* * * *

Chapter 15

Strangely enough things seemed to normalize between the three of us. My nights were a routine of business meetings, dinner functions, and mad, passionate sexscapades. A perpetual sandwich, with me as the juicy meat in the middle everyone wants to take a bite out of.

My vampires were true to their promise, they were cautious. They treated me as their delicate little bloodslave–sex toy, and I was pretty happy with it. A happy little addict living in a world where I had everything I wanted. Well … almost everything.

Lia’s reentry into my life took away that sense of privacy with Enrique. Our little circle of trust had expanded from two to three. Lia was there in everything we did, every business meeting. Every time Enrique consulted me about his associate’s thoughts – he consulted Lia’s opinion as well. Felt like us girls were being carefully balanced on a scale of Enrique’s time, attention, and affection. He never seemed to give her or me any preferential treatment. This equality was in everything we did. If he took us shopping to Canal Street, he’d spend ridiculous amounts of money on both of us, whatever we wanted. No perfume, dress, jacket, pants, tops, underwear, or jewelry was off-limits. Everything I could want.

Everything except for the one thing I wanted most … Love. Perhaps it was too much to ask that these creatures could ever love, at least not the way humans define it. Enrique never used the word. I can’t really say that they didn’t love me. They let me sleep in Enrique’s master bedroom suite with them. His windows were blocked against the daylight, completely blocked. Not one ray of daylight could enter that room. I guess they were pretty nervous about daylight. It spoke to their trust and confidence that they allowed me to sleep with them while at their most vulnerable. Being in their bed naked and intimately entwined together made me feel loved, but it’s not quite the same thing. It just wasn’t the same as that one-on-one intimacy I had shared with Enrique while Lia was in Spain.

I guess I understood why. He had to maintain balance, avoid Lia’s jealousy, or so he had said. I had to accept the fact Lia had been there all along, in the background. Enrique had never really been without her while she was away. The two of them were connected deeply. My privacy with Enrique had been an illusion.

I think we need some illusions in our life. Allows us to function without acknowledging certain cold hard facts. I needed my illusion, but I couldn’t get it back.

But I was happy. I had plenty of reason to be happy. I’d enrolled at NYU with online classes. Enrique’s New York attorney worked on renewing my visa. Things couldn’t be better.

My birthday, July 24, I received several very cool gifts from my new family.

“Open mine first.” Lia beamed as she handed me four wrapped gifts, a definite surprise. Although we got along well, we had no real sentiment between us, just sex. Lots and lots of sex.

“How cute!” Three pairs of edible underwear.

“This one next!” She shoved another in my hands.

“Will it fit him?” I held up the vibrating cock ring to the light to gauge its size.

“We’ll test it out tonight.” Enrique smiled a flash of fang. He might enjoy my gift more than I.

“Now this one.” Lia impatiently handed me her third gift, a golden see-through Versace top.

“That’s so beautiful. Thank you.” As I hugged her I began to wonder if maybe she did care for me in her own twisted way.

“Here, I know you’re gonna like this one.”

She handed me her last gift, an eight inch-long gourmet chocolate penis. They both insisted on watching me bite the head off.

“It’s not much, but I think you’ll like it.” He put two small packages in my hands.

The first gift, a twenty-four carat gold bracelet with the word Hope engraved in the center.

“Oh, that’s so beautiful, thank you. I love you.”

I didn’t ask what it cost. If I had to guess I’d say probably ten thousand or more. The other gift he gave me was priceless and brought tears to my eyes. A single piece of paper from the US office of immigration, a notice stating I had been granted a temporary visa until my card would be issued within thirty days. That little piece of paper said I was now lawfully visiting the US of A. Not quite a real visa yet, but still the best gift I’ve ever been given. How he arranged it to be issued on my twenty-third birthday, I’ll never know.

I could hardly stop crying on him as I hugged him fiercely. I loved him so much. He’d given me the life I dreamed of, mostly.

“No more tears, querida. We’re taking the night off together to celebrate. No business. Be sure to wear your new top, I want to see you in it. Smiling. No tears.”

“These are happy tears.” He had cleared his schedule for my birthday.

I felt so damn good; strong, healthy, and ready to rock ‘n roll. We hit Club Tobago over on Liberty Avenue in Jamaica. I downed several shots of tequila in the limo on the way there. I was half toasted by the time we arrived. Their DJ mixed up a hip blend of reggaeton and R&B, which just happened to be my own personal preference in music.

The place had it all, and a VIP section packed with awesome people. Lia and I danced, all over each other. We had a blast making out in front of everyone. I had on my new golden sheer top, no bra, nipples rock hard for everyone’s enjoyment, and tiny black boy shorts. The outfit matched perfectly with my golden skin, platinum bleach blond hair and five hundred dollar YSL heels. I looked like a damn rock star, and I certainly felt like one.

Nothing could bring me down, not even my jealousy at watching them feed from other girls on the dance floor. It usually bothered me to watch some girl getting what I wanted, but not that night. I tried my best to ignore my jealousy and waited my turn to be bitten. The problem was, girls get all hot and horny as the vamps suck on their necks. Things often got frisky. They put their hands all over my vampires.

That’s how I’d come to view them, as mine. I was theirs of course, they own me. But I liked to think of them as being exclusively mine. At the end of the night, no matter how many others they fed from, I’m the one in their bed at home in the penthouse. No one else was included in our ménage. No one else entered our circle of trust. I don’t like sharing them, but it’s a necessary evil.

We made it home about four in the morning, by then I was so smashed they had to carry me into the penthouse. We had a short sweet threesome and crashed for the day. All in all it had been the best birthday of my life.

One night flowed into another, the three of us inseparable, day and night. I attended all of Enrique’s business meetings, read everyone’s minds, tattled on them in our private after-the-meeting meeting. At the end of each night and often the beginning, my vampires screwed my brains out. I began to adapt to these little sexual marathons. I learned to perform like a porn star, my stamina and endurance had tripled.

It was the best. The best career I ever imagined. The best food and designer clothing. The best restaurants and nightclubs. The best sex ever. And I loved Enrique with all my heart. I can’t say the same about Lia. We got along. Occasionally I caught her irritation at some small thing. Usually some issue related to me. She was still an impatient psycho catty bitch, but she accepted me and I accepted her. The awesome sex went a long way to making up for our personality clashes.

They say all good things must come to an end, and so it happened with my perfect little world. About a month after Lia returned from Spain I found out Enrique had a business meeting scheduled with my former cartel boss Faustino a.k.a. El Tiburon – The Shark. I was required to be there to provide the service of psionic eavesdropping. It was the beginning of the end of my perfect life.

* * * *

Chapter 16

Faustino Vasquez did not look like a physically impressive man. At five foot eight, a hundred sixty-five pounds, he’s easily underestimated. He’s deceptively calm and jovial, smiles often. Those who don’t know him personally would never suspect he had such an intimidating nickname. I knew exactly why they called him the shark. I’d witnessed him cut a man to pieces with a machete. A very traumatic experience, one I never cared to repeat. The information I’d help to extract had led to the man’s mutilation. The idiot lied about three kilos of missing cocaine. Knowing the man was too much of a fool to survive in the cartels didn’t make it any easier to watch him die in such a gruesome manner. Cartel Darwinism. Only the most vicious and intelligent men survived for any length of time.

Faustino used the incident to teach me a lesson. I learned that lesson well. I would never cross Faustino. He was a very possessive man, especially of me. At first I thought he wouldn’t put me to work in Spanish Harlem. I learned his kind of possession required me at his beck and call, continually paying on a debt I had long since paid.

Even in sex he was possessive. He preferred the missionary position, and he wrapped his hands around my head to stare in my eyes as he hammered on me. From his perspective I was categorized as personal property, and that’s how he made me feel.

Although I had been present during Faustino’s machete-inspired investigations, playing lie detector, that’s not exactly where he acquired his reputation and nickname. When he moved into Spanish Harlem twelve years ago as a cartel enforcer, a-low-on-the-totem-pole thug, he began wiping out competing Coke dealers with a machete. It took him a few months to pull it off. There were retaliatory shootouts, but when the dust settled, Faustino sat at the top of the distribution chain. Cartel members back in Colombia were impressed with his control of the market. Of course, Faustino had to kill his own local boss as part of the deal. That’s the way of these things.

I’d been thrown into these cut-throat cocaine politics since the age of fourteen. Sad to say, I thought their psychotic behavior was normal. It’s hard not to when you’re surrounded by it. Moving to New York had been quite a learning experience. Suddenly I realized there’s an entire world that exists outside the influence of the cartels. I learned most Americans know nothing of the primitive dog-eat-dog environment I lived in beyond what they saw on CNN.