by Smith, Maren
Nothing about her looked like a woman intentionally paying a visit to Black Light’s exclusive dungeon. She wasn’t dressed the part. Instead of sexy, her outfit consisted of pink yoga pants and a clashing orange t-shirt. Her long brown hair was twisted in a messy and crooked braid. Her hands were clasped over her stomach and judging by the tension he could read on her drawn face, she looked scared.
Newbie, he thought. Except that didn’t make sense either. Newbies were always given their first tour around by established mentors and very, very few ever came alone.
“Holy fuck!” Pixie erupted from her chair. “Do you know who that is?”
Without waiting for an answer, she bolted back behind the bar. Puzzled, he watched her fumble out the club’s business phone from under the bar and hunch down where she wouldn’t be seen. What in the world was she doing, calling security?
He startled when the chair closest to him suddenly bumped his knee under the table as the newbie woman who had just walked in pulled it back from the table. She didn’t look any less scared as she sat down, completely uninvited, despite the sea of empty tables all through the bar area, directly beside him.
Hands clasped tight in her lap, she stared at him the way he imagined a horror victim might pause to look at Freddy Krueger just before the knives came out.
“Hello,” he said, surprised and trying hard not to sound defensive or accusatory.
She swallowed, her eyes huge and just shy of apologetic. She said nothing.
At the cross, the two men were just starting to play, neither paying any attention to anything other than the flogging scene one was intent on giving and the other was equally intent on receiving. Behind the bar, Pixie was whispering into the receiver and peeking at them over the top, as if the scared woman was a bomb. Klara had just come out of the back with two new bottles of liquor in her hands. She stopped, surprised when she looked his way, and on the other side of the bar, coming swiftly out of the shadows of the short hallway that led to his tiny closet of an office, came Spencer himself. Black Light’s normally unreadable manager stopped stalk-still in the mouth of that short hall… and stared.
Hands gripped tightly, the woman looked only at him. Desperation crept into her stare as her breathing turned quick and shallow, her nostrils flaring at every ragged inhale.
Okay.
Okay, what the hell.
“Carlson,” he introduced himself and, with all the cheerfulness his confusion could muster, he stuck out his hand. “How you doing?”
Swallowing hard, she looked from him to his hand. A tinge of pink embarrassment cut the paleness of her face a half second before she took it. She was shaking. Her palm was damp and her grip desperate as she clutched his fingers in the most clinging hold to ever pass for a handshake.
“I—I—I—” She flushed every bit as pink as her pants. “Puppy,” she stammered. Dropping his hand, she knocked over her chair when she bolted from the table.
Carlson watched her flee all the way back to the club exit with the same degree of bafflement that he’d watched her sit down, only now it was worse. His legs jerked, the instinct to jump after her and chase her down so strong that he actually moved his chair. The only reason he stopped was because that was when Pixie came up from behind the bar, like a wild-eyed laughing whack-a-mole.
“Oh my God!” she hissed, too loud to be actual whispering. “Do you know who that was?”
He shook his head. “No clue.”
“Puppy-girl!”
The way she was staring at him made Carlson think that ought to mean something, but he’d only been working at Black Light for eight or so months now, and that name rang zero bells. “Okay, I’ll bite. Who’s Puppy-girl?”
“Ethen O’Dowell.” Her eyebrows arched incredulously. “You don’t remember him, the Menagerie Master? She was one of his pets back when they used to come here. He went to prison for assault or something. Police raided his torture house. They found whipped girls in cages. It was all over the news for weeks.”
The name Puppy-girl did absolutely nothing for him, but Ethen O’Dowell… that did tickle a memory. He vaguely recalled hearing something on the news about it shortly after he returned from his last deployment, but at the time he was more concerned with finding housing off base. In this area, considering his price range, that wasn’t easy.
Neither was adjusting to civilian life. Not after twenty-two years, the last eleven of which he’d spent as an explosives technician, and the last two of which he’d spent in Afghanistan helping make soldiers and civilians alike safer in their own backyards. He’d taken incendiary devices out of schools, hospitals, houses, streets, back alleys, dog houses. He’d gained a lot of good friends among his fellow soldiers, as well as among the local soldiers he’d helped to train. He’d lost more than a few of those friends too, both to snipers, insurgent attacks, sneak attacks, dog attacks, mob attacks, and then of course, to the fucking bombs.
No, he was done.
No one should ever have to go drinking with a fellow one weekend and then to his memorial the next. It wasn’t right.
So, when his tour was through, he requested his discharge, the army granted it, and he came home.
Except, that wasn’t as easy as it should have been either.
“Trust me,” Pixie snorted with a laugh, “we get some odd ducks in here, but the Menagerie Master and his ‘girls’… bar none, they were the weirdest of the—”
“I beg your pardon.” Softly spoken as it was, the interruption was still enough to stop Pixie mid-sentence.
She straightened abruptly, snapping her mouth shut when she saw Spencer, no longer hovering in the hallway like he had been while watching Puppy. Having fully stepped out into the lounge, he stood at the end of the bar, hands on his hips, frowning hard enough to put the gossipy submissive back in her place.
“My kink may not be your kink,” he said meaningfully, arching an expectant eyebrow and then waiting.
Clearing her throat, she finished the well-known line for him, “But that’s okay.”
“The next time I hear you calling our paying guests weirdos, I will write you up and you’ll go home.”
She wilted. “Yes, sir. I’m sorry. That was out of line.”
“Yes, it was,” he agreed, but he also let it go.
Grabbing her rag, Pixie found something to keep her busy out of his line of sight, and back Spencer went to his office, leaving Carlson sitting at the table in a near empty dungeon, wondering what the hell had just happened.
He turned to stare at the door to the locker room, but he couldn’t see any hint of the woman called Puppy lurking nervously in the shadows.
She was probably long gone, and yet for reasons he couldn’t quite pin down even in his own head, Carlson got up and followed in her wake, passing Danny at the security desk and then, on instinct, into the tunnel. It was cool. The D.C. weather still waffling back and forth between winter and spring. If forecasters could be believed, they were actually due another bout of snow sometime tonight before morning.
He shivered as he neared the end of the tunnel where Luís was stationed. “Did you see a young woman about so high?” He measured out her approximate height, winning a frown from the other man.
“You mean Puppy?” He thumbed through the door, but added, “Stay away from that one, my friend. That whole situation is nothing but trouble.”
Coming from Luís, that actually struck Carlson’s caution bone. And still he persisted, slipping through the door into the Psychic Shop, dark and closed though it appeared just like all the other stores along this street.
He wished he’d thought to grab his coat. Although not as cold as the world outside, the area behind the door had a definite chill. When he reached the locked security door, a monitor on the wall showed four different angles up and down the sidewalk directly outside the security door. The area outside was well-lit, just in case someone with thoughts of larceny or worse decided this might be a good place to jump members preoccupie
d with either coming or going. It was a relatively new security measure, thoroughly appreciated by the female members. Carlson liked it because it let him see without needing to open the door that not only were there two pedestrians currently walking down the street opposite of the secret entrance, but also that Puppy was bent over in the shadows just behind the stairs. She didn’t seem to be hiding. From the look of her, she was either throwing up, fighting not to throw up, or had just lost that fight and was now scrubbing her wrist over her mouth and crying.
Carlson’s hand was on the latch before he knew what he was doing and before he could soften his exit in a way least likely to startle the already skittish woman, he was shouldering his way out onto the steps. She jerked upright with a gasp and they stared at one another.
She had doe eyes, soft and brown and terribly frightened.
“I’m sorry,” he said, immediately stepping back and holding his hands up in surrender to make himself as non-threatening as possible. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
The dark lines of her eyebrows buckled slightly, but she backed up a step anyway. Wiping her mouth again, she said nothing.
At least she didn’t run away. Carlson accepted that as a positive sign. “Are you okay?”
Her exhaling puff actually steamed the air, although the wind immediately swept it away. It also cut right through the heavy shirt Carlson was wearing, stinging his skin. She shivered as she said, “It left me here.”
“Left you?”
“The cab,” she said, her tone low and defeated. “I asked it to wait, but it left.”
Ah. Carlson swept his gaze up and down the near empty street, lit at evenly spaced intervals by the amber of the streetlamps. Sure enough, no cabs. In D.C., however, something was always open. Getting one to come back wouldn’t be a hardship.
“Come on.” He beckoned to her. “Come inside where it’s warm. We’ll call you another to take you home.”
“I-I’m okay,” she said, but that was a lie if he’d ever heard one. She was shivering, hugging her arms to her chest, her thin short-sleeved t-shirt doing nothing at all to either protect her from the night air or hide the goosebumps now peppering her skin. It was right there on the tip of his tongue to call her on it too, but he quickly put a muzzle on that dominant asshole tendency.
“It’s warmer inside,” he coaxed instead. “You don’t have to freeze. I promise, you’re perfectly safe. Come on.”
He beckoned again, but she retreated another step. Hugging herself, she looked up one end of the street and then down it the other way. Her mouth flattened. Her dark eyes worried.
Softening his tone, he held out his hand. “Please come inside.”
“Just inside the door,” she finally agreed, teeth chattering.
“If that’s where you want to wait,” he agreed, “at least it’ll be out of the wind.”
She checked up and down the street one more time, but seeing no cab, came out of the shadows and hesitantly climbed the steps. She hugged herself so she wouldn’t have to take his hand. Anyone else would be rubbing the warmth back into their arms, but she didn’t. She held herself straight and still, and as soon as she was inside, huddled in as small a space as any person could take up, shooting him glances out of the corner of her eyes not just as if she were waiting for him to do something awful, but expecting it.
“I’m Carlson Garvey,” he introduced again, offering her his hand to shake.
She looked at it for almost eight seconds—he knew, because he was counting. Very hesitantly, she finally accepted it.
“Puppy, was it? That’s different. I like it.”
She held her icy hand tense in his while he waited to see if she would shake or snatch it back again. When she only stood there, he gave her cold fingers a gentle squeeze and released her.
“I’m going to have to go back down the tunnel to the security desk to call a cab. Now,” he cautioned, and although he was doing his best not to be that asshole—that one Dominant in every group that just couldn’t help but issue orders to a submissive that wasn’t his—he wasn’t entirely successful at keeping the bossiness out of his tone when he asked, “if I do that, are you going to stay right here where it’s warm, or are you going to immediately duck back outside again? Because the look on your face says you are one sharp word or sound away from bolting. And I’d really rather you not freeze half to death waiting for your ride to get here.”
Her throat worked as she swallowed. “I’ll stay here.”
He was pretty sure she was lying, but he went ahead and left her there. Hurrying back to where Luís was stationed, he asked, “Can I borrow your coat?”
Blinking, he thumbed over his shoulder to the tunnel. “It’s in my locker. What happened to your coat?”
“I’ll let her wear it while we wait, but I’d rather not freeze too. How about a cab, can you call one?”
“Sure. For you or Puppy?”
“Puppy,” Carlson said. “Apparently, she had one waiting for her, but it left.”
“Not a problem.”
“Take your time,” he added. “I don’t want it to get here before I get back.”
He hurried, jogging all the way back to the locker rooms where he grabbed his coat, and then headed back to Danny at the check-in desk. The security guard was studying his display of monitors with a book lying face down on the desk not far from his phone.
“Look at that,” he said, pointing at one. “Do you see that? Who’s walking the floor tonight? That can’t be safe.”
Distracted as he was, Carlson gave the monitor a quick glance. He recognized the two men from earlier. No longer at the cross, the submissive was hanging suspended from a noose-like rope tied up over the fully elevated hoist bar. His hands were captured in restraints that also bound his thighs. His fully erect cock was standing high against his belly, despite the crop-wielding Dom who circled him, slashing first at his shoulders, then his ass, and even giving his cock two light flicks with the very slapper tip.
“It’s fine,” Carlson almost immediately dismissed. “Look at where the rope goes. They’re using the hoist for leverage, but the submissive is choking himself.”
Bending closer, Danny peered at the black and white monitor. The mood lighting in the dungeon was turned down low, but even so, it was possible to see the end of the rope in the submissive’s own bound hand. “Oh. I see. Thanks.”
“No problem. Can I borrow your coat for a minute?” he asked, shrugging into his own.
Sitting up a little straighter, Danny pulled his coat off the back of his chair and handed it over.
Knocking a quick thank you on the desk, Carlson rushed back up the tunnel toward the Psychic Shop. He supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised to find the dark shop empty and no sign of Puppy at the windows where he’d left her. Looking outside, he finally spotted her, tucked up in the shadows of the building next door. She was trying to stay out of both the wind and the light, and the only reason he spotted her was because she kept stealing nervous peeks around the corner back at the Psychic Shop door.
“Naughty girl,” he said under his breath. His instinct was to go out there, either drag or coax her back inside, or at the very least to wrap her in Danny’s heavy winter coat until the cab got here. The last thing he wanted to do was spook her worse than she already was.
She was hugging herself, and while she was too far away for him to be sure, he knew she had to be shaking.
He had no business forcing his help on someone who clearly didn’t want it. He should let this go, and he knew it, but oh how it went against every dominant, protective instinct he had to take that first step back from the door, rather than shove his way through it.
He was on the verge of turning around and walking away, when she suddenly dropped from standing to squatting. Covering her head with both hands, she rocked first, punched her own thigh twice, and then jumped up again. She tried to come back to Black Light, but just as quickly lost her nerve
and retreated to her hiding spot again. Hugging her arms, she squatted down against the cold, and before he could stop himself, Carlson shoved his way out the door into the chilly night.
He strode across the extra wide city sidewalk, heading straight for her with Danny’s coat draped over his forearm and nothing but instinct driving him. This wasn’t his first rodeo, not by a long shot. And yet there were so many reasons why he never should have marched up to her, clamped his hand onto the back of her neck, dragged her to feet before wrapping Danny’s coat around her shoulders, and landing a single, hard swat to her butt to get her moving back inside.
There was a history here and it didn’t take knowing it for him to tell that she was obviously broken. But sometimes, broken people just ought to stick together.
To him, this felt like one of them.
Chapter 4
Swaddled in someone else’s coat, once more Puppy stood in the Psychic Shop entry, staring at the man who’d ventured out into the cold just to drag her back inside. He’d even swatted her butt. It hadn’t been gentle. It hadn’t been particularly hard, either. Cold as her skin was, that was probably to blame for why she could still feel his handprint tingling on the surface of her bottom. But for the life of her, she honestly didn’t know how she felt about it. Not that she was insulted or even offended. She just didn’t know why he’d done it.
Carlson Garvey, he’d said his name was. Trying not to be obvious about it, she stole peeks at him through her lashes, this veritable mountain of a man who could not have physically been more different from Ethen had she’d ordered him out of a catalog. Ethen was tall, but Carlson looked taller. Ethen was slender, possessed of a lean and wiry strength; Carlson was broad in the shoulders, lean in the hips and waist. He stood military straight and tall, with burly arms folded across his chest and legs slightly braced apart; Ethen was more a hands-in-pockets kind of guy. He liked suits and ties; Carlson was dressed like a dom about to scene, in full-out black leather pants and long-sleeved black shirt, buttoned at the wrists, as well as all the way up to the very top of his neatly folded collar.
