Rise (Hold Book 4) Read online

  Rise

  Claire Kent

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Claire Kent. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means.

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  One

  Only fuck a man if he can do something for you.

  That had been the first piece of advice Talia had received last year after entering the leisure suite, and she reminded herself to follow it nearly every day.

  The hardest thing was figuring out which men could actually do her some good.

  The leisure suite was only available to high-ranking Coalition officials or guests of the Residence of the High Director. All the men and women who had access were either rich or powerful—most of them were both. But sometimes the richest and most powerful people were also the stingiest with their money. They would refuse to offer donations to the suite in exchange for using its services.

  Fucking a man who wouldn’t donate afterward was a wasted effort. Talia had made a number of those mistakes when she’d first arrived, and she was trying not to do it again.

  She needed to fuck men who would do her some good—who would donate generously to the suite afterward—and it took practice and discernment to recognize which ones would.

  She’d only been here for eleven months. She still had a lot of learning left to do.

  “Try not to look so eager,” Jenelle murmured to her softly, leaning over so no one else in their section could hear her words. “Men are contrary, and most won’t want a girl who is easy to get.”

  Talia groaned and leaned back in her seat. She and Jenelle were sitting in the leisure suite section of the central arena, where the next round of the Combat Tournament was about to begin. Talia didn’t really care for watching the fighting, but she needed to attend each of the weekly rounds anyway. The arena was packed. Everyone who had any status in the Coalition and was currently stationed on Earth or its surroundings was here. If she wanted to attract another man this week, this was where she would find him tonight. “Why did they even choose me for the suite? I’m terrible at this.”

  Jenelle laughed. She was in her early thirties and was both beautiful and intelligent. She’d been assigned as Talia’s mentor when she’d first started in the suite last year, and she was still her friend. “You’re not terrible. Everyone has been very pleased with your services, and most of them have offered donations afterward.”

  “Not very big ones though.” The suite might be designed to offer sexual favors to the Coalition Council and the High Director’s guests, but it was no different from any other workplace. In order to move up in the suite hierarchy and earn a better room, nicer clothes, and more replicator privileges, leisure escorts had to earn donations.

  The larger the donations, the more privileges they earned.

  Right now Talia was sharing a room with eight other girls—a step up from the common room she’d had to sleep in when she first arrived.

  Eventually she wanted her own room like Jenelle. Real privacy in a space larger than the sleeping pod she currently possessed. Absolute quiet. Maybe even an allowance to purchase a few treats now and then. Real fruit. Even chocolate.

  She’d never had her own room in her life, and right now the only food she could eat was the replicated stuff—food processed from base nutrients and designed to look and taste like the real thing. It was a far better replicator quality than what she’d had to eat as a child, but still… It simply couldn’t come close to real food.

  But the only way to get her own room and an allowance was to earn as many donations as Jenelle earned, which meant she had to become the favorite of a powerful man.

  Jenelle only fucked one man now. He was a trusted advisor to the High Director, and he donated enough to the suite to make it worth Jenelle’s seeing him exclusively. He was in his sixties and not particularly attractive, but he was kind, and Jenelle actually liked him.

  It sounded like a dream to Talia. Only one man to fuck—and a nice one. Her own room. A little bit of freedom. Her goal was to get there before she was thirty, which meant she had twelve years left to go.

  She’d never get there, though, if only the losers were interested in her.

  “Stop worrying,” Jenelle told her, evidently reading her mind. “You’re doing just fine.”

  “Sure I am. I’ve only fucked three men all week. Most of them aren’t interested in me. My body just isn’t right.”

  Jenelle shook her head. “Stop it with that. You know very well that we need a variety of body types because different men and women all have unique tastes. Some men prefer bodies like yours.”

  Talia believed that in theory. On her home planet, men had started staring at her with hunger in their eyes when she was fourteen years old. She had large breasts and rounded hips and a heart-shaped face. She’d grown up understanding her value was in her physical beauty, whether or not she always liked what she saw in the mirror.

  It was different on Earth though. Everyone was sophisticated and cynical here, and they all followed whatever body type happened to be in fashion.

  What was in fashion right now for women were elegant, slim bodies and slight curves in keeping with the life partner of the High Director. The slimmer, the better. Jenelle was built like that, as were a good number of the female escorts in the leisure suite.

  Talia wasn’t fat or even overweight. She didn’t earn enough donations to eat much real food, and you couldn’t get fat on replicated food. But she was too curvy to be of interest to most men. Even the men who might have been attracted to her still didn’t choose her because they were trying to follow the current trends.

  People were like clones, and the closer one got to the center of Coalition power, the more like clones people became.

  The Residence of the High Director of the Coalition Council was as close to the center of power as one could get in the explored universe.

  Older men—most of them over seventy—seemed to like her the most, and she was perfectly fine with that. Even with artificial aids, men that age rarely expected very vigorous sex. Some of them just liked to have a warm body in bed with them.

  She was happy to be a warm body. It didn’t take any practiced skills for that, so her inexperience wasn’t a problem.

  All she needed to do was find a generous old man who wanted to see her regularly, and she would be set.

  When a gray-haired man walked by the leisure suite section, eyeing the women (there were also plenty of men in the leisure suite, but this man obviously preferred women), Talia straightened up.

  “Not too eager,” Jenelle murmured.

  Talia did her best to compose her expression into one of cool disinterest, as if whether this man chose her wasn’t a significant matter. When he paused in front of her, she moved her hand to the tie of her tunic so she could open it and show him her breasts to let him know she was available, but he moved on before she could.

  She slumped back, watching as he ended up making an appointment with Breann, who was a few years older than her and had a similar body type to her.

  Breann had the reputation of being very skillful in bed.

  Talia hadn’t been here long enough to develop those kinds of skills.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Jenelle said with an encouraging smile. “He looks like he�
��s tight-fisted anyway, so he’d probably be a waste of time.”

  Talia was happy to hear that. She never doubted it was true because Jenelle was much better at reading men than she was.

  “The fights are about to start,” Jenelle added, turning Talia’s attention to the masked Combatants who were filing out into the ten combat rings on the floor of the arena.

  The ten fights in tonight’s round would occur at the same time. These Combatants had been whittled down from the hundred who began the Tournament three weeks ago. After tonight, the winners would go on to fight next week and so on until there was just one fight in the final round and then just one Combatant remaining.

  The Tournament only took place every four years, so this was the first one Talia had been present for.

  The fights were no-holds-barred, and they usually ended up bloody. Talia really didn’t like to watch the raw, violent grappling. Sometimes it nauseated her. She hoped it wouldn’t be too bad tonight, and she kept her eyes on the two men fighting in the ring closest to where she sat.

  She was surprised when, in less than a minute, one of the men was down and not moving.

  Tournament fights almost never ended so quickly.

  The crowd was cheering for the winning Combatant, and he raised a hand in victory. He got to go on to next week’s round, and he hadn’t even been injured. He was barely sweating.

  He wasn’t as big as most of the other Combatants, although his muscle development was very impressive. He had hair on his chest, which was unusual since most of the Combatants shaved themselves clean.

  “This must be his first Tournament,” Jenelle said, eyeing the man. “He looks young, and I’m sure he wasn’t here four years ago. I wonder where he came from.”

  Talia was mildly impressed with the man’s easy victory, but she wasn’t interested enough to pay him much attention. Her eyes were roaming the aisles near where she sat again, hoping for a man to appear who was interested in her.

  Three fucks in one week weren’t nearly enough to earn her an improvement in lifestyle. She didn’t like the girls she shared the room with, but she also didn’t like being trapped in her sleeping pod, which was the only way she could be alone in her current circumstances.

  If she could earn more donations, she could at least move up to a room with just three other girls and a bigger pod.

  Two years ago, back in her home village, she’d never believed even that much was possible in her life.

  Things were different now. She could expect more than the loneliness and barren drudgery she’d grown up with.

  But it would never happen if no one looked at her twice.

  ***

  Talia didn’t get another man that evening, and she didn’t have any appointments the following day. She had to sit in the common room and hope for a drop-in to choose her, but by midafternoon, she was so tired of listening to the endless chattering of the other escorts that she went to hide in the library for a few hours.

  The Residence of the High Director might sound like it was a house, but it wasn’t. It was a fortress as large as a city that orbited Earth. It boasted the best that Coalition civilization had to offer. As an escort, Talia didn’t have access to most of the perks, but she was allowed to use the library.

  The Residence library had digital access to the entire public Coalition archive. But it also had more than that.

  It had real books. Actual bound books with paper pages. Talia was allowed to read them. And she was even allowed to borrow them and take them with her as long as she scanned them out so there was a record of who had them.

  As far as she was concerned, the best part of becoming a leisure escort was having access to the library.

  Talia loved books, and she loved reading, but she often went to be alone. To have quiet for a little while, away from everyone else.

  She’d never seen anyone else in the library in the eleven months she’d been living at the Residence.

  When she’d been a girl in her home village, her favorite thing had been to visit a nice old man who had a shelf of historical books. The books were all about past civilizations that had thrown off oppressive regimes and found freedom.

  The old man had let her read his books, and she’d read them over and over again. She loved those stories. She knew most of them by heart. She’d spent hours daydreaming about stories like that coming true in her own world, although she knew it was impossible. So she always searched the Residence library for more stories like that.

  She didn’t care if they were real history or not. She liked to read of rebellions, of revolutions, of victory over oppression.

  She liked to daydream it was possible.

  Occasionally she read stories about the formation of the Coalition. A thousand years ago when space travel became safe, humans had spread from Earth to ever-expanding regions of space, populating planets and developing new worlds. They’d brought their cultural differences and ideological divisions with them, however, and eventually they’d established the Coalition Council as a way of maintaining peace.

  The Council included a representative from all the major planets, and it was supposed to support justice and freedom for all the worlds under its governance. Hundreds of years had passed since then however, and none of the old ideals still held.

  The Coalition Council was filled with the most ruthless and ambitious people, and the High Director was the worst of them all. Their only priority was to maintain power, and they did anything necessary to hold on to it. They didn’t take care of people or worlds or anything really. They only kept control.

  She’d always thought it was sad. Heartbreaking, really. That a government that had begun with good ideals had transformed into what it was now.

  It was too depressing to read about it very much, so she usually went much farther back into early Earth cultures.

  Earlier this week, she’d found a collection of ancient stories, many of which were about the enslaved becoming free. She grabbed the big volume off the shelf again and took it over to her favorite curtained window seat to read it.

  She spent a happy hour reading about a beautiful woman who had become the concubine of an ancient king. She’d then become his queen. She’d then managed to save her people.

  Talia loved the story so much she read it twice.

  Eventually she forced herself to close the book.

  She’d spent too long here already, and she needed to get back to the suite. She would never get anywhere unless she found a few partners, and she couldn’t do that from the library. She grabbed a few books to read over the next evenings, in case she still didn’t have any appointments, and then she left the library, mentally reviewing her list of men who’d shown interest in her and might want to see her again.

  She always kept a running tally of those men in her mind, rehashing their age, appearance, wealth, and status, taking comfort in having as many possibilities as possible.

  One day she was going to be a favorite.

  One day she’d have her own room.

  The hall was mostly empty in the midafternoon like this since the Council was in session. So she was surprised when she turned a corner and saw a man approaching her. He had dark blond hair and a square face and looked to be in his midthirties. Talia recognized him immediately.

  Usually a man so young was of no interest to her since it took a long time to gain political power in the Coalition. But Talia recognized this one. He was one of the subcommanders of Coalition Special Forces, and he’d just arrived at the Residence a few days ago after being stationed on a border planet.

  She gave him a little smile as she passed him.

  She’d seen him at the Tournament last night, which was where she’d found out who he was. He hadn’t shown her any interest, but that didn’t mean he never would.

  She wasn’t naturally outgoing, but being shy didn’t work for an escort. So she forced herself to say, “Good afternoon. Be sure to stop by the leisure suite when you have some free time.”
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  He paused, causing her heart to jump in excitement.

  His eyes crawled over her body from her high, dark ponytail to the toes of her boots—made in a soft fabric that molded her legs all the way to her midthighs. Most of the women in the leisure suite wore boots like that, and both men and women wore ponytails high on their heads. It was the way they were identified.

  He didn’t say anything, but he kept looking at her, so her hope intensified. She adjusted her stack of books to reveal more of her body and gave him a slightly trembling smile that she’d practiced for months with Jenelle. (Jenelle had always advised that Talia, with her long hair, youthful appearance, and dimples to put on a shy, girlish demeanor since a lot of men really liked that.) “We’d love to see you in the leisure suite,” she said, dropping her eyelashes strategically.

  When she looked back up, she was pleased to see that the man’s expression had grown hot with interest. He reached out to raise her chin. “You’re a little chubby for my taste, but it looks like you’ve got great tits.”

  Chubby.

  Talia hated being called chubby.

  Despite his words, this man didn’t seem to mind her body. In fact, he’d moved his hand down to the neckline of her tunic, pulling it away from her skin so he could see what was beneath. He kept pulling until the fabric started to tear.

  To make it easier for him and to keep him from ripping her tunic any more, she moved her books to one arm and untied her sash. The tunic was a wraparound, and she pulled it open to show him her breasts.

  Her breasts were good. Everyone said so. They were big and rounded with perky rosy nipples. Her belly was soft but mostly flat, and her pussy was shaved smooth.

  Her heart was racing in excitement as she waited for the man to make up his mind.

  He was interested.

  He was definitely interested.

  And he wasn’t gross or unattractive.

  He was a subcommander in the Special Forces.

  She couldn’t have asked for anything better.

  “Do you have a few minutes right now?” he asked at last, his voice slightly thick with lust.