Where There's Fire (Panopolis Book 2) (4 page)

The first thing I’d done after finding that out was set up a money transfer and an online account with a rather lenient European bank. Well, no, that was the second thing I’d done; the first thing had been to laugh my head off, then have him fuck me in a pile of hundred dollar bills. It had been surreal, and kind of slippery, but still fun.

“Yes, ha-ha, have your fun at my expense.” Raul lifted our joined hands to his lips and kissed my knuckles, raising his heavy eyebrows suggestively. “You know I exist to amuse you.”

“Is that right?” On the TV, Jean Parks had started up the promo spot for her interview with my parents again. I shut the television off and tossed the remote aside. “Does that mean you’re at my beck and call?”

“Absolutely.”

Exactly what I wanted to hear. “You’re mine to do with as I please?”

“Your humble servant,” he murmured, his black eyes fixed unwaveringly on my face.

“Did you think about me when I was gone today?”

“Constantly.”

I clambered over into Raul’s lap. He was bigger than me, strong and well muscled, and he loved it when I took advantage of that fact and climbed him like a tree. Having a big, strong man willing to let me have my way with him was definitely a turn on.

Right now what I wanted was his mouth. “Slouch down,” I said, and he slid beneath me like water, lifting my hips with his broad hands so he could settle lower on the couch. He stopped when his head was in line with my hips, then reached around and palmed the front of my jeans.

“Be good,” I whispered. “I didn’t say you could touch.”

“But I can touch,” Raul said, his voice soft but delighted. He kissed my hand again, a little gesture, but clearly meant as a triumph. I knew how he felt. He gently scraped his teeth over the heel of my palm before pressing his lips against the thin skin of my wrist. A spark of pleasure made me shiver, and that spark seemed to echo through Raul’s body as he closed his eyes with a sigh. It wasn’t always easy for us to be intimate now, but when we were it was so much more intense than it had been before I was experimented on. The lines in his forehead eased, and I grinned. The pleasure was a delicious feedback loop between us.

“You can touch me now,” I teased. “But maybe not for long. Not if you want to be good for me.”

Raul laughed. “How will you stop me?”

“Maybe I’ll use zip ties.” I lowered my zipper and started to awkwardly shimmy my jeans down my hips, finally kicking them off entirely. “You don’t have a super strength ability you’ve been hiding from me, right?”

“You don’t need super strength to escape from those zip ties, just leverage. I’ll make you better ones,” he promised, but his eyes were fixed on my cock as it emerged from its cloth prison. My underwear quickly followed my pants to the floor.

“Maybe I’ll use rope. Or metal—you’ve got a pair of handcuffs in the closet that I’ve never seen you take out.” I leaned in and brushed the head of my cock against Raul’s lips, pulling back when he tried to take it into his mouth. “Or maybe I’ll gag you, and get myself off on your face without touching you at all.”

“That would be a terrible waste of a willing lover.” Raul jerked my hips forward suddenly, throwing me off-balance and swallowing me down to the base at the same time. His mouth was a warm, slick cavern, his tongue insistent along my shaft as he swallowed around the head. Raul called me the perfect length for this, which was generous of him but oh, sometimes I really believed it.

His eagerness was a drug that left me languorous in his grasp, easy to tease and even easier to provoke into giving Raul what he wanted. I put one hand against the back of the couch to help hold myself up, threaded the other into the hair at the base of his neck and pressed as deep as I could go. It was far enough to make him feel me, not far enough to choke him—bleeding guilt into our sex was the fastest way to make it stop as far as Raul was concerned.

I held his head still and thrust into him, barely able to keep my eyes from crossing. My body balanced on a knife’s edge of pleasure, too quickly ready to come and unable to hold back. Raul sucked and swallowed, his hands still on my hips gripping me hard, and all too soon my orgasm went from idea to imminent, then crashed into me and swept my remaining restraint away. I shouted when I came, sublimating the last of my adrenaline dump from earlier, the anxiety of the day, the pain of watching my own parents betray me on national television into the sharp, sweet rush of pleasure.

Raul pressed his nose to my belly as he swallowed every drop. I finally pulled back, quivering and oversensitive, and slumped down until we were crowded together in a messy pile. I was panting and sated, but Raul’s dick strained the cloth of his sweatpants. Raul was close enough he was shaking—it was clearly so much harder now for him to hold his climax back when he experienced mine secondhand.

“What . . . what can I do,” I mumbled, touching his lips. “What do you want?”

“Edward—God—like this, wait . . .” Raul pulled down on my shoulders and ground up into me, driving like a nail against my perineum, up into the softness of my sac and back down, only a few times, before he came in a rush, bending his head to my shoulder as he groaned, “God, I love you.”

And I knew that, I knew how much Raul loved me. We’d had our moment of truth and it had ended with Raul fighting literally to the death to win my favor, with him killing for me, risking imprisonment and torture on my behalf. Raul would do anything for me, and I ached to prove I could do the same for him.

I managed to ignore the absolute ridiculousness of our position for a few more minutes before I had to back up and get some space, or completely overheat. That left me standing naked from the waist down, in a sweaty, rucked-up hoodie, being laughed at by a lover who’d made a mess in his own pants.

“You’ve got no room to mock me,” I told him, but I was laughing too. “Look at you, you need another shower.”

“Come with me,” he said. “There’s only enough hot water left for one, at this point.”

That was probably true; someday we would use our ill-gotten gains to buy a better hot-water heater, but it kept slipping my mind. Likely since we showered together a lot. “I should study some more.”

“Edward.” Raul stood and kissed me lightly on the lips. He must have felt how much I liked it, because he smiled and put his hands on my shoulders. “You’re as prepared as you’re going to get. You said it yourself: this is your own bank. You know the people, the layout, and the timing. All you have to do now is pull off the job, right?”

“Right.” I wasn’t sure who he was trying to convince.

“And I’ll be nearby, in case . . . well, just in case.” He kissed me again, then tugged me along toward the shower. I let him guide me without a struggle. He was right, of course. I knew what I needed to do. I knew how things were going to go. Tomorrow would be picture-perfect, my first solo job, my chance to prove myself as a Villain.

Tomorrow had to go well. I wouldn’t let it happen any other way.

Has anyone heard of compliance protocol before? It’s the idea that the best way for an institution to emerge unscathed from a criminal altercation is to let it happen. Statistically speaking, there’s less property damage and loss of life in, say, a bank robbery if the employees are compliant. This protocol tends to break down on a more individual level, but on a grand scale it gets results.

Funny thing about compliance protocol in Panopolis, though . . . it could be going the way of the dodo. Everyone’s seen the marketing campaigns going on now: Be Your Own Hero. Ostensibly those ads and television spots are meant to sell Hero merchandise, and it’s working: that shit is flying off the shelves. It’s also emboldening our rank and file. Civilian altercations with Villains are on the rise. You know what happens when someone with no superpower confronts someone with a superpower?

They get crushed.

We rode separately to downtown Panopolis, me on my scooter and Raul on his motorcycle. It made sense to have different methods of escape available, but I still felt better when we met up again at the rendezvous point four blocks down from my target. I’d watched my old bank from a distance for two weeks, getting a handle on who would be arriving when and how much time I could count on having with the manager before I had to deal with the customers. I got a new suit, the sort of blandly innocuous dark blue that so many professionals in Panopolis defaulted to, and practiced my new face in the mirror for weeks before dubbing it good enough to do a decent job of disguising me.

The face change was Raul’s idea. He was an expert at it, tightening a muscle here and relaxing one there and somehow giving himself an entirely new appearance. He could go from the strong, handsome features I was used to, to squinty eyes, a pinched, a tired mouth, and an oversized nose in seconds, and that was only one of his variations. The first time he tried to teach me, I’d spent half an hour looking angrily constipated and had given myself a headache from glaring at my own reflection.

“Why not use makeup?” I’d demanded at last. “Prosthetics? It’s got to be easier than this.”

Raul had shrugged a shoulder. “It might be easier, but you can’t assume that such things will always be at hand when you need to disappear into a crowd. What if a prosthetic falls off, what if your fake nose catches on fire? Better to learn to do it by yourself, and hold the rest in reserve.”

In the end we’d compromised. I’d tucked my hair up underneath a hat, a rather ridiculous fedora that was, for some reason, coming back into fashion, then thickened my eyebrows with a little mascara. When I dropped my lower jaw down and back I almost eradicated my chin, and had painted a thin layer of latex around my eyes to add spidery wrinkles to my face. Finally I’d let my eyelids sag a bit, hunched my shoulders slightly, and topped it all off with a battered briefcase in one hand, a cane in the other. Canes were a surprisingly common accessory in Panopolis, a fact that only made sense once you considered the numerous people who got caught between the crosshairs during a Super fight.

My cane had a number of special modifications, courtesy of Raul, though I hoped I wouldn’t have to use any of them. The briefcase, complete with a subtle biometric lock, would hold whatever I managed to get out of the bank, as well as my tube of slow-burning fire. Hopefully I’d make good use of all that empty space. That was the part of the prep work that had bothered me most when we were planning the job.

“What do you mean, I pick them randomly?” I’d asked incredulously.

“It’s better that way,” Raul had insisted. “You make the manager open completely random boxes for you. His master key should be capable of that, and then you’ll have the advantage of inscrutability. If you start to get a reputation as wanting one particular thing—diamonds, say—then the police force can use it as bait. Better not to present them with any weaknesses to be exploited.”

“Oh.” I could see his point: the Sapphire Sultana, whose weakness had been—you guess it, sapphires—had been nabbed by Mr. Fabulous not long ago when the Museum of Nature and Science put on a special display of her favorite stones. “But what if I don’t get anything worthwhile?”

“No one puts things that aren’t worthwhile inside a safe-deposit box. Besides, this is only your first job. Worry about turning a profit once you go to work for the corporations.”

Corporate jobs were the ones that made you real money, and there were people around to broker them if you knew what you were searching for. Raul was notorious enough that he had representatives seek him out, rather than the other way around. I . . . was not. Not yet.

“How are people supposed to know it’s me if I’m in a disguise?” I asked once we were a block from First National. It was cool out, a little after eight, but my palms were sweating so badly I worried I might drop the briefcase. “I thought the whole point of that was not to be recognized. And I’m not going to spray paint ‘Edward Dinges was here’ on the inside of the vault; that’s tacky.”

“Tell one of your former coworkers when you’re almost done. Let them carry the tale.”

“Ah.” Well, that would certainly work if I ended up with someone like Wendy. She could talk like nobody’s business, and about things that were nobody’s business too. “Okay.”