Dark Pleasures Book 2
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CrimsonPetals
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New Priorities
ORSON
Book 2: Cruel Fears
Orson couldn’t help but chuckle as he typed out a message. “Meet me tonight, my bunny…” His legs were numb from sitting for so long, and his eyes felt like sandpaper from staring at the screen. But there was a thrill coursing through him that he couldn’t ignore.
“Finally…I’m in…I’ve got him!” he whispered to himself, his voice filled with anticipation.
He jumped up from his chair, pacing around his dimly lit basement apartment. He tried to regain the calm composure he usually relied on, but it was nowhere to be found. Instead, he was filled with a mix of dread and excitement.
The glow from his five computer monitors cast dancing shadows on the cold brick walls. Orson had been living in this small, underground apartment for two years. But he’d lived in all sorts of places since he left his mother’s house at sixteen.
This place was more like a cave than a home. The brick walls felt cold and uninviting, and the lack of windows made his three-hundred-and-fifty-dollars-a-week rental feel like a prison. His few possessions—a broken sink, a microwave, three suits, six pairs of pants, and a single nightstand—were all he had.
But it was home…for now.
Orson had never really sought out a place of comfort. He didn’t believe such a place existed. He saw his living spaces as temporary shelters, places to hide.
He never wanted to live in a “home” again. Home was where nightmares were born.
Despite the lack of comfort, Orson was ecstatic. He punched the air and spun around, a wild grin on his face as he looked at his computer screen. After six years of hard work, he was finally seeing the fruits of his labor.
“TET-TRON.” The words on his screen made him want to dance with joy. But they also stirred a deep fear within him, a fear that had been growing over the past few weeks. He was about to do something that could cost him everything.
But he was willing to pay the price. He was ready to take down a monster. A monster he’d been playing a dangerous game with for far too long.
They called him the Pied Piper, and Orson was closer than ever to catching him. Tonight was the night.
Orson knew that the only thing that could help him was the Tet-Tron. It was his masterpiece, a creation born out of his hatred, sorrow, and thirst for revenge. It was a powerful tool, capable of reaching into the darkest corners of the internet and dragging the monsters hiding there into the light.
Orson knew this because he had created it. He had spent years perfecting the AI of the Tet-Tron, writing the Python code, and creating the algorithms. But somewhere along the way, he had left himself vulnerable.
Orson was a gray hat hacker. He enjoyed creating chaos, hacking government files, and causing mischief. But when it came to the Tet-Tron, he realized that his skills weren’t enough.
He needed something more powerful, more destructive. So he had turned to a black hat hacker. They were dangerous and untrustworthy, but Orson was desperate. He needed their expertise in Python, a powerful programming language used by hackers.
But just as Orson had completed his masterpiece, it was stolen from him. The black hat hacker he had been working with, a man named White Wolf, had betrayed him. He was actually a white hat hacker working for the FBI, and he had left Orson with nothing.
In a blink, Fox’s labor of love, his brainchild, his magnum opus was snatched away from him. For years, he’d lived in fear that he’d never reclaim it. He’d lost the battle. The monsters he’d been hunting would continue to thrive, and there was nothing Orson could do about it.
Initially, he was swallowed by a profound, crippling despair. A part of him knew he should’ve been grateful that the FBI only took the Tet-Tron and didn’t imprison him for life, but the loss left him shattered. However, after some time, Orson found a new purpose, a new quarry.
The White Wolf. And now, Fox had him in his grasp.
In a cruel twist of fate, after years of relentless searching and hunting, Fox stumbled upon the White Wolf in a backdoor chatroom. It appeared that the White Wolf had resurfaced, once again masquerading as a black hat, pretending not to be an undercover cop aiming to steal the Python of those more skilled than him.
Fortunately, the arrogant fool had reused an old IP and rerouted it as a weak attempt to conceal his old digital footprints. But if there was one thing Orson excelled at, it was spotting familiar code, especially code he’d come to loathe as much as the White Wolf’s.
Aware that he needed to tread carefully, and acknowledging that the Wolf had outsmarted him before, Fox had created a brand new IP for himself. He spent weeks perfecting the fake accounts and looping the relatively clean digital footprint through over fifteen different cell towers before he even dared to approach the White Wolf this time.
Then, with utmost caution, he initiated contact. Since then, Orson had been steadily chipping away at the White Wolf’s entire federal employment account. Orson had been thorough, clawing, cracking, and hacking with every tool at his disposal.
To his astonishment, he found himself deep within the databases of the USCB, the federal department that the White Wolf worked for. The United States Children’s Bureau, a federal agency organized under the United States Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration.
Like a juicy piece of ripe fruit hanging just beyond a barbed wire fence, the Tet-Tron awaited him. But Orson knew that some things couldn’t be hacked by brute force. In this case, such a powerful federal agency required him to have an access code before he could infiltrate the databases and hack into the Tet-Tron to reclaim it.
The act of doing so would undoubtedly make him a fugitive for the rest of his life. It would mark the end of his life as anything but Fox. There would be no more Orson the intern. Orson Wells would be a certified criminal hacker. But he was prepared to pay that price.
Now, all Fox had left to do was to finagle his way into obtaining the key access code. In an almost poetic twist of fate, Orson had devised the perfect plan to extract the access key from the White Wolf himself, in person.
After extensive digging and hacking, Fox had discovered a single email thread exchanged between White Wolf and an external source from his work computer that mentioned a physical location by name. Heaven.
A cryptic name with an even more elusive truth that Orson had spent countless sleepless nights trying to uncover. After all his investigations, Orson concluded that Heaven was the name of three large, seemingly abandoned mansions tucked away on the east side of LA.
The mansions were interconnected by underground tunnels and chambers where thousands of passionate, ravenous, and wild couples gathered for burlesque parties, ranging from the ordinary to the extreme. These parties ran all year long, hosted by the city and state’s upper crust, and organized by an anonymous benefactor known only as G.O.D.
The parties and access to Heaven weren’t costly or exclusive. In fact, there seemed to be no real fuss about identification or names. All one needed to do was learn about the mansions’ location from a friend, and they could essentially walk in and join the fun.
And Orson knew exactly where to find it, thanks to the White Wolf. Orson also knew one crucial detail from the Wolf’s personal search history and email exchanges. The White Wolf was a man, and he was into BDSM. As a dominant.
Orson was both thrilled and deeply unsettled by this revelation. On one hand, it provided him a window into how Fox was going to get the access key to reclaim the Tet-Tron. On the other hand, the thought of dealing with another person who practiced that lifestyle made his skin crawl.
Not because Orson was opposed to it. He was a practitioner in his own way. But the idea of other Dominants made him sick because he knew that men who often participated in that lifestyle had this warped notion that the bigger they were, the more they had a right to dominate.
But despite his size, Orson didn’t submit, and he never would. He would never surrender that part of himself, and in most cases, he enjoyed making other men submit to him. Orson would be damned if he would ever let a man play his Dom.
Besides, he was all the Dom he would ever need. But to get what he wanted, perhaps he could pretend, just as the White Wolf had pretended to be a black hat all those years ago. Barely concerned with what pretending to submit would do to him, all Fox could see on his computer screen was the Tet-Tron.
All he could think about was the monster he wanted to kill. All he could feel was the satisfaction of a hunt nearly completed. All he had to do was go to Heaven and drag the White Wolf down to hell.
With a sharp chuckle more malicious than joyful, Orson returned to his work with a fervent zeal. His fingers clacked as his tired eyes glazed over the codes he was inputting, the countless fake accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and email) he needed to create to lure the White Wolf into a meeting with him under the guise of a Sub looking for a new Dom.
Fortunately, one of the best things about this whole fiasco was that the FBI didn’t seem to know who he really was or what he looked like. If they did, Orson knew he would have been arrested long ago when he first breached the USCB’s security firewall.
But unfortunately, the flip side of this was that Fox couldn’t risk hacking the White Wolf’s personal information or accounts without the risk of triggering too many red flags and scaring off his prey. So Orson had no real idea what the White Wolf looked like or his real name.
There was a single stock picture of the man that was blurry and mostly useless. Just a few weeks back, Fox had started to send out flirty DMs and a few risqué private messages. He’d taken some provocative photos of young men who shared his height, weight, and skin and hair color, then cleverly edited his own face into the pictures.
He posted these as his profile picture on Facebook under a pseudonym that made him chuckle with self-deprecating humor. Bunny. When the White Wolf took the bait less than a week later, Fox’s disdain for the man only deepened.
But Orson played his part as a timid, hesitant Sub flawlessly. After weeks of teasing, playing, and pretending to ignore the White Wolf’s responses, Orson had finally managed to arrange a meeting in Heaven. Tonight…
Orson felt a swarm of nervous butterflies in his stomach as he read the message summoning him. His gaze then shifted to the large box sitting by his door. The image on the box was of a skinny blond boy dressed in a scandalous leather outfit, complete with bunny cosplay ears, oversized zippers, and more exposed skin than Orson cared to think about.
This was to be Fox’s costume in Heaven. A part of him cringed at the thought of debasing himself in front of another Dom in such an outfit, even if it was just a ruse. But beneath the embarrassment, a deeper horror stirred, making him feel weak.
The thought of submitting, even for a moment, was so repulsive that Orson had to fight the urge to smash his monitor to pieces. Hating the way his fingers trembled and his heart pounded in his ears, Orson shook his head. He returned his fingers to the keyboard and prepared to type his agreement.
Just then, a large speech box popped up. A small, dancing blue wavelength appeared and began to move erratically as the ringing of a call echoed in his headset. Pulling back in relief and confusion, Orson glanced at the call number on his screen, frowned, tapped his keys, and answered the call.
“Hello? Is that you, Maybell?” he asked gently, recognizing the number since he had hacked Maybell’s phone a few weeks earlier.
“Hello, yeah it’s me…,” came the quick reply. Maybell’s voice was smooth and sweet, momentarily easing his anxiety.
“Hey Fox…um, I’m sorry to call so late and so suddenly like this…but are you busy?”
Busy? Aside from ripping off the government and planning a hit on an undercover cop? Nah, not much.
Fox rolled his eyes at his own sarcastic internal response and decided she didn’t need to know about his current, highly illegal activities. He leaned back in his chair, ignoring the crunch of the wheels as they rolled over the cold concrete, moving him away from his keyboard and toward the center of his room.
Still excited about his discovery, he spun his chair in a slow circle, shuffling his feet as he responded warmly into the headset microphone.
“Ha! Busy? Me? No, I’m not too busy for you at least,” he said, smirking as he rested his chin on his steepled hands. “What’s wrong? Talk to me.”
Maybell took a breath and let out a small, forced chuckle. Orson had never known her to giggle nervously.
“Oh! Nothing’s wrong at all!” she replied quickly, almost defensively. “I just…um, wanted to know if you wanted to…you know, come over for a little while? I guess I wanted some company tonight, but if you’re busy then don’t worry about it. I’ll be fine…”
Her voice was strong, but there was a slight tremor at the end of her sentence that sent a chill down his spine for reasons he couldn’t explain.
Why do I get the feeling she’s not fine at all… Damn it. I wonder if Isiah did something stupid…maybe trying to parent trap them last night wasn’t such a good idea after all… Damn it, Crow, you idiot! I really thought you would handle this the right way…
Orson stifled a sigh as he leaned forward and gently prodded her.
“Maybell, little crow, tell me what’s wrong?”
He could almost hear her smile at his pet name as she paused.
Over the past few weeks, as they’d spent more and more time together, Fox had started calling May by this pet nickname. He knew she wasn’t a hacker or cracker like him and Isiah, but she was a part of their world in her own way.
In many ways, Maybell reminded him of Isiah. Her tenacity and sharp mind mirrored her mate’s, but she had a tenderness and empathy that Isiah lacked. He saw her as a smaller, sweeter, but no less significant figure.
A little crow compared to the dark, intense Crow Orson still respected as a master hacker. And knew better than to anger.
“Fox, I said nothing’s wrong…” May’s voice came back, sounding strained as if she was trying not to sound weak.
Orson frowned and asked a different question.
“Fine. Nothing’s wrong, but then why are you calling me at two in the morning and not Isiah?”
There was a long pause, during which Orson could tell that his friend, a woman he barely knew but whose sweet spirit he would set the world on fire for, was on the verge of tears.
Feeling a slight panic, he stopped spinning and called out softly, worried.
“May, please talk to me. I can’t help if you won’t talk to me…”
“Umm, please don’t bring Isiah into this?” she suddenly whispered back, her voice heavy with burdens he understood in his own way.
“Can you just come see me for a while? I had a nightmare and I don’t… I don’t want Isiah here so I called you.”
Fox felt his stomach flip at her confession.
Now he had serious questions, but he simply glanced over his shoulder at the screen he had been working on. One of the most pivotal moments of his life was waiting there.
Meet me tonight, my Bunny…
Like a punch to the gut, Orson remembered the first time his own father had called him that vile nickname…while he chased him naked under his bed, crying and screaming to get away.
Orson’s jaw tightened as the nauseating memory surfaced, and he mentally berated himself for allowing it to emerge.
The Fox had chosen his abuser’s pet name as his online alias, a strategy to channel all his loathing toward the Wolf each time he received a message from him.
But maybe he had miscalculated his own emotional distance from that name, because right now, he felt like he might throw up.
What surprised him even more than his sudden urge to back out was his strong desire to see Maybell.
His connection with her, and hers with him, had developed rapidly, fueled by intense drama.
But the more time he spent with her, the more he found himself caring for her. Her company brought him happiness, and the thought of her being upset hurt him more than the prospect of postponing his meeting with White Wolf.
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes…with some chocolate. How’s that sound, lil crow?”
There was a soft sound, like Maybell had moved away from the phone to wipe her face or nose. Then she let out a small, watery laugh, pretending to be cheerful for his sake.
“It sounds lovely…see you soon then?”
Fox agreed and ended the call.
With a sigh of disappointment, he removed the bulky headset from his ears, his red-orange hair falling over his eyes as he shook his head to dispel the drowsiness.
“Jesus, Isiah, what did you do?” Orson muttered to himself as he turned and tossed his headset onto the small twin-sized cot in the far corner.
Before putting on his coat and grabbing his keys, he walked over to the computer and typed his response.
Not tonight, Wolf. How about Saturday?
He added a small bunny emoji and a heart to his final message, hoping to prevent any argument.
See you in Heaven!
With that, he spun around and left the room, trying to ignore the gnawing unease in his heart and stomach.
The thought of meeting the Wolf stirred up a whirlwind of sickening memories he couldn’t fully suppress.
He aimed a spiteful kick at the box by the door before leaving his den.
