Page 17 of Vallaverse: Twist
“Are you going to pout? Or sulk?” she asks.
“Just tell me why.”
She sighs dramatically. “To bait him.”
“This isn't a game or a paycheck, Kris. Brooks is not a client.”
She laughs and takes a sip of her drink. “He most certainly is. He might be the biggest fish of them all. I was just making the worm look nice and juicy.”
“No,” I argue. “You didn't. What you did is ask for a Valla rampage.”
She blinks innocently. “Why would he go on a rampage?”
I rake my hands through my hair, yanking on the roots. “Brooks isn't a client, Kris.”
“Is he special?”
“Stop it.”
“You seem terribly lucid today.”
“Brooks isn't a client.”
“No,” she sighs. “I suppose not. But he will pay through the nose for a few minutes with you. That's a fact.”
“I can't see him again, Kris. I can't.”
“Just imagine how good it would feel if you were flying high and boiling hot and I handed you over to that Valla for a week.” Her voice trails off wistfully.
My dick is immediately hard at the mention of Brooks and R in the same sentence.
“No.”
“You'll do it.”
“I won't.”
Her lips curl around the rim of her glass in a small smile. “We'll see.”
***
I don't want to ask her for it. She told me she'd give it to me when I asked for it. I'd rather die than ask her for anything right now, especially mymedicine.But it's been two days and I'm so sick. I'll only get sicker and sicker and sicker until I'm no more than a pile of sick and bones on the floor begging for relief. That relief will have a cost, though, and I'm terrified of what it will be.
Deep down, I know what she's doing. I know what her goal is, and the longer I go without R, the more confident I am that I'm right. Terribly right.
Kris is using me to climb social and para-political ladders. The clients started out as her friends, whom she wanted me to meet and whom she knew she could trust me with. But they stopped being friends somewhere along the way, and now all of her clients are high profile in one way or another. And they're all financially loaded. As the client list improved, so did the living quarters Kris set up. The penthouse we're currently living in came right after I spent a week with an Alpha in the rafters of the proverbial food chain who had very specific and very cruel tastes. He's one of the few that I can remember in vivid detail, and it isn't a fond memory.
Kris sees Brooks as a big fish. If I thought of him as someone who didn't matter, I would agree with her. But he might be the only person in the world who actually does matter. He didn't deserve to see Kris crawling all over me. He didn't deserve seeing her hands on me at all. She did that on purpose to show him what he could have access to if he's willing to pay her price. She's done it before; I've just never cared about it—until now. Until now all that mattered was my next dose and the ecstasy waiting for me on the other side of it. None of this was real until just a little while ago. Up until I couldn't look away from his eyes, it was all just noise.
Guilt and shame are two different things, and they're both so heavy inside me right now that breathing is difficult. I can't let this happen. I can't let her turn Brooks into just another client. I can't let her sell me to him.
I was with Brooks the first time I took R. One of his guys gave me some to try. He said Brooks would enjoy it as much as I did. And he did. We both did. It was supposed to be a one-off thing that was fun for a night.
But I liked it too much.
Everything felt so much better with R. Every single orgasm was made of celestial matter, and I couldn't stop.
I. Couldn't. Stop.
