12
Murder
Maddox was in a meeting.Again. As usual, it was being held in the lower levels of his home, where reinforced concrete and steel mesh helped create not only an atmosphere of safety, but a fairly close approximation of the actual thing.
“Violence is at a peak,” Candy reported. “Slayings are up over three hundred percent. This might be considered natural population control, if you don’t find that term offensive, sir.”
She was not wrong. The war was everywhere. With Bertram and Ernest slain, not only were various factions rising in a bid to take their place, but their loyal progeny and followers were attempting to avenge their passing.
No direct action had been taken against Maddox, due to the general understanding that he would wipe out any and all who were even a slight irritant, let alone an actual threat.
“We’ve had some reports that you will be expected to take their place, sir. Is that something we should be making plans for?”
“No. There will be no taking of places. The old structures are gone. New ones will be made in their place. This is as it should be. The chaos taking place now will settle soon.”
“You seem very relaxed, sir,” she observed.
He was relaxed, because everything was panning out more or less as he had expected it to the moment he saw the twins crumble into dust. The old power structures had been removed, and in their place would rise new, younger vampires. It was a good thing, and he welcomed it.
“Maddox, we have a problem.” Lorien walked into the meeting, interrupting it as though none of the humans present actually existed.
“Not now, Lorien. Please. I am busy. There’s a war on.”
Lorien’s voice got tighter and more tense, overly polite. “Mads. I need to see you now.”
“Lorien…”
“Now.”
Maddox raised a brow at Lorien which silently said I will rip your throat out myself if this is not truly an emergency.
Lorien looked back with an expression which said fine.
“Please excuse me.”
He followed Lorien out of the room, his jaw gritted with irritation.
“We have a dozen law enforcement humans here, Lorien, now is not the time to…”
Lorien turned to face him with a grave expression. “Will’s killed someone.”
“What?”
“He’s killed someone,” Lorien repeated. “I put the body in the upstairs bath. He left it outside, behind the house. He’s careless. And reckless. Like a fledgling, without being a vampire at all. He didn’t kill because he was hungry…” Lorien shook his head. “He’s a little monster.”
Maddox ascended the stairs at a remarkable pace, even for a vampire. In very swift time he discovered that the bath did contain a corpse. A corpse which fit in the bath far too well for Mad’s liking. For a brief moment he thought Will had killed a teenager, but on closer inspection it was just a short man. A man he knew. A man who worked for the federal government.
“Hey,” Will said, perching on the side of the ceramic tub.
“Oh no, my boy, what have you done? That was an FBI agent!”
“He came back. He was trying to build a case against you. I made sure he couldn’t.”
Maddox took a deep, sighing breath. "You're not supposed to kill humans, boy. That’s a crime.”
Will shrugged. “I do crimes all the time.”
“Yes. Yes, you do. But this is a crime which will be investigated.”
“Hm,” Will said, noncommittal.
“Do you have any sense of consequences at all, William?”
“I’m not a psychopath. Of course I understand consequences. I just don’t care about them.”
“I’m not so sure that’s true.”
“Well,” Will said.
Maddox waited for him to finish the sentence, but apparently that was all Will had to say.
“Will, killing people…”
“You got me out of prison. I was in prison for killing people. This guy needed to be killed. I killed him.” Will spoke in an annoyed staccato.
“I had planned to turn him into an ally.”
“That would have been stupid. He hated you. He was going to kill you. He had a stake with your name on it.”
“I don’t think…”
“Literally. Check the bath. There's a wooden stake with your name carved into it. Like a psycho. An actual psycho. Unlike me. I saved you. And I don’t want any fuckin’ attitude.”
The last part of that sentence got Will into more trouble than leaving a corpse at the backdoor like an eager cat.
“Oh, you don’t want attitude, whelp?” Maddox grabbed him by the collar and dragged him up, speaking with cool menace. “I need to go attend to the law enforcement in my parlor. When they have gone, I will deal with you. Lorien, make sure he doesn’t go anywhere or kill anyone else. Put him in his room.”
Will watched Maddox leave dispassionately. He was not afraid of what was going to happen to him. He’d served time for murder before, and Maddox wasn’t going to lock him up for three years, so what did it matter? Pain was inevitable. He knew he was in the right, no matter what any authority figure might think. If he was the sort of person to bow to social pressure in terms of who should or should not be killed, he’d never have ended up in prison in the first place.
“So,” Lorien said conversationally. “You’re in trouble.”
“I don’t care about this kind of trouble. I’ve been in this trouble all my life.”
“The killing people kind of trouble?”
“Sure. The first person I ever killed was my best friend’s father.”
Lorien looked at Maddox aghast.
“He used to beat him. So. I killed him. People thought it was an accident because I was only seven years old at the time. But it wasn’t.”
“You’re a terrifying little beast,” Lorien said with no small amount of admiration. “But you should be afraid.”
Will looked at Lorien with disinterest. “I’m never afraid.”
“Is that right?”
“Far as you know.”
Lorien smirked. “The gap between what you know about you, and what I know about you is vaster than you realize, puppy.”
Again, Will had the feeling Lorien was hinting at something, but so indirectly Will couldn’t even begin to imagine what it was about.
Maddox could not stop smiling to himself. He would have to get the smile off his face before he returned to Will. Obviously, murder was bad, and murdering FBI agents could not be encouraged. Will had been very bad. Absolutely terrible. But he seemed to have done it out of good intentions and that was rather sweet. The first corpse to be presented was a milestone to be marked — and marked it would be.
“If I could cut this meeting short, I have some household matters to attend to,” he said upon his return.
“Certainly, sir,” Candy said obligingly.
“It’s safe to assume chaos is going to continue to reign in the city. There’s something to be said for letting them battle it out. Natural order is the preferred order. Let’s focus on looking for anomalies, frontrunners, and anybody from out of the country. If Europeans show up, I’m going to want to know. Doubly so if they’re British.”
“Yes, sir. Understood.”
“You know where to find me if you need me, Candy.”
“Absolutely, sir.”
“You,” Maddox growled, striding through the door of Will’s bedroom tall and stern, and not nearly as angry as he was pretending to be.
Will had never felt bad about killing before. He didn't feel bad now either. But he did feel something when Maddox looked at him, and that was new. It was something like guilt, but more exciting.
“You strangled the man with your bare hands. That’s a brutal way to kill someone.”
“I didn’t have any other weapons,” Will said simply.
“And you liked it.”
“It was okay. Not my favorite kill. Not my least favorite. Somewhere in the middle,” Will made a back-and-forth motion with his hand. “That’s what he was, right? Just sort of meh. Kind of like the man himself.”
“As savage with your words as you are with your hands,” Maddox observed.
“Did you look for the stake he had? With your name on it?”
“Oh, I’ve saved it in my collection of weapons hopeful humans have attempted to kill me with. There’s a very nice morning star flail you’d like.”
“So you know he was going to kill you. And you know I stopped that from happening.”
“He would have been attempting to slay me in front of law enforcement.”
“I don’t think he cared. He had the eyes of a man who just wanted to kill, no matter the cost. I know those eyes. I see them in the mirror all the time.”
“I imagine you do, boy.”
Will cocked his head to the side. “You’re not really angry, are you. You wouldn’t be talking if you were.”
Will was starting to know him better than Maddox expected.
“I’m not angry. Angry is something I am very rarely. It's one of the benefits of no longer being alive and having very little in the way of investment in the present, let alone the future.”
“Oh, so now you don’t care? Because you're dead?”
“I care. I’m just not angry in the way you perceive anger. What I am is determined to ensure that you will not act with lethal force without my permission again.”
“Uh huh. Lot of people been trying to stop me from doing that for years. What are you going to do that they haven’t? They locked me up and threw away the key.”
“You know exactly what I am going to do to you. I’m going to whip you until you beg me to fuck you, and then I’m going to fuck you until you beg for mercy. Remove your trousers and bend over the bed.”
Will did as he was told. He had not been lying to Lorien. He wasn’t afraid.
In the vulnerable position, his ass bared to Maddox, he waited for the inevitable. The first sound he was aware of was the sound of Maddox’s fine leather belt being pulled from the loops at his waist. Some poor calf had given its life for this.
“Bad little whelp,” Maddox lectured, lashing the belt against Will’s hide. There was a moment in which Will felt practically nothing, followed by a flash of burning heat.
Will let out a laugh that Maddox was probably not going to appreciate, but there was just something about being hurt for doing something he had absolutely no remorse for that amused him greatly.
“What is so funny, boy?”
“I'm not sorry, and you can't make me, and you don’t want me to be sorry. It’s ridiculous. I finally kill someone who deserved to be killed and here you are pretending to punish me.”
Another lash landed, harder than the first, and directly over it. Will heard himself hiss in pain.
“I may not be able to make you sorry, but I am sure that I can make you sore.”
He set about doing just that, infernal lash after infernal lash landing across Will's punished cheeks. It was a merciless beating, one that was deliberately unfair. There was a moment in which Will thought he might cry for that reason. He should be receiving praise, not pain. But another stroke landed and the heat rushed through his body and his cock got even harder, rubbing against the bed.
“I’m going to fucking come,” he cursed. “I'm going to fucking…”
“Don’t you dare,” Maddox lectured. “You just choked the life from another human being. You will not enjoy this whipping, boy.”
And yet the lash landed low across the very base of Maddox’s cheeks, jerking him forward against the bed, making his cock fuck the coverlet all the more. He couldn’t have stopped himself if he’d tried. He arched and he ground and he humped the bed like the horny puppy he was, making a hot-bottomed spectacle of himself beneath Maddox’s lash.
“Fuucck!” he cursed, coming as hard as he ever had, the satisfaction of killing Chauvelin only exceeded by the orgasm that came at the end of Maddox's lash.
“Naughty boy!” Maddox lectured, not entirely convincingly as Will crawled up the bed and rolled over, his underside covered in the mess of his pleasure. “What am I going to do with you?”
“Thank me?” Will suggested.
Maddox dropped the belt and was atop him in a second, his long, thick cock pressed to Will's lips. He grabbed Will's hair and made him suck, not that Will needed much encouragement.
“Thank you, boy? For being a disobedient, murderous, dirty little whelp?” Maddox’s powerful hips urged his cock further down Will's throat. “It is you who should be thanking me for not locking you up myself. I could turn you in to the officers downstairs, let them take you away…”
They both knew that would never happen. Not with the way Maddox was looking down at Will with an expression of pure possession, his hand curled in Will’s hair, his upper lip curled, his fangs ever so slightly extended as he pushed the head of his cock down into Will’s throat. It was a picture of pure domination, and Will could not tear his eyes away.
“You should obey me, boy. It would be so much easier if you would give in, turn your violence and your darkness over to me to wield as my tool. But you’re still keeping them for yourself, greedy boy. That’s why I have to punish you. That’s why I have to stripe your ass and fill your throat.” With that, Maddox thrust deep into Will’s mouth and held himself there, using his grip on Will’s hair and rocked his head back and forth on his cock, using that hot, wet, dirty hole for his pleasure.
It was obvious Maddox had been just as turned on while whipping Will as Will had been while being whipped. It was even more obvious that Maddox enjoyed the resistance and the sass, and appreciated the motive behind the murder. There was no real disappointment in his voice or eyes, and this was not really a punishment.
“You don’t deserve this, but you will take it," Maddox grunted. “Drink my seed, boy. Take my essence deep inside your disobedient belly.”
Will tasted his master's come, swallowing it gratefully as Maddox pumped it down his throat. He could be obedient when he wanted to be, and when Maddox needed him to be. But he would never stop acting on his own instincts. The reflexes that made him swallow and gratefully lick his master’s cock clean were the same ones that had made him eliminate Chauvelin. It was submission of a kind Maddox might not understand, but Will understood himself, and that was all that mattered.