"It's official. Cate's dead." Kyra hangs up the sat-phone as I hang my head. We were celebrating the triumph of my first-ever moose kill when Kyra called Liz and got the news. She drops her robe and steps naked into the spa with Celine, Marta and me. We are in the sisterhood's bush country retreat for a too-long postponed moose hunt. Kyra doesn't hunt, but she's been enjoying the walleye, pike, and trout fishing while Celine and I each bagged a moose. We impressed our guides by gutting our own kills before letting them pack the meat out, and then cut, wrap, and freeze it for our journey home. We have two more days in camp and it was feeling good to soak in the heat, celebrate our success, and drink to the future with my sisters. But of course, part of the plan all along was to be in the loving care of these sisters when my obituary was read.

"Did we get the mole?"

"Yes, Cath. Claire's team nailed her. She sends her regards, and her congrats on the moose. She caught the mole checking the status of Cate's profile weekly at the same time. Hundreds of others were accessing your profile, but not like clockwork. We deliberately pulled the plug on Cate about ten minutes before the suspected mole checked. Karl called his contact in the Knights about fifteen minutes after she checked. Nobody else checked your profile in that time. We caught an outgoing cell call from her apartment, but the conversation was scrambled, in the same way that our phones scramble our conversations."

"Is it Honey Brown?"

Kyra seems shocked. "How the fuck did you guess that, Cath?"

"Just a hunch. She was unusually interested in getting to know Dan and me. She overplayed her hand."

"And you didn't tell anyone, Cherie?"

"There was nothing to tell, Lini. Just vague uneasiness. She couldn't have been Mick's girl."

Marta unexpectedly speaks up. "We know she's not. We don't know why she's involved, but she must be Karl's conduit." I knew that Marta was involved in the mole hunt, when she wasn't needed as my bodyguard, but I didn't know she was up to speed on the suspects.

"Karl? Damn. I thought he was behaving."

"He probably thinks he is behaving. He probably thinks she's feeding him what we want the Knights to know. His handler turned him to our side and we've been feeding disinfo through him, but we suspected somebody else was playing him. He was transmitting things that we weren't feeding him, but he wasn't doing anything to hide that from us. Honey must be calling him from one of our phones. She's going to get the mushroom treatment now, though."

"Keep her in the dark and feed her shit?"

"And watch where the shit flows."

"You seem to know a lot about this, Marta."

"Well, Mrs. Malibu tipped Mrs. Riviera off when Honey offered so much to get you to lecture to the burqa babes. Bethany read me in when she assigned me to you."

Even when she isn't here, I feel Bethany's presence. She sent Marta to me. She kept Marta involved in the mole hunt. She distanced herself from me when she found romance with a man we enticed into a playboy pre-nup, but she's still one of my guardian angels.

A resigned sigh escapes me. "I'm going to miss Cate."

Celine is on my right and Kyra is on my left. Both move closer to me as I feel Marta's feet grasp and hold my foot. She's been my shadow for over a year, and one of my lovers for six months. She's reticent about acknowledging our intimacy with the other sisters, but I appreciate that she is the first to actually touch me.

Kyra and Lini both hug me. I have chosen to be here, far from my husband and children for the death of my heroine and the retirement of my sisterhood profile. I'm still the same person, but until we need her again, the legendary Cate Blanc must grow more legendary without me. And I must be humble. And I don't know if I can be. In a few short hours, I have gone from the adrenaline rush of downing the big bull moose, and I won't lie, it was quite exhilarating to bring that big brute down, to the grieving mother of my own Frankensteinian creation.

Margaret and Allison, Celine and Kyra's bodyguards, are watching our six as we enjoy the warm water and the near freezing night air. The Talisker is taking on new meaning tonight. Gabe, the man who introduced me to the smoky single malt, and Claire, the woman who planned and executed my rebirth are the only two protégés I've carried into my future with the sisterhood.

Of course, Dan's mistresses, Faun and Dee, had to be told that I am not really dead. They were sworn to secrecy because they will learn of his wife's ongoing good health from him, and they have to avoid showing surprise when they do. We have still only told him that we know about them, not that they are sisters. Non-sisters would be unlikely to know of Cate's demise.

I had to personally meet with William Fuscia, Chelsea, Mindy Monrovia, Keri, and Wil to inform them of my illness and to turn them over to their new sponsors. Barbie insisted on taking William and Chelsea. Mindy, Keri, and Wil each have different sponsors, or at least they think do. Actually it is one black card sister with three different aliases, who always meets each one veiled and uses three different voices to try to trip them up. It's a shame they can't be fully trusted, yet.

I flew with Kyra, Marta, and Allison into Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. A male customs agent boarded the plane, addressed us as 'sisters', gave us our forged Canadian passports, and left just as Celine and Margaret joined us. I am able to cross the border now on any of three different passports, one is Canadian and I have mentally assigned that one to Saint Cate. One is my real identity, and that belongs to Cate Confidence. And the third is another US passport, under the name of Simone Chartreuse, my new sisterhood alias, who gets Sister Cate, my naughty nun persona, by default. Simone is a tan card sister with little prospect of achieving blue card status. Her profile looks so boring that she will hopefully not attract attention as I continue my duties on the Red Council.

As we are leaving the hot tub, Kyra asks if I need anyone to be with me tonight.

"No, that's okay. Marta will be there for me."

"I mean for... warm company."

Kyra and Celine have been bunking together on this trip and I'm sensing that both are quite happy with that.

"Um, I won't be cold."

Her eyes widen. "Marta?"

"Sleep tight with Lini, Ky. No telling when you'll see her again."

"You naughty girl." She's smiling. We're not supposed to get involved with our bodyguards, but our hearts want what they want.

I crawl into bed and Marta asks whether I need privacy.

"No, Love, I'm craving company tonight."

"Good. I know that had to hurt."

"It did but... it's the end of my rebirth. When I publish this story, the cat will be out of the bag, but by then, they won't know what to believe."

She crawls under the covers with me and we snuggle. "You're tense, Love. Let me rub your back and neck."

I roll onto my belly and she mounts my ass. It's a little awkward for her because we're on the bottom bunk of a double bunk set and she has to duck low to keep from rubbing against the underside of the top bunk. I feel her coarse orange bush rubbing into the valley of my ass, a sensation that ignites my desire. She kneads my neck and shoulder muscles until the strain from the moose hunt relaxes out of them. I say, "Enough.", when I feel her wetness rub against my ass.

She drops down onto my back and I can feel her nipples like cool hard stones against my skin. Her knees push in between mine, spreading my legs just enough. She humps her mound against my ass, a motion that she knows I enjoy as much as she does. The feel of her hard muscular thighs as they rub against my ass cheeks is so masculine. She won't use a strap-on with me. She knows that I like the feel of her strong, tall, lean, athletic body without falsehood of any sort. She's clean of tattoos and piercings, except for her ear lobes, and I keep artistic photos of her beautiful body parts on my cell phone to admire when I'm alone.

Our fifteen year age difference and my mature cougar body seem to delight her.

She rolls off my back and I mount her, straddling her hips and kissing her lovely face. The new me has pubic hair, though I keep it short and trimmed into a small 'v'. I rub it into her nest against her hard prominent mound.

I lie with my weight on top of her and begin to cry. She knew it was coming and she hugs me tenderly until my sobs stop, the way Dan would. She has let me cry on her with each major stage of grieving over the loss of Cate. When the sobs are finished, the heat in my firebox has not abated and I slowly slide down her body until my lips take possession of one of her hard nipples. I roll to the side, keeping my grip with my lips as I slip my hand down until I can dip my middle finger into her silky, slippery, wet, pussy lips.

"Oh, Cathy. Now you'll get all tense again."

"You complaining, Love?"

"Nope. I'll just rub your back again, and then... Oh, yeah. Right there."

She pulls my face back up to hers for a kiss as I pinch her clit in the vee between my fingers and smear her nectar all over her vulva. I spread her legs wide and move down to lick her syrup into me. Her clit is out of its hood and my nose pushes it around as my tongue cleans her. She's close when I finally engulf her micro-cock and suck and lick it as she arches up against my face and shudders with ecstasy.

I let her simmer down and then move in again. Her second orgasm is longer and stronger and her nectar is thicker now, more like the semen of a snipped man. I love that she has good strong secondary orgasms. Anything other than one strong climax is rare for me, but I have consistently given her the one that she says is 'more pleasure than relief'.

"Okay, Love, now that Cate is gone, you promised to tell me why you wanted to stick with me so much that you even changed your look from sexy ninja chick to susie homemaker."

"You'll think it's silly, Simone. I still can't get used to calling you that."

"It doesn't matter, you promised. You know how I am about commitments."

"It was your stories."

"My stories?"

"I read the first one when I was still married, just after you published it. You made me feel the feelings that you wanted me to feel, the ones you felt, the pain of betrayal, the joy of finding hope in an ocean of despair. You know that there are things that I don't ever feel, things that my... history has either denied me or spared me. Your stories, have a way of getting around those gaps, of filling in the blanks.

"I was on a military base, an enlisted member of our armed forces. I was teaching courses that we don't have to teach our men, how women can use our strengths to defend ourselves against men, and how to defend our sanity if they... overpower us and... do the most degrading things to us. I... survived that. I almost didn't. But anyway, I was hooked on your first story from the moment I read how you helped your Kyra character get inducted, without realizing that's what you were doing.

"Then I got the message that military wives dread. My husband was killed in a foreign land by men who stone women for wearing shameful underwear. I wanted to go there and kill every damn one of those men and make sure they knew it was a woman killing them. But our brass wouldn't let me. I was pregnant with my little hero. My husband had been hoping to be home for his birth. I left the service when my time was up. That's when Bethany found me."

"Wait, you went directly into the black card sisters?"

"Yeah. 'Have Kids, Will Kick Ass' is our unofficial motto. It doesn't say anything about having a husband, cheating or otherwise. So Bethany told me about this group of women that needs people like me, people who can protect them while they use their gifts, their bodies and their minds, to make the world safer for all of our children. She also told me that protecting this group, or really associating with them in any positive way, would include me as one of them.

"When I heard that, it clicked with the stories I had read. I didn't dare to hope that the Last Wives Club was real. I wasn't absolutely sure that it was until I read your version of the Chelsea rescue mission. I stayed in the hotel parking lot and waited for her ex-husband to pick up the laptop. That's one of many details that matched your story. That's when I knew I had found you. You did a first-rate job of disinfo. Your message came across with details that obscured our reality. Only the people involved will recognize themselves in your stories, and only if the random details are precise enough. But it was fun meeting the real-life versions of Gabe, Claire, Kyra, and Lini."

"Does anyone else know that you've read these stories?"

"Bethany does. She's the only one, and I intend to keep it that way. I can't risk being personally associated with the stories, same as your Red Council."

"This is wonderful."

"I'm not following you."

"It's just so good to have confirmation that my stories are having a positive impact. After the negative consequences of Terri's friend, I've been hoping for... better..."

"Ah. I wondered about that. So much effort for so little recognition. The opposite of so much of our popular culture. If you were just in it for the buzz, you could have got more buzz by titling it 'Fifty Shades of Credit Cards'. But it was clear from the start that you're not. You want people to feel other emotions beside just... lust. You want your readers to walk in your character's shoes and drink from the firehose of life that threatens to wash your characters away."

I laugh. Just hearing those words from my lover's mouth make all the effort worthwhile. She gets me.

"I love to hear you laugh, Cathy. I love many of the sounds you make."

She asserts herself now. Did she really answer my question? Or did she just tell me her story? It doesn't matter. She acts to create the kind of world she wants to live in. The kind of world where she can push me onto my back and kiss me. The kind of world where she can rub her finger in slow circles around my bellybutton and ignite a fire in my cunt. She traps my leg with hers and rubs her orange bristle brush against my thigh. Her hand slides over my mound and two long fingers with very short nails curl into me. I raise up against her palm as she possesses me from within. A touch of her tongue to a nipple brings the first gasp of pleasure. A nibble of the other nipple with just her lips brings another. More follow as she kisses, licks, and nibbles around until her tongue is probing into my pussy lips. She has a long tongue and it never seems to tire. She circles it around my clit until I become her tongue-puppet, writhing and singing as her tongue commands me.

I come and I can feel Marta's smile as her tongue slows and pulls the last few gasps of pleasure from me before I say, "Pas plus, ma amant. Merci beaucoup." It's a phrase I picked up from Lini. Words that I hope are drawn by her in English from my best friend, Kyra, tonight. "No more, my lover. Thank you." I've heard Kyra try to speak French. It isn't pretty.

Marta comes up and kisses me. I kiss her back until she says, "I understand the fish bite best before noon."

"Good night, Love."

"Bon nuit, ma chérie."

Marta's French is beautiful. I turn my back to her and she massages my shoulders. In an amazingly beautiful contralto voice, she sings the same lullaby that Barbie sang to me when I had my crisis of faith in the sisterhood. I don't care what she thinks her emotional limitations are, that is love.

Author's Note: It seems appropriate that I end these tales of the adventures of Cate Blanc in the Sisterhood of Sin with the loss of her mask and the retirement of her sisterhood profile. The Simone Chronicles will begin where this ended, but not very soon. I appreciate all the supportive comments and votes I have received for these stories. Those who choose to follow me will be notified when I resume publishing. Until then, know that I have enjoyed making love to you with my memoir-fantasies.