shadowland

by Radclyffe

  When she turned around, the room was unnaturally quiet. The hush of many heartbeats and the tremor of shared anticipation rode thick on the air. Kyle’s heartbeat, though, was slow and steady, her mind totally focused on one face. Brad stood alone at the edge of the raised platform, the heavy leather satchel in her hand.

  When heads turned to stare at her, Brad felt perspiration break out on her back and under her arms. Now there was no turning back. Kyle awaited her on the steps of the stage. Brad stepped up, her head high, careful not to lower her gaze. As it was, Kyle held the advantage over her, being taller, but now she appeared even more commanding. The tight black leather encasing her chest and thighs gleamed in the intermittent flash of the strobe.

  “Last chance, Brad,” Kyle murmured as she took the bag from Brad’s hand. She let her fingers graze Brad’s arm, felt her flinch. She smiled, a thin, knowing smile. She understood Brad, because she understood herself. Power was their true drug of choice, the one thing they had in common—the one thing they both craved, no matter who wielded it. She could smell Brad’s need. “One more step, and there’s no turning back.”

  Brad knew how badly she would lose face if she turned away. Kyle was the only one who had ever come close to usurping her position in this dark shadow world—not even Dane had ever garnered such a reputation as a top. All I have to do to beat Kyle at this game, my game, is refuse to acknowledge her dominance. I can take whatever Kyle offers, absorb the punishment and the power, and then I’ll win. No one will ever dare to challenge me again.

  “I’m not going anywhere.” Brad squared her shoulders. “I still don’t think you can do it.”

  “Take your jacket off. Fold it neatly, and put it down.”

  Brad complied, her movements showing no diffidence, and then regarded Kyle belligerently.

  “I won’t wipe that arrogant look off your face,” Kyle said too quietly for anyone else to hear, “because I’m going to enjoy watching it crumble so much.”

  Turning slightly to one side, she motioned for Brad to precede her toward the scaffold. In the silence, the hiss of matches flaring sounded like a living beast stealthily approaching.

  “That’s far enough.”

  Catching Brad’s arm, Kyle positioned her midway between the side posts of the scaffold so that she faced the room. Her next words came in a lethal whisper. “I want you to see them watching you.”

  Quickly, Kyle stepped off to the side, placed her bag on a small ledge in the shadows, and slid the long zipper open. The sound was magnified in the dark, quiet room. She removed wide, well-padded leather shackles attached to short chains. She hooked the chains to the rings set into the wooden arches, returned to Brad, and slowly drew her fingers down the center of Brad’s body until they dipped fleetingly between Brad’s thighs. She smiled when Brad tensed.

  “Time to play.”

  Slowly, purposefully, she slipped a long, slim object from the inner pocket of her vest. When the switchblade snapped open, it caught the reflection of the lights and glittered in her hand. A murmur passed through the crowd. Brad’s eyes fixed on the six-inch blade in astonishment.

  “You haven’t got the guts.” Brad’s voice belied her certainty.

  “Oh, but I do.”

  Eyes locked on Brad’s, Kyle deliberately cut each button off the front of Brad’s shirt with a practiced flick of her wrist. When the shirt fell open, exposing Brad’s small firm breasts, Kyle quickly reached down and pushed her hand into the leather waistband of Brad’s pants. She jerked the material away from the taut flesh beneath, creating a narrow space between Brad’s abdomen and the pants. While Brad gaped in surprise, Kyle turned the knife sideways and slid the flat of the blade straight down along the underside of the zipper. Then she abruptly released her hold on the material and left the gleaming black handle nestled against Brad’s pale abdomen.

  “Stand very still, now,” Kyle warned mockingly as she stepped back. “It’s sharp.”

  Fuck, are you crazy? Brad’s stomach muscles danced against the cold steel, and sweat trickled down her sides. The point nudged against the swell of her sex. She twitched and felt a tiny point of pain. Jesus.

  Methodically, Kyle stripped off the remains of Brad’s shirt. While Brad stood naked from the waist up, the knife protruding from the top of her pants like a misplaced phallus, Kyle carefully applied the restraints to Brad’s ankles and wrists. She drew the chains tight until Brad stood with her arms straight out and her legs slightly spread. When done, Kyle pressed against Brad’s back, one hand around Brad’s middle teasingly stroking the knife handle, her mouth close to Brad’s ear.

  “Funny how something so deadly can make you hard, isn’t it?” Kyle pressed the shaft against Brad’s belly. “You are, aren’t you?”

  “Fuck you,” Brad gritted. Fear, usually someone else’s, always aroused her. But her body didn’t know the difference. She was throbbing. If she hadn’t been terrified of driving the point of the blade into her clitoris, she would have thrust back against the elusive pressure. It was all she could do to stay stiff-legged and still.

  “Oh—I forgot. No safe word.” Kyle jiggled a chain with one hand and flicked the knife handle with a fingertip. Brad moaned quietly. “You can get out of the restraints anytime you like.” She waited a heartbeat. “But if you do—I win.”

  “Fuck. You.” The words were barely a whisper; all Brad’s senses were centered on the blade with the razor-sharp edge lying against her skin. Nothing had happened. She hadn’t been hurt. But her blood ran hot, and her body sang with arousal. The slightest movement, even a breath, sent shivers of excitement down the blade and into her center. It won’t work. But still she felt the restraints on her arms like bands of iron. Can I get out? Christ, what if she uses that blade on me?

  Kyle shifted to Brad’s side so quickly, Brad barely registered her movement. Eyes wide, Brad looked down to see Kyle’s hand wrapped around the knife handle, her fingers pressed into Brad’s belly.

  “In,” Kyle moved the knife a millimeter, knowing just where the tip lay, “or out? Makes you want to come, doesn’t it?”

  Brad stopped breathing. She lost all awareness of an audience. There was only Kyle and the knife and her own need.

  “Not yet,” Kyle growled as she pulled the knife free of Brad’s body with a wrenching motion, as if pulling it from her depths. She heard someone gasp and realized with satisfaction that it was Brad. Sweat beaded on Brad’s breasts and began to trickle in uneven streams down her sculpted torso. Under the red lights it looked like blood.

  Kyle smiled grimly, the room having receded from her view; she saw only Brad, helpless within her power. For an instant, she saw Dane and the raw, oozing wounds. Rage threatened to usurp her reason. She shook her head; she needed all her concentration now. “You have such a beautiful body. No one has ever marked you, have they?”

  Heart pounding, Brad stared straight ahead.

  “No,” Kyle mused. With the tip of the blade, all of which was visible to the crowd in the blackness of the room, she outlined Brad’s breasts with intricate movements. She lightly scratched the skin with the point, not deep enough to draw blood. “Guess that will be my pleasure.”

  The blade was everywhere—now nearly piercing the nipple, now close to the soft, vulnerable underside.

  Brad panted, her eyes slightly unfocused. At any moment, she expected to feel the sharp lancet spear her flesh. The steel flashed as Kyle moved it rapidly from hand to hand, finally bringing the point to rest in the hollow at the base of Brad’s throat. When Kyle pushed hard enough to dimple the skin, Brad arched her neck away to relieve the jagged pressure. Adrenaline, the product of fear and thwarted excitement, poured through her. Her heart pounded, her loins pounded, her flesh cried out to run—or to surrender.

  “I could end this now,” Kyle whispered, her mouth against Brad’s neck next to the blade. She pressed, and Brad pulled against the restraints. “It would be quick,” she bit hard enough to leave teeth marks, “and you’d
only feel the smallest point of pain. Like a needle driven into your arm.”

  Kyle knows! Brad’s senses reeled. She knows about Dane...and Nancy?

  “But I don’t need drugs to control you. That would be too good for you, Brad. Too simple.” Kyle held the knife to the straining woman’s throat with one hand, and with the other she smoothed a hand down the rigid abdomen to cup the leather-bound crotch. Smiling with grim satisfaction as the muscles quivered under her touch, she squeezed until Brad whimpered. “I want much more from you than your life. I want your soul.”

  The ice in Kyle’s voice settled like a cold hand around Brad’s heart. In the center of her being, fear burgeoned like a living beast. She finally understood that the game they played was not a game and the stakes not reputation, or even life—but sanity. She moaned as Kyle sliced the blade along the sides of her legs and slashed the leather open to her knees in several rapid, powerful thrusts. Her skin was untouched, but her flesh felt flayed open nonetheless.

  “Now,” Kyle grated as she released Brad’s wrists, turned her so that her back was exposed to view, and quickly refastened the shackles, “we play by my rules.”

  Kyle stepped back from the naked woman, lit a cigarette off the gold lighter in her pocket, and walked to the shadows. She selected a long-stranded cat from her bag. She knew that Brad could hear her movements but that she could not see her. Good.

  Satisfied with her choice, Kyle moved from the shadows to the cone of light at the front edge of the stage and gauged the distance to her unwilling submissive. She grinned humorlessly at the irony. With a quick flip of her wrist, she tested the whip. The snap of the leather sliced through the thick air, and when Brad flinched at the sound, Kyle smiled for real.

  She flexed her arm, cracked the whip. Brad jerked again, silent as the first blow landed.

  Kyle knew how to work a body. She knew how to coax out the subtle differences between pleasure and pain, to ignite just the right nerve endings until sensory overload made it impossible to distinguish between the two. At first her strokes were teasing, glancing off the contour of Brad’s back and buttocks, stinging for an instant and then gone.

  And at first, Brad fought the pain, determined to withstand any punishment Kyle could deliver. She would not be subdued; she would never give in. As the force and rhythm of Kyle’s delivery increased, Brad twisted in her restraints, seeking to escape the next blow. But Kyle had primed her well. Despite her rising panic, the arousal that had been fired by the long, torturous preparation escalated. The tension of the knife ritual, the powerlessness of being restrained, and the tantalizing pinpoints of flickering stimulation created by the lashes blurred the edges of pain into lust. Even as she tried to resist, her body betrayed her, her flesh swelling and pulsating to the rhythm of the cat. She bit back her moans—of pleasure, not fear—as she struggled to contain the tantalizing pressure building in her thighs and pelvis. Her hips thrust in time to the strokes, each short-lived blow a caress. I want to come. Oh God, I want to come.

  *

  Dane shouldered her way through the crowd of people on the stairs waiting to pay their cover and tossed a bill to the bouncer. As she started to brush past her, the heavyset woman grabbed her arm.

  “Just a minute,” the woman said. “There’s a heavy scene going on in there. Take it easy.”

  “Sorry.” Dane slowed her headlong rush, but still pushed insistently through the crowd until she could get a view of the stage. When she did she stopped short, her stomach clenching. Kyle, awesome in full leathers, stood in front of Brad’s suspended body hefting a heavy braided whip. Even in the subdued lighting, Dane could make out the flush on the skin of Brad’s back, and she knew that Kyle had been working on her for a while. As she watched, Kyle’s arm arced, and the cat landed with a sharp crack across Brad’s lower back. Barely able to stifle a moan, Dane watched as Brad’s body instinctively jerked away.

  Another blow landed with a crack, the flesh recoiled, and Dane closed her eyes. She was back in another dimly lit room, the echo of leather breaking skin resounding through her body. Flinching at the sound of each strike, pain suffused her mind. Trembling, she relived the moments of her own destruction.

  *

  Brad cried out, every blow carrying her closer to release. Her mind still rebelled, but her body had made the inevitable transition from rejection of pain to the acceptance of pleasure. She abandoned her need to resist Kyle’s power—she welcomed it. The lash on her back became a soothing caress, the swelling of her injured flesh the blossoming of desire. There was no thought, only sensation, as the first exquisite ripples of orgasm trickled along her spine. Her hips thrust to the rhythm of the contractions; her neck arched back in rapturous agony. Her moans penetrated the darkest corners of the room. I’m coming. Oh...soon...soon.

  Kyle’s mind was numb; her eyes blind. She no longer felt the people pressing close to her; she couldn’t hear Brad’s cries. Her arm had become the vehicle for her anger, the whip the embodiment of her own pain. The rhythm of the blows echoed the fury in her heart. Redemption was near. At last, she would drive the demons from her soul with the power of the cat.

  “Kyle, stop!” Dane grabbed Kyle’s arm, twisting her off balance. The blow fell wide, striking the floor impotently.

  Eyes glazed, Kyle stared at Dane uncomprehendingly and tried to wrench her arm away. “Let go.”

  “No.” Dane brought her other hand down hard on the shaft of the whip. “Kyle! Look at me, Kyle.”

  “Dane?” Kyle blinked, still confused. Why are you here?

  “Then look at her,” Dane whispered, still holding Kyle’s whip arm tightly. “That was me, don’t you see? It could still be me. Don’t do what they did to me. Oh God, Kyle, don’t become like them.”

  Kyle’s vision cleared. She saw Dane’s face, wounded but fiercely strong. She turned, saw the woman collapsing against her restraints, dangling at the end of her own desire. Heard the broken woman plead.

  “Someone else can finish her off.” Kyle tossed the heavy instrument of torture at Brad’s feet, sick of herself. As she turned away, her husky voice echoed throughout the room. “I’m done with her.”

  As the crowd parted to let them through, Kyle closed her mind to the sound of Brad still calling her name.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Kyle sank into the passenger seat, mentally and physically exhausted. She didn’t know where they were going—she didn’t care; all she knew was that she had become what she most hated—a user of people, an abuser of power. She was no different than Brad—a sadist unaffected by another’s suffering, a hand that held the whip without tenderness, without feeling. In those last moments with Brad at her mercy, she had wished only to inflict punishment, no longer seeking the delicate balance between pleasure and the physical boundaries of pain. She had been tested, and she had failed. Drowning in remorse, she surrendered to despair.

  Jesus. Just like Brad. Just like...She glanced at Dane, the sharp planes of her face ethereal in the moonlight. She’s so beautiful. And I’m just like the ones who hurt her. God. I’m just like them now.

  “Let me out,” Kyle said suddenly, pulling on the door handle. It was locked; they were traveling well over thirty miles an hour. She didn’t care. She needed to be alone with her anguish. “Dane, let m—”

  “No.” Dane watched the emotions play across Kyle’s face, feeling her agony and her guilt. “Where would you go?”

  “Anywhere. What does it matter?”

  Dane longed to reassure her, to tell her that the sorrow and the shame would pass. Kyle had not lost herself, not yet, because if she had, she would not be suffering. And if she had truly passed beyond redemption, nothing Dane could have said or done would have made her drop that whip, not until Brad had broken under the lash.

  “It matters to me.” Dane parked her car in front of her apartment and went around to open Kyle’s door. “Please come inside.”

  “Why?” Kyle struggled in an agony of uncertainty—afraid t
o hope for salvation, desperate to banish the terrible loneliness. “Didn’t you see what I just did?”

  “I saw. It will be all right.” Dane knew only one way to convince Kyle that deliverance was possible—the only way she herself would understand. If she could convince Kyle now that she was worthy of Dane’s trust, she could free her. She held out her hand. “Kyle, please.”

  The sound of her name, spoken so gently, gave birth to a sliver of hope. Trembling, Kyle reached out. She shivered at the first touch of Dane’s warm skin against her cold palm. It had been so long, and the road had been so lonely. Unprotesting, she followed Dane into the bedroom where her journey had begun a lifetime ago. Head bowed, a dark figure shadowed in the muted light, Kyle stood in the center of the room wondering where along the way she had lost herself.

  Dane approached Kyle slowly and framed her face with both hands, lifting the dark head until their eyes met. You already have my heart. Let me give you my body. Let me heal you.

  Kyle searched the depths of Dane’s eyes, wanting to lose herself in their tender mercy. What if it’s too late?

  Without a word, Dane sank to her knees, her hands lightly grasping Kyle’s thighs, her head down, supplicant. Reverently, she pressed her face into the soft leather between Kyle’s legs. There was no one else in the world she would do this for. There was no one she had ever wanted so much. This was not sex; this was salvation. Hers, and she hoped, Kyle’s.

  When Dane grasped the zipper and tugged it down, her mouth slightly open to embrace the flesh her hands exposed, Kyle grabbed her wrists. “No.”

  Dane looked up, her face beseeching. “Please.”

  “No,” Kyle repeated breathlessly, pulling Dane to her feet. “That’s not what I need.”

  “Then tell me.” Dane swallowed, remembering the image of Brad’s humiliation, remembering the sound and the feel of the leather rending her back. “Anything.”