The Inn Ch. 10

"Because you've sat and figured that out, and you're working toward it practically and methodically, and all you have to do is realize that the exact same approach works with writing."

"Does it? Have they staged a lot of your plays, then?"

"Sort of," I said. There wasn't much chance I could explain film rights and movie options to her. "Where I'm from, people read stories out of books. A fellow named Gutenberg invented a machine that's so fast at bookmaking, it's put all the scribes out of work. So books are cheap, and I've had ... I don't know how many copies of my books and stories sold."

Her eyes narrowed and she looked sidewise at me. "Are you playing with me, Simon? You've still never said just where it is you're from, you know. And it certainly seems to get more fanciful by the day – scribing machines, really?"

I countered with the only thing I could think of. "You've never told me where you're from either. It's not Piperville, right?"

The way her fingers went limp in my hand made me wince inside. What a dick, Simon. That can't be happy territory for her.

"No," she said in a small voice. "It's not Piperville, not really. But I don't even know, to tell you the truth. Mama and I just ... we just happened our way through the towns and hamlets along the Southerly Reaches, living here a year, there a year. Piperville was our last – the last year before she died. I was ten."

I pulled her close, fearful she might stand up and leave to hide her sadness or just to flee the reminder of what she'd lost.

"I'm sorry, Leyna," I said. "That was a stupid thing for me to ask."

Her arms went round me and she sniffled into my shoulder. "Don't worry ... I know you didn't mean any harm. And I deserve it for poking at you about your home. I do wonder, and I do want to know, but I shouldn't have made a joke of it."

"Hush. That's wrong too." The warmth and softness of her, filling my embrace, chased away my panic and worry. "Your sense of humor is one of the most beautiful things about you. You don't ever need to hold it back around me. Or your curiosity either. But I'm from a pretty strange place, and I'm nervous about telling too much about it, just like you were nervous about letting me read your play."

She breathed evenly in, then out, then in again. The movement pressed her breasts more firmly against my chest.

"Maybe we should do something neither of us is nervous about."

Throb.

"Um ..."

She pulled away far enough to playfully hit my sternum with the back of her hand. "I meant get you a bath, silly."

"Oh," I said.

Drawing closer again, she looked me deeply in the eyes. "The first time I take you to bed, it's going to last much longer than we have time for before I've got to get started on the dinner hour."

Throb.

"I guess a bath sounds pretty good, then."

"I thought it might!"

* * *

After filling the tub, Leyna kissed me and left me alone in the washroom to go about her chores. I got out of my clothes slowly, my head in too many places at once. Wondering what Leyna's room was like. I'd never been in it, never even seen the door. Like the kitchen, the staff's living quarters lay out of bounds in the downstairs section of the Nestled Goose where patrons weren't permitted. At the same time, going absolutely into orbit at the thought of sleeping with her tonight. She intoxicated me, and not primarily with her luscious curves or the sexy soft pink of her smile. I don't think I've ever wanted a woman as much in my life. But ... alongside the yearning, a crawly whisper of guilt. I couldn't tell her the truth about where I came from; she'd think I was crazy. But the idea of lying to her or swallowing the secret indefinitely – it made me feel like a creep. Especially considering: Necromanata.

That last was the one I wanted to think about least – not right now, not tonight. But somehow I had to learn whether she knew anything that might lead to his locus of power. And no matter how hard I tried to kick that subject to the curb, it just wouldn't go away.

Sighing, I plundered through the soaps and bath salts to find the ones she'd bathed me with before.

And the door opened, making me jump up with a squawk.

"Jesus, Leyna! You just about gave –"

But it wasn't Leyna.

Framed momentarily in the doorway – and then stepping inside and shutting the panel behind her – a woman took in my naked form with sharp, appraising eyes.

"What the hell do you think –"

"Simon, is it?" she asked. Her voice had almost no intonation, but carried an assumption of control. Or maybe the two long knives at either side of her belt made me think I should shut up when she talked. "The barkeep downstairs told me you were in number three, but the room was empty and I saw the maid stepping out of this one, so I thought I'd have a look."

I cleared my throat and remained crouched by the bin of bath products, thankful the angle kept my dick out of sight behind one leg. "I wouldn't have minded a knock. Is there something I can help you with?"

If Burgham had sent her up to see me, the odds seemed good she was looking to hire me for sex. Which would normally have struck me as terrific – she had a svelt figure and beautiful dark eyes, even if they were a bit calculating. And I could certainly have used the money at the moment. But every brain cell in my head, to its very last axon or dendrite, currently sparked or squirted its neurotransmitters on one or another topic related to Leyna. To be interrupted by the prospect of screwing a stranger for money when the most beautiful person I'd ever met expected me in her bed later that night – well, it fell far short of appealing, to say the least.

Unfortunately, I didn't realize how short of appealing until the dark-haired stranger turned her head, scanning the room, and I caught a glimpse of a scar in the shape of an erratic starburst, half-hidden along the left edge of her forehead beneath a lock of hair.

Oh. Fuck. Me.

The face had seemed a little familiar – along with the tight leather outfit and the knives. But she'd only appeared in a single short story I wrote for an anthology a while back, so it took the scar to jab my memory with a sharp stick.

"I've heard a couple of things about you," said Valdazirit Cang. Satisfied with the lay of the land, she turned and locked the door behind her. "That you're good with a pen, for instance. And also good with a prong."

"Um. I suppose I've been told that myself." I tried to use my peripheral vision to pick out something, anything, in the tray of bath goods that I might use to defend myself – soap powder to fling in her eyes, or the bottle of simmer-oil for getting the bathwater warmed up. But all the glass containers looked the same from the corner of my eye, so if I was going to find the right one, I'd have to turn my head.

Cang drew one of her slender, elegant knives in a casual gesture of threat. "But not very good at Basilisk's Bluff, I think. Stand up away from the sundries, if you please."

I raised both hands and did what she said. Cang had murdered more people than I'd taken baths, so without the element of surprise, I had no hope of opening up one of the containers before she could skewer me.

Why the fuck is she here? What the fuck does she want with me? I took the knife as a clue that she didn't have sex on her mind.

"I was hired by a gentleman in Phaeratos," she said. "It seems a pesky letter arrived to cause him financial aggravation, and he wanted to know who'd sent it."

Duke Phurl. Goddamnit. I'd blackmailed Phurl instead of some other rich candidate because I knew he had a decent disposition and almost no vices besides philandering. I figured that made him a safe mark. After all, hiring an investigator who could breach the confidentiality of the Imperial Mail would cost more than paying my extortion.

Except that Valdazirit Cang worked insanely cheap.

Emphasis on the "insanely." That starburst scar covered the spot where a cursed gem had burrowed into her brain years ago, turning her into a psychopath with a couple of unswerving habits. She could track down just about anyone or anything, but always neglected to tell her clients that whomever she found on the other end of her mission, she would kill.

Think think think think think, Simon!

Maybe ... "Look, it's possible I wrote some letter to your employer – I'm a scribe. People hire me to write things out for them. So the person who ... said whatever it was your employer didn't like, they're probably long gone. Lots of people pass through the inn here in Piperville. If you tell me what was in the letter, maybe I can remember a name, or describe them to you."

"Oh, that won't be necessary," she said, turning the point of her knife against one fingertip. "The postal carrier and your old scholar friend downstairs both confirmed you as the resident letter-writer, and I'm afraid my orders were not 'Find out who caused the letter to be written,' but 'Find out who wrote the letter.' So it doesn't matter to me who hired you to write it."

Goddoubledamnit. Cang was also insanely literal.

She took a step forward, and I took a reflexive step back, nearly tripping over the splash-rim that surrounded the tub.

Wait. She's also insanely accommodating, isn't she?

"So ... what, are you going to kill me over a letter I'm not really even responsible for?"

"I'm afraid so, yes."

"I don't suppose you give people last requests, do you?"

An indifferent shrug lifted her shoulders. "Depends on how much of a bother the request is, to be honest."

Okay. Okay, this might work.

"The thing is," I said, "if I'm going to die ... I always thought I'd want to go out at the moment of climax. There's something about having your breath cut off as you're getting close to orgasm, they say. I promise I'll make it worth your while – you know, prong-wise."

She tilted her head in predatory contemplation. Then she gave another shrug. "Why not? I enjoy sex, and I also enjoy throttling people. How do you propose we do it?"

"Well, there's a bathtub right here. I'm a pretty big fan of bathtub sex. You could ride me in the tub and then just shove me under once you've come and I'm getting close."

"Inventive!" She waved me toward the washbasin with a flick of her knife. "You'll have to get in before I take my clothes off, though. I'd hate to have you try something while I'm stripping and have to stick you, now that you've dangled sex and a drowning in front of me."

"Sure," I said. My hands started shaking as I turned to the water pump. "Just let me finish filling the tub up – oh, and you'll have to put the simmer-oil in first if you don't trust me with the bottle."

Nodding, she kept the knife leveled at me and moved to kneel by the bin of soaps and powders, where she picked the right bottle up after a near-instantaneous glance to look for it. I worked the lever on the pump, taking the least threatening posture and angle I could manage as she moved over to drip the heating fluid into the tub. It sizzled and steamed as water gouted from the spigot.

After a few more leans on the lever, I decided the water looked about deep enough. A finger dipped in the near end told me the temperature was okay too – warm, but not blistering. Valdazirit watched me with hungry eyes as I swung a leg over the rim of the tub. My foot confirmed what my finger had told me, so I stepped entirely in, turned, and settled into the bath's cozy, wet embrace.

She really likes the look of my cock, I told myself. She's totally hot for it. This is going to work. But the alternative thought – that she stared at my crotch because she'd decided it might be more fun to castrate me than to fuck me – didn't exactly stiffen me up. Dude, she's not going to cut your gonads off. She wants it too bad. Fuck – if I can't get hard ...

Cang sheathed her knife and moved her fingers to the fastening straps that bound the leather top tight about her chest. One by one, she slipped them loose of their tiny buckles, so that the pressure of her breasts within the black leather garment forced its undone gap wider and wider. As the swells of her tits and the deep, sweet valley of cleavage lay themselves bare, my crotch forgot all about the possibility that she might dis-member it. Or maybe some of Eesia's venom still rattled around my veins.

Either way, as her top came off, I got really hard, really fast.

Despite being lean and strung with taut, almost wiry muscle, the psychopathic mercenary had a fantastic rack – two lush and round and proudly pale orbs of femininity, peaked with nipples of a deep brown, like teak pearls jutting from the flawless disks of her areolas. As she shucked entirely free of her glossy black top, a set of sculpted abs revealed themselves, along with the dainty dimple of her bellybutton centered between them. Then she stood one-legged and leaned to slip off a boot, breasts swaying down with the motion. A second later, she had the other one off, showing dainty feet and firm calves.

She undid her belt. Shimmied loose from her pants. Put her hands on her hips, feet set wide, eyes and carnivorous smile fixed on me as I stared at the neatly trimmed black wedge of her pubic hair.

"I must say, it's a strange pleasure to see that look on a face instead of the pleading, squealing ones I usually have to look at."

I kept my gaze on her dark-thatched mound, since I suspected her eyes might have a less arousing effect.

"Well," I said, "if I have to find myself nose-to-nose with death, you're making a much nicer sight of it than I'd always feared."

Chuckling, the assassin came across the room, hips swaying, her movement filling the humid space with a dense, leather-deepened intensity of womanly cunt-scent.

My cock burgeoned harder still, stiffening so fast it swished through the water surrounding it.

Definitely doesn't look like performance is a worry. At least that's something.

She reached the tub and looked down through the clear water, licking her red lips at what she saw. "Yes ... if this works, I may have to make a habit of it. Not with you, sadly, but ..."

I shrugged. "If you do, then at least I've done my part to ease some other poor sap's last few moments."

"I like," she said, stepping into the tub astride me, "this attitude."

Valdazirit Cang loomed, one foot on either side of my waist, legs now parted wide enough and at an angle to reveal the delicate pink gash of her pussy, its lips mildly swollen, clit a delectable nub at the head of her mound. I slid a wet hand up her shin, over her knee, along the inside of her thigh, trailing bathwater across her flesh as it went. At the juncture between her legs, I brushed the backs of my fingers across the soft folds of her pudenda. She rolled her hips and ground down against my knuckles, then slowly knelt, riding my hand steadily down toward my upright but submerged erection.

As her knees settled alongside me, the water level rose, creeping up my sternum to the level of my collarbones – then up and over my shoulders with the lowering of her thighs, her pelvis. I caught my hard-on in the hand I was using to rub her, guided it quickly into place, and felt the hungry mouth of her cunt envelop me.

"Ahhh, god ..." I gasped. Cang's dark eyes flared, and she gave a low grunt at the penetration. With no further prelude, she sat down hard and started to fuck.

"Yes," she said, riding back and forth along my cock with an absolute vaginal stranglehold. "Yes, this is a satisfying way to end a mission."

Each stroke of her hips sent bathwater lapping up my neck to the jawline.

"Yesss ..."

I put my hands around her waist, felt the rock-hard strength of the muscles there, and did my best to thrust up in time with her.

"Uh!" she said, dragging her nails up along my chest. "Uh! Ah! This!"

If I'd hoped sex would provide some small drop in her guard, enough for me to throw her off or wrestle her down, the power of her heaving, humping form told me otherwise almost immediately. She might not be as strong as Juliette Ravendark, but she was certainly as strong as me, and from this angle I had no hope of getting the upper hand.

Especially once her fingers moved up and closed around my throat.

"Not ... really ... that close ... yet," I said, having to close my mouth against the surging waves set up by her accelerating rhythm.

"Nnnhhh," she moaned. Her encircling hands applied a ghost-light pressure. "I know you're not. But – I am, and I don't want you thinking ... you can get away ..." The pressure tightened. "... when ..." Tightened. "... I ... ah ... ooah ... UHHHH!"

She came. Her grip around my neck squeezed in hard enough for me to feel the pulse in my carotids. I could barely get out a squeak when the sex-driven waves ebbed – and when they peaked, they splashed all the way up over my nose and into my eyes.

"Ahh! Sweet Ofara, bless my cunt – gahuhhhhhh ..."

The orgasm-locked curves of her body warped and shifted, then cleared and trembled, three different times as the water rolled up and then away from my face. I held my breath at the crests and did my absolute best to push her farther over the edge. Still clenching her waist, I slammed upward, hard as I could, plunging my cock home through the spasms of her vaginal grasp. She felt incredible – if not for the whole I could be about to die turn-off, I couldn't possibly have avoided coming. And the effort of pounding up into her slid me deeper and deeper into the tub, until I had to tilt my head back and strain my neck as far as it would go to get my face above water even when the waves sloshed to the far end of the basin. Crashes and splashes of water alternated with her drawn-out groans of climactic bliss, see-sawing the volume of her cries in waves.

"OOOOooooOOOoooHHHhhh!!"

Then she gave a single, vicious grunt and settled back into her stroking, controlled rhythm with a vengeance. Her eyes held a fiery glee as she fucked me, choke-hold tightening minutely with each roll of her hips.

"This [wave crash] the best [wave crash] –ex and killi– [wave crash] –f my life!"

Helplessly, my cock swelled toward orgasm. She leaned forward and drove me all the way under, where even the deepest wave-troughs didn't reach my nose – and even if they had, the iron clutch of those hands would have cut off all breath.

A ringing filled my ears. The blur of my watery vision darkened at the edges.

Come ... on ... Simon ... keep ... fucking ...

With the last burst of strength I could find, I shoved hard up into her. Everything disappeared into a black tube of orgasm, strobed with flashes of oxygen-deprived hallucinatory color – sparks, lighting ... a pit of blackness –

And then a hand under each of my armpits pulled me up from dark, up from the water, into gasping, coughing air.

"Simon! Simon!"

It took several repetitions of my name for the voice to register as Leyna's. Her face wavered into focus along with a ragged wheezing sound that I realized must be my own breathing. Beyond her, towering up toward the ceiling, Burgham the bartender's stolid form shifted and rotated, a furious look on his face and a heavy iron frying-pan in one hand.

"glah ... Cang ..." was all I could manage.

"What in the hellpits of Tantarrus is going on here?" Burgham roared down at me.