Saving Sara (Masters of the Castle) (3 page)

Everything around her jerked. Sara didn’t realize it was because she herself had moved that way, wrenching her hand out of Robert’s though he tried to grab her arm. She twisted to run, but her legs refused to follow her and she fell, crashing to the floor in a rip of costumed skirts. Pain shot from the impact through her hip and up her back. She must have screamed, though she didn’t realize that either, not until everyone around her turned to stare. She flailed on her back on the floor, every limb scrambling and clawing to get her uncooperative body moving, unable to tear her eyes off the sight of that flaming wand. Unable to stop screaming.

Robert turned away from her, stabbing his fingers back through his hair
, and something hard struck her back. A wall… no, a door… It yielded almost immediately and the next thing she knew, Sara was kick-crawling backwards across cool bathroom tiles. She stopped only when she crashed into the wall between two urinals, one of which was in use.  Zipping quickly back into his pants, the startled man jumped back from her and then fled the bathroom entirely.

The most horrible noise reverberated through the small room—high-pitched, scratchy, rattling in and out of raspy sound and repeating over and over again. It bounced off the bathroom walls, filling her ears. It was her, she suddenly recognized. She was still screaming, and it barely sounded human.

She wasn’t burning. The fire hadn’t touched her, hadn’t even come close, and still it took real effort before she could make that awful sound stop coming. Huddled against the wall, shaking violently, she clutched her knees to her chest and stared at the door. The smell of the fuel was still in her nose, although now it mingled with the equally pungent odor of something else—ammonia.

She had wet herself.

Jackson had his plate in hand, his silverware rolled in a napkin and tucked up underneath, and his mouth set for seafood alfredo. So, naturally, no sooner had he joined the buffet line than did he get the call: Dungeon proper, sub in trouble.

He came out of the line and headed for the door, dropping his plate and silverware on the first table he encountered. The couple already seated there looked up from their plates in wide-eyed surprise. They glanced from him to the bold white lettering of his shirt—
Castle Security
—stretched tight across his chest and back to him again. He cut an imposing figure and he knew it.

Always disarm with a smile.

He smiled and waved. “Hi, how you folks doing? Dishes are clean, don’t worry.” He patted the man on the shoulder, reassuring the submissive first. “How’s the food?” he asked the woman next, distracting her back to her plate. “Seafood alfredo. Excellent choice. It’s always good here. Excuse me.”

One more pat, one more smile—always personable, always friendly; yeah, that was him—and then he was off. Long-legged strides carried him quickly from the dining hall and out of the thick of the lunch crowd. As soon as possible though, he broke into a jog, ducking through the ballroom to shave some time off having to go all the way around and reaching the main entrance foyer a good ten seconds ahead of the response team on duty. He had the under-stair cupboard door open and was halfway down before he heard the jingle of their keys and the pound of their sneakers hitting the top step behind him.

Slow. He tsked and shot them both a look. Ah, but he was in charge. He
should
be the first on the scene, the first to know what had happened and the first to act to fix it—whatever
it
was.

Today’s "it" wasn’t hard to find. All Jackson had to do was follow the crowd. The dungeon monitors already had the scene pretty well locked down. One was talking to a very agitated dominant—purple bracelet, nobleman program. He was doing a lot of nodding, a lot of commiserating; now and then he’d interject a word or two, and it was working. He was calming the guest down. With every word, the man’s voice was lowering. His pacing and wide-arm movements were becoming less aggressive. Jackson would talk to him eventually, but for now, he wasn’t needed there.

Two other dungeon monitors were re-routing the crowd, turning the music up a little, getting the focus of public attention back on good times. Like the pretty little lady doing time on a wooden horse, unpadded, with a peaked top, which she straddled like a pro. Her hands were bound behind her back and she had weights on both ankles, keeping the pressure right there on her bald little pussy and very sensitive perineum.  Her naked body was shimmering with sweat. Very nice. The little whimpering sounds she made were even nicer. He loved those sounds. One of these days, he really ought to take some vacation time. It’d been a long, long time since he’d last had a pretty little thing like that bound and helpless to his whims, the blush of a hot bottom suffusing her  and soft whimpers like these spurring his lust to hot and hungry peaks.

Yeah, someday…but not right now.

He turned his attention back to the job and noticed one of the dungeon monitors standing a little apart. Standing guard, it seemed, in front of the men’s room door. When the man noticed Jackson, he beckoned, but Jackson was already heading for him.

“Ethan,” Jackson greeted, as soon as he was close enough, “what happened?”

The dungeon monitor shook his head, then shrugged. “Claustrophobic, maybe. I really don’t know. I’m actually supposed to be patrolling the private rooms. I came running when she started screaming, and I know, I know what you’re going to say. People scream here all the time. But if you’d heard the way she was screaming, you’d have come running, too.”

She? Jackson double-checked himself. Yup, the restroom door said gentlemen. He looked at Ethan again. “Who’s in there with her?”

The young man almost winced. “Well,” he hedged. “I started to go in but, to be honest, I do ‘take it, bitch’ a hell of a lot better than I do ‘there, there…please stop crying.’”

Jackson managed to keep from rolling his eyes, but only just. He stepped forward, started to push the bathroom door open, but then changed his mind. With a single step back, he aligned himself with Ethan again. Looking him straight in the eye, very quietly he gave the young dungeon monitor a single word of advice: “Learn.”

Ethan managed not to grimace the same way Jackson had managed not to roll his eyes: only just. “Yes, sir.”

Stupid kid. Young kid, Jackson promptly corrected himself. One who had a lot of potential and a
lot
still to learn.

Planting his hand on the door, Jackson pushed it open and went inside. The pitiful sight of the crumpled submissive was truly that: pitiful. Huddled against the wall, she clutched her knees to her chest as if they could somehow shield her from whatever came next. A long trail of torn skirt cut a path back to the door
, showing the direction she’d come, and the smell of piss hit him on his first breath. He didn’t know if she was sitting in a puddle of it or if some jackass had missed the target at the urinals, but Jackson immediately backed out the door again.

“Have someone bring me a change of clothes, washcloth and towel,” he told Ethan. “Put a cleaning sign on this door and direct anyone who needs it to the secondary bathrooms on the other side of the dungeon. And he,” Jackson stabbed an accusatory finger at the agitated dominant most likely responsible for all this, “doesn’t go anywhere until I figure out what happened.”

Ethan nodded and back Jackson retreated into the bathroom. He locked the door, guaranteeing their privacy before turning his attention to the woman once more. She looked like a wadded up tissue, huddled in the volumes of her ruined gown, sandwiched between two urinals with her face pressed to her knees and her head buried under both arms. Now and then she sniffled, but from the sounds of it, she seemed to be done crying. Which always made his job easier.

Time to go to work.

Jackson pasted on his most disarming smile. “Hey, honey. Mind if I—”

That
was as far as he got before she jerked her head up off her knees and looked at him. Her face was flushed and wet with tears, her baby-blue eyes and soft mouth both rounded in a warring mix of surprise, recognition and dismay.

“Jackson?” she croaked, her poor voice sounding raw.

And just that fast, all her features rearranged themselves into something that resurrected memories best left forgotten. His own recognition hit him like a half-ton truck. “Sara.”

Her hair had grown back; of all things, that was his first thought.

She was still beautiful—how could she ever be anything but?—that was his second.

And yet, what came spilling out of his mouth was something else entirely.

“Give me one Goddamned reason why I shouldn’t put you over my knee right here and now,” he growled. He had no idea why he was growling; he wasn’t mad. He didn’t know what he was feeling, but it wasn’t mad. Not at first, anyway.

Not until she blinked up at him with those wounded baby blues—like a kid who’d just been told Santa had been found shot to death in a back alley somewhere; no more Santa, no more presents, from now on, Christmas cancelled—then she burst into tears. “Please don’t yell at me, Jackson. I can’t take it. Not now. Please?”

She covered her head with her arms again and sobbed into her skirts. That was when Jackson got mad.

Jackson never got mad. Well, all right. Upon occasion he might, but when it hit him it was usually directed at co-workers who failed to follow protocol, or Doms who should have known better, or assholes trying to pass themselves off as Doms in the pursuit of a
“Fifty Shades” thrill.  There was more to being a Dom than smacking ass and pulling hair; Jackson knew that even if half the clients in this place didn’t. The only ones he didn’t get mad at were the subs. There wasn’t any point to it. Losing one’s temper involved emotion and this was a resort based on fantasy. Emotion was never involved, not for him, not when he was playing and certainly not when he was working.

Not until now.

Jackson stared across the bathroom at the pitiful heap that was Sara, her shoulders shaking as she cried. Sitting in piss and the phony, fancy rags of a bygone era, every bit as beautiful as he remembered her being. Back within his reach for the first time in over three years and yet no closer to being his than she had been back then.

God, he wanted her.

What was that old saying? Want in one hand; spit in the other—see which fills up faster.

Yeah, that was the story of Sara in his life.

A brisk knock on the bathroom door shook Jackson back into working mode. He unlocked it and opened only far enough to take the washcloth and towel Ethan offered. The dungeon monitor held up three Grecian slave-girl outfits—little more than white tunics designed to cover as little as humanly possible.

“I brought small, medium and large. I wasn’t sure about her size.”

Jackson took the medium. He thought she might be small—compared to him, she was downright tiny—but he knew for a fact she wasn’t large. He knew by experience that picking the wrong size could only aggravate the situation. Too big would leave her swimming in excess cloth (
first this and now you think I’m fat?
). Worse would be trying to squeeze her into something too small (
first this and now I’m fat!
) before taking that long walk of shame up to Master Marshall’s office. One crisis at a time; that was his motto, and he always did his best never to aggravate a bad situation.

He took a quick look around the room. The dungeon monitors had done their jobs admirably. Almost everyone was refocused back into play-time mode. One scene had concluded—a sub with badly-smeared makeup was being let out of the stocks by her master. Several new scenes had begun—the violet wand was being warmed up while a nervous sub looked on, wringing her hands and nodding as she listened to whatever her master was telling her. He was taking the time to soothe her, comfort her fears, tell her what was going to happen—Jackson liked that. Good man.

Dead ahead of him, the agitated dominant had calmed for the most part. He wasn’t pacing anymore, but stood with his back propped against a stripper pole, watching the people around him. A lick of flames ignited on a well-soaked fire-play wand, catching Jackson’s eye. He stared, everything coming into sharp clarity as he watched experimental patterns being drawn—first in alcohol and then in fire—on the back of a very relaxed submissive. She barely moved, only a slight feline enjoyment as she arched ever so minutely up into his caressing hand when he smoothed the fire back out again.

Jackson was moving before he realized he intended to, and it wasn’t to go back into the bathroom.

“No one goes in,” he told Ethan, never once taking his eyes off his target. He crossed the floor in only a handful of brisk steps and when he stopped, it was to stand in front of the agitated dominant. This time, he made no effort to diminish how imposing he was. The dominant stiffened in surprise and bumped into the security guard waiting beside him, his eyes growing huge as he stared up into Jackson’s accusing glare.

“Did you come with her or were you matched here?” he asked, sheer habit helping to keep his voice soft, calm, helping to keep his arm at his side when what he really wanted was to grab the—at best insensitive jerk and at worst total dickwad—by the scruff of his scrawny neck.

The man said nothing, but a slow flush of guilt began to creep up into his face.