and sporting wood.
Mark waited until the area near The Red was clear of people, and then he ducked under the red velvet rope and hurried to the shadowed arch of the double doors. The Watcher who’d been there earlier would no doubt be back any second. Obviously they kept an eye on this entryway. To keep out people like him.
He pulled the iron ring and the right door creaked halfway open. Mark slipped inside and pulled it shut behind him.
Everything changed in that moment.
The pumping beat of the band outside was replaced with another throbbing sound…only this one was more organic. More sexual. The air was heavy, humid and hot. And the walls on either side of the entryway had dozens of small oval alcoves inset in them. Candles burned in each of those spaces. The room glowed and rippled with the flicker of the flames. The ceiling glowed faintly, but seemed to do so with its own light. It looked as if it was made of heavy glass, and a low red light glowed behind it. But the light wasn’t coming from any one direction…the whole ceiling seemed to bleed a viscous bloody color.
Mark stepped past the entryway and into a long hall. He walked to the right and passed a room with writhing bodies, all shifting and moaning on a floor studded with what looked to be nails. He stepped inside the entry a moment, squinting through the faint red light to see if Rae was there.
A burly man with a back as hairy as a gorilla’s was driving himself between the legs of a middle-aged woman close to the door. She lay back across the floor of nails, her arms outstretched as if she welcomed the man’s sex, but with every thrust, her heavy breasts shook and she screamed out in what sounded far more like pain than pleasure. When the man pulled out of her and rolled her onto her belly, her back resembled a pincushion; a thousand spots of red glimmered in the low light and began to run as her blood, uncorked, flowed from the wounds.
Mark winced. No pain, no gain?
Nearby, a thin, aging, black-haired woman held what looked like a college-aged boy by a chain that hooked to a leather collar around his neck. “When I say jump, I mean jump!” she yelled and hit the kid across the ass with a wooden paddle. He cried out, but in the next moment, she yelled, “Jump,” and he did, screaming as his feet came down on the nails.
Then she slammed the wooden paddle across his penis, and the kid screamed even louder as he lost his balance and fell backwards, impaling his ass and shoulders on the nails. The woman jumped on him then, straddling his abused cock and forcing her tongue into his mouth even as he continued to scream. She closed his lips with hers and then reached down and guided his cock inside her. How it had remained erect, Mark couldn’t fathom. The kid wrapped his arms around the woman as if he truly loved her. The sound of his pain was dulled, but not stopped, by the suction of her lips, but soon her own bleats of pain joined his as he pushed against the floor and rolled her over, pinning her wrists and her back to the nails with his body. His cock never left her, as they fucked and rolled, fucked and rolled, until both of their bodies were nothing but a bloody rash.
Mark felt sick.
This was not sex play.
This was horror.
It had only taken him a minute to confirm that Rae, thankfully, was not in this room, but…where was she?
He slipped back out of the room and walked a few steps farther down the hall. He heard the sound of the whips before he reached the door. They slapped wet and sharp, with a rhythm that was unmistakable. And the screams that answered each crack told the rest of the story.
Mark peered around the edge of the door and saw three men, nude from the waist up, standing around a woman who appeared to be hanging from the ceiling. At first he wondered why there were so
She was hung from the ceiling by hooks. Each rope ended in a steel barb that pierced the skin, in sequence, from her shoulders all the way down to her calves. Six crank wheels surrounded her, and when one of the men turned the handle on one, the ropes that held the hooks in her calves and thighs began to pull up until her body hung at a forty-five-degree angle. One of the other men reached out and pinched one of her nipples between his fingers, pulling on it until it stretched from her body like almond taffy. The woman cried no, and someone in the room laughed. That’s when the man abusing her breast pulled a long knife from a sheath in his leather pants.
Mark shook his head and hurried on. Now he knew he was right to come here…he had to find Rae before they did something horrible to her. This was wrong, all wrong. He understood a little bit about the pain and pleasure dichotomy, but this was something else.
This was hell.
The next room was full of people, and Mark strained to see what was happening. He could hear the bleats of pain, but the light was so faint, he couldn’t make out anyone’s face.
But then he didn’t need the light. He heard Rae scream. Mark abandoned stealth mode and rushed into the room, pushing people aside as he struggled to see in the darkness.
That’s when the lights came up, and the room suddenly glowed in a harsh white. It brought tears to his eyes and he blinked to clear them. But when he could see again, he wanted to cry in earnest.
Rae stood in the center of a circle of nude men and women, her arms outstretched. Her wrists had leather bands around them, and chains were hooked to each of those bands connecting her arms to the ceiling. Her ankles were similarly bound, the chains extending to walls on either side of the room, forcing her to stand with her legs spread wide.
All of the circle around her held whips or floggers with long leather straps. Some of those straps glimmered with the silver of steel.
Rae’s face was run with black from mascara…her tears had turned her into a ghastly clown. The marks of whips crisscrossed her breasts and back, angry red welts wrapped around her like red rope.
Mark pushed the people away from her and screamed, “Leave her alone!”
Nobody stopped him as he stepped into the center of the circle, reached up and unhooked the leather bracelets on Rae’s wrists from the chains and then did the same with her feet. As he did, her blood smeared across his hands; her back and legs were a mess of bleeding cuts.
“Mark, what are you doing? No,” Rae complained blurrily. She almost seemed drunk. Mark wondered if they’d drugged her before doing this. Fuckers!
Hands grabbed at his shoulders then, as well as at Rae’s. But Mark’s fists fended them off. He felt someone’s nose crush in a warm rush beneath his fingers, and a second later he punched a woman in the gut who was still holding a whip. She doubled over before the next guy grabbed at Mark and tried to stop them from leaving.
“Enough,” he yelled. “You’ve hurt her enough. I’m taking her home.”
He held her around the waist and began to push their way from the room. “Wait a minute,” Rae begged, pounding on his back. “I want my clothes!”
He stopped and she bent to pick them up. As she did, Mark realized the room had gone silent, and Rae’s torturers all stood still, in a single file along one wall. None resisted him. The one who had refused him entrance to The Red when he’d come with Selena stood in the center. “I told you this was for her alone,” he said quietly.
“Not anymore,” Mark said and pulled her from the room. He wouldn’t let her stop until they were back in the Blue Room, with the familiar sounds of ’80s goth rock pounding from across the stage. Then he let Rae pull her skirt up over her hips and half shrug on her corset (he clasped some of the hooks) before he dragged her from the club.
Rae didn’t speak on the way home. Mark knew better than to press her, but after a few miles, he couldn’t stop himself. Her clothes were ripped and bloody. He could see the pale skin of her ribs through the side of the corset that exposed the flesh just beneath her shoulder. She looked like someone who’d been attacked by a man with knives.
“Why did you let them do that?” he asked. “Did they drug you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know why, or you don’t know if you were drugged?”
“I don’t want to talk about it right now.”
Mark felt his anger surge. “I thought our deal was full disclosure,” he said. “If we do this, there are no secrets-
