Chapter Twenty Six
Lisbet submerged herself in the tub in Beck’s pleasure palace for the second time that day. She had more blood sprayed on her skin than she thought and she had so much disgust that she needed to wash off.
“Beck,” she called into the bedroom. She had left the door open because everything that happened at the party rubbed her wrong. Carlos and Hessia could come back to Beck’s palace anytime they liked. No doubt they would be back and if she was in the tub when they got there, she needed to notice so she could grab a housecoat. Lisbet no longer felt safe. “Beck!” she called again.
“I’m here,” he said, the back of his elbow was visible at the door. It was low. He was sitting on the floor in the hallway, though Lisbet couldn’t see the rest of him.
“Can you grab me a nightgown? Is there one I could wear that would actually cover me?”
“Don’t get your hopes up,” he said, tossing a hoodie and some sweatpants onto the counter. “Would you prefer a thong or a pair of my briefs?”
“Your briefs,” she called back to him.
He tossed the underwear to sit atop the pile of clothes he was creating. “Do you need anything else, princess?”
“Do you think your palace is bugged? Do you think there are cameras and microphones all over the place here?” Lisbet asked, holding a mountain of bubbles next to her chest.”
“No. That would go against the general code of pleasure palaces. They don’t want anyone to find evidence of their crimes, so no cameras, no microphones, and if you do something particularly naughty, the only thing to do is to do it again.”
“Then we can talk about when your father’s pleasure palace will be raided? How soon is that going to happen? Is that going to be next month, next week, or tomorrow?”
“What we’re claiming with the evacuations,” Beck began, a curl of smoke escaping from around the door, “is that the miners are coming out themselves.”
In the past, when Lisbet reported evacuated areas to the public, she did not reveal whether or not the miners came out of their hideyholes of their own accord. “Has the public story changed then?”
“Yes. We’re putting more pressure on the miners to come out by themselves. We’re saying that miners are choosing to evacuate.”
“Is that true?” Lisbet wondered.
“No. We’re telling the miners they’ll get lighter sentences for their enslavement crimes and that it would be better for them if they weren’t raided. The remaining miners have been getting better at sensing when a raid is coming. A few of the palaces have set enough explosions of their own to have killed dozens of the Voynich boys. The problem is that those boys have already made a sick amount of money for what they’ve done here. I don’t know if they have much more appetite for dismantling pleasure palaces. They’ve said a few things that indicate they’d be happier to dig up dead bodies from this point onward. We probably won’t be able to empty the whole planet. We’ve emptied two-thirds of the planet for sure. That was true when we left the rocket site this morning. If we want more precise information, I need to get access to my work, though I’m a little spooked to try when my parents have been messing around in here. Though I am confident they aren’t recording us, my VR connection might not be as sound as it used to be.”
“If you can’t get access, is that going to halt your work?” Lisbet asked, peering over the side of the tub.
“No. Vantz has contingency plans for everything. There are plenty of other people working. I don’t have to be there. If I did, I never would have gone to the rocket site to rig that bomb personally. I sent everyone else to work on evacuations. But my father’s palace is set to be the last one raided. His is the largest and therefore the hardest.” Beck paused and thought seriously for a moment, running calculations in his head. “We should prepare for the eventuality that the Voynich crews will not come here and that Vantz will elect to set off the final chain reaction to give Mars an atmosphere without evacuating this complex of palaces. We need to convince them to evacuate.”
Lisbet thought about the people they met at the party at Carlos’ pleasure palace. She didn’t know if any of the people who held the controls to the electric wrist buzzers would ever want to leave. The place seemed thick with a frenzy for power that couldn’t be silenced by the promises Vantz was making them. He was only offering that they would continue breathing. It wasn’t enough for people that high on their own hedonism.
Lisbet would have been happy to let all of them suffer the consequences of what they’d done, except for one thing… Tiffania. Lisbet hated to leave her to die. Wasn’t there something she and Beck could do?
“You know,” she said in a voice that echoed through the bathroom. “Those people were not what I expected… and neither were you.”
Beck snorted. “What does that mean?”
“It means that you were so good at talking to them. You kept your head on straight and didn’t let anything that happened bother you. You even laughed with that guy who spilled blood on me. It’s too bad you couldn’t do your own PR work. I’m sure you could convert everyone.”
Beck exhaled. “What you saw was nothing. I stopped fighting those people to their faces ages ago. I couldn’t remake the system from my position inside it. I had to step out of it and find a way to burn them out. Yelling at my father never fixed a thing.”
“You used to fight with them?” Lisbet asked in an interested whisper.
“Yes. My father has been told my thoughts, but…” he trailed off.
“Hmm,” she hummed as she looked around for a bathrobe. “I never fought with my parents when I still lived at home. In particular, I never fought with my father. Now, I want to scream at him until I run out of breath, breathe in, and scream some more. I got a message from him when I was in cryostasis back at the rocket site. That was what woke me up. He sent me a message to make sure I was really married to Vantz. He noticed some flaws in the paperwork. I was sold to you and not Vantz.”
“Ah,” Beck said. “The marriage certificate we gave you didn’t have Vantz’s name on it at all. It only had my name. You were in such a state of confusion and unhappiness that you didn’t even read it before you signed it. Sometimes I play that moment back in my head. How would things have been different if you had read it and realized that I was your purchaser?”
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
Lisbet felt a heaviness fall on her upon hearing that. She shouldn’t have signed something that she hadn’t read, but it did explain why Beck and Charcoal were acting so strangely until the certificate was signed and whisked away. Even Charcoal knew what Beck was doing and the position she had been placed in because of what she signed.
“Are you mad I did that? That I tricked you into this whole thing? You thought you were getting Vantz Bloomburg?” he asked, his voice coming around the door like a cat peeking around a corner.
Lisbet sighed. “It doesn’t matter. How could it matter? Even if we weren’t likely to perish in a collapsed canal, it’s the same thing, because you and Vantz are the same person. Besides, if you want to show me the courtesy of marrying me instead of treating me like a sold woman who gets burned until her wrist is black, then…” Lisbet couldn’t remember what she was supposed to be saying. “It doesn’t matter. I signed the personal sale papers of my own accord. Yes, I was upset when I signed them. I was upset when I signed the marriage contract as well, but…” She stood up out of the water and unable to find a bathrobe, she grabbed a towel and put it around herself.
It didn’t cover as much of her as it should have, but Lisbet stepped into Beck’s field of vision anyway.
Sitting on the floor in front of her, he blinked. “Do you need a robe?” he asked, peering over her shoulder.
She shook her head in the negative.
He turned back to her, his cigarette making a column of smoke next to his face while he considered her with curious eyes. “Did you get a taste of something you liked at my father’s party tonight?”
She shook her head and looked down. “No… I… uh… I think you were right about us… about me… and I…” She could say more if she knew what words to say. Why was she tripping over herself?
“Are you sure you want that?” he persisted, blowing a line of smoke between them.
“I want to understand what all those girls at the party were raving about,” Lisbet said saucily, stalling what she really had to say.
He lolled his head between his shoulders in a show of resignation. He stood up and got a robe for her from the closet in the hallway behind him. “That’s very sweet,” he said as he pulled the bathrobe around her shoulders. “But I don’t think you’re ready for all that entails.”
“Why? Am I not grown up enough for you?” Lisbet asked as he tied the sash at her waist over her towel.
He scoffed. “Are you in love with me?”
She hesitated. He wanted her to beg, not because he wanted to assert dominance over her, but because he wanted to be sure he wasn’t forcing her into anything.
Finally, she found her voice and said, “Look, I’m scared. Really scared.”
“You’re scared of dying? That’s reasonable,” he agreed, looking down and turning away from her.
She hauled his attention back to her with the force of her voice. “Okay, I am scared of dying, but if we die in this palace, it’s likely to be fast and everything that lives has to die at some point. Some people are just luckier to live longer lives. I could slip on the soap and die with my head cracked on the tile. When your time is up, it’s up. Death is hanging over all of us all the time. No, what I’m scared about at this moment is that I’ve been wrong about you. That I’ve been wrong about everything.”
He paused and looked at her like something inside him was finally on while she spoke to him, that for once, their conversation was important to the man who found everything dull.
Lisbet stumbled over the words, but even with the stumbling, she delivered them anyway. “That it wasn’t some sort of upside-down luck that brought me to Mars to work with you. It was intentional. It was your intention that brought me here. That I came to you so immediately because even though the situation of selling myself for life is ridiculous… I came because something in me called to you, so when you called for me, I came. I think that if you told me what the situation was when I arrived and that you wanted me to be your wife… I would have resisted very little. I would have opened up and let you fill me because I… don’t want to live the life I had. I wanted to fall in love with Vantz. I did fall in love with Vantz and what was he? A VR simulation with your voice.”
“What are you saying?” he asked, stepping closer to her and getting in her face.
“I’m saying I want to be in love with you,” she said sternly.
He stood with his face close to hers. “Prove it.”
She reached up and kissed him. For a moment, she was back in her father’s house. Beck was the pool boy and the last person in the world she was supposed to be with. But she ignored the impulse in her head to always say no and deepened their kiss. In the next moment in her head, Beck was a servant in the skyscraper tower. Again, someone she wasn’t supposed to touch. She fought hard against the feeling and slid her hand under his shirt until she felt skin. At the last moment, he was her husband’s subordinate and she slapped that idea down as hard as she could. Those were lies she told herself so she could sabotage herself with a clean conscience. Beck had found a way to tell her he was hers from the very beginning. She just hadn’t been listening.
She kissed him again and the feeling went straight to her head.
“So, I’m man enough for you now?” he asked, taking one hand and whipping his shirt over his head.
It was a challenge because of how she’d reacted when he was shirtless before. She hadn’t looked at him.
She looked at him now. Gritting up her courage, she even ran a hand across his stomach. She gulped. “I’m such a baby. This is the first time I’ve ever touched a man’s bare stomach,” she admitted. “I’m shy… and I’m certainly going to bore you compared to those other girls who…”
“Took naps when they visited?” he supplied.
Her eyes widened. “Really?”
“I won’t admit to being virginal, as that would be a horrific lie, but I will say that was what was happening most of the time when my father sent girls to entertain me.”
“Why the eight-pack if you weren’t fooling around with them?” she asked with her interest piqued.
He put his hand around Lisbet’s wrist and said patiently, “The eight-pack is for you. It’s something I made during the time you were floating through space between Earth and Mars. I was trying to make myself over… make myself into a man you’d want.”
Lisbet gasped. “Is that true?”
He nodded and scoffed, “I wanted to impress you. As for my life here in this palace, you need to understand that the girls here have been abused within an inch of their lives. It’s better for everyone if they don’t die, but they’re still wounded deep down inside.” He put a hand on Lisbet’s chest over her heart.
His hand felt strange on her, like he was opening her awareness up to what would happen next. Her body was heating up.
Beck said his next words carefully. “The girls liked coming here because they knew that I wouldn’t hurt them. I wouldn’t demand anything of them, but some of them grew to hate coming here.”
“Why?” Lisbet asked curiously.
“Because I refused to love the way they wanted,” he explained.
“They wanted you to love them?”
“Of course, but they were warped. They had been taught to crave a kind of love that isn’t love at all,” he said with a downward glance, at his hand on Lisbet’s chest. “I would never hurt you for fun or push myself on you to show you my power. That’s not love. I want to give you real love. Touch you like you’re gold. Precious and rare. Soft and painless. Do you want me to tell you how I adore you? Sweep you away? Do you want me to love you? ”
Lisbet’s throat was too dry to answer. She nodded.
“It will change you,” he warned. “This whole place, my palace, Mars, and me. I’ll change you. Are you sure that is what you want?”
“Yes,” she gasped, conscious that she had to say the promissory word or he wouldn’t do a thing.
He took her into his arms and led her through the archway that brought them to his bedroom. The feel of the carpet under her bare feet felt like walking on moss. The fabric of her robe falling away from her felt like wings uncurling about to take flight. His breath on her skin felt like the hot wind of a summer night when the stars were close enough to touch. It felt like nature to let go of the old and become enveloped in something new. It was a feeling like being inside an egg that was cracking and breaking. Under thousands of tons of rock, Beck changed Lisbet. She begged him to change her and even though she did not expect it, she loved every moment of it.