by Poppy Flynn
He wanted his next move to be his last, and that meant taking the time to check out the real estate and not rushing into making a decision. With what might well be a prowler lurking around the club, even if it just turned out to be kids messing about, his presence here might actually be a benefit right now.
After crawling out from underneath the haphazard pile of cardboard boxes, blankets, and the tarpaulin in the defunct goods recess, she felt her stomach cramp and gurgle noisily. She was still lethargic from a lack of proper food and her joints had become stiff and achy from sleeping outside in the cold. She was almost tempted to try to find a refuge or women's shelter, except that those would surely be the first places Master would look. He knew she had nowhere else to go. Besides, how would she ever go about finding one? She had no idea where she was or what direction to go to find anything.
After two nights on foot, she had come to the end of the agricultural belt she had been wandering through, and three days ago, she'd found this building on the other side of the trees. She hadn't planned to stay here, but the ankle of her injured foot had become so swollen that she could barely walk, and she knew she finally had to rest it. Plus, now that things had become more built up, it was difficult to remain inconspicuous.
This warehouse on the edge of the woods had caught her attention because of the people she had seen coming in and out. She'd soon realised it was some kind of kink club. She'd worked out that it had two separate entrances, and she had felt oddly at home glimpsing the odd little bit of fetish wear worn by the few who weren't completely bundled up in their cosy winter coats.
She'd spied the recessed doorway, protected from view by a solid, high fence, as she'd been crouched in the woods, considering her next move.
It hadn't taken her long to work out that the doors were unused, with the added bonus that the area leading to them was undercover, sheltered, and shadowed, as well as little used.
The big man came out once a day with rubbish for the recycling, and occasionally, a couple of other people, but she could sleep the night in relative safety and obscurity in the deep alcove, and she'd also found a glass in which she could catch rain water to drink. There was even a beautifully soft blanket that had been thrown out, which she snuggled into at night. It just had the tiniest hole and it smelled so lovely. Plus, there was always a plentiful supply of boxes to keep her warm, and she'd even found a couple of half-eaten bars of chocolate while she'd been searching through the bins. She had slowly sucked each and every piece. It had been like tasting a little slice of heaven. She couldn't remember the last time she'd had any; it had been years since she'd deserved a treat like that.
As her stomach cramped up again, enough to make her wince and groan, she wondered if there was maybe some more, since last night had been a business night. She decided she would look first, before she crept over to the baked goods factory that she had discovered a few units down. They often threw away overdone or stale pastries, but she thought something there might have been bad, because she had thrown up last night and her stomach still felt decidedly delicate. Or maybe that was just because she was starving. She'd known hunger before, but never as bad as this.
She needed water first, though. She knew enough to guess that she was dehydrated since she hadn't had to pee for a long time, but it had been raining, so her glass should be full this morning.
She tried to sip at it, but the desire to gulp was too great despite the slightly weird taste the water had. She was already used to that, though, but it only seemed to make the gurgling and cramping in her stomach worse this time and even the thought of the fairly short walk to the bakery warehouse was just too much right now. She decided to try her luck here, instead, and see what she could find.
Her movements were sluggish, and the feeling of nausea was literally quadrupled now that she'd moved. It seemed to take all of her strength to lift the huge bin lid and she was aware that her arms were trembling. Her barely focusing eyes fixated on a chocolate bar wrapper with a tell-tale bulge that hinted at leftovers and she snatched at it. Well, in her mind, she snatched at it; the reality was somewhat more listless, but hoping that the sugar would do something to combat her sluggish lethargy, she nibbled hungrily at it before she even closed the lid.
Maybe that was why she missed the rapid footsteps or didn't key into the sixth sense that usually warned her to danger. Or maybe it was just the sickness and light headedness she felt. She was normally so alert! She had to be.
It was the shout that made her jump almost out of her skin and kicked up her heart rate to the level of sheer terror.
She dropped the heavy lid in her abrupt shock, and the edge crashed into the fleshy part of her arm just below her elbow, tearing a pained howl from her lips even as she instinctively dragged her hand out, grazing and lacerating the rest of her forearm as she did so. The inherent impulse to flee had her whirling around and heading for the woods before her lucid brain kicked in, but sickness and injury caught up with her in those terrified moments and she tripped over her own feet in the bulky, oversized wellingtons.
The flurry of movement sent her stomach rebelling and she retched as she tried to run, choking with the effort to keep going. The strain on her injured foot sent shards of pain shooting up her leg and caused her to stumble. Tears streaked down her face and a wail resembling the cry of a wounded animal was ripped from her throat as her hazy brain chastised herself at being caught.
That was the last thing she remembered before blessed blackness swept through her last vestige of consciousness.
"Shit!" Micah cursed under his breath as the indeterminate figure stumbled away from him. The person had been hidden from him by the expanse of the lid of the recycling bin and, at first, he had thought it was a kid. As the figure staggered away, retching, with a shuffling, uneven gait, he re-evaluated that notion and decided it must be someone elderly or maybe even a drunk trying to get his hands on some free booze from the club.
The anguished cry had sounded decidedly female, however, and his innate protective instinct had him sprinting over to where the figure now lay crumpled and unmoving on the rain slicked ground.
He frowned as he took in the size of the boots that stuck out from the folds of a bulky waterproof coat. They were definitely man sized and had him proceeding with a little more caution. The long winter coat concealed most of the figure, the tatty fur trimmed hood flopping over its owner's head.
"Hey there!" Micah gave the prone figure a gentle nudge with the tip of his boot, in case it was some kind of trap, but there was no response, and he decided that no one would lie that long in a cold, wet puddle unless they were incapacitated.
He crouched down, but keeping his guard up, Micah leaned forward to rip the hood away from the intruder's face. He sat back on his haunches in shock when he uncovered the dirty but deathly pale face of a young woman.
He swore again as he realised she was unconscious. He braced himself to pick her up, shocked anew and almost toppling backward, when, instead of hefting a dead weight mass as he had expected, he found she weighed barely enough to cause his muscles to strain. It was all just bulky fabric, he realised. One of the Wellington boots fell off as he readjusted his stance and lifted her, uncovering a skinny leg, unhealthily thin despite the thick, oversized sock that was covering it.
Micah didn't think twice as he carried her toward the elevator and into the club. His sole concern was in helping the unfortunate girl.
It wasn't until he had moved her briskly into the employee lounge and laid her down on the couch there that he wondered that the hell he was supposed to do next.
Call an ambulance, the police? The club owners, perhaps? Nobody would appreciate having any kind of narrow-minded law enforcement types sniffing around a kink club. And calling paramedics to an unconscious woman at a venue like this might cause some undue suspicion, but he couldn't leave her like this!
As he grabbed his phone out of his pocket, he opted to ring Logan Thornton. One of the four co-owners,
he was also a lawyer. This could be his call.
"Hey, Micah?" The tinny voice came through the ear piece with a definite question. It was unusual for Micah to ring his bosses unless there was a really severe problem.
"Logan…" Micah greeted. What the hell did he say now? "Umm…I have a woman here at the club."
Logan gave a dry chuckle. "I don't think you rang me to give me an update on your non-existent love life, but if you did, then way to go, buddy!"
The noise Micah made in his throat resembled a snort. "Yeah, well, this one might be a problem. I don't know if she's a vagrant or something, but she's unconscious."
"Fuck!" The epithet shot like a bullet over the phone connection. "What the hell happened? Have you called anyone?"
Micah looked over at the waxy faced girl on the sofa; she was still out cold.
"I went out to investigate some suspicions I've had over the past couple of days and caught her rummaging in the recycle bins. She tried to run away when she saw me, but collapsed and, no, I haven't called anyone except you. I need to know how you want me proceed; she doesn't look like she's in a good way."
There was a quiet pause at the end of the line before Logan spoke. "Call Xavier; he's a doctor. Get him to come and have a look at her and we'll take his advice on where to go from there."
"Even if that means involving the authorities?" Micah queried, wanting to be sure they were all on the same page.
"Yes," Logan said quietly but decisively. "It may prove awkward, but we have a duty of care that we can't ignore just because it might make things uncomfortable for us."
Micah nodded, even though Logan couldn't see him. "Fair enough. I thought the same, but just wanted to check. I'll ring Xavier right away."
"Thanks, Micah. I'll get over there as soon as I can, and I'll alert Joel, Jake, and Connor to the situation."
"No problem, I'll talk to you later." With that, he hung up and started on his second call.
"You want the good news or the bad news?" Xavier asked, a scant thirty minutes later.
Micah was still thanking his lucky starts that Xavi had the morning off and lived close by, but since the girl was still unconscious, he knew things couldn't be great.
"Hit me with it, doc," he sighed. "I need to know if I've got to involve any outside agencies."
Xavier pursed his lips, strands of silver at his temples glinting in the harsh, overhead lights. "Well, the bad news is that, from a purely cursory investigation, she's suffering from hypothermia, frost bite, and malnutrition. All of that has added up to exhaustion, which is probably why she's still out cold. The good news is that I believe all of it is minor, so she could probably forego the hospital visit as long as she has someone to care for her."
Micah sighed, but his relief was short lived as Xavier hadn't finished.
"Unfortunately, I think there's more, and I can't be definitive until I give her a thorough examination. I'll need you to help me undress her."
Micah winced. Stripping off a scared, defenceless, and unconscious woman grated on his principles, but he understood the necessity even if he didn't like it.
He puffed out a frustrated breath. "Sure, Doc. Let's get to it."
The remaining Wellington came off first, and Micah sucked in a shocked breath at the amount of swelling and bruising around her thin ankle and the unnaturally bent and blackened little toe.
"Hmm," Xavier pondered, examining her foot carefully and frowning heavily. "This toe was broken a long time ago and never treated. It looks like there were already some circulation problems with it, which have exacerbated the frost bite. She might lose this one."
Micah felt his gut clench at the thought, even though he didn't know the unfortunate girl.
"The ankle has been twisted and sprained, but since she'll need to keep off her feet because of the frostbite, that will heal well enough."
Micah moved to hold the limp woman up while Xavier stripped the bulky coat from her and was thrown by the fact that she had one of the club's soft aftercare blankets wrapped around her thin frame underneath it. As he fingered the ragged tear in the fabric, he recalled binning it a couple of days before, on refuse collection day, supporting his conjecture that she'd been around the club for a few days at least, if not longer. Now, seeing the state she was in, he wished he'd found her sooner.
There was an odd shabby assortment of clothes covering her frail body. All were oversized and, now that her coat was removed, the stale smell of age and mildew was unmistakable, making him wonder where the hell she had been.
When he unravelled the scarf from around her neck and caught sight of the tell-tale bruising there, his speculation became verbal. "What the fuck, Xavi? Are those marks what I think they are?"
Even the club sadist looked grim right now. "If you're thinking that it looks like she's been strangled, then I 'm very sad to say you'd be right," he agreed, tipping her head back and inspecting the damaged area. "Hard enough to lose consciousness, and on more than one occasion in recent weeks, I would say, going by the various different stages of the bruising."
Xavier looked at the girl's face again. "Do me a favour, would you, Micah? Can you grab a bowl of warm water and a wash cloth? I'm starting to think that's not all dirt on her face," he muttered grimly.
Micah rose and dragged his fingers through his hair. When he took a long look at the girl on the couch, he couldn't help wondering what the hell they had gotten themselves into. Before he followed Xavi's instructions, he fired off a message to Logan, encouraging him to get over here as soon as possible. An unconscious, abused girl found outside a BDSM club had all the connotations of a nightmare scenario. This was all panning out to be a potential shit storm. He could feel it in his gut.
An hour later, Logan, Joel, Jake and Connor had all arrived and the full extent of the situation had been uncovered. For all that Micah was a Master Dom who liked nothing more than to tie up and spank or flog a willing submissive and see the reddening of welts and handprints cover her skin while she was bound and defenceless, this was an altogether conflicting representation,
The very significant difference was consent.
That small but crucially important distinction which marked the profound divergence between BDSM and abuse. It all came down to the matter of choice.
Micah had seen a lot of things in his years as a Dom. The psyche of a masochist had been one of the things that had led him into the lifestyle when he had explored the phenomenon as part of his doctoral thesis for his psychology degree.
Masochism could be a way for someone to completely let go by way of a mutual power exchange. There were people who needed that in order to feel liberated, to completely give over their free will to another person, to allow themselves to let go of all the stresses and responsibilities in their lives. It was a way to calm the mind and no longer considered, in psychological circles, to be a symptom of mental illness.
But most consenting masochists, even the more extreme, stopped short of accepting the permanent or long-term damage that was demonstrated here.
The girl's entire body showed evidence of both fresh whip and burn marks, many breaking the skin, as well as old scars. Her wrists and ankles showed the kind of damage that could only come from prolonged and aggressive shackling. At least one of her fingers pointed to a suspicion of broken bones, left unhealed, as well as the toe on her injured foot, and now that her face was washed, what they had initially mistaken for mud and dirt proved, instead, to be the bruises from a black eye and a bruised cheek, in keeping with being punched. Plus, it was obvious that, although partially disguised by dryness and chapping from the elements, she was also sporting a badly split lip.
As well as the lacerations, she was covered in bruises. The fingertip ones on her buttocks and upper thighs disturbed Micah the most, and he found he didn't want to contemplate how she had come by them. Jesus! She was a mess! And so thin, she was almost skeletal, another sure sign of abuse.
He paced back and forth across the room while
Xavier finished up his examination and pulled a blanket over the girl and Logan spoke in low, strained tones to Jake. Micah finally came to a standstill and asked what surely must be on everyone's mind.
"So, what do we do now?"
"Do we need to get her to a hospital, Xavier?" Connor asked. He'd been quiet up till now, contemplating and taking everything in.
"I can guarantee you that, while it wouldn't be a bad thing, they would almost certainly discharge her sooner than would be ideal, given the kind of on-going care she needs, but hospital beds are always in short supply and they won't keep her any longer than absolutely necessary. There's nothing critically wrong with her. She needs to be warmed, fed, rehydrated, and rested, but those are all things that could be undertaken at home after a minimal observational stay if she had one. Since we don't know that she does, or at least a safe one, then social services would likely be called in to aid her and she may be found a place in a women's shelter, but she is unlikely to get the care she needs in a place like that. She really needs to stay off her feet for at least a week so that frostbite can heal. Refuges don't offer that kind of care."
"Would there be other ramifications if we did that?" Jake asked, jamming his hands into his pockets as he gazed worriedly at the battered woman.
Xavier stood to his full height and looked the owners, and Micah, straight in the eye. "Given the state that she's in, the hospital would most certainly call the police to investigate the obvious signs of abuse. There's clearly the potential for repercussions there. I'm sure you've all considered the implications of having an abused woman found on the grounds of a club such as this one. It will certainly shine an unwanted spotlight onto both Club Risqué and its members. Inevitably, this is the first place the police are going to look for her tormentor."
