Quaranteam
Chapter 18
The next morning, Andy woke up before anyone else. Taylor had been allowed to remain on the bed, in Lauren’s arms, all night, and the two were still intertwined when Andy awoke. He suspected Niko would be up shortly, Lauren not long after that, although she might sleep a bit longer what with Taylor pressed up against her. Aisling wouldn’t be up for hours.
Andy had gotten decent at extracting himself from the bed, but this morning, it didn’t take almost any effort at all. He grabbed some sweatpants and a t-shirt, pulled them on and then moved out of the bedroom and onto the balcony, looking out onto his driveway, just as the morning sprinklers turned on, down below him. He sighed, leaning against the railing, shaking his head.
“You’re still worried,” Niko said as she moved out onto the balcony with him. “Worrying’s not going to change anything.” She leaned her head against his shoulder. “Anything I can do to lighten the load?”
“Nah,” Andy said. “By this time tomorrow, it’ll all be done one way or another. So I’m trying not to think about it.”
They stood together quietly for a moment, before she laughed. “Not working, is it?”
“Nah,” he said, joining in the laugh with her. “But I’ll make it work.”
Niko decided to take a couple of personal days, and called in to the base, telling them she needed a few days to deal with some private matters. She didn’t know when the dropoff was going to be arriving, but she figured that Andy might need some help, and wanted to be around to help him through any chaos.
A few hours later, Taylor awoke and was truly in agony, her ass hurting like she’d ripped it open, so Lauren also decided to take the day off and tend to her. She wasn’t actually wounded in any serious way, but as predicted, the high sensitivity of her nerves post imprinting process had all the sensations cranked up to a hundred. Andy could even see a little hint of regret in Lauren’s expression before she steeled herself back up, to not let Taylor see even a moment of weakness.
Aisling offered to help Lauren, but Lauren insisted that Aisling just go about her normal day, so the redhead had gone down into one of the living rooms to work for the day, although she told Andy that she’d come help once the women arrived.
All the girls seemed to think Andy was walking on pins and needles, but at this point, Andy was less worried about the women arriving and more worried about the upcoming card game. He spent most of the morning watching poker videos with the hole cards covered, practicing trying to read people’s expressions. He hoped it would keep his mind off things, and it mostly worked.
It was just after two o’clock in the afternoon when the military truck rolled up his driveway. “Here they come,” he said, watching from the balcony as they started to help the two women from the back of the truck. “Oh fuck. Shit. Shit shit shit shitshitshit!”
“What’s the problem?” Niko asked him. She’d come to join him on the balcony when the truck had been buzzed in at the gate.
The first woman to get out of the back was the blonde Nico had described to him earlier, Sheridan, a lithe woman dressed in yoga pants and a sports bra. She stretched as she got out, folding one of her arms behind her blonde mane of hair, bending like he’d never seen before. She looked to be in her mid thirties, and certainly she was a very attractive woman. But she wasn’t the problem.
No, it was the woman who got out right after her that had sent him into a tizzy.
“Shit, I thought you said the other one’s name was Teri.”
“It is,” Niko said. “At least that’s what she told everyone. Why?”
“Back when I dated her, she was going by Erin,” he sighed.
Sure enough, the second woman looked much like she had when Andy had dated her nearly a decade ago, with a handful of notable changes. She looked older, certainly, but she’d also dyed her hair a dark chestnut brown, hiding those golden locks of hers. She also had a large tattoo on her right shoulder, which he could see through the sleeveless dress she was wearing. It was a stylized bird of paradise, and it appeared that the wings curved back under the dress along her skin. She was a little curvy, but a bit less curvy than she’d been when they’d been together.
“You dated her?” Niko blanched visibly. “I’m sorry, Andy, if I’d have known...”
“No, I know you didn’t know, Niko. But let’s just say I won’t feel bad at all about passing her on to one of the other men.” They walked into the bedroom and headed out into the hallway, starting to head downstairs. “I hadn’t been out here long when Erin and I started dating, and we were together for a little over two years, while I was just getting started out here, working in corporate communications for eBay while I was writing the first few Druid Gunslinger novels. She hated them so much, constantly told me I was wasting my time, and that I should just focus on climbing the corporate ladder at eBay.”
“You’re fucking kidding.”
“I wish,” Andy said, as they walked down the stairwell. “After that she started telling me she didn’t like the way my friends treated her, which is to say they wouldn’t do everything she said without question. I finally got to the point where I was so sick of her bitching at me about how I wasn’t living up to her expectations that I broke up with her a week before Valentine’s Day. Packed up all her shit for her and threw her out of the apartment.”
“That’s uncharacteristically cold of you, Andy.”
“Oh yeah?” he said, stopping walking. “She had it coming. The place was entirely in my name, and I’d spent the better part of half a year trying to convince her to put her name down as a co-renter on the lease, and she wouldn’t do it. I moved out of that apartment at the end of next month and didn’t leave a forwarding address, just so the bitch couldn’t find me, because she kept harassing me. I didn’t just move apartments—I moved cities. Hell, I moved whole regions of the goddamn Bay. Back when I was dating her, I was living up in El Cerrito, so I moved fifty miles south and hoped I was fucking done with her.”
“What do you mean by harassing?”
The doorbell rang, and it made Andy wince.
“She showed up drunk at least a dozen times. Broke into my car a few times. Broke into the old apartment once. Tried threatening my friends to find out from them where I moved to. After that failed, she tried tailing me home from work for a while, until after about a year or so, she finally left me alone.”
“What a hot mess.”
“That’s an understatement,” he said as they headed down the stairs. “Yeah, let me tell you, Erin Teresa Donegal and I are over and done with, and there is no way in hell I am letting that deranged terror into this family.”
“Ah Andy, love! There you are!” Erin said as they reached the bottom of the stairs. “I see you’ve moved up in the world since the last time we talked. I’m so excited to be joining this little family you’ve been given.”
“Don’t unpack, Erin,” Andy said. “You aren’t staying.”
“The hell I’m not!” she said, her voice level raising to an uncomfortable volume. “I was given the option of what man I wanted as a partner, and I chose you, so it’s a done deal. No more running away from your problems anymore.”
“I don’t have to accept anyone sent to me, Erin, and I’m certainly not going to bring someone into my family who hates my friends and trashed my car.”
“Oh my god, are you still upset about that? It happened in the past. When are you going to let it go?”
“Considering you never paid me back for the car window or the car stereo you destroyed, I wouldn’t hold your breath any time soon.”
“Uh, are you sending me back too?” Sheridan asked, a confused look on her face, as if she realized she was caught in the midst of a deep historical squabble. “We haven’t even met.”
At this point, Andy remembered what he’d been told to do in the instructions from Covington, and went into the rehearsed speech. “Look, there’s a meeting in a few hours, and I can go and see what’s going on. Maybe there was some kind of mixup about who was sent to who, so you can stay here for the night, but please don’t unpack, at least until tomorrow when we get all this figured out. I should be back before midnight with some kind of clarity over all of this.”
While he was talking to the two women, Aisling had been using his cellphone to photograph the two for the sake of the poker game. Covington had made it clear that all the players needed to know what the “prizes” were, and so each woman was to be photographed in advance.
“There’s no mistake, Andrew,” Erin said. “I’m exactly where I want to be.”
“Erin, I’m not the same guy you dated a decade ago,” he said, as Aisling handed him his phone back. “You would not be happy here, and I certainly don’t think the rest of my family would take to you very kindly.”
“No kidding,” Aisling said as she scowled at the woman, shaking her head. “How could you not like his writing?”
Erin sniffed in contempt at the Irish redhead. “They’re juvenile, childlike stories, and nobody’s ever going to want to read them.”
“Funny how I’ve sold half a million books across the series, Erin.”
“Children have disposable income, Andrew, and while I’m sure your little stories are fleeting distractions for them, nobody remembers them after they’re done with them. They don’t affect anyone. They’re not literature. They don’t mean anything.”
“Jesus,” Niko growled, “I’m glad he’s not letting you in, otherwise I’d probably have to beat your ass until you were begging me to stop.”
“I would like to see you try, young lady,” Erin sneered back. She was about a decade older than Niko, but Andy would’ve bet on his partner over his ex.“I’ve been taking self-defense classes since I was a child.”
Aisling smirked and shrugged. “Niko’s in the Air Force. My money’s on her.”
Erin shook her head. “I have so much work to do here, Andrew, in teaching these girls respect and—”
“Shut up! For fuck’s sake, will you shut up and listen for one minute in your goddamn life, you vacuous socialite? This is my house! These are my partners, and they belong here, which is more than I can say for you!”
“Andrew! How dare you—”
“Stop talking! Oh my god, do you ever shut up, or are you so enthralled with the sound of your own voice that the words have lost all fucking meaning? You never wanted me, you wanted what you thought you could make me into, but whatever docile, kowtowing toady that is, that’s not me, and it’s never going to be me! I’m done getting pushed around by you. So don’t get fucking comfortable!” At that, Andy stormed off, leaving Aisling and Niko to apologize to Sheridan and/or deal with Erin.
Andy headed downstairs and into his office, closing the door behind him, moving to settle down at his desk, as his two cats, both of whom had been in his office, moved to claim his lap, demonstrating their affection, trying to soothe the temper of their angered master. As it usually did, the cats cleared his head and cooled him off.
He wanted to not think about it, so for the next few hours, he just focused on his writing, getting a few chapters into the next Druid Gunslinger novel, that he was currently calling “The Dryad Always Sings Twice,” although he wasn’t in love with the title.
Some time later, there was a knock at his door, and he sighed. “It’s unlocked,” he said, hoping it wouldn’t be Erin.
Niko moved to enter the room, closing the door behind her as she moved in. “You weren’t kidding about that girl being a piece of work,” she said. “How’d you two even hook up in the first place?”
“I mean, she’s attractive, and she took an interest in me at a time when I didn’t have a whole lot of self-confidence. And she wasn’t entirely like this back then. The longer we were together, the more her intense desire to have complete and total control in our relationship came out.”
“Yeah, but pretty girls make graves,” Niko said to him, moving to wrap her arms around him from behind.
“None of you three have killed me yet. Maybe I’ve just gotten lucky.”
“Or maybe you’ve gotten more refined in your taste since your mishap.” She kissed him tenderly. “Anyway, I thought I’d let you stew a bit, but it’s getting time for you to head over to Covington’s for the poker game. Are you ready?”
He chuckled a little. “Not really, but there’s no time like the present.” He saved his file and shut down his computer. “Is she still being a pain in the ass?”
“Nah, Ash basically quarantined them in the pool house out back after Erin demanded to see where the master bedroom was, so she could get unpacked.”
“Like you said, quite a piece of work.” He helped the cats off of his lap and moved to stand up before giving Niko another kiss. “Thanks for keeping her away from me. You can imagine the hard memories seeing her brought up.”
“No kidding. I mean, the fucking gumption on that bitch.” She pet Muninn for a second before Andy opened the door, and she moved to walk with him. “Anyway, I’m coming with you.”
“Are your sure you want to? There’s a chance I won’t come back with your friend.”
She nodded, as they headed down the hall, heading towards the garage. “If you don’t, I want to be with you so you know that I’m not mad at you.” Niko pushed one of the buttons and the garage door in front of the Tesla roadster. “Hop in, I’ll drive.”
The drive over to Covington’s mansion was only about ten minutes, and at least a couple of those minutes were spent waiting at the gate for Covington’s security team to let them in. There was a full checkpoint, with a couple of women in military fatigues, each of whom had a M16 at the ready.
Covington’s mansion was far more decadent than Andy’s, and as they drove up the driveway, Andy suspected that Covington might even be the founder of the enclave that preceded New Eden, when it was just a bunch of rich fat cats living in a gated community of their own devising.
The house itself was some weird hybrid of European colonial tradition and hyper post modern industrialism, with a statue of Covington himself in the center of the circular driveway in front of the home. The statue portrayed him as a pioneer, with a child on one shoulder, and a dozen women laying around him, each reaching up to him like he was their savior.
“Oh. My. God.” Niko muttered. “This is extra extra.”
“Even if I have to cheat,” Andy mumbled, “I am going to run this asshole into the ground.”
Niko immediately turned and shook her head at him. “Don’t cheat. Don’t. He’s caught cheaters before, and they get thrown out and lose everything.”
“Relax,” Andy said, “I don’t even know how I could cheat here, even if I wanted to, which I don’t. We’ll play a nice, fair game of poker. Any tips from your friend?”
“The only thing she could tell me is that he has a hard time getting untilted if things start going against him.”
Andy nodded. “That’s good to know. Let’s go meet the competition.”
The two exited the car and headed up the stairs, where a blonde in a French maid’s outfit opened the door for them. It was similar to the outfit Nicolette chose to wear, except here the blonde’s tits were completely exposed, and the skirt was significantly shorter. Andy was certain the girl wasn’t allowed to wear panties either. “You are here for the game?” the woman asked him, her voice accented in heavy French tones.
“I am. Andrew Rook.”
The woman nodded. “Staff and colleagues need to remain away from the card room, so I will escort your woman to join the rest of the chauffeurs.” She snapped her finger and another woman, this one in a butler’s outfit, except that she wore no shirt beneath the black overcoat, which left most of her breasts exposed. “Amber will take you to meet up with the other players.”
Andy could feel Niko tense up next to him, and took her hand in his. “I’ll see you in a bit, okay?”
Niko sighed, exhaling the breath, then nodded. “I’m just sad I won’t get a chance to see your face when you see all the other stakes in play tonight,” a sly smile on her face. “That’s a shame, but let me tell ya, I think you’re gonna play your absolute best when you see what’s up for grabs.” She winked as she started to stroll away with the butler.
“This way, sir?” the butler said to him and led him down a series of stairs. It felt a little like walking into a lair. The hallways were lined with expensive art, but there was no rhyme or reason to it, no sense of what was important or what had personal meaning. It all felt, well, dumped. Like someone was showing off what they’d acquired, but didn’t really care for. In fact, the whole home felt like that. Like the owner didn’t enjoy any of what he’d acquired if he wasn’t rubbing it in everybody’s faces. It made Andy hate him even more.
Eventually, the butler brought him to a lounge room with a massive LCD wall filling one entire side of the lounge. But Andy didn’t look at it for more than a second, because it was time to size up the competition.
“Ah, Andrew!” Covington said. “There you are. I was starting to wonder when you were going to show up. I was afraid that you had chickened out.”
Andy scrunched his eyes. “You don’t know me very well, Mr. Covington—”
“Please, Andrew, call me Artie!” he laughed.
“Arthur then,” Andy started. “You don’t know me very well, Arthur, but one thing you should learn early on about me is that I don’t spook easily, and I certainly don’t back away from a challenge if there’s a reason to try and win.”
“Well, there’s definitely prizes worth winning in tonight’s pool. Here, Airdrop me the pictures of your stakes and we’ll look over all the possible winnings together.”
Andy paused for a moment, then pulled up his phone, sending the images over to Covington’s phone. A few seconds later, the images of Sheridan and Erin joined the others on the wall, like trophies on a wall. The very presentation of it all made him sick, but he needed to look at the faces, to establish some sort of foundation to the stakes in play.
He immediately saw why Niko had been teasing him. The wall of faces was full of beautiful women, twelve in total, and both Doctor Charlotte Varma and her daughter Asha Varma were up there, although they didn’t look at all how he’d imagined them. Charlotte looked European, and Asha’s features were an interesting blend of European and Indian. Asha thankfully looked a little older than the 18 Andy knew she was. Both women were stunning. But they weren’t the ones who caught his attention at the onset.
There were two faces on the board that he recognized immediately.
One of them was Emily Stevens, a British actress who’d co-starred in a series of films as a teenager before becoming an LA celebrity in a bunch of well-received indie films over her twenties. She still had that posh English accent, which Andy had to admit did a hell of a number on him, a blonde upper class British girl who was known to be clever and charming in interviews. Last he had heard, she was dating some rich soccer player. Andy suspected he was another casualty of the virus that had killed so many other Americans. She was a staunch feminist and Andy tried desperately not to imagine how Covington would treat her if he won.
The other face was the real star of the show, though. Sarah Washington. 31 years old. 6′2″. From New Jersey. Started out as a teenage actress on Broadway before getting a break in an ensemble movie that Andy loved and barely anyone else had seen, about a writer who suddenly realizes what he writes in his stories is coming true. She was a quirky towering redheaded actress who’d broken into the mainstream with a trio of ballet comedies before branching out. In the last several years, she’d done action films, heavy dramas and a score more comedies, some fantastic, a couple utterly terrible. She was the darling of the talk show scene, a wonderfully flirty and feisty girl next door with a flair for profanity. There was even a YouTube video entitled “Sarah Washington Swears For Ten Minutes Straight.” She loved to complain about how clumsy she was, and yet, also did some of her own truly elegant stunt work in her action films. There was one fight scene in “The Cooler’s Daughter” that he had watched hundreds of times, marveling as she flipped, ducked and dodged, while throwing punches and shooting an oncoming assault of faceless goons. Sarah had a couple million Twitter followers, at least as many Instagram followers, and yet, still wasn’t one of the best known actresses in the world.
Andy’s crush for the girl ran deep and fierce, and had for a long time. In fact, she’d held the number one slot on his Hall Pass list for the better part of a decade.
And she was now in play.
Niko hadn’t been kidding when she’d said that he’d have all the reasons he could imagine to want to do well. He couldn’t bear to imagine what Covington would do to all of these women, but he realized he needed to size up the rest of the competition, and thankfully, Arthur was in the process of introducing everyone.
“This is James Haunton, the mayor of New Eden,” Covington said, pointing to a large rotund man with thinning grey hair and a walrus mustache that Andrew was sure entire bowls of soup had gotten lost in. The man had soft hands and wore expensive silks, with a large bulbous nose. Andrew immediately knew he would be the first one down to the felt.
“Sir Nathaniel Watkins, the founder and head of Inner Light Investments.” Watkins’ face wasn’t unfamiliar to Andy, seeing as Watkins was one of the most well-known investors in the Silicon Valley, with Inner Light having money in most of the semi-successful tech startups over the last dozen or so years. Watkins was lean and WASPy, dressed in a geeky button up blue shirt and khaki pants, which went a good distance to hide his wealth. He also had a big bushy brown beard that looked more unkempt than it should for a man with as much money as he had. He mostly just looked like any other start-up burnout. Inner Light didn’t have a terrible reputation, so if Andy had to let anyone walk away with a decent chunk of the money, he decided it might be Watkins, not that the man might give him a choice. Watkins had made his money judging people’s intents, so Andy marked him away as one of the people to keep an eye on the most. He, other than Covington, was likely to be Andy’s biggest challenger.
“Gregor Vikovic, owner of the Quilt Real Estate Group.” Vikovic was easily the biggest man in the room, looking more like a football linebacker in an expensive suit than a card player. He was Russian, in his mid fifties, with a great big silver bushy beard, tightly braided and pulled together. While he looked like he could tear Andy in half given a chance, he didn’t seem to have much in the way of subtlety, so Andy figured he wouldn’t be much to worry about.
“And this is Jake Jacobson, from the Jacobson clan that owns the AllStore chain.” One of Andy’s friends growing up had a phrase that Andy had never shaken loose—‘Never trust anyone named Jake.’ Jacobson was dressed in a full suit and tie, but the suit was imported silk and probably cost more than Andy had made all of last year. Jet black hair with a pencil thin mustache, the man felt more reptilian than human, with beady eyes and a perpetual sneer on his face. The AllStore chain was notorious for underpaying its workers, avoiding unionization, denying health benefits to its employees and putting them through nearly unbearable working conditions. When one of their clerks had been trampled to death during a Black Friday sale a few years ago, AllStore had gone to court to avoid paying out a settlement, saying the employee had endangered himself by stopping to help pull up a customer who had fallen, saving her life at the cost of his own. Andy wanted to take him for all he was worth.
“Gentlemen, this is Andrew Rook, one of the newest additions to New Eden. He’s a writer of some silly little fantasy series,” Covington finished.
“I write the Druid Gunslinger books under the name Blake Conrad,” Andy said, as the men started to gather up their things. “They’ve done fairly well, and Working Title Productions has the option to make them into films.”
“I’ve got some stake in Working Title,” Watkins said, an easy going smile on his face. “Maybe I can help give them a push through development hell. Who’s your contact point over there?”
“Now now, gentlemen,” Covington said, “there will be plenty of time for chit chat over the poker table. Let’s head next door to the card room while I remind you all of how this works, mostly so our newcomer doesn’t feel left out.”
As they stepped into the room next door, a lavishly decorated card room awaited them, with a bar off to one side. A poker table sat in the middle of the room, six spaces around it, with a topless Hispanic woman sitting behind it, holding a deck of cards in her hands.
“Who’s this?” Andy asked.
“This is our dealer, Veronica,” Covington said. “So none of us have to sully our hands constantly shuffling and dealing cards.”
Andy shook his head. “Absolutely not. We all take turns dealing individually or I’m out.”
“Out, my dear boy? Why would you do something so foolish?”
Andy smirked, having considered this possibility before hand. Covington had caught other people cheating, but apparently no one had ever accused him of cheating, despite him often finishing in first or second. “You know who has their own dealers? Casinos. You know why? Because the house never loses. You might trust her, but that’s certainly no reason for the rest of us to do so.” The woman had a Shufflemaster next to her, and Andy pointed to it. “That handles all the hard work of shuffling. Dealing cards is easy, and we all take a turn at it. Every five hands, we rotate and someone else takes the dealer’s chair. That way we know that nobody’s cheating.”
Covington started to fret, but Vikovic chimed in before the man could get a sentence out. “Da. Dealer is one of your girls, and you always seem to catch good break when you need it. I agree with new fish. We will all deal this night, see if your luck changes.” Vikovic didn’t seem like someone Covington would want to argue with.
Andrew didn’t know for a fact that the Veronica had cheated for Covington before, but it didn’t hurt to throw people a little off their game right at the start, and Covington’s winning record had people a little suspicious of him, so the man was going to do everything he could to ablate the doubt.
“Fine,” Covington sighed. “I suppose we can all take turns dealing then. Veronica, would you mind simply tending the bar for the evening?”
“Yes Master,” she said, slowly moving to get up from the poker table.
“All right gentlemen. Each of you has one hundred thousand in chips in front of you. Whites are worth a hundred, blues are worth five hundred, reds are worth a thousand and greens are worth ten thousand each. The game is No Limit Texas Hold’em.”
“Hopefully you know this game, yes?” Vikovic asked Andrew as they all moved to take a seat at the table, Covington opting to start in the dealer’s position first.
“I’ve played it a few times, don’t you worry,” Andy told him.
Covington continued with the rules. “The position you go out in determines in what order you get to pick from the pool, unless you choose to rebuy in, which you can do once. If you’re eliminated and don’t rebuy in, you are guaranteed to take home at least one woman.”
“Free word of advice, new fish,” Jacobson said. “Don’t rebuy in. Learn to lose gracefully.”
Andy smirked at the man. “Hopefully you can take your own advice.”
“Spunky,” Jacobson teased, an oily smile on his face. “I like it when they fight back.”
“First place takes five women from the pool, second take three, third takes two, fourth and fifth each take one,” Covington said, dumping the deck into the Shufflemaster, pushing the button to let the machine randomize the cards. “If you choose to rebuy in, you will be restaked an additional 50k in chips, but lose that, and you take home nothing. Any picks you would have had will go the first place winner. So if you go out in third and want to rebuy in, you’ll get an additional 50k to play with, but you are giving up both of your picks to first place if you lose. Selection is obviously done in terms of priority, so the first place winner selects all of his women first, and so forth down along the line.”
“Most of us know not to rebuy in, young man,” Vikovic told him, “but there are those among us who simply cannot resist one last taste at the apple.”
“I’ll have you know, I’ve come back from my restake games over half the time,” Jacobson couldn’t resist tossing in.
“What do you guys normally do for a payout when everyone’s only got one woman to stake with?” Andy asked.
“Everyone gets one, but obviously first place normally gets first pick of six primo broads,” Haunton said. “But there’s always at least one person who rebuys in, so I don’t think we’ve ever had first place go home with less than two. Tonight’s a big ass pot, though, so everyone’s got their game faces on.”
“And nobody’s ever gone home with a woman they’ve regretted taking?”
The five men all laughed, and Covington shot him a condescending smile. “If we do, we certainly don’t let them talk any more once we get them home. I keep telling you, Andrew, you really must come around to our way of thinking.”
“And I keep telling you, Arthur, that’ll happen when hell freezes over.”
“Alright already!” Haunton growled. “Enough with the jibber jabber! Shuffle up and deal!”
The game had begun.