Page 8 of Power

As if he owned it, my body responded automatically. I detonated under his fingertips as I cried his name out. “Shyam!”

My torso collapsed onto the table as my orgasm washed over me. I took a few moments to catch my breath.

Shyam pulled away from my body. I pushed myself up off the table and saw that he had made his way to the door. He was about to step out and leave me—again.

“Shyam!” I raised my voice at him in anger. I was usually soft-spoken, but I was furious that this was happening again. The first time, I had been pissed at myself, but this time, I was pissed at him.

He turned back toward me with an unreadable expression on his face.

The scarf around my neck had come undone during his manhandling. His eyes flicked to the bruises on my skin. It almost seemed like concern entered his eyes. Before I could ask him what was wrong, he stepped out the door and closed it behind him.

Chapter VII

Shyam

Smoke trailed from the end of my cigar. I brought it to my lips and inhaled deeply. Tipping my head back, I exhaled slowly, letting the tension in my shoulders release.

Nirvana was full of life tonight. Fridays were always good. The women were out in droves.

Jai and I sat in my private office suite on the third floor. One wall was made of tinted glass—bulletproof and soundproof—and overlooked the entire club. Below us, I could see hordes of horny twenty-year-olds looking to hookup. They were young, with tight asses and perky tits, and danced for attention—to be noticed by young guys looking for an easy fuck.

My mind wandered to Amelia as I breathed in another puff from my cigar.

Amelia Anne Becker, age twenty-three. Only child of Joseph and Angela Becker from Seattle, Washington. Her father had been an electrician, and her mother was a nurse. Joseph Becker died from cancer when Amelia was fifteen. She had lived with her mother until she moved across the country to enroll in NYU’s School of Engineering on a scholarship. She’d graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and held top honors.

She had been active in many engineering organizations in university and had won awards for a few competitions. Her professors described her as “bright” and “driven.” IP Innovations was her first job out of school.

Her record was clear. No misdemeanors, or even parking tickets. She had dated sporadically since moving to the city, but nothing serious to note.

She was squeaky clean. Innocent…almost virginal, even. Her file said that she had visited a gynecologist nearby and had an active prescription for birth control that was renewed monthly, despite not dating regularly.

I liked women with experience. Virgins needed to be broken in before they learned to fuck well. The risk of them becoming too attached was high. I enjoyed my share of them, but nothing could compare to a woman who knew her way around a dick.

Amelia looked like a virgin on the outside, but when I took control of her, she knew exactly how to respond. She wasn’t afraid to want more. I had not planned on touching her again today at the office, but after cornering her at the club, I couldn’t resist. Something drew me to her whenever she was near.

When I found her being mauled by that motherfucker, I saw red. Rage took over and I wanted to beat the shit out of him. Then, when she stared at me with that innocent look, I needed to erase any evidence that someone else had touched her first.

Fuck, her skin was so soft, and my dick liked it. Having her bent over the conference table just a few hours ago had unleashed something primal in me. Hearing her call my name while she came had awakened something in me that I had not felt with other women. And she was intelligent. The way she spoke about her work turned me on. I was not used to women talking about something other than how they wanted to suck me off.

Jai sat back in the leather armchair across from me, enjoying his cigar while he checked out the view below us.

“Our guys found Manish’s body,” Jai said between exhaling rings of smoke from his mouth.

“Where?” I could feel my temper about to boil over.

Manish was one of our best men in India, our eyes and ears back home. He had gone M.I.A. last night while we were at the club. I had been on my way up to the suite to call my guys in private when I had found Amelia cornered by some fucker. She had distracted me.

“Abandoned train car in Bengal. His body was mangled. Missing fingers and toes. Slash wounds to the gut and throat. They say he bled out,” Jai responded somberly.

“Do we have a location on Tarun yet?” He was an expert at hiding and had been doing it for most of his adult life. We had planted men all over India, especially in Bengal, to find him. Unfortunately, none of them had been successful yet. Even with our best tracking software, we could not find a location.

“Once the tracking app from IP Innovations is complete, we may be able to locate him,” Jai offered. He was a tech genius, so I trusted his confidence.

The real reason we bought startups was so that we could keep tabs on all the players in our world, especially Tarun. We were able to gather various bits of data from different apps we acquired to put together full profiles of each person in our drug network, like a web of data of the underground.

Tarun’s profile had been more than difficult to compile. We were only able to find information from his teen years, when the internet first started collecting data from users. The most updated photo we had of him was from when he was eighteen years old. That was also the last time any of us had seen him in person. None of the information we found was helpful, since it was now outdated. He had been able to raise a tech team of his own to block the retrieval of his own data and cloak his photos so he couldn’t be tracked. He was elusive from photographs. He remained hidden away from anyone except his closest men to avoid recognition. To the rest of the world, he was still a fat kid with a double chin and a large, dark-brown birthmark on the left side of his neck. We hoped that with the app from IP Innovations, we could track him using their feature that altered images to find a hit. Amelia was oblivious to how useful she was to us by having created this feature.

To the outside world, Sethi Tech just seemed like another tech giant who bought over startups with innovative apps. However, the only apps we were interested in were tracking apps. Sure, we acquired some random non-tracking apps from other startups too, but that was just to throw off the public.

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