store. They tried everyone and everything as fast as they could, anxious to embrace the dark seduction of NightWhere.
After a few nights, the Watchers intervened. Nothing happened in NightWhere that wasn’t seen by one of their number. No sin was too small to be savored. And those who were ready received a second invitation, different from the ones that got them into the club. The Blue Room was the appetizer. There were some who never really grasped that and never traveled beyond its blue strobe lights. But those people eventually stopped getting invitations to come to NightWhere…because the Blue Room was not the point. Not really.
The Watchers were quiet, but they were always in the shadows. They walked the club at midnight and passed paper discreetly into waiting palms.
Amelia had received hers six months ago. And now she wore the invitation around her wrist. The mark of the snake. Its blue-grey scales wound around her skin like a bond. The serpent’s mouth swallowed its tail, the ultimate act of self-indulgence.
Amelia walked through the middle of the dance floor, letting one hand slide across the hairy chest of a man whose eyes were closed in pleasure. She smiled and ruffled the hair of the head that worked at the man’s groin and then passed on. Getting off on the dance floor was like premature ejaculation. They’d learn.
She passed the wooden racks where a woman and a man were tied to polished oak arms, as a bare-chested, brawny man swung a flogger in each hand. He smacked the leather straps against the man’s back, which arched with every contact. The woman was braver. Her short, spiky blonde-and-brown hair was matted in sweat as she stiffened with each blow from the leather. Each blow caught her across her small, tight breasts. Her nipples were hard and the sweat pooled in her belly button. The woman whispered one thing after every blow.
“Harder,” she begged.
Amelia nodded as she watched. The woman reminded her a lot of herself. Taking it right on the chest. Needing it to go deeper, below the skin.
She didn’t recognize the body, and so she violated the torture zone, forcing the flogger to stop. Amelia slid one finger beneath the woman’s hair, lifting it from where it had plastered against her forehead.
“What’s your name?” Amelia asked.
“Rae,” the woman whispered. “Tell him to make me feel it.”
Amelia kissed Rae softly on the lips, enjoying the heat of her need there. “I’ll take care of it,” she promised. Then she took the flogger from the big man, who was streaming sweat already from the exercise.
“Let me show you what she needs,” she said.
When the first slap of the leather caught Rae’s breasts, she cried out.
“That’s better, isn’t it?” Amelia asked, and Rae nodded quickly yes, biting her lip as the straps fell again, and then dragged away.
Amelia whirled her wrist gently, but the sting of the leather on Rae’s flesh was audible every time she let her wrist go. Rae lost control and screamed out at one point, but she didn’t ask for it to stop.
The man in the rack next to her turned his head to stare at the whipping. His mouth creased, and he blinked back sweat nervously. The sweating “master” laid a hand on Amelia’s shoulder and gripped her tightly, a silent urge to take it easy. But Amelia only hit the girl harder, leaving line after line of red welts along Rae’s belly and thighs and then
At last, Amelia set the flogger down and undid Rae’s bonds. She held the trembling woman close and kissed her hard on the mouth and neck, as Rae shivered with the aftermath of her first true paingasm.
When the trembling stopped, Amelia held Rae’s face between her palms and smiled. Rae struggled with a barrage of feelings; she wanted to kiss Amelia, and slap her at the same time. Her flesh burned, everywhere, and in the back of her mind she wondered how she would be able to wear a bra tomorrow. But mostly she felt a surge of love for this woman who had known exactly how to give her what she craved. No holding back. No halfhearted spankings or slaps. She had drawn blood. Amelia’s eyes held her own with a green flare that was piercing. Filled with a need that the beating had awakened in the other woman’s own flesh.
“I’ll look for you in The Red,” Amelia said. She bent down to take one last kiss, and was gone.
Rae sank to the floor and pulled her slut clothes close. She put her arms around her knees and rocked slowly on the floor, closing her eyes now and then to just live in the burn that followed every drip of sweat down her breasts and belly and thighs. Sweet heat.
The two men stepped over from the other rack and knelt beside her. Their erections were as obvious as their concern.
“Are you okay?” the flogger asked.
She looked up at him with eyes crying in desire and pained joy.
“Oh yes,” Rae said. “This is what I’ve been looking for.”
She pulled him down to the ground with her, wrapped her arms around his chest and cried.
Chapter Three
The anxiousness that had plagued her earlier was gone now, thanks to the warmth and power of wielding the whip. Sometimes she just needed to be reminded of what she really needed. Amelia could fight against herself, but she would never win. She needed what NightWhere gave as much as she needed food or sleep.
Amelia worked her way to the back of the club and past the beginner’s flogging racks to an arched doorway in a shadowed corner. The entry was cordoned off with a red velvet rope, but Amelia stepped over the barrier and knocked. The door opened slightly at the touch of her knuckles, and without being asked, Amelia held her wrist out. Someone inside shone a small black light across her skin, and the snake there shimmered and glowed in the purple-hued light; the snake looked almost alive as the flash moved over it.
The hand disappeared and Amelia followed it inside.
The door closed behind her and the boom and throb of the Blue Room’s sound system suddenly disappeared. In its place, she heard a more appealing sound. The sound that made her blood pump faster. The sound that made her thighs grow damp and her groin warm. Her whole body, in fact, underwent a change as she stepped past the candle flames on either side of the room and heard the first few screams from beyond the foyer, back in the dark recesses. She took a deep breath and the stress of the week slid away from her as quickly as she shed her clothes. Once stripped, Amelia walked past the first dark curtain. The red lights trained from the ceiling and floor accentuated the road map of her scars, but Amelia didn’t care. She would make new ones tonight. Deeper ones. Always deeper…
“I’ve been waiting for you,” a man’s voice said.
A hand grabbed her by the hair and yanked her sideways, into a room cloistered by curtains dark as blood.
“It’s been too long,” he said.
Amelia looked up into his angry, dark eyes and matted black hair and grinned.
“I’ve missed you too, Gordon,” she said, reaching out to touch his bare, thick biceps. She trailed her fingertips down the gentle curves of his ribs and then brought them forward, teasing across his groin to the edge of the waist of his shorts. She began to work on the buckle of his belt, but Gordon slipped his hands around her wrists and forced her hands away from him. He yanked her backwards. Something sharp stabbed Amelia in the back, and she strained her neck, trying to see what. As she did, something pinched her skin again and again.
“Fuck,” she complained, and then looked at the wall and said it again, only this time it was more in a tone of admiration than complaint. “Fuuuuuck!” she said.
Gordon hoisted her wrists into the air and into two waiting leather shackles. He quickly pulled them tight and then he bent and slipped cuffs anchored to the wall near the floor around her ankles as well.
Amelia felt her breath catch as she considered what was about to happen. She couldn’t escape her bonds by leaning forward, and if she leaned back…her skin would be pierced by a hundred points of steel. The pinching she had felt was because the wall was lined in long, sharp nails, all pointing outward. She was bound against a vertical
