Bishop waited until he heard the guest room door closed before he collapsed back in bed. His heart pounded with the cocktail of instincts that had taken all his willpower to suppress.
Reaching down for his aching cock, he rubbed himself through his boxers as his mind spiraled.
What the fuck was Kit thinking, crawling into Bishops bed and offering himself up like a vulnerable little gift?
If Bishop were any worse of a person, he wouldn’t have hesitated.
As it was, Bishop nearly gave in. For a moment, he wanted nothing more than to believe Kit’s offer. To flip him over and take him. Slowly. To break him down until he cried from pleasure.
Except Bishop couldn’t ignore how wrong Kit’s little charade felt. The boy’s every movement was an empty performance. Portraying seduction, not truly wanting it.
Bishop was a lot of things. A murderer, however much he dressed it up in the concept of justice. A kidnapper, after this week. But lucky for Kit, Bishop wasn’t a rapist. If Kit was trading sex for a place to stay, Bishop wanted no part of that.
But now that Kit was gone, Bishop’s desires were a secret known only to himself and the darkness. What harm was there in pretending?
He stroked himself through his boxers, twisting his thumb over the head. Imagined Kit’s hand on him instead, so much smaller, so fragile. Kit would be so easy to break, but Bishop wouldn’t want to do it the easy way.
Bishop would learn every piece of Kit as he fractured away.
And Bishop had an undeniable feeling that there was more to learn. This wasn’t the first time Bishop felt something was offabout Kit’s reactions. Like he was filtering himself through some theoretical idea of how a person was supposed to behave.
Bishop’s contact still hadn’t returned any results in his search for Kit Byron.
In the darkness, Bishop’s thighs flexed. Friction and need boiled in his blood. He remembered shoving the bandana between Kit’s thin lips, feeling them stretch wide around his fingers. The memory evolved, until it wasn’t just Bishop’s fingers shoving into Kit’s mouth. Until Kit gagged on Bishop’s cock instead, the length forcing between those pretty pink lips. How wide his mouth would stretch, how his jaw would ache. How his eyes would narrow and redden, on the edge of tears.
Bishop ran his hand through his hair, tightening into a fist, and imagined he was holding Kit by the hair instead.
The memory of Kit’s threatening tears drew Bishop over the edge.
Afterwards, Bishop panted raggedly. He wasn’t about to kick Kit out onto the street, if that’s what Kit was worried about. But one thing was certain—Kit couldn’t stay here much longer. Bishop’s willpower would only stretch so far.
5
Don’t worry, I’m not going to murder you ;)
Lounging with his feet on his glass-topped desk, James flipped through a folder on his phone. The images were a mix of screenshots and photographs, each neatly labeled at the bottom.
A scan of a driver’s license. A write-up for a six-year-old drunk driving charge. A map. Photos of a suburban street. Seven photos of the same man, taken from different angles and distances, sometimes partly obscured by fencing or foliage—each clearly taken without the subject’s knowledge. A professional headshot of a smiling, silver-haired white man in his fifties.
A travel itinerary placing the man in San Corvo on a business trip next week.
James flipped through the discreetly-taken photos again. This private investigator wasn’t nearly as good as Bishop, who would never have sent him photos taken through chain-link fencing.
Still. This was good enough. Another rung in the ladder that would take James to his goal.
James glanced out through the glass walls of his office, suppressing a grin at the well-paid professionals glued to their own computers. The sun was nearing noon over the glitteringcity. James should head out soon, so nobody felt obliged to work through lunch just because the director was still in the office.
San Corvo Security wasn’t James’s only company, but it was the one he kept most directly under his personal control, in his mother’s memory. The others were mostly just investments. Useful investments. His family’s money was all James had left of them, so he may as well make the most of it.
His phone rang with a call from Rope Guy.
James pressed a button, and his office’s windows slowly changed hue, taking on a darker, bluer tint. Now, he could still see out, but nobody else could see in. His assistant could read lips—which James usually found convenient, but not when certain of his friends were calling.
After the windows shifted, James answered the phone. “Long time no talk, Darius.”
Darius Fontaine, one of the most annoying people James knew, wasted no time on pleasantries. “Did you know Bishop’s keeping a sex slave?”
“Of course,” James answered, before his brain caught up. “Wait, hold on. There’s no way Bishop’s fucking him. Is Bishop fucking him? That’s not fair, he said I couldn’t…”
