Page 5 of Shai

She should have been out for hours. I’d given her enough tranquilizers to knock out an elephant. Either she was getting wise to it and had only pretended to drink the wine containing the crushed-up tablets, or the old crone was building up a tolerance. Gnarled fingers slid into my hair, her fingertips tracing the contours of my skull. I suppressed the shudder that threatened to break free, forcing my lips into a shape that I hoped resembled a smile rather than the grimace it wanted to be. “What do you think we should do with him?”

She looked pleased as punch at being asked, some of my men’s body language revealing that they were far less comfortable watching the great and mighty Shai defer to his mother. It was one of the reasons I preferred her asleep for as many hours of the day as I could get. It kept her out of my hair and stopped her from interfering in a kingdom she seemed to think she had a shareholding in by sheer virtue of once having pushed me out of her pussy.

I retreated back to my chair as she lowered herself gingerly to the floor, strands of long white hair trailing over the man’s skin as she ran her hands over his body. She gave a running commentary as she poked and prodded. “Nice muscles. Can’t have been with McIntyre that long. Bruised of course, because that fat bastard doesn’t know how to play with his toys nicely.” Pushing his thighs apart, she took the man’s shriveled dick between thumb and forefinger. “Tiny dick, but I suppose that’s to be expected given his low body temperature.” She spat on her palm, and I knew what was coming even before she let out a cackle and wrapped her hand around the limp cock in an attempt to coax it to full tumescence.

There was a shuffling of feet and I knew if I looked up, most of my men

would have averted their gaze. If I had a choice, I would have done the same. Knowing it would upset my mother though, I watched. I watched her breathe life into the man’s cock until it grew considerably in size, the smallest of gasps spilling from blue lips as her hand moved faster. My mother lifted her head, triumph in her eyes as they met mine. “Not so dead after all.”

Once she’d teased him to full hardness, she pulled her nightdress up

around her hips. She wore no underwear, the white of her pubic hair on full display. I lounged back in the chair, pretending a casualness I was a long way from feeling as she straddled him. She seemed to care nothing for the audience as she fumbled awkwardly for a minute before finally taking him inside her, and riding him like a woman twenty years her junior.

I examined my fingernails, extracting a tiny piece of dirt. I needed to

find stronger tranquilizers or some other way of keeping her under control. In the early days, she’d had her uses, but those days were long gone, leaving a woman who was so desperate for a fuck that she didn’t even care whether her partner stopped breathing in the middle of the act. While I wasn’t exactly renowned for being picky when it came to sexual partners, I did prefer them a little farther removed from the grave.

The slap of skin echoed through the room, my mother not bothering to

be gentle as she used the man like a glorified dildo. Finally, after what felt like forever but was probably only a few minutes, she reached an orgasm, moaning loudly before going slack on top of him. Another excruciating minute passed before she disentangled herself from him, climbing off him and pulling her nightdress back down. “Thank you, my darling boy. That was just what I needed.”

I gave a nod. It was easier to go along with the charade that I’d had any

choice in the matter. I could have stopped her, but it was likely it would have triggered one of her moods, and I had better things to do this evening than spend it avoiding her sharp tongue as she threw out barbs designed to wound. And if there was one thing a mother knew how to do, and how to do well, it was to hit below the belt, every word designed to wreak the maximum emotional damage possible.

The man hadn’t orgasmed, his cock still standing stiff and proud, the rest of his body as pale as ever. As well as skating far too close to necrophilia, my mother was evidently a selfish lover as well, one who only thought about her own pleasure.

Taylor coughed, the sound breaking the strange atmosphere that had fallen over the room. I angled my body toward him, but kept one eye on my mother. However, now that she’d had her fill, she seemed to have lost interest in the half-drowned man, her path taking her across the room until she left it altogether, the tension in the room easing slightly with her departure.

Dragging my gaze away from the man’s stiff cock and ignoring the faint stirring in my groin that told me that perhaps I was more like my mother than I wanted to admit, I focused on Taylor. He was still waiting on my directive as to what I wanted done with our new friend from the river. There were a number of options. I could have him thrown back where he’d come from. I could leave him where he lay and let fate decide whether he lived or died, see just how strong his will to survive was. I had no way of knowing how long he’d been at the bottom of the river, but common sense dictated that he should already be dead. It was tempting to leave him, but there was one problem with that option. I didn’t believe in fate, other than the one I controlled. If I willed him to live, he should live. It was as simple as that.

A faint smile came to my lips. Yes, I was fate. Not the river. Not McIntyre. Me. Men should know better than to die if I’d decreed otherwise. Mind made up, I addressed Taylor. “Put him in the blue room and call Callaghan. Tell him to get off whatever whore he’s on and get here as fast as he can. Tell him that if he knows what’s good for him, this man will live.”

Taylor gave a nod before disappearing through the door, his phone already in his hand. I had no doubt that the disgraced surgeon would be there in record time. I’d acquired him after he’d been sued for malpractice for killing two patients during a single afternoon’s operating session fueled by a cocktail of drugs. I’d cleaned him up and saved him from prison, and in return he was at my beck and call, day or night. For that, he got a more than generous salary which allowed him to spend his free time participating in his second favorite vice after drugs—whores.

I went over to the window to stare out at the silent city, my gaze automatically straying south of the river to the part of the city that continued to elude me thanks to that damn bastard, McIntyre. He was the key to it all. Get rid of him and his empire would crumble like a house of cards. I just hadn’t found a way of doing that yet. I would, though. Either that or I’d die trying.

Leaving the room, I went the long way around to my destination, not

wanting to run the risk of bumping into my mother when I’d seen quite enough of her for one night, in more ways than one. Entering my bedroom, I came to a halt in front of the first of the two large tanks, my lips curling up into a smile at the sight that met me. “Hello, my darling Nyoko.”

She pressed her body against the glass, her scales iridescent in the light.

I slid the lid across and lowered my arm into the tank, letting her wind her thickly muscled body around it. Once her head had reached my shoulder, I plucked the rest of her considerable length from the tank, draping her around my neck. I’d had Nyoko since she was a baby and less than a foot long. The king cobra had grown to be almost six foot long, and in all likelihood still had more growing to do.

With Nyoko around my neck, I walked over to where the second snake

was housed. The black mamba couldn’t have been more different from the cobra, and as such I hadn’t given it a name. Where Nyoko had been tamed to a certain degree, or at least she had when it came to me, there was no taming a mamba.

They were known as the most aggressive snakes in the world for a

reason. He was a weapon, not a pet. I leaned closer to the tank, the snake’s black eyes following me. He was still beautiful in his own way, every muscular inch of him. “I don’t need you today, little one, so you may as well go back to sleep.”

Elijah

THERE WAS a strange clack-clack sound coming from my right—a rhythmic and almost soothing sound. Eventually, the fact that I didn’t know what it was began to bother me. Well, that, and the strange sensation of lying on something soft. In McIntyre’s compound, the only bed ever afforded to me was the floor.

Everything came back in a rush. The beating, the ultimatum, the car ride, the river, the sack, and then the water filling my lungs when I couldn’t hold my breath any longer. How was I not dead? And what was that sound?