Of course he did. It always came back to sex, didn’t it?
“Should have known you’d be into having me tied up.”
His eye twitched. “Oh, I am—don’t get me wrong—but we’ve already established I could get that for free.” He finally smirked, and I gritted my teeth.
“No fucking way.” The device on my chest burned white-hot, and I cried out before I could stop myself. Cy’s hand came down on the red screen almost instantly.
“First thing we learn in training is reading body language. It’s always more honest than words. And your body is so honest, doll. It can’t lie like you can.”
His face was triumphant, and I was fuming. He circled around me like the predator he was, and I tried to follow him as he stood behind me. He knelt down, mouth right next to my ear.
“How about this—one more question? If you don’t lie, I take that thing off you, and we talk like grown-ups.”
“Why should I trust you’ll keep your word?”
“Don’t have any other choice.”
He wasn’t wrong. “Ask.”
He put one hand on each of my arms, tied to the chair, and leaned in so I could feel his warm breath against the shell of my ear. “Has anyone else ever made you come as hard as I did?”
“Fu—”
He snapped his finger to my lips. “Ah ah ah. No lies, or no deal.”
Pain started to seep into my chest again, and he already knew the answer anyway.
“No.”
He circled back around in front of me, grinning from ear to ear. “Was I the best you’ve ever had?”
“You said one question.”
“Indulge me,” he said with a hungry look in his eyes.
“I’ve done that plenty.”
His fingers danced over the device, and I winced as the needles retracted, small beads of blood pooling on my skin as the device jumped back into Cy’s palm.
“Lie to me if you want now, but I know the truth. So let’s get down business.”
“How are we going to do this?” This was a negotiation I was used to. I’d done it a million times before.
He grabbed a data pad from the desk. “Think you could do a reconstruction of this?”
I blinked. “What?”
“Didn’t you go to school for data reconstruction or some shit? That’s what the deal is for.”
Silence stretched for a long moment. So he didn’t want sex? He had a job for me? “I didn’t finish my PhD.”
“Does it look like I give a fuck? Can you do it or not?”
I scanned over the data on the pad. It was the signal from the city’s monitoring system. Nothing about it seemed abnormal until the signal disappeared at…the time of the attack.
“I’d have to do more than just look at this on the screen. Run it through some different filters, try some anti-noise algorithms—”
He pulled the pad away. “Good. So we have a deal?”
