Liberty...And Justice for All (16 page)

“Is there a place for us to change and store our stuff?” I asked.

Tony took us to a private bathroom and changing room down the hall. He handed me the key. “You holler if you need anything,” he said. “Otherwise, I’m going to pretend you’re not here and this isn’t happening.”

“Perfect,” I said.
I wish I could, too,
I thought
.

Catherine and I changed quickly. She looked slutty-fabulous in her red satin outfit and heels; I felt frumpy in comparison in my black lace get-up. “Why’d you have to get me a
thong
?” I asked, wincing.

“Payback,” Catherine said, checking her makeup one last time. “For being a royal pain in my ass.”

I just glared at her and put some lip gloss on.

“Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath. “We’re going to have to hide my bag in the room somewhere, so that if we have to make a quick exit, we’ll have what we need.”

“What’s the plan?” she asked.

“You mean, you don’t have one?” I asked, trying to breathe deeply and get my anxiety under control. “We’re going to go in there, tell the girls we’re here on a trial basis. To start with, we should just hang back and watch. Let the other girls take clients first—to see what the hell they do in there, but also so we don’t take their business and piss them off. Then we copy them. Wait—check your phone,” I said.

She pulled it out of my bag. “Text from Matthew,” she said. “Shawna’s passed out and the name of the girl who’s dealing here is Britney.”

“Okay,” I said. “Text him back—tell him we’re at dinner and shopping some more.” I pulled my bag over my shoulder. “Let’s go meet Britney. And Catherine—”

“What?”

“Whatever else happens tonight, we stay together. No matter what.”

T
he S
&M room was as good a version of hell as any I’d ever pictured.

I turned to Catherine. “I’m not judging anybody, but this is
so
not my thing.” I felt positively squeamish looking around. The walls looked like stone, from a castle or a dungeon. There were large, throne-like chairs set up in various parts of the room; they had straps for securing hands and legs. Along one wall were a myriad of devices: whips, paddles, chains, feathery-looking switches. There were hooks in the walls, on the floor and on the ceilings. And a bench. And a fake jail cell.

What all this stuff might be for, I really couldn’t imagine. But I had a bad feeling I was about to find out.

She shrugged. “For a former stripper, you really are a prude. I think a little light flogging might do you some good.”

I looked at her, horrified, and tried desperately to control my expression when one of the workers approached us.

Her outfit was…very utilitarian. Black rubber bra with silver spikes on it, a matching collar around her neck, and what appeared to be a black rubber thong.

And I thought
I
had a wedgie.

“I think we’re underdressed,” I whispered to Catherine out of the side of my mouth.

“Can’t you be cool? Just this once?” She hiss-whispered back.

“Hi girls,” said the woman in the rubber outfit. She smiled and had a surprisingly friendly voice. “You look a little lost—you take a wrong turn?”

“Actually, we’re the new girls,” Catherine said. “Tony asked us to observe tonight. And to jump in if you guys need us.”

“I’m Laney,” the woman said, and shook our hands. I had an overwhelming desire to use some hand sanitizer immediately thereafter. “You girls know the rules?”

Knees knocking, I shook my head.
No.

“No alcohol in here. No phones, no pictures. No touching unless you’re given express permission by the client. No sex—not in here, anyway. I can tell you more about that later,” she said, and I thought a big
no thank you!
“There are also a couple rooms out back that are private, for role-playing.”

Huh?
I wanted to ask, but I knew better.

“We clean up each station after use,” she said, motioning to a counter. “There’s antibacterial spray and paper towels in there.” A look of disgust must have crossed my face because Laney clucked her tongue. “Aw, c’mon sugar, it’s not that bad. It’s like wiping down the treadmill at the gym.”

I nodded at her silently, trying desperately to be cool.

“We have mostly a tourist clientele,” she continued. “Guys looking for a thrill—BDSM is all the rage now. Every guy thinks he wants to be Christian Grey, even though they have no idea what the hell that means. They pay a huge cover fee and have no idea what the fuck to ask for, so we just give them the standard, give ‘em all the feels.

“We do have some regulars, though. Locals. They’re pretty into it. Most of us girls, myself included, were dancers before. But this is better money.”

“Do you have any male Doms working here?” Catherine asked.

“We’re rolling out to the female market after the first of the year,” Laney said. “And that’s when we’re going to start making serious shit-ton money—the ladies know what Christian Grey is all about.” Laney laughed. “This place is going to be like a BDSM Disneyland for MILFs.”

“So you’re expecting business to grow significantly,” I said.

“This place is a cash kobe-beef cow waiting to be slaughtered,” Laney said. “We’ve had some complications, but we’ll get out in front of them, I expect.”

“What kind of complications?” I asked.

“You sure ask a lot of dumb questions,” Laney said, arching a penciled-on eyebrow at me. “You two take a look around. Introduce yourself to the other girls. Then stay back and watch. I’ll be working the room if you need me.”

Catherine and I went to the back of the room, along the wall. There was only one client in so far, and he’d been taken to a role-playing room out back.

I turned to Catherine. “What’s role-playing?” I asked.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” she said. When she could tell that I was serious, she just rolled her eyes. “Ask my dad. He won’t know, either. You two belong together.”

My stomach plummeted at her words. We did belong together, but I wasn’t sure he was ever going to forgive me for what I was doing.

She must have read the look on my face. “He’ll be fine,” she said. “You know he won’t stay mad at us forever. We just have to stay alive.” She shrugged, like it was no big deal.

“Right,” I said. “No problem.”

“We need to find Britney,” Catherine said, looking around. “So we can get a move on.”

Some of the other dancers came into the room, all wearing various leather and rubber outfits, some with metal rings on them. One of the girls had a ponytail on top of her head and enormous knee-high red rubber boots; she saw us standing in the corner and narrowed her eyes at us. For the next ten minutes she watched us, intermittently gave us filthy looks.

“I think we might have our Britney,” I said, motioning to the woman in the red boots. “She’s watching us and giving us the stink-eye. Is it okay for me to admit that I’m totally scared of her?”

Catherine snorted. “You can’t be scared of someone named
Britney
. Christ. Sounds like somebody’s babysitter.”

“She looks like a really scary babysitter. I’d be hiding under the bed if she showed up at my house,” I said, squirming as she started striding towards us.

Britney was on the tall side, probably six-feet with those boots on, and her chest was broad. Her breasts were enormous, but they didn’t move or jiggle as she strode toward us—they pointed at us like red rubber torpedoes. She had big shoulders, big biceps, big, muscular thighs. I’d hazard a guess that she did pretty well as a dominatrix.

She was so scary I was ready to give up and submit by the time she got to us.

“Hey,” Catherine said to her, in an unusually friendly voice. “We’re the new girls.”

“Nobody told me you’d be here,” Britney said. Now that she was standing closer to me, I could see that she had enormous tattoos covering her shoulders and a spiked piercing in the side of her face.

“Tony sent us. Laney just gave us the rundown. I’m Catherine, by the way. This is Liberty.”

“Britney,” she said. She turned to me. “Liberty, huh? Name’s familiar…You work around here?”

“I used to dance at The Treasure Chest,” I said.

“Where you at now?”

“Here,” I said. She gave me a sharp look. “I hope,” I squeaked out.

“Either one of you ever do BDSM stuff before?”

Catherine and I both shook our heads and Britney snorted in what sounded like disgust. “Fuckin’ Tony. He wants to turn this into the freakin’ Cheetah Girls, or something, I swear to God. You two look like you should be selling Jell-O shots and handing out cupcakes, not using a cat o’nine tails.”

I didn’t say it out loud, but a Jell-O shot and a cupcake sounded pretty good to me right then.

“We have some regulars who come in. Don’t come
near
them,” Britney warned us. “They’re the best tippers.” I wondered if they were also representatives from the Freeman cartel. “You girls can have any of the leftover tourists,” Britney said, stalking away. “They don’t know what they’re doing, either.”

“Watch her,” I said to Catherine. “Whoever she takes as her client is probably who we’re looking for.”

“And then what?” she asked.

“You tell me.”

“We’re going to wait. And when she’s done, we’re going to go over and meet him,” Catherine said.

“I don’t think Brit’s gonna be a fan of that.”

“The only other thing we can do is follow him, and ask to come along when he leaves,” she said.

“Too suspicious. He’ll never trust us enough to take us there tonight. C’mon—you know that. Angel never would have let his guys bring back women they just met.”

“Actually, they did it all the time,” she said. “They never worried. If one of the girls did something questionable, they’d just shoot them.”

I raised my eyebrows and looked at her. “Awesome,” I said. “So either they don’t trust us enough to let us in, or they
do
let us in, and then there’s a real chance that they’ll kill us.”

“We have guns, too,” Catherine said.

“They’ll take them.”

“We’ll steal some of theirs. This whole thing was
your
idea, originally, remember? Why are you freaking out now?”

“It’s starting to seem a lot less smart,” I said.

Catherine snorted at me. “That can’t really seem like a new thing to you, Liberty. ‘Less smart’ is sort of where you dwell.”

“Enough,” I said. “I’m afraid, okay? I’m afraid of what your poor dad is going to do once he finds out we’ve gone. I’m even afraid of the whips and chains in here. I can only imagine what I’ll feel like, out in the desert.”

I stopped myself for a second. I knew exactly what I would feel like—I’d been a prisoner before.

And all I’d hoped for, all I’d wished for, was that someone would come and help me.

I thought of Mia, locked up in a cartel compound. We couldn’t just leave her.

“But it doesn’t matter,” I said, straightening up. “It’s not about me. We have to get Mia out.”

Catherine nodded. “It’s settled. I’ll text Matthew and tell him we’re staying out. If the cartel contact comes in, we’ll figure out how to deal with him.”

“I think that’s now,” I said, watching two men as they came in. Britney was on them in an instant.

We watched as Britney smiled at the men and rubbed one of their arms; she immediately grabbed his hand and led him to a room out back. The other man stayed in the main room, watching the other clients with a mild look of amusement on his face. Two of the other girls went over to him and started talking.

Before I knew she was even gone, Catherine was next to him, too, a feline smile on her face. She was taller than the other girls and she used that to her advantage by placing her red-satin-encased breasts right in front of the guy’s face. I watched, nervously, as the other girls gave Catherine angry looks.

True to her typical form, she tossed her hair and blithely ignored them.

It was good that Britney was busy in the back room. She would have kicked Catherine’s ass for poaching like this. I looked around the room: Laney was busy using what looked like a feather duster on a hapless fraternity brother who was strapped into a chair. The other dancers were in various stages of bondage play with other customers who’d come in; I squinted at them and looked away.

The two dancers near Catherine looked sour and ready to mutiny as she continued to chat up the client. She was now running her hands down the lapel of his leather jacket and he looked…into it.

The other women backed off; one of them turning to glare at me pissily.

Catherine was very beautiful. The red-satin stripper gear didn’t hurt. And I supposed she could be charming, when she wanted to be, but I’d never actually seen any direct evidence of that.

This appeared to be direct evidence of her abilities. She grabbed the man’s hand and brought him to one of the chairs with shackles on it. Wasting no time, she pushed him back on it gently and then climbed right onto his lap, whispering in his ear and smiling at him seductively.

I was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to use the chair like that.

Britney was still out of sight and Catherine used the time she had to her advantage. She straddled the man, rubbing herself against him, and continued to talk in his ear. At one point, he put his hands on her breasts and she arched her back, like she was…into it.

John was totally going to kill me.

I looked over at Laney; if she saw what Catherine was doing, we were going to get kicked out. Lucky for us, she was thoroughly engaged with the fraternity brother, who was looking petrified as she flogged him with the feather duster.

“What the fuck’s with you two?” One of the girls that Catherine had displaced asked, unexpectedly coming up on my right and making me jump.

“Um, nothing,” I said, smiling at her stupidly and shrugging. “We’re training.”

She frowned at me and pointed at Catherine. “That’s not training. That’s dry-humping.”

I nodded, trying to look philosophical about it. “I think she likes him.”

“You’re out of here, after tonight,” she growled at me and left. I freaking hoped she was right.

Catherine was starting to get a little…
athletic
with her client. That woman had been right: she was totally dry-humping him.

Not that he seemed to mind.

Just then, Britney and her client came back around the corner. She looked horrified and then just death-glared at Catherine; her client apparently didn’t share her disgust because he laughed. He bent over and said something to his friend and I saw Catherine’s face as she looked up at them; she was a little red, like she’d been exerting a real effort.

Britney looked like she was restraining herself by not pulling Catherine off the guy. I could see her take a deep breath and get herself and her powerful shoulders under control. The men were talking to each other, ignoring Catherine and Britney. Eventually, Catherine slid off the man and Britney went back into what must have been the locker room, nodding goodbye to the men and trying not to glare at Catherine.

Once he finished talking to his friend, the man who Catherine had been straddling grabbed her hand and led her towards the door. She didn’t turn back to look at me; she just followed him, looking straight ahead.

No no no no
, I thought, watching them wildly.
Not without me.

I ran over toward them—which wasn’t easy to do in stripper heels—and the man who’d been with Britney turned before I got there, like he was used to people trying to sneak up on him. “What’s up?” he asked me, casually, and smiled.

My chest was heaving from my sprint across the room. “Are you guys leaving?” I asked, giving him a big smile. I hoped my boobs looked good from all the chest heaving caused by running; I needed all the help I could get. Catherine was standing next to the man she’d been with, his arm draped around her, her hand on his chest. Her face was a mask and I couldn’t get a read on her, what she was up to.