Page 47 of Fearless
Sniffling through the blood and involuntary tears, Ethen half-laughed as he eased himself to sit up. “She’s not here.”
“Don’t lie to me,” Noah warned. “I know you bought her a cab and plane ticket, so don’t even try to—”
“She’s not here.” Laughing, Ethen pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket and wadded it over his bloody nose. “You people.” Making no effort to get up, he glared at Noah as if he both hated and was amused by him. “Yes, I paid for her to come home, and she assaulted me. Just like you assaulted me. And, just like I intend to do to her, I am going to sue you over it.”
“You’re going to sue me?” Noah echoed, unimpressed.
Ethen smirked.
“Good on you, mate,” Noah said, only too happy to return the smile. “Let’s make it worth the price, yeah?”
Ethen grabbed his arms when Noah grabbed him, dragging the taller man to his knees by his hair.
“Crawl,” Noah ordered, damn near scrubbing his nose to the floor. If it wasn’t broken before, it was before they were halfway through the kitchen. “Crawl like you made her crawl.”
The blonde got out of his way. Hands clutched to her chest, she followed from a safe distance as Noah dragged her dom through the house to the back bedroom. He found the cage built into the framework of Ethen’s bed, exactly as Hadlee had once described it. She’d said it was the cage he liked to put Kitty into, the one that had left her terrified of confining places. It was the reason Noah always left the bathroom light on at night. It was one of many reasons why Kitty shook when she thought he was going to punish her.
Flinging Ethen up against the cage, he unbuckled his belt and ripped it from around his waist. “Get in.”
Ethen scrambled, but Noah still managed to whip him twice across the back and legs before he was too far under the bed to read. Slamming the door, Noah threw the sliding-bolt and padlocked it with the one he found hanging on the door. No doubt waiting for Kitty’s return.
“I hope you like prison,” Ethen spat, cowering in the shadowy back of his own cage. “You have no idea who you’re fucking with!”
“The best civil lawyer in his field, or so I’ve been told.” His belt still in his hand and the urge to keep using it tickling at the back of his neck, Noah hunkered down to better see Ethen through the wire of the door. “Go ahead, extradite me. It might take awhile, since I don’t reckon you’ll have much sway once you get done explaining this—” He tapped the wire of the cage. “—or that battered girl in your living room to your cop buddies. You may be King Shit out here, but I don’t live here and you don’t scare me. So, go on; jump, since you’re feeling so froggy. I’ll take you down with me, mate, but I promise that’ll feel like a slow leisurely fuck in the garden compared to what I’ll do if you ever bother my Kitty or her friend again.”
Ethen’s eyes narrowed, but already his confidence was dimming to a mere ghost of what it had been.
“That’s a promise,” Noah warned. He turned away, half expecting to find Pony-girl with a phone in her hand and, at the very least, emergency services on the other line. But although they had walked right past a line of cellphones on the kitchen counter, the tall blonde had made no effort to grab one. She hovered in the bedroom doorway, posture perfect, her nervousness revealed only in the fidgeting of her fingers and the swallow of her throat when he came toward her. She looked from him to her master and back again, every inch of her a woman who had been told what to do every minute of every day for so long that she didn’t know what to do now.
When he neared the door, she backed away. “Go to your room,” he ordered.
She obeyed.
“Stupid fucking—” Ethen said, only half under his breath.
Noah closed the door on him, following a few paces behind Pony-girl until she was in her room. There wasn’t a bed, just a leather sex-swing hanging from the ceiling and some hay on the floor. An assortment of crops and whips lined the hooks on the wall, alongside a giant black horse-cock of a strap-on. “You may not come out until the police get here.”
He had no idea if she’d obey that or not, but he didn’t lock her bedroom door when he closed it on her. Dialing 9-1-1, he put the phone on the counter and left.
* * *
“Oh my God!” Hadlee said, shock and happy surprise lighting her face as she came shoving through the door that separated the main play area from the locker room’s security desk where Kitty had been waiting now for almost twenty minutes. Getting past Luís had been a nerve-wracking ordeal because Kitty had nothing with which to prove her membership. Ethen had always taken care of that. For a while, she had been so convinced that Luís would turn her away, but in the end, a quick phone call had got her through the first checkpoint, through the tunnel that ran under the alley and straight to Danny, who was content although in no great hurry to investigate further. “What are you doing here?”
“Trying to get in,” Kitty said, pretending she couldn’t see the look Danny shot her as he waited silently, cellphone pressed to his ear. The old her would have felt guilty for causing him trouble. All the new her felt right now was tired, but still she tried to smile as she accepted Hadlee’s welcoming embrace.
“You look so much better,” her friend said. “You’ve put on weight—oh, but not in a bad way,” she hastened to assure. “It looks good. You needed it.”
If she had put on weight it couldn’t have been more than a few pounds and was due entirely to Rule Number Seven. Something she hadn’t paid much attention to since she’d left Noah’s house. She did feel guilty about that, though she tried not to think about it. She also changed the subject. “So… apparently, I was banned?”
“Oh, uh…” Hadlee winced a glance to Garreth who was standing quietly beside her, arms folded across his chest, a very domly and disapproving frown on his face. “Yeah, about that…”
“Ethen got banned,” Garreth corrected. “Because of the cellphone incident on Roulette night.” He traded looks with Danny, who was finally off hold and softly relaying information to whomever he’d called—probably Jaxson or Chase, Black Light’s co-owners and the only two people with the power to confirm or rescind a banned membership. “I don’t think the Menagerie was included in that order, but we’ll get it straightened out.”
As if, now that Garreth was on the case, the problem was practically resolved, Hadlee changed the conversation back again. “When did you get back?”
“Almost two hours ago,” Kitty said, but inside all she could think was how nice it must be to have that kind of confidence in the man in your life. That no matter the problem, he could just… fix things and magically make everything all better.
Noah had that kind of magic.
