Chapter 3
three
. . .
“What the fuck!?!” Eric screams, the hole in the couch next to his leg still smoldering.
“God, that was … louder than I thought.” Junko winces and tugs on her ear before shaking her head and locking back in, a delicious smile on her beautiful face. “Sorry.”
“It’s ok, baby.” I give Junko a reassuring smirk.
“It's a fucking gun you fucking bitch! Did you think it was going to be qui–“ Eric wants to turn to admonish Junko, but he is once again met with the barrel of her gun.
“This is the problem with men like you. You never listen when you're being spoken to, or know when you're allowed to speak … or when you should shut the fuck up and let the girls have their fun,” Junko says, grinding the muzzle against his temple.
“Fuck you! You two don’t know who you’re fucking with! You’re not even women.”
Junko brings the butt of the pistol down on the crown of Eric’s head, then puts the muzzle back at his temple. She doesn’t hit him hard enough to draw blood, just to get his attention. “Misgender us again, bitch, and you’re dead.”
“Fuck you.”
“Not a chance.” Junko smirks. “Men like you don’t deserve the kind of love I can give.”
“Well, you … women …” he says grudgingly, valuing his self-preservation over histransphobia for surely the first time in his life, “have no idea what you’ve gotten into. Ihave money, I can ruin your lives overnight.”
Junko shakes her head. “Money can't buy everything, Eric ...”
“Including self-awareness,” I say, sitting down in a chair next to the couch. “You didn't notice your grounds crew didn't come in today, did you?”
He narrows his eyes at me, searching his mind for a scrap of memory of the past day.
“We couldn't have spent all morning disconnecting your security systems if they were snooping around, so they had to go off to an emergency across town all day. It's funny what a couple hundred dollars and screaming at someone over the phone can do, really,” I say. “And, god, if you’re actually a billionaire, why are you hiring subcontractors for that stuff instead of having a dedicated staff? Don’t you find it beneath you that you have to share your staff with a bunch of other men who want to appear important?”
“What do you--“
“You're still talking. Why the fuck are you still talking while Carmilla is talking?” Junko taps the barrel of the gun against the side of his head before pointing it directly at him again.
She looks halfway primed to pull the trigger again, this time against Eric's head, but I shoot her a look to calm down. We have all night.
I will say, holy shit, Junko looks hot holding a gun like this, the tip of her tongue pinched between her teeth, the anticipation of it all making her giddy.
I remind myself not to get on her bad side, because I’m really very sure that she’d ruin me if she needed to …
and not in the fun way she usually ruins me.
“Junko's a little more high-strung than I am; she's really looking forward to hurting you. So I advise you to calm down,” I say.
“You're lucky I'm letting you stay alive. Her plan was to kill you the second we walked in the door, so … I guess thank the theater kid in me that wants to make all of this so much more dramatic.”
I stare at Eric and let the silence linger. A few seconds stretch to ten, then twenty. He's quiet as a mouse.
“Wow, you can actually shut your mouth when your life's on the line. Good boy.” I playfully tap his nose with my fingertip before twisting around to look out the window and the coastline where our escape is waiting. “It’s just a shame, if you’d learned that earlier, you wouldn’t have to die tonight. ”
There’s a moment of panic on Eric’s face, but it quickly turns to dismissal. “You’re not fucking killing me tonight.”
“What part of any of this makes you think I’m lying?” I ask. “Junko …” I wince at her again, acting as if she’s about to pull the trigger, this time with lethal results. She knows that she can’t end it that way, but Eric sure doesn’t, based on his flinch away from the gun.
“We'll let you sit in suspense about whether or not we’re serious about it … sound good?” I say, twisting on my heel as I keep eyes on Eric. I envy Junko’s sensible sneakers right now, as my feet were fucking killing me, but of course I had to put the show on for Eric.
“If you kill me, you’ll have half of the state police and the FBI on your asses before you can even leave my property,” Eric seethes.
I shrug. “Maybe we would. But … maybe we’ve already written your suicide note, completely airtight.
Maybe we’ve sent it to all the news channels and posted it to your social media.
Maybe your fellow billionaire parasites have already started posting breathless tributes that their AI chatbots wrote for them, saying how good of a guy you were, how essential you were to the tech community, and how your presence will be missed. ”
Eric eyes me, the slow calculations going on in his head. “Bullshit.”
“You think?” I ask. I reach down to my purse and pull out a phone. It doesn’t have a case on it, which is the indicator of a sociopath or a billionaire, or in this case, both. “You want to check your phone and see if it’s true?”
Eric’s eyes swirl and his mouth tightens. “How the fuck …”
“After all we’ve done, you’re surprised that Carmilla lifted your phone without noticing? Try to keep up.” Junko relaxes her arm, letting the pistol have some distance from Eric’s skull, but keeping the threat there.
“I’ll let you take a look,” I say. I hold my hand out with the phone clutched in my fingers. The screen says 1:38 am, which means we need to get a move on the rest of the evening’s activities before too long, but a little more toying would be fun.
Eric reaches out to snatch the phone from me, but my reaction speed outmatches his easily. I yank my arm back just as he gets close enough, tossing the heavy, oversized phone over my shoulder. A second later, it hits the slate tiles with a satisfying crunch.
“My god, you really thought we’d let you do that?
Use your phone?” Junko chuckles, stepping away from Eric’s side and letting the gun hang by her side.
I know this is an inappropriate moment to get hard about someone, but, god, she is so hot.
She walks over to the phone with slow steps, grinning in the dim light.
I allow myself a moment of attention away from Eric to see the glee in Junko’s eyes as she brings the heel of her shoe down onto the phone, crushing it.
“Wait, you …” Eric starts, looking up at Junko.
“What?” My girlfriend sneers.
“You’re … you … I remember you …”
“Yeah?” Junko levels a weary gaze at him, the green lace trim of her dress shimmering in the light. “All positives, I’m sure,” she deadpans.
There wasn’t a practical reason for Junko to get, pardon the pun, all dolled up tonight, but she thought if I was getting pretty as fuck, why shouldn’t she?
And I certainly reaped the rewards of this, as I can barely keep breathing as she saunters toward Eric, her hips swaying, her motions the product of so much studying and perfection of how to look as irresistible as possible.
She didn’t even need a gun in her hand to command attention.
But she does have one, and Eric can’t keep his eyes off of it.
“And what is it that you remember, exactly?” Junko says.
“You … worked for me.”
“Wow,” I give Eric a mocking clap, “you do actually perceive people other than yourself sometimes. Saintly, really.”
“You were …”
Junko puts a finger on Eric’s lips, silencing him, “I was that little tranny fag that’s not convincing anyone with how fucking busted he looks?
The one you said should be locked out of the bathrooms because ‘someone might catch something’?
” Junko’s expression remains placid, her resolve here admirable.
For as much as this whole thing was about revenge on this horrible man, she had much more of a right to rain hellfire down on him compared to me.
I just got fired, she got harassed. “Don’t act like you didn’t say it.
That’s directly from the email you sent to your own fucking HR department when you told them to fire me”
Eric tries to speak, but Junko presses a sharp, pointed, black nail into his lips, silencing him further.
“You’ve lost the right to speak … you’ll listen, now,” Junko continues.
“Eric, when your company is staffed by a ton of developers, you should take a lot more care in the things you say via electronic means. We know how to break into this kind of stuff. We know how many people use very easy-to-guess passwords. You shouldn’t be surprised that doing things like finding an HR person who leaves a written password on his desk isn’t all that tough. ”
Eric’s expression has changed in the span of a minute as Junko has taken hold of the situation.
I was playful, and maybe even in the back of his head he was thinking he still had a chance to fuck me, because knowing men like him, there are some things they’ll never give up on.
But with Junko, he can tell she’s all business, and the business she wants to do is something that will have real consequences.
“What we’re going to do now is, you’re going to pay us.” Junko steps in close to Eric. “A lot.”
“For what?” Eric makes a move to stand up, but the reaction from Junko and me keeps him planted.
“I assume in order to keep you alive … right, baby?” I ask, stepping over to Junko and grasping her shoulder. I want to hug her hard, but I know she has to keep her hand free in case the gun is necessary. “You said if he plays nice, he gets to walk out of this situation?”