Heart Like a Lion

Max swallowed another retort, doubt creeping into her eyes for the first time. After a moment more she finally walked back over to the whip rack, and slowly, grudgingly, cuffed herself into place as instructed.

Sonny allowed himself a momentary wistful admiration of the way the posture pushed out those prodigious, bare breasts of hers in parallel fashion to the bound hands and forearms of the captive girls -- she really was a magnificent-looking woman. Then he tore his attention away and turned it to the girls. "You two, I want you both to get up and go out to the Reception area in front, please," he said. "I'll join you shortly and we'll get you cleaned up and untied. You understand?"

For a moment he wasn't sure they did understand; the blonde, in particular, looked back at him with cum dripping from her pretty features and vivid blue eyes as empty as a Barbie Doll's, as if he might as well have spoken Greek. But finally the brunette's expression began to clear and Sonny could see her recognizing him from earlier. Something nameless passed between them and she said, in a quiet, husky voice: "Whatever you say... Sir. Cami... come on, let's go."

She tottered to her feet and headed for the door. After a moment the blonde looked aimlessly around her and announced randomly: "He didn't come. He didn't come for me." And then she got up and followed.

Marcus' voice cut bitterly into the ensuing quiet. "So I guess you think you're some kind of hero, now. Isn't that right."

"Hero?" Sonny smirked without humour. "A 'hero' would have reported his suspicions to the BPD and let them come here and find you in the act. A 'hero' wouldn't have stood at that door for half an hour watching you fuck those girls inside-out before he did anything. I'm about the furthest possible thing from a 'hero,' Marcus. I'm a fucked up preacher's kid with more kinks than he knows what to do with... just like you."

"You're nothing like me."

"I don't kidnap my talent under cover of the law and security, that's true," Sonny said. "And I don't kid myself that indulging my kinks is some kind of cosmic justice. But here's the thing... I don't abuse myself for having kinks either." Looking contemplatively at his brother, he added: "Although even I was hiding from the truth, still, wasn't I? Hiding behind bullshit and artistic pretensions. You caught me out on that earlier, didn't you?"

"You had to hide, what you do is... is..." Marcus' tirade about "filth" petered out before he could properly get it started, though. He seemed to realize suddenly that he was naked, sitting in the middle of a clandestine pervert's dungeon with the juices of a reluctant sexual conquest drying on his prick, and that talking about divine justice might sound a bit hollow. The fervour in his eyes dimmed, confusion replacing it.

"Filth, yes," Sonny finished for him. "We're same filth as everyone else, you and I. We've just been loath to admit it until today. Well, you know what: I'm not going to hide anymore, Marcus. I'm a pornographer. A dealer in smut, just like you said. I'm good at it... and I'm going to dedicate myself to it. Maybe even celebrate it." As he edged toward the door, he added: "It might be that you don't have to live in denial anymore, either. You don't have to make yourself a criminal to be kinky. You don't have to be ashamed of what you want, what you feel. You don't have to dress it up as something it isn't."

Marcus was following his subtle progress as he talked, tension building in him. He finally said: "Sonny, you know I can't let you leave here with that phone."

"Well... thing is, you really can't stop me." Sonny made a rueful face and said: "Max was wrong, by the way. I didn't live in Brooklyn for ten years without learning how to use a taser. I'm really sorry about this, bro, but I can't have you following me."

Marcus was charging to his feet, a shout stillborn in his throat as the taser hit him. He went stiff as the current ran through him, then dropped like a stone. Max cried out, breasts jiggling as she tugged at her cuffs and rattled the whip rack, shouting: "You fucking bastard! Marcus... Marcus!"

Sonny ignored her, standing over his brother who looked up at him in literally stunned bewilderment as he tried to will his painfully spasming muscles back into motion. "I should tell you," he said: "If you plan on continuing to have... festivities down here, you'll have to let your boys Kyson and Teyson in on it. They're the ones who let me in here and armed me. Never know when they might be willing to talk to someone more official." He watched Marcus absorb the information, his eyes flickering. Sonny was turning away when one last thing occurred to him: "Oh, and by the way? Watching the two of you just now, it couldn't be more obvious that the people you really want to be fucking are each other. I don't know why you can't just admit it to yourselves. Ever think of using this little playground you've created here for that?"

This time? This time he saw the words really hit Marcus, saw something like a sacred revelation dawning brightly in his brother's eyes.

Then he saw something a lot more like alarm dawning in Max's as it came suddenly clear to her that she was about to be handcuffed and alone with a still-horny Marcus, animated by this fresh conviction, when the use of his limbs came back to him. She started tugging at the cuffs again, more desperately now, the rack full of whips rattling as if in inanimate mockery as she saw Sonny turn to leave, shouting after him: "Hey, hey! Uhhh, Sonny! You don't have to leave me here! Hey, listen, we got off on the wrong foot, I'm sorry for calling you a bastard, okay? We can work something out, hey! You can't just leave--"

Sonny gave her his sweetest parting smile as he closed the door on the two of them. So long, Max, he thought with bittersweet satisfaction. Hope you enjoy being my brother's new obsession. You've earned it.

It was four o'clock in the afternoon by the time the Slammerskins' war party finally hit the All-American Mall. Almost four hours since Eoin Jaeger and his boys had taken a pause in their Hatred session to look around for Cami and Lennie and try to figure out where they'd gotten to... almost four hours since all Hell had broken loose.

At first they'd been amused to come across the pair of semi-conscious hippies down in the courtyard, one of them with most of his teeth knocked out; unmistakable evidence that Cami and her brass knucks had been this way. They'd hooted at them with a laughter that was almost halfway good-natured until one of them, perhaps not entirely seeing the humour in his situation, had rather waspishly gone out of his way to mention the two hot skingirls they'd thrown a good sound fuck into before they met with their misfortune.

Had to be a lie, of course, but it didn't take much to make Eoin see red on the best of days, and this hadn't exactly been the best of months. Or years. Cutting loose at that pair of suspiciously Jewy-looking motherfuckers had felt good; the poor bastards had looked like pieces of modern art by the time the Village Park boys were done with them. Unfortunately none of the lads could have anticipated the mob of uncharacteristically aggro hippies milling in the parking lot yonder -- or the outcry that would go up when a couple of them came looking for the two wasters and caught themselves an eyeful of the last few boots being thrown.

Never one to retreat when there was a direction to charge in, Eoin had gone steaming out after the hysterically screaming hipsters, with Eddy and Barry and the others hot on his heels. In this way they'd all made the unfortunate discovery that there were like sixty people waiting for them in the parking lot, a bunch of them seriously pissed and some armed with bike locks and chains, which for all their being mostly-naked and mostly-hipsters was not like the best of odds. Barry had tossed Eoin his Louisville slugger -- and promptly gone down himself as one of those huge Kryptonite bike locks made contact with his temple. It had all happened fast after that, like being caught in some kind of patchouli-fuelled zombie apocalypse as the rest of the nudist cycling weirdos had closed in and Eoin and Eddy had swung and booted and torn and head-butted their way through the crowd, reaching the other side unscathed by equal portions of brutality and intimidation and sheer dumb luck before it dawned on them that this was the kind of scene that would attract cops like flies and that, loathe though they were to leave their mates behind, it was probably high fucking time to leg it.

A five minute dead sprint later they'd reached their old mate Chaz's house, blowing like a couple of old nags forced to run the Triple Crown. The cunt's mom had to let them in on account of Chaz was dead drunk from the night (or early morning) previous and passed out on his couch. So they'd helped themselves to the Sam Addamses left in his beer fridge and let themselves feel the adrenaline high, sharing a laugh and a high-five as they realized they'd just carried off a fucking legendary feat of Viking bravery. Under his extra layer of sloth-bestowed fat, Eddy suddenly looked like the old Eddy again, fearless as a wolverine on meth; and as for Eoin, well, Eoin was back, motherfucker. Alive again.

They still had no idea where the girls had gone, though, beyond their having stolen a couple of bikes from those fools they'd tuned up. Which meant no idea as to a next step; that was until Eoin had the bright idea of remote-checking his voice-mail machine back at the Apartment. Not much of note, just collections agents and telemarketers, until he found a message from a girl named Valerie who he knew from school -- not a 'byrd, but a pretty cool girl he'd used to hang with from time to time -- who worked register over at the Banyan Tree Bath Products store at All-American.

He'd listened to the message, nearly crushing the receiver in his hand as her description put cold hooks of terror in him: Cami and Lennie streaking the mall concourse on bikes wearing nothing but their socks and their footwear (which was just the kind of shenanigans those little minxes might get up to if they were sufficiently bored) -- and then the Mall's crazy-assed wannabe local pseudo-SWAT team coming down on them. The fighting. The tasers. The girls being marched off in cuffs to the infamous "R.A.M.S." holding room.

All kinds of weird, dark rumours swirled around that little nutcase fiefdom, had done for at least a year, rumours which Eoin had never credited -- until the moment he had to stand in a mate's apartment listening to someone telling him that Cami might be trapped there.

He'd gone wild. Eddy had to forcibly restrain him from going off alone to break her out, reminding him the cops were no doubt looking for him, that even he couldn't take on four or five guys armed with batons and tasers on his own. And so Eddy had set to calling up all the mates he could think of as Eoin paced back and forth like a caged lion, out of his head with worry, ranting about how kikes and niggers had sent the whole damned country to hell, about how the Zionists and the Bilderbergers and the Rothschilds had fixed it so that a good honest White man couldn't catch a break, so that a sweet White girl like Cami couldn't even get up to a little innocent mischief without the thug government of the U.S.S.A. and its wannabe weekend stormtroopers coming down on them. Scenarios kept running and running through his mind's eye, each one worse and more horrific than the last.

Eddy was just as worried, he could tell, but he kept saying: "The boys will come through, just don't go off half-cocked, the boys will come through." And so they'd called and waited, called and waited, as the time had ticked by and ticked by. Every minute a lifetime, and Eoin's newfound energy burning up his veins with building fury.

It was a quarter past three when the first troops had arrived. Two guys from around the way, Chuck and Theo, good mates and solid skins but frankly a bit on the skinny side, not exactly your top-grade warrior material. And from the rest of them, the more than twenty-five Slammerskins across the eastern burg who should have been rallying to the call? The ex-Army guys, the heavy hitters, the "respected" men on the national scene? Not a single fucking Bo Peep. And so they'd waited again.

"Well it's, uh," Chuck had reasoned twenty minutes later when there was still nothing: "The cops are kind of laying it on heavy out there, maybe they don't want to take the chance—"

"Fucking chance!" Eoin said. "Fucking cowards! Those two 'byrds have more balls than any ten of them! Chance." He'd spat -- on the kitchen lino, and hastily apologized to Chaz's mom for that -- before raging on: "Down for the cause, that's what they keep telling us. We do to death, that's what I keep hearing. Slammerskins forever! Forever Slammerskins! What happened to that! The fuck does White Power even mean these days, that's it, we're fucking going."

Chaz had still been dead to the world as they'd finagled his car keys from his mom and piled into his Miyata, Eddy squished behind the wheel and Eoin still raging in the passenger's seat about how the Obama economy was stacked against the White man and deliberately made to suck out his vital energy and make him think he had no right to be a warrior, how even the Southern States were ripping down the Stars and Bars now just because a few jungle bunnies in some church didn't know how to defend themselves, Hell, they'd probably deserved it anyway, there were going to be changes from now on if he had his way, the B-Ville Slammerskins were going to shape the fuck up and go on the offensive after all this was done and dusted.

They'd had to take back lanes and indirect routes to the Mall, Chuck hadn't been kidding about the number of black-and-whites cruising the roads. By the time they pulled into the parking lot, Eoin had moved into a maudlin register about how he was going to make it up to Cami when he got her out, how he was going to make it all like when they were first together, he was going to get his act together and treat her like a fucking queen. But then he'd looked up and seen that they'd arrived and it didn't take long to get his war face back on.

And so, now. Now it was on.

Now the four-strong war party of Slammerskins stomped through the Mall in a phalanx, brazen as you please and fuck you very much, their steel-toed Docs hammering the floor in almost military cadence as they made a beeline for the heart of the main floor concourse, for the escalator down into the belly of the Beast. People, even security guards, caught one whiff of Eoin's vibe and one glimpse of the slugger in his hand and hastily made way, which quietly pleased him despite the agonizing urgency of his mission; it had been too long since that had happened.

Down the escalator, into the quiet basement level that seemed like a realm apart, they walked up to the front door of the shiny R.A.M.S. offices and found it locked up tight, like nobody was home. Eoin wasn't fooled for a second.

"Hey!" he'd shouted, pounding on the door. "Hey! We know you're in there, you motherfuckers! HEY! Open up! We want fucking words, you cunts! We want Cami and Lennie! Hey, you FUCKERS! Hey, you KIKES!" He'd started kicking at the door with each epithet, now, hammering at it with all the strength of frustration and fear and rage, an afternoon full of it, a lifetime full of it. "Hey, you NIGGERS! Hey, you SCUM! Hey, you COMMIES! Open the fuck UP! We're not GOING anywhere until you OPEN UP!"

Chuck and Theo hung back as Eddy joined him at the door, the pair of them laying boots and all their considerable weight into their blows until the frame started to splinter, the door to give way, bursting asunder as the locks bent and broke under the repeated hammering and then finally, finally they were through and striding in, ready to kick ass and take names.

In retrospect, probably nothing could have prepared them for the sight that greeted them, and that stopped them cold.

A roller-coaster of a day. Marcus James was musing on contradictions, the highs and the lows and the highs again, the strange twists of fate, as he took a break and stepped out of the back room to grab some hydration.

The shock -- both metaphorical and literal -- of his little brother's intervention seemed to have dropped scales from his eyes. The sense of revelation he'd felt had been practically road-to-Damascus calibre as Sonny had confronted him with what should have been obvious to him all along: that what he and Max had been doing back in that... that dungeon, call it what it really was... had had nothing to do with justice. Had been about their own fucked-up and misplaced yearnings, about the outward projection of their desire for each other.

As the effects of the taser had worn off -- a gutsy move, he had to give the little hipster bastard credit -- as he'd gotten up and he and Max had looked at each other, he'd seen the trepidation in her eyes, the resistance to the truth. But he'd also seen the wetness between those firm, creamy thighs, had memories of a thousand salacious and flirtatious looks she'd given him as they were "disciplining" one "subject" or another in this very room. It all fit together like a jigsaw puzzle in his memory. It was all about her, all about them. And this desire wasn't wrong. It was the denial, the victimization of others, that was wrong. They did need to explore it; in fact, they had months of wasted time to catch up on.

"Marcus, wait, Marcus, don't you see he's playing you, he's distracting you," Max had babbled at him as he explained this revelation to her. "You and I, we're not, it's not, look wait a second, I don't want, no wait n-mmmphhhhh. Mmmmphhh-nmmmmphhhh!" And a well-placed ball-gag had put an end to those interruptions.

"Not 'Marcus,'" he'd told her quietly, stroking her cheek with affection. "'Sir.'"

And then he'd gotten about explaining his revelation more thoroughly: the dreams and fantasies about her that he'd never confessed to having, the things he'd done with their subjects that he'd far rather have been doing with her. How deep down, he knew she felt the same. He explained all the signals she'd given, how he wouldn't let her down, how he'd make sure she found the same satisfaction he'd been looking for in the wrong places all this time. How Sonny had been right, that they didn't have to lie to themselves anymore.

As he'd said these things, he'd casually unbuckled that prodigious strap-on from around her waist and buckled it in place just above his own natural cock -- finding the two instruments almost matched in size, in particular as his cock had reared up in its full tumescence at the prospect of taking the prize it had yearned for in secret for so long. He'd listened to her whimper with desire as, kneeling there with her wrists shackled rearward around the rack full of whips and canes and floggers, he'd lubed her tight star with his spit and then filled it full of fake cock while his hard, throbbing member had taken her hot pussy; and he'd felt in heaven as never before as he reached around her to take those big, beautiful tits in his hands, caressing and squeezing them as he'd double-penetrated that gorgeous bitch from behind.

"God, Maxine," he'd moaned as he pumped her holes with hard, deep strokes. "I've wanted this for so long... we never should have waited so long..." And she'd grunted and snivelled and whimpered something that he assumed meant "me too" or "you're right" as his balls had slapped her fat clit and her slick cunt had clenched and creamed repeatedly around his plunging member, until he'd tensed up and bent forward and sunk his teeth into the soft flesh of her shoulder, breathing in her scent as he pumped his third load of the day deep inside her, and she'd looked back him with both her holes stretched and filled and mascara running down that lovely face as the tears of joy had overflowed. She'd never looked more vulnerable, more desirable, more perfect.