The Original Sinners: The Red Years

Nora didn’t reply. Closing her fingers around the key so tightly the teeth bit fiercely into her hand, she slipped from the room and into a back hallway. Nora felt Søren’s eyes on her. She didn’t look back.

20

Zach followed Griffin to the balcony section of the bar. Leaning over the railing, they studied the show below.

A lovely dark-haired woman with sinister-looking chopsticks in her hair and wearing a kimono stood on a platform below them. She twined a black rope around a shapely red-haired girl who stood calm and naked next to her.

“That’s Lady Noy. She’s the queen of Asian Rope Bondage around here.” Griffin pointed out two women down in the pit. “And that babe she’s tying up is Alyssa Petrosky.”

“Petrosky?” The name sounded vaguely familiar.

“Yeah, that Petrosky. She’s the governor’s stepdaughter. She’s a pretty infamous submissive down here. Really into exhibitionism.”

“I can see that.” Zach marveled as Lady Noy finished her work and hoisted the girl into the air with a complicated rope and pulley system. The girl lay back in an elegant asymmetrical arch and seemed completely at peace with both her nudity and her bondage.

“And that’s Agent Byers—he’s high-level FBI,” Griffin said, pointing out a man strapped to a cross and being flogged by a woman half his age. “And a sub, too.”

“Are you allowed to tell me all this?”

“What? You’re going to tell someone? No one would believe you if you did tell. And if you spill a word, Kingsley Edge will destroy you. He watches all our backs—it’s part of the membership fee. I’d bet you my bank account that he’s already got a file on you.”

“On me? Are you serious?” Zach asked. He remembered how Nora seemed to know so much about him at their first meeting.

“You get within five feet of Nora and you get a file. And it sounds like you’ve been a helluva lot closer than five feet.”

“I’m hardly blackmail material,” Zach protested.

“Really? Anybody out there you’d prefer not know that Nora blew you?”

Zach flushed and said nothing. Yes, there certainly was.

“Point taken,” Zach said.

“You gotta know, Zach—Nora’s not just some smut writer with a wild sex life. She’s the motherfucking queen of the Underground. And Kingsley Edge is, obviously, our king.”

“And him? What is he?” Zach didn’t even want to say Søren’s name.

“He’s whatever’s higher than a king and queen.”

“An emperor?” Zach guessed.

Griffin smirked. “A god.”

“A god,” Zach repeated and looked down at the worshippers beneath them. The FBI agent Griffin spoke about was now being dragged from his cross and the woman in leather wrapped a collar around his neck and attached a leash to it. She led him on his hands and knees across the floor.

“I can’t believe you put collars on human beings,” Zach said with renewed disgust.

“The collar is everything down here. Subs love their collars.”

“Do all submissives wear collars?”

“Not all of them. House submissives, those are subs that work here at the Circle, wear house collars to show they’re on the payroll. They look like this,” Griffin said, pointing at the collar he wore as part of his punishment. Where a dog tag usually would be hung a small silver number eight inside a circle. “But in private a Dom will use a collar either for utility, for love or both. A collar can be as meaningful as a wedding ring to some couples.” Griffin laughed. “Holy shit…you should have seen Nora and Søren back when they were still together. I’d only been coming here a year before she left him. But I got to see them in their glory days. Collars are leather usually, black or brown, right? Guess what color her collar was?”

“I don’t know. Red?”

“White,” came a voice from behind them. Zach and Griffin turned around and found Søren watching them in a white collar of his own. “What else would it have been?”

* * *

The halls and stairways of the 8th Circle were a labyrinth to most, but Nora knew them better than her own home. She could have found her way around blindfolded. A few times in the past she’d had to. She turned corner after corner and descended a small staircase to the lowest level of the building. At the end of the quiet hallway stood a door identical to all the others except this door and its knob were painted completely white.

Nora stood before the door and took slow, deep breaths. She couldn’t even imagine who or what waited behind the door. The White Room was reserved only for the highest-level Dominants—not even Griffin had earned White Room privileges yet.

Slowly, she opened the door and hung her riding crop on the knob outside to show it was occupied. The White Room door had a lock, one of the few at the Circle that did, but Nora knew better than to lock herself in with a stranger. She’d learned that the hard way.

Nora took a cautious step inside. At the center of the room stood an iron four-poster bed heaped with luxurious white linens and pillows and surrounded by a semitranslucent white bed-curtain. For all its pretensions of purity and innocence, Nora knew for a fact that some of the most lurid sex acts in the history of the world had been performed in this room.

She crept to the bed and pushed the bed-curtain back. In the center of the bed lay a young man sleeping on his side. Nora studied him for a moment as her heart beat ferociously in her chest. He appeared to be about seventeen years old. He had straight black hair that fell past his shoulders and the longest, darkest eyelashes she’d even seen on a boy. They rested on his pale cheeks and fluttered in his sleep. Her eyes roamed down his body. He wore a frayed T-shirt, jeans with tears in the knees and white socks, one with a hole in the toe. He’d taken off his shoes but not his watch. It was leather and as wide as a bondage cuff. He’d covered his other wrist with a black wristband. He appeared tall but his hands and feet seemed disproportionately large. He hadn’t finished growing yet. Nora sighed and cursed Søren with everything within her. The boy—her gift—was inexpressibly lovely.

Nora leaned forward and brushed an errant strand of hair off the boy’s cheek and tucked it behind his ear.

“Oh, Søren,” she said as she sighed to herself. “You shouldn’t have.”

* * *

Zach searched for a suitable reply. He found himself strangely speechless in Søren’s presence. The priest seemed to find Zach’s discomfort amusing.

“Where’s Nora, sir?” Griffin asked for him.

“She will be occupied for some time with Circle business. While she’s off, I thought I should entertain her guest for her,” Søren said with a magnanimous air.

“But Nora told me I had to stay—”

Søren’s hand snaked out with the subtle speed of a cobra and grabbed Griffin by the throat. Zach stepped forward but Griffin shot him a warning look. At least it appeared Griffin could still breathe.

“Mr. Easton, may I call you Zachary?”

Zach attempted to tamp down his nervousness before answering.

“Do I call you Father Søren? Or sir?”

“I understand you aren’t Catholic. And you aren’t part of this community. You may call me Søren, of course. Would you care for a tour?”

Zach sensed that Nora’s priest desired his company for a reason or reasons he didn’t care to find out. But he decided to use it as a bargaining chip.

“Will you let Griffin go?” Zach asked.

Søren seemed to find this amusing.