Chapter 9: The Service Tunnels
The service corridor swallowed them whole. The maid uniforms, now smudged with grime, felt like pathetic disguises in the echoing cavern of dripping pipes and shuddering machinery. The air was a physical thing, warm and humid, carrying the tang of ozone and the deeper, earthier smell of wet concrete. Bioluminescent tubes ran along the ceiling, casting a sickly greenish light that made their skin look corpselike.
Casey’s voice crackled in Mai’s earpiece, strained with static. “Status, girls? Find Freddie yet?”
Mai pressed the talk button, her lips almost brushing the microphone. “We know where he isn’t,” she whispered, ducking under a low-hanging conduit. “The main orgy suite is a dead end. Inez Murphy is running it. No sign of my father.”
Beside her, Felicity wiped sweat from her brow with a trembling hand. The scholar’s eyes were wide behind her glasses, darting from the pulsating pipes to the deep shadows between rusted support beams. “What kind of place is this?” she breathed, her voice barely audible over the constant, subsonic hum.
Mai’s jaw tightened. She glanced at a service panel, its screen displaying arcane symbols mixed with technical readouts. A leftover from the Consortium’s magical tech. “A hunting ground,” she said, her tone flat and hard. “Rich people get bored. Their usual thrills turn to ash. So they find new ways to feel alive. New things to own. New experiences to consume.” She looked at Felicity, and in the green light, her expression was grim. “My mother used to say the worst monsters don’t have fangs. They have trust funds and zoning permits.”
They moved forward, their soft-soled shoes silent on the metal catwalk. The corridor branched, and a discreet, polished brass plaque pointed down a narrower, cleaner tunnel: ‘Residential Suites – Authorized Personnel Only.’ A private elevator, its doors brushed steel, stood at the end.
But a sound pulled them up short. Not machinery. A voice, sharp and commanding, laced with a Spanish accent, filtering through a ventilation grate above a heavy door marked ‘Hydraulics Control.’
“—do not pay for simpering! I pay for enthusiasm! ¡Demonios! Make him understand the privilege!”
Mai and Felicity exchanged a look. Inez Murphy. Casey’s voice came again, more urgent. “We’ve got schematics. That control room has a secondary access shaft that leads to the suites’ utility closets. If he’s being kept somewhere quiet, that’s the route.”
Mai pointed up. Felicity nodded, her fear momentarily overridden by academic curiosity. Together, they shoved a rolling tool cart beneath the grate. Mai climbed up, her fingers finding purchase in the mesh. She pulled, muscles in her shoulders corded, and the grate gave way with a muffled shriek of protesting screws.
The view from the grate was a slice of hell wrapped in velvet.
The control room had been converted. One wall was still covered in flickering monitoring screens showing various rooms of the club. The others were draped in rich, crimson fabric. The floor was littered with silk cushions. In the center, Inez Murphy stood, still impeccably dressed in a tailored cream suit, her silver-streaked dark hair in its severe bun. Her face was a mask of furious impatience.
Before her, a young man, maybe early twenties, naked and visibly terrified, was on his knees. His wrists were bound with silk cords to a ring in the floor. Standing over him, also naked, was a woman in her forties, her body toned and hard, her face blankly professional. She held a wicked-looking flogger made of thin, black leather straps.
“Again,” Inez commanded, her voice icy. “And this time, you will thank her.”
The professional woman’s arm rose and fell. The flogger whistled before landing with a sharp crack across the young man’s back. He jerked against his bonds, a strangled gasp escaping him. Red welts bloomed instantly on his pale skin.
“Thank you!” Inez prompted.
“Th-thank you,” the boy stammered, tears cutting clean lines through the sweat on his face.
“¡Porquería!” Inez spat. “Where is the fire? Where is the genuine gratitude? You are being sculpted! Honed! This is a gift!” She paced, a predator in her glass-walled enclosure. “The gentleman upstairs requires a specific… ambiance. He believes he wants broken things. What he truly needs is something broken and beautifully, convincingly grateful. You are not projecting gratitude. You are projecting piss and fear.” She stopped, tapping a manicured nail against her lips. “Perhaps we need a more direct lesson in enthusiasm.”
She nodded to the professional. The woman set the flogger down and approached the bound man from the front. She gripped his chin, forcing his head up. Her other hand snaked down between her own legs, fingers working briefly before emerging glistening. She smeared her wetness across his slack lips.
“Lick,” Inez ordered. “Clean her. Show some fucking appreciation for the hand that shapes you.”
The boy’s tongue darted out, trembling, licking at the proffered fingers. The professional woman watched him with detached interest, as if observing an animal perform a trick.
Mai felt Felicity freeze beside her, a tiny, horrified inhale catching in her throat. Mai’s own stomach roiled, but her eyes were already scanning the room. The monitors. One screen showed a lavish bedroom, all soft grays and blues. A man sat in a wingback chair, his back to the camera, facing a window. He had thinning light brown hair. The set of his shoulders was achingly familiar, even in pixelated monochrome.
Freddie.
He was just sitting there. Unbound, but utterly still.
Mai tapped Felicity’s arm and pointed. Felicity followed her gaze, her eyes widening further. She gave a tight, quick nod.
Inez’s voice dragged their attention back. “Enough. He’s too cold. We’ll use the transmitter. It’s crude, but it gets the point across.” She walked to a console, different from the security monitors. It was sleek, black, with a single, prominent green button. A leftover piece of Consortium tech, a neural influencer designed to amplify baseline emotions. She pressed it.
A low, almost inaudible whine filled the control room. The bound young man shuddered. The fear on his face didn’t lessen, but it was joined by something else, a compulsive, biological urgency. His hips gave a helpless jerk. His cock, which had been limp, began to stiffen against his thigh, a traitorous response completely divorced from his mind.
“See?” Inez said, satisfaction smoothing her features. “The body knows its purpose. Even when the mind is stubborn.” She gestured to the professional. “Proceed. He’s primed. Make it theatrical.”
The professional woman pushed the young man onto his back, his bound arms trapped awkwardly beneath him. She knelt over his face, lowering her cunt onto his mouth. “You will eat me until I am satisfied,” she stated, no inflection in her voice. “You will make me come. And you will enjoy it.”
She ground herself down onto his face. The boy’s muffled sounds were lost as she began to move, a slow, ruthless rocking of her hips. Her hands braced on his chest, nails digging in. On the monitor, the feed showed a close-up of the action, the woman’s folds smothering him, his tongue forced to work.
Inez watched, arms crossed, a critic at a performance. “Better. The humiliation is palpable. But we need the joyful submission. The transmitter amplifies arousal, but it can’t create the story. We need to break the story in his head and write a new one.” She sighed. “After this, we’ll move him to the empathy chamber. Let him feel the pleasure of others until he mistakes it for his own.”
Mai had seen enough. She gestured sharply to Felicity. Move. They dropped from the grate, landing softly on the tool cart and then the floor. The private elevator was ten feet away.
“The transmitter,” Felicity whispered, her voice shaky but analytical. “It’s a variant of a Green Moon arousal amplifier, but inverted. It doesn’t remove inhibitions. It bypasses the brain’s consent pathways altogether and stimulates the primal reward centers associated with sexual stimulus. It’s… it’s rape by neurology.”
“Can you disable it?” Mai asked, her fingers prying at the elevator’s call button panel.
“Maybe. If I had time and tools. But it’s probably wired into the club’s main grid. Killing it might trigger alarms.”
“Then we find my father and get out before they use it on anyone else,” Mai said. The panel came open, revealing a simple keycard slot and a manual override lever. “Shit.”
A sound behind them. A door hissing open. Not the control room, but another service entrance further down the corridor.
Two figures stepped out. Club security, but not the blazered guards from upstairs. These were bigger, dressed in black tactical gear, their faces hard. One held a device that looked like a souped-up tablet, its screen glowing. He looked from it to Mai and Felicity.
“Unregistered thermal signatures,” he said, his voice a gravelly monotone. “Maids don’t have clearance for Sub-level Three.”
Mai didn’t hesitate. She launched herself forward, a move her mother had drilled into her a thousand times. Low, fast, using her smaller size. She drove her shoulder into the first guard’s stomach, just below his body armor. The air left him in a surprised oof. The second guard swung his tablet like a club.
Felicity screamed, “Mai!” and lunged, not at the guard, but at the wall. Her hand slapped a large, red emergency shut-off valve for the glowing pipes. She twisted it with all her strength.
With a deep, groaning shudder, the bioluminescent tubes along the ceiling flickered and died. Darkness, absolute and choking, swallowed the corridor.
In the black, sounds became everything. The grunt of the guard Mai was wrestling. The fumbling curse of the second. Felicity’s panicked breathing.
And from the control room doorway, now sliding open, Inez Murphy’s voice, sharp with fury. “What is that? Who is out there? ¡Luz! Get the lights!”
A flashlight beam cut the darkness, sweeping erratically. It caught Mai, pinned under the first guard who had recovered his wind. It caught Felicity, pressed against the wall.
Inez stepped into the corridor, silhouetted by the bloody light from her room. She held a small, elegant pistol. “Ah. The adventurer’s daughter. And the scholar. How… quaint.” She raised the gun, aiming at Mai’s head. “Let’s add some new materials to the workshop.”
The muzzle flash was a brilliant, blinding stab in the dark.
But the shot never came.
From the open elevator shaft, where Mai had been working the panel, a hand shot out. A hand followed by a arm, wiry and strong, in a tailored but slightly frayed sleeve. It grabbed Inez’s wrist and yanked her off-balance with shocking force. The gun went off, the bullet ricocheting off a pipe with a deafening spang.
The man who emerged from the shaft was disheveled, his light brown hair a mess, his face pale and etched with deep exhaustion. But his blue eyes, as they found Mai’s in the strobe-light chaos, held a desperate, lucid fire.
“Run, Mai!” Lord Freddie Highmore croaked, his voice raw. He swung Inez around, using her as a shield against the second guard’s now-raised weapon. “Don’t look back! Go!”
He was alive. He was here. And for the first time in years, he was fighting for her.
Mai didn’t need to be told twice. She grabbed Felicity’s wrist, the scholar’s fingers icy and slack with shock, and hauled her down the corridor away from the struggling figures and the glaring flashlight beam. “Move, Fe—lic—i—ty!” she grunted, each syllable punctuated by a frantic footfall.
“My father’s in the elevator shaft! He’s alive!” Mai yelled into her mic, her voice ragged as they skidded around a corner. “But Inez is here, she has a gun, she has guards—we’re compromised!”
“Understood,” Casey’s voice came back, tight and focused. “Heading your way. Evade.”
They burst through a heavy fire door and into a carpeted hallway, the sudden opulence a dizzying contrast to the industrial underbelly. Plush gold carpet, wallpaper in deep burgundy. The sounds of their pounding feet were muffled here, but new sounds filtered through ornate doors: muffled laughter, rhythmic thumping, a low, sustained moan.
Felicity was gasping, her breaths coming in sharp, wheezing hitches. “I saw… the transmitter… it bypasses the anterior cingulate cortex… it’s monstrous…”
“Breathe later, run now,” Mai snapped, glancing back. No immediate pursuit, but the silence felt worse.
Stacy’s voice cut through the comms, a blade of cold promise. “Jan kept me from shooting a Senator at the Palmer House. But there’s nothing in the rulebook stopping me from beating the shit out of a Senator’s wife at the Ambrosia Club. Give me a vector, kid.”
“Sub-level three, hydraulic control access,” Mai panted, pulling Felicity past a gallery of unsettling abstract paintings. “But she’s armed, and my father is—”
A door opened ahead of them. A man in a silk robe, holding a champagne flute, blinked at them. “The help isn’t supposed to run,” he slurred.
Mai yanked Felicity left, into the first open doorway she saw, and slammed the door shut behind them.
The room was vast, warm, and humid, smelling of expensive perfume, sweat, and sex. Low, amber lighting illuminated a sunken central pit filled with cushions and writhing bodies. A man was bent over a chaise lounge, a woman kneeling behind him, her lips and tongue working intently at his exposed anus. Another couple was entangled on a padded bench, the woman’s legs hooked over the man’s shoulders as he drove into her with slow, deep, wet thrusts that made the bench creak. In the corner, a woman in intricate leather bondage gear, her breasts tightly bound, was using a violet silicone vibrator on another woman who was tied to a St. Andrew’s cross, her cries rhythmic and sharp.
They had stumbled directly into the main orgy suite.
A woman nearest the door, her face flushed, a collar around her neck, looked up from where she was servicing a man with her mouth. “Maids are supposed to wait in the service ante-room until we’ve finished up,” she said, her voice husky but firm, a thread of irritation in her gaze. “You’re disrupting the ambiance.”
Mai’s mind spun. Felicity was trembling violently beside her, her eyes glued to the scene, her academic mind undoubtedly short-circuiting at the raw, unfiltered carnality. The door behind them was their only exit, and it would lead back to the hall, likely into pursuit.
Thinking fast, Mai bowed her head slightly and let a stream of panicked, broken Japanese fall from her lips. “Gomen nasai! Chotto matte! Toire wa doko desu ka? Wakarimasen!” she babbled, layering her tone with frantic confusion. She grabbed Felicity’s arm again, her grip iron-tight, and pretended to scan the room with wide, desperate eyes as if looking for a bathroom.
The woman in bondage gear rolled her eyes. “God, did staffing send us the fucking interns? The service door is that way.” She pointed a riding crop towards a discreet, leather-padded door on the far side of the room, away from the orgy pit.
“Arigatou gozaimasu!” Mai squeaked, bobbing another bow, and dragged Felicity across the perimeter of the room. They had to step over a discarded lace thong and a trail of clothing. The sounds were overwhelming: the slap of skin, the wet suction of mouths on flesh, grunts, and keening moans. A man reached out as they passed, his hand brushing Felicity’s thigh. “You can join, sweethearts,” he murmured.
Felicity flinched as if scalded. Mai shoved the leather door open and practically threw herself and Felicity through it.
They stumbled into a quiet, dimly lit service anteroom. And there, pressed against the walls on either side of the door, were Casey and Rebecca, still in their maid uniforms. Rebecca’s arms were already opening.
“Mom,” Felicity whimpered, the word a shattered thing, and fell into her mother’s embrace. Rebecca clutched her daughter, one hand cradling the back of Felicity’s head, her own face pale but fiercely calm. “Shhh, baby. It’s okay. You’re out. You’re safe with me.”
Casey’s eyes met Mai’s, assessing, hardened. “Freddie?”
“Alive. Fighting Inez and her guards. In the sub-level corridor by the private elevator. He… he told me to run.”
Casey nodded once, a soldier’s acceptance. “Good. Then he bought you time. Stacy’s on her way down. We need to move.” She looked at Rebecca, who was whispering soothing nonsense to her trembling daughter. Poor Felicity just wasn’t built for this sort of thing.
Outside, on the manicured drive where the convoy had died, the situation had curdled into bureaucratic farce. Jan now sat cross-legged on the asphalt, Godfrey III cradled in her lap like a furry, indignant infant. She stroked his head, humming tunelessly.
A cordon of frustrated federal agents stood around her, weapons holstered, hands on hips. Facing them was a growing phalanx of the Ambrosia Club’s private security, their tailored blazers looking absurd next to body armor. “You cannot leave a disabled federal convoy blocking our primary entrance!” the Head of Club Security barked. “This is a profound breach of our covenant!”
“Our vehicles are inoperative due to a suspected targeted EMP attack!” a federal team leader shot back. “We are securing a high-value magical detainee! You will accommodate!”
“Accommodate? This is a private enclave! Move your trucks!”
Into this standoff strode Senator James Murphy. His salt-and-pepper hair was impeccable, his wire-rim glasses catching the flashing lights of the Club’s security vehicles. He took in the scene, his eyes passing over the disabled hulks of the transports, the arguing men, and finally landing on Jan. His expression, already tense, twisted into outright loathing.
“You,” he spat, the word carrying over the din. He recognized the red hair, the defiant posture, the infuriatingly serene expression. “This is your doing. This is a pathetic attempt at a ‘rescue’.” He sneered the word, turning his fury on the Club security. “Don’t you see? This witch doesn’t sit in the road for her health! Her little coven of perverts is here, right now, skulking around your precious grounds! They are undoubtedly here to disrupt, to steal, to desecrate!”
He pointed a shaking finger at the dark tree line beyond the club’s walls. “Fan out! Sweep the perimeter! I want every shadow checked! They are here for her, and they are nearby!”