by Zoe Blake
“Oh my God, what time is it?”
“Five thirty… Hey, where are you going? Aren’t you coming with us?”
“I can’t. I’ve got to get home!” Regina said, grabbing her purse from the bottom drawer and standing. “I’ll talk to you on Monday.”
“If you’re sure? Hey, are you going to that party?”
Regina simply gave a wave over her shoulder and instead of waiting with her fellow coworkers at the elevator, she pushed through the door and tore down the stairs. With each flight, she prayed that traffic would cooperate. If not, if she didn’t arrive home before six… She didn’t need to contemplate the consequences… he’d said any infraction would add more to her atonement.
With a screech of brakes that caused her to jerk forward against the seat belt, she practically ripped the keys from the ignition of her VW Bug and reached for the door handle. With a curse at the lack of freedom, she fumbled with the seat belt catch, yanking it free. Grabbing her purse, she raced down the ramp of the parking garage and around to the front of her building. Her pounding heart leapt in her chest at the sight of a man, standing just inside the glass doors, his hands behind his back, his posture ramrod straight. When their eyes met through the glass, his arm came around and he pointedly looked down at the watch on his wrist. When he looked up, she felt her knees began to shake. His expression matched his name—well, probably his pretend name—but he did look very grim indeed. She never made it into the building as he strode to the doors and pushed through.
“I’m so sorry… there was a jam up on…”
“If you’ll come this way?” he asked, his voice as calm as hers was frantic.
“Wait… I need to run up to my…”
“Miss Redd, you need to come with me,” he countered as his eyes captured hers. “Unless, of course, you aren’t concerned about keeping Mr. Wolffe waiting?”
Oh, she was concerned all right. She was suddenly extremely concerned. Glancing past him, she saw Paul, her doorman watching. “May I please tell Mr. Carter that I won’t be home?”
“No need,” the man said. “As Mr. Wolffe has already informed you, you need not worry. Everything has been taken care of.” He paused and then lifted his hand, gesturing towards the curb where a sleek black sedan waited. “Shall we?”
“Ye… yes, of course,” Regina said, managing to give Paul a shaky smile and a little wave before she turned to step in front of the driver, walk the few steps to the car and when he reached to open the door, managed a soft, “Thanks,” before she bent to step into the vehicle.
“You are welcome, Miss Redd.”
“Um… okay… um… I mean, thank you, Mr. Grimm.”
“Remember to fasten your seat belt.” With that, he closed the door, the sound causing her to give a little jump.
Geeze, just relax, she told herself. It’s not like you are going to your execution. You’ll be back in a couple of days. After fastening her seat belt, she remembered Glenda’s words. No, she wouldn’t be spending the weekend in bed with her tummy aching from food poisoning, but she’d most likely be spending it with her bottom… at the very least… aching from any one of a dozen implements that her love, the man who held her heart in his palm, would be using to exact the atonement he considered due.
Goldie in Chains
by Maren Smith
A Goldilocks Story
She is an independent career woman with a penchant for the seamy underside of life. Her name is Goldi, and Goldi has always walked her own road. Including the road that led to her latest job. Breaking into that house was every bit as easy as she’d been led to believe. What it wasn’t, was empty and shifters (particularly were-bears) were not known to be forgiving. Now, trapped in the terrifying dark of their basement dungeon, Goldi knows she’s in for a long night of carefully exacted revenge. What she doesn’t know is which might be worse: the inevitable pain as they work in tandem to break her down… or the incredible pleasure that pain brings.
Goldi in Chains Warning:
Three vengeful shifters... one thieving burglar caught red-handed... Beware! The following story contains serious caning, bondage, and all the anal and sexual punishment that ought to occur when someone is reckless enough to get caught in a were-bear's dungeon. When too big meets too hot, it's always just right.
Maren Smith
Excerpt from Goldi in Chains
She was an independent career woman with a penchant for the seamy underside of life. But then, she was Goldi, and she didn’t mind that. She had always walked her own path.
Lockpicks in hand, Goldi moved through the cool forest shadows. The assorted pick sizes jingled as she twirled the ring of them around her finger—flip, catch… flip, catch—and beneath her feet, crisp pine needles and brush twigs crunched softly as she slipped through the trees.
It was a remote house, the directions certainly were right about that. Not a mansion by any means, but far from a hovel and hidden well back amongst the old forest cedars that blended damn near seamlessly with the mossy roof shingles. Shadows cast by overhanging branches seemed to draw one hazy grey curtain over the river-rock walls, while the overgrown trellises of hollyhock and ivy drew another in green. From this distance, what bits of the house she could make out clearly looked more like the face of the mountainous cliffs just beyond it, or perhaps the jumble of some past landslide already grown over with vegetation. If it weren’t for the glint of daylight that periodically reflected off a second floor window as she circled the property, she might have walked right past the place without even noticing.
And that would have been a pity, because her caller had promised to pay two grand for this job. Divorce—such a nasty business. Especially when one soon-to-be ex decided to be a dick about how much she really did make and yet was stupid enough to keep records. Not that Goldi was any kind of tender-hearted Robin Hood or Scarlet Pimpernel. Oh no. When she robbed someone, it was all about the money and she certainly didn’t give it away once she got it. However, every now and then, it did give her warm, fuzzy feelings to know her impending thievery was about to shaft someone who really, genuinely deserved it. Be they male or female, exes, in her opinion, always deserved it. If they didn’t, they’d still be married.
Dressed all in form-fitting black, Goldi circled the house. First from a distance, then cautiously moving in closer, she stayed in the shadows where she’d be harder to spot until she felt confident no one was at home. No thin wisps of smoke snaked from the chimney nor were there lights on inside, not from any of the many windows and most had the curtains wide open. In this day and age, that practically begged for someone to break in. Goldi was too damn good at her job to refuse.
She made one last circle, this time with all of her attention fixed on each avenue of entry. The front door faced a small clearing; she wasn’t quite comfortable with the idea of boldly going in through the front. There was a side cellar-style door, half hidden behind a chopping block and enough neatly stacked cords of wood to keep a small village warm for at least six months, but it had a padlock on it. The lower floor windows were all high enough that she’d need something to stand on in order to reach them, but if worse came to worst, she supposed she could climb one of those wood stacks. She’d hold that in reserve for Plan B, since the house did have a back door. Nice and secluded, tucked behind a small porch and two ivy-covered trellises. A simple door latch. No deadbolt. One look at that and she was decided; she was totally a backdoor kind of girl.
Somewhere in the forest, a twig snapped. Goldi froze, but a quick scan of the trees behind her revealed no hint of danger, especially not the two-legged, just-returning-home kind. Still, she hesitated, waiting and listening, her eye following the dip of each breeze-bending fern and the rustle of the brush. Maybe it was coincidence, or maybe it was the source of the noise she was looking for, but less than ten feet from where she had pressed herself to the trunk of a large evergreen, a pinecone suddenly dropped. Tic-toc-tac—it bounced off the thick branches high over her head
and all the way down to the ground. This was a forest, she told herself, her wary eyes searching for signs of what had dropped it. Forests had animals. Squirrels and birds and all that shit.
Keep it together, Goldi, she told herself. When she got her phone call later today, she was not about to report she couldn’t do the job because she’d let herself get spooked by a bunch of rodents chucking nuts at each other. She forced her attention back to the job.
The house remained still, with no signs of occupation behind any of those open windows. Slipping through the undergrowth, she approached the back door and climbed the steps. The ivy trellises hid her well, although that honestly didn’t matter. The house was so remote, she could have done a striptease in the open yard without anyone ever knowing.
Tic-toc-tac! She jumped when another pinecone fell out of the trees, landing within feet of her. She looked up, seeing nothing but tree branches.
Fucking squirrels.
Somewhere, in the not quite so distant distance, brushes rustled.
Fucking bunnies, too. That sounded much too big and heavy to be a squirrel.
She fidgeted with the lock picks in her hand, anger growing as she swallowed her unease. Get in, she told herself. Get the finance ledger and get out again, only two grand richer. Eye on the prize, Goldi girl.
Eye on the prize.
The back lock was one of the easiest she’d ever picked, and the most unnecessary. Had she checked latch first, she’d have noticed the door was already unlocked. She tsked, as much at the owners as at herself. “Apparently, some people don’t realize how dangerous the world can be.”
Apparently, she didn’t either. She was just about to go inside when a stick snapped behind her. Flattening into the shadows of the ivy trellis, Goldi peered through the wood slats and leaves. Her heart thumped to a sudden stop. Less than fifteen feet away, a shaggy brown bear was venturing from out behind two giant red cedars. Breathing heavily, nose to the air, it looked right at her.
“Oh shit,” she breathed.
She didn’t move. Neither did the bear, not for the longest time. In the end, easing herself over the threshold as slowly and as non-threateningly as she could, Goldi slipped into the house and shut the door. She locked it too, although fat lot of good that would do if the bear decided it wanted in. Both hands pressed against the door, she waited for her heart to either re-start or explode. She touched her chest, reassuring herself that it was indeed beating, and by the time she eventually peeked out through the side window, the bear was gone.
“Shit,” she said again, craning her neck and leaving face and hand prints on the window that she then had to erase. But no, the bear really was gone. Give her five seconds and the ledger, and she’d be gone too.
Relieved, Goldi assessed the main floor of the house long enough to get her bearings. She was a little surprised, frankly. Although the caller had told her this was the home of a woman, there wasn’t a single feminine frippery anywhere in evidence. In fact, the décor was singularly masculine. That didn’t make sense. The furniture was blockish, wooden and looked like it had come straight out of a Medieval Dungeons R Us catalog. The dining table was long enough to double as a rack with a fathomless array of ropes and pulleys dangling from the ceiling above it. Of the four chairs arranged around it, one had thick leather straps on each arm and leg, as well as a seat that could be changed out. The one on it right now was perfectly normal, but there were three others stacked neatly against the wall—one with a giant hole in the seat, one with metal bumps and knobs, and one with a rather sizeable and suggestive protuberance positioned where one would have no choice but to sit directly on it. Her pussy underwent an involuntary spasm, though she wasn’t at all convinced that was where such a protuberance was intended to go.
To the right, she saw far enough into the kitchen to recognize some of the tools hanging from the over-the-stove utensil rack and on the hooks on the wall were implements that would have been more at home in any gruesome mafia murder scene. To her left in the living room, positioned right in front of the unlit fireplace was a wooden horse. Again, it was blockish, but complete with neck and head and even a long, flowing mane. It was also complete with straps upon its back and at the top and bottom of all four legs.
“What sick bastard lives here?” she was startled enough to say out loud.
A puff of heavy breath was her immediate answer. Goldi jerked back from the door to find a giant black nose pressed up against the window right at face level. The bear was back and it was breathing in the air, picking and discarding through all the many scents until it found hers.
Goldi retreated from that thin pane of glass and only stopped retreating when she accidentally bumped up against the wooden horse. She leapt back from that now too, crashing into the wall where an array of wide to thin leather straps, braided whips, crops and canes were hanging. Two fell from their hooks to the floor. Her skin tingled, not just from where she’d touched the horse, but now feeling every place on her back, hips and buttocks where those now swaying implements had brushed her. Her stomach tightened. Her nerves tangled and twisted together in an odd and uncomfortable… warm but scared… unnerved and yet vaguely aroused sort of way. It moved through her in sinuous, serpentine motions, taking root deep in the pit of her fluttering belly, so low that that she could almost feel it prodding between her legs.
The ledger, she told herself. Get the ledger and get the hell out of this place.
And then she had it, that oh shit moment when for all her alertness and caution, she heard the slow shuffle of heavy footsteps crossing the hardwood floorboards of the room directly above her head. A lesser thief might have forgotten everything and bolted right then; not Goldi, although she did bolt. Out of that interrogation-slash-serial killer-style décor of a living room, down the hall past the corner staircase and into the study. The ledger was exactly where the directions she’d been given had said it would be. A stark black book almost a foot wide, twice that in length and heavy enough to balance out a baker’s morning sack of flour—it was lying open on the desk where anybody could steal a gander at the contents.
Normally, Goldi would have been tempted, but now was not the time. Already those shuffling steps had reached the upper-floor staircase and now were coming down the steps. She ducked back out of the study, striving hard to be quiet even knowing she was trapped. With every step she took and every step she heard—it had to be a man; he sounded so heavy; what, did he weigh a ton?; and why did his boots on the stairs make a sound like claws scraping the wood?—she knew she wasn’t going to make it out without being seen. For the first time in the whole of her nefarious career, she was caught.
Her heart thundering against her ribs, indecision froze her in the hallway. Huge shadows of movement were growing upon the wall of the corner landing to her right. The snuffling black nose of the bear was still exploring the back door’s window straight ahead of her, and to her left, the only door-sized exit left available to her, was the front door.
It was locked. Padlocked, in fact.
From the inside.
Once upon a time, a wise man had told her that the downfall of man was destined to be greed. Another had immediately corrected him, saying that fate would always be caused by a woman. Well, Goldi knew better. They were both wrong. The downfall of man always had and ever would be his or her own morbid curiosity, and certainly she was not immune.
Heavy ledger clutched to her chest, Goldi couldn’t save herself from her own awful curiosity. Just as the heavy shuffling footsteps turned the landing corner, she turned far enough to see what was even now staring back at her with beady black eyes. Not a man. No, it was another bear. A huge bear, bigger even than the one starting now to scratch for entrance at the back door.
They stared at one another and, for one horrible, heart-attack-like pause that gripped the interior of her chest, neither moved. Then animal muscle rippled under the dense fur of its pelt and the bear hupped up to stand on its back legs. Stretching out its massive
neck, it opened its mouth and brayed the kind of bellow no girl wanted to hear from any creature as big as that or outside the protection of an extremely sturdy bear-proof cage.
She ran, the book still clutched tight to her chest (because if she made it out of this alive, it was still worth two thousand; a girl had to have priorities), and that bear in fast pursuit. It bounded down the stairs, chasing her the length of the hall. Its size was her best ally. When she rounded the corner, it hit the wall and she ducked into the first open door she saw. Slamming it fast between them, she almost fell down the stairs directly behind her before she realized she was trapped in the cellar instead of a closet.
It was very dark down below, but with a glimmer of light that reminded her there was another way out. The double cellar doors she had seen during her reconnaissance outside. Those doors were her way out, especially now that the bear had reached this one. She could hear it snuffling along the crack at the bottom and see the massive shadow of it blocking out the light. This door opened inward. All the bear had to do was shove and the jamb would shatter, and then the beast would be inside. With her.
Goldi fled blindly down the stairs, barely able to see the dim outline of each in the darkness. What she found when she reached the bottom did not make her happy. There were no windows. Her only avenue of escape lay in the cellar doors she’d seen from the outside. She ran to them, pushing and shoving and doing little but rattling the double doors on their very secure hinges. Shit; she’d forgotten they were padlocked.
“Damn it!” She slammed her shoulder against them, trying with all her might to force the doors up and open, but neither budged and the only other exit was currently being investigated by a very large and growling bear.
She turned in a full circle, her eyes gradually adjusting to the gloom enough for her to make out the sparse lines and hard edges of widely spaced furniture and even the dangling cord of a single bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. Feeling the way with her feet, she reached for it, hoping the light might help her find another way out. It didn’t, but it did help her see her situation more clearly.