NightWhere (17 page)

“It’s already too late,” Selena insisted. “NightWhere is more than just a club. I think you realize that by now. Once someone enters The Red it’s really too late, but if she’s been with them for two weeks…”

“Help me find her,” he begged.

“I can’t, Mark. You don’t know where they are.”

He looked at her with eyes brimming with anger and frustration. “I need help here,” he said.

Selena touched his face and smiled sadly. “I know,” she said. “And I
want
to help you. I really do. Let’s go out to dinner or a movie or something. But I can’t lead you to NightWhere.”

“I’m going home,” he said, looking at the beautiful woman in his passenger’s seat. “Where am I dropping you?”

“I’ll stay here,” Selena said. She reached into her handbag and pulled something out. A pen. Finding a scrap of paper, she wrote down a number and handed it to Mark.

“Give me a call,” she said. “I’d like to see you again. Preferably not in NightWhere.”

She leaned in and kissed his cheek. “I’m sorry about your wife, I really am.”

Then she slipped out of the car and closed the door.

She waved before turning and walking away from him across the parking lot. Mark was tempted to call her back. Just the scent of her left behind in the small space inside his car excited him. She had offered herself to him, and he’d said no. The brain in his pants was now thinking of ways to convince himself to call her back, but Mark shook his head. She was beautiful and sexy and nice. But he wanted Rae. And until Rae agreed that he could go sleep with her, he was not going there. He was stubborn and formal that way. It’s what kept him sane when the world grew crazy. Boundaries and rules, even when the rules were about cheating.

He watched Selena wind through the cars and knew that he needed to find another way to track Rae down.

He just couldn’t think of what that way might be.

Chapter Twenty-Three

After After Hours

After the doors closed at dawn, NightWhere went to sleep.

She had intended to go home, though she didn’t really want to. And then Kharon asked her if she wanted to stay. How could she say no?

She didn’t.

He led her down a hall behind The Red. It wound in a spiral, slowly descending as they passed room after room, all the doors closed. The carpet was the color of ash, the walls a fresh claret. They reminded Rae of the blood room, glinting with light like flowing liquid. Most of the doors were closed, and those that were open…slammed shut just before they reached them.

“Where are we going?” Rae asked.

“You’ll need a place to sleep,” he said. “And after the past few hours, I’d guess you need a place
now
.”

As if on cue, she stifled a yawn with the back of her hand.

Her guide smiled and ran a cool hand down her back. She trembled at his touch; her skin was puckered and torn from the whips and flogs and hooks that had kissed and bitten her skin over the past few hours.

“Here we are,” he announced presently and opened the door to a suite. Rae stepped inside and Kharon followed, closing the door behind them. Rae walked a couple steps down a hall. To the left was a small kitchen and straight ahead a couple more steps was a living room. A black leather couch hugged one ocean-blue wall, while a black widescreen TV occupied most of the visible surface area of the other.

She walked through the living room a couple steps down a hall, past the open bar that looked into the kitchen. The bedroom occupied the end of the hall, past a small bath. The room seemed immense as she stepped inside, but that may have been due to the color; the entire room was painted in black—ceiling and walls were the hue of midnight, and even the carpet was a shade of black. Framed around the room were photographs of humans in coitus—but these were not simple art porn prints. Some of the women had been photographed lying on silver steel beds, while being penetrated by women with gently tapered knives fastened to their waists in place of strap-ons. There were bloody men strapped and stretched on racks, while women adorned only in chains straddled and fucked their faces and cocks. In one image, a woman forced her sex upon a beefy man’s face as she held a pipe cutter to his hard cock. Blood dripped from the place where the metal touched his flesh. There were images of men and women bleeding from a hundred whip marks, all of them clearly aroused and enjoying whatever partner they mounted or were mounted by. In one scene, a man with two bleeding stumps for legs French-kissed a woman who had hamburger where her hand should have been. The handprint on her naked white ass dripped fresh blood and both of their bodies were dotted and smeared with the quickly draining remnants of their lives. Yet their tongues still played…

In the midst of the gallery of pain porn was a huge, king-size bed. Its bedspread and pillows were silken black, and as Rae stood still in the room taking it all in, Kharon put his hands on her hips, holding her firmly from behind.

“I hope you approve,” he said.

“Oh yes,” she smiled. Even after the night’s exertions, she felt herself warm at the mood the room set. “It’s perverted as hell. It’s…amazing.”

Kharon slipped his hand under her shirt and softly stroked the fresh wounds on her back. His touch was like a balm to her; all of the complaints of her tortured skin faded. His hands did not stop on her back. He reached around to press his palms to her tummy and slipped them lower to toy with the swollen lips of her labia, exposed beneath her skirt. Then slowly, he drew his hands up her sides and rib cage until his fingers neared the underside of her breasts. In seconds he had slipped above them too, gently cupping her softest flesh and then teasing her nipples hard between the cool tips of his long fingers. He breathed against her neck and Rae melted back against him, dying for his touch. She had dreamed about him since the first moment they had met, but she had never dreamed that she would have him like this. Alone in a sensual room, all to herself.

Kharon drew the shirt over her head, and Rae didn’t resist. She took a deep breath and enjoyed the sensation of being undressed by another, as if she were a child.

Then he loosed the button of her tiny skirt and drew down her stockings until she stood nude, a white statue unmoving in the center of the black room.

He undressed himself then as Rae watched, slowly exposing an emaciated form. His ribs were visible, barely covered, it seemed, by his blue-white skin. He was pale as a corpse and thin as a rail. She could almost see his bones move beneath the parchment of his flesh. Every vein on his arms stood out in blue relief. Rae realized that he was hairless—completely, utterly hairless. Could he be this way from shaving? Or was he naturally bald? She didn’t care, she just had to feel it for herself.

She stepped forward as he stepped out of his long black pants. His body was day to the night of his clothes, and Rae put her palms on the pale, bluish nipples of his chest, anxious to feel this strange but powerful man. He was not beautiful; just the opposite. And yet, something about him drew her, attracted her, and she knew that whatever he asked, she would do. No matter how evil or dirty or foul. She pressed her breasts to his and kissed his neck as he stretched to the side, allowing her access. She breathed in his scent, faintly acrid, like burned hair. She felt his cock shift and grow between them, until it pressed against the inside of her thigh.

“What do you want from me?” he asked, pushing her hair aside to whisper in her ear.

“You,” she answered. “I want you.”

He bent against her and slipped an arm under the backs of her knees and then hoisted, lifting her all at once into the air. He laid her on the bed and climbed on after. He crawled on top of her, propping himself up on his arms to stare down at the small erections of her breasts. He bent to lick and then bite them. She squirmed at his kiss.

His mouth moved from her tits to her neck, and then his tongue was in her mouth. It felt strange. Liquid smooth, but winter chill.

“You’re freezing,” she whispered, when he slid closer, and his penis pushed for her to give him access.

“Then warm me,” he said. “Before you grow cold too.”

She spread her legs wide, lifting her ankles to rest on his shoulders.

“Whatever you want,” she said.

“I want you, here, in the dark for me,” he said, pushing himself like melting ice inside her. She moaned and accepted him, pulled him closer in a way that she hadn’t with a man in a long while. She wanted him to be not just inside her, but
IN
her, part of her.

“Take me,” she whispered. Part of her thought of Mark at that moment, as there was something about this sex that was different from just a swinger’s tryst. Something deeper was happening.

“If I take you, you belong to the dark forever,” he warned, long black eyes staring hard into hers as he shifted in small, tight circles against her groin. She drew in a breath and let it out, again and again, small sharp gasps of pleasure. Rae looked deep into his eyes and thought about his words. She thought about the pictures of people being impaled all around her and of the rabbits she had helped run not so long ago. She thought of Mark and smiled. He’d been good to her but…

“I’m yours,” she agreed, dragging her nails down Kharon’s back and closing her eyes as she felt the rush of his orgasm cascade inside her.

The cool flesh of him drove her heat to an explosion that left her senseless, head spinning on the damp black pillows. She cried out again and again as he spent himself inside her, and her moans continued even after he drew away and ran his fingers across the soft skin of her cheek, delicately, yet she could feel the edge of his nails.

“Until tonight then,” he whispered finally and slipped off the bed.

The lights turned off in the other room, and then the door to the hall opened and closed, leaving Rae exhausted and spent, in the midnight room.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Searching

The ad read:

Feel the Lash, Taste the Knife.

Do you want it?

Bondage-A-Go-Go

The Cat Club

3713 Broadview

Thursday, August 18

9 p.m.

Mark bent the page over and leafed through the rest of the free magazine. Nearly every page featured an ad for an escort service or adult video store. He had been in the adult scene for a while now with Rae, but he’d had no idea there were so many outlets locally.

He pulled another magazine off the rack in the vestibule of Galaxy Adult World and skimmed through the pages looking for any other options. The last six pages were dedicated to personal ads, and he thought those might be a source for leads as well. He’d decided that his only hope of finding Rae was to seek out some of the more extreme sex events that hid in the city’s basements and warehouses after hours.

He and Rae had been recruited at a swingers club…so obviously NightWhere looked for people in those places. With its focus on pain, where better to search than at the city’s extreme bondage clubs?

At least, that was Mark’s theory.

He rolled the two magazines up and stuffed them in his back pocket. Then he went inside.

The cash register and a case display of condoms, jellies and vibrators was next to the door as soon as he stepped into the store. The place had racks of porno mags in the front, from
Hustler
and
Penthouse
to more obscure titles like
Golden Girls
and
MILFs and Gangbang Brothers
. In the back half of the store, the walls were covered with DVDs divided by type—from Straight, Gay, Bi and Bondage to Lesbian and Amateur. A sign on the wall at the back of the store pointed to a stairway and read
Peep Shows, 25 Cents
.

On the counter by the door, a small poster board was covered with Polaroid photos of women holding their shirts up to their necks to expose their tits, obviously taken right there in the store. At the top, in marker, it read
See Who We’ve Seen!

Mark stood and looked at the Polaroids for a minute, wondering if he’d recognize any of the women. There were Mexicans, blacks and whites, fat and thin, old and young. But none that he knew.

“Need help?” a voice from behind the counter asked. Mark looked up to see a thin, older guy watching him. The man wore heavy black-rimmed glasses that made his eyes look too close-set. He apparently hadn’t shaved in a day or two.

Mark opened his mouth to say no, but then caught himself. He was used to dismissing shop clerks, but…that’s why he was here.

“Actually, yes,” he said. “Have you ever heard of a place called NightWhere?”

The guy raised an eyebrow. “That some kinda underwear store?”

Mark grinned. “No—it’s
where
as in a place, not clothing,” he said. “It’s like a heavy-bondage club.”

“Private club?” the guy asked. “I’ve heard of Bondage-A-Go-Go, but not NightWhere. ’Course, those dominatrices are always starting up some new dungeon. One gets busted and they pop up with a new name the next week a block away.”

“No, it’s a bigger kind of deal than that,” Mark said. “But it’s in a different place every month.”

The man grinned, looking at Mark over the tops of his glasses. “That’s smart,” he said. “Keep the prudes and the police away.”