Hell, she’d learned more on that job in the three years she’d spent there than she ever would have learned with a full vo-tech degree.
And it was that on-the-job experience which had landed her the job at the brewery.
Farking Marco.
She’d heard from other women that reporting him did no good. He denied everything, he was buddies with someone in HR, and he always retaliated.
That was why Stacia had tolerated his bullshit as long as she could. She’d almost expected Billy to look the other way, which was part of the reason she’d finally snapped.
Had she known he was going to nail Marco for finally doing something in front of a witness with more pull than Marco had, she would have rethought her approach.
But at that moment, she’d been pissed.
The fark.
Off.
She almost wished they hadn’t fired him. It would have been fun making him flinch any time she walked past him, deliberately baiting him into backing down.
Making golf jokes.
As she settled into her bus seat for the nearly hour-long ride back to their apartment, she stared out the window at the cars lining both sides of the streets, parked there. Some still drivable, some not. Some with owners who could afford to drive them on rare occasions, most sitting there with owners who hoped to one day be able to afford to drive them again.
Not many cars sharing the road with the bus in this neighborhood. Stacia never complained about their apartment when she realized she could be living in a neighborhood like this, run-down, crime-ridden, and looking like it had imploded and just not collapsed yet.
It could always be worse.
She just wanted—needed—a little respite. No telling what Marvin’s excuse de jour would be as to why he couldn’t even earn a farking nickel as a panhandler. Hell, sell his blood if he had to.
Anything.
She’d even look the other way without judgment if he wanted to go hustle on the street turning tricks. She wouldn’t deny it wasn’t the best option, but it was one she’d kept in the back of her own pragmatic mind as a possibility, if worse came to the very, rock-bottom worse.
Their bills had to get paid. Her aunt needed her medication. If Stacia was ever forced to that point of financial desperation, she would do whatever it took, short of breaking the law, to keep money coming in. Prostitution, while not very savory, was at least legal in their state. She certainly wouldn’t be the first woman who needed to spread her legs to pay the bills.
And with the way their country’s economy had bottomed out, she likely wouldn’t be the last.
Starving, or not working, was not an option. Not for her. The only shame was in not trying.
Acting weird even by his normal standards, Marvin had spent most of his days over the past two months going to that damn church that had sprung up in their neighborhood four months earlier in a previously vacant grocery store building. Apparently a place run by that televangelist dude.
Barn? No, Silo. That was it.
Silo gave her the creeps any time she saw him on the TV. Even Aunt Darla had once commented that she didn’t like him before turning the channel.
Stacia had first wondered if Marvin was going there and trying to sign up for whatever charity programs they might be offering. She knew some churches periodically offered classes like free employment counseling.
Hell, even a food pantry would be great. It’d be less money they’d have to spend at the store on increasingly expensive staples like rice and dried beans. They hadn’t had beef in a couple of months. Chicken was the cheapest meat they could get their hands on, and it was something they could stretch over a week or longer, everything from eating the meat, to making stock from the carcass and using that for soup.
But Stacia didn’t understand why Marvin kept going there with what seemed to be nothing to show for it. And she hadn’t been able to pin him down long enough when he was at the apartment to question him about it.
Some of them had real jobs to get to, unlike her brother.
It was after seven in the morning when Stacia punched in her code to unlock the door to apartment 216 and dragged herself inside, locking it behind her. The small front room held their tiny kitchen area, the rickety table and three chairs, a ratty sofa, an old recliner, a dinged-up coffee table, and their TV.
She was glad to see Marvin at least wasn’t asleep on the couch with the TV going. She would have kicked his ass for wasting electricity and running up their bill like that.
Hell, maybe I should make him sleep on the couch. Then I could rent out his room anyway.
She peeked in and found him asleep in his room. After a moment of fighting the urge to go in and scream him awake, she pulled his door closed and headed to the bathroom to grab a shower.
Fighting with him likely wouldn’t help. It damn sure hadn’t helped any in the past.
Maybe I should just rent it out and not tell Aunt Darla. Just do it and force Marvin out. Would serve him right.
At least then she could be sure that Aunt Darla would still get her meds.
After undressing and stepping under the hot water, she decided to let it go for now. She needed food and sleep. Marvin would have to wait until she could deal with that without wanting to kick his ass the way she’d almost kicked Marco’s.
Chapter Four
Reverend Hannibal Silo, founder and leader of the Church of the Rising Sunset, impatiently drummed his fingers on the glass top of his desk in his penthouse office in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
He was not amused.
There had been no new information received on the whereabouts of the SOTIF1 team, AKA the Drunk Monkeys.
The men who had, thus far, foiled his attempts to get his hands on two members of The List.
All they knew was that Dr. Phe Quong and Dr. Peter McInnis had likely been located by the team and taken into protective custody.
They had not, however, been brought to the United States and turned over as per their last known standing orders from their commander, General Joseph Arliss.
General Arliss was also someone who’d been vexing Silo for a while.
Silo had taken great pains over the years to acquire well-placed contacts and operatives throughout the corporate world, government, and military, sometimes by taking them on as true-believer allies, sometimes by bribery, but usually by extortion, through getting information on them that they didn’t wish to become public.
Arliss, however…
Silo stewed.
It was suspected, as best their other contacts could independently discover without drawing suspicion to themselves, that Arliss had somehow given his pet SOTIF team a command to go off-the-grid. No further information on their whereabouts was forthcoming, even though the general had made no official indication that the men’s mission, goals, or status had changed.
To get anything else out of Arliss would require a direct order from the President herself. Even the generals running the other SOTIF teams couldn’t pry that info out of Arliss if he didn’t want to reveal it.
And if that was what it would take, well then, that was what Silo would do.
Meanwhile, he was awaiting word from his right-hand man, Jerald Arbeid, about Jerald’s conversation with one Senator Tom Davis from Illinois. The senator had connections inside the CIA. Jerald had traveled to DC to talk to the senator in person.
They’d been dealing with the senator for a while and it was time to start shaking his tree with a little more vigor. They were offering him a chance to skip a couple of his regular monthly extortion payments to Silo in exchange for him snagging Silo a new contact inside Homeland Security.
The NSA had become practically worthless in terms of usable information. Yes, they seemingly had intelligence data on every person in the country, the ability to spy and sneak through computers and phones and bank records at will, but any attempt to sift through that nearly infinite resource was akin to trying to find a particular drop of water in the Pacific Ocea
n.
It just wasn’t worth the aggravation.
Besides, the people who worked there really didn’t give a shit about blackmail. They could cover their own tracks quite effectively, thank you very much. Silo knew it wasn’t worth the risk of one of them uncovering evidence that would bring unwarranted attention upon himself.
And he knew for a fact that had happened at least one other time, when one of Silo’s contacts had tried to flip an NSA operative into coming to work for Silo. It had cost Silo a twenty-thousand-dollar-a-month extortion payment when the idiot hung himself rather than being exposed by the NSA operative as someone who viewed child pornography.
Silo had also viewed it as a chilling warning shot across his bow that future attempts to meddle in the affairs of anyone at the NSA wouldn’t be tolerated.
No, what he really needed was one of the pissant guys at Homeland Security, who were always on the lookout for ways to improve their own standing and who weren’t afraid to look the other way in the pursuit of their own self-interests.
Silo had neared the end of his patience by the time Jerald called Silo on the burner cell phone they’d bought for just this purpose.
Jerald didn’t keep him waiting. “We have a deal, sir.”
Silo took a deep, relieved breath and let it out again, his normal placid smile returning to his face. “Excellent.”
“Three months in exchange for three names. And I will have a personal meeting this afternoon with the first prospect here in DC.”
“You don’t think we should bring them out to Albuquerque?”
“Since we are on an accelerated timeline, I thought it best I handle this one personally, considering the limitations of travel now. One of the other prospects is in Los Angeles, and the third I’ve already contacted about coming to our headquarters in New Mexico in a few days.”
That was Jerald, always on the top of his game. “Good, good.”
“Besides, I already had information on file to leverage against the prospect here in DC. I will need a couple of days to gather background information on the other two to decide how best to proceed.”
“I trust your judgment, son. Keep me posted.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll fly back tonight and be in the office in the morning.”
“Good work. God bless you.” He ended the call and allowed the smile to spread into a wide grin. This was the best news he’d heard in weeks.
They were finally making progress.
About damned time.
Silo had four special promo spots to film that afternoon. By the time his driver took him home that evening at his usual time, Silo was in high spirits, an excellent mood. After bidding the day nurse good-bye, he walked to his wife’s room. They were nearing forty years of marriage.
Mary sat on the end of her bed, waiting for him as she did every night.
At his appearance she stood, turned, lifted her housecoat to expose her bare ass, and bent over the bed.
He smiled and began removing his belt as he started his walk across the room. Then he realized she wasn’t crying like she usually did.
He stopped, head cocked. “Look at me.”
Slowly, she turned her face toward him. Then he realized her eyes looked red and puffy, as if she’d already been crying.
“Tsk. My, my, my. You’ve started and finished crying without me. For shame. You know what that means, don’t you?”
She closed her eyes.
He used the sharp-edged, harsh tone on her that he knew would get her ass moving. “Go get them. Right now.”
With her face already turning nearly purple from her shame, she stood and hurried to her closet. Inside was a locked cabinet that only he and Mary had access codes to open. They told the staff it was for personal records.
It also kept a record of who accessed it and when. If she ever went into it without him ordering her to, it would mean a blistering beating for her.
So far, she had not.
She returned with the vibrator, bottle of lube, and a condom. Dropping to her knees, she silently held them up to him.
“Noooo. How do we ask?”
Oooh, he knew how much she hated this part. Despised it.
It made it that much sweeter for him.
He normally didn’t use a condom when he fucked her. But when he really wanted to shame her, to remind her that she wasn’t anything more than a worthless whore and he damn well knew it, he made her debase herself.
She’d been the one in college captured on video and begging to be gang-banged by the frat boys. Hell, at one point she’d had three huge cocks at the same time, one in each hole. Over twenty different men had used her that night, and she’d screamed out in pleasure countless times, pleading with them not to stop, until she’d literally worn them all out.
Usually he didn’t allow her pleasure. She was forbidden to masturbate. He’d broken her of that habit when he’d walked into her room one night soon after they were married, with the intention of using her, and caught her frigging herself with her hand.
She’d gotten fucked in the ass that night as punishment, and twice a day for two weeks after that, having to say the entire time he was fucking her, “I will not make myself orgasm,” out loud over and over again, while she rubbed her clit with her hand and wasn’t allowed to climax.
He was a strong believer in operant conditioning. She’d forever associate masturbation with anal sex.
Anyway, the conditioning had worked. The human brain was an amazingly malleable thing, especially when training was paired with a mixture of sex, pain, and shame.
The video cameras he’d had installed in her bedroom and bathroom also made sure she didn’t get away with anything. Only he could see the videos, and he reviewed them on a regular basis, making sure to mention things to her to let her know he had reviewed them. Even this many years later, she would still sometimes look up at one of the cameras, as if she’d just had an unapproved thought and was worried he’d seen it.
He’d ensured the daily cocktail of meds she took were also designed to reduce her sex drive as well as make orgasming difficult.
Which was why he reserved this special treat for her when he felt she deserved it.
Most days, he had her suck him off after her discipline, and that was it. Sometimes, he fucked her pussy. There were a few times here and there that he fucked her ass, usually after she’d lubed him with her own spit.
When he really wanted her to feel shame, when he saw her getting too used to her daily discipline sessions, he used this little slice of hell to further debase her.
Aaand now there were her tears, of shame, loathing, maybe even hatred, rolling down her cheeks.
He didn’t care. They were tears. And he owned them the way he owned the rest of her. When he wanted to see her tears, by God, he would see them.
“Place them on the bed,” he said, “and assume the position.”
Slowly, she got to her feet and laid the items out exactly as she knew he would want them. The bottle of lube. The condom. And the vibrator.
Oh, she was in for a treat tonight. His cock was painfully hard already.
She hoisted her housecoat again and bent over the bed, bare ass exposed.
He stepped up behind her and started the discipline with the belt, harder than usual, but not hard enough to break the skin. He also went longer than normal, careful to keep an eye on the time so he’d be finished well before the night nurse arrived.
Once her ass was flaming red, he stepped back, breathing heavy, cock ready to burst from his pants.
“Now you know what you have to do.”
Sniffling and crying, she stood and turned, removing her housecoat so she was naked. Then she dropped to her knees in front of him.
She mumbled.
He grinned. “Oh, nooo. You know how to ask. Do I need to break out the video tonight and make you watch it from beginning to end to remind you what a filthy whore you are?”
She took a deep breath. “Please, husband, I want
you to fuck my ass and make me come tonight.”
“Take my cock out.”
She did, her hands trembling.
“Kiss it.”
She did, pressing her lips to the tip.
“Better than that.
She took a deep breath and slowly deep-throated him, holding it all the way to the base for a moment before slowly sitting back. He watched her with his hands on his hips, the belt still hanging from his left hand.
“Very good. Now put a condom on it, and the lube.”
She got up and retrieved them from the bed. Then she returned to kneel in front of him. She opened the condom package, rolled it onto his shaft, and then started coating it with lube.
“It’s your ass it’s going inside. Remember that. The lube is for your benefit, not mine.”
When she finished, she returned to the bed. This time, she lay on her back, ass at the very edge, her knees drawn up to her chest and legs spread wide.
“Remind me what it was you wanted again?” He nearly giggled.
“Please, husband, I want you to fuck my ass and make me come tonight.”
“Get your vibrator.”
She did.
What he especially loved about this punishment was that she was incapable of lying to him after so many years of his training her. She was also incapable of faking an orgasm. And he’d purchased the vibrator because it was an especially strong one.
Her sex lay open in front of him as he stepped up to her and grabbed the base of his cock. “Look at me,” he said.
She forced herself to look up at him. Tears streamed from her eyes.
She was never allowed to wipe them away, or any snot that might run out her nose, before he was finished with her.
After laying the belt on the bed, he pressed the head of his cock against her asshole. Sometimes, when he didn’t feel like making the walk to her room in the middle of a night, or if there was a nurse on duty and he didn’t want a witness, he’d play the frat house video on his TV with the sound down and stroke himself to several orgasms while watching her get spit-roasted and reamed by the frat boys.