The place had been packed wall to wall, and the majority of the crowd were shifters. Mellow blue lights swept through the massive dance floor, catching on globes hanging on chains from the high ceiling. They gave the impression of bubbles floating to the water’s surface as blue swaths of fabric draped among them. The aquatic theme carried on to showcase massive fish tanks on the left wall where the booths were set, as well as beneath the gleaming black bar on the opposite side that peeked between the many legs standing in front of it.
Along the far wall that held the metal staircase leading up to the second floor was a massive mural of a vivid sapphire-blue ocean from the perspective of someone standing atop the jagged, rocky cliffs. It was painted with such intricate detail, it felt like I could walk off the ledge and fall into the churning sea. The choice of subject seemed off for a nightclub, but it was still a breathtaking piece.
My time in Vegas had felt unproductive so far, which is why I lay here now obsessing over a woman likely associated with themob that I’m trying to get in with and subsequently screw over on Andrea’s behalf. I needed to get up and dosomething.
“Damn it!” I hissed. My hands rubbed my face furiously. I hated feeling so out of control with my life. And I hated floundering about in hopes of getting lucky.
If the Masked Merrow lead ended up being a dead end, I needed to have another avenue to explore. It would be more difficult to track the Red Riot’s association online, but if the girl Frank mentioned did, in fact, live in Vegas and happened to be in sex work, there was a chance she was connected to Red Riot in that way. Was it a stretch? Absolutely. But if I were grasping at straws, I might as well use both hands. It was no secret that the Riot was neck-deep in the Vegas sex industry. I had to dive in somewhere.
Starting with the Prey to Play website.
With a tired groan, I shoved up onto my hands and forced myself out of bed. Since I wasn’t planning to sleep anytime soon, I padded to the kitchen to grab a cold brew coffee from the fridge and drifted to the space I had claimed as my office for now.
Of all the streaming platforms I’d encountered—both legal and illegal—I had never come across a more encrypted site than Prey to Play, where Frank’s current target hosted her camgirl sessions every third day. It would have been logical to wait until I got some sleep to start tackling the website, but that niggling thorn in the back of my mind that always showed up while in the midst of a hacking project spurred me to try and get through its firewall. So far, I’d had no luck. I didn’t get a very good look at the camgirl from across his desk. Scrutinizing her picture further, I realized I had seen that mask before… or at least, someone who had a similar mask.
The woman from Masked Merrow, the one who sat on the club owner’s lap. The one whose scent bowled me over as soon as I stepped into the room. That spiced vanilla smell stayed with me,like a ghost who haunted me every waking minute since that shit-show of a meeting. I dreaded what it could mean to find her scent so fucking irresistible. My adopted father would go on for hours on how he first met Felicity, sniffing her out in a crowd while he was eating lunch at some restaurant in Seattle. He said her smell was one he could never forget, burned into his brain from the first time he found it. I thought he was being a hopeless romantic about the whole thing. The chances of finding a shifter mate were slim at best, and only through something calledpheromone bonding.It was nature’s way of ensuring mates could track each other down. Mates were historically known for birthing more than the average number of children, so naturally those bonds superseded common sense.
The implications of getting involved with a woman like that were not something I wanted to consider, especially if she ended up embroiled in the mob I was supposed to be infiltrating.
If that woman from the club turned out to be my mate, I was ten levels below fucked.
The camgirl had a similar body shape to the Masked Merrow woman, as far as I could tell from the scantily clad version posted on her page. The mask she wore was definitely the same—matte black with the X-shaped eyes and a stitched mouth, all backlit in neon pink. It certainly wasn’t the typical Halloween store mask.
It irked me that I couldn’t just hack into the site. I didn’t really want to register as a site member, even with all the protections on my own computer, but otherwise, there was no way to get past the very basic front page undetected. All it had were the entry fields for a username and password.
The registration page was just as bare. It didn’t ask for much more than the name on the credit card used to pay for the subscription and a billing address, both things that could be easily faked. Unless there was a verification…
“Of course,” I muttered as the next prompt popped up.
Please enter the dollar amount charged to the card registered.
By the time I got through the sign-in process for that credit card, entered the amount charged—sixty-nine cents, which seemed a bit on the nose—and waited for the loading screen to finish, my patience had almost hit the end of its rope. I logged into Vixen’s page, where she was already well underway for tonight’s session. It took a moment to get my bearings, but the layout was simple enough. Her screen took up the majority of the page, with a chat box running along the right side that had two buttons at the bottom—‘tip’ and ‘request private call.’ She seemed to be reading whatever was in the chat, a hypnotic bass-driven dub-step playing low in the background on her end.
This time, she was in a pink, frilly babydoll lingerie top and high-cut underwear with white ribbons tied on either hip. She sat on the edge of the same bed in her profile picture with her left foot tucked under her opposite thigh to offer an enticing peek. The crotch of her lacy panties barely covered anything between her legs.
Every other line in the chat window was someone tipping one dollar, five dollars, ten dollars, and there were a couple of fifty and one-hundred-dollar contributions. The rest of the comments were lewd and extremely descriptive, provocative things the other attendees wanted her to do.
“You’re not being very creative tonight, no offense,” she commented playfully. Her voice was obviously changed with some kind of modulator. “I may have to go shop my stash and find some toys to play with on my own.”
It was painfully clear that Vixen was baiting the group, and about twenty of them took it hook, line, and sinker. The chat exploded with all sorts of emojis and explicit comments on what they wanted her to do.
Find your biggest dildo and sit on it.
Go get the anal beads again!
I want to see you splooge alllll over the camera like a bad girl.
Stuff all your holes, baby girl.
I was getting secondhand embarrassment from watching what these people were typing. Is this what Frank spent all his nights doing? Was he in this session right now, making the same kind of raunchy comments to this woman? My lip curled in disgust at the litany of demands that were, honestly, not even that creative. My bet was on half of these users being guys hardly out of high school, with severely lacking sex lives. I wasn’t a prude by any means—I was known to partake in some filthy comments during sex—but knowing these men were throwing out suggestions like this without being able to read the woman’s reactions felt selfish and wrong. If I thought my partner felt the least bit uncomfortable, I’d stop immediately. Not only could the chat not see her face for feedback, but the added pressure of being paid to entertain these fucked-up requests was disgusting to me. Not for her, for the ones who thought it was okay to say things like ‘rip yourself open on a big dick’ with no repercussions. Didn’t she have moderators or something?
And why was I getting so worked up over all this?
Vixen leaned back onto her palms. The pose pushed her breasts out to almost spill over the top, leg kicking like she was bored. Her head tilted, letting the bubblegum pink curls fall over her shoulder in an enticing cascade.
“Hmm,” she hummed. “I guess it’s just me and the dildo tonight. What color are we thinking? Red, blue, or green?”
The chat flooded with answers again, but the majority was very obvious within a few seconds.
