17. Zane
17
ZANE
M y hand smooths over the wood, away from my body, before I flick my wrist and bring it back toward me once more. The tool I am wielding is turning the wood into a beautiful, rounded object. When I work with the wood this way, it's the only thing that soothes me. My mind finally calms, and I zone out as I get lost in the flow of the work.
There are birds singing outside, heralding the coming evening. Tonight, we will be having ourselves a little visitor. My skin tingles with anticipation at the thought.
I stop working the wood and lean forward to blow off the dust. I sit back and take the time to look at the planes and curves of the object I'm working on. This is going to be a coffee table. It won't have legs, but instead will be one continuous smooth piece of wood that curves at each side, and balances on itself against the floor.
The door to the mansion opens, and Saint strolls in looking like he fell from the cover of GQ .
I glance down his body, and my mouth widens in a silent grin. He’s wearing a patterned silk shirt that is undone halfway down to his navel, and he has layered silver chains at his throat. His shirt sleeves are rolled up, and a pair of dark jeans cling to his legs. Finishing the outfit are what look like snakeskin boots. I can't tell if they're real or not, because I'm hardly into fashion, but, knowing Saint, they will be. I don't give a crap about clothes, mostly. I wear what feels comfortable, and if I did have a style, it would probably be closer to the grunge of the 90s than anything else. Except those kids were all skinny with painted fingernails, and I'm practically a giant.
Saint has bags in his hand, and he walks by me and into the kitchen. Intrigued, I stand and follow. I lean against the doorway as he unloads the bags. We’ve managed to get the electricity flowing in this place via solar power, so we have a refrigerator. He takes out chips and dip, placing it on the side, before also pulling a large bag of mixed, salted nuts free from the paper carrier. Finally, he takes out a bottle of white wine and places it in the fridge, followed by a bottle of vodka, which he puts in the freezer.
The wine must be for our guest, because we never drink that stuff. We prefer the vodka. Not that she's old enough to drink, but if she wants a glass, I'll gladly give it to her.
Lex sent a message this morning saying there was a new plan. He explained he'd found the new girl digging around in the dean's office.
The fact that she broke into Rossi’s office makes her even more attractive to me. That's a pretty ballsy move on her part. It also means she has the skills to pick a lock, which makes me hard whenever I think about it. What a contradiction she is. Big, innocent eyes, sinful body, and the skills to pick locks.
She’s certainly piqued my curiosity. What the hell was she doing in there? It's kind of good for us that Lex went a bit overboard and decided to stalk her in the early hours, so he saw what she was doing. It means we now have something to hold over her. We don't have to play the nice guys, which is probably a good thing, because we suck at that. Instead, Lex says we should simply barter. Get what we want the good old-fashioned way, by trade.
She wants us to keep quiet, and we want her to suck our cocks. Seems fair to me.
“She’ll be arriving in around two hours,” Saint says. He turns to me, and his gaze runs down the length of my body. “Are you going to get changed?”
I shoot him a perplexed glance. No, I say with my hands, using our sign language.
It's not American Sign Language, it’s our own invented way of communicating, and it’s limited. We can have basic conversations with it, but anything in-depth and I use my notebook. It gives me a way to cover the basics, though, without me having to write everything down. Typing out my every utterance either on my tablet or writing it out with a pen and paper is a ball ache and seriously pisses me off.
It makes me feel weak, too, which I fucking hate.
Last night was particularly bad. I didn't sleep, and tossed and turned as I thought about a lifetime of this. A lifetime of having to write down my thoughts instead of being able to speak them. It's not just that it singles me out from the rest of the pack; it’s that I truly find it a complete pain in my ass.
I hate trying to get people to understand me on a day-to-day basis. It’s not so bad if they already know who I am, and that I’m unable to speak, but when I head into town and have to communicate with a stranger, they look at me like I’m stupid. Then I want to break their faces, even though it’s not their fault they don’t know what’s going on.
When I finally get the people who did this to me, I'm not going to slit their throats in return. I'm going to cut their cocks off while they’re still breathing and make them eat them. I’ll literally shove those useless appendages down their throats until they’re gagging. Then I might just disembowel them too for added fun.
Enemies of my father did this to me, and he's been looking for them, but so far, he's not found them. It means it’s up to me to get vengeance for myself. When I do, I'll rain hell down on them.
Where is Lex? I sign.
Training, Saint signs back. “He has a fight in two weeks, remember?”
He shrugs.
Oh, yeah, of course. I've been away, and it's easy to fall out of the routines and rhythms of college life when you keep having to take long breaks.
I wonder when my next fight will be. I'd relish one. In fact, I'd happily take Lex’s place. Nathaniel seems not to have picked me for the longest time. I think it's because he knows deep down that the rage within me would probably have ended up with me killing my opponent.
While the fights here can be brutal, they most certainly should not be deadly. The shit that would cause as various mafia factions went to war would tear things apart.
I pick my tablet up and write on it quickly. What do you think about Lex’s plan to get what we want from Vani?
Saint shrugs. “I think it will work, because it seems she really doesn't want anyone to know she was in the dean's office. The only problem I see with it is if we push it too far, too fast, and she goes running to Daddy.” He smiles, a shark’s grin. “She’s going to need some finessing.”
I nod because I agree. Everyone has a breaking point, and we don't want to push her beyond hers. If she goes running to the club, then not only will we lose the most interesting thing to happen to this place in a long time, but we will risk igniting a war with the biker club. I'm already fighting a war on one front, so I don't need one on another.
Her father’s right-hand man has pissed me off, but the best way to get back at him is by doing the exact opposite of what he commanded. I’m looking forward to it, too.
We can start gentle , I write. Yes, we don't have to pretend to be nice, because this way this is all out in the open that we're getting what we want in order to give her what she wants. It still doesn't mean that we have to start full on with her, though, does it? You know, they say the best way to break a horse and to have it do whatever you want is with kindness. I push the tablet at him .
“Or in her case, kindness and lots of orgasms until we addle her brain,” Saint says, his smile turning positively sadistic.
I’ve seen him make women come so much they’re sobbing messes and seem genuinely scared of the painful pleasure he’s wringing from their bodies. We tend not to mess around with the girls from the college and go for older women from the nearby towns. They’re often married, up for some fun, and won’t talk. I assume that Saint and Lex are as hard for Vani as I am. If they hadn’t been, I’d maybe have pursued her on my own. I fuck women without them being there, but I must admit I prefer the dynamic of the three of us.
We will start gently with Vani, but I bet at some point, she taps out. Saint, especially, has very particular interests. Until I met him, I thought I was a deviant. Now I think I'm one of the most upstanding members of the community. In comparison, at least. He loves to make the girls cry, and I think he loves it even more when Lex swoops in to save them with his soft act. Something about the way they play off one another is a twisted dynamic but they both feed off it and love it. The women do too, but they aren’t like Vani. She’s younger, and so much softer than the kind we normally play with.
The door bursts open, and Lex walks in.
“Yo,” he says with a smirk. “Not long now.”
“How do you want to play this?” Saint asks. “Straight up tell her, ‘Suck our dicks and we won’t tell’?”
Lex shrugs. “I mean, it works for me. She has a choice. She can say no. Walk away.”
“If she refuses, will we tell Nathaniele what she was doing?” Saint muses.
A thought hits me, and I wince. Shit, there’s something Lex hasn’t considered, Vani too, possibly. I slam my hand on the table to get their attention and shake my head. I sign, no . Then I write. Want her here. She’s fun.
“Fine, so no telling on her even if she says no.” Saint sighs.
I write faster. She’s going to get caught anyway.
Lex frowns.
The cameras! So are you.
“Fuck,” Lex says. “Shit, I never even thought, I was so intrigued by what she was doing.” He thinks for a moment. “Although, if Nathaniele doesn’t know anything’s been taken, then he won’t have a reason to look at the footage. She relocked the door after she left.”
“What did she take?” his twin asks.
“Paperwork of some kind.” Lex punches his fist into his palm. “Fuck, I should have told her to hand it over, find out what’s so interesting that she needs to break into the dean’s office less than twenty-four hours after she arrives.”
“We can always break into her room sometime,” Saint says. “If it’s that important, it’s unlikely she’ll have destroyed them.”
He nods. “You’re right. And maybe Nathaniele won’t notice his paperwork is missing, but we don’t know if the lock held or shows any signs of damage.”
Lex is right.
I scribble down a couple of lines. If the lock is fucked, he’ll check the cameras, but he might check them anyway, every morning.
Saint bites the inside of his lip. “So, why hasn’t he come for me or Lex already? He’d have seen us on the camera but wouldn’t know which one of us it is.”
“Maybe he just hasn’t gotten around to checking them yet,” Lex adds. “Or else he’s letting us sweat.”
Can we hack the cameras? Wipe the footage before he thinks to check? I pass the tablet to them.
Lex shrugs. “I mean, I can try. I’m pretty good at the basic stuff. We ought to get on it soon, because I don’t want Rossi hauling me up in front of him. That just leaves the issue of getting her to agree to some fun with us.”
“Could just force her.” Saint takes the vodka out of the freezer and pours us all a shot.
Lex looks uncomfortable. Outright forcing her most definitely won’t be his thing. He’ll tell himself he’s being a decent guy this way, by offering her a choice, even though there’s nothing decent about it.
I’m not worried about her saying no. I think she’ll say yes. I think she’ll say yes even if Nathaniele already has her on tape because I think she’ll want us. I caught a glimpse of her desire—the way her breath had quickened and her lips had parted—when she was staring at my erection yesterday. And all women want to fuck Saint. Whether she’ll still want him when he reveals the depths of his depravity, who knows, but right now? She does.
If she’s been in an MC and spent her life there, she’ll have been around women who were passed around like meat and used like a fucking wank sock. We don’t do that. We make them come so hard they aren’t ever going to be the fucking same.
No one would have cared if those women came or were remotely happy. She won’t have seen that shit upfront, but she’ll have picked up on the vibes. I definitely want her to suck my dick, but I’m not averse to giving her a fuck-ton of orgasms of her own.
If you can give a woman the best sex of her life, when so many men are shit in bed, you can give her a whole new appreciation of it and desire for it.
Vani will be the same.
When we give her that, she will be hooked.