NightWhere (7 page)

“Is there a problem with the music?” the man asked with a thin grin. “We could have the band perform a striptease, if that would help you get in the mood.”

Mark laughed. “No, I don’t need to see that drummer naked!” The drummer in question was bald and looked fiftyish and about 200 pounds overweight. “We were just talking.”

Selena didn’t say a word…she just stared at the man, as if by staring she could wilt him.

“The night moves fast in NightWhere,” the man said with a crooked smile. “I wouldn’t want you to miss the pleasures of the club because you lost track of time. Do consider taking a walk around, before it gets too late.”

“Got it,” Mark said. He nodded, but made no move to leave his stool. The man stood still in front of him for a moment, searching for something to say. And then he leaned across the bar, said something to Sin-D, and walked away.

“Kharon,” Selena said quietly. “A Watcher.”

“C’mon,” Mark said. “Let’s you and me take a walk.” There was something about that guy he just didn’t like.

Selena slipped from her stool and together they moved to the dance floor, swaying slightly in time to the bass-and-drum combo.

Rae hated to admit it, but she’d felt relief as her husband had walked away towards the bar. Part of her recognized that they had reached the divide; NightWhere was her ticket into the places she had only dreamed of before…places that, honestly, she was afraid to admit that she’d dreamed of. It was not the place for Mark; he didn’t have the need burning inside his bones like she did. He couldn’t follow her here, not now. In the most private place, Rae walked alone.

She let the dark, pounding beat of the band sink into her bones as she slowly moved to the back of the club, back to where the slaps of leather on flesh resounded, even above the echo of the drums. Fingers reached out from the crowd to trail across her bare arms as she passed by. She welcomed their touch, but didn’t slow to answer their invitations. There was only one thing she wanted now.

The feeling of surrender.

The feeling of the dark, welling up through her skin.

“How can I help you?” a voice said from next to her. “My name is Kharon.”
 

Rae looked up and saw a man with large eyes watching her intently. His head was shaved, his face pale, his lips barely pink. The faint stubble of his beard looked like salt and pepper against his skin, and she found herself instantly imagining how it would feel rubbing against the soft skin of her breasts. He had that magnetism—that weird electricity that in just a moment of speech made you want to be closer to him. In the strobes of the dance floor, his features jumped and jagged, sharpened and smeared—he was both extreme and soft as the light shifted.

“I was looking for a woman,” she began, but stopped as he began to laugh.

“Aren’t we all?”

“She was here last time, right here in this room. I met her at the racks…she made me feel deeper than I ever have before. She whipped me…”

“This is not narrowing it down much,” Kharon said, again with an audible trace of humor in his voice.

“I need to find her again.”

The man stared at her until the silence between them was filled with nearby cries. Rae could almost count the pores of his forehead as she stared back at him, daring him to hold his game longer than her.

“I want to show you something,” Kharon said and began to walk away. Rae wasn’t sure what to think…but she began to follow. He stepped through the aisle of whipping racks, where five pasty-white men had volunteered to be flogged and cried out like wounded kids with every light blow.

Rae stepped past them in disgust. She could tell with a glance that they were dabblers—they flirted with the pain but, really, they craved the humiliation. She had no use for them and hurried to catch up to Kharon, who slipped into the shadows of NightWhere as easily as paper slipped away on the breeze. Something inside her demanded that she not lose him.

Her eyes found him again, just ahead, and she quickened her step. He opened a black door hidden in the black wall at the back of the club and Rae ran across the intervening space to follow. She caught the door before it closed and darted inside to join him in wherever it was he was going. But on the other side of the door, she realized that she had left…everything…behind.

When the dark door shut behind her, Rae felt suddenly alone in a room of shadow. The air seemed to glint with some kind of floating light… But it was a hazy, cottony illumination. The strangest, most ethereal beams bled from random holes in the dark. Rae stepped forward and a dozen bells chimed, announcing her walking presence. She felt nothing touch her. Even her feet seemed to move across air. But with the movement of every muscle, the room sang, betraying her feet.

Not so far ahead, she could see the man, still walking.

Bells chimed and sang as she followed, the cacophony growing louder the faster she walked. Rae couldn’t see what was causing the bells…her skin seemed to touch nothing as she walked through cool black air. But with every step, the echoes of chimes and other shadowed sounds flared painfully in her ears.

Finally she stopped and the cacophony also stopped. The man she chased turned to face her, a look of amusement in the crack of his lips.

“If you want to follow me,” he said, “you must learn to walk between the shadows. You still have much to learn.”

With that, he turned and disappeared into the dark.

Rae ran forward, trying to find him, but as she moved away from the club, the noise grew so loud that she stopped and held her hands to her ears. She couldn’t see anything…the room was black. Now that he was gone, she was totally in the dark. An orchestra of angry sound assailed her ears.

“Wait!” Rae called, trying to be heard above the din, but nothing answered.

“Shit,” she said to herself. She put her hands out, crying again, “Wait,” and the air chimed.

“I will not be afraid of noise,” she promised. But she no longer walked ahead. Rae retraced her steps through the dark, hoping that her feet were truly following the same path and not leading her in circles. The sound inside her head pounded until she felt her eyes swell. She wondered if her ears were bleeding. But little by little it began to diminish. And then her hands met a wall.

She moved along it, a little to the left, and a little to the right, looking for the door. Her hand knocked against something cold and metallic, and Rae grinned, curling her palm around the knob and turning…and then she was suddenly out of the stark aural pain and back in the blue haze of the club. The bell screams turned to human cries of pleasure and pain. Rae smiled. The cries of passion sounded like home. She moved towards a man with a riding crop, and when he favored her with a grin, she bent over and offered herself to his hand.

She accepted his slaps with interest…but as his hand touched her, she felt cold. Bored.

There was sting in his spanking, but something wasn’t connecting with her. He didn’t give her what she needed. Rae began to look around at the other subjects being spanked and whipped around her, and realized there was more to her need than simple pain.

Her chest was filled with a horrible void. Rae found herself struggling not to cry.

“Were you looking for me?” a voice asked. Rae looked up and Kharon stood behind her, a riding crop in his right hand.

“Yes,” Rae admitted. The relief flooded her voice as she wiggled her hips for him to see. She needed him.

He leaned down and pressed his lips to her own as his left hand slid from her bare shoulder, down the velvet skin of her back, to finally cup the soft skin of her ass. His hand squeezed.

“There are things that you must learn if you are to follow me,” Kharon said. “And the first is this.”

He stepped back and raised his hand. Then brought it down.

In moments, Rae’s cries joined the moans that reverberated above the band in the Blue Room.

Cries of wanting.

Cries of ecstasy.

Cries of pain.

Chapter Six

In The Red

The sound of the lash on Amelia’s skin made Gordon’s cock hard beneath his leather. The woman lurched and shook against the stone wall of the torture chamber he’d led her to with every kiss of his whip.

“Are you mine?” he called after every strike. The whip left red weals on top of the latticework of white scars that made up most of Amelia’s body. And after every strike came Amelia’s muffled, tearful refrain—“No, you fucker”—taunting his violence to reach another level.

He obliged, cracking the whip against her ass and thighs, letting it land on the soft flesh of her waist, and dragging its harsh bite against her rib cage. She bled, but he did not stop. This wasn’t a place where people
dabbled
in pain. This wasn’t the amateur zone where fat men wore diapers and pretended to take discipline until their pathetic cocks were so aroused that they came in their pants from the feathery attention of play whips.

This was The Red. And nobody came here to play. This was the place for pain, real pain. And tears. And blood. And at the end of it all…release. Euphoric, life-threatening and -altering release. The only safe word here was not a word at all—it was complete and utter obedience. And even that would likely only get you more pain.

Gordon thought of the things that had pissed him off today, this week, and he brought the whip down harder, losing himself in the cathartic feel of beating a human being who refused to say no to a bloody pulp…yet not even touching her with his actual fists.

Sometimes he longed to do that actually. He was allowed to be violent here, but the reality was, he was still just hiding behind a whip—his desire was to sit on top of some moron and beat the life out of him, one blow at a time. He had never dared to try that, even here.

From the wall, after a flurry of wicked, fast, wet-sounding leather cracks, he finally heard the words he’d been waiting for.

“Yes, I am yours,” Amelia called out.

Gordon dropped the whip then and smiled as he pulled her closer to him. He ran a hand over Amelia’s wet back and brought his fingers back red. His grin spread wider, and he reached up and untied her wrists from the hooks. She staggered when he grabbed her by her elbows and raised her to stand before him, solely on her own feet. Then he asked the question again, as she swayed with exhaustion in the dark, and her bleary eyes struggled to focus on her torturer.

“Are you mine?” he asked again.

“Yes,” Amelia whispered. Sweat trickled down her cheeks and black hair plastered across one side of her face where she’d leaned on the wall for support.

“To do whatever I want with?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Gordon knotted a fist and stared at the naked, pathetic woman in front of him. Her breasts were small but her nipples were erect. Her belly was thin and flat…the dark hair below her belly button was trimmed short. She would have been pretty, if her skin didn’t look like an egg that had been shattered and glued back together.

Gordon punched her in the stomach.

Amelia gasped and doubled over, but his hand grabbed her by the hair and yanked her upright.

“Anything?” he asked again.

She nodded.

The slap of Gordon’s hand resounded above the noise of the other tortures going on in The Red. He caught her cheek and then reached out and held her by the nipple of her left breast, pinching as hard as he could with his thumb and forefinger.

Amelia gasped and cried. “Anything.”

“I can kill you?” he said simply.

Amelia looked at him with a spark of fear, and yet, strangely,
hope
in her eyes. “Yes,” she whispered, a thin drool of blood beginning to seep from the side of her mouth.

“Not yet,” he said and pulled her close, smashing his lips to hers, tasting the blood he had drawn and enjoying the feel of her tongue, which at first hid deep in her swelling mouth and then ventured out to twist with his own.

After toying with her for a few moments, he pushed her away and undid his belt before kicking his pants to the floor. His cock bobbed anxiously, and he guided Amelia across the room to lie across a wooden horse. “Hold the rings,” he commanded, and she rested her breasts on the wooden bar of the horse as she reached down to hold the two iron rings that extended from it. He pressed his cock between her bloody legs and felt barely any resistance as his head kissed her lips. They were wet with need and blood. The lubrication of her pain let him enter her without resistance.

Gordon moaned as he ran his hands along the wounds he’d dug in Amelia’s back, and then pressed his whole body to hers as he struggled to slide himself deeper inside her, so deep that he could pound out her heart with his cock. He wanted to own her insides as much as he did her outsides. He grabbed her breasts cruelly and squeezed, slamming against her from behind, his pace speeding up quickly as her own voice joined his in an arpeggio of animal pleasure.

Gordon saw red as he came inside her.

Amelia saw red as he came inside her.

The room ran red as he came inside her…drops of blood began to rain from the ceiling and run in sheets down the rough stone walls to coat their skin as the couple moaned in the rhythm of their passion and finally moved past their climax to drop gasping and amazed to the floor.