Lords of Pain: Chapter 10

Every muscle in my body aches by the time I finally get home from practice. I park my truck in the garage and wince from the soreness. Our first game is Saturday and Coach decided to put us through the gauntlet to make sure we’re prepared. I collect my bag from the back of the truck and approach the house, knowing what’s waiting for me inside.

Not that I care.

I don’t. But the awareness of her presence is a hard thing to shake, like being fucking haunted. It’s an annoying thing to reconcile, the half of me that wishes Story hadn’t ever come back, and the half of me that’s salivating at the thought of owning her.

I hang my gear on a hook by the back door, feeling my aching muscles strain. The truth is, I don’t mind a little pain—especially when it’s the result of a hard practice or a well-played game. Each hit, each blow gives me somewhere to channel all this pent-up energy I have swelling inside. It’s something concrete to fight.

That’s another reason I agreed to have Story as our Lady.

Especially after dominating so hard last year, I need a challenge. Shit here’s gotten too lax. It’d be easy to fall into the complacency of it. To stagnate. To become less powerful in the process.

Ms. Crane is hunched over the stove when I enter the kitchen. She gives me a sidelong look. “Still alive, I see.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” I ask, shrugging off my jacket. The scent of her cooking slams into me like a freight train. “What’s for dinner?”

“Lasagna,” she answers. “And I better not hear any lip from Satan’s right testicle in there. Damn sick of hearing his big blond bellyaching.”

“Tristian?” I ask, peering back to see into the dining room. “You know how he is.” Tristian’s hateboner for Ms. Crane is a thing of legend, and it’s completely mutual. They were doomed from start, since he has to have his special fucking organic, non-GMO, locally-sourced yadda yadda bullshit, and I’m not sure Ms. Crane knows how to cook anything that doesn’t come frozen or in a jar.

Pausing, I give her a look. “Right testicle? Which one of us is the left?”

She pulls a knife from the drawer and I have to actively stop myself from stepping back. Ms. Crane can be a scary bitch sometimes. “Oh, the other one.”

I quirk an eyebrow at her. “What exactly does that make me?”

Her grin bares a row of stained teeth. “You’re the foreskin, kid.”

I glower at her. “I don’t think paid help is supposed to be quite this insolent.”

“I don’t think I give a fuck,” she responds, glowering right back. “I’m not one of your little bimbo bitches. Now shut your damn face hole and get the plates down. You’re not too old to put over my blade, boy.”

I roll my eyes. I know better than anyone that Ms. Crane has the cred to back up her threats, but if she really wanted to off me, she would have done it when I was a rowdy, pissed off kid, taking refuge in her squat little office on the off weekends. And God knows Tristian would have been dead forever ago. Her soft spot for me is understandable. She’s practically family—like a cranky, old, gin-drinking, chain-smoking, ex-felon aunt. But she has a soft spot for the others, too, I guess. After all, we did pretty much rescue her from South Side.

While she’s puttering around in the pantry, she says, “I met your little toy today.”

I peek back in the dining room, not seeing her. Clenching my jaw, I voice the question that’s been kicking around in my head since I pulled in the driveway, “Where is she?”

“How the hell should I know?” Ms. Crane answers, emerging from the cupboard with a bottle of grated parmesan. “Fed her a snack and sent her on her way. She didn’t seem inclined to attend dinner with the sentient manifestations of Satan’s genitalia. Can’t say I blame her. You’ve got the personalities of an anal itch. Don’t know how I stand it.”

“You’re really on a tear today, Ms. Crane.” I narrow my eyes. “What the hell crawled up your ass and died?”

She waves the knife at me. “That girl? Whatever you think she is, she’s the opposite. I know the look. She’s gonna fuck you up, kid. Can’t say I won’t laugh when she does.”

“You don’t know anything about her,” I grind out, snatching a plate from the cabinet.

“Oh, I know her better than you ever will.” Hobbling past me, she sends me a raspy chuckle. “Birds of a feather. Don’t matter if we only just met. Me and her go way back. You’ll see.”

Fucking cryptic old crime widows.

“You cannot be fucking serious,” Tristian says, sneering at the food she sets on the table. There’s a vein popping out of his forehead and Rath and I share a look at the building tantrum. “Do you have any idea what’s in this cheese? It’s not cheese. It’s shelf-stable saw dust! The pasta…this can’t even be legally referred to as pasta! This bread is full of preservatives and chemicals, and I don’t even want to know where you got the meat in there.” He rubs his temples like he’s grasping for his last shred of control. “I can’t eat this garbage, Ms. Crane!”

Ms. Crane stabs a serving spoon into the middle of the lasagna and says, “You can eat this or you can eat shit. I don’t give a damn either way, you putrid lump of horseshit.”

Tristian’s eye twitches as he watches her leave the room. “I’m getting sick of her crap! Why is she our housekeeper and cook? She shouldn’t be getting paid for two jobs if she can only do one and a half.”

Rath shoots him a glare. “Leave Ms. Crane alone. It’s not her fault you’ve got some kind of food-related mental illness.”

“Caring about my body isn’t a mental illness,” he responds, standing. “And I’ll get the last laugh when you’re both eaten up with cancer and have failing organs.” Rath and I roll our eyes as Tristian storms from the room.

“I swear he gets worse when he’s not getting any,” Rath says, serving himself a helping. “Shit’s about to get really tense around here. What do you think that’s about anyway? The fidelity clause?”

I can’t imagine how many calories I burned at practice. It must have been thousands. I heap three big spoonfuls of pasta onto my plate, trying not to think too hard about the clause my bitch stepsister added to the contract. “Trying to piss us off.”

Rath looks doubtful. “Nah, there has to be something tactical there. A whole academic year with the three of us, and she knowingly bars us from fucking anyone else? That’s just asking to get railroaded at every turn.”

“She thinks we can’t do it,” I explain, chewing my food blankly. “She thinks we’ll fold, and then the whole contract will be null and void.”

Tristian returns then, plate in hand. “Luckily, I still have leftovers from my little date with Sweet-ass Cherry.”

I stop chewing. “Your what?”

Instead of answering, he says, “I’ve put myself in charge of her general wellbeing now. Any withholding of meals needs to go through me first.”

Now, I set down my fork. “How the fuck do you figure?”

“I figure,” he begins, chomping into a piece of bread, “since she fainted in the library. In front of the Counts. Because she hadn’t fucking eaten today. It made us look like bad Lords. You’re too pissed off to look after her, and Rath isn’t reliable enough to look after himself most days.”

“Hey!” Rath protests, but then instantly nods. “Actually, that’s fair.”

Tristian tips his drink to him. “Obviously, it needs to be me. Good thing too, considering I’m the only one who gives a shit about nutrition around here.” Rolling the tension from his shoulders, he tosses us a grin. “Took her to that nice place on Market Street. A little reward.”

I scowl at him. “A reward for what?”

Tristian shrugs. “She came face to face with the Barons and the Counts and she didn’t speak to them. Didn’t even look at them.”

I stare at him hotly. “What were you doing that she fainted in the library?”

Tristian gives a casual shrug. “Fingerbanging the fuck out of her sweet, wet cunt.” He chuckles, like he’s remembering. “Not what I really wanted to do. Taking her cherry in the library today would have been epic. Instead, I had to settle for a little public exhibitionism.”

“Public exhibition?” Rath groans. “Fuck, that’s worth—”

“More points than you have,” Tristian confirms, smiling like the cat who got the cream.

I feel the anger rise up, swelling and pulsing. It’s bad enough that I’ve only got a measly two points for my punishment that morning. But now they’ve both had more of her than I have. Figures. Always knew she was a slut. I don’t know why hearing about it makes me want to pick up this plate and slam it into their fucking faces.

“How long has she been holed up in there?” I tuck all the volatility away, even though these two can probably see through it. It’s never easy hiding stuff from them.

“Pretty much since we got home,” Rath says. “She was quiet when she and Tristian got in. Ate a snack in her room.”

“She’s licking her wounds,” Tristian says, grimacing at something on his plate. “She might have gotten a reward, but she still disobeyed several rules today. I had to correct her with that fingerbang.”

“I was right, wasn’t I?” Rath asks, and Tristian nods back.

“She gets fucking sopping wet,” he agrees, ignoring the way I’m strangling my fork. “And tight as fuck. I completely believe she’s a virgin. I’m not even convinced she’s ever had an orgasm that didn’t come from the two of us.”

Disgusting. These assholes look about two seconds from high-fiving over the table like the shitheads they are.

Tristian continues, “She’s just so fucking oppositional, though. Not texting, arriving late…oh, and do you know why she was late to the library?” He doesn’t wait for us to answer. “Because she was talking to your dad.”

My voice comes out in a low, dangerous hiss. “She was fucking what?”

Rath and Tristian both shoot me similar sympathetic looks. They know all about what happened back then, up to and including the spiral it sent me down that year.

Tristian scoffs in derision. “They had a happy little family reunion, right in the middle of campus. Had to nip that shit quick.”

Goddamn it.

Motherfucker.

I slam my glass down and lurch from my chair, snatching my plate up. Is that why she really came back here? To be close to my father again? The bitterness that settles in the back of my throat makes food unappealing at the moment.

“This doesn’t need to be a situation,” Rath says in a sorry attempt at calming me down.

Tristian agrees, “I already punished her for it. She won’t be going near him without our say-so again, trust me. She heard that shit loud and clear.”

“You know we’ve got your back.”

Since they’re both used to my temper, neither looks surprised when I leave the room.

I know it’s not fair. These two have been ride-or-die by my side since elementary school. Like me, they’ve been through some serious shit, but they keep that close and know how to present themselves on the outside. There’s no whining. No sniveling. They’re tough, loyal, and deep down, maybe more depraved than I am.

But a small, resentful part of me thinks: You have your own backs. They want Story. They want her in the same way I want her. Absolute possession. But how could it be absolute if it’s three people?

This is a competition. The Game will have a victor. One of us will take her, fuck her, own a part of her that no one else can ever lay claim to. She’s mine by rights. We all know it. And somehow, these two have pulled ahead of me in the race to have her. It’s not fucking fair.

Well, I think as I wrap my plate up, I’ve never played fair a day in my life.

I’m not about to start now.

It’s late when I slip into her room.

I’d picked out the sheer curtains myself, making sure the light from the streetlamps would reach her bed, but nowhere else. It takes my eyes a moment to adjust, but once they do, I see her. Sleeping.

The first time I saw her, that night at dinner when my dad announced his engagement to her gold-digging mother, I thought she was…fine. Cute. Sort of nervous and awkward, but perfectly fuckable. Better still was the knowledge—the intuition—that my dad was gifting her to me.

It made perfect sense. My dad got a toy, and so did I. He never came out and said it, but he never had to. I’d practically grown up on his porn collection, learned the right way to treat a girl, to fuck a girl, to put her in her place. The fact that I was still a kid, that he was my dad, made it difficult to share our interests. But he knew. I knew.

Story and her mom were his way of bridging the gap.

So I sat there at dinner and tried to play at being polite, even though I was buzzing with anticipation. I texted the guys the second we hit the parking lot, bragging about my shiny new girl, all mine, no one else’s.

What a fucking joke.

What none of them know, however, is that Story is prettiest when she’s sleeping. I look at her now, drinking in her milky skin, a lock of dark hair falling over her cheek. Her mouth is always parted in sleep, those plush lips of hers looking wet and ready.

It gets my dick rock hard, just like it always did back then. Sure, I made her life a living hell and the guys happily followed my lead. She was easy to pick on back in high school. Fun. All small and weak. I made it clear we weren’t family and never would be. I made sure she had no social clout at school. That she was never to speak or acknowledge me in public. Ever.

That didn’t mean I didn’t know about her. No. I kept a close eye on the girl in the next bedroom, especially as she got closer and closer to my father. It seemed that, briefly, Daniel Payne suddenly loved playing the savior who swept in and plucked these two unfortunate souls out of abject poverty. I knew it was fake, but they didn’t.

Keeping tabs on Story was like an addiction back then. First, because I was fixated on my new plaything. I wanted to know what she smelled like, what she sounded like, what she looked like under the clothes. It was easy enough and it consumed me. I had to share a bathroom with her, giving me access to her things, her scent, her presence. I knew what kind of shampoo she liked, and that she preferred white toothpaste to the blue gels. That her fucking long hair clogged up everything. I knew when I saw the crumpled-up papers in the trash that she was on the rag. I knew everything and it drove me mad, because it just made me want to know more.

The shared bathroom provided something else—something unintentional: access to her room, to her secrets. To her. I spent hours sitting with my back against the cool tiled walls, listening as her voice carried through the vent from her bedroom. That’s how I found out about her and Mary conning old guys out of gift cards and money by showing them their tits or whatever.

I didn’t stop there. Night after night—even after I found out the truth—I snuck into her room and stood by her bed, thinking of all the things I could do to her. At first, these thoughts were all about that soft-looking mouth of hers. The skin that disappeared underneath her little boyshorts. The dark outline of her nipples beneath a tank top. The way her hair might look, wrapped tight around my fist as I pulled…

I left her little gifts in the form of my jizz on her lips, on the shiny tip of her tongue. Not enough that she’d notice. Just enough that I’d know she was marked—that she carried a part of me inside her.

But that was before.

Before the night I walked past my dad’s study and saw them. Story in his lap. His hand up her shirt. Touching her tits. The tits that were supposed to be mine.

Dad was clearly drunk, and there she was, just sitting on his knee, staring blankly at nothing as his fingers toyed with her nipple. I know he whispered something into her ear, but I couldn’t hear it. I could only see the minute, reluctant shake of her head before I stormed away.

After that, the things I imagined doing to her at night grew into these evil, acrid things. I could smother her with a pillow. I could steal the data on her computer. I could gag her, hold her down, and fuck her hard and fast and brutal.

Right now, she’s curled up in the middle of the bed, arms wrapped around a pillow protectively. What is Story afraid of? Me? The guys? Something else?

Whatever it is, she’s foolish enough to think that a pillow will be enough. I lower myself in the chair and focus on the girl in the bed—on the rise and fall of her breath and how very, very vulnerable she is right now.

I’d held off the night before, telling myself that all I was going to do was watch. But here I am again, my cock getting harder and harder under the thin fabric of my sweatpants. My hands fist the edge of the cushion. Story’s legs shift, moving under the blanket and I freeze, watching silently as she rolls over, facing me. I don’t move for a long, treacherous heartbeat, waiting to see if she’ll wake up like she had the night before, peering around the room like she was looking for a monster.

Her eyes never open, but in the dim light I see her mouth slack, lips parting once again. Story’s lips have always been so red—so plump. It’s the first thing Tristian said to me about her when he met her. “I bet those lips would look amazing wrapped around a cock.”

I’d played around with it, before I realized that Story was never meant for me—that she’d probably flirted and slutted her way into my father’s designer trousers. I used to pull my dick out and slot the head of it between her lips, just the littlest bit. She never knew.

It wasn’t enough, though. It was a dissatisfying tease, just like Story herself.

But Tristian had finally done it that night in the laundry room—forced his cock past those red, pretty lips, and fuck it all, he’d been right. They did look amazing. I grimace at the memory, my heart pushing blood between my legs. Leaning my head back, I finally relent, shoving my hand into my pants and pulling out my length. The cool air feels good against the overheated skin. I run my hand down my length and conjure the fantasy I’ve perfected over the years. We’re back in the house and I’ve snuck through the adjoining bathroom and into her room. I’m standing by her bed while she sleeps, and it’s some truly kinky combination of motivating factors: fucking and hurting.

In the fantasy, the blanket is down around her waist and she’s wearing a tight tank top. I can see her nipples visible through the fabric. Even though I know it’s nothing but trouble—she’s my stepsister and a dirty whore—I reach out and touch one, feeling the smooth surface instantly pebble. She doesn’t wake, and it just spurs me on. I lift the blanket and carefully, quietly, slide into the bed behind her. Her back is pressed against mine, but her breath continues in even, controlled inhalations. When I push my hips forward, I suddenly realize she’s not wearing any panties. The feel of my hard cock pressing insistently between her thighs doesn’t stir her. I nudge the outside of her hip forward, giving me access to the warm heat between her legs. I wrap her hair around my fist, and there’s no stopping it. There’s no controlling the urge to take. My cock slides between her legs, pushing at her pussy. I grip her hip and hold her still, forcing my cock inside with a hard, unforgiving shove.

She cries out in the fantasy, always the same sharp, wounded sound that fades into a sleepy, confused whimper.

Now, my hand angrily strips my cock. This fantasy—this old, reliable, never-fails fantasy—takes on a new intensity with her only a few steps away. My balls tighten, the pit of my stomach burning with the need to finally have her. I know the truth, that this fantasy is tied up in the perversion of wanting to hurt Story, humiliate her, defile her. But much stronger than that is something else. It’s what releases the trigger of my orgasm, time and time again.

I want to fuck my stepsister.

I want to claim her.

Own her.

I want her to finally be mine.

That’s what I think about, staring at her sleeping form as I come, the spunk oozing warm and thick down my hand. I exhale silently, chest heaving from exertion, cognizant of one other thing.

I let someone else take her away once.

I won’t do it again.