Kevin Brown

"Master, could you please throw me away harder next time? I'd like to feel used and thrown aside."

"Certainly. Will there be time for lovemaking, Elaine?"

She stood up and looked me in the eye. "Anything you do to us it lovemaking, Master. If you desire, we can have ordinary sex."

"I want to cuddle," I demanded.

"Master only has to say the word," Elaine smiled.

Since she was so close, I yanked her hair and pulled her into a kiss. I cleaned the inside of her mouth with my tongue and then pulled her away, throwing her to the floor. "Better?"

"Yes, Master."

"Button me up," I ordered. She gave my cock one more slurp and redressed me. "That is my assistant, Fatima. She can be your assistant too."

Unreal.

Elaine's assistant had come into the room and waited just inside the door while Elaine had been servicing my cock. I idly wondered if they would kiss each other if I ordered it. Elaine gave me a wink and then proceeded to tongue her assistant. When they were done kissing, the assistant scratched at her neck and a collar appeared, no leash attached.

Even more unreal.

I made my exit, waiting for them in the atrium. I inspected Elaine again, then made a spectacle of inspecting Fatima. She was very attractive, black hair against dark skin and a white suit for contrast. She was going to get a massage soon.

Just when I thought that I was alone, I heard yet another woman coming into the atrium. It was my favorite redhead, Sherry. She proceeded to slap me then kiss me. "So whose assistant are you?" I asked.

"Yours, except for the sex part. I want to do this as a job and maybe we'll work on another Zachary later."

"That's good," I nodded. "I'm going to have my hands full here, anyway. Zoey said she wanted to move back to the Anson Complex. What are your feelings on that?"

"I'll take a room there but I go anywhere you go. I'm a natural immortal, so I can fold with you if necessary," Sherry replied. "You have an appointment in an hour with Parker Renraw."

"Great. I wonder how that's going to go."

***

Parker already knew what had happened and told me welcome to the family. Then he asked me to track down a person inside the studio leaking their dailies to some video blogger who was critiquing their content without knowing the process. Since my wallet was partially tied to the health of the studio, I told him I'd take a look for no charge.

I moseyed around the building until I found the server room. It was impressive by my standards, except for the two kiddies playing 'Persephone's War' on the main terminal. I walked over to the server they were tying up and killed the game by command line.

"Yo man, what the fuck?" Geek number one said.

"You ain't supposed to be in here!" Geek number two exclaimed.

I showed them my yellow badge and they blanched. "I'm allowed to go anywhere I want to, especially to catch a couple shrooms wasting my money playing video games!"

"Your badge ain't real," geek two challenged.

"Get out of my chair. Now."

He didn't budge, so I pulled my now-favorite trick of a dilation wave and rolled both their chairs into opposing corners and taking a third chair for myself. I let the wave go and started with rifling through the routing tables.

I heard one of the geeks calling for their boss, but it didn't bother me. I had every right to be in my chair. I tested their connection, and they had nearly four hundred millisecond latency on a three hundred gigabit connection. I swiped that figure onto one of the sub-monitors so I could see any effects of my work.

One of the spikes in latency was caused by the geeks colocating a game server onto the company network. I heard a door opening and some bawling, then a man with a signature pocket protector showed up reflected in one of the blank monitors. Before he had a chance to ask who I was, I picked the card off my lapel and handed it over my shoulder. He turned as white as the geeks had and stepped away to verify it.

The game server was not just on one of the servers, it was actually hardware attached to the network. There were fully five hundred users on the server, playing the game and cheating at it. I forcefully disconnected them and remotely powered down the server. One of the geeks tried to object, but the other told him to shut up.

Pocket protector came back in and gently set the badge at the console I was occupying. He asked if there was anything he could help with, and I gave him the physical location of the gameserver and asked him to pull it from the server cabinet. He came back in ten minutes later and dropped it on the floor.

I didn't mind him watching me work, he kept a respectful distance as I rearranged the routing tables to reject the incoming connection attempts to the server I had shut off. I saw Gwen's routing bug in the router and disabled it. She didn't really need access to what were now my servers. I found Parker's leak quite by accident. Someone had set up a read-only device that was sending out video at that very moment. I looped the video feed back into a porn streaming server and put a clamp on the bandwidth. I would deal with that sonofabitch later.

The latency for the fiber connection had dropped to two-fifty milliseconds, but that wasn't enough for me. There was a bunch of supposedly encrypted traffic originating off of over a hundred office computers. I did a packet inspection and found all of the packets were the same. There was a worm on those computers which had downloaded a DDOS bot. Those bots were using company computers and bandwidth to attack other servers in what looked like a crude LOIC.

"Is that what I think it is?" Pocket protector asked while I was pondering the traffic.

"An LOIC? No, it's not as bad as I originally thought," I said after a moment. "It looks like a worm plus bot, but the packet contents are the same. Whatever it is, it's attached to a browser. You see the HTTP requests going out on eighty, then a burst of traffic on one eight oh eight oh?"

"Yeah, I see it," pocket protector replied. "Probably a renegade browser extension. You two, you're on scut duty. Go around and clean all the browser extensions off every computer on the network. Get it quick and I might forget about that pile of shit laying over there on the floor!"

I went back to my task of remapping the ports on the company router. I heard a lot of sighs from behind me, the geek equivalent of the headslap. Once I finished that task, I fired off a text to Parker to let him know I found his leak, and would be fixing that myself. He sent a text back saying Lisann needed to talk to me. I didn't feel so happy after reading that.

Pocket protector was happy to see me go, but I wasn't happy to leave. Something has gone wrong in the three hours I had been in the server room.

Lisann and her sisters were in the conference room, and none looked happy. I didn't feel happy either, because their collars and my leashes were showing.

Lisann took a breath. "Kevin, we are of the opinion that your are not Master material. Based on what happened this morning along with your activities the last few hours, we have changed our minds about you."

"Of course you have," I said. "You're right, I can't be unnecessarily cruel to women. I think that debasement and torture are for men with no hearts. If I had no heart, I wouldn't let you go, so let's get on with it."

Elaine was first, the look in her eyes cold as steel as I unbuckled my leash and removed her collar.

I take my last breath.

Alana came next. As I reached behind her neck to unlock the leash, she put her hands on my wrists. She looked me in the eyes, as if she was searching for something, and put her hands down so I could finish my task.

I take my last breath, I take my last breath.

Annalise came to stand in front of me and turned around. She lifted her hair so I could remove the leash and collar. She walked away from me, patting Lisann's shoulder as she passed.

I take my last breath, I take my last breath.

"What is he doing?" Annalise asked.

"Taking the coward's way out. Not willing to fight, he's leaving the ring," Elaine coldly answered.

Lisann rushed around the table and put her hands on my face. "Kevin, stop!"

"I am," I whispered.

"Kevin, listen to me. I said that you couldn't be my Master..."

"I take my last breath..." I saw the light behind her.

Lisann slapped my face. "I didn't say anything about you not being my husband!" She slapped my face again. "Kevin!"

Light.

Time froze, Lisann's tears stopped rolling down her cheeks.

"You're an ass, Kevin. I've seen a few of those in my time," Gaia said.

"I want to die, Gaia."

Gaia's voice came from the light. "Always quick to pout, like a petulant child."

"It just hurts so much. I want to stop the hurting."

"The hurt you were feeling was miniscule compared to the pain your death will visit on the mothers of your sons. You didn't consider them, did you?"

"Please let me die. Please?"

"You need to take stock, Kevin. Lisann loves you, and she is willing to break their circle to be with you."

"I thought you didn't meddle in normal human dealings," I snapped.

"My mandate can vary. Besides, you're not a normal human."

"Semantics. Let me go."

"Very well."

Time resumed, and Lisann put her hands on my cheeks. "Kevin?"

"No. No to everything, Lisann. I may not be taking my last breath, but I'm not taking any more with you. Turn around."

Despite the fact that she wanted to say so much, Lisann turned around and lifted her hair so I could unhook my leash. When I went to unbuckle her collar, she walked away. I should've realized there was a significance to that part of the ritual.

All of them left the room without another word. I plopped down in the chair closest to me to debate life choices. Leaving the conference room was a given. How long should I wait? Does everyone know what happened? I went to the restroom attached to the conference room and cleaned myself up. I wasn't too bad, considering. The leashes and collars had been collected while I was cleaning up, all the better lest someone less enlightened find them. I mixed in with the other people in their suits and made my way to the front entrance. I debated for a moment and left my access lanyard with the ladies at reception.

I was almost to the doors when an arm hooked through mine and spun me around. "Alana?"

"Let's have a chat, Kevin." She lead me back past the reception desk where she picked up my ID. We went to an unmarked door and she tapped it against the knob and pushed the door open. As it shut, she pinned me up against the wall with her forearm against my neck. "Five minutes?"

"Two."

"For as many movies as we have put together, you would think that we'd able to stick to a script. Or, even know when we've flubbed it."

"Huh?"

"Lisann said that we decided you weren't Master material. She forgot to say that you are husband material. None of us could figure out why you would want to take your last breath when you didn't want to be a Master! The whole ritual was about you taking our collars off!"

A light came on in my bead. "Because the Masters don't control the collars, the submissives do."

Alana released her arm block. "Lisann lost it when you told her 'no' and doubly lost it when she realized she was had missed the most important part."

"When she started saying that you didn't want a Master, I was sure that was it. I am tired of all the heartache, Alana. I just want to put my heart in a woman's hand and know she will treasure it as I would treasure hers. I could have worked the Master thing, probably, but I wanted the chance."

Alana sighed. "What can we do, Kevin?"

"Is this a 'we' thing?"

"Even Elaine? Yes, she realizes she was cold."

"No collars," I demanded.

"How about this? We don't ask for permission to speak?"

"Reasonable," I agreed. "Maybe mix and match the master-girlfriend things. It might be fun."

"Lisann says she still wants to be your pet. I think it's kind of cute, you leashing her. You two are actually the most compatible of our pack," Alana said.

"I don't want women asking me for permission to speak!"

"We won't ask for permission, but we won't try and speak over you. As far as decisions go, we will counterpoint you, but we will follow your lead."

"All right," I nodded. "Your two minutes are up. Where's Lisann?"

Alana pulled open the door, Lisann was standing there, her expression neutral. I waved her in, and Alana left. The first thing Lisann did was offer me my leash. I took a long, hard look in her eyes before I accepted it. She turned around and lifted her hair, showing me that her blouse was low-cut in the back. Right above her bra strap was a tattoo that said 'Kevin's Bitch.' I had a snicker as I clipped my leash onto her collar.

"That's permanent?" I asked.

"Yes, it is."

"Then I want a tattoo on my arm, 'Lisann's Master.'"

"Pet begs her master to have it done on the inside of his forearm. Private words, if you will?"

"Done," I nodded. "And yours, with low-cut dresses?"

"I will wear my marks with pride, Master."

I sighed. "So be it."