Chap 2

The days dragged on with Riki unable to discipline his tangled thoughts into any kind of definitive conclusion. A week passed. Then ten days. And yet Riki remained indecisive.

What do I do? At this juncture? Knowing that Kirie had sold Guy out to Iason, the shock and anger gripping his heart turned the world black in front of his eyes.

And as if to drive the point home, Katze had issued him that unspoken ultimatum. In any case, there was only one path left open for him to take.

No matter how well he understood—even though he understood—he could not take that final step. All his angst didn't alter the reality of Guy's disappearance in the slightest. Now he quailed at knowing for certain what Iason's true intentions were.

We all think we're the fairest of them all.

Kirie's taunt still rang inside his skull. He was fine in the light of day. Whatever dull, repetitive bit of manual labor came his way, simply putting his body into motion put the thoughts out of his mind.

But as soon as the sun went down, the anguish welled up like the beating of a tell-tale heart. If he touched bases with anybody, talk of Guy was sure to come up. So he didn't hang out with any members of his old gang. But neither did he like the looks he got when he visited unfamiliar dives.

Ever since giving Jeeks the beating they deserved, rumors of Bison's comeback had hung in the air. To Riki and the gang, it was all dust in the wind. A bad joke. Yet leaving their own motives out of the picture only made the rumors fly faster and fiercer.

It was a pain in the ass. In the end, Riki wasted away the nights nursing a glass at an old watering hole. Knowing he couldn't get himself completely wasted, he drank sparingly. The fear of losing control and losing his mind served as his unconscious watchdog. But he still did all he could to dull the tumult in his mind, and drank what he could until his brain went numb.

When Guy opened his eyes in the morning, he found himself not in the comfortable surroundings of his own pad, but in a bedroom now familiar enough to his senses to suggest he had been there before.

The same unfathomable sigh spilled from his lips. Guy was back in the jail cell of another bad dream.

If this was an ordinary dream, then at some point he would wake up. For whatever reason, there was no way out, no exit to the nightmare that brought Guy there.

Or, rather, that was how bad dreams always played out. But push come to shove, this place was—the confining conditions of house arrest notwithstanding—far superior to his own crappy room in the slums. Which perversely made waking up to reality worse.

And so he ate and slept and sat in a stupor in front of the tube. There really was nothing else to do. Security successfully thwarted every attempt to escape, and he soon gave up on the idea.

Adorning the humdrum interior decor was a fashionable new model of telephone. But it wasn't connected to anything. There were no network connections. Aside from the usual shit offered up on the television screen, every bit of useful information was censored out, and what remained proved suffocatingly insipid.

He had nobody to talk to. He was tired of talking to himself. A sigh was the only sound escaping his lips. There was no way to avoid the awareness of the solitary state of his confinement.

It was boring. Boring. Boring. Having so much time on his hands was more painful that he could have believed.

Ten days passed.

Guy never saw the Blondy who'd imprisoned him there again after the first day. A Bloody named Iason Mink.

Why? What was going on? What did he have to do with this? What was going to happen next? The questions festered day by day, wearing on his nerves. No answer was forthcoming.

"This joke ain't fucking funny anymore."

Words were his only recourse. He had absolutely nothing else.

The cold night wrapped its icy arms around Riki. He stumbled back to his room and threw himself on his bed. Like a stiff rope cracking under a hard strain, all the joints in his body took on a lethargic numbness. He didn't bother taking off his clothes. He didn't even bother turning over.

The thoughts in his head had turned to sludge. His eyelids felt like anvils. He sank into the freezing puddle of the chilly dark night.

Triggered by the release of the front door lock, the temperature of the apartment soon rose automatically, adjusting itself to a more comfortable level. Before long, without a murmur of complaint, Riki sank into a deep sleep.

He had no idea how much time passed after that. And it didn't matter. His dry throat suddenly aroused him from slumber. He weakly pried open his eyes. His tongue felt like sandpaper. His mouth was too dry to summon up any saliva. His throat was so parched his body seemed to be baking from the inside.

"Shit. What the—" he grumbled, his head still half-buried in the pillow.

Listlessly he raked the hair back from his forehead. His leaden brain still refused to admit he was awake. His sluggish, numb thoughts remained less alive than dead.

Riki half-crawled, half-dragged himself out of bed. He got heavily to his feet and staggered not to the kitchen, but to the bathroom. Before quenching his parched throat, he had to clear his clogged head and rinse the stench of alcohol from his skin. It was one or the other or both.

The sound of rushing water roared painfully in his ears. Riki emerged from the shower, toweling off his wet hair as he pulled on a bathrobe. In the kitchen, he mixed some concentrated juice together with mineral water and gulped it down.

Finally, some sense of life returned to his body. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, took a deep breath and let it out. He put down the glass and turned, intending to head back to the bedroom that doubled as the living room in his studio apartment.

Riki froze in place. A light he didn't remember turning on filled the room.

But that wasn't it. The glow from a phantom, a mirage, shone in his eyes.

Iason?

Struck dumb. Riki couldn't move.

What's going on?

In contrast to his wordless, trembling lips, his heartbeat pounded painfully at his temples. His wide black eyes stared motionless, as if rejecting what they were seeing.

An illusion?

But his tortuously racing pulse and the cold, tingling spasms crawling up his spine would not allow him to escape this sudden reality. Because there, right in front of him, was Iason's cool and beautiful countenance. The Blondy said in an easy tone of voice, "It's been awhile, Riki."

The concreteness of that voice—that Riki hadn't heard in a year—clawed its way through his ears and into the center of his brain, cementing the truth of what he was seeing.

Riki suppressed the shudder that ran through his body. He instinctually squared his shoulders into a guarded stance and growled. "Get the fuck out."

But instead of expressing anger, his voice grew shrill and unnaturally hoarse. It didn't rebuff the intruder, and it didn't help discern his reason for being there. Riki's thoughts simply hadn't had the time to collect themselves at that point.

Not to mention that telling Iason to get lost and making him were two completely different propositions.

Nevertheless—or even because of it—he had to say something. Speaking his mind was his only means of drawing the line and clearly marking the distance between them.

Or so he wanted to believe. And yet—

"You want to head out looking like that?" Iason asked, not the slightest hitch in his voice. "Don't you and I have some business to take care of? Namely about Guy?"

Iason played his trump card with a poker face.

At that moment, Riki felt the fire rising in his throat. Shit— he started to say, but swallowed the words before they left his throat.

The options Katze had held to his head like a gun that day morphed and changed into the form that stood in front of him now. That realization was scathing, enough to make his heart seize in his chest.

Riki settled into his stance, braced himself, and clenched his fists. His eyes tilled with bloodlust as he stared back at Iason. But that was all he could do.

"Frightening. You look like you could actually tear my throat out." Iason smiled crookedly. "I believe I actually felt goose bumps."

In stark contrast to the supposed lord of the manor—who bared his emotions and bristled like a porcupine—the uninvited guest remained calm and composed.

"Today makes two weeks. I expected to hear from you already. I apparently miscalculated."

The malice buried within the insinuations in Iason's voice rubbed Riki the wrong way, accompanied by a needling, stabbing pain. He clenched his fists so tightly his fingers were turning white and beginning to tremble—because of his irrepressible rage—or his emotions having no other form of release—or because of the fear imprinted on his subconscious—Riki himself couldn't have said which was which. This was a whole different situation. On a whole different level. And an overriding sense of hesitance bound him hand and foot.

Iason calmly made himself at home on the old, moldy sofa. He sat there, relaxed, suffusing the room with an unwavering self-confidence and imposing, impenetrable dignity completely at odds with the cramped warrens of the slums.

This was the unblinking reality. And yet despite the oppressive weight of the real, Riki still could not grasp what would explain why Iason had injected himself into this environment.

In defiance of Katze's warnings, I refused to show my cards. So Iason came all the way here to force my hand?

A Tanagura Blondy had come to the slums alone. That fact could only be taken as the cruelest of practical jokes. Contemplating Iason's true intentions, Riki felt a cold chill snaking down his spine.

So he refused to think about it. What he was experiencing was simply too impossible for him to believe. The dead silence strangling his thoughts grew painful. The pain became too intense to stand. Riki at last let the sparks fly.

"So what is it you want to say to me? You want me to kneel down and kiss your feet?" He grasped desperately at any fragment of reason. "Don't tell me you came all the way here and busted into my place while I was asleep just in order to sell Guy back to me. So what do you want?"

He controlled his voice as best he could manage. All the screaming and yelling in the world wouldn't budge Iason in the slightest. But keeping himself on an even keel wasn't easy. He couldn't entirely quiet the spasms shaking his hands, his feet, and his guts.

"Katze has been issuing these veiled threats and warnings about how making this problem go away is all up to me." Riki choked down the bile rising in his throat. "The way you're talking sounds to me like you're using Guy as some kind of bait to get me back."

He finally put it into words—the knot in his stomach, festering bad feelings that his all-night drinking binges could not disguise.

"He's your old pairing partner, isn't he?" The question plucked mercilessly at Riki's taut nerves. Though Iason's voice was warm and inviting, its undertones were hollow and thin. "So what do you think I should do with him?"

"Do with him?" Riki echoed, his voice ragged. He felt Iason's serene gaze wrapping its talons around his heart.

"Unlike you, he's too old to start from scratch. It's not worth it. I suppose I could cut to the chase, drug him up and use him for sex whenever a lascivious thought crosses my mind. How about it? Or tinker with the gray matter a bit and turn him into an obedient slave? Sell him on the black market? Or in a brothel? How he ends up really depends on your next choice."

"You—must—be—joking—"

Riki's words emerged haltingly and muddled.

Iason icily replied, "His fate is in your hands."

Katze had spoken the same intimidating words. But Katze's voice could not compare in the slightest to the sudden impact coming from Iason's mouth. Neither the tone nor the weight.

And more than anything, the look in those eyes held Riki frozen in place. More than the irrationality of being forced to choose between two evils was the force of intimidation that made him feel like he were being pushed off a cliff. Iason was forcing him to resolve—here and now—all the confused thoughts and unanswerable questions that had been muddying his mind these past two weeks.

And in a manner to Iason's liking.

Riki couldn't speak, as if his throat were constricted by the churning blood in his veins. All he could do was bury his fears and channel all his burning passion into his eyes as he glared at Iason.

And Iason met that look with his own overwhelming air of superiority. A look the same as when they had met five years ago in Midas, a cold countenance that betrayed not a particle of concern about what anybody else might think. The ferocious, calculating tranquility that only men of absolute power possessed. Eyes that reflected that same divine right of kings.

Iason was undoubtedly an android Blondy, whose brain alone had been transplanted. And yet those azure eyes stared so fiercely as to completely set aside their finely crafted and artificial origins.

The uncompromising and fractious silence devoured one minute after the next, exhausting Riki like slow water torture, leaving him on the verge of breaking. Tension building upon tension with no respite. The silence digging like a thorn into his sides. The hostility sharpening as each passing second sparked and festered and burned.

Suddenly, Iason came to his feet. As if in concert, Riki started; his eyes leapt in response, a vivid reflection of the balance of power between them. Iason closed in on him, one step and then another. With each step, the suffocating intensity of his presence grew, forcing Riki to unconsciously retreat.

"That's far enough!" Riki cried as the tension shattered all at once, leaving his restraint broken at the lightest of grazes.

But Iason didn't stop. "Why?" he asked, the sarcasm buried in the cool inquiry deliberately provoking Riki. "What is there to be scared of? This is so unlike you." With a derisive smile, he cast aside Riki's apparent loss of nerve. "Is this hard-nosed attitude your one redeeming trait after all?"

The strength of Iason's unwavering gaze rooted Riki's feet to the floor. "You were taking forever to make up your mind, so I decided to drop in for a little visit."

Iason's unflustered voice spoke with an absolute power that wouldn't allow Riki to look away for an instant. He felt his flesh prickling. The impulse to retreat shot through his body, down to the tips of his toes. His pounding pulse clawed away at the fear crawling up his spine.

And yet, Riki somehow held his ground. There was no way he was caving in so quickly. If he showed Iason any weakness, he'd just be the Blondy's pet again.

There was no way. There was no way that was happening.

"So what's your move, Riki?"

From this close distance, a coolly serene gaze fell on Riki. The choice is up to you, those eyes were telling him.

Iason could easily just take Riki with him, wringing out his willfulness without breaking a sweat. But that was not what Iason would do.

A sacrifice is meaningless unless offered up willingly. That was what this was all about. The first offering had been extracted by force. The second must be given freely. After that, there would be nothing left to withhold, no excuses to give.

Iason had cornered him. Cut off all escape routes. Made him an offer he couldn't refuse. And so Iason waited. Waited for Riki to deliver himself up freely.

Riki swallowed hard.

"So, toss him overboard or meet the asking price."

"Where am I supposed to find that kind of money?"

Ten thousand kario. That was the price on Guy's head. Not a sum anybody could simply laugh off. It'd be a stretch even for the greediest of loan sharks charging the most cutthroat interest rates.

Not ones to skimp on such things, Kirie had said of the Tanagura elites.

The kind of price tag you'd expect to see on top-of-the-line merchandise, Katze had pointed out, the darker implications clear.

Either way, it was loose change to Iason. But not to Riki.

"Hold me upside down and shake me, and you'd be lucky to come up with a penny."

If not money, then something else of equal value. Something that Riki could not bear to part with.

"Then I'll take your freedom in exchange."

He'd known it was coming all along. Now Iason finally played his cards and showed his true, malevolent colors. Riki couldn't pay with his body, but with the freedom he coveted. Getting Riki to hand it over had been the goal of this twisted game all along.

"If you want Guy returned unharmed, you have to come back of you own free will."

That was the only price on this product.

"Quit yanking my chain," Riki growled.

Step on his pride. Throw his conscience in the ditch. Mock every rule he lived his life by... but never make him step over that line in the sand he could not cross.

"And what guarantees do I have that you won't hurt Guy anyway?"

That first day Riki had been locked up stark naked in the cell in Eos, he'd been forced to live that way for the next month. "Pet training," it was called. His legs spread, his privates exposed, and the furniture called Daryl going down on him night and day. Exposed and abused before and after, his pride torn away, the semen wrung out of him. Everything he clung to and everything he would not let go of was forced, driven, and sucked out of him.

And yet, as much as he didn't want that happening to Guy—

"Give me two weeks. Don't do anything. Just keep him provided for. That's not asking too much, is it?"

It was the only thing he could say, even knowing that he was bargaining with Guy's life in the process.

"I see. And you intend to force concessions out of me while holding a worthless hand?"

Riki had nothing left to bluff with, but he had no choice but to double down with what he had.

"And if I do, it's all right with you? Whatever might happen to Guy?"

Iason's gaze never wavered. The tone of his voice only grew colder, an ice pick aimed at Riki's only known weakness.

"What about you? Are you OK with letting the whole world know?" Riki could give as well as he could take. Even if it meant scraping together his very last grains of courage. He licked his dry lips and steeled his gaze. "There's no lack for the kind of dirt here that would make those Commonwealth big shots all tingly with excitement. I was under your thumb for three years. But that didn't mean I was kissing your ass every second of the day, Iason."

Unexpectedly, Iason's smile only broadened. "At last you're getting into the swing of things. Men who can bully a Blondy with that kind of bluster are few and far between. And it's an even bigger thrill for not having heard the likes of it for a full year."

The cruelty in Iason's brilliant countenance deepened to a frightening degree. Enough to make Riki momentarily regret his fighting words.

"Now that you mention it, there was someone a long time ago. Someone just like you. But I gave his face a gentle caress and he came to heel just like that. How about you?"

Riki swallowed hard despite himself. He didn't need to ask who that was.

"So what will it take to get you to humbly bend your knees before me?"

Up until now, Riki had never been required to submit willingly. His self-respect as a human being, his pride as a man had been stolen by Iason four years before. So what could he offer him now? Nothing. He had nothing left to give. Nothing other than the last bastion of who he knew himself to be. And that was something he would never surrender.

"I see. Perhaps to start things off you'd like to observe Guy being treated like you were. You slum mongrels are rather used to your male/male liaisons. Instead of a run-of-the-mill sex robot, what about a crazed, half-human, bioengineered chimera riding him? Now that'd be a thrill. Don't you think?"

Riki bit down on his lip. He should have known better than to try such a desperate bluff on Iason. Nevertheless—

"So what do you want, Iason? Do you even know yourself? I'm twenty years old. Too old to be kept in Eos. Isn't that common knowledge among pet owners?"

That reality couldn't go unspoken. But why would he, of all people, feel compelled to blurt out such a thing? Turning it over in his mind, his stomach churned and he felt himself becoming more pissed off.

Most of the male pets kept in Eos were younger than fifteen. And besides that, the higher an elite's rank, typically the younger the pet. Four years before, at Riki's debut in Eos, the unbridled opinion was that in terms of commodity value, he'd barely made it under the wire.

Compared to a pureblood female, the prime of a male was indeed short. A female could choose her mates, be bred, and have children. But not a male. Aside from the tiny fraction that could obtain "seed rights," common practice in Eos was to discard males by the time they hit seventeen.

Among them, Riki lasted as Iason's pet until the age of eighteen. A rare exception. And to make matters worse, he was mated neither in public nor in the shadows. He was the sole sexual property of Iason. The pets of Eos loathed him for it.

"I'm pretty much a has-been, aren't I?" he asked with particular force. Riki no longer wore the symbol of his humiliation—the pet ring—and never would again. Not in this lifetime. "So what's the deal? After all this time, and going to such lengths, why call the lost dog home?"

No mere whimsy lasted three years. And if there was some fucking time limit at work, then why the hell let him go in the first place? And why now? That was what everything came down to. Even as a pet in Eos, what was going through Iason's mind? Riki didn't have a clue.

As far as he was concerned, Iason was a slave master who bound and subjugated him with chains of pleasure. There was no way he was going back to that life a second time.

"You elites have your pick of the purebloods, the queen of any harem. But three fucking years? With a slum mongrel? I'd think even you would get bored after a while."

"Which is why I let you run free for a year."

"What?"

"I removed your pet ring, called off the guards, and allowed you to roam the slums for a while. You've had enough time to catch your second wind, haven't you? My patience does have its limits."

One year of freedom? To catch my second wind? His patience has its limits? Riki couldn't make heads nor tails of what Iason was getting at.

What—are—you—trying—to—say—?

"Do not misunderstand. All I did was remove your pet ring. I have not otherwise touched your official registration records."

In that moment Riki felt like bashing Iason's face in. His mind reeled. "You—must—be—joking—"

It wasn't possible. Removing the pet ring and erasing the records should be one and the same thing. There were no exceptions. There couldn't be.

"I am not joking."

"It's impossible! Quit messing with my head!"

"You want proof?"

Yeah, if such a thing exists, I sure as hell want to see it! He choked down the words before they exited his lips. What if Iason was telling the truth? What if he really did have the evidence? What would Riki do then? If the evidence was thrust in front of his eyes here and now?

He had no other recourse. With a snap of Iason's fingers, it was back to the life of a pet. Riki swallowed hard. He's bluffing. He had to be. He couldn't have gone to all this trouble.

Using Kirie—

Nabbing Guy—

Paying a finder's fee of ten thousand kario.

The evidence couldn't exist—Iason never would have gone to such lengths.

And yet—why—?

A cold shock licked down his spine as Iason extracted a passcase from his breast pocket and flipped it open and held it up in front of Riki's eyes. The unforgiving, undeniable evidence.

Riki stared at it. His eyes widened with shock. A pet license with the holy seal of Tanagura affixed.

"Yesterday, today, and of course tomorrow as well, you are my pet."

A shock like Riki had never expected in his life seized his heart. The truth weighed painfully, like a heavy stone on his chest. His vision warped and crumbled, filling with fire like the heat waves rising from a desert floor.

"Three years, Riki. I tamed and trained you for three years. That's how much time and patience the task required. Have you forgotten already? Put it all behind you?"

Riki would never forget. There was no way he could. The pet poison stained every corner of his body. During those three years of intolerable humiliation and festering pleasure, every day with Iason had woven the intoxicating curse into the marrow of his bones. The thick weight of the sludge made him want to vomit it all out—though it could never be purged from his memory.

"A pet is not simply some flashy accessory, Riki. You are mine to use as I wish for as long as I want. Whether you are twenty or forty, it makes no difference. You are that lithe and lewd slum mongrel who fawns on no one. How could you imagine I would let you go at this juncture?" Calmly and warmly Iason drove the tip of the blade home. And then smiled coldly.

Riki stood there petrified. The blood drained from his face. His lips trembled. Regardless of whatever thoughts tumbled through his mind, his benumbed mouth and tongue could not form the words.

Iason returned the passcase to his breast pocket. And in a manner suggesting it was his natural right to do so, threw his arm around Riki's waist and yanked him closer.

In that moment, Riki twisted his body and jerked his hands free and awkwardly stumbled away.

"Come here, Riki," Iason said, with all the menace of a spurned owner.

His back against the wall, Riki summoned defiance from the pit of his stomach and hurled it back at Iason. "Who the fuck am I? There're hundreds of bastards who want to be your pet, so why the hell settle on me?"

The scream drained the air from his lungs and the color from his face. He had no place to run. It was a scream of both desperation and necessity. But even the sharpened point of Riki's fury shattered like glass against Iason's shield.

"I so cherish these enlivening moments when you defy me even as a Blondy. When you react to me so humanly. I feel myself tingling right down to the center of my brain. I love how you look at me with such undisguised disdain. It's so endearing I want to rip out your beating heart and press it to my cheek."

Both repulsive and doting, Iason spun the words out of his mouth. As if they would lure his lover into his arms. Like the pitiable sacrifice in the lair of the Angel of Death, Riki could hardly even blink.

All he could feel was a numbing hallucination that seemed to rise up his body from the tips of his toes and close clumsily about his throat.

In a refined and practiced manner, Iason removed his gloves and slowly reached out his right hand. Not toward Riki's waist or arm or shoulders, but for the scruff of his neck, which he seized gently and stroked like a prized dog's.

Riki jerked and shrugged his shoulders and backed away. But Iason had already arrested any further movement. "No, no, no." he said. "Stand still."

Iason's deep and tender voice cascaded over Riki. It was enough to make Riki's heart leap in his chest. Over those three years, the sensuous touch of Iason's hands had become ingrained inside him.

Iason's fingertips traced undulating lines along his neck, grazing his earlobes. Slipping across his shoulders now, a whole year later, raised goose flesh on his skin. Stealing beneath Riki's bathrobe and fondling his chest, a stroke shooting some indescribable shudder through Riki.

In that moment, Riki tasted every drop of a thirst that had lasted a year. His pulse beat like two bass drums, one after the other. His breath burned in his throat. His heart raced faster. His nipples grew flushed and full, hardening to points. As Iason assaulted the peaks of that rigid heat as if to crush them with his fingertips, the lusts buried deep in Riki's body burst into flame.

Something was slowly seeping through his tissues, staining the flesh. That which he could not forget, no matter how hard he tried, reared its head and opened its ravenous mouth.

He was helpless before it.

Riki bit down on his lower lip and squeezed his eyes shut. He was dying of thirst, like the cracks opening up on a parched lake bed, but the smoldering wildfire had never gone out. And so the incandescent brand held Riki in its rapturous grasp. The scrupulously ingrained sexual response rippled and bloomed, like a bud of spring bursting into the sunlight.

Iason loosened the front of Riki's bathrobe and pushed it off his shoulders, letting the fabric fall into a heap on the floor. As he pulled Riki closer to massage his tight buttocks, even before pressing against his loins, Riki's member had come to attention in stark proof of his pleasure.

Riki could conceal nothing. Make no excuses. He could only grind his back teeth and hang his head.

Iason did not hesitate. As if to confirm the sensations of a year before, he redoubled his efforts, touching Riki with intensity and then gentleness, and with great attention to detail—

Iason kneaded the hot buds of Riki's taut nipples, the tense muscles of his buttocks. The curve of his rod and then the weight of his balls in his hand. His fingertips toyed with the slit of the honeyed tip until he firmly gripped Riki's rod in his palm. And then, exercising his rights as master and owner, he fitted the pet ring back into place.

Z-107M. The number of the brand that cursed Riki's existence.

Riki trembled when he tasted that particular sensation snug against his flesh again after so long. In the blink of an eye, without a note of fanfare, his brief flirtation with freedom had collapsed.

However, perhaps the underlying truth was that the burning sense of loss and the physical pangs of pleasure were of two different dimensions. Stimulated by the well-accustomed touch of Iason's caresses, his back arched. The flickering flames of desire licked at his nether regions.

"Ahhh—"

Iason squeezed his nipples hard. Riki couldn't help but gasp and moan. The fingers strummed, pressed, and twisted to one side and then the next. Manipulated until his throbbing blood bruised beneath his skin. And yet it was a vexingly lax stimulation.

But enough that the tip of his hard shaft oozed honey. When Iason grazed it with the balls of his fingers, the permeating pet poison rolled through Riki like a wave. He knew he'd be a slave to his senses until his final, gasping breath.

With his free hand, Iason kept a measured grip on Riki's package, massaging his balls, as if to confirm, from time to time, the position of one sphere or the other. Riki's shaft burned down to the tip. The precum welled up. The furrows in his brow deepened.

Iason grazed Riki's glans with the pads of his fingers, coating them with sexual juices. Riki's gasps grew in intensity as Iason plunged his finger into the narrow valley of his muscled folds.

"Ahhh—"

Sparks shot across the back of Riki's eyes. His groin began to tremble and spasm. In the year since he'd returned to the slums, he hadn't done it with anybody. He'd jerked himself off in a perfunctory manner. The thought of these unconstrained pleasures frightened him.

No matter how much he desired the touch of skin—how much he hungered for its warmth—he merely went through the motions. The stimulation coursing through his starving body was stronger than anything he'd ever imagined.

"You have no perseverance, Riki." Iason's cool banter made Riki bite his lip. "Compared to your mouth, this is so much more honest."

Aroused by Iason's probing digits, Riki's creamy ejaculation slicked the Blondy's hand. Turning and baring and exposing the ripe rift of his hidden flesh, Riki keened and groaned, his head slumping to his chest. Were it not for the pet ring clasping the base of his member, those stimulations would have brought him to climax in a flash. Even Riki was startled by the parched condition of his sexual being.

"With this, the throbbing of your favorite spot is too much to hear."

Iason dangled the words before Riki like catnip, forcing the mongrel to realize his own masochism.

"Spread your legs."

Riki followed the command immediately, shifting his feet accordingly.

"More."

The severe tone in Iason's voice prohibited a refusal. And yet, the vibrations strumming Riki's eardrums plunged deeply, stirring him to the core. Enough to bewitch the last vestiges of Riki's self-control.

The tip of Iason's finger glided down the valley, grazing his hidden bud.

With a shiver, Riki suddenly caught his breath. Whether touched or not touched, the softness of the contact made his senses reel and his blood boil. He loathed this stripping bare of the wellspring of his pleasure centers, tuned as they were to a hypersensitive degree. Even he had not touched and toyed with himself in this way.

But now he had to acknowledge the awe and undiluted desires unleashed as the seal was broken. And yet, the line drawn by Iason's lingering finger inflamed Riki's starved state.

"Just—do—it—"

Exciting Riki's fevered, swollen flesh over and over—pushing him to the breaking point—the drumbeat stuttering through the center of his body maintaining the agony—

He desired Iason's finger, desired him to plunge deeper and divide him in two, so compelling was the lust. It bore into him, accosted him, and assaulted him. He wanted that entrancing, intoxicating bliss to take him over. But then—

"What do you want?" Iason asked.

Riki growled low, inaudible curses in response to such coldness. Nevertheless, his starving state forced him to pry open his frozen lips.

"Don't play with me—" he shot back, glaring at Iason from beneath his brow. His black eyes brimmed with carnality, the corners of his eyes stained red. That and the unconscious desire in his voice only added to his strangely compelling allure. "I'm telling you to hurry up and fuck me."

Riki wasn't trying to be provocative. He no longer had the vitality to deliberately act that way. The words leaping hoarsely from his throat were, after a manner, a request. A plea.

But Iason would spare him no mercy. "If that's what you want, then make your vows. Again, and clearly. Whom do you belong to?"

Riki gulped. He stared back at Iason, his eyes whirlpools of despair and the pressing demands of desire. If he did not give, he would never get what he needed. It was another chain binding him all the further, but Riki could discipline himself no longer.

"I—am—yours—I—belong—to—you—"

The stark reality trickled from the corners of his clenched teeth. This was no lie that would vanish with the morning dew. Though at best a verbal promise, Iason knew that with a certain amount of conditioning, it would have the entrancing power to bind. Because the pet ring by itself was not enough to hold Riki. That was why it was necessary for Riki to swear upon his body and his soul with his own words.

"Yes, you do. That will suffice."

Iason leisurely parted Riki's hidden bud. His finger turned and twisted and buried itself inside, like a nail driven through the heart of Riki's pride. Iason moved his finger deeper, harder, assaulting Riki's soft inner walls.

Riki cried and groaned.

"Ahhh—Hnnn—"

Incandescent moans erupted from his mouth in unrestrained succession. Seeking some support as his body imploded with the pleasure, half-unconsciously he rocked his hips and dug his fingers into Iason's back.

Riki thirsted. He hungered. In the depths of his parched body was a place that could not forget the tremors licking up his spine. Permeating him bit by bit. A stinging heat scorching his blood.

Riki held his breath and waited. For the moment of blistering fire and numbing ice when the tightly strung strings of his bliss snapped—

"Hahhh—"

His eyebrows furrowed, his back arched, the sobs pulsating at his throat, his semen gushing out of him—what was he in that moment? What regrets did he harbor for his fleeting freedom? Or his own contempt at his fate? Or the masochism that forced him to kneel before absolute power?

His body took up the pet poison like a sponge. He should have possessed some natural resistance, a point of self-immunization. However, the culmination of that empty year left him with nothing but a body that could be toyed with, provoked, stimulated into these uncontrollable spasms of sensuality.

The harsh and biting reality hit him hard.

He'd struggled day after day to erase the memories of what had been crammed into his mind and instructed to his senses. Had he, in direct opposition to his efforts, engendered all this hunger and thirst instead?

Iason's finger, swallowed down to its joints, twitched and wormed its way inside him. That alone tightened the tendons of his inner thighs until they hummed. His hot arousal stoked his pulse, tightening around his groin like a vise, Sending whirlpools of narcotic numbness swirling into his brain.

He was living through an old dream, his body falling into a well-remembered rhythm as Iason's finger kneaded his feverish, ripe flesh, grazing the walls of his insides, rending him apart. The place of pleasure was etched into his memories, and his desires traced that line back to the precise location of the rapture. Heat and pain and fire. Tossed and turned by the undulations of bliss, his feelings were swept into the void.

And yet, as if to prove that his basic instincts, coveting more pleasure, knew no limits, he clamped tightly around Iason's finger, drawing it in deeper. The bonfire had been lit, and it would not be easily extinguished. He couldn't help but expose this humiliating awareness of his masochistic desires to Iason. Doing so only added fuel to the fire.

"A finger alone is not enough?"

"Put—it—in—me—" he said, knowing that if he didn't ask, it would not be given.

"It's—not—enough—"

So he had to say it.

His body was bent over. Accompanied by an overwhelming sense of size and mass, Iason entered him from the rear, stroking the inner walls of his flesh, swollen with a hard, fierce fervor. Filled by that which he desired, Riki was assaulted simultaneously by intense feelings of relief and waves of lust and lasciviousness. Riki threw his head back, cries of joy spilling from his throat.

Iason took his time, breaking him in slowly, and then burying himself to the hilt. Pleasure spasmed through Riki's body as Iason rocked him back and forth. Massaging his inner parts, ascertaining the wellspring of his ecstasy. Riki's cries rose shrilly, as if his lungs were being turned inside out.

As if to engrave the new contract into Riki's soul, Iason drove into him, penetrating deep until Riki's back bent like a bow. He gripped Riki's waist and thrust his hips forward. Riki clasped his hands against the wall and gasped.

With every thrust, Iason's rock-hard appendage plunged deeper and deeper. Riki's spine creaked like a hinge and the repeated shocks blasted into the corners of his skull. He felt himself suffocating, his rapturous cries frozen in the air.

Riki's member, swollen to an arc, scattered drops of bliss about his feet. Reaching the pinnacle of his arousal, he climbed ever higher. He climbed higher and could not find release, with every stop retreating further from him. The pleasure turned to stinging pain.

"I've—got—nothing—left—mercy—please—"

The tears poured down into his twisted and trembling mouth. Simply standing erect was torture. Each breath was like a rasp in his throat. His midsection felt on the verge of breaking in two. His legs turned to rubber and were seized by cramps and convulsions.

The point came when too much pleasure turned inexorably to pain, when heaven became hell. The numbed center of his brain felt like a lead ball in his head. His eyes blurred and couldn't pull into focus.

Finally, Iason eased their bodies apart, cleanly separating the connection between them. In that instant, Riki collapsed to the floor in a boneless, panting heap.

The murky, muddled atmosphere in the room showed no signs of stirring. The scent from Riki's seed scattered across the wall and floor collected and stagnated there.

Riki couldn't recall how many times he had climaxed. He only remembered Iason whispering in his ear how he'd wring Riki dry until he had nothing left to give. There wasn't a drop of semen left in his body.

His unkempt black bangs were plastered against his forehead. He'd already lost any sensation below his waist. He crouched there, each breath burning at his throat, and looked vacantly up at Iason.

"You'll have Guy back by tomorrow," Iason said coldly as he straightened himself up. "So make the best of your goodbyes." He walked away without a backward glance. And then stopped, his hand on the doorknob. "I shouldn't have to say so, but when you return to Eos, be sure to leave the grime of the slums behind you. You wouldn't want to leave any loose ends lying around that might trip somebody up. Would you, Riki?"

With that warning lingering in the air, Iason exited Riki's apartment.

The freezing, vacant, midnight streets of Colony Block 24. The pedestrian traffic had petered out. Hardly a sign or porch light glowed anywhere. No watchful eyes to take notice of Iason. There was only the rhythmic stride of his boots echoing through the cold night air before it was absorbed and swallowed up by the darkness.

Slipping through the tangle of streets and alleyways without a moment's confusion, Iason's sure-footed steps brought him to King's Road. As if waiting in the shadows for him to arrive, an air car appeared, gliding up and stopping next to him. The door opened without a sound. Iason slid his lanky form into the car and settled into the back seat.

"Parthia," was all he said.

"Understood," Katze said, his eyes fixed ahead with an expressionless gaze as he quickly accelerated.

Iason leaned back, surrendering to the cushioned seat with only the slightest tremor. His mind flashed back to the Riki he had just parted from.

As defiant as the first time we met.

Riki's countenance was an unbridled display of alarm and wariness. When Iason pondered that, a wry smile rose unbidden to his lips. He couldn't help but think fondly of Riki, the way he clung stubbornly to his freedom with all his might, not realizing it was nothing but an illusion.

This attachment was something more than possessiveness. Hadn't he measured out a year's time and put that distance between himself and Riki in order to know exactly where he stood? Such was the extent of his desire for Riki.

The startling rigidity in Riki's extremities and the pulsating heat in his body still lingered in his hands. As if deliberating on those echoes and reverberations, Iason slowly and tightly clasped his hands together.

After this, I shall never let him go. He'd set out to apprehend and had been apprehended instead. This knowledge was closer to an inner awakening or resignation to the truth, rather than a personal condemnation.

As Raoul put it, "How could an elite such as Iason Mink lose his way over a bit of slum trash?"

The bitter sarcasm hit home. But Iason let it wash over him with a single thin smile. Even when it came to his whimsies, Iason was determined to the end. His loyalty to Jupiter, the creator of Tanagura, did not waver in the slightest.

Except that his absolute devotion was a bit diluted because of Riki.

Why? he asked himself. But Iason himself had no answer. He'd never experienced anything like this before. If forced to provide a reason, he felt he had stumbled across something he could not do without. That seemed the closest truth he could come to.

Something important, that he could not stand to lose.

But it wasn't that, either.

Something he didn't just long for, but must possess, even if that meant grabbing and binding it fast.

That was more it. Something akin to an attachment.

So as far as Iason was concerned, there was no need to engage in an inner debate. He'd take Riki back and lower the curtain on the little farce he'd scripted to get the job done.

To he sure, his sense of the quixotic had gotten out of hand, and the whole thing might not have been in the best of tastes. But the ends justified the means. Making Riki pant and sing, the breath tumble ragged from his throat, had been easier than he'd remembered.

The boy was in a half-starved state, after all.

That had been an unexpected revelation. Five years before, provoked by Riki, he had taken him for the hell of it.

Or, perhaps, the real problem had arisen before that.

Sex is no big deal. Simply a convenient substitute for jacking off. So Riki had once asserted, and in a sense he was the truly naïve one. Among the slum mongrels, whose sexual mores were said to hit rock bottom, that naïveté was quite rare.

As if sex was a been-there-done-that affair for him, he didn't know the true meaning of pleasure. That might be a better way to put it. Not an amateur, yet no master, either. Even knowing where the bud of his pleasure lived, he pretended indifference.

Riki had been a hard-nosed brat when Iason first met him. Too much of a brat to make Iason want to pick him up and play with him. But when he learned that Riki was renowned in the slums as a frenetic gang boss, that strange and unexpected naïveté did not strike him as the kind of preening haughtiness that would so clumsily sell itself short.

And that was indeed not the case. Seeing Guy—Riki's pairing partner—with his own two eyes, Iason at last understood that somewhere under the mask of Riki's uncompromising pride must be buried the roots of his innocence. Namely, a body that had come to be loved and prized by a single man. The confirmation of what he never would have presumed. So this is Guy—

Even becoming aware that he'd been set up and sold off by Kirie, Guy didn't throw a tantrum. The man who was Riki's partner was more collected, but it bordered on the disagreeable.

Hearing the extravagant sums Kirie had received, Guy had gaped at Iason and said with a wry smile, "He's overcharging you, you know?"

Even all that talk of becoming a pet that Kirie had swallowed whole with jealousy and envy only made Guy quip, "There's nothing desirable about me. No diamond in the rough here—just gravel no Bloody would ever take to."

He'd turned Iason down flat. And on top of that had added, "So you must have other motives in mind if it really had to be me."

The man could think on his feet. And yet didn't possess the deviousness of mind to imagine he'd been used as the lure to hook Riki. But when he found out—after so easily reading Kirie's double-cross with a thin smile—how would he react then?

Iason would be lying if he said he wasn't curious. Call it another one of my whimsical moments. A slight smile turned the corners of his mouth.

Iason had stolen Riki from a man like Guy four years before and made him his pet. He'd torn every ounce of bliss from his green body, planted in it a garden of pleasures, and trained him to be a pet that knew every carnal secret. He beat him into obedience but certainly not into docility.

No matter how Riki protested and denied reality, he had a body hypersensitive to pleasure that bloomed at the slightest lascivious touch. Simply trailing a finger down the back of Riki's neck made his nipples erect. And when Iason pressed and manipulated the rigid heat contained therein, Riki's cock would instantly swell and harden.

It was mortifying to Riki, but of great satisfaction to Iason. Despite that one year gap, Riki's body had not forgotten the amorous touch of Iason's hands. He had conducted a fine performance.

Nevertheless, Riki's hidden bud had been tighter than expected, and had resisted Iason's finger. During that year, Riki had apparently not indulged himself in one drunken orgy after the other.

"Him and Guy are over."

Iason had taken Kirie's pronouncement with the necessary grain of salt. But the reality of the hypersensitivity he expected and found inside Riki, accompanied by that unexpected stiffness, aroused in him a fresh sense of surprise.

Given time, he would carefully loosen those chains. Before that, though, it would he Riki letting loose. When Riki's lips trembled and he begged to be fucked, Iason couldn't help thinking that the previous year had not gone to waste. Iason had given himself this year to ascertain the exact nature of his attachment. He didn't harbor the illusion that he'd done so in order to induce this famine in Riki's body.

"A pet's life isn't worth shit," Riki had hissed in his face a year ago, grimacing at the pain of the pet ring grinding into his groin. "I'm nobody's bitch!" he'd managed to blurt out in the gaps between the pleasure and pain.

But then he'd said. "I belong to you."

The black eyes stared back at him, brimming with physical desire, and those were the words that had emerged. A total defeat, Iason was sure. That conviction sent his own passions over the top.

And those definitely were his own passions. The flawless product of reason and intelligence, a Blondy should never be possessed by anything so degrading as these animalistic lusts.

And yet Iason lusted. For Riki. All his logic and self-control smashed to nothing. Before Riki's very eyes, a Blondy had degraded into a mere sex android. Had he sunk so far?

He could acknowledge to himself the masochistic contempt, but still could not surmount the wonder of it all. There was no way that Raoul—this latest round only fueling his bitter castigations—would understand where he was coming from. That he, Iason, had succumbed.

But Iason knew. Even penetrating Riki as often as he liked, he could not obtain that transcendent sense of satisfaction. Flesh and blood and the android. That insurmountable wall was itself not the source of his suffering. He felt it when the two of them became one—a rough and grating thirst in a deep corner of his heart.

Iason could control the physical body, but Riki's soul remained out of reach. Iason had never imagined that this would have weighed upon him as heavily and painfully as it did.

If he could only convert what he was feeling into words, perhaps something would arise that would bind the two together. The only other option was to torture Riki, turn him inside out and fill him up, until they became one.

Iason curled his lips in his self-contempt at being carried away by such fanciful daydreams. At this point in the game, nothing had changed at all. All that kept Riki fast at his heels was the pet ring. That was the rock-solid reality in front of his eyes. Canter off on a sudden tangent, and he might never find his way back again. There was no going back to the past to change the path he'd chosen.

There was no option but for Iason to reign over Riki from above as his absolute master. Yet, now and then, a chafing sense of irritation and frustration welled up inside him. As if besmeared by such muddled desires, his body itself began to rot. He began having bad dreams. Or not dreams at all, but omens, storm clouds gathering on the horizon.

Out of sheer hopelessness and inexperience, the feared Ice Man of the black market could not calmly cast away his tumultuous heart without a moment's hesitation.

The fresh, raw attachment drawing him to Riki and his wool pride as a Blondy battled and blended and tangled together. And before long, the borderline between them was ground into the mud and no longer visible. Iason did not perceive this as corruption. But branding it a heresy from the perspective of his creator, Jupiter, could change nothing at this point.

In the final analysis, Iason thought, only the bent chains of master and pet tied them together. Riki and myself—

This one thought on his mind, Iason permitted himself a deep and private sigh.