DutyBoundARe (3 page)

“You look chipper,” he said to his driver.

“Shut it, you,” Odalia growled as she pulled out onto the street.

“Late night?” The tension in his chest eased. Odalia might as well have been the little sister he never had.

“Maybe,” she groused.

Mathieu chuckled and shook his head. Odalia had hooked up with a local bounty hunter and Dominant on a whim and the two had tipped over the edge into a committed relationship within days. It was the kind of whirlwind romance he knew the feel of.

“You’re awfully quiet,” Odalia said after a few moments.

“Just thinking.”

“Got any plans for tonight?”

“You work till two in the morning.”

“So? Dungeon’s open till four. You should come. Everyone asks about you.”

Any other cop asking him about attending a dungeon would be ludicrous, but Mathieu had introduced Odalia to the public kink scene and she’d flourished into a dynamic young woman. He’d hated leaving patrol because it meant giving her up as a partner.

“Yeah, probably not tonight. Maybe another time.”

“Don’t say that, man. You’ve been divorced over a year. You haven’t been around the scene for over two. People miss you.”

Odalia pulled the cruiser into a spot at the station and he got out. It was the only way to end the conversation. She killed the engine and hurried after him.

“That’s how you’re going to handle this?” Odalia asked as they stepped aside for two people leaving the building.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about, rookie.” He opened the glass door and held it.

Odalia stared at him hard for a moment, her gaze narrowed. He didn’t doubt she had an earful to give him, but the presence of so many prying ears silenced her. Odalia had her own demons to keep at bay here.

At New Year’s, a fellow cop had stolen compromising photographs of Odalia her new beau had taken of her all kinked up. While the pictures and the electronic source had been destroyed, it hadn’t silenced the thief, and she’d had to hold her head up high and ignore the snide comments and assumptions made about her.

“Be safe out there,” Mathieu said as he split off from Odalia and headed to his desk.

He moved through the building all the way to his department. The phone on his desk blinked orange. A good omen, if it was what he hoped.

Mathieu jabbed in his voicemail and listened to the voice on the other end.

“Hello Detective Mouton, I got your message about the assault case. I’m faxing the statement over. Not sure if it’s what you’re looking for.”

Mathieu saved the message and headed over to the fax machine. There it was. The victim’s statement along with the two college students. It wasn’t a lot—potentially, it wasn’t even related—but he wasn’t going to take a chance.

Lisette groped under the bed
for her precious backpack. In her flurry of cleaning after lunch, she’d pushed it under the bed to vacuum. Not that Mathieu owned a vacuum, but his neighbor was nice enough to let her borrow one, so long as she cleaned the bag out before she returned it.

Cleaning and baking were her two go-tos if a good flogging wasn’t on the table for working out her frustrations. Before Seth, getting that flogging hadn’t been a problem, but it had been so long, almost a year, since she’d played with anyone. One of the liberating things about leaving Seth was the immediate opportunity to play platonically with others. Her little subbie heart wanted that so bad.

Where was the damn bag?

Lisette reached farther under the four-poster and grasped…something. It felt like nylon stretched over…something. She pulled the object out and laid it at her knees.

It looked like…

It couldn’t be.

There was just no way.

Lisette grasped the hard end of the object encased in the leg of a pair of nylon pantyhose and lifted it.

A flogger.

Mathieu had an honest-to-god flogger, and it was even put away properly. Sort of. She’d never leave a good leather flogger under a bed, but that was her.

Typically a person owned several floggers with various intended uses. Some were purposefully more thuddy and felt like a massage. Then there were those that stung or outright hurt. Those who really got into flogging had several, and since the leather strips, or tails, could get tangled, one of the cheap ways of preventing a huge mess was to slide the flogger into the leg of a pair of pantyhose. It was breathable and kept the tails from tangling.

Lisette picked the knot apart and slid the well-crafted toy out into her lap. She’d seen her fair share of floggers and this one was handmade by someone who knew their shit.

The handle was stained and sealed black wood, almost dildo shaped. She could easily see someone putting a condom over it and using the handle as an insertable toy. Had Mathieu used it like that? She gulped and flicked her glance to the rest of the toy. There were easily fifty strips of black rawhide falling from the wooden handle.

If she had to guess, this was a thuddy flogger. The kind she liked.

Lisette licked her lips and a shiver stole down her spine, straight to her pussy. Her channel clenched.

Could Mathieu be kinky? Like her? Or was this a leftover from an old girlfriend?

The possibilities were endless.

She laid the toy out on the bed and stared at it for a moment. There were too many questions. She shook her head and bent to search for her bag. It was not by the side of the bed, instead, it was down by the foot. But that wasn’t what interested her. There were several large, plastic containers with opaque sides. Were there more toys?

She itched to peel back the secrets, find answers, an explanation, but that wasn’t how one thanked their host for his hospitality she’d pretty much forced from him. With a deep breath, she grabbed the backpack and left the bedroom and apartment in a hurry.

Lisette hopped on a bus without an idea of where it was going and slid into a seat, content to watch New Orleans pass her by. It was her way of learning a city, or in this case, re-learning. But her mind wasn’t in a state to take in the Katrina-wrought changes to her beloved city. No, she was still thinking about what was under that bed.

Was kink why he’d broken up with her?

She’d always thought of Mathieu as such a rule follower, a strict adherent to black and white. He said earlier that he’d been a bad boy and she a good girl in college. That wasn’t how she’d seen him at all, but maybe she’d known even then what she was at her core—a submissive who wanted to love and adore her Dominant. Granted, she hadn’t fallen into that lifestyle until after Mathieu dumped her.

There were so many questions swirling in her head, and no possibility of answers until later tonight, whenever Mathieu got home.

Lisette felt an instant pang of guilt for not taking Gator with her. The poor dog might be used to staying in his crate, but this was a perfect opportunity for him to get out, despite the drizzling rain. She promised herself to think of him next time.

The bus slowed to a stop, and for the first time since she got on, she took notice of where she was. Not that she had any idea of what district she was in, but a café sat on the corner. She gathered her bag and piled out the back door, taking a chance that this place had what she needed.

A small placard in the window next to the door had the blessed words: WiFi Available.

She stepped into the café that could have been on any classic New Orleans street corner with its black and white checkered floor, wooden four-top tables and jazzy decor. For some reason it made her breathe easier. The city hadn’t been home for years, but it called to her.

Lisette ordered coffee and took over a table next to an outlet, careful to put her back to a wall to prevent some poor soul from seeing her Kinky Girl Blogs’ site. The ad placements on the side of the site alone came with an advisory warning, and that was before you got to the content.

No kinky topic was safe. Lisette had a team of ten regular bloggers who rotated posting. Some specialized in certain topics. There was one pro-Domme who provided her services for a fee, two women who identified as Dominant in relationships, several people who lived a polygamous lifestyle, three switches, one slave, and a handful of submissives. Lisette was always on the lookout for more people to add to the mix.

Five years ago she’d started the site to have an outlet to talk about her journey into BDSM. By that time she’d been into it for a year and had two short but successful relationships. She’d also been halfway through her Master’s in psychology. Ultimately, her experience since the blog exploded was the driving reason behind why she’d switched to focusing on sexuality and psychology. It was a narrow field; she still needed to get her damn internship done, but she loved that she helped people in tangible ways.

Her dream was to have her very own practice, do podcasts and maybe even write books for those who would never get up the courage to come to her for help. Before any of that could happen, she needed Seth out of her life so she could get back on track.

Lisette brought up her email, full of messages from the anonymous Q&A widget on the website and her bloggers, as well as friends from Chicago and Miami she’d abruptly left behind.

It was too soon to face her friends and for now even her bloggers would have to wait.

There was something she had to do.

She brought up the Kinky Girl Blogs site and plugged in her username and password.

The backend of the site was a clean, gray interface that made navigating it mostly easy. She flicked over the updates, glad to see that everything down to comment moderation and updating plugins was in hand.

That left her with the one task she’d given herself today.

Coming clean with her audience.

Hello Kinksters,

No, your eyes are not deceiving you; it really is me. Kinky Girl, your fearless leader. I know I haven’t been around lately, and for that I apologize. Life caught up to me in the worst way possible and I’ve needed to deal with it in my own way.

I’ve been trying to compose this blog in my head for weeks, but I wasn’t sure how to start it. As I sit here, I’m still not sure what I’m going to say except this.

I, KG, am a victim.

Many of you will remember the discussion from a year ago about dating vanillas that caused a lot of comment drama. I eventually documented my struggles with falling for a man who had no kink inklings and you all helped me through that break-up. I’ve misled you all into believing the saga with my ex has ended.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In the intervening months between admitting the break-up and now, my ex has beaten me and put me in the hospital. The extended absence I took a few months ago was for necessary surgery on my arm because he broke it so badly it took all the hospital’s doctors and all the hospital’s nurses to put me back together again.

Writing this isn’t about accusing my ex of his wrongdoings. I can and have done so to the police and proper authorities.

This is about me taking my life back.

Yes, I am a victim.

I have hidden this from my closest friends. My bloggers. And even my family is unaware of the full extent of my injuries, but that’s another topic entirely.

Today, I refuse to hide any longer. I did not ask for the broken bones or bruises. It was a criminal act against me, and for that, I will never apologize, but I will fight for justice, and I will regain all the little pieces of me that have shattered and scattered during this journey.

I realize this could be potentially triggering for those of you with similar backgrounds, so I will tag the blog with the appropriate warnings. For now, I’m closing the comments because I did not warn the blogger team I was posting and they have lives. My internet access is sporadic, so if you feel compelled to email me, know I’m getting the messages, but I cannot reply to all of them in a prompt manner.

I hope this doesn’t change how my readers view me, but I have to accept that it will. And that’s the hard part for me. Abuse wasn’t something I asked for. It happened to me. I’m still the same person underneath, but I would be ignorant if I didn’t also know this will change me. I’m not sure how. The future will tell.

Now for something a bit lighter. The other day I was out in a cute park and I snapped this picture. Yes, it’s a new foot picture of my toes in the grass. Remember, the Foot Fetishist book will be coming out in just a few months and my feet will be in it!

Kinkily yours,

KG

Seth took a pull on the bottle
, never once letting his eyes leave the TV over the bar. Around him, men talked shit and bragged about one player or another. He watched it all, but didn’t much care one way or another who won. It was merely something to take his mind off the hunt.

One of the former Marines slapped him on the back. The drunk’s speech slurred together until the jumble of sounds coming out of his mouth were incoherent and vile to smell. Seth pushed the man onto the empty barstool next to him. Idly, he brushed his fingers over his phone.

Waiting was the hardest part. You had to allow your prey to forget you were there, make a move, step out into the open before you took that shot.

He was one of the best hunters the country had. It was his life’s mission to be given prey, hunt it, and put it down. Except every so often some suit thought he needed a break.

What he needed was a target. One that would go down.

There was an RSS notification in the top bar of his phone.

Just to be sure, he clicked on it and waited for the bare bones of the post to load, keying in on the author of the entry.

“Got you,” he muttered.

Seth dropped a few bills on the bar and slid through the drunken crowd. The clammy grip of the New Orleans evening gripped him as he stepped out on the street and made the block back to his hotel in record time.

While he had learned to track prey the old fashioned way by reading the ground and brush as a kid, his methods had evolved with the times. After all, not all prey was convenient enough to leave a blood trail. The trick was figuring out what kind of trail your quarry would leave. That was where he excelled.