"HARDER."
Gresso glared at the little twerp over his shoulder massaging his back. "You ain't tickling ivories there, Tinkerbell. Didn't you suck enough milk from your momma?"
The kid massaging his back didn't say a word, just applied more pressure. He was used to Gresso's harsh words. For as long as he'd known the big man, he'd always spoken this way. He didn't have what the French called… finesse.
The Boss relaxed, and his muscles settled as the kid continued to roll his thumbs into the man's shoulder blades. They were in the corner where their rag-tag crew usually hung out when the sun was out. Some of the inmates were shooting hoops, while the others pumped iron like it was their job. This was the life for them, Frodo supposed, but it bored him. Really bored him.
"Hallå, Chefen! Don't you have a schedule today?" teased one of his guys, a skinny Lithuanian who was trying to learn Swedish. He was talking about Gresso's visits to the clinic to see
Yrah… the girl whose face was branded onto his brain on the day he met her. For the past five years, she’d been the only thing who’d kept him going. The thought that she was out there, living a happy life—oblivious of the ugliness of his world, untouched by the filth he trudged through day after day—made his own existence bearable. And all because she said she wasn’t afraid of him.He’d never desired, craved, yearned for anyone the way he did for Yrah. Almost nothing in the world frightened him anymore, but the thought of anyone hurting her kept him awake at night. Why he obsessed over her the way he did, he hadn’t been able to figure out.Maybe it was her long black hair that he imagined winding around his fist and pulling as he slammed himself into her over and over again. Or her sweet, full lips that tempted him all the time to grab and kiss her. Maybe it was her voice. Even when Yrah was mad at him, her lovely voice was soft, breathy, and reminded h
Yrah shifted her weight between one foot then the other while Gresso stared at her with meaning, as though he were expecting something from her. Yrah scratched her throat, adjusted the lapel of her lab coat, and swept her hair out of her face.As soon as she closed the door to the clinic with Gresso following closely behind her, he went to sit in her desk chair, folded his muscular arms over his broad, hard chest, and focused his eyes on her, squinting a little as though he were concentrating.The man had the features of a Greek god. She couldn’t believe he wasn’t a Hollywood actor or something because he was just THAT good-looking. It seemed every time she saw him, he got even more gorgeous. How was that even possible? You’d think she was seeing him for the first time every time she reacted to him flexing his biceps (not that he ever flexed on purpose), which was with open-mouthed awe and some drooling.The object of her admiration ran the tip of his f
He opened his eyes, surprising her once again with their beauty, just before blowing the candle. When he looked right at her, the blush on his cheeks came back as if he were suddenly the shy one, so when he took the cake from her, she didn’t protest.She followed him to the table with a saucer and fork as well as a knife to cut the cake. She even cut a slice for him.“You still haven’t said it,” he murmured as she handed him his cake.She leaned over to kiss his cheek since he sounded so pouty. “I’m sorry, Gresso. Are we good now?”Though it still looked like he was trying to stifle his smile, his eyes glittered with his genuine emotion. “Nah. Let me think about it first. You broke my heart, Yrah.”She was about to answer when the door opened, and Ysiah walked in. Yrah tried to look as casual as possible and said hello.Her colleague smiled at her, but as soon as he looked at Gresso, his face darkened. He cleared his throat and returne
Tension began to build up below Yrah’s navel as Gresso continued to lick her clit like a cat with a bowl of cream. One of his hands reached up and pinched her nipple to roll between his fingers while he blew softly on the heated bud of her core. So many sensations, so many new feelings. Yrah’s head went side by side on her pillow, keeping her bottom lip clenched between her teeth so she wouldn’t scream and let everyone in the prison complex know what was happening to her.Gresso spread her labia with her fingers and languorously dragged his tongue over the sensitive flesh, occasionally dipping down to tease the entrance to her cave that held her innermost secrets. Before today, no one else had ever touched her there, and now this beautiful man was there, worshipping her, paying homage to everything that made her a woman.She wanted to scream, cry, and plead, but she didn’t know why. Did she want him to stop, help her ease the agony that’s building up inside o
She’d been so out of it that she didn’t realize he was already naked. When did he take off his clothes? When he kissed her and allowed her to taste her own essence from his tongue, he parted her thighs to make room for himself in between them.She gasped when something hard and blunt brushed against the sensitive petals of her feminine core. Her eyes widened with discovery, and for a moment, she stopped kissing him back.Yrah meant to take in air, but Gresso sucked her lower lip and bit it. Groaning, he rubbed himself against her, seeking entrance to her wet heat.Yrah was getting dizzy. She hadn’t seen his penis yet, but just from the way it felt prodding against her, she feared it was a big one, and it was going to hurt like hell entering her.“G—Gresso—”“Shh…” He kissed her jaw, the side of her head, then her ear. “It’s just going to hurt for a little bit, honey-bunny, but after that, it’ll be paradise, I promise. It’s going be so good,
“I AM VERY DISAPPOINTED.”Yrah could only lower her head in shame when she heard the gravity of Agent Tejano’s tone. He was their handler, their supervisor. She didn’t know what kind of hiding she could have done earlier when the agent came to knock on her door. It was even worse when she found out that her brother-in-law, Kuya Trojan, was sitting in the warden’s office. She would rather be outside eating dirt right now.She pursed her lips together and balled up her hands into fists at her sides. Gresso was in another interrogation room with his brother, arguing over what happened to them while she was here, in another room with Agent Tejano.They were probably separated, so they couldn’t conspire together and tell one story. Just like the criminals on TV. Whoever was the first to sing got the deal.Agent Tejano was sitting across from her, studying her with a look of dismay and disgust; she didn’t know wha
Agent Tejano talked about Gresso like he was some kind of sorcerer with some otherworldly sway over women. Yrah’s eyes glazed with tears. Was that why it had been so easy for him to get into her pants? Because he had a unique talent for it and how he seduced her was his modus operandi for every woman?The bitter laughter almost spilled from her mouth. She didn’t like the way this conversation was going. She couldn’t get enough air. She wanted to be alone so she could smash her skull repeatedly into concrete. She spent twenty years in school, four of those in medical school, only to be tricked by the “Destroyer.” Son of a bitch. She had to be a special kind of idiot.He probably wasn’t even attracted to her. Maybe he saw her the first time and marked her for target because she had the word “Victim” stamped on her forehead. Who knows. He almost had her sister before. What if he only hit on her because she resembled her Ate Bella?He must have detected she
Yrah stared blankly at the files in front of her. She and her team are in the conference room, discussing the inmates who'd been found with chips, but her mind was somewhere else. She couldn't forget her last conversation with Gresso. She touched her neck, remembering the sensation of his hands clasped around her throat as he tried to squeeze the life out of her.If he'd wanted her dead, he could have just easily broken her neck. The look in his eyes when she confronted him with what she'd learned from Agent Tejano would haunt her for a long time. She'd been upset that he wasn't forthcoming about explaining himself or his side of the story, but it had hurt him that she had no faith in him. And when he saw in her eyes that he'd frightened her, that's when he'd shut down.It had already been a week since the two of them parted, and she just couldn't stop thinking about how angry he was when he left her on the floor of that corridor. She'd challenged him, call
“AH, MON AMOUR!” Sobbing, Frodo wrapped his arms around the computer equipment retrieved by Tejano from the team who gathered the evidence and arrested Frodo originally.Yrah had to cover her mouth to keep herself from laughing as Frodo kissed the monitor, then picked up the mouse and the keyboard to kiss them lovingly, too.“Papa mizzed you, mes amis. Not to worry, we are together again!”Yrah had to bite down on her lower lip to keep her laughter in. Now she understood why fixing the Warden’s computer was a special treat for Frodo. He had a special affinity for the machine.They all slowly approached Frodo as the kid settled into his seat and got to work. Kuya Trojan and Tejano left to fetch the equipment the kid had requisit
Yrah rubbed her face with her palms after she saw Frodo’s X-ray results. It was attached at the base of his spine, near his tailbone. A few months ago, Frodo had gone in for a routine check-up, was knocked out, and had the chip implanted in his spine while he slept. The docs told him they removed a suspicious-looking mole that might be cancerous.So far, all of the ones they’ve found were in the hosts who’d died during the fights. They’d developed a way to extract the chip from the corpses without them detonating and had placed each of them in a safety box especially designed to contain the explosion within. The boxes were afterwards incinerated in a facility far, far away.The warden had begun to evacuate the prisoners above ground to transfer them to other holding facilities in the meantime until this matter was resolved.
Agent Ysiah cursed a blue streak when he discovered that two of the men Gresso had killed during the fights had chips embedded in their spine. They could have detonated at any time, during the fight or the autopsy. A surgeon from the hospital was able to remove the packets without problems and they immediately delivered the evidence to their mission specialist. The complete postmortem examination of the handful of dead prisoners found to be embedded with the packet had to be done in secret.“We can’t just remove the packets from the bodies. Look at this.” Yrah pointed to the full-body X-ray and MRI results of one of the inmates. “The packets extracted from Cadaver A and Cadaver B were both found in the lumbar region. If you take a closer look, you will see that the packets are grafted onto the spinal cord via artificial ganglia that the bodies readily assimilate, as they function li
Yrah couldn’t concentrate even though she was supposed to be monitoring a patient they needed to rush to the hospital. Technically, it wasn’t even her shift, but Jaz had food poisoning and couldn’t get out of bed, so Yrah had to cover for her.She couldn’t stop looking at her wristwatch. It was almost eight in the evening. Frodo said Gresso’s match would start at eight. She told the kid to convince—beg—Gresso to call off the fight, but Frodo only said that his Patron would not listen. She would have gone herself, except she was needed at the clinic.One of the undercover guards approached her and offered her a canned coffee drink, but Yrah refused. “Oh, no. I don’t need to be jumpier than I already am.” She rechecked her watch. “How much longer do you think Dr. Z would take?”“He should be back in about thirty minutes. He only went to the other medical center to fetch some vaccin
Gresso’s grip tightened around the bandage he was holding. His jaw clenched, adding to the grimness of the already dark expression painted on a face that still bore evidence of his last fight.He could also feel Frodo’s worried stare. The kid seemed to have lost hope of convincing him not to fight because he knew Gresso wouldn’t hold back, either.Gresso’s body was still sore, and his knee was the size of a watermelon, but he needed to go out there tonight. It wasn’t just about the pot money he could give to Frodo for another round of his mother’s chemo. First, he didn’t want the kid going out there because of how skinny and weak he was. He wouldn’t last ten seconds in the arena. Frodo was annoying as hell, but Gresso didn’t want him sent back to his sick mother in a body bag.Frodo used to hack into systems and hold them for ransom just to get money for his mother’s treatments. Gresso believed he was a good kid. He
Yrah stared blankly at the files in front of her. She and her team are in the conference room, discussing the inmates who'd been found with chips, but her mind was somewhere else. She couldn't forget her last conversation with Gresso. She touched her neck, remembering the sensation of his hands clasped around her throat as he tried to squeeze the life out of her.If he'd wanted her dead, he could have just easily broken her neck. The look in his eyes when she confronted him with what she'd learned from Agent Tejano would haunt her for a long time. She'd been upset that he wasn't forthcoming about explaining himself or his side of the story, but it had hurt him that she had no faith in him. And when he saw in her eyes that he'd frightened her, that's when he'd shut down.It had already been a week since the two of them parted, and she just couldn't stop thinking about how angry he was when he left her on the floor of that corridor. She'd challenged him, call
Agent Tejano talked about Gresso like he was some kind of sorcerer with some otherworldly sway over women. Yrah’s eyes glazed with tears. Was that why it had been so easy for him to get into her pants? Because he had a unique talent for it and how he seduced her was his modus operandi for every woman?The bitter laughter almost spilled from her mouth. She didn’t like the way this conversation was going. She couldn’t get enough air. She wanted to be alone so she could smash her skull repeatedly into concrete. She spent twenty years in school, four of those in medical school, only to be tricked by the “Destroyer.” Son of a bitch. She had to be a special kind of idiot.He probably wasn’t even attracted to her. Maybe he saw her the first time and marked her for target because she had the word “Victim” stamped on her forehead. Who knows. He almost had her sister before. What if he only hit on her because she resembled her Ate Bella?He must have detected she
“I AM VERY DISAPPOINTED.”Yrah could only lower her head in shame when she heard the gravity of Agent Tejano’s tone. He was their handler, their supervisor. She didn’t know what kind of hiding she could have done earlier when the agent came to knock on her door. It was even worse when she found out that her brother-in-law, Kuya Trojan, was sitting in the warden’s office. She would rather be outside eating dirt right now.She pursed her lips together and balled up her hands into fists at her sides. Gresso was in another interrogation room with his brother, arguing over what happened to them while she was here, in another room with Agent Tejano.They were probably separated, so they couldn’t conspire together and tell one story. Just like the criminals on TV. Whoever was the first to sing got the deal.Agent Tejano was sitting across from her, studying her with a look of dismay and disgust; she didn’t know wha
She’d been so out of it that she didn’t realize he was already naked. When did he take off his clothes? When he kissed her and allowed her to taste her own essence from his tongue, he parted her thighs to make room for himself in between them.She gasped when something hard and blunt brushed against the sensitive petals of her feminine core. Her eyes widened with discovery, and for a moment, she stopped kissing him back.Yrah meant to take in air, but Gresso sucked her lower lip and bit it. Groaning, he rubbed himself against her, seeking entrance to her wet heat.Yrah was getting dizzy. She hadn’t seen his penis yet, but just from the way it felt prodding against her, she feared it was a big one, and it was going to hurt like hell entering her.“G—Gresso—”“Shh…” He kissed her jaw, the side of her head, then her ear. “It’s just going to hurt for a little bit, honey-bunny, but after that, it’ll be paradise, I promise. It’s going be so good,