by Maren Smith
At first, she thought he was going to ignore her. Then he rolled over far enough to glare at her. “Seriously?” he asked. It sounded more like a demand. Like she ought to have known what she’d done and already be well on her way toward apologizing for it.
Her stomach wasn’t just sinking now. It turned cold.
He knows.
Impossible, she told herself. How could he know? How could anybody know, unless…
Wendy might have said something. Word might have got back to Marshall, and he’d notified Eric when Eric had gone for his walk, and then Eric might have told—
Unless Eric had gone for a walk all the way back to the room they all shared. What if he’d searched yesterday’s clothes and found her camera? It wasn’t password protected. All he had to do was turn it on and look through the gallery at the evidence she’d collected. What if he’d dug through her laptop bag and found her notes and her laptop, because like an idiot, she’d brought them, thinking she’d have all this alone time to write her damning article.
Eric wouldn’t go snooping through her things, the utterly stupid half of her brain tried to whisper, but contradiction was right there for her to see in the shadow-cast lines of Reeve’s angry face. He knew something and that was the only thing she could think of that she had done that could possibly take him from the man who had touched her so passionately mere hours ago to this, this scowling stranger with his back turned towards her. So he could sleep without touching her, not even accidentally. Quite a feat, considering there were three of them in this king-sized bed.
“Maybe you should think about it,” he coolly suggested. “Think about it really carefully. I’m pretty sure Marshall’s going to want to talk about it in the morning.”
Oh yeah, he knew all right.
He rolled back over, folding his arms across his chest and didn’t move. He didn’t speak either. His heavy sigh spoke volumes for him.
She was caught. Guilt chewed at her, guilt and regret. It made her angry to feel either one. What did she have to feel guilty about? They were the ones doing a damned illegal thing here. If anyone had a reason to feel guilty, it ought to be him!
Sandy flounced back onto her side, putting her back to him now too. She folded her arms as well, but try though she might, every shred of anger that she managed to summon against him felt hollow. She shouldn’t feel bad, but she did, and she didn’t understand it. No one had ever made her feel this small before. All her thoughts kept circling back to how much she didn’t want Reeve to be angry at her. She wanted to explain, but even in this confused state she knew there was no explaining this. She needed her story. She needed to advance her career or she was forever going to sit at that scarred up desk of hers in the middle of the typing pool, halfway between the coffee machine and the elevators, where the heat blew too hot in the winter and the A/C froze her out every summer, staring across the floor at the private offices where the real reporters worked their stories, flushed out their research, and took their important phone calls while she hammered out two hundred word articles about who won the Bark Dust Day’s annual wiener eating contest and who threw up in the alley behind the ring-toss booth.
Where was the importance in that? Where was the anything in that? She’d been doing it for years. How could she possibly explain how stagnant she was? Or how her mother had given her a scrapbook the day she’d landed this job and how that had been six damn years ago and how her scrapbook still didn’t have one meaningful article attached to any of its pages because in all that God damn time she hadn’t written anything of merit? How could she possibly explain how humiliating it was every time someone asked her, “What do you do for a living?” and she’d reply, “I’m a journalist.” And then they would say, “What do you write? Anything I might have read?” And how the only answer she ever had to give was: “I don’t know, did you read in last Sunday’s paper about Mrs. Alderson’s cat, Muffy? Caught in a tree again. Took two firefighters twenty minutes to finally get it down. That article right there, that was all me, baby.”
How could she possibly tell someone like Reeve, who worked in a place like this, any of that when she couldn’t even explain it to herself without sounding like a spoiled, whiny, incompetent loser?
It wasn’t fair!
She covered her face with both hands, pressing her fingers over her eyes to keep back the rushing sting of tears. She opened her mouth to help control her breathing, to keep it soft and steady. She’d much rather he thought she was sleeping—the peaceful sleep of the perfectly innocent, God damn it—rather than to know she was crying.
Like the baby they’d dressed her as.
She held herself still, just concentrating on her breathing until the self-pity waned back into anger, and then into pity again. Eventually, it deflated until all she was left with was sadness, but without the added weakness of tears.
She wasn’t sure how long she lay there, staring sleeplessly into the unburned logs of the gas fireplace. But it was long enough for Reeve’s breathing to slow and deepen, evening out until he and Eric were both snoring damn near in unison. It made her angry all over again.
She had no idea what time it was when she finally lifted the blankets and slipped out of bed—two, maybe three in the morning. With nothing more than the guttering flames to see by, it was very dark in the little cabin. She stubbed her toes on a hearth-stone as she searched through their scattering of clothes. She found Reeve’s master keycard in Eric’s pants pocket. She found her Little Red Riding dress kicked halfway under the foot of the bed. It was as she was dressing that something Reeve had said sparked in her mind. She’d been too shocked and then upset at the time to comprehend it then, but she did now. He’d said Marshall would want to talk to her in the morning. If he knew and Marshall knew, that meant it was over. In a matter of just a few hours, she was going to get hauled into his office and, at the very least, thrown out of here. That gave her only what time remained between now and then to find the records room, take what she needed, and get the hell out of here. There was no way she could evade capture for long, but if she could avoid it just long enough to get taken by the police instead of by the masters, at least her evidence would end up in the hands of someone who might do something about it.
Did she even still have her camera and the initial photos she had taken? That was the first question and her first place to start looking. Giving up on her corset, Sandy climbed into her boots. Her hair wasn’t brushed and she was unlaced down the back, but considering the time of night, she doubted anyone she might pass would think much amiss about a submissive wandering the halls half dressed. And that was if she passed anyone at all. People had to sleep, even here.
Eyeing the bed, Sandy crept one last time far enough through the room to gather both their boots, their coats and their clothes. She left them both their underwear, no sense in being cruel, but the rest she planned to leave scattered in the frozen bushes between here and the Castle. How successful that would be in delaying their inevitable pursuit, she didn’t know, but it was all she could think of.
Pausing by the bed, she offered them both one final silent goodbye.
She could have smacked Eric with his own pillow, but that might have woken him so it probably wasn’t a good idea. She could have smothered Reeve with his. That probably wasn’t a good idea, either, nor did it make her feel any better. The Castle was just a fantasy, she told herself, and Reeve was only an extension of that. Everything he’d said to her, everything he’d done, every touch of his hand, both the harsh ones that had set her bottom on fire and the soft ones that right now left her heart feeling brutalized… well, small wonder he went by Master. He’d actually made her forget that none of this was real. He’d made her fall in love with something and someone that didn’t exist. Now what the hell was she going to do?
Get her head on straight, that’s what. Get her head on, get her camera back in her hand where she knew it was safe, get the rest of the evidence she needed and then get the hell out. Because
the fantasy wasn’t real, and master or not, it was past time somebody brought this place to its knees.
She only had a few hours left. Time to make the most of it.
Chapter 12
She should have known better than to think the Castle would ever truly go to sleep. It took her twenty-eight freezing minutes to trudge her way back, through snow that was ankle-deep in the woods and shin-deep on the lawn. Once she was past the trees, all she had to do was let the many well-lit windows of the medieval castle draw her in like the monolithic beacon it was. She was the only idiot out in this frozen weather. Even the security guards were snug back in their shacks, two at the mouth of the drawbridge and two more at a second entrance at the rear of the perimeter wall. One hefted his cup of coffee and an eyebrow when he spotted her coming.
“Need a ride?” he asked, cracking his window as she stumbled past.
“I’m good,” she said, through chattering teeth. She’d hugged her cloak in tight around her, but it wasn’t anywhere near thick enough to keep out the cold.
The guard knew it, too, because before he shut the window, she could have sworn he muttered something about seriously doubting whomever was waiting for her would agree. It rankled her, but she was too damned cold to turn around, trudge the half dozen steps it would have taken to stomp back to his window, pound on it until he opened up and then blister him with a piece of her half-frozen mind.
Then it just made her sad, because the only people waiting for her were the ones who wanted to throw her out on her ear. Or have her arrested. Unless, of course, she got them arrested first.
With options like these, love wasn’t just complicated, it was impossible. She kept walking.
Inside, the castle was far busier. The lights were all on at half-brightness in the common areas, including the Dungeon, which by the sounds of it was in full swing. Two people descended into it even as she ascended the main curved staircase to the second balcony floor. For the brief period in which the door swung open, then closed again, she got an earful of the horrors below—the multitude of impact implements striking their targets, the moans and groans of those who had to endure it… the shrill cries of someone enduring far worse. Her imagination ran wild with how much worse things could possibly be down below, but all she could summon were half-hearted visualizations of drawings she’d seen in a high school library book about the Grand Inquisition. On the heels of that came far more recent visualizations—her bent over the biting edge of the footboard, with Reeve measuring the length of his braided crop across the full swells of her flinching backside.
That was about as torturous as she could imagine and, having felt the cut of that crop three different times now, she sympathized with the screamer.
And envied her. If that poor woman felt for her unknown dom anything close to the same degree of confusion and attraction that Sandy felt toward Reeve, then each and every one of those cries was justified. And probably conflicted, since as much as the crop had hurt, that hadn’t stopped Sandy from wanting more. What was she supposed to do about that? Time healed all, right? So, all she had to do was get out of here, stop thinking about it, and eventually it would stop attacking her heart every time thoughts of Reeve intruded on her.
Like when she reached the room they were all supposed to be sharing and she saw his keycard in her hand. She swiped it, half-expecting alarms and flashing lights to go off, alerting the entire floor to the fact that she was pilfering access to her own things. But all she heard was the soft click as the lock disengaged and she simply walked into her room.
Her camera was gone, of course. So was her laptop, her notes and, in fact, all her luggage. She had a good idea where to find it though: Master Marshall’s office. Clear on the opposite side of the Castle from where her rooms in the Royalty wing were, but also in an area where it made sense for not just his office to be located, but for the records room as well, since the basement was being used for anything but storage.
Back down the hall she went, back the way she’d come, crossing the long second-floor balcony with one cautious eye on the empty floor below. Somewhere in the labyrinth of halls and adjacent rooms she could hear people talking and laughing. She could smell food, a mix of burgers, bacon, pizza and cinnamon rolls, so the buffet must still be open. No one was in sight, however. No one was up here in this hallway, either, and there was no guard positioned outside Marshall’s office door. One would have thought the security would be better than this.
After a quick glance to make sure she was the only one in the hall, Sandy sidled up to Marshall’s door. Again, she expected flashing lights, whistles and sirens as she scanned the keycard. Again, the lock simply clicked, granting her access to the room. She quickly shut herself inside. Rubbing her sweaty palms in the folds of her cloak, she made it three steps before the absolute darkness of the interior lit up as every fake torch on the wall suddenly came on.
Her heart almost stopped, but she was still alone in the room. No one was hiding by some magic light switch, ready to yell, ‘Gotcha!’ The torches must have been motion-activated; she’d triggered the sensors.
“Jesus,” she whispered, pressing her hands over her heart to still its panicked beat.
She was wasting time. She didn’t have enough of that as it was.
Her luggage, laptop and camera were nowhere in sight. Marshall’s desk was unlocked, so she ransacked it, but the only thing she found was a manila envelope in his inbox, with her name neatly printed in the upper left corner. There were no other employee or guest files, just a lot of sample brochures, a few business letters, some newspaper clippings, a book on marketing, a flyer about reserving someone named Boss Bondage for an instructional on rope tying, and three boxes worth of paperclips, all linked together. The man was tidy.
And that cupboard she had pinned most of her hopes on back when she’d first decided to hunt down the Castle’s records was actually full of spanking implements. The second Sandy threw open the top doors and realized her mistake, her ass clenched hard and her skin erupted in that same dreadful, anticipatory crawling that thoughts of Reeve rolling up his sleeves inspired. She really didn’t like spanking. She liked thoughts of it even less when she was actually doing something she knew she shouldn’t be.
Fortunately, breaking and entering wasn’t exactly a spanking offense. It was more of a ‘six months to a year’ sort of thing, depending on good behavior, and whether or not the judge was also a guest.
She shut the cabinet doors, but even then, she didn’t feel better. Particularly not after searching down through all four dresser-style drawers, where she found the same variety of sex toys that had been in the dresser in her room. The man had to be OCD, or something. These toys were far more neatly arranged than those in her dresser had been, all the way down to the butt plugs, which were arranged first by material, then color, then size from largest to smallest.
Slamming that drawer harder than it needed to be, in frustration, she checked the only other hiding place she could think of and that was behind the door opposite the fireplace. It was a bathroom, not a storage room. Her things were not inside.
One room down. God only knew how many more to go. She had to hurry.
With no clear idea of where to start, keycard in hand, Sandy just started going down the hall. She started with the room directly across from his, but it looked to be a waiting room or training room of sorts. This room had real lights. It also had a TV, a long table, an assortment of chairs, and one file cabinet that, when she opened it, held blank employment forms, tax forms, 401k, and healthcare enrollment forms. The bottommost drawer held nothing but new-hire manuals and maps of the Castle. Nowhere on any of those maps did she find a room marked with an ‘x’ or labeled ‘We keep our important papers here’.
Zigzagging her way back and forth, she went from door to door. She found a receptionist’s office, complete with phone and computer. But the computer was locked down, password protected. Damn. There were a few files on the desk, but none of the people
photographed inside were underage. A few more were tucked into the mail cubbies that took up an entire wall. Each cubby was marked with a name. This must be how the Castle’s masters and submissives received their assignments.
Sandy checked every envelope. Each was sealed, because confidentiality—as all the brochures and the website so clearly said—was the Castle’s top priority, but that didn’t stop her. She opened one after the other, but all the assignments were dated for tomorrow or the day after, and none of them looked to be underage either. The empty cubbies, she realized, had to be for those employees who either had no assignments or who had already picked up their paperwork. The files must still be stored somewhere else, but she was getting warmer.
She found a conference room next, with a narrow maintenance closet right next to that. Perhaps if she’d put a little thought into it and zagged instead of zigged, she’d have skipped both those doors directly across from her and found her Eureka a good five minutes earlier. The records she was looking for were located next door to the receptionist’s office. It was the last room on the right before ducking around the hallway.
The records room pulled double duty, providing extra storage for a lot of odd and end furniture no one must have needed. The lost and found was in here too. Twelve huge green plastic tubs were lined up on a long shelf, each one labeled with a month. Castle policy must have been to keep everything found for a year, because there was only one set of months and March’s tub was still sealed with contents inside. February’s lid was off, but nothing of hers was inside. She didn’t dig through it. Oddly, she felt weird about snooping through other people’s personal belongings. At least she’d found the files and, of course, as her life was ruled by Murphy’s Law, the drawers were locked.
