Page 6 of Brave
Okay.
Okay, what the hell.
“Carlson,” he introduced himself and, with all the cheerfulness his confusion could muster, he stuck out his hand. “How you doing?”
Swallowing hard, she looked from him to his hand. A tinge of pink embarrassment cut the paleness of her face a half second before she took it. She was shaking. Her palm was damp and her grip desperate as she clutched his fingers in the most clinging hold to ever pass for a handshake.
“I—I—I—” She flushed every bit as pink as her pants. “Puppy,” she stammered. Dropping his hand, she knocked over her chair when she bolted from the table.
Carlson watched her flee all the way back to the club exit with the same degree of bafflement that he’d watched her sit down, only now it was worse. His legs jerked, the instinct to jump after her and chase her down so strong that he actually moved his chair. The only reason he stopped was because that was when Pixie came up from behind the bar, like a wild-eyed laughing whack-a-mole.
“Oh my God!” she hissed, too loud to be actual whispering. “Do you know who that was?”
He shook his head. “No clue.”
“Puppy-girl!”
The way she was staring at him made Carlson think that ought to mean something, but he’d only been working at Black Light for eight or so months now, and that name rang zero bells. “Okay, I’ll bite. Who’s Puppy-girl?”
“Ethen O’Dowell.” Her eyebrows arched incredulously. “You don’t remember him, the Menagerie Master? She was one of his pets back when they used to come here. He went to prison for assault or something. Police raided his torture house. They found whipped girls in cages. It was all over the news for weeks.”
The name Puppy-girl did absolutely nothing for him, but Ethen O’Dowell… that did tickle a memory. He vaguely recalled hearing something on the news about it shortly after he returned from his last deployment, but at the time he was more concerned with finding housing off base. In this area, considering his price range, that wasn’t easy.
Neither was adjusting to civilian life. Not after twenty-two years, the last eleven of which he’d spent as an explosives technician, and the last two of which he’d spent in Afghanistan helping make soldiers and civilians alike safer in their own backyards. He’d taken incendiary devices out of schools, hospitals, houses, streets, back alleys, dog houses. He’d gained a lot of good friends among his fellow soldiers, as well as among the local soldiers he’d helped to train. He’d lost more than a few of those friends too, both to snipers, insurgent attacks, sneak attacks, dog attacks, mob attacks, and then of course, to the fucking bombs.
No, he was done.
No one should ever have to go drinking with a fellow one weekend and then to his memorial the next. It wasn’t right.
So, when his tour was through, he requested his discharge, the army granted it, and he came home.
Except, that wasn’t as easy as it should have been either.
“Trust me,” Pixie snorted with a laugh, “we get some odd ducks in here, but the Menagerie Master and his ‘girls’… bar none, they were the weirdest of the—”
“I beg your pardon.” Softly spoken as it was, the interruption was still enough to stop Pixie mid-sentence.
She straightened abruptly, snapping her mouth shut when she saw Spencer, no longer hovering in the hallway like he had been while watching Puppy. Having fully stepped out into the lounge, he stood at the end of the bar, hands on his hips, frowning hard enough to put the gossipy submissive back in her place.
“My kink may not be your kink,” he said meaningfully, arching an expectant eyebrow and then waiting.
Clearing her throat, she finished the well-known line for him, “But that’s okay.”
“The next time I hear you calling our paying guests weirdos, I will write you up and you’ll go home.”
She wilted. “Yes, sir. I’m sorry. That was out of line.”
“Yes, it was,” he agreed, but he also let it go.
Grabbing her rag, Pixie found something to keep her busy out of his line of sight, and back Spencer went to his office, leaving Carlson sitting at the table in a near empty dungeon, wondering what the hell had just happened.
He turned to stare at the door to the locker room, but he couldn’t see any hint of the woman called Puppy lurking nervously in the shadows.
She was probably long gone, and yet for reasons he couldn’t quite pin down even in his own head, Carlson got up and followed in her wake, passing Danny at the security desk and then, on instinct, into the tunnel. It was cool. The D.C. weather still waffling back and forth between winter and spring. If forecasters could be believed, they were actually due another bout of snow sometime tonight before morning.
He shivered as he neared the end of the tunnel where Luís was stationed. “Did you see a young woman about so high?” He measured out her approximate height, winning a frown from the other man.
“You mean Puppy?” He thumbed through the door, but added, “Stay away from that one, my friend. That whole situation is nothing but trouble.”
