Ellie and the Great Cupid Heist

Ellie's the name, and acquisitions is the game. If you want it, I can get it for you. But you'd better be ready to pay. Only the very richest can afford my services, but what they get for that money is, well,anything. No matter how well protected it is, no matter the security systems, I can get in there and retrieve it, whatever it may be andwherever it may be. I pride myself on being able to penetrate absolutely anywhere, whether on the mortal or immortal planes.

For example, the strong room in Cupid's mansion in Olympus. Whereit is kept.

You know,it. The Bow.

I had no idea why my client wanted Cupid's bow, nor was it my business to ask. Maybe he wanted to make a love happen, or maybe he wanted to prevent it by putting the bow out of reach. I didn't care. He could afford the fee to hire me and my team, and that was that. He had stressed that the bow had to be in his hands by 6am on Valentine's Day, though, and so that's why just before midnight on the 13th I found myself dressed head to toe in black, equipped with an arsenal of gadgetry that would make James Bond's mouth water (if he could take his eyes off how the skin-tight black accentuated my curves), breaking into Cupid's place.

Getting into the mansion had been rather eventful. In true Mission Impossible style, I'd cut through a skylight and abseiled down. Unfortunately, my rope had got tangled in a giant statue of Venus that hadn't been there on the plans intel had sourced for me. (So Cupid kept a forty foot statue of mumsie, naked, in his house? The lad had someserious issues, I reckoned.) From the looks of it, I guessed it to be the hitherto unknown original that must have inspired Alexandros' famous Venus de Milo, except that now it was missing not only her arms, but also half her right tit, which had broken loose when I tugged my rope free.

I could only hope that Venus would forgive me the unplanned mastectomy, if she ever found out. She was known to be quite the vengeful bitch (I mean look at all the things she tried to do to Psyche when that poor girl threatened to win Cupid's affections away from mummy-dearest). In my defence the statue must have been of seriously substandard marble to have cracked like that. Maybe when I was out of here I should let Cupid know (anonymously, of course) that he'd been sold a dud.

Anyway, I'd swung round behind mummy-dearest's gigantic back, my feet planted on her arse as I waited to see if anyone would respond to the almighty crash I'd caused when I dropped my (or Venus') boob, my finger poised over the switch of the auto-winder that would haul me back up through the skylight to safety.

Luckily it seemed my intel was correct and the mansion was empty this evening. And not only that, but thankfully the multitude of alarms that protected the place did not include one to detect giant tumbling titties.

Whew!

Landing softly on the ground (though why I bothered after having caused such a racket I have no idea) I unhitched myself from my abseiling cord and slid behind the plinth on which the newly-vandalised Venus stood.

"A... are y'in?" whispered a voice from the tiny earpiece I wore.

It was Geoff, my technical backup on this job. I couldn't have wished for better. A geek through and through, his thick Scottish brogue stumbled awkwardly whenever he was around a woman, but he was nevertheless a bloody genius and perfect for this job.

Before moving into the private sector he'd worked for SIS -- the Scottish Intelligence Service -- beavering away in their technical lab up near Glenrothes, in Scotland's Silicon Glen, a superbly equipped facility that hid behind the cover of being a factory producing automatic haggis-sexing equipment for Highland farms.

Currently, Geoff was sat in the back of one of our covert ops support vans, which was parked a few hundred yards from the perimeter of Cupid's estate under the cover of being an ambrosia delivery truck.

"Yes. No problems," I whispered back, lying through my perfectly polished teeth.

"OK. Now tae yer, um, right is the corridor leading t' the strong room. Remember tae step ow'er the infra-red beams."

"Yes, yes," I hissed. Geoff's insistence on reminding me of things I knew perfectly well from the briefings was beginning to irritate me.

I tapped the earpiece to break the connection. If asked later, I could always claim it was interference and the call had dropped.

OK. I crept to the doorway and peered around. Nobody.

I kneeled and got out my phone from its pouch at my belt. Setting the camera to infra-red, I scanned the corridor ahead of me, taking note of the beams that criss-crossed it like the threads the Fates might weave after a particularly bad three-day bender.

I tapped the screen, initialising the app that would guide me through the web of optical trip-alarms. Like the phone itself, it was a technical wonder. Running under an advanced pre-release version of Android which Geoff had brought with him from the Scottish Intelligence Service labs (Android seeven-dot-twa, "deep fried mars bar"), it would constantly scan the area ahead of me, passing me directions over a Bluetooth link to my earpiece.

Just one thing to check. Reluctantly, I re-enabled the comms link to Geoff's wagon.

"Are you sure the cameras around the strong room are all disabled?" I asked.

"Oh aye," he answered. "D'ye nae trust me?"

Well I did, so long as he'd not got distracted by internet porn (the weakness that had seen him booted out of SIS), but I wasn't going to say that.

"Implicitly," I replied.

Well no point in delaying any longer. I stepped out into the corridor and gingerly lifted my left leg over the first beam. My headset beeped, and I angled the phone to see the next thread of light crossing just above waist height. I bent almost double, slowly easing myself under it and up again to cross the third beam.

Slowly, carefully, like a cross between a tai-chi master and a slow-motion limbo dancer in ninja costume, I picked my way down that corridor, bending in ways the human body should never have been able to. One final beam and I was outside the door to Cupid's strong room.

Relieved to be able to stand upright again, I straightened up and stretched to relieve the cricks in my joints. Fine. Now I just had to get through the thick armoured door that loomed in front of me, featureless save for a combination lock at shoulder level.

I leaned in and peered at it. Yes! There it was -- the maker's mark. Just as my research had indicated, it was a Hephaestus: a lock made by the very craftsman of the gods himself, the lame but incredibly skilled divine smith.

This lock would resist any attempt to pick it by earthly tools, and I suspected that a failed attempt would be fatal. Hephaestus' locks were often booby trapped; a favourite trick being to have them shoot poisoned quills at the luckless would-be cracker.

Well I had tools that were not of the mortal realm. From my utility belt I took a tiny hammer, no larger than a toothpick. It looked quite pathetic, but the miniscule head was faced with a small flake of Olympian steel retrieved from the floor of Hephaestus' very own workshop, and said to have come from the hammer he used to craft his fantastic mechanisms. The theory was that the lock would recognise the substance which had created it, and resonate in response, resonances that would allow me (or rather Geoff) to 'see inside' the lock and work out the combination.

It was a good theory, but this was the first time we'd ever had to put it into practice. And one mistake would see me writhing on the floor with a face like a porcupine's back.

I set the sound recorder going on my phone and then placed it face flat against the door just to the right of the lock. Then, ever so slowly, I tapped the actual combination dial with the tiny hammer, once from above, once from below and once from each side. Gingerly I removed the phone and breathed out. Whew! So far, so no-faceful-of-poison-quills.

Checking the recording had saved itself properly, I then uploaded it to Geoff. I could picture him sat in the back of the van, hunched over a rack of computers with more teraflops than a high energy physics mainframe, peering at a 3D image of the internals of the lock as it gradually appeared on his screen.

I clenched my fists with frustration. Damn! What was taking him so long?

Finally my earpiece beeped and his voice came through.

"OK. It's fifty-fowr, twenty-echt, eleven. Got that?"

"Fifty-four, twenty-eight, eleven," I repeated. "Are you sure, now?" It would be me doing the Saint Sebastian pincushion impersonation if he'd got it wrong.

"Sure," he replied, too serious to joke.

I reached out for the lock dial.

54.

A faint click that made me shudder, but no poison quills.

28.

I was still alive.

11.

A louder clunk and the door swung open. I had done it!

Behind the door was a plain room, walls, ceiling and floor of cream marble, and in the middle of the chamber stood a fluted column, on which stood a metal tripod bearing...

Cupid's bow.

I grinned so wide my jaw muscles twinged, and stepped towards it, taking in its sleek perfection, charcoal grey polished riser with customised grip, carbon fibre limbs and black Kevlar string. (What? Were you expecting a simple wooden recurve? Even Cupid moves with the times!)

The only thing to break the sombre effect of the beautiful weapon was a single red heart, just above the grip.

Beside it sat a quiver with three arrows. The client had been quite specific in wanting the arrows too, so I slung the quiver over my shoulder before gingerly lifting the superb bow off its stand.

Now came the difficult part -- retracing my steps encumbered by bow and arrows. But I managed it and was pretty soon back in the support wagon with Geoff.

"Wow!" he breathed as he stared googly-eyed at the prize. "May I?"

I handed him the bow, knowing that however much we should be getting out of there Geoff would never be able to concentrate until he'd satisfied his curiosity.

"And... these are the arrows?" he asked rather redundantly as he set down the bow and drew one shaft from the quiver.

"I... I never thocht I'd hid one o'those in ma hands," he spluttered. "Unique! I mean I ken there's rumours the Yanks hiv one that they dooned in Iraq and they're tryin' tae weaponise it at DARPA, but still..."

I nodded. A single weapon of precision seduction could beat a whole arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Love had brought down empires. I mean look at Troy...

I tried to get Geoff to focus on the task in hand. "We'd better be..."

And then it exploded. The tip of the arrow.

It had been booby-trapped. Ithought the job had gone too smoothly...

"Arse!" I cursed, and not just because that's where one of the ricocheting fragments had hit me. No, rather because Geoff had been hit too and any moment now we would start to feel...

...Oh my! How come I had never realised just how handsome Geoff was? His pallid complexion was suddenly pale and interesting, his thick glasses the sign of a studious and intelligent mind, and his hopeless addiction to porn was just, well, a sign of his outstanding virility. As for his skinny hands, well I could just imagine them running up and down my backside as we kissed. Mmmm... geektastic!

He turned slowly towards me, his mouth working like a salmon caught on the line and about to be clubbed to death.

"Ellie," he finally managed to say, "I've aye wanted tae, tae tell ye this. I... I think ye're right bonny."

His eyes slid down to my chest. "And oh God, y've got the most wonderful breasts."

Crudity aside, his choice of compliment should have warned me that we were both well and truly under the spell. I am nothing special in the boobage department and from what little I'd seen of Geoff's taste in porn (JingsLookAtTheJugsOnHer-dot-com, Scotland's Premier Site for Well Endowed Women, being one of the windows he'd hurriedly minimised last time I entered his lab), his preferences ran to women with a bit more up top than I did. But suddenly Miss Modest-Bust was flavour of the moment.

Not that I was complaining. I loved him, I now knew, and not a shallow crush either but a deep, soul-possessing passion. I would do anything to please my man, and that including cupping my less-than-gigantic breasts, rolling them as I shimmied closer.

"Like what you see, Tiger?" I asked, blowing a kiss. (God, how I cringe now, but at the time it felt like the very pinnacle of sophisticated seduction.)

"Aye," he growled. "Oh aye."

"So what're you going to do about it?" I asked, hands on hips now, challenging.

He crossed the remaining distance between us, a look of animal determination on his face. As an image of geek-turned-alpha-male it was only very slightly marred by his cry of "shit!" as he stood on another fragment of arrowhead.

Suddenly his hands were all over me -- on my breasts, my arse, twisting through my hair. It was if he had turned into a god of lust -- one of those many-armed Indian ones.

He span me round, clearing the top of a half-height server rack by sweeping paper cups and their dregs of cold coffee onto the floor, then grabbed my wrists to place my hands none too gently on the warm steel surface, bending me over forwards. And I let him. I wanted him to take me there and then, in the back of a cramped covert ops van. Hunched over rows of whirring hard drives, I was desperate to see how hardhis was. I had storage capacity waiting to be filled, and as for access time, well I might not manage the five milliseconds promised on the labels on the RAID arrays below me, but I was tearing at the zipper of my skin-tight black trousers as fast as I could.

I realise now that our sudden crazy hunger for each other was just a consequence of the arrow shards that had lodged in our flesh. An intact Cupid arrowhead would release its payload of desire in a controlled manner. But splintered apart, it was like crushing a slow-release drug capsule to get a rush. Our libidos were simply ODd, out of control.

Geoff yanked my trousers down and groped my buttocks. "God, fit an arse!" he breathed. In the state that I was in, it seemed like the most sophisticated and seductive line ever, and I didn't even care when his fingernails snagged the cuts in my backside where the arrow shards had sliced into me.

"Panties!" I yelled back over my shoulder. "Don't just stand there, man, get my panties down."

"Panties, aye," Geoff muttered, tugging at the black lace that was between me and my goal of getting well shafted. Then louder, "Dinna fash yersel'."

"Why not?" I shouted back, my voice raw with carnality. "Iwant to be 'fashed.' Well and truly fashed. Fashed like I've never been fashed before." I hadn't a clue what I was asking for, but it the word just sounded so earthy and delicious that for a moment I was almost as in love with it as I was with Geoff.

Another pull, a wiggle and a wriggle, and then my panties were decorating my ankles. Geoff reached between my thighs to prepare me, but I was readier than a ready meal, wetter than Brighton on a Bank Holiday weekend.

"Don't mess around," I ordered him. "Just stick it in."

I felt the head of his cock press against the lips of my sex, which were swollen almost painfully and oozing lubrication. But still he was going too slow for me.

"Look," I told him. "I'm the boss on this mission, and I say field team insertion...now!"

He thrust forward and I braced myself against the onslaught. He was bigger than I'd expected, wider, and I felt stretched. So, so wonderfully stretched.

"That's it, Geoff," I cooed, encouraging him. "That's good.Very good indeed."

And it was. My new love had quite a good grasp of technique (not to mention of my hips!). He couldn't be quite the innocent I'd assumed. I wondered for a moment how many other women he'd had before me, but then I pushed the thought aside. I didn't want to know. He was mine. All mine. My preciousssss.

Soon we had a good rhythm going -- me pushing back, rolling my hips as he rammed in and out of my sodden cunt. The air reeked of sex -- thick, musky and glorious -- and the squelches and groans of our frenzied coupling completely drowned out the fans in the equipment racks.

One particularly hard shunt sent my knee into the front of one server. In front of my eyes a screen came to life, a red warning box flashing.

"DRIVE MOUNTING ERROR -- PLEASE REBOOT"

Sod that, I thought. This mounting was going pretty damned well, and no way was I going to break the rhythm of the superb fucking I was getting to fiddle with my footwear! In fact things were going so well that I could feel the beginnings of the hot tension in my belly that promised a bloody good orgasm in the not-too-distant future.

"Keep going, Geoff, keep going." The last thing I wanted was for him to ease off now. "Yes! Just a bit harder! Faster!"

My lovely geek tapped energy reserves I'd not dreamed he'd possess, hammering into me with a vigour that left me grunting, gasping for air. And all the time the good feeling was spreading through my groin, up around my anus and down my thighs, muscles tightening, ready for the big release.

"Oh," I gasped as a little tremor hit me. Then a bigger one. "Oooooh. Oh yes!" Feeling as if I was bursting asunder, my orgasm washed through me, sending my muscles spasming, making me hyperventilate. "Fuck, yes!"

I let out a keening wail, a strange squeak that sounded almost like a door opening. Geoff grunted one last time. "Yes, Ellie, oh yes!" and suddenly I felt his seed spurt inside me, hot, thick and so, so needed.

It took a good few moments for our breathing to return to normal, moments we spent still joined, just enjoying the feel of being coupled like this. At last he withdrew.

"Thank ye, Ellie, sweetheart," he said.

"Thankyou, Geoff," I replied. "You were wonderful. Youare wonderful. I do so love you and I think we're going to have an amazing future together!" (Yes, I know. It makes me shudder too, now.)

"It's me you should be thanking," came a chuckle from beside the open door of the van.

It was Cupid, holding the bow we'd left lying there when we'd been overcome with lust. And looking around his shoulder, with a face like thunder, delicate hand clutching a giant broken marble nipple, was Venus.

Oops.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

And so that's how I come to be here. Spending Valentine's Day knee deep in shit in the Augean stables. It seems that Cupid owed Augeas a favour, and I am his way of repaying it.

Almost three thousand years it's been since Hercules cleaned the place out. You have no idea how much dung a thousand divine cattle can produce in that time. No shortcuts for me, either. No rerouting two rivers to sluice out the filth like Hercules did. Environment Agency rules forbid it nowadays, it seems. Polluting watercourses, and all that.

As for Geoff, my 'sweetheart' (yes, the effects of the arrow wore off as quickly as they took hold)? Well, he got off lightly. Allhe has to do is apply a few decades worth of Windows update patches to every server in Olympus.

And to add insult to injury, Venus seems to have taken rather a shine to him. With his new-found confidence around women, it wouldn't surprise me if he wangles a place on Venus' personal staff, as her IT security consultant. Making sure her vulnerable ports are well protected against unauthorised connection attempts whilst making a few of his own, if you follow my drift.

Now I think I can hear Augeas coming. I'd better not let him catch me slacking, talking to you or I'll be even deeper in the shit.

Back to the grind...

Author's notes:

[1] 'fash,' in case you were wondering, means to get annoyed, bothered or worked up.