Release: Davlova: Book One (18 page)

I reached over to touch his arm, but he pulled away from me. No wonder, too. He probably assumed I was going to try to fuck him. “Goodnight,” he said.

“Goodnight,” I answered back.

At some point later, I woke to total blackness. Soft flesh whispered against mine.

It took me a second to remember where I was, and who I was with. It was Ayo, not asleep, but suddenly next to me, touching me, crawling gently on top of me. I felt his oversized cock between us, not erect, but soft and warm, and I was ashamed at how my own body immediately began to respond.

His hair brushed my cheek and I reached up to push it away from his face, although in the dark, I couldn’t see his expression. Only shadows.

“Will you kiss me again?” he asked.

“Do you want me to?”

“Yes.”

He still tasted like tears. He was shy at first, but quickly grew bolder, letting me tease his lips apart with my tongue. He melted against me, sighing softly. I stroked his back and he arched toward my touch as if he’d never felt anything so blissful.

“Kiss me here,” he whispered, guiding my lips to the spot just below his ear.

I was happy to oblige him. I rolled us over so I was on top, making it easier to explore his pale neck. He went limp, relaxing in my arms, somehow offering himself up to me. He had the softest skin I’d ever touched, and no matter where I touched him, whether teasing his flesh with my fingertips or tasting it gently with my tongue, he sighed and clutched at me. His fingers tangled in my hair, although he never pulled. I moved lower on his stomach. With one hand, I reached down to explore the strangely hairless skin around his groin. His cock was hard now, although I didn’t touch it yet. Instead, I stroked his hips. I caressed the cord of flesh between his legs. I cupped his balls in my hand.

“Misha,” he whispered, as I circled his navel with my tongue. “We shouldn’t be doing this.”

“Why not?”

“If he finds out...” He took a deep, shaky breath. “He’d hate it!”

“Then we’ll do it to spite him.”

He made a sound—a strange, breathy sound. It took me a moment to recognize it for what it was. He was laughing. “You’re insane.” But there was a note of awe in his voice.

“Tell me when to stop,” I said, because without his trigger word, he’d never finish the normal way.

And then I took his cock in my mouth.

He gasped, and for the first time, his fingers dug into my scalp. He pushed me down while thrusting his hips up. It was purely instinctive, I knew, that need to push deeper. But he was too big for me to swallow all the way, and instinctively I jerked away to keep from gagging.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“Don’t be. You can do anything to me you want.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

There was a terrible brittleness to his voice. A tremulous note, asking if that’s what he’d done.

“You won’t,” I assured him.

I sank down onto him again, swallowing as much of him as I could. He sighed happily as I moved on him. His soft hand stroked my shoulder. He was trembling, but otherwise motionless. He seemed to like what I was doing, and yet he was so still. I began to wonder if I was doing something wrong.

I stopped, looking up to meet his eyes in the low light. “Do you want me to quit?”

“No.”

But it sounded more like a question than a statement. “Tell me what you want.”

“I’m not sure that I know.”

“I’ll do anything. I’ll kiss you or suck you or let you fuck me. Or we can go back to sleep if you want. Anything.”

He laughed again, such a quiet, breathy sound, as if he’d had to muffle every laugh he’d ever had. But he rolled us onto our sides. He used his hand in my hair—just like Donato, and yet nothing like him at all—to guide my mouth back to his cock. This time, I quit trying to lead. I went loose and let him direct me. I let him hold me while he moved very slowly in and out of my mouth, as if exploring what each inch of his flesh could experience. More than anything, he liked me to concentrate on his tip. He spent a long time there, moving his foreskin against my lips, thrusting slowly and gently against me, all the while making soft, hushed sounds, not only of pleasure, but sounds that spoke of surprise. Of amazement and delight. He’d been beaten and fucked and fisted and used, but I knew without asking that nobody had ever given him this kind of pleasure.

At last, he pulled free. He was panting quietly, his whole body trembling. “We need to stop,” he said. “It gets painful after a while.”

I climbed back up the bed. He reached down to wrap his hands around my erection. I couldn’t help but moan, but it made me feel dirty, too. “Do you want me to—?”

“No,” I said, pushing his hand away. It was partially a lie. I wanted him desperately. I wanted to let him continue to stroke me. I wanted to rub my cock against him and come all over his pale, silky stomach while kissing his sweet lips. But then I thought about how often demands like that had been made of him. “You deserve at least one night that’s just for you.” I kissed his cheeks and was a bit dismayed to find them wet with tears. “What’s wrong? What did I do? Whatever it is, I’m sorry!”

“What?
Why?
Please don’t be sorry, Misha!”

“I made you cry.”

He reached up to touch my lips with his soft fingers. “I cry a lot. But these were good tears.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” His cock was still hard, pressing against my thigh. He pushed a bit, almost as if he couldn’t help himself, but then he settled into my arms with a sigh. I held him and kissed his blond curls. “It was so different, Misha.”

“What was?”

“Feeling real pleasure without the programming behind it. Without the pain. I never knew. I had no idea.”

He said it without bitterness, a simple statement of fact. That alone was enough to break my heart. I wanted to tell him I’d never let Donato hurt him again, but it would have been an idle boast. There was nothing I could do. Instead, I pulled him closer. I held him tight. And I vowed that I’d get him away from Donato, one way or another. I’d burn the city to the ground, and Donato with it, if that’s what it took.

“Where did you come from? Before the Dollhouse?” It was something I’d wondered many times. Had he been on the street, like me, before the Dollhouse found him? Or had his mother handed him over to them? “Surely you weren’t raised there?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. If I try to think back before I lived with him, it’s like I get confused and find myself thinking about something else.”

“That black spot?”

“Yes. It swallows everything.”

“Except the pain?”

“The pain I can handle. It’s the shame of being forced to like it that I hate.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“It’s fine.” But his hand moved from my chest for a moment. He sniffled, and I realized he was crying again, not making a sound, but silently wiping his tears away. “Sometimes I can’t tell where the programming ends and I begin. It’s not that I even mind so much that it’s there, but I wish they’d done it some other way.”

“Like what?”

“They could’ve programmed the tears away, too. They could have made it so I enjoyed it, and never felt bad about it afterward. I think a lot about how that would be, to be programmed to be happy with whatever he gave me.” He shook his head. “I hate him for not letting me have that.”

I kissed his blond curls. “You wouldn’t be human then.”

“Sometimes I think I’m not human now.”

“Ayo—”

“It doesn’t matter. That wasn’t what he wanted. He likes it when I cry. Making me hate myself is what he enjoys most.”

I didn’t ask him any more questions after that. I didn’t think I could bear to hear the answers.

We slept again for what felt like only moments. I woke to Ayo scrambling away from me. “He’s coming.”

A second later, Donato burst into the room. His anger hadn’t faded in the hours he’d been gone. If anything, it was worse. The beast was fully in control.

It was a terrible night. Ayo screamed and begged and cried. I ached for him, my cock kept hard by the il, but my stomach roiling. I fought to keep from being sick at the way Donato used him. I lost count of how many blows I took across my face for not obeying fast enough. I lost track of how many times Donato called me a whore. He vented his lust and his fury on us both. He left afterward, not slamming the door this time, but walking out quietly. I had a feeling the monster in him was finally sated.

I lay on the floor where I’d fallen, battered and sore. My ass hurt from being pummeled, my ribs ached from being kicked. The right side of my face throbbed from his backhands. But I’d had it easy. Ayo lay on the bed, curled into a ball. His pale body shook with the force of his sobs. When I tried to touch him, he flinched away from me. I wanted to hold him. I wanted to cry with him, to try to tell him everything would work out, but he was afraid of me and I didn’t have time to win back any of his trust. The butler came to get me.

“Not yet,” I said to him. “Give me a minute.”

“It’s nearly dawn and the carriage is waiting. You have to leave.”

I looked helplessly over at Ayo on the bed.

“I know,” the butler whispered. “I’ll take care of him. I promise.”

I was beaten, in more ways than one.

I went to the carriage. Back down the hill. Away from Miguel, who I might have loved. Away from Donato, who I hated. Away from Ayo, the soft, sweet boy who had only asked me to kiss him.

CHAPTER TEN

The next day the pedalcart driver came by as arranged, but I wasn’t out front to meet him. After all, I had nothing to report to Anzhéla or Aleksey. I told myself that was the only reason. I told myself it had nothing to do with the giant bruise on the side of my face, from my hairline to my jaw, or my eye being nearly swollen shut. I sat alone, staring out of the window. My little room was high and near the back of Talia’s building, and I looked out over white roofs toward the city wall.

I hated it all. I hated the city. I hated the trenches, which I couldn’t see but could somehow feel behind me, and the desperate wretches who lived there. I hated the white district and the oblivious fools who filled it. And more than anything, I hated the fucking hill and every single person who lived on it.

Most of all, I hated Donato.

Every time I thought of him, my heart ached. I could barely breathe. I kept thinking about the yacht. About floating in the sea while anchored to him. About how good I’d felt while he made love to me in his bed.

And then I’d think about the night before, the hatred in his eyes, and the things he’d done to his slave.

How could Miguel and Donato even be the same man?

More than anything, I thought of Ayo, out of my reach on the far side of the wall. The butler had said he’d help him, but what could he do? Some calming salve on his rectum, an ice pack for his eye. But there was no serum or elixir that could soothe the worst of his injuries. Those were deeper, buried in his psyche, out of reach of any normal doctor.

They could’ve programmed the tears away, too.
At the time he’d said it, I’d thought it sounded like an even greater cruelty, but I understood better now why it was something he might have wished for.

Early in the afternoon, Talia knocked on my door. She came in without waiting for me to admit her. “Get out,” I said, without turning to look at her.

“You missed your appointment. Anzhéla wants to know—”

“If I had anything worth telling her, then I would have kept it. Now get out.”

“Misha—”

“Get. The fuck. Out.”

She sighed heavily, obviously annoyed. “He’s asked to see you tonight.”

“No.”

“You can’t refuse to go.”

“I sure as hell can. He can find a new whore. I’m done.”

She hesitated and I sat stiff in my seat, trying to decide what I would do if she argued. Would I throw a fit like a recalcitrant child, or burst into tears? Those were the two most likely possibilities. Luckily I didn’t have to find out. She left without saying another word.

Outside, the temple bells rang at regular intervals, marking the passing of the day. The buzz of the afternoon market faded. I could hear children running through the streets, shouting to one another, playing games I’d never had the luxury of learning. As the sun fell low in the sky, their parents began to call them inside.
Time to eat, honey, and we still have to attend to your lessons.
Nobody had ever spoken those words to me. Nobody had ever really loved me. Not since my mother.

I remembered with sudden blinding clarity how it had felt to be held in her arms. I remembered her voice.
Run along now, Misha. Mummy has work to do.
For the first time in more than ten years, I let myself think about how it might have felt to have a normal life. What if she had lived? Would she have called me in from my games? Would she have called me “honey”?

Would I still be a whore?

She’d talked so many times of returning home to Aurius, and for years, I’d fostered a dream of going there myself, as if that distant city harbored a better life waiting to be found. I was older now. I knew better. It would be the same there as here. It was the same all over. Dirt and filth and squalor. I was trash, a guttersnipe turned thief, and a whore. No matter what city I ran to, I’d never be more.