The Win

by Emma York

  Back to the right, I went to the end of the corridor. There was the room with the cupboard in, the place where he’d begun to properly induct me into his world. That bar that had made my shoulders ache, the plug that had widened and tormented my ass, the clamps for my nipples, the hundred and one toys we were yet to try out together.

  Upstairs were several bedrooms. There was a study, another reading room. One room served as art gallery. It was the size of two or three bedrooms knocked through at some point in the past. Six tall windows faced the back of the house, letting in the light to illuminate the paintings that covered the walls.

  Up on the second floor, I found the servant accommodation, the rooms smaller but still palatial compared to what I was used to at home. The carpets were as thick and the few people I met nodded greetings but were busy doing their own things, working, reading, busy on laptop computers.

  The hallways on each floor were filled with ornaments, statues, antiques. I found Roman headstones, ancient Greek statues, Oriental vases. I would have to ask him what some of these were, where they had come from. Stopping in front of a marble piece on a wooden plinth, I examined it closely.

  She reminded me a little of myself. Whoever had completed the carving had been incredibly talented. It was a woman, young, late teens or early twenties, her hair curling around her head, almost real even though to the touch it was as cold as the rest of the marble. On her face was a look of fear and the reason why was easily apparent. Behind her was a carved wolf chasing, jaws open, eyes fixed on her.

  That was how I felt when I first arrived here, that he was coming after me, that there was no escape from something so strong, so dangerous, so determined. But compared to the statue, I had no expression of fear on my face when his hands descended onto me. I thought I had nothing to fear from my situation.

  The doorbell rang at that exact moment. I thought one of the staff would answer it but when it rang again and there was no sound of anyone heading towards it, I descended to the ground floor and pulled it open myself.

  When I saw a man in a police uniform standing on the doorstep, for a moment I felt afraid. Then I became suspicious. I got the sneaking feeling he had done this, that this was part of the elaborate roleplay that was our life together. I was to be taken somewhere and he would be waiting there, no doubt to remove my handcuffs if I pleased him enough.

  “Alice Lawson?” the officer asked.

  “Yes,” I replied, already putting my hands out ready. I had to give him credit, it was a realistic uniform.

  “I’m afraid Mr Powers has been in an accident.”

  “An accident? What kind of accident?” Fear rose up in me once again. If this was part of his roleplay, it was a weird way to go about it.

  “I don’t know. I was just asked to come and collect you and bring you to him.”

  Of course you were, I thought, fear turning to irritation. I’d have to have words with him. It was one thing to create a scenario to play around with, it was another to scare me into thinking he was genuinely hurt. Or was I supposed to play nurse?

  “Where is he?”

  “In hospital. Are you ready to go?”

  “Yes, of course. Let’s go.”

  I didn’t know what to think. It was an ordinary car I climbed into but the uniform he was wearing, his manner, they suggested this was no roleplay. “Look,” I said, leaning forwards as he started the engine. “This isn’t real, is it?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he replied, setting off down the drive.

  “Who sent you?”

  “My superiors sent me. Told me to be quick, said it was serious.”

  I sat back, becoming worried once again. Was it real? Wasn’t it? I went to dig my phone out only to realise I’d left it charging in my bedroom. “Have you got a phone on you?” I asked.

  “Afraid not but we’ll only be a couple of minutes.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “I don’t know but I know they think it’s serious.”

  “Which hospital are we going to.”

  “St Jude’s.”

  “But St Jude’s is the other way.”

  That’s when I realised. It was a roleplay. It had to be. The officer suddenly looked guilty, his mask slipping as he realised he’d been caught out. I didn’t want to upset him, it wasn’t his fault I knew where we were, or that he’d picked the hospital my father had been taken to all those years ago.

  That made me think about my father. I hadn’t been there when he died. Mum had come home in tears and told me. I’d listened as she said they did everything they could for him and in the end, she’d watched him go.

  I cried too, more because she was upset. I was too young to know what death meant.

  “Don’t lie to your mother,” was the last thing he said to me before I was taken home, leaving the two of them alone together. At that age, I didn’t get it. I thought he’d come back sometime, when he was finished being dead. It was many years before I grasped the reality of it. We were alone in the world.

  I thought about saying the safe word, Wonderland, pull the plug on this. But I didn’t for two reasons. One, Ethan had clearly gone to a lot of trouble to set this up and I didn’t want to disappoint him before anything had even happened. Two, I got a feeling the driver might not have been told the safe word and then I’d have to break character and tell him I knew what was happening, that I wanted to have a word with his employer.

  I would have to speak to Ethan afterwards, tell him I had found one of my limits. I didn’t want to think of him getting hurt. I didn’t want to think it might be true that he was injured. The thought was enough to cause me physical pain, my stomach in knots as we drove. It might only be an elaborate set up but it was confusing, not sexy. I didn’t like it.

  To have been arrested and taken to him for an interrogation, that would have been hot. But not this, not to think he was lying dying in the same place my father had gone.

  “Where are we going?” I asked as the car turned a corner.

  “Almost there,” he replied, pulling into a space on the side of the road.

  “Where are we?”

  The door opened before he could say anything else. The next thing I knew there was a bag over my head and I couldn’t see anything at all. I gasped, the fabric sucking into my mouth with each breath as I was yanked out of the car and shoved into something. Was it another vehicle?

  I fought to free myself as a door slammed shut. There was a clicking noise. What was that? Someone grabbed my wrists and then I knew. It was a ziptie, binding my wrists. Another was attached to my ankles and then I was trussed up and unable to move, rolling around the floor of what I presumed was a van.

  The engine started and as I began to scream into the bag over my face, I was driven out of the city and into my own personal hell.

  SIX

  ETHAN

  I searched the entire house, unlocking the doors to rooms I hadn’t used in years. I couldn’t find her. I asked everyone. The cooks, the maids, anyone who was in the building. No one had seen her since she decided to explore the house that morning.

  She had been seen up on the second floor after breakfast. Someone had heard chopsticks being played on the piano. One of the gardeners had seen her walking around the house not long after I left. When I was certain she was missing, I called the police.

  “Pippa, it’s Ethan. Alice has gone missing.”

  She was sympathetic but limited in what she could do. “She’s not a child or a vulnerable adult, I can’t even touch this for twenty-four hours.”

  “But she could be anywhere by then.”

  “Or she might have turned up and we’ve been wasting our time.”

  “Do you think I’d bother you if she had just gone for a walk? Something’s wrong, Pippa, I know it. Please, help me.”

  “All right, listen Ethan. I’ll do what I can but it’ll be on the down low, if I get caught, I’m in a world of shit.”

  “Thank you, let me know if you hear
anything.”

  “Take my advice, see if she went home. Is she supposed to be at work?”

  “Not until tonight.”

  I hadn’t even thought to do that. Would she have gone home? Without leaving me a note or anything? Had something come up with her mother?

  “If she’s not at work tonight, give me a ring back and I’ll put the name about but if I do it now and she shows up, I’ll-”

  “I know, you’ll get it in the neck.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine, Ethan. She won’t have gone far. Try not to worry.”

  That was easy for her to say. She hadn’t left her house to find someone had stolen all of her money, then come home to find the most important person in the world vanished.

  I tried my best to keep calm. She would turn up. She had just gone out without leaving me a note. That was all. She’d gone shopping or gone for a walk somewhere. But I couldn’t get away from the niggling feeling that something worse was going on. It was a hell of a coincidence that she would vanish on the same day that someone would hack into the system at the office and set out to ruin me.

  I waited until her shift was due to start at the club. When the time ticked towards eight, I was already in the car park, hoping I would see her arrive, climbing out of a taxi and then everything would be all right. I couldn’t go inside to see if she was already there. They knew my membership had been cancelled. Even with all my billions, the door staff wouldn’t take a bribe. It was not the way the club worked.

  Alice didn’t appear but Rowena did, ten past eight her car rolled in and came to a stop over near the staff door. I climbed out of my car but before I’d even reached her, she was shaking her head. “You’re not a member anymore, Ethan, there’s nothing more I can do for you.”

  “Have you seen her?” I asked. “Has she rung you?”

  “Who?”

  “Alice of course, who do you think?”

  “No, I’ve not seen her. Why, what’s happened?”

  I sighed, trying to keep my emotions under control, not wanting my anger to bubble over. I’d never get anywhere if that happened, not with Rowena. “Someone has emptied the company accounts. Someone has tanked the business and now Alice has vanished. She is supposed to be working tonight, right?”

  “Right,” she said, shaking her head. “I see.”

  “You know something, don’t you. Goddamit, Rowena, how far do we go back? Tell me what’s going on.”

  “I got a red token. Your name was on it.”

  I felt like an anvil had dropped on my head. The weight of her words sent me staggering backwards. “You’re kidding,” was all I managed to say, a tiny note of hope in my voice. “Say you’re kidding.”

  “I’m sorry, Ethan. I tried to stop him. I didn’t think it would go this far.”

  “How far did you think it would go? A slap on the wrists. You’re a naughty boy Mr Powers then all back to normal. You know how these things work.”

  “I had no choice, Ethan. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry? She’s gone and you’re sorry.” I felt a wall of rage building up inside me. “This is Jason’s doing, isn’t it?”

  “He doesn’t give out the tokens, you know that.”

  “Then who was it? Him?”

  She nodded.

  “Give me his name.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “This is serious. They could be doing anything to her. What the fuck did I do to deserve a red token?”

  “You put her name in the auction and you hit someone on club property.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud. For that, I get a red? You know that’s nowhere near serious enough. Loss of membership was enough. This has got Jason written all over it, I just know it. You’ve got to help me, Rowena. Give me his name, let me talk to him, find out where she went.”

  “I can’t, you know I can’t.”

  She glanced up to her left and I saw where she was looking. The camera above the door, the unblinking eye always on, watching the car park, watching our conversation.

  Her voice lowered a little. “I can’t risk helping you. I’ve enough problems tonight waiting for the glazier, some little vandal smashed one of the windows. I can’t help you.”

  I caught her eye and an understanding passed between us. “I’m sorry, I can’t do anything,” she said in her normal voice. “Once the token is out, there’s nothing anyone can do. No one can break the rules.”

  She turned and walked away. I didn’t care. I had the information I needed. It had passed between us in an instant. All I could do was wait for the club to shut.

  So began the longest few hours of my life. While I sat in the car, watching members laughing and joking as they headed inside, I got a call from Pippa. No news of her. I told her to keep an eye out but not to do anything just yet. If I was going to do this, I was going to need the police to remain out of it.

  For years, we all knew of the system. We all knew about the owner of the club. He had never been seen. Only Rowena dealt with him, everyone else dealt with her.

  He didn’t just own Club Darkness. He owned a string of clubs like this spread around the world. No one knew exactly how many there were. Same as no one knew how many tokens were out there. Black tokens for bidding on the auction. That was all most of us ever needed to know.

  There were whispers about the red tokens, nothing more than rumours at first. But ten years ago, one had been issued. Those of us who were here at the time had thought it was a joke, that someone was pretending the legend was true.

  But the woman it was given to, the things that happened to her. Afterwards, none of us joked about it anymore.

  Word got round fast. Obey the rules. But as time went on, we all started to relax. There hadn’t been another token since and a number of rules were broken in the following years. There was that punch up in the car park last Christmas. All that happened was the two who started it had their memberships revoked. That was the worst that I thought might happen to me. That was what I deserved for being caught.

  This had Jason’s hands on it. Somehow he had manipulated this situation. I didn’t know how. I didn’t care. What I cared about was finding Alice and fixing this. Losing membership of the club had hurt. Looking up at it, hearing the noise within, was like being outside of a family party that you belonged to.

  But that was nothing compared to how I felt about Alice. Even losing my fortune meant nothing. I’d have given it all up to get her back.

  The night wore on and my emotions coalesced into a plan. I would get in. I would get the name. I would go see them, make them talk. Then I would find her and bring her home. Only when she was perfectly safe would I set about getting revenge. That was for later, much later. For now, I needed to find her.

  I knew she was out there somewhere. Was she afraid? Was she thinking of me? Waiting for me to rescue her?

  Only when the last car but mine left and all the nights went out did I emerge. Around the side of the club was the window by Rowena’s office. She was right, the bottom pane had been cracked and taped over. Had she broken it herself?

  Peeling away the tape, I was able to remove the broken section.

  Rowena was a good friend. She had been for many years. But she was limited in what she could do by the position she was in. She couldn’t be seen to be showing special favours to any member. Or ex-member in my case. She had to abide by the rules. But like me, she knew which rules could be bent just a little.

  She had helped me more than she had to but I would never tell a soul. Even if I was caught, she was in the clear. I had just decided to break into the club, an act of vengeance for having my membership revoked.

  Once the glass was out of the pane, I was able to reach in and up, undo the latch, slide the window up just enough to slip inside.

  Once I was in, I slid the window closed before stopping dead. Could I hear anything? No, the place was dead. It was just after four in the morning. If there were alarms in place, they hadn’t noticed
me yet.

  Using the light of my phone, I scanned the desk. She had left a slip of paper in the middle of the pile, barely noticeable amongst the rest but it stood out to me. It was written in red ink. Red ink for a red token. Kind of appropriate. Two words. William Lawson.

  Lawson. Alice’s last name was Lawson. Was it a coincidence or was this man connected with her in some way? She’d said her father was dead but there might be other family members out there. What if someone had taken offence at me seeing her? At what we were doing together? Was that enough of a reason to ruin my life?

  I took the slip of paper and headed back over to the window. Easing it open, I was outside a second later. Then I walked slowly to my car, avoiding the sweep of the camera. Once behind the wheel, I dug out my phone. Looking on the internet, I could find a whole bunch of William Lawsons out there and no way of knowing which one it was that I wanted. Then I thought of Roy.

  The IT guy. Four in the morning. He was bound to be asleep. But it had to be worth a shot. I rang the number and he answered at once. “Ethan Powers, you’re up as late as me.”

  “I wasn’t sure you’d be up. Where are you?”

  “I’m still at the office. I’m getting there. Another few hours and I might have something.”

  “I need you to look something up for me. You’ll find it quicker than I could.”

  “What do you need? If it’s pizza menus I have the best three in London memorised.”

  “William Lawson. Any connection to Club Darkness. It might be buried but I need an address and I need the right one.”

  “Give me ten minutes.”

  He hung up and I sat and waited. All I could do was wait. My future was entirely in someone else’s hands. While I waited, I thought of Alice. “I’m coming for you,” I muttered to myself. “Just hold on a little longer.”

  SEVEN

  ALICE