Jessman.

He got off his bike, touched the latch that held the small storage area under the seat closed. An assortment of bells, beads, ragged feathers greeted his gaze. He rummaged through them, found what he was looking for—a bright glitter catching the light. He stared at the ring, the sparkling gem set in the gold. Engagement ring... his mind told him, the knowledge surfacing from the dark pool of his past.

It had a meaning. Must have been important to him or he wouldn’t be carrying it around, something about it familiar. A pang of hurt rising in him, choking him. But he couldn’t remember who it belonged to, why he had it.

And whatever meaning it had was lost in a past he couldn’t recall.

Jessman though, he was part of the here and now. Part of his present.

And no matter who the ring had belonged to, they were part of another life. His life before he’d almost died, his life before David.

He tossed the ring and it caught the dim light, glittering like a captive star and to land on the thin strips of plastic in the bin. The ring lay there, a gem and gold amid LC trashmoney.

“Toll paid, you have credit with the Troll. You may pass.” A click sounded and the box closed, vanished into the wall as the thick steel rods withdrew into the walls of the tunnel.

He got back on the bike, not even waiting for the bars to fully open. Within seconds the bike was moving fast, lights and shadows flashing by faster and faster as Bells raced to save the man he loved.

He braked hard to go around a curve, the back wheel of the bike sliding, skidding. Going too fast for the stained pavement that lined the tunnel. Muscles strained to hold the turn against the laws of physics that were trying to slam him and the heavy cycle into the far wall.

Traceries of aqua and emerald mist spun around him, a flicker of something serpentine appearing for a brief instant as the man brought the machine upright and urged it to another burst of speed.

He braked again when the lights of the Aoki Entertainment Corp’s parking garage came into view. Forced to a modest speed that irritated him, he maneuvered the bike through the levels heading upward the roar of the cycle echoing off concrete and the parked vehicles of executives. Sports cars, limos expensive and gleaming under the harsh lights. Round and round the garage, up five levels to the top. Ground floor. The streets of Miami just beyond the exit.

He stopped well before the security checkpoint. The single bar of the gate was down, and he didn’t have the entry fee to get past them into Miami.

The gun emplacement protecting the garage was manned as always.

No money.

Seconds burning away.

Katana Blue could already be there, killing the man he loved.

He might arrive too late to help Jessman.

Or he might get there in time.

But not if he sat there wasting time.

He took a deep breath, slammed down the accelerator and roared toward the gate, the heavy bike lifting onto its rear wheel for an instant before it hit the ground. Fifty. Sixty. Sixty-five. He was at the security gate. Steel bars, gun emplacement. Security watching him coming on.

Committed to the course he’d chosen, Bells turned the bike onto its side and slid under the bar of the gate amid a shower of sparks that spewed from the tormented armor of his bike as it ground across the concrete.

Ice flame filled his body.

Danger.

He felt it coming for him.

The potential of death.

And he twisted, pushing the bike, aqua mist shot through with cobalt flame surrounding him.

A storm of lead filled the air. Bullets hitting the bike, blowing pieces out of the pavement, a couple of them nailing him. Sparks flew and his thigh burned, the leather shredding, the thin armor composite under it taking damage as a pair of bullets ripped into his back, punching through the leather, biting into flesh.

Red lights flared to life at the bottom corners of both eyes. Damaged. System alerting him to the blood he was losing, the holes in his body. Minor wounds. Nanites flooded his system from the storage unit in his belly, the tiny machines racing to stop the blood loss, repair damaged tissue. Eject the bullets if they could.

He righted the cycle, heard more bullets hitting it and him, Bells twisting the accelerator, shifting gears, increasing the speed. He entering the thick ground traffic of Miami doing almost fifty. Weaving between other vehicles, going up on the sidewalk, doing his damnedest to get to Jessman.

Desperate to reach his lover before Katana Blue and the pair of Drakuls could do him dead.

The glass fronted NeuroTech tower rose in front of him.

Another minute at the most.

One minute, and he’d be inside.

Five minutes, and he’d be at Jessman’s apartment.

Katana Blue could kill dozens of zoner punks in five minutes.

For him, Jessman was easy prey.

Real easy.

Don’t let him be dead. Please don’t let him be dead!

* * * * * *

Jessman sat on his couch staring at a vid. He had no idea what the show was about, and didn’t bother to link into it, watching the images of four young women in skimpy cocktail dresses flickering on the digital screen. No sound. No incoming sensations.

He took a sip of the bourbon in his glass, the ice clinking as he did, his gaze moving to the clock at the bottom left corner. Ten-thirty.

Tired. Damn tired.

But not ready to sleep alone.

Two damn nights, and a few incredible fucks.

He craved the Sweet Sisters.

Desired the man who’d introduced him to their kiss.

The thought of sleeping in his own bed without the gunwhore was abhorrent.

He finished his drink and carried the empty glass to the kitchen, set it in the sink and turned to head for bed.

Bells or not, he needed sleep. Had a job to do come morning. Interviews of potential employees to conduct. A new research team to construct.

The lights flickered, dimmed. The air circulating through his apartment went still, the hiss of the fans stopping.

Brow creased in slight annoyance, he muttered, “Now what?” and glanced at the EnCoSet console. The whole thing was dark, none of the usual dim lights lit to show it was working. Not even the standby light to show it was off but still protecting him.

Jessman went over to get a better look at it wondering if the thing had malfunctioned.

The whole unit was black. He touched the reset button, watched the unit flicker, heard a sigh of sound come from the voice module, the console going black again.

Frowning he said, “EnCoSet, run diagnostic.”

There was no response.

A chill of dread crept along Jessman’s spine and he glanced around, uneasy, wondering what was going on.

“EnCoSet, restart.”

Nothing happened for a second time.

He reached for the emergency button, pressed it, waited for security to respond, got nothing but a hiss of static and another flicker of the EnCoSet’s screen.

The first tinge of fear edged into his mind and he looked down the dark hallway that led to his bedroom.

If someone had been in his apartment already, the EnCoSet would have been off when he’d arrived. They’d have already killed him.

Wouldn’t they?

He headed for the door to his apartment at a run.

He got no further than his coffee table when the door slammed inward, a smoking hole where the doorknob used to be as the whole thing erupted into bits of burning plastic. The acrid stench choked him, hot, semi-molten plastic littering his carpet and couch, spattering the glass top of the coffee table. Burning holes in the shade of the lamp closest to the ruined door.

A man, taller than himself by a half foot stepped into his apartment through a cloak of smoke. The man was dressed in a floor length coat of midnight blue, silver and blue, a pair of cybereyes regarded him. Behind the tall man were two other men. Their corpse-white faces and bright red eyes sent a bolt of pure terror through him.

Zoner punks. Lowlife teched-up scum.

Killers.

Three killers come to get him.

Jessman didn’t wait to see more than that; he turned and ran from the danger, heading for his bedroom.

Chilling laughter followed him.

“You can run, Jessman, but it won’t do you no good. You gonna die!” a voice told him the man laughing.

“Yeah, you gonna die, corper.”

He reached his bedroom, slammed the door closed, locked it knowing how futile the gesture was. It wouldn’t help. They’d kick the thin interior door in easy as they drew a breath.

He pulled his phone form his pocket, put it in his ear. “Dial security. Emergency.”

A soft buzz greeted him. Dead air.

Dead as he was about to be.

“This is an emergency!” he told the phone.

But remained dead, useless.

He heard the laughter getting closer, the killers taking their time, terrifying their prey.

David ran for the bathroom, stumbling, made clumsy by the fear ripping at his guts. He slammed it closed, putting another door between him and the killers. Another illusory barrier that couldn’t stop the men who’d come for him.

Choking back the terrified whimper coming from his fear-tightened throat, he cowered at the back of the small room. The panic coursing through him made it hard to draw a breath and he was shaking. Shaking so bad that his legs didn’t want to hold him up.

Trapped and about to die, he frantically searched the bathroom for something to use as a weapon. He didn’t have anything like that in his possession, not here in the bathroom, not anywhere in his apartment unless the couple of pitiful kitchen knives he owned could be counted as weapons. But they were beyond his grasp, the killers already between him and their illusion of defense. Nothing else among his possessions would be an effective weapon against the killers coming for him. Then he remembered the bag Bells had stowed under his bed and wondered.

Is it there? Did Bells leave a weapon inside it?

And if the gunwhore had left a weapon, would he dare to use it?

He fumbled the lock open and dashed out of the bathroom, scrambling over the bed and falling onto the floor on the opposite side, the bed between himself and the bedroom door.

Please God, please let it be there. Let there be a gun. Please, oh please.

He groped under the bed, eyes still on the bedroom door, hands patting along the floor as he tried to find the bag. Unable to locate it, he bent down, peering under the bed, trying to see where the black bag was in the darkened room. Someone knocked on the door and his heart slammed in his chest, terror greater than anything he’d ever known in his life ripping at his heart, turning his very soul into a whimpering mass of unmitigated terror.

The incident with Stone didn’t compare with this, didn’t come close. Bells had been there to protect him, to save him.

And this time there was no one to save him.

No one to protect him.

No one but himself.

He couldn’t breathe, thought his pounding heart would unravel from the fear tearing at him.

“Oh, Doctor Jessssman! Hey in there! Don’t you wanna come play wif us?” a slightly shrill voice questioned. Crazed laughter bubbled through the door like the sound of devils echoing up from the depths of the deepest pit in Hell.

“Yeah, come out! We ain’t gonna hurt you...much,” a second voice called, chortling in amusement.

“We can smell you fear, Doctor. Smell sweet as blood!”

Wild laughter followed that remark, and he heard something scratching at the door, the sound reminding him of a pet begging to be let in. The hair on the back of his neck stood up as another burst of manic laughter bubbled through the air.

Insane. They sounded stark raving insane.

“Doctor Jessman, come out an’ play wif us!” the shrill voice called through the door.

His hand closed on the bag and he pulled, dumped the stuff out on the carpet, praying there would be a weapon, something useful among the toys his lover had left behind.

Butt plugs, vibrators, dildos of every description lay scattered on the floor along with the collar, whips, leather restraints, metal handcuffs and something solid and hard. Something black as sin.

He grabbed the pistol, the weight in his hands almost reassuring, giving him a faint sense that he could handle the situation, take some control of what was happening away from the men coming to kill him. He debated going for the bathroom, of hiding there, but he’d be trapped, cornered in the small room where any evasive tactics would be impossible.

As if he stood any chance of surviving the next few minutes.

He stared at the gun in his hands. He’d never actually fired one. Not with his real body. But in vids, he’d been a zonewarrior familiar with such things.

Familiar with the game of death.

“Knock knock!” a giggling voice whispered as something scratched along the plastic surface. David imagining strips of plastic being ripped free of the door by the claws of the monster on the other side.

Two of those things out there had looked dead. Gaunt and dreadful, like some sort of real zombie escaped from a horror simvid.

The door frame shattered, splinters of plastic scattering across the floor, the door swinging wide open to show a pair of glowing red eyes. He didn’t need to see more. Didn’t want to see what was coming for him. Jessman closed his eyes and squeezed the trigger, hoping he’d hit something, praying he’d scare them off, not even sure the points of light were a real target because he just couldn’t look. The recoil almost tore the gun from his grasp, the pistol more powerful than he’d anticipated. But he’d only fired guns in sim, not the real world. Wrists aching, he opened his eyes at an odd strangled cry. Looked to see the doorway was empty, the remains of the door swinging slowly closed after hitting the wall.

The plaster where the door hit was cracked, the door hung crooked from the broken frame, one of the hinges half ripped from the wall.

My apartment is a complete mess now. He giggled, the sound full of hysteria as he realized how it how stupid worrying about his belongings was when he was about to die.

Bells, where are you. I wish you were here.

“Ssshit corperman’s got hisssself a gun! Ain’t that ssssome sssshit?” he heard one of the laughing lunatics say from somewhere down the hall, the words slurred, sounding thick as if he were talking around a mouthful of meltychew.

A shadow appeared as the wrecked door swung aside. The only thing he could see was a corpse white face leering at him showing off unnaturally long canine teeth. Then it moved into the stronger light from the window.

And he found himself staring at an apparition straight from nightmare. The zoner’s eyes caught the dim light, reflected it back like the fires of Hell, the color shifting from that of good brandy to crimson flame as the thing—the zoner—moved. It hardly appeared human to the researcher. Stick-thin, with an inhuman pallor unlike anything he’d ever seen. Coupled with the teeth, the eyes, the jerky, almost disjointed way it moved left Jessman staring. The zoner looked even more like an escapee from a horrorvid than it had when he’d first seen it. No living breathing human being could be as gaunt as this creature and still draw breath.

Something dark dribbled from between its lips, enhancing the moving corpse effect to a degree that filled Jessman with increasing dread.

Maybe its not alive.

But that was stupid. Dead things were just that, dead.

Jessman found himself staring at the blood pouring from the corpse-pale flesh of the thing’s mouth. At the blood running down the bony chest he could see through the black lace of the shirt the creature wore.

He raised the pistol, trying to hold it steady and not managing to do it, the weapon wavering from side to side, too much emotion clouding his mind. I’ve actually shot someone. I’ve actually done it. Oh my God!

The shaking got worse as what he’d just done rampaged through his mind.

White-face shook himself like a dog coming out of water, hellglow eyes focusing on Jessman. The mouth widened to show bloody techfangs and teeth in a maniac grin that chilled Jessman to the bone.

“Now you gonna die sssslow, corper,” the ghoulish creature told him and took a menacing step forward.

He heard a sound, an odd keening noise and saw that another guy with the same pallid skin, hellfire eyes and stick thin body—this one clothed in tattered black velvet—had moved into the doorway. He walked to the bleeding zoner, touched the hole in his chest brought the fingers to his lips. Licked them clean.

He couldn’t take his eyes away from the pair of men, lost in some sort of madness. He could see it in their grins, hear it in their laughter.

“Corper bagged hisself a Drakul.”

David looked up. Discovered that the tall man in the blue coat was standing in arm’s reach of him. Ghost images cluttered his vision.

Fast. Too fast.

Not as fast as Bells. He could see the trail of this man more clearly, the lingering blur of motion not as hazy, his own optics almost able to follow the man in the blue coat even if Jessman couldn’t turn his head fast enough to keep up.

The gun was taken from his hand and he blinked when he found himself on the floor. His right wrist hurt, as did his chest. He’d been shoved, his back hurting from the impact with the bedside table, his crystal and brass lamp lying in pieces on the carpet beside him. The unknown zonewarrior wasn’t as fast as Bells, but whoever the man in blue might be, he was more than quick enough to overcome an unenhanced corporate researcher.

He slammed into the wall on the far side of the room the painful impact leaving him dazed. Jessman crumpled to the carpet, mind gone numb to everything but the hurt.

He was helpless to defend himself.

Helpess to do anything but die.

The two ghoulish men laughed, coming for him. He gasped for breath, unable to move. Their hands closing on his arms, yanked him to his feet. Still laughing maniacally, they took turns shoving him back and forth between them.

Trapped in a nightmare.

Unreal.

Leering faces. Bloody fangs. Hands hurting him, tearing his clothes with razor-edged fingernails, cutting his skin. Jessman fell to the ground, legs unable to hold him up, shock setting in. His tormentors kicked him, hard enough to hurt, not hard enough to break bones.

The freaks started to sing, the song unknown to Jessman.

“Dance with us as the world dies,

“Dance with us as fire rains from the skies,

“Dance with us it’s a party in hell!”

They kept kicking him until he couldn’t breathe, vision dimming, the world and his life fading from sight.

* * * * * *

“I’m sorry, but we don’t have authorization to let you in, much less to let you go up to Dr. Jessman’s apartment,” the female security guard told him through the door.

“Call him again!” Bells snarled. He had to get up there. But he didn’t have any of his gear, had no way to fake the codes that would give him access, let him slip through their surveillance through a less direct route.

And if he had his gear, he didn’t have the time to take the circuitous route through the bottom floors of the enclave.

He had to get up there fast.

“You should just go back where you belong,” she told him. She wasn’t being unfriendly, but she wasn’t going to let him in either.

Another guard joined the woman at the door. Taller than his companion—who topped Bells by a head—the big man regarded Bells through a pair of chrome eyes. Eyes he knew had a direct link to the guns mounted on the man’s arms. A visible cyborg, the guy was meant to intimidate people with his size and the armor that protected his body, with the guns mounted directly onto his arms. Corpers might be intimidated by such an inhuman appearance, but Bells didn’t view them as anything but a weapon like any other. There were true c-altereds in the Free that didn’t even look like a human being anymore, their bodies lost amid massive modifications that transformed them into biomachines, alive but no longer human.

“Call him again!” he pleaded, trying to stay calm, making an effort to reason with them.”

“You don’t have clearance to come in, and he doesn’t have the clearance to let you in without the request going through the proper channels,” the woman argued.

“I just came out of the LC, there are three killers coming for him!” Bells explained, moving closer to the door, pressing his hand to the surface. He could see the elevators. Knew he could reach his lover.

And knew it might already be too late.

“Please, call him again!”

The woman sighed, her gaze going unfocused as she did what he asked, her internal comm connecting to the enclave datanet.

She sighed, shook her head. “There’s no answer.”

They’d called David’s apartment three times. And they weren’t getting any answer.

Too late. I might already be too late.

He pressed his hand to the cool surface of the door. It looked like normal glass, but it was bulletproof, nothing short of a major explosion able to damage it.

Or at least that’s what the corpers believed.

He looked past the two guards at the bank of elevators.

Four transfers to reach his love.

Five minutes.

David might already be dying.

Or dead.

He didn’t have any more time to waste talking to these idiots.

His gaze swept the entryway, found the spot he wanted, the point where the magnetic lock held the door closed. He stepped away from the door, closed his eyes, took a deep breath, let it out slowly.

Bells spun in place, braids fanning out, ringing loud and clear as he kicked with every bit of power his body had, foot impacting the locked glass and steel door. The bulletproof materials shattered, the maglock surrendering to the impact that also broke the door hinges and sent the twisted metal framework slamming into the two guards.

They both went down under the impact, falling as Bells leapt over the broken remains of the door to run past them.

He was inside and almost to the elevators, running full tilt in a blur of motion the enhanced corpsoldiers were struggling to track. He felt the cool burn warning of hostile intent, but not the blizzard and blast furnace charge of death coming for him. None of them were able to get a bead on him with their weapons.

A fact he’d counted on, NeuroTech’s biocyber technology not being up to the same degree of sophistication as Polycyber’s most advanced test subject: him.

Fifty feet into the building, running as fast as a burst of full speed could carry him. Only then did the alarms scream to life, lights flashing, the words, “Intruder alert!” sounding throughout the ground floor.

“STOP HIM!” the female security guard shouted.

Bells ignored the elevators on the lobby floor. By now they would be on lockdown. He knew where the fire stairs were and ran, the cybered male security soldier following him, unable to catch him or match his speed. The soldier opened fire, both guns blazing, sending a few service personnel scrambling for cover, hitting and killing two of them in his overzealous efforts to kill the intruder.

Bells went around the corner, still moving at full speed, lights going yellow as his oxygen level dropped and his internal temperature increased. Faint trails of mist billowed around him, aqua and emerald traceries he ignored, didn’t care to analyze.

Didn’t want to remember.

He hit the door to the firestairs amid a swirling cloud of ethereal fog. The impact of his body crumpled the steel door and ripped the steel frame away from the concreted wall. The door caromed into a trio of soldiers who’d come to stop the intruder.

Bells jumped over the dazed men, phantom wings spreading as he raced up the steps taking them five at a time, his speed carrying him upward. A few of the telltales in his lower field of vision winked to red, flashed green, glowed a steady yellow.

He sped up five flights of stairs in under thirty seconds, the glimmering lights in his vision flickering between red and yellow, warning him to slow down, urging him to conserve energy. He ignored them, came out in the fifth floor transition lobby gasping for breath, not bothering to slow down. He raced across the lobby in a blur of motion and a swirl of mist. He could feel the strain, felt his body heating internally, more telltales burning yellow and red.

He came to a sliding stop, mashed the call button for the elevator, stood there gasping, sucking in precious air, body shaking slightly, cobalt and emerald shot aqua mist spun around him.

A soft ping told him the elevator had arrived and he bolted in, hit the button for the next transitional floor. He stood there gasping for breath, shaking from the burn of so much energy, body feeling the effects of what he’d done.

It didn’t matter. He’d survive. He always did.

But if Jessman hadn’t answered the buzz of the security guards, it meant David was in trouble. Dying trouble.

And if the man he loved died, he’d never forgive himself.

Never.

The elevator doors opened at the next transitional lobby and he ran for the other side where the next set of elevators waited, one standing there open and ready.

Please hang on, David. Please.

* * * * * *

They hadn’t killed him while he lay in a stupor, and they hadn’t let him stay unconscious either, shoving something in his face that stank so bad it brought him up out of the darkness, choking and gasping for breath.

He hurt so much he couldn’t move. Didn’t want to move. Was starting to wish they’d just kill him and get it over with.

The two red-eyed men were kicking him, but their laughter was fading. The hellfire light of their eyes was focused on him, and the one that he hadn’t shot kicked him again.

How can it still be alive? Shouldn’t it have bled to death by now?

He wanted Bells. Wanted to see his lover one last time before he died. Wanted to feel the soft as silk lips claiming his in a kiss that left him dizzy and aching to be fucked.

He whimpered as another kick landed on his hip.

The wounded monster stared down at Jessman, the whole front of his body covered in gore. He’d shot the son of a bitch square in the middle of its chest, and the thing was still moving, still grinning, though its movements were becoming awkward. It swung a foot at him, stumbled and fell, a dazed expression on his face.

The other one kicked him in the side and he couldn’t feel it, he already hurt so much that the added pain had little meaning to his numbed brain.

Dying. He was dying.

Soon to be dead.

Tears leaked from his eyes, lips forming his lover’s name. He clawed at the carpet, wanting to crawl away, wanting someone to help him. Begging anyone to come and save him.

By now the people in the apartments adjoining his must have called for security. They must have informed them of a disturbance in his apartment. Help was coming. He just had to hold on a little longer. Just had to stay alive until security arrived, until they came and killed the madmen and their silently watching associate.

“Enough!” a deep voice ordered.

The madmen backed off. “Bells ain’t gonna know this corper, he ever see the body of his moneyboy,” the horror he hadn’t shot remarked.

David turned his head.

They were standing by his bed, watching him.

Dark spots stained the white carpet. Dark trails of something wet on his arms, chest, his clothes turned to rags.

He stared at the splotches on the carpet, thoughts dulled by the pain. Tried to figure out what they were, what they meant.

He raised his head, dazed, numb and watched the tall man coming for him at a walk, a sword gripped in his fist, the blade gleaming blue-silver in the dim glow of the city lights coming through the window.

Death was coming.

And no one was there to save him.

Not corporate security.

Not Bells.

No one.

The man grabbed him by the back of his ruined suit, yanked him away from the wall, shoved him to his knees. He struggled, kicked, scared, not ready to die.

Something hit the side of his head and he saw stars, felt something warm and wet slide over his ear. A drop fell to the carpet. Dark like melted chocolate in the dim light.

Blood.

His own blood.

The carpet was spattered with it. His clothing soaked with it.

He didn’t even feel it when he dropped face down onto the floor.

Bells ain’t gona know this corper... The words slithered through his mind, infused with meaning, his brain grasping what they’d done to him.

He closed his eyes and thought of Bells. Remembered how it felt to kiss him, to feel the gunwhore’s strong, deceptively small hands on his body. He heard the stormwind chimes of his lover’s hair. Life flashing before his eyes, the triumphs of the day all for nothing. He faced the end with a single regret: he wouldn’t be able whisper words of love to Bells.

A hand gripped the back of his suit, yanked him onto his knees a second time.

Bells...help me. Please help me...

* * * * * *

Please help me... A whisper of sound that didn’t touch his ears. A plea bound in pain.

A growl of fury rumbled in his chest, slid up his throat, left his lips as a bellow of primal fury that shook the walls of the elevator. Hands lashed out, wreathed in the misty forms of scaled paws tipped by wicked curving talons that tore the steel of the handrail, leaving deep gashes in the metal.

The elevator doors opened, Bells’ gaze taking in the destroyed entryway of David’s apartment. His face twisted into a snarl of fury. He rushed forward, a hatestorm of killing rage burning in his body, the .357 and the nine mil clutched in his fists.

As he moved the mist around him thickened, the suggestion of the serpentine from appearing around him, emerald scales tinged with gold. He entered David’s apartment at a run, jumping the damaged coffee table, the stink of melted plastic not strong enough to hide the smell of cordite and blood filling the air.

A flood of aqua mist, shot through with green swirls and cobalt flickers like lightning spun around him in an ethereal tornado as he entered the hallway leading to Jessman’s bedroom

The tableau revealed froze his soul and burned in rage-flames through him.

David was down on his knees, a man standing over him, the sword from which the man took his name raised over Jessman, ready to decapitate the researcher.

Trademark kill of a zonewarrior named Katana Blue.

There were two figures behind the other killer. Curs with white-fang grins and walking dead faces, damned to hell eyes glowing in the dark.

“Deal with the whore,” Katana Blue ordered, deep voice giving the command.

A pair of screaming Drakuls launched themselves across the room coming for Bells in a rampage of blood-mad hate.

The first one went down with the back of his skull blown out. The second one slammed into Bells, the gunwhore not bothering to evade the attack. The impact took Bells off his feet for a fragment of a second. He kicked the Drakul aside, rolled and came up firing, the shot taking the sword from Katana Blue’s fist. The blade caught the light as it spun away from the zonewarrior. Bells’ second shot hit the sword with a sharp spanging sound, the blade snapping in half, one part falling to the floor, the point and about foot of the blade sinking into David’s bed.

“You bitch!” the big man roared, coming for Bells at a run.

The Drakul snapped at him, grabbing a handful of his braids, trying to sink its teeth into him.

Bells diverted his attention to the Drakul, jammed the barrel of the revolver into the crazed killer’s belly and pulled the trigger as Katana Blue’s fist connected with his jaw and sent him staggering. Telltales flashed red and yellow in the periphery of his vision like some manic string of holiday lights.

He spun, darted into the living room, the enraged killers following him, Jessman forgotten as they ran after new, more dangerous prey. He was counting on them giving chase, counting on them to have more hate for him than desire to complete their mission.

He reached the living room, spun to face them, Katana Blue right on his heels, coming at him through the mist he knew the other man couldn’t see. Mist he didn’t want to acknowledge, because to acknowledge it was to remember something best forgotten.

A big pistol banged out death, Bells swaying aside before the bullets hit him, something interposing between them and his flesh. Insubstantial, the shape reminiscent of gauzy wings. A dragon’s wings.

Ignoring the phantom images surrounding him and the warning yellow and red indicators in the lower part of his visual field he returned fire, both pistols bellowing lead at the bigger zonewarrior.

“DIE!” Katana Blue roared as the two of them went down in a snarling tangle of limbs and guns, lead hitting the ceiling, ripping apart the white couch, fluff floating into the air as the two of them scrambled for supremacy. Katana Blue, bigger, heavier, tried to pin him. Bells rammed the barrel of the .357 into the other man’s face, pulled the trigger. Flesh sheared away, blood spilling to reveal the reinforced bone underneath.

A fist struck his face, the yellow glow of two lights flashing red from the impact.

Bells retaliated, kicking Katana Blue, getting both legs into it. The bigger zoner went airborne. He came down hard, shattering the coffee table. Bells hopped to his feet in time to fire four bullets at the incoming Drakul. Killight, he knew him. All four bullets hit, the one from the powerful .357 hitting Drakul’s face, the other trio from the nine mil peppering his torso in a close line.

Killight screamed. Enraged, techfangs dripping gore, he staggered, colliding with the darkened EnCoSet unit. He touched the hole in his face where his nose used to be, blinked and sagged toward the floor.

Frost and flame.

Bells turned as Katana Blue came for him, gun firing. Bullets slowing as struck the fog around him the projectiles hitting Bells’ jacket. He felt nothing as he emptied the clip of the nine mil at Katana Blue, aiming high, the bullets tearing up the zoner’s face. He fired the .357, watched a chunk of the other man’s face go spinning away, his right eye ruined.

“Fucker, I kill you!” Katana Blue roared as he came for Bells again.

Bells moved, aiming for the oncoming man with his .357 and the nine mil but he didn’t have time to get any shots off before he was bodily picked up and hurled.

Bells hit the wall where the EnCoSet unit was embedded, the hard plastics and delicate computer equipment shattering along with the plaster. Electricity coursed through him as the power feed to the EnCoSet made contact with his body. He gasped, his entire body spasmed and his vision went momentarily dark right before he hit something big and very solid.

Dazed, Bells struggled to regain his feet, his legs numb, spine feeling as if he’d been hit with a wrecking ball. He coughed and spit, watched a spatter of blood land on the broken remains of the wall he’d come through.

His legs registered the orders of his mind and he stood, plaster, plastic and shattered bits of the EnCoSet unit falling from him. He felt a smooth hard surface at his back. The refrigerator, door dented, handle flattened from the impact of his body. Every telltale in his visual suite blazed red He coughed again, spit another mouthful of blood and staggered away from the fridge, his legs wobbled under him, Bells stumbling worse than a drunk.

He’d lost the nine mil somewhere after his impact with the reinforced wall that held the EnCoSet. The .357 remained in his left fist, but he didn’t know if there were any bullets left.

He groped in the pocket of his jacket for one of his speed loaders, but abandoned the search when Katana Blue came around the end of the wall, the tall man striding toward him, ready to do him dead. He fired the .357 and heard the soft click of an empty chamber.

“You gonna die now, bitch!”

A shrill scream from the direction of the bedroom tore into Bells’ awareness.

He knew the voice.

David, his voice shrill from pain and fear.

Bells bolted from the approaching zonewarrior, leaping through the hole his own body had made in the wall.

He felt twinges of pain, damage indicators burning like the coals of hell at the bottom of his vision.

Bells reached the end of the hallway and came to a skidding halt, eyes taking in a tableau that shocked even a man as jaded to death and killing as himself.

Zeboo, the Drakul he’d first shot, was menacing his lover. The back of the Drakul’s head was gone but the bastard was on his feet, staggering toward Jessman with the remains of a katana gripped in his fist.

Jessman was on his feet, the man bloody and battered, eyes wide with horror as he watched the jerky movements of the Drakul coming for him. Blood ran from a deep cut in David’s chest, the injured researcher cowering against the wall with nowhere to go.

A roar of fury came from Bells, the sound so loud the windows rattled. Zeboo dropped the broken katana and stood there, the light from the window shining through the hole in the front of his face, his one remaining eye wide in shock.

Jessman covered his ears with his hands as an unbelievable sound so loud it vibrated through his chest erupted through the room, left him dazed, unsure how he’d wound up on his knees.

Something warm and wet spattered across him.

Blood.

He blinked.

Watched as the creature that had been about to kill him fell to the floor, what was left of its head gone.

David lifted his head to see a fury of blurred movement filling the room.

Bullets impacted the wall by his head and he fell flat to the floor, not caring how close he was to the remains of the zoner or the spreading circle of gore on the carpet.

He glanced up from where he lay and saw the man in the long blue coat standing motionless with the remains of a katana rammed through the middle of his body, Bells’ hand gripping the hilt.

The taller killer staggered a step, his ravaged face evincing shock.

“I told you if we ever crossed paths again, you’d die,” he heard his lover’s velvet soft voice state.

The tall man coughed, went to his knees.

“Dumbfucker that you was, you didn’t believe. Now you dead, Katana Blue, and you got no one to blame but you own sorry ass self.”

The dying man laughed. “You get dead some day, dead as meat.”

Bells leaned closer to the other zoner. “Mebbe so, but that ain’t gonna be today.” The blond twisted the blade, pulled it down, ripped it free.

Jessman turned away, retching, choking on the terrible smell, his head aching.

The body of the freak that wanted to kill him was kicked aside.

Bells crouching in his field of vision, the man’s beautiful face was battered and bloody. Dirt, bits of glass and plastic and blood discolored the pale braids.

Jessman reached out, touched a crushed bell, caressed torn feathers.

“You came...” he whispered, hand moving from the braid to the leather-clad shoulder. Firm. Solid under his hand. Real.

“Yeah, I be here. Been here sooner, but found out I didn’t have no permit to get back up here wif you,” the gunwhore told him. “Dumbfuckers. Even when they couldn’t get you by phone they didn’t take my warning about someone comin’ to do you dead serious. I broke through security and got here fast as I could.”

Gentle hands touched pulled him to a sitting position. His lover. The bloodstained hands of a murderer touched his face. “Shhh, you’re safe, David. It’s all over.” Arms enfolded him into the warm embrace of the cold killer he loved.

“Bells, oh, Bells,” he moaned, and threw his arms around his battered rescuer.

Three would-be killers lay dead in his apartment.

Dead because the man he loved had killed the killers.

David held tightly to the blond man who’d saved him as the tears spilled from his eyes. Bells’ arms went around him, lips moving over his tear-streaked face in gentle kisses, the blond as heedless of the blood covering him as he was of the sanguine mess covering the gunwhore.

“Oh God, oh, God...” he gasped, the sound cut off by the gunwhore’s mouth, a tongue darting in, pressing against his tongue, sliding over it. He tasted blood, his, Bells’ and he didn’t care.

Bells, his Bells had come, had saved his life.

He returned the kiss, eager for it, the contact a reassurance that he’d come through the ordeal alive. Alive because Bells had come to his rescue. An avenging angel of destruction bringing death to the men who’d come to kill him.

The kiss deepened, a tongue invading his mouth.

He was safe.

Safe.

Chapter Six

What You Make Of It, Again

Bells was enjoying the kiss. Relishing the way David clung to him as if he were the most important person in his life.

After saving him twice he probably was, at least for now.

Jessman’s hands pressed to his back and he felt the tender spots where he’d been tagged by bullets from the Aoki Entertainment Corp’s security gate. He’d been hurt worse, and the feel of Jessman yielding to his kiss, letting him press the man to the floor, the way Jessman wrapped his legs around him meant more than the faint ache. For him, the pain was proof he lived, a spice mixed into the pleasure of his lover’s touches.

David’s hands found the place where he’d hit the handle of the refrigerator door and he gasped into the kiss, felt his cock go hard.

Wounded and bleeding, both of them. Eager to reaffirm that they were alive with hot passion.

He ripped the remains of Jessman’s shirt open, broke the kiss to look at his lover’s wounds. A deep cut from the broken katana, the rest of the man’s chest scored with gouges, nicks, shallow cuts, the marks of razor-edged tech nails, the talons of a Drakul. He bent down, kissed a few of the cuts, heard Jessman moan, felt his legs tighten around his hips.

He wanted David. David wanted him.

He gazed into Jessman’s dark eyes, one of them starting to swell closed, a ring of bruising showing he’d been punched in the face.

Battered and bloody, but the man was no less attractive to him. No less desirable.

Not because this was his moneyboy, but because this was the man he loved.

Loved.

He touched the gash in his lover’s chest, saw David wince.

“Ain’t nobody hurts what’s mine,” he told Jessman.

The man reached up, got a grip in his hair and pulled him down for another scorching kiss.

“Shit, the place looks like a warzone.” A male voice from the front of the apartment. Young. Nervous.

“Look at all the blood,” a second voice. Also male. Older, more sure of himself.

That figures. The trouble is over before the cavalry arrives. Useless fucking idiots. Upper floor security sucks everywhere. I bet they’ve only got basic gel-boost. Worthless in a fight with anyone like the Drakuls, much less someone like Katana Blue.

Or me.

Jessman couldn’t hear them, his desperate hands clinging to Bells, fingers gripping tight. The scent of fear strong, laced through with the tang of giddy relief and the sharp odor of blood.

He heard the sound of feet crunching over broken glass. Thick glass, so it had to be the remains of the coffee table the guards were moving over.

“Do a sweep of the apartment. Find Dr. Jessman. If he’s dead, our asses aren’t worth a zoner’s piss.” Female, but not the security guard from the ground floor lobby, the cadence and timber of her voice different.

They’d be coming into the bedroom soon, and Bells didn’t give a damn. If it weren’t for him, David would be dead. Nothing but a cooling corpse they’d have to tag and send to their morgue for cremation.

A lost asset, to be written off like the broken furniture.

He didn’t give a damn, but Jessman’s reputation might be damaged if security found him on the blood-covered floor in a clinch with a zoner-born gunwhore.

He heard them moving along the hallway. Slow. Cautious.

Sighing, he pulled away from Jessman. Stood, stepped away from the researcher.

Jessman stared at him, confused. “What’s wrong?” his dark-haired lover asked.

“We got us some company,” Bells replied as he put his hands on top of his head and waited for the trio of dark shapes to reach them.

His lover frowned, flinched at the pain it caused, a small cut reopening in his cheek, seeping blood. He wanted to go to David, embrace him, kiss away the man’s pain, turn it into pleasure. But looking at Jessman, really taking stock of the injuries he could see, told him what his lover really needed was a hospital.

“What are you doing that for?” Jessman questioned, gesturing at him.

“To be sure there aren’t any mistakes,” Bells replied. He wasn’t pleased with the idea of assuming the position, but he’d be less amused if some trigger-happy moron tried to gun him down because of a misunderstanding.

More to the point, he’d hate to see the man he loved caught in the resulting crossfire that would break out if anyone from NeuroTech started shooting at him. He wouldn’t take being shot at without returning fire, even if the only weapon he had was his .357.

“Did you hear someone talking?” the woman asked.

“I think so,” the second of the men responded.

“Doctor Jessman? Are you there?” The woman calling out, trying to identify the source of the voices.

Jessman man got to his feet, swayed and braced his hand against the wall to keep from falling.

“I’m here,” he called out, “no thanks to you people.”

Bells grinned at his lover’s words. “Nice touch,” he remarked.

“And it’s the truth,” David replied, taking an unsteady step toward him.

The lights came on, Bells’ eyes compensating for the sudden glare, keeping him from being blinded by the abrupt change.

There were three of them standing in staggered formation, right side of the hall, then left, then right. A good formation in theory, but they were close together, within an easy sweep of an automatic weapon. He could have taken them down before they knew what hit them.

Good thing for them he wasn’t interested in doing them dead, or they’d have been down and dying already.

“Move and we’ll kill you!” the youngest of them threatened in a display of over eager zealousness.

“Shoot him, and I’ll have your asses out in the street faster than you can say unemployed,” Jessman snapped as he limped into their view.

The woman with them stepped forward, got a good look at Jessman and frowned. “Emergency medical personnel needed in Dr. Jesman’s apartment. We also need a cleanup team and an incarceration team ASAP.”

The young man had his weapon trained on Bells, the barrel held dead on with his chest. Stupid move. The only fast and sure way to take out a zonewarrior was to blow his head off.

Bells gave him a feral smile, watched the kid pale, the end of his assault rifle wavering as a tremor began. Fear. Mind-numbing fear.

He let the smile go, moved his gaze to the older man who’d begun to check the room. As if expecting any of the deaders to be alive, he checked them for pulses.

The woman’s hazel eyes were watching Bells. Wary as the kid. Uneasy. He could tell she was sizing him up and he knew why. He’d been the last man standing at the little bang-bang-get-you-dead dance party that had taken place in Jesman’s apartment, and that made him a danger to her and everyone in her little crystal tower fantasy world.

The dark-haired researcher was frowning, the woman’s words taking a long moment to sink in through the shock of his ordeal. Bells could tell what was going on in his lover’s head as clearly as if he could read the man’s mind.

“Incarceration team?” David finally asked. “What did you want them for? The men who attacked me are dead.”

“Doctor, you’re hurt. Please let us deal with the situation,” the older male security guard replied.

“That’s right,” the woman added. “We’re better able to determine what needs to be done than you are, sir.”

David just stood there, one hand on the wall, staring at the woman. It looked as if he was going to capitulate, let the woman call the shots.

Slightly disgusted, Bells turned his gaze on his lover, but the man didn’t even look at him.

“Yes, you’re right. I am hurt and I need medical attention,” Jessman stated and Bells braced himself for the betrayal he knew would be coming. The other man would let them take him to jail. Let them shove him in a cage. Something in his heart felt about to crack and he turned his head away, stared at the night sky on the other side of the bedroom window.

“We’ll handle this mess, Doctor,” the woman said.

“I’m sure you will, but I haven’t lost my mental faculties...”

Reflected in the glass, Bells watched as Jessman leaned closer, peering at the name printed on her shirt, “Officer Ventura.”

“I’m sure you’ll be fine too, sir,” the woman replied. “Now why don’t we get you out of here?” She reached for David’s arm, intending to lead him away from the scene, but Jessman pulled his arm out of her grasp, wincing as if the motion caused him pain. From the looks of his skin under the rags of his suit, he’d been kicked and scratched. It angered Bells, all those injuries, but the men who’d done it had already paid for the crime of touching his lover with their lives. He had his revenge already. But he found himself wishing he’d been able to extend their suffering for what they’d done to Jessman.

“No, Officer Ventura, I’m not going anywhere until I know what you intend to do with my—” he heard Jessman pause, “bodyguard.”

The woman frowned. “Bodyguard?”

Bells glanced at the researcher. So Jessman was trying to save him from being jailed. That wasn’t what he’d expected.

Then again, the situation with Megalli-Loran still existed. The potential for more killers remained. Jessman needed him.

Dark eyes regarded him from a face swelling from abuse, the expression on Jessman’s face made unreadable by the distortion of damaged tissues.

What does he really feel for me? Does he just enjoy what I can do to him, or is it more than that? Does he want me the way I want him?

“Yes, my bodyguard. Bells is a professional gunwhore. I hired him a few days ago, but he had to return to the Liberty City Freezone on business. Apparently when he came back, someone downstairs refused to give him entry.”

Bells gave Jessman a tiny fragment of a smile. Not only was the researcher making it sound as if he belonged there, he was also making it seem that the guards downstairs were in the wrong for not letting him into the enclave.

“I think he more than proved he’s capable of protecting me, don’t you?”

“That may or may not be the case, Dr. Jessman, but there is a building-wide bulletin ordering his capture for illegal entry into NeuroTech.”

David glanced at him.

Bells shrugged. “The guards in the lobby wouldn’t believe me when I told them you were in danger. They wouldn’t even listen to me when you didn’t answer their calls to your apartment. I told them that three killers were on their way up here to murder you and they didn’t listen to that either, because they were so damned sure that stupid piece of lowtech shit EnCoSet would call if you were in trouble. They didn’t believe me and I was afraid you were running out of time.” He met the security officer’s gaze, “Turns out I was right too.”

She gave him a resentful glare and turned her attention to David. “Sir, really, he’s dangerous, and—”

“And my ass would be dead if he weren’t!” Jessman railed at her, surprising Bells as much as it startled the security guard.

Bells hadn’t known Jessman had it in him to stand up to anyone like that. Most corpers didn’t, and wouldn’t make an effort either. The hint of a smile Bells had let touch his lips grew a bit more apparent.

“Really, sir, he’s not worth your—”

David jabbed the woman in the chest, “Now you listen to me and you listen good, Officer Ventura. He is a highly paid professional! A bodyguard that can’t go toe-to-toe with polymer gel boosted killers like those three and live through it would be rather pointless! If I had relied on you three pathetic idiots, I’d be dead! Dead, instead of trying to explain why my bodyguard is not going to be taken away from me!”

A slight smirk tugged at Bells’ lips. He’d never seen Jessman face down anyone in the corporate world before and it was nice to see that, even after the horrors Jessman had faced tonight, the man wasn’t about to let someone tell him what to do while they was hauled his protection to jail.

Jessman was willing and able to stand up for something, and it mended the tiny cracks in Bells’ heart to know that the something David was willing to fight for turned out to be him. It could easily be out of a sense of self-preservation motivated by the cold hard reality that the vaunted safety of the NeuroTech enclave was riddled with holes. Or Jessman might want to keep the services of someone able to fulfill his sexual fantasies. Either way, Jessman was fighting to keep him, and in the kill and take world in which Bells lived, that amounted to something.

“I, umm...” the woman hedged.

“Come here,” Jessman ordered, his dark gaze on Bells.

The blond stepped closer to his lover. “Yes, Dr. Jessman?”

“You are under private contract with me, isn’t that right?”

The lie was an easy one. “Yes, sir.”

“And how long have you been in my employ?”

“Three days.”

David turned to the woman, “Satisfied?”

“Well, sir, the bulletin is still in effect. I’m sorry, but you don’t have the authority to change or cancel a security alert.”

“And you aren’t taking him out of my sight,” Jessman countered and motioned to the mess surrounding them. “I’ve already suffered enough without him, don’t you agree?”

“Really, sir, that’s up to my bosses. I can’t help you,” Officer Ventura explained.

Bells could hear another group of people entering the apartment. A larger group, the heavy steps of highly cybered corporate soldiers in the mix among people of normal weight.

The young corporate security guard actually turned his eyes away to see who was coming, a move that would have gotten him quickly dead if Bells had the intention of taking them out.

Young and stupid, he wouldn’t last long if he ever got into a firefight with a zonewarrior. Or the solders of a rival corporation.

A group of men and women came up the hall, the four of them dwarfing the small space, making it appear much more narrow than it really was between their height and the layers of combat armor protecting their bodies. They towered over Bells, every one of them well over six feet in height, the man at the rear of the pack pushing seven feet in height, making the gunwhore look almost doll-like in comparison.

Bells watched them come in, a tendril of chill-flame licking along his nerves.

Hostile intent. But they weren’t here to do him dead.

Not yet, anyway.

“We’ve come to take the prisoner to the detainment facility,” the man in the lead stated. His hazel gaze swept over Bells from behind the colorless visor of his helmet. A faint sneer of distaste distorted his mouth as he took him in, saw him for what he was, zoner intruding into their pristine realm. Trash dirtying their world.

Bells returned the man’s stare. The guy would have been attractive if he didn’t look like he spent his time sucking lemon juice out of a weasel’s asshole.

“What do I have to do to make you fools understand he’s not the threat, they were?” Jessman said and stepped in front of the new arrivals, standing between the soldiers and him.

His respect for Jessman ticked up a fraction. The man was doing his damnedest to protect him. He really was.

“It’s okay, sir,” he said putting on his least threatening demeanor. He was a gunwhore, had the skills to move among the corpers, yet he wasn’t one of them. They knew it. They weren’t about to accept his place in their domain, he could see it in their eyes. He could also tell they were ready to push the issue, maybe take Jessman in with him for interfering with them.

“No, it’s not okay,” David replied.

“Doctor, please. This man is a danger. He’s a known...” Officer Ventura began.

“Gunwhore? Of course he is. From the Liberty City Freezone. I’m well aware of those facts. What none of you seem to be capable of understanding is that I hired him. He was just doing his job, or trying to,” Jessman told them.

Ventura sighed and shook her head. “See what I mean, he’s preventing us from doing our jobs.”

“Yeah, I see,” Lemon-filled Weasel Face remarked, his tone acerbic.

Bells considered just urging David to let it go, let them take him down to their lockup. But he knew once he got into that jail, it would take a hell of a lot of pull from someone to get him out again. Pull that a simple researcher didn’t have.

“You all seem determined to let those bastards kill me. Didn’t any of you bolt-brained idiots realize my EnCoSet was non-responding because it had been deactivated by the actions of three killers hired by Megalli-Loran? Three killers that almost murdered me because you wouldn’t let my bodyguard come and do his job!”

He had to admit it, Jessman was doing a pretty damn good job of defending him to the soldiers, not that a researcher had enough pull to do much to protect him.

Bells wasn’t afraid of the soldiers. The newcomers were prison guards. Slow, clumsy, he knew the type. Strong and hard to kill, unless you went for the eyes, the soft places on the throat.

If worse came to worse he could break free of them, escape out of the tower pretty much the same way he’d come in: by outrunning the security forces.

But it would mean never returning here.

Never coming back to Jessman.

And that wasn’t acceptable.

Neither was going to a corp detention facility. Especially not when he was loaded with the polymer tech of a rival corporation.

They’d tear him apart to see how he worked.

The thing that made Bells really uneasy was the knowledge he might not be able to break free of the corporate lockup. With the telltales at the bottom edge of his vision a mass of red and yellow and very few green indicators left, he wasn’t sure how well he’d really do against the guards if he had to fight his way free.

There were other people moving out in the living room. Cleaning people or medical personnel, Bells couldn’t tell from the sounds he heard.

Jessman and the guards were still facing off, the guards clogging up the hallway, David not moving aside so they could get into the room.

“Will you morons get out of the way!” a voice ordered, the command delivered by someone used to being in control.

The soldiers got out of the way, Jessman falling back, keeping himself between the guards and Bells,

A well-dressed man entered the room. Ageless— he could have been in his late teens or pushing fifty— he took a quick look around, gaze pausing on Bells, who still had his hands on top of his head rather than risk doing anything to upset the corp soldiers. He didn’t want anything to happen to David, and getting caught in the crossfire between him and this many guards would get his lover deader than meat at this stage of the standoff.

The young man turned to David. “This is the gunwhore you hired the other night?”

Jessman nodded. “Yes, it is.”

The young suit’s gaze snapped back to regard Bells. “Consider yourself under contract until further notice by order of the NeuroTech accounting department.” The suit snapped his fingers and gestured dismissal at the soldiers. “Out, all of you get out. You are worse than useless.”

“But, sir,” the woman who’d been talking to Jessman began.

“The bulletin is cancelled. Check with the infoserver if you don’t believe me, but whatever you do, get out! The medical staff can’t even get in here with the bunch of you idiots cluttering the place up.”

Reluctant, but obedient, the soldiers filed out, a med crew immediately taking their place, the group closing around Jessman as a few very quiet people clothed in utilitarian garments of low-paid menial workers came in to take away the corpses.

Their eyes were as empty and dead as those of a the corpses they came to move; none of them so much as lifted their eyes to look at any of the people around them. Lowest of the low in the corporate world, and they stayed well away from Bells, faint looks of distaste making their mouths tense, their eyes fastening on anything but the only thing in existence lower than them: a zoner.

The medical personnel were examining Jessman, prodding him with their hands, looking at the visible injuries, running diagnostic scans via the dataport in the back of his head. None of them seemed too pleased with their findings.

Bells let his hands drop, stepped closer to the people swarming around his lover. “How is he?” he asked, got a hostile glare in response and retreated.

Corpers.

“Doctor Jessman, we need to take you to the hospital for a series of more advanced diagnostic scans. I’m worried you may have internal injuries or broken bones.”

Dark brown eyes turned to regard him.

“I’ll be with you, sir. You’ll be perfectly safe,” Bells reassured.

“Yes, if you’re with me, I know I’m safe.”

* * * * * *

Jessman endured being poked, prodded, shoved through an MRI and three other scanning devices that checked bones, cybernetic enhancements and his internal organs to make sure he wasn’t in danger of dying.

Director Perez had arrived at some point during the tests, spoken with him and reassured him that no further threats to his life would be able to reach him. What else they might have talked about was lost in the fog of exhaustion that had closed over him during the night.

He’d undergone a battery of tests already this morning, the staff double-checking to make very sure he wasn’t suffering any delayed problems from the beating he’d taken. Other than sore ribs, an aching back and a bit of stiffness across his chest where the gash from the sword cut had been, he felt well enough, though the entire prior day had taken on a surreal nightmarish quality in his memories.

The one constant he could recall from the long night was Bells. The gunwhore right there with him, cobalt eyes watching every move the staffers made.

He’d gone through a chat with a corporate psychologist last night who’d prescribed a dose of medication to make him sleep. A nice dreamless sleep minus any nightmares his ordeal might have caused. He’d stayed asleep until the staff came for him for the morning batch of tests, which had been followed by another chat with the same psychologist. He’d gone back to his room here in the hospital after that, which was under an hour ago.

With all the test results in and the okay from the psychologist, Jessman was deemed fit to go home, though he was under strict orders to remain home from work for two days to let his mind and body heal from the attack.

Half the day was gone, but he was sitting on the edge of his hospital bed getting dressed to leave, a pair of cobalt eyes watching him from across the room.

The gunwhore was standing with his shoulders leaning against the wall, arms folded over his chest, that same impassive mask over his features.

But watching him, seeing the way he stood there, made Jessman wonder if the gunwhore was all right. Bells had taken a lot of punishment during the fight and Jessman found it hard to believe that his lover could have come out of such a fight unscathed.

He glanced at his own body. The bruising along his ribs had visibly faded; the nanites they’d given him had done their job and repaired most of the damage he’d suffered. But he was still tender and sore, which was one of the main reasons he wasn’t supposed to return to work. At least that’s what they’d told him.

The nanites had assured the worst of his injuries were well on their way to healing. Any scars left would be taken care of at a later date.

At least he didn’t have to worry about his medical bills. He’d been told that Director Perez had taken care of it, and guaranteed payment for any follow-up medical care he required, including any visits to the psychologist that he might feel he needed to work out the emotional scars such a harrowing experience would leave on his psyche.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked Bells.

Soft ringing accompanied the man’s nod.

“I can’t see how you could be. The apartment was a disaster.”

Bells just shrugged.

He frowned. Bells wasn’t talking. Hadn’t spoken much since the soldiers had almost taken him away. Not that the blond was much for chatting.

Fucking...now that was a whole different story. Bells did that so well, there really wasn’t any need for words.

David slipped his new jacket on, did up the buttons and sat there wondering what to do next.

His old apartment was destroyed, and it would take workers weeks to repair the damage done in less than ten minutes.

Ten minutes.

The whole ordeal had lasted only ten short minutes, but to his mind it had seemed like hours. Pain and fear turning every second into an eternity.

He heard the windchime sound of his lover on the move and looked up to find the man standing beside the bed, one slim hand held out to him.

He stared. There was a rim of something dark brown-red under the blond’s nails.

Blood.

Dried blood.

“Come on, it’s time for you to go home.”

He took the offered hand. The blood didn’t matter to him. What mattered was his lover, the beautiful brave killer of a man who had saved him. Rescued him from death a third time.

Jessman brought Bells’ hand to his lips, kissed it and looked up at the gunwhore.

“You’re sure you’re okay?” He searched the blond’s face for any sign of pain, any discomfort, but there wasn’t even a bruise to show from the battle. Not even a tiny cut to be seen, yet he remembered seeing the man’s face covered in blood. Remembered seeing the pale gold of his hair spattered with it.

Could it have just been the blood of the men he killed? How could he have fought three of them and not come away injured? It just doesn’t seem possible.

“Yeah, I sure, Jessman,” the soft buzz of zonetalk, the faint hiss of the double esses in his name melted like audio chocolate over his mind. Soothing, reassuring.

He put his arms around Bells’ waist, pulled his lover close and pressed his face to the zoner’s chest. He closed his eyes and tried not to cry.

A hand curved around the back of his head, cradling it, the gunwhore’s other hand resting on his back, fingers pressing, stroking down his aching spine, the touch gentle. A lover’s touch.

Or the hand of a skilled professional.

“Shhh... s’kay, Jessman. Ain’t nobody gonna come for you today. Megalli-Loran’s boy got hisself meat dead yesterday. Ain’t no one gonna come for you ‘til they get theyself some new damn fool out into the LC lookin’ to hire more damn fools.”

He held tighter to the zoner. “I was so scared,” he admitted on a quiet sob.

A warm chuckle vibrated through the cheek he had pressed to Bells’ chest. “You done damn good, Jessman. I knowed you dun shot one of the bastards youself. I be damn proud of you, Jessman. Damn proud.”

David’s breath caught. “You...you’re proud of me?”

Bells pulled away, stepping back to look at him. “Yes, I be proud of you, David. Most corpers woudda just cowered in they bathroom, let death come for them. Pissed theyselves and died begging for mercy. But you tried to fight back. You got guts, Jessman.”

The blood stained hand touched his cheek, the neon eyes meeting his, gaze locking on his face. “I knew you had some steel in you. Saw it in the Iron Web when I had you there. You a strong man, Jessman. Stronger than mos’ corpers.” The blond leaned in and pressed a light kiss to his mouth, darting tongue dipping between his lips for a taste. Just as quick the blond retreated, hand gripping his and pulling, forcing Jessman to his feet.

“I’d have done you dead if I hadn’t seen that in you.”

“Would you?” he asked, wanting to hear the zoner praise his courage again, just to make sure he wasn’t imagining it.

“Yes,” was the simple reply as Bells led him toward the door.

“I don’t have an apartment yet,” Jessman reminded him.

“Yes, you do. Perez arranged it. Sixty-fourth floor, southwest corner. Should be able to see the LC from there.”

Jessman let Bells lead him out of his hospital room.

He’d be six floors higher. At the sixtieth was the start of the floors reserved for upper middle management. Larger apartments. Higher pay brackets.

None of yesterday had been a dream.

But good portions of it had been the stuff of nightmares.

His lover moved with the same easy grace he knew so well, which amazed him and shouldn’t have. People enhanced to the degree the gunwhore had to be just to move as fast as he did were a great deal tougher than normal humans. Enhancements that made Bells such a good killer also made him harder to kill.

Under the bright lights of the corridor, Jessman could see how much abuse the man’s clothing had suffered. The leather scraped, cut, holes punched through the armored jacket.

Bullet holes.

Several of them.

“You’re sure you’re okay?”

“Don’t worry none ‘bout me, Jessman. Ain’t nothing happened to me gonna do me dead,” the blond reassured as he led Jessman past the nurse’s station.

“Take care, Dr. Jessman,” a young man on duty said.

“Thank you,” he replied automatically as Bells guided him to the elevators.

“Two floors up, and we have to transfer at the tenth floor lobby.” The blond told him, all trace of the zoner accent gone from his speech.

Chameleon, this lover of his. Changing his color to fit his environment.

And the mystery of who he was—or had been in the past—nibbled at Jessman’s mind, wanting an answer he knew he’d never get.

Not without a whole lot of trust growing between them.

Much as Jessman wanted that sort of trust, he didn’t think it would be forthcoming. Corporate mid-level executive and zoner. No, their worlds were too disparate. Their lives separated by more than just the physical symbolism of the Wall.

Bells wasn’t going to compromise himself by revealing the secret of his past. Not to him. And he couldn’t see the blond telling anyone in the zone either. Especially if that past included being born in a corporate tower, as Jessman was beginning to suspect. The blond was too educated to be zone born.

But just who, or what, Bells had been in his past would remain a mystery.

One he dared not bring up for fear the gunwhore would leave and never return.

They made the transition on the tenth floor, rode the elevator up to the fifteenth floor lobby and transitioned to another elevator, rode up to the twenty-fifth floor and stepped out into a polished alabaster lobby, tasteful wallpaper in white on white and classic art prints on the walls.

Bells led Jessman to the far side of the lobby, to another bank of elevators that would take them farther up the tower’s south side.

They rode up to the fiftieth floor lobby, transitioned a final time and came out into a gleaming lobby of white marble floors shot through with pallid grey veining. Tasteful potted plants in freestanding planters stood just across from the elevators. Pale wood laminate made up the bottom half of the walls. Between the wooden bottom and the off-white wallpaper that finished the walls to the height of the vaulted ceiling in the lobby was a narrow strip of gleaming brass.

Simple elegance.

The door to the southwest apartment was open, the sounds of people coming from the interior.

“Well, if you’re all done you can leave.” David recognized the voice. Director Perez.”

“We’re done, so we’ll be going, sir.”

“Good job. Here, this is for getting the apartment ready so quickly. You’ve done a good job.”

“Thank you, sir.”

A group of workers filed out, the men and women wearing one-piece work coveralls in dingy brown. They carefully avoided looking at David, though one of the women did sneak a look at Bells as they passed, the group departing, heading past the resident elevator probably for a service elevator hidden out of sight down a short corridor between the apartments on the north side of the lobby.

Bells pulled him toward the open door, and Jessman followed his lover to the door of his new apartment. Bells stopped, stepped aside so he could enter ahead of him.

David stepped inside and paused, taking a good look around. The living room was larger than the one in his old apartment, but the layout was much the same, as was the decor.

The door closed behind him and he turned, alarmed that Bells might have gone.

But the blond was there beside the door, expression unreadable. He motioned and Jessman turned just as Director Perez and a trio of assistants—including the Asian woman he’d met yesterday—entered the living area from the short hall to the bedroom.

“Ah, David, there you are. Welcome to your new home,” the Director said and walked toward him, hand extended.

Jessman took the offered hand and shook it. “Thank you, Direc—” he shook his head, “Carlos.”

“You’re quite welcome, David.” But the man’s gaze was no longer on him. Director Perez was staring at Bells. His interest was evident by the way he took the gunwhore’s appearance in, eyes roving from the crown of blond braids down the lean body. Carlos was looking at the blond the way a starving man looked into the window of a restaurant, the hunger to have and possess what he was seeing very clear in the man’s expression.

“So this is the gunwhore you told me about. I missed seeing him last night.” The Director stepped closer to Bells, who held his ground, tipped his too-beautiful face up to regard the taller man with a cool, impassive stare.

The look took David’s breath away. And from the way Director Perez was staring at the gunwhore, it was having a similar effect on him, too.

Perez reached for the gunwhore with the usual reaction from Bells, the blond evading the man’s hands as easily as he dodged Jessman under similar circumstances.

Perez smiled. “Ah, yes, how rude of me. Pay to touch, isn’t that right?”

Bells nodded, braids ringing seduction that went to straight to David’s groin.

The Director pulled out his wallet. Removed a crisp bill. Five hundred in NeuroTech dollars. “For a kiss.”

Bells actually glanced at David as if he sought permission to accept the money, the proposal. Jessman felt a pang of angry jealousy. He didn’t want Perez kissing his boy, but he didn’t want to anger his boss either.

“You can take it.”

The slender fingers reached up, took the money between index finger and thumb, held it as if it were a poisonous thing he really didn’t want to touch. The cobalt neon was still watching him, not Perez.

Anger simmering under the surface as Perez took the slender man by his shoulders and pulled him closer, Bells moving with the wordless command. Jessman watched as Perez plundered Bells’ mouth, the kiss aggressive, taking, demanding, forcing the gunwhore to the submissive role. He stared as Bells’ cock went hard, blinked at the soft whimper that came from him as Perez tightened his hold, deepened the kiss.

Something broke inside of David. Emotion coming to an abrupt boil inside him. Fury. Possessive rage. Bells was his. His!

He squelched the anger, turned away and went to the bar that stood at one side of the living room, right by the door of the dining area. Jessman poured himself a glass of mineral water with hands that shook, fingers white-knuckled on the bottle and glass.

From the mirror backing the bar he saw Perez gripping a handful of cornsilk braids, saw the flame of Bells’ eyes as it was shuttered behind half-closed eyelids.

The little bastard was enjoying it!

Of course he is, it’s his job, David told himself as he took a drink and discovered the water didn’t want to go down. He almost choked, but forced himself to swallow past the knot of anger in his throat.

The other people with Perez—a man and woman—crossed his living room, closing the door to his apartment behind them with a quiet click as they left.

The mirror gave him a view he didn’t want, Perez crushing the slender gunwhore to him. The man’s Asian assistant had moved closer, her smile reminding him of a shark scenting blood on the water. Closing in for the kill.

His eyes narrowed and he wondered what the woman’s agenda might be, what she was after in her relationship with Perez.

Gasping, Carlos broke the kiss, stood there gazing down at Bells’ face flushed with lust. “God, Jessman, where did you find this tasty bit of manflesh? I may have to borrow it from you for a night. I’ll be sure to provide you adequate companionship and protection.”

David wanted to grab Bells and take him away from Perez. Wanted to tell his boss to fuck off and go find his own lover. Instead, he forced a smile as he turned to face the Director. “Well, Vivian found him for me, but I understand she’s no longer with the company.”

“No, she’s not,” Perez agreed, his attention still focused on Bells as the gunwhore moved away, his hips moving in that mesmerizing sway that drew Jessman’s gaze as surely as it drew those of Perez and the woman.

“She had the numbers of a few higher class fuckbrokers in the Freezone. That’s where he came from.”

“No matter. I doubt there are any more like him out there anyway,” Perez replied as he turned a warm, very friendly I-want-something-from-you smile on David.

Bells vanished into the kitchen.

That made no sense to David. If the man wanted to make money, wouldn’t it have been better for him to stay out in the living room with the three of them? Out there he could make himself available to Perez and his beautiful assistant, and the easy money they could offer. Wouldn’t it have been smarter for him to stay where they could see him?

“You’re probably right,” Jessman agreed, not even thinking about what he was saying.

Perez came closer, smiled at David as he glanced at himself in the mirror behind them. Jessman followed his boss’ glance. Reflected in the mirror, he saw Bells out in the kitchen, the gunwhore looking at a paper on the breakfast nook table, elbows resting on the tabletop, bent over with his ass toward them.

Jessman swallowed.

“Quite a find,” Perez remarked as he poured himself a little mineral water from the bottle Jessman had already opened. Adding a splash of bourbon, he motioned toward the mirror. “He’s a true professional. Worth every damn dollar we’re paying for him.”

Jessman nodded, not sure where Perez was going with the conversation. Not sure he would like where it was going.

Perez motioned to his assistant and she strolled out to the kitchen, her own hips moving in the same seductive sway he’d seen in Perez’s office.

She’s another gunwhore! He realized as she moved up behind Bells, gathered his braids in her hands and tugged on them. He shook her off, stepped away.

Bells wore a smile on his lips, but his expression was ice cold. Unfriendly. Not at all what David expected from the blond. The woman stopped where she was, glanced back at them, an amused smile curling her lips.

“I don’t think he wants to play with me, Director.”

Bells snorted. “You got that shit right.” Zonetalk coming from his lover. The blond’s stance arrogant, ready to...what? Fight with the woman? Use force to keep her at bay?

But why?

Just something else Jessman found unfathomable about the blond gunwhore.

Perez leaned closer to Jessman, and the researcher forced himself not to flinch away. The situation was making him uneasy. Every passing moment increased the feeling that his career was very much at stake. But he had no idea which way to jump. Was he being tested? Was this what the Director expected from him in order to retain his position as the head of the polymer gel research department he’d just been given? He didn’t know, but he felt trapped. And—as with the men he’d fought last night—there was nowhere to run.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t going to be settled with a gunfight, either.

Politics and careful decisions would settle this battle.

But he knew so little. Knew nothing about the Director but his place in the company as the guiding force in the polymer gels sector here at NeuroTech.

And the fact his lovely assistant had to be every bit the killer Bells was or she wouldn’t have the job she held, because she seemed to be Perez’s bodyguard rather than the man’s executive assistant as he’d first surmised.

But bodyguard didn’t seem to sum up the total of their relationship.

The sexual undertones were becoming very apparent to Jessman now that they were in his apartment, the woman stalking Bells the way a cat stalked a mouse.

“Tell you what,” Perez murmured and slipped an arm around Jessman’s shoulders, “maybe we should have a bit of a party some night. Just the three of us.” Perez grinned, the lust alive in his expression as the woman darted forward and grabbed Bells by the hair again, pulling on the braids.

Jessman couldn’t even tell what Bells did, wasn’t able to see anything but a blur of movement, but his lover was out of the woman’s grasp.

The female gunwhore smiled coolly at Bells as he put the table between them.

Jessman might not have seen what Bells had done to get away from her, but he could see the way the cobalt flame of the man’s eyes had dulled to the color of slate. An angry grey he knew meant the blond gunwhore was done playing around.

“Scared?” he heard the Asian woman ask.

“Of a cheap Shinjuku gunwhore? Hardly,” Bells replied in an ice under velvet tone.

“Shinjuku?” The woman laughed, lips curled into a derisive smile. “Is that where you think I’m from?” Her brow arched with the question.

“I don’t think you were made in Shinjuku. I know it,” his lover replied, the blond’s mouth twisted up in a mocking smile. “Kami no Freesky did you,” the blond replied, using the Japanese name for the person who’d cybered the other gunwhore. “I know her work.”

“Oh, you are clever,” she replied. “You know your boost modders at least. But how good are you?” She made a move, hopped onto the kitchen table, crouched there, hand reaching for Bells.

“Don’t try me,” he heard his lover reply, the steel in his voice ripping through the dulcet tones, his lover’s voice harsh, threatening.

Perez was watching the two gunwhores in the mirror, face slightly flushed from the lust burning in his veins. “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”

Jessman nodded, but kept his gaze on Bells.

The tension between the two deadly prostitutes thickened the air, made it hard for David to breathe.

“You’re a good-looking man, Jessman. Someone like you can go far if you play the game the right way.”

A knot formed in Jessman’s stomach and he caught a look from the Asian woman, her gaze on him in the mirror, tongue sweeping over her lips as if she were savoring something sweet that clung there.

Oh, dear God!

“We could make it a foursome, if you prefer,” Perez added as the woman leapt off the table, joined them by the bar. “I’d love to see your boy fuck my assistant.”

She smiled wider and turned her gaze on the gunwhore reflected in the mirror. “Such a pretty thing, isn’t he?” she murmured the question demurely. “His creator must be very pleased. I wonder how well he’d hold up to my...” she smiled sexily, “special enhancements.”

“I, ah—” Jessman struggled for some way out of the situation, tried to find some way to avoid the plan being mapped out by his boss and his own gunwhore. A way out of something he didn’t want that wouldn’t anger Director Perez.

Perez patted him on the back. “Think it over. You’ve had a rather stressful couple of days. Rest and consider my offer. You could go very far in NeuroTech with the right—“ Perez grinned, hand sliding down David’s back to rub his ass, “backer, of course.”

Somehow Jessman kept the smile on his face while the knot in his stomach turned to a block of plascrete.

He knew all about sex for favors. But no one had ever been so blatant about it. Not with him, anyway. Then again, he hadn’t ever been in the position of being propositioned by one of his bosses until just that moment.

The blond gunwhore came toward them, the muted song of the bells in his hair speaking to Jessman in tones of desire. His mouth went dry.

Perez patted his ass, gave Jessman a grin and a wink. “You think it over, David. Let’s go, Mae. These boys need their rest. We can come back and play later.” Perez motioned her toward the door.

The woman’s eyes moved over Jessman, lips quirking in a ferine smile as she replied, “He looks rested to me, but you’re the boss.”

“That’s right,” Perez agreed as he moved toward the door following behind the woman.

Jessman trailed them, frowned when Bells edged past him, getting between him and his boss. He almost asked what the gunwhore thought he was doing, but decided his paid lover was doing his job of guarding him and let it drop.

“You take tomorrow off,” Perez told him. “But I expect to see you back to work the following day. You’ve got a department to whip into shape.”

The man patted his shoulder, his hand trailing down David’s broad chest. Carlos winked, licked his lips suggestively, then followed the sleek woman out. “Don’t forget my generous offer. A little private party would be a good way for you to put yesterday behind you and embrace your future.”

“I won’t forget,” Jessman assured as the pair left his apartment. It’s going to keep me from sleeping is what it’s going to do.

Mae turned, walking backward, wiggled her fingers in a goodbye meant to be cute but which somehow came off as menacing. “See you later, gentlemen.”

“Yeah, later,” Bells remarked, the edge of the zoner accent surfacing.

Bells shoved the door closed and David sagged onto his new couch. “Dear God, what am I going to do?” he muttered the question rhetorical, not expecting an answer.

“Stay as far away from that bitch as you can,” Bells replied. “I ain’t know what her game be, but she up to something and sure as fuck it ain’t good.”

“Of course she’s up to something, Bells. She’s fucking her way up the food chain.”

Bells sat down beside him, rested a hand on his thigh. The contact felt cool, not warm. He put his hand over Bells, it felt almost cold.

“It’s more than that. I...think I’ve met her before, but I just can’t remember where or when,” Bells told him, the gunwhore staring off into space as if he were searching for an answer on the far wall of the room.

“Well, if you remember, tell me.” Jessman leaned back on the couch, slid his arm around Bells. “Fucking her would be like having sex with a barracuda.”

Bells snorted. “Good analogy.”

The gunwhore flowed to his feet. “I’m hungry.”

David looked around the apartment. “Let’s go get you some clothes and we can have a late lunch out.”

Bells regarded him blank-faced, then nodded, offering his hand to Jessman. “Sounds like a plan.”

“Okay, let’s go,” Jessman agreed and took Bells’ offered hand, the smaller man pulling him to his feet with ease.

Chapter Seven

Sin and Punishment

Jessman stood in the elevator admiring his lover. In leather he was hot. Sexy. Desirable. In tight jeans and a sleeveless tee, Bells was a confection of sin. A picture to turn any man’s mind to thoughts of sex.

Dressed that way, the gunwhore looked all of sixteen or seventeen. An illicit toy like those kept by so many corporate executives in the upper echelons of the world’s wealthiest companies. Companies like NeuroTech. He’d never met the man, but rumor claimed that the head of the Miami enclave owned several genetically altereds that were part human, part exotic animal.

Jessman had trouble reconciling the look with the age he’d been given by the gunwhore their first night together.

Twenty-eight.

The face was too smooth. Too young for the man to be so old. Thirty was the same as ancient on the streets of a place like the LCFree.

Zoners lived hard and fast. Died young.

Jessman considered pulling the blond close for a kiss, but decided that standing there taking in the sight of the blond’s beauty was enough for the moment. The almost innocent expression on Bells’ face too wonderful to spoil.

Bells was holding an ebook, scanning the pages of a techzine they’d uploaded at the ebook seller in the mall, the tangle of his braids half hiding his face.

Breathtaking. Heartbreaking. Beautiful.

Jessman had glanced at the zine, read over the younger man’s shoulder as they rode the first elevator up the transition lobby. Three degrees and he couldn’t understand what he was reading, which made him even more curious about his lover’s past.

Outside his field, Jessman was as ignorant regarding technology as anyone who’d never set foot into a corporate university.

He watched his lover reading, a bemused smile curling his mouth at the memory of dinner. Dinner, which had become an interesting mini event with Jessman aware of every set of eyes that took in his lover, and every envious glance that had come his way. There had been a lot of both during the hour and a half it had taken them to order and eat.

After he’d actually lived another of his dreams and gone shopping with the gunwhore. Bought him a few things he’d needed—a change of clothes to replace his ruined leather pants and bullet-hole-riddled shirt. A few candies and something he’d paid for, but had no idea what the purchase had consisted of.

Not once during the shopping trip or the course of the meal had Bells appeared to notice anyone but him. Not a single instant while they were out did the gunwhore’s gaze stray from Jessman, which did a lot to restore the researcher’s confidence. It let him forget about the Director and his assistant for a short time.

Time that had come to an end already, his thoughts turned to the effort of escaping the trap he felt closing around him.

A trap he didn’t know how to avoid.

The elevator came to a stop and Bells folded the ebook closed, shoved it into David’s jacket pocket and turned an unreadable face up to him as the door of the elevator opened with a quiet ping.

The cool killer stare twisted around Jessman’s brain and drove a jolt of lust right to his dick, which went half-hard. The left side of the gunwhore’s mouth twitched in the barest hint of a smile and the flesh between David’s legs went completely stiff.

“See what you do to me?”

“You easy, Jessman.” Bells held his right hand out, wiggled his fingers. “Key card.”

Jessman frowned as he pulled it from his pocket. “Why?”

“I’m going to be the first one into the apartment, that’s why,” Bells answered as he stepped out of the elevator ahead of Jessman. He paused to look left, then right, and Jessman realized his bodyguard was doing his job. Scanning the short corridor that led to the service elevator, checking for danger before they entered the small lobby that led to his door.

“Is that necessary?” he questioned and handed the card over as they walked to his door.

“It’s my job to protect you. Isn’t that why NeuroTech is paying me?” Bells asked him.

“Yes, it is. But is that the only reason you’re protecting me?”

Bells didn’t answer him. Said not a single word in reply. He put the card in the lock, pulled it out and set his hand to the entry pad so the EnCoSet could read his palm print. The door clicked open.

The blond stepped inside, glanced at him. “Stay here. I want to check and make sure there aren’t any surprises lying in wait for us.”

“All right.”

The blond drew his revolver and moved into the apartment, checking behind the bar, in the kitchen, moving into the hallway and vanishing toward the bedroom.

Bells came back a few heart-hammering minutes later. “All clear.”

Jessman smiled, calming. He stepped closer to the blond, letting the door close as the blond holstered his revolver.

He caressed Bells’ cheek, moved his hand to slide his fingers through a few braids before wrapping them around a handful and pulling hard, dragging the smaller man closer. Bells allowed it, moved with the pull in his hair, unresisting. Jessman set his mouth over Bells’ lips in a searing kiss, felt the killer give into that too, passion meeting passion in a blaze of mutual desire. He eased his thigh between the gunwhore’s legs, felt a hard cock grind into the muscle as a honey-sweet moan of need slid between his lips from the zoner’s throat.

Bells yielding to him. Submitting.

And it was sweet. The feel of the sleek killer pressing against him.

Arms wrapped around Jessman in a tight embrace, firm lips parting to admit his tongue. Their tongues twined, danced, tasted, a shudder passing through the smaller man in his arms as he pulled on the braids. Another soft gasp of pleasure reverberated down his throat.

Bells wanting him.

Submitting to him, fully to him.

Gasping for air, Jessman stepped away, broke the kiss. “I want you in my bed, and I want you there now!” A demand. Hungry and possessing. Ordering. David still had a fist full of braids and he pulled on them as he took a step toward the hallway, intending to lead the blond to his bed.

But this time the gunwhore didn’t budge, blue-flame gaze regarding Jessman from behind the tangle of braids that had fallen over his face.

He pulled harder, watched as the man’s blond head moved with the action.

But the rest of Bells stayed where he was, motionless. He might as well have been pulling on a chain fastened bolted to a wall. Those cobalt eyes just stared at him, Bells’ face unreadable. No trace of the desire that stiffened the gunwhore’s cock showed.

Jessman should have feared that cool look, should have taken it as a sign to be more cautious, or to back off altogether from his chosen course of action. But the last two days had left him in a highly charged emotional state, Jessman in a frame of mind to take a few risks. Make a couple of dangerous choices.

Stupid, foolish choices.

Between one blink and the next Jessman found himself knocked painfully to his knees, his tie gripped in the gunwhore’s fist and pulled tight like a leash, the slender blond leaning over him, glaring steel-grey anger at him.

Fascinated by the color-change eyes, he stared up at Bells, heart pounding, fear-tinged lust heating his blood, throbbing through his groin.

“I let you fuck me once, Jessman. Don’t think you can do it whenever you want!” the gunwhore’s voice sharp as steel, anger underlying the deceptive gentleness of the tone. Their faces so close he could feel the warmth of the softly delivered statement on his mouth. On his eyelids. So close he could almost taste the other man’s lips. “I decide when we go to bed, and if we go to bed. I do the fucking. Not you! Understood?”

Jessman trembled under the sheer force of the blond’s voice, his menacing presence, the cruel lash of his words urging his capitulation. Demanding he submit to the gunwhore’s will.

“Understood?” The one-word question was snarled at him, the tie pulled tighter, choking him a bit. Commanding obedience. Demanding he yield.

Sparks of searing need burned up Jessman’s spine from the fire of lust in his balls as the smaller man dominated him, forced his submission, trained him to subservience.

He didn’t resist. Felt no hesitation, had no thoughts of rebellion.

Bells was his master, and he was the zonewarrior’s slave.

But he had only one Master. One man he would bow down to, submit himself to, one man who could own him, dominate him.

And that one man was Bells.

“Yes...Master,” he answered, struggling to speak, the tie digging into the collar of his shirt, constricting his airway. Warning him he’d overstepped his boundaries, done something to piss off the killer beneath the angelic exterior.

A mouth closed over his, tongue rammed between his lips and teeth in an aggressive invasion, a claiming of him that he wouldn’t fight. Wouldn’t deny.

The idea of dominating the blond was a thrill, one he’d entertained as a pleasant daydream. But being dominated by the sleek killer was much more than a daydream, it was a need and he craved it. Groaned as the tie around his throat was pulled harder, the gunwhore’s other hand getting a grip in his hair that held him motionless.

The kiss ended.

“What are you?” the dulcet voice asked.

“Your boy,” Jessman replied without even a half second of hesitation.

“Are you going to forget that?”

“No, Master, your boy won’t forget it.”

His tie was released and he took a deep, shuddering breath, the throbbing ache of his cock, the burning heat in his balls almost more than he could bear. He pulled at his tie, gasping for air, slightly dizzy.

But he wasn’t given the time to catch his breath, the gunwhore’s mouth claimed his a second time. He was helpless as the hot tongue probed the depths of his mouth, proved to him who was master and who was slave. Bells owned him body, mind and soul. And Bells abandoned him, shoving Jessman facedown on the floor, pinning him to the carpet, a booted foot placed between his shoulder blades.

“You been bad. Now you gonna be punished for you sin, Jessman.”

The foot moved, the bells in the man’s hair chiming as he stepped away.

“You’re wearing too many clothes.” A quiet murmur, the statement igniting fireworks in Jessman’s brain, burning like the trails of a dozen meteors through his nerves to coalesce deep inside his groin.

He wanted the blond’s cock, wanted it bad. Wanted to feel it ramming into him, taking him, bending him to the slender killer’s will, turning him into a whimpering slave to desire.

He wasn’t a natural slave. If he had been, he’d never have found the courage to stand up to Hartland. Would never have gotten up the nerve to play politics and face Hartland in front of Director Perez. Wouldn’t be here right now, on his knees at the blond’s feet.

He’d be in some rathole microcube apartment drowning in misery.

Or out on the street.

Or dead at the hands of the killers who’d come for him the night before.

He reached for his tie, but slim hands closed around his wrists.

Wind chimes ringing, his cock jumping in response as Bells shook his head. “Did I tell you to undress?”

Jessman stood there dumbfounded. “Uhhmm, no, Master.”

Slender hands reached for the buttons of his coat. Undid them one by one until his suit jacket was open. Bells reached up and pushed the jacket from his shoulders, fingers brushing along his arms. The coat hit the floor with a rustle of fabric.

Cool air blew over him from the air conditioning, which was good, because he felt like he was going to ignite as the gunwhore reached up to grip his tie.

Jessman glanced down, saw inscrutable steel-grey eyes regarding him, the man’s emotions hidden under the zonewarrior’s bland expression.

He was pulled down, lips touching his, barest suggestion of a kiss, fleeting, a feather light brush that brought a groan from him.

Hint of a smile on the gunwhore’s lips just as fleeting as the kiss. Instead of loosening the tie he pulled it tighter, choking David. “You gonna behave, Jessman?”

“Yes, Master.”

Again the trace of a smile, there and gone fast as a blink.

The gunwhore’s eyes were beginning to shift toward blue, the steely grey fading, his own gaze captured by the gradual change. Fascinated as always by the shift of colors. Stormy color to neon cobalt, blue flame to tempest hues.

The way it happened added to the mystery, the beauty of the man he loved.

Loved with every molecule of his body, every bit of his heart and soul.

Graceful hands pulled at the tie, removed it, caressing down his shoulders, over his chest as they drew it free from the collar of his shirt.

Jessman’s balls felt ready to explode into orgasm and he shuddered, the tie fluttering away to land on the edge of the bar.

Jessman bent down, wanting a kiss.

Slate-blue eyes stopped him, held him motionless.

Fingers moved along the line of buttons on his shirt. Stopped at the buckle of his belt. Brushed across his belly.

The researcher almost lost control, stopped himself before he could make a grab for Bells. Jessman held himself in check and didn’t violate the unspoken rule of ‘don’t touch’. He started to tremble as he fought the urge to take what he wanted and to hell with the consequences.

The buckle opened, Bells tugging on the belt. The motion almost a caress, slow, teasing as it slid around his waist. Jessman swallowed. He was being stimulated, aroused by such a simple act. Bells was a master of more than the domination game; he was also a master of seduction, and David was becoming lost in the sensations, the ache of his balls, the throbbing of his erection. The heat filling his body to a feverish pitch of desire.

He needed. Wanted.

And wasn’t going to get.

Not until his lover was done punishing him.

Bells tossed the belt in the same direction the tie had taken. The tip of a pink tongue darted out, dampening the gunwhore’s lips, burning cobalt gaze on David’s face as he reached up and unbuttoned the collar of his shirt, hands forcing Jessman’s head up and back, neck arching so far back it became hard to breathe.

The button gave way, the one below it following.

A slim body pressed to him. Hands moved over his shoulders, caressing, warm breath, soft lips touched his jaw, the gunwhore standing on his toes, the hardness of his cock against one of David’s thighs.

Jessman groaned as Bells kissed along his jaw, felt a sigh flow over kiss-dampened skin, goosebumps rising, a shiver dancing down his spine at the heat of the smaller man’s body, the way his hip brushed along the length of Jessman’s cock.

He couldn’t take it.

Couldn’t stand there motionless anymore.

Yet Jessman didn’t dare move.

Not if he wanted what the gunwhore was offering.

Not when the alternative was additional unknown punishment.

He’d already committed one sin.

Was already being punished for that crime.

He’d sought to dominate.

To control.

And now he was being shown that he had no control.

That the gunwhore held the power of domination over him.

His only choice was to submit.

“You bein’ good, Jessman,” the blond whispered. “Keep bein’ good an’ we see what you reward be.”

“Yes, Master, this boy understands,” he replied, heard the tenseness in his own voice and wondered if his colleagues would even recognize it.

Bells’ warmth retreated, hands moving over his shoulders, fingers undoing another pair of buttons. The warmth returning, lips touching exposed skin, wrenching a groan of frustrated desire from Jessman. He shuddered, shivering from the contrasts of the cold air moving over him and the hot body grinding against his pelvis. The feel of fabric-shrouded cock to cock touches that teased but gave no relief.

Gone. The phantom sensations of heat and that cock pressing his echoing through his body.

Like that first night.

The first time he’d had sex with the gunwhore.

Tease and retreat.

Excite and withdraw.

Maddening him with lust, Sister Pleasure’s demand until nothing could distract him from his need to have the other man.

Not even the touch of Sister Pain.

Two more buttons.

More kisses.

A damp tongue laving a nipple, pulling a whimper of desire from him.

The hard edge of teeth closing on the tender flesh, a tiny flash of Sister Pain lighting that part of his brain, that sector of his pleasure center up bright as lightning.

He moaned, eyes closed, swaying on his feet.

Hands pushing beneath the fabric of his open shirt. Hot on his skin, that damp point of heat flicking across his left nipple, fingertips closing on the right nipple, pinching. Another taste of Sister Pain burning bright in his brain, firm cock against his through the frustration of clothing between their eager flesh.

A gasp, whimpering cry, body trembling as his Master punished him with frustration, trained him under the whip of unfulfilled desire.

Willpower was the only thing keeping Bells from shoving David to the floor and fucking the man into a stupor. Willpower and the need to dominate, to possess the handsome man, to teach him that he was the one in charge. Him, not Jessman. Him.

At least for now.

At least until Jessman understood what it meant to submit.

Until he’d learned and understood the responsibility of being in control.

No, I can’t give that to anyone. I can go through the motions, but that’s all they are. Hollow motions to please customers who didn’t understand the difference between allowing them to have my body, and true submission.

It isn’t the positions of the bodies that matter, it’s the mind and emotions. Without those, it’s nothing but an empty game.

And that was the difference he had with David. The man held nothing back, gave himself fully to Bells. Surrendered everything he was to Bells.

And Bells loved him for it. Loved every sound he made. Every trembling second of what they had together.

No money could buy this.

No money was worth losing it.

Bells nipped the bit of flesh under his lips, teeth savaging the sensitive skin, drawing a gasping cry from the researcher, a shuddering breath following.

Every sound, every soft gasp from David enflamed Bells, made him want to drive his cock between the solid flesh of Jessman’s ass, to feel the heat of eager flesh surrounding him.

He wanted the corper. Wanted him bad.

But he wasn’t ready to give either of them what they desired.

Not yet.

He eased the shirt off of Jessman, touching his lover’s arms, his chest. Feeling the softness of natural human skin, the firmness of unenhanced muscle. Soft compared to his own body. He loved the feel of it under his palms, under his lips as he kissed his way along Jessman’s chest, licked the silken skin, let his teeth graze across a pebbled nipple. He went lower, tongue darting into Jessman’s navel, dampening skin, hands moving over David’s back, feeling the warmer skin marking every bruise that discolored his lover’s body.

Bruises left by would-be murderers.

Anger filled him. Twisted around inside his chest and tore, the rending fangs of a beast ripping at him, awakening something at the core of his being. A Thing that growled and thrashed within the bindings that sought to hold it dormant.

Gasping, trembling, he stepped away from David, looked at his lover’s passion-flushed face, his half-closed eyes through a tracery of aqua mist and emerald fog.

He shook himself, bells jangling a discord that brought the man’s dark eyes open to look at him. Worry creased Jessman’s forehead.

Bells turned away, staggered to the bar gasping for breath, denying the Thing freedom. Refuting Its existence.

No! Not real. It’s not real! I won’t accept it. Won’t believe in it!

Hands shaking, he grasped a bottle, poured himself a bourbon, downed it in a gulp.

“Bells, what is it?”

And he couldn’t answer. Wouldn’t give voice to the insanity of memory battling for freedom. Wouldn’t acknowledge a Thing that couldn’t exist. Didn’t exist, except in the dark corners of his mind where gibbering madness lurked amid the ghosts of a past he never wanted to reclaim.

Ethereal vapors shot through with lightning flash color spun around him, the Thing, the It testing the bindings that held it. Inky chains that restrained It.

Not real. Not real.

He kept telling himself that. But if It wasn’t real how had it gotten into his mind? Where had it come from? Why was it there?

Unending questions to which he had no answers.

Didn’t want to find the answers.

Brown eyes, dark hair.

A face. A sweet, kissable mouth.

He gritted his teeth until they squeaked from the pressure.

“Bells?”

He shook his head, poured and gulped another glass of the potent liquor, heard the soft tread of the researcher as he came closer.

Unbidden a hand touched his shoulder, a warm body pressed to his back, arms enfolded him, lips brushed his hair.

“Whatever I did, I’m sorry,” the man whispered.

“Not you,” he got out between a hard lump in his throat and a tightness in his chest that threatened to become tears. Tears with no reason behind them he would acknowledge. Tears from that lost past.

Brown eyes looking at him across a gulf of time.

He turned, looked up into eyes the same color. Reached up and closed his hand in short dark hair, pulled and kissed lips that tasted sweet as love. A breath shuddered in his chest, vision blurring he closed his eyes against the flood threatening to escape.

He wouldn’t cry.

Not in front of anyone.

And especially not in front of David.

David, who would misinterpret it as something meaningful. Something important. A wordless admission of attachment for him.

An attachment he could never admit.

But the tears weren’t for that. They weren’t for the man he’d come so close to losing.

They were for someone long gone.

A woman he’d lost a lifetime ago.

One he refused to remember.

Couldn’t remember.

Not ever.

Not if he wanted to retain the tenuous grasp he had on sanity.

Tenuous as the mist he knew he would still see if he opened his eyes.

He broke the kiss, turned in David’s grasp, his back to his lover, the man’s hard cock pressed to his ass as he leaned on the bar. “Let me go.”

No anger, no demand, a simple request that the taller man honored by releasing him, stepping away, giving a quiet sigh of disappointment, their sex play over before either of them was satisfied.

Bells reached behind himself, touched David’s hip. “I’m a moody bastard,” he murmured. “Just give me a few minutes to—” he paused, searching for an excuse, “forget what they almost did to you.”

David’s reflection in the mirror paled, eyes widening, surprise and understanding taking their turns on his face as his mind wrapped around the emotions and thoughts Bells’ words had awakened.

Probably the wrong excuse. Bells splashed more of the bourbon into the glass and took a sip. He watched David in the mirror, the man’s body an enticement he knew he was going to yield to the instant he could see it without the veil of ethereal mist that flowed away from him toward the researcher, reaching for Jessman the way Bells longed to.

He stared at the glass in his hand, the trace of liquor clinging to the inner surface.

“What the hell,” he murmured and set it down, spun. Awakening the song of his hair, he virtually pounced on the dark-haired man, taking him to the floor, lips closing over David’s, sealing the researcher’s shocked gasp inside their locked mouths. His tongue sought out Jessman’s, wrestled with it, erotic struggle as he rocked his hips, grinding his ass into the taller man’s groin just to feel the vibration of David’s moan as it flowed down his throat.

The blue and green vapor spun around them, no more substantial than the holo-adverts that adorned the concourse of most shopping malls.

Jessman didn’t see it. No one else ever saw it.

And he’d refuse to admit that he did, even to himself. From now on he would pretend it wasn’t there. It would go away. It always did. He just had to ignore the stuff and not let it keep him from doing what he wanted, or what he needed to do.

He hadn’t let it slow him down when he was killing David’s would-be killers. There was no reason to let it stop him now, either.

Right now the only thing he wanted or needed was the researcher, and some good old-fashioned fucking to make him forget the pointless crap locked in the back room of his mind.

The past was just that, the past. Gone. And nothing in it had any meaning. Not now. Not ever again.

He didn’t believe in ghosts.

Not even ones that whispered words of love.

And he didn’t believe in the serpentine Beast chained somewhere in the depths of his mind. Or was it part of his soul?

Whichever it was, he didn’t care.

All he cared about was the man under him.

The man moaning, hot and eager for his cock.

He broke the kiss, Jessman panting, struggling to breathe, the researcher gasping out. “I want...you...”

Bells regarded Jessman, silent stare, the feel of a hard cock under his ass urging him to do things that weren’t in the game plan with the other man.

Not for a while. That taste of domination he’d given David was all he’d get for quite some time regardless how much he would enjoy another chance to have the man’s impressive cock ramming deep into his ass.

The very thought turned the ache in his balls to a bonfire of lust.

Bells stood. Stepped away from Jessman. “On you feet, bitch,” he ordered, reverting to zonetalk because he’d already discovered the effect it had on the corper.

Jessman stood, erect cock shoving out the front of his trousers.

He regarded Jessman with cool dispassion on his face and raging want pulsing through his genitals. His insides ached, wanting to feel a cock rolling across his prostate. He had it bad for the tall man. Really bad.

Standing there half-naked, cock hard and wanting him, David was everything he’d ever desired in a lover. Handsome, intelligent and with enough courage to face the dual lash of the Sisters, able to endure the harsh demands he made on his lovers. David was much more than a client; he was his lover, his love, the one person who could accept what he was and not flinch or turn away.

Letting a smirk curl his lips, he reached for the button of Jessman’s trousers and undid it, the tips of his finger tickling across the skin of the man’s lower belly. Gripped the tab of the zipper and pulled it down, making it take time, making sure he stroked the hard rod of the man’s cock as he did.

Jessman groaned and Bells let the pleased smile surface, let the researcher see his amusement. He enjoyed putting Jessman through his paces. Loved the sound of the man’s deep voice when he moaned in pleasure, the fuckblush that darkened Jessman’s cheeks when he was thrusting his cock into the man’s crop-reddened ass.

He let go of Jessman’s trousers, watched them sag to reveal firm thighs below the boxers the man wore, the researcher’s cock tenting the material of his underwear even worse than it had with the pants in place.

Bells wished he had a riding crop, wished for the collection of toys that had been lost in David’s last apartment.

But he was good at improvising. He glanced at the bar, and the tie and belt draped over it. Spotted other useful things. Elegant glass formed in sleek shapes. The top of the bourbon decanter glinting under the lights.

His smile turned to a predatory grin as he sauntered to the bar, picked up the bourbon and poured a finger’s worth into the glass, brought the decanter’s top to his lips and let his tongue move in a suggestive sweep over the end.

Jessman groaned, foot lifting to come closer, dropping to the floor as he kept his place. His master hadn’t called him.

“Good boy,” Bells murmured. “You learnin’ more all the time ‘bout bein’ a good subbie.”

He took the end of the decanter into his mouth and licked off the traces of alcohol, Jessman’s eyes on the movement of his tongue over the smooth surface. He set the decanter’s top aside, poured the last bit of bourbon in his glass and drained it in a gulp.

The mist was fading, the color dimming to a washed out pallor that made easier to ignore. Soon it would be gone as if it had never been, and he could forget he’d seen it.

“Step out of your pants,” he ordered, watched as Jessman obeyed, licked his lips and watched the excited flush darken Jessman’s cheeks.

He motioned Jessman to come to him, the researcher dropping to his hands and knees, crawling to him. Bells’ smile widened. “You really is learnin’, ain’t you?” he asked, the throb of lust hammering in his groin, cock twitching, balls clenching as the need to cum rocked through him.

He wanted Jessman, and he was going to have him. Going to have the man fast and hard.

“This boy wishes to please Master,” Jessman murmured as he came to a stop at Bells’ feet and knelt with his head bowed, body straight, shoulders back.

His breath caught at the sight. Jessman made such a fine slave with his attractive, muscular body and handsome features. His rich brown eyes and dark hair.

“What I gonna do wif you, corper man?”

“Fuck me, please, Master,” was the eager response.

“What you done worth my cock up you ass? I ain’t seen you do nothin’ to deserve that yet.”

“What does Master want? I’ll do anything Master requests.”

“Hmm....” he pretended to think it over, prolonging Jessman’s anticipation, giving him time to envision what he might want, what might be expected of him. But Bells knew what he wanted already.

“You gotta face Sister Pain,” he replied.

Dark eyes met his gaze.

Slave and Master.

He leaned down, lips almost touching Jessman’s. “Can you do that?”

“Yes.” Fearless. Accepting.

Bells caressed Jessman’s face with his right hand, fingers moving from his cheek into the short-cropped hair, gripped and pulled. “Stand,” he told his lover as his left hand closed on the buckle end of David’s belt.

Obedient, the corper stood. He yanked David’s boxers down his legs, shoved him toward the bar and David moved, forced to step out of his underwear as he did.

“Place your hands on the edge and step back. I want you to have to lean forward to keep your hands on the bar.”

Jessman did as he was asked, the angle of his body giving Bells good access to the man’s ass.

He stood there looking at the smooth flesh, frowned at a few discolorations. Temporary legacy of the beating David had taken from Zeeboo, Killight and Katana Blue.

He gritted his teeth, angry all over again at the three men. Bells took a deep breath, let it out slow and easy, fighting the rage.

That was over. The bastards who’d dared hurt what was his dead by his own hands.

Bells drew the leather through his hands, felt the grain under his palms. Cheap, but real leather. Just the right stiffness, the right feel. He doubled it, got a good grip on the buckle end. Bells didn’t give Jessman any warning. He knew from the precum dripping off the researcher’s purpled cock that it wasn’t needed. He lifted the belt, brought it down on David’s ass, heard the crack of leather on flesh, the sharp intake of breath as the first bright stripe appeared on the man’s ass. Flesh the offering. Pain the sacrifice. And Jessman willing to pay the price for what they both desired: a good fuck.

His cock up David’s ass, the researcher taking him as he jerked his lover’s dick until they both climaxed.

What they wanted.

But not yet.

Bells waited, let the anticipation build and brought the belt down with the same amount of force, and let it rest on the spot he’d just struck, let Jessman feel the cool leather resting on the hot stripe.

Jessman groaned a wordless appreciation of the sensation.

Bells stepped closer, hand caressing along Jessman’s hip, thumb touching the edge of one hot welt. He bent down to press his lips to the abused skin, heard a sharp intake of breath, lapped at the raised flesh with the tip of his tongue, wetting it. He blew on it gently, Jessman shuddering with the feeling.

He stepped away, brought the belt down on the wet place, heard David’s gasp at the increased pain it caused. Wet skin, firm leather, a new sensation, a different flavor of pain like the belt. They’d used a cat o’nine tails, a riding crop, but never the wider strap of a belt.

The belt arced up, descended in a wicked slap that wrenched a real cry of pain from Jessman. A glance, checking his lover’s condition, the bar of needy flesh not as firm, but still as purple and wanting as it had been before the slightly too-brutal contact of the belt.

“Master,” a sigh, tight from pain, the painful strike almost too much for the man to bear.

Welt rising higher than the others, Bells trailed the belt over it, saw Jessman’s cock twitch, harden, the man’s legs shaking from reaction, from the new experience screaming through him. Pain, lust, hurt, need warring on the battleground of Jessman’s emotions, flesh and mind under siege.

The next blow was gentle by comparison, turning skin red without making a raised area of flesh.

David moaned and Bells brought the belt down in another brutal lash that ended in a choked scream of, “Master!” that echoed off the walls.

The belt cracked across the last shreds of the sound, drowning them out, a new scream ripping free, a sob following it.

“M...Ma...Master, this boy..is sss...sorry!”

Bells kissed the trio of welts, heard Jessman’s sobs. “Punishment for you sin,” he told his lover, the zonetalk flowing from his lips, driving home the point. “Now tell me what you dun wrong.”

“T...tried to...dom...” was the choked answer.

“Tha’s right, Jessman. Ain’t no subbie fucktoy gonna dom me. You be my slave, not my master. You got that?”

“Y...yes...” Jessman sobbed, the sound of his pain burning into Bells’ mind, fanning lust to an inferno of need.

Chapter Eight

Breaking Through

His butt cheeks hurt. Hurt worse than the first time Bells had introduced him to the Sweet Sisters and their maddening kisses.

But compared to the beating he’d taken at the hands of the two ghoulish zoners, it was nothing. Nothing but his lover training him to obey, to submit and never cross the line.

He’d done something wrong when he’d tried to dominate Bells, overstepped the bounds that defined their relationship, mistaking his own moments of power for power over the blond killer.

It proved to be a serious error.

Facing down Hartland wasn’t the same.

Fighting corporate politics wasn’t the same.

Even confronting the three zoners who’d come to kill him and doing his best to fight back wasn’t the same as trying to dominate the man he called Master.

Master of his body, his flesh.

Of his heart and soul.

He’d made a mistake he’d never repeat.

As his Master had commented, he’d learned, the lesson driven home by pain.

He felt the belt as it was laid over his back, draped there. A reminder of his sin. The touch of the leather to help him recall the resulting punishment.

A hand stroked his hip, soft lips touched the hot welts, his lover’s other hand gripping his hip, then sliding around in a caress that ended with slender fingers taking hold of his cock. He shuddered, moaned as that cool hand gave his erection a slow stroke. The touch felt so good, he whimpered as the thumb swept across the head of his cock, spreading the slick wetness of precum, the sensation blazing across the sensitive flesh to ignite in his mind, the feeling tearing a louder cry of need from him.

“Shhhh, Jesssman. You ‘kay, no need to wear out you voice so soon. We gonna be at this a long time.”

The words ‘a long time’ rolled around inside his head. He didn’t want a long time. He wanted to cum.

But what he wanted wasn’t what he’d get.

His Master was in control, not him.

“Feels good,” he moaned, felt the gunwhore’s jean-clad crotch pressed to his ass, the man’s hips moving, hard cock teasing his ass as his dick was stroked, the motion firm and slow. Maddening, like everything the blond killer did to him. Meant to drive him wild, make him scream, make him want.

And he wanted.

Wanted it all.

The pain, the pleasure, the hard rod of the blond’s cock up his ass stroking him inside, the firm hand wrapped around his erection, blinding him with mind-shattering passion.

Jessman lifted his head, saw himself in the mirror, face streaked with tears. Heard the music of the gunwhore’s hair as the blond stepped away from him, released his cock, leaving him bereft of any sensation but the burn of the welts on his butt, the cool air around him and the weight of the belt over his hips.

A warning against further sins.

A reminder of the punishment he’d endured for his most recent mistake.

His lover walked toward him, Bells’ easy grace, the way he moved leaving David struggling to breathe. The blond stood, watching him in the mirror. Reached down and gripped the bottom edge of the thin tee he wore. Bells pulled it up over his head and tossed it aside, the bells in his hair jangling. Jessman’s cock jumped at the sight of smooth golden skin and sleek muscle. The gunbelt was next, the black leather slipping off of the blond, dropping to the floor with a soft thud Jessman barely heard over the hammering of his own heart.

David swallowed, gasped for air, his whole body on fire, blood gone to molten heat in his veins, erection so hot and needing he didn’t know why he hadn’t lost himself and cum.

But he knew why.

His Master hadn’t said he could.

Neon flame met his gaze in the mirror, the blue so intense it felt like it was searing into his own cybered optics.

“What you lookin’ at, corper?”

“Perfection,” Jessman replied, breathless and aching.

The zoner smiled at that. A genuine smile, not the faint trace that was the zoner’s usual concession to pleased amusement. Jessman’s heart broke with the beauty of his lover’s face, the transformation from killer to human being. His lover’s smile as spectacular as the light of dawn that filled your vision the morning after meeting death face to face and surviving the encounter.

Jessman knew such moments well. He’d faced death, survived the night and lived to see the dawn three times.

And every time it was because this incredible man had saved his life.

He froze as Bells reached for the top button of his jeans. Each twitch of a finger, the ripple of tendons in the back of his lover’s hands held his gaze captive. Mesmerized. A narrow trail of spun-gold strands came into view. The second button opened, revealing more of the soft curls.

David shuddered, lifted a hand from the bar, wanting to touch, to help Bells undress.

The smile vanished.

Cold warning stare, the gunwhore’s gaze pinning him in place.

He let his hand drop, gripped the edge of the bar. Stood there trembling. Eager to touch. To taste. To drive the blond mad with lust the way Bells drove him to the brink of sanity. He longed to feel the smaller man yield to passion, to hear him cry out as he came.

But he wasn’t allowed to move, so he stayed where he was, helpless to do anything but watch as the gunwhore revealed his body to Jessman.

“Good boy,” Bells murmured and undid the next button on his jeans, the head of his cock revealed.

Jessman moaned at the sight of it. The damp slickness coating the darkened skin made him want a taste.

A smile twitched the corners of Bells’ mouth, but he didn’t grin this time, the reward of his Master’s smile revoked because he’d almost made another mistake. He’d almost moved from where his Master put him, almost made the error of moving without permission.

Too many mistakes.

He had to do better.

Bells removed his boots. Jeans still half buttoned, he sauntered closer, leaned in until Jessman could feel his warm breath.

A brief blur of movement Jessman couldn’t track was followed by Bells reaching up to touch David’s shoulder. The cool hand trailed along his back until the fingers arrived at the place where the belt rested. He saw his lover grip the buckle end of the belt, the leather sliding over his skin, teasing, tantalizing. Warning.

“Ain’t gonna learn, are you?”

He lowered his head, closed his eyes. Knew what was coming. Another round of punishment that he deserved. “Forgive me, Master, your boy is foolish. He doesn’t mean to make so many mi—”

The belt cracked, stinging fire across his hips, the tip of the belt snapping painfully on his right butt cheek, drawing a flood of tears from his eyes.

He opened his eyes, blinked away tears.

It hurt. But not as bad as he’d expected. Not as bad as the punishment he’d endured for daring to try and dom the gunwhore.

He deserved the punishment.

Found that he expected it, had started to crave the pain.

The pain given to him by his Master. Pain with intense pleasure as the reward he could handle. Accept. Want. But only if it was from Bells.

He blinked a few more times, trying to clear his vision. Discovered that Bells wasn’t in his line of sight. He started to turn his head and froze as something ice cold brushed across his enflamed buttocks. Cold and wet.

Ice, soothing the sting of the welts.

Warm wetness, a tongue laving across the cold.

He groaned at the contrasts. Cold and hot as they reawakened the sting of the welts. The throbbing pain of his abused flesh.

Cold and hard, the piece of ice was traced over his anus, sending a chill through him, pulling a gasping cry out of him. The ice moved over his asscheeks, returned to the tight ring of muscle where it was pressed hard, breaching, entering him, muscles closing around it, a finger pushing it deeper.

His hips bucked when the hard ice touched the good place inside of him, brushed across his prostate and sent a flash of electric pleasure rocketing through his body.

Pleasure for the pain.

His Master showing him what something as simple as a cube of ice could do to him. He groaned.

An arm wrapped around his hips, forcing him to go still, the finger shoving the ice deeper.

“Please! Bells, please!” he cried out, body straining for another taste of stimulation inside him.

“You get what you want soon enough,” the gunwhore murmured, voice raw and tense. Aroused.

His Master wanted him. Desired him.

David moaned, gripped the edge of the bar tighter.

He couldn’t help it; mind teetering on the brink, Jessman groaned, cock bobbing as he pushed onto the intruding digit.

A hand smacked his thigh. “Do not move!”

His whole body tensed, mind fighting the urge to push, the need for more stimulus. The finger retreated and he gritted his teeth in frustration, biting back the curses. He couldn’t take this. Wanted the teasing to stop, the fucking to start.

Another piece of ice, cold, soothing on the welts, glided over his butt, slipped into the crease of his ass, pushed and went inside, the icy stroke over his prostate tearing a cry composed of frustration and pleasure from his panting lips.

“Yeah, that’s good, isn’t it?” Bells’ voice from behind him, the blond’s hands stroking along his butt, down his thighs and up, fingertips teasing his balls.

“Please...”

Flame-blue eyes met his in the mirror. Sweat dampened David’s hair, tears streaked his cheeks and Bells stood there, cool and composed.

Master and slave.

Bells approached with the same confident swagger, maddening to watch. David whimpering for want of the man, his cock. The cool killer who could do so many things to drive Jessman mad with need.

Like the things Bells was doing now.

A hand brushed along his ribs, moved up his shoulder.

“You almost ready, Jessman.”

He wanted to grab the blond, throw him down, fuck him until Bells screamed his name.

Stupid. Just a stupid fantasy. It would never happen.

He glanced down, saw the darkened head of Bells’ cock peeking from the partly open jeans and licked his lips at the thought of having it in his mouth.

Bells gave him a slow, sexy grin that left his heart racing.

Still smiling, the blond ducked under Jessman’s arm, pushed him back and gripped his hair, pressed a kiss to his lips that stole every molecule of oxygen from David’s lungs, left him gasping and dazed.

Breaking the kiss, Bells met Jessman’s gaze, placed one hand on David’s shoulder, the other on the edge of the bar. The hint of a smile curled his mouth as Bells lifted himself to the glossy bar top. He spread his legs, the tip of his cock right under Jessman’s nose.

David stared, tongue darting out to dampen his lips, mouth watering at the thought of how the man’s flesh tasted, the sweet-salt taste of the precum beading there a treat for the researcher. He thought of how that cock felt when it drove into him, striking the bundle of nerves deep inside him, sending him into a realm of bliss.

Heaven.

The gunwhore leaned back on the bar top, bracing himself on his elbows. “Do you want what you starin’ at or is you jus’ plannin’ on lookin’ at my cock?”

The researcher just stared at him for a few ragged breaths. “Master gives permission for me....” Jessman paused, tried again. “Master gives permission for this boy to touch him?”

He sat up, caressed David’s face. “Master does,” he agreed.

Jessman reached for the jeans, and he shook his head. “I didn’t say you could use your hands.”

The man frowned, looked down at the head of his cock, raised his gaze and looked at his face. Puzzled. Unsure how to proceed.

He leaned back, scooted forward. “You’re clever, you’ll figure it out.”

A hot wet mouth closed over the head of his cock, tongue darting into the slit, laving over the sensitive skin. He sighed, closed his eyes. It felt good. Very good.

But it stopped too soon. He felt Jessman’s nose brush over the head of his erection, teeth closing on his jeans and he grinned. It certainly didn’t take him long to figure it out.

Teeth clamped on the fabric and pulled; the metal button didn’t open. Warm breath flowed through the cloth, warmed his cock and balls, teasing. He rewarded his boytoy with a soft sigh of pleasure, encouraging him without words.

Jessman gave a frustrated grunt and pushed at the button with his tongue.

He felt the thing resisting David’s effort. Metal bit into his tender flesh and Bells groaned, shuddering at the hint of pain. He arched his back, giving Jessman more room to work.

The button popped free, exposing more of his cock to Jessman’s eager mouth, the firm sweep of his tongue, a brief flash of pain as a tooth grazed him. His breath caught, a shudder passing through his whole body at the second tiny hint of Sister Pain’s presence.

Another button popped loose and his cock sprang free right into Jessman’s hot mouth. He groaned as the researcher took his full length in, the head of his cock hitting the back of his lover’s throat, lips wrapped firmly around it as he sucked.

“Good, Jessman, real good,” he murmured and ran his fingers through the man’s damp hair. A tongue slipped over the head of his cock, upper teeth grazing skin. He groaned, enjoying the feel of a skilled, hungry mouth that teased and sent a slow burn of heat deep inside him. Felt the pressure coiling in his balls.

He’s good, damn good at sucking dick. I could just lay here and let him get me off, let him pleasure me like this for hours.

Maybe one of these days.

There would be more days, more nights with the researcher. Many many more since he was now in the exclusive employ of the handsome man, the deal done, payments to Katerina for his services paid in full for a month courtesy of NeuroTech’s accounting department.

Bells let Jessman take him deep a few more times then stopped him, pushing the man away.

“Please,” David moaned. “Please.”

He grasped Jessman’s wrists and drew them to the waistband of his jeans. “You want my cock, you better get me out these pants.”

Bells braced his hands on the bartop and David pulled, revealing the rest of his groin to the man’s lustful gaze. Jessman leaned in, placed a kiss on the head of Bells’ cock, engulfed the entire length. Bells groaned appreciatively, smiled as Jessman let his cock go and moved lower to kiss his ballsack, finishing by pulling his jeans off and tossing them aside.

Jessman stood there looking at him, expression showing the emotions ripping through the man. Lust at the forefront. Admiration and something else, something gentler, warmer. Something that he could easily mistake for love.

Blond or not, he wasn’t that much of a fool.

Or maybe he was, because it sure seemed to be love.

Wishful thinking. Damn fool is what you is for thinkin’ that man gonna love someone like you. Dumbfucker’s what you is.

He reached for the taller man, pulled him close for an exploring kiss, his arms going around Jessman, holding him. He caressed along the man’s back, touched the welts and swallowed Jessman’s answering cry.

They were both ready.

He slipped off the bar without breaking the kiss, his tongue wrestling with Jessman’s, another deep moan rumbling in his throat. Jessman voicing his need. Giving sound to desire.

Bells broke the kiss, their eyes meeting, locking.

No words, just raw emotion, unfettered need showing, Bells conceding his own passions, letting them show where the other man could see it. On his face, in the softening of his expression.

Not love. He wouldn’t let the other man have that. Wouldn’t let it be seen by anyone.

But desire. Open need. Yes, that he could and did give before he turned away, picked up Jessman’s tie and guided the man’s hands to the top of the bar. Jessman watched him in the mirror, excited by what he was doing before he even got started.

He saw the shudder pass through his lover’s body as he tied the soft cloth around his wrists, knotting the free end around the water faucet.

Done he captured David’s mouth for another dizzying kiss that left Jessman leaning on the bar for support.

“I think you be jus’ ‘bout ready,” he murmured as he headed for Jessman’s behind. He picked up the belt from where it had fallen on the floor, flicked it over the waiting ass.

A fresh sting awakened in the cooling welts as his belt smacked across the abused skin. The blow hadn’t been hard enough to cause a new welt to form, but it hurt, sent a new wave of raw heat through Jessman’s body another burst of excitement through his groin, His cock pulsed, balls going tight in reaction to the hurt.

He heard a wild jangle of bells and turned to see what his lover was doing. Felt his answer in a hot mouth as it closed around the head of his cock and licked the precum away. A faint vibration through the hard shaft, the sound one of approval that told him Bells liked what he was doing, enjoyed the taste of the precum slicking the head of his cock. The pull and push of being blown tore through him with the force of a hurricane wind. He gasped, tried to clutch the bar top, but with his hands tied, he couldn’t get a grip on anything.

“Going to cum!” he warned, felt a sharp pinch and groaned as the gunwhore stopped his impending release. “Bastard!” he grated out.

A hand cracked on his hip and he jumped at the pain. Another mistake made. Cursing at the man who was his Master.

“This boy is sorry,” he panted as the mouth worked him, drove him close a second time. Stopped too soon, body straining for release. He groaned in frustration, the sound of the chiming making him shudder.

Trained animal. The sound of the man’s hair made him shiver with need.

He looked in the mirror. Saw Bells standing motionless, watching him with the cool zoner mask firmly in place. The only thing to show the blond’s aroused condition was the firm rod of flesh rising from the golden tangle of curls.

Bells reached out, ran a hand over his belt-lashed ass. The man’s fingers were cool as they moved over the welts, touching them, both soothing and enflaming the hot skin.

“I got plans for you, Jessman. But you ain’t been good enough for some the things I wanna do wif you.” The blond moved closer, and Jessman turned to see a pink tongue dart out and lap at one of the welts. The wet flesh followed the line of the injured skin to the crack of his ass. He groaned as it moved along the crack, dipped in to touch his anus, stopped.

“I think you learn to be good. I right ‘bout that?”

“Yes!” he groaned out the agreement as the tongue returned to his butt, touching another welt, dipping inward to thrust at the tight ring of muscle. Jessman moaned, spread his legs wider, lost in the teasing touch at his hole.

He heard a faint sound that was quickly lost in the shimmering notes of the silver in his lover’s hair. Something harder, bigger than the gunwhore’s tongue pressed between his butt cheeks and he gasped. Cool wetness trickled into the hot crevice of his butt, hit the pucker of his ass.

Flesh drove into him in a sudden expansion of his anus that left him trembling and seeing white flashes in his vision, the head of Bells’ cock hitting the right place and nearly overwhelming him with the explosive sensation.

A hand grasped his cock, fingers and palm coated with something very slick, stroked him as the rod of flesh inside retreated and slammed home a second time.

“Master!” he cried it out, reacting to the smaller man’s claiming of his body, his mind. Drowning him in rampaging pleasure that spun him in a whirlpool of intense sensation. Cock driving home hard and fast, hand pumping his erection at a pace nothing short of furious.

No control.

No need for it.

He was being controlled. Owned. Enslaved.

“Who do you belong to?” Bells demanded, voice a rough growl.

“You, Master! This boy belongs to you!”

The thrusts went deeper, hard, and fast. So fast he felt nothing but a flashburn of intense pleasure that spread from his prostate and balls, along the full length of his cock.

“Cum, Jessman!” Bells growled the order. His pelvis slapped into Jessman’s ass, forcing him to brace his forearms on the bar or be knocked off his feet. The hand not around his cock smacked his hip hard enough to hurt.

“Cum!” the command snarled this time. A relentless demand for obedience.

Hard flesh inside him, strong hand around his cock, the feel of the slaps on his hip united and flowed up his spine to blaze through his mind, the orgasm so powerful his vision blanked.

A faint trace of awareness returned, the cock inside him driving as hard and fast as it had been before he’d gone over the edge. The hand wrapped around his cock was still holding firm flesh, not the limp result of an orgasm.

“How?” he gasped as his body headed for another mindshattering release, the cock inside him and the hand around his erection merciless in their demands.

Bells gave no answer, his erection jolting across the place inside Jessman that made him see comets shooting across his optics. Merciless. The gunwhore was using him for pleasure. Master and slave. The way it should be.

He cried out as another sensation, neither pleasure or pain, seethed through his insides. Coiled deep in his body, filled his balls, made his aching cock tingle.

Sex enhancement drug.

Perfectly legal.

And nothing Jessman had ever tried.

Heat and light billowed outward through his body from the cock stroking his insides. From the firm grip on his cock, the clenched sack of his balls.

He groaned, body arching, legs going rigid as the sensation took control, wiped out thought and left only his ability to feel.

Feel the hardness of flesh moving in and out of his ass, every stroke sending a trail of sparks through him. The fingers and palm of his lover’s hand became sound that rose in a symphonic crescendo, the notes blending with the sparks and the flickers of lightning that became part of the whole each time the man’s hand struck him.

A scream of ecstasy tore from him as he climaxed, the sound echoed by another voice.

Bells clutched David to him as he spiraled out of control, cum spilling into his lover, pouring out of him as Jessman’s cum spurted over his hand.

Jessman’s legs gave out, and he eased the taller man to the floor, staggered over to untie his wrists, his own legs shaky from the after effect of the drug. One of the few he’d mess with, it had more effect on the bottom man who got the full dose of the drug as it lubed his ass.

He sat down on the carpet beside Jessman, the researcher gasping and trembling beside him, his own body starting to shake in reaction. It couldn’t hurt either of them, nothing sold in a corporate mall had any lasting effects. But it did leave the user tired.

And for him it left him tired and hungry, the red glow of a low energy indicator warning him he needed to eat soon or risk falling on his ass.

He absently licked David’s cum from his fingers and watched a beatific smile light Jessman’s face. The man was so damn attractive. Sure, he knew some of it was enhancement surgery, but it didn’t really matter. He liked what he was seeing. Wanted to keep it for his own.

Perez. He’s trying to get between us. I wonder what that bastard’s game is? Unfortunately, he suspected he’d know soon enough.

He stretched, leaned his shoulders against the front of the bar waiting while the tingling in his lower body faded. Jessman scooted closer, rested his head on Bells’, his cheek pressing against the braids on the top of his head. He sighed in contentment as Bells put his arm around Jessman, holding the other man, the two of them sitting there like lovers, rather than gunwhore and client. They sat there for a while until their breathing and heartbeats returned to more normal rates.

“That was, amazing. Thank you,” Jessman finally said.

“You liked it okay then?”

“I did. A lot.”

“Might buy another dose sometime. Don’t wanna to use too much, cause it stops working if you do.”

“I guess that’s what happens with most of those sexual enhancement things.”

“Yeah,” Bells agreed and closed his eyes.

“We smell like whores,” his lover remarked.

“Nothin’ new for me.” Bells was watching the low energy indicator in his visual suite flickering between red and yellow. His systems unsure of his actual condition because of the drug in his system, the lingering effect of the beating he’d taken at the hands of the Drakuls and Katana Blue. Another indicator began to flash, blinking red. Nanites depleted, needing to be replenished because of the battle he’d fought. The drug that his body absorbed triggering the alert when the polymer micromechanisms failed to disperse into his bloodstream to clean it.

Bells closed his eyes, read the telltales that told of damage that wasn’t repaired. Injuries that needed tending. Nothing hurt, but that wasn’t a surprise either, considering the boosted state of his body. He’d been functioning most of the prior night under an endorphin high, and the levels of that hormone were still elevated enough for him not to notice the cracked ribs he was sure he’d sustained.

He had to have the damage he’d sustained in the fight checked out. Needed to have the nanites that did the damage control replenished, give them what they needed to repair any remaining internal damage.

And that meant a return home to the LCFree.

His stomach growled.

“You can’t be hungry already,” David said as he moved away.

Bells opened his eyes to find Jessman kneeling beside him, a frown pulling his brows down.

So serious. He liked the concern showing there. Real worry.

“Cyber and drugs burn lots of energy.” Bells grinned. “So does fucking.”

David laughed, the sound bubbling along Bells’ spine, making his balls start to ache. He’d just fucked the man and wanted him already, which proved how wrapped up in the researcher he was getting. He loved the tones of David’s voice. So rich and full, like well-aged bourbon.

On an impulse he grabbed Jessman, pressed his mouth to the researcher’s and felt it open for him, accept the penetration of his tongue as Jessman embraced him and got a good hold of a few braids. He pulled and Bells shuddered at the trace of pain, broke the kiss.

“You so bad, Jessman. What I gonna do wif you, huh?”

Jessman grinned. “Fuck me…” the man replied instantly, gave him a fast kiss, then finished by saying, “Master.”

“You is persistent, I give you that.”

“Will you give me more cock?”

Bells couldn’t help it, he started to laugh. “You gonna turn inta a ho, Jessman. Then what you do?”

Jessman grinned at him. “Make you pay for my services, maybe?”

“You funny, you is.” Bells got to his feet. “You gotta take a shower and you ass needs to get to bed.”

“But I don’t want to.” Jessman argued as Bells offered the researcher his hand, pulled the man to his feet.

“Too bad, boy. You goin’ ta bed, Master says so.”

Bells started picking up his clothes and getting dressed.

David frowned. “Are you going somewhere?”

The silver bells answered, ringing at the blond’s nod.

“You’re supposed to be guarding me!” Jessman argued and took both of the man’s slim hands in his own to stop him from getting dressed.

“Don’t worry.” The zonetalk accent was gone, his lover pulling his hands free and tugging on his shirt.

“But what if someone comes to kill me while you’re gone?” An edge of panic, of fear had crept into his tone.

“I’m not going to be gone long, Jessman.” He picked up his boots. “I’ll need some money. I have to go home for a while and get some things I need.”

“I’ll buy what you need from the mall!” Jessman argued, dropping to his knees beside his lover. “Tell me what it is?”

Eyes of blue flame regarded him, the man’s face losing every trace of emotion. “It’s personal.”

“You’ll be back? Tonight?”

Bells shrugged.

“But what if someone comes for me again?”

“The guy who was hiring them is dead. Until MLC finds someone else to do their errand work, you’ll be safe.”

“When will you be back? You’re being paid—”

The blond kissed him, silencing his protest, pulled away after a moment, offered him a slight smile. “It depends on how long what I’m going to do takes.”

Boots on, Bells stood, held out his hand. “Give me a couple hundred if you have it. I’ll have a fine to pay.”

David found his jacket, pulled out some crisp corpdollars. Two hundreds and a fifty. “Will that be enough?”

“Should be.”

A smile curved the man’s sensual mouth, and the researcher’s chest went tight, another wave of passion overwhelming him, drowning him in a confusing tide that swept away his common sense.

“I love you,” he blurted out, and saw the blond’s face go blank.

Bells stood there watching him. Silent. Face unreadable.

This was it. The end of what they shared.

David’s mouth went dry, the taste of bitter regret on his tongue. Tears fogged his vision, a chill filling him.

Bells’ head tilted, cobalt gaze regarding Jessman from a face cool as stone. A muted carillon accompanied the blond’s nod. “Yeah, I figured you did.”

Jessman waited, his heart feeling as if it would stop.

But the blond didn’t say anything else, just reached up and pulled David’s head down for a kiss that left the researcher breathless, his cock aching.

“I’ve got to go,” Bells said as he pulled away, heading for the door of the man’s apartment.

A hard knot filled Jessman’s chest. “I don’t want you to go, Bells. I want you to stay here with me.”

The blond turned to look at Jessman over his shoulder, neon flame regarding him through the tangle of braids. Beautiful, but icy cold. “I have to go.” Bells hand closed on the doorknob, the man pausing for a moment, head bowed.

“Love you,” he whispered so softly that Jessman wasn’t sure he’d even heard the two words that meant more to him than anything in his life ever had or ever would.

Then the blond was gone, taking the music of his bells and his dulcet voice with him.

But the music in David’s heart was louder than a symphony, elation filling his soul, a giddy schoolboy laugh bursting from him as the door of his apartment clicked shut.

On the other side of the door, Bells just smiled, a warmth that was purely David Jessman filling him.

They were both fools, and he wouldn’t trade such foolishness for any amount of money.

Three little words. Three little words spoken with the weight of truth resting on them.

I love you.

He closed his eyes; let them sink into the dark corners of his soul.

He would protect David even if it meant he had to wash the floors of Megalli-Loran Corporation in the blood of its management, or walk through the fires of Hell itself.

David was his, and nothing and no one was going to come between them.

End