Finding You Bk. 02: Paradigm Shift

CHAPTER 1

Marcus stalked the network of walkways that crisscrossed the ceiling high above Elysium's floor space, the restless need to move forcing him out of his office. Mostly hidden in darkness, the walkways allowed the club's owners and security personnel to supervise almost every square foot of the massive club without disturbing the patrons below. The bar, dance floor and massive dungeon areas could all be overseen from The Heights, as the employees had dubbed the level of overhead walkways. There were only two areas not visible from The Heights: the exclusive VIP section of the club and the private playrooms.

Though shielded from view from above, every room in those two areas had a network of discreetly placed CCTV cameras installed that constantly monitored the activities for breaches in legality or safety. At Elysium, privacy was only an illusion; one that could be bought from the general masses, but not from the watchful eyes of the security team who were there to ensure that all members obeyed the club rules, even behind closed doors.

As his boot heels rang out along the suspended, metal grates, he should have been watching the various scenes and activities taking place below him, but he couldn't focus through the turmoil in his brain. A craving he was unable to satisfy distracted his mind and occupied his full attention, such that he barely noticed the cacophony rising up from the club floor.

The private BDSM social club was full to capacity, as was normal for a Saturday night. Naked, writhing submissives occupied all the play spaces with their leather clad Dominants holding court above and behind them. The huge, horseshoe-shaped bar was crowded with patrons whisking drinks away as fast as the bartenders could pour them. Even with the two-drink maximum, the bartenders were in a flurry of motion to get everyone served. The sunken dance floor was a seething mass of moving bodies, gyrating around the raised DJ pedestal. Even the expensive private playrooms had all been booked out for the night, with people left disappointed on the waiting lists.

None of this mattered to Marcus; there wasn't room in his brain to rejoice at his club's success, not with every brain cell dedicating itself to thoughts of her.

He moved without purpose along the walkway until he found himself overlooking the alley that housed the voyeur theatres. Looking down, he paid no attention to the various scenes of debauchery playing out in each of the rooms below, entertaining the crowd of avid spectators packed on the other side of the one-way windows. Even the VIP club was full to capacity with the upper echelon of the rich and kinky, spending obscene amounts of money to partake in carnal delights that only Elysium could provide.

People swarmed like ants on a picnic below his feet, but her face was the only one his dark eyes could see...and her ghost was everywhere he looked.

...A squealing sub bound to the St. Andrew's cross, writhing under the flying tails of her Dom's flogger.

...A pretty brunette wailing, getting her round ass spanked with her head locked in the stocks.

...A naked, Rubenesque woman, moaning through countless orgasms with her Dom's face buried between her plump thighs.

Every one of these sexual creatures had her face superimposed on theirs and no matter what he did; Marcus couldn't clear her image from his mind.

Wherever his gaze roved, people grouped into pairs, trios and more, were all having a good time and the only thing he could see, was the one thing he couldn't have. There were a thousand reasons for Marcus to be happy, the proof arrayed like a banquet below him, but the gnawing emptiness in his gut made him feel as destitute as a beggar.

Marcus should have been deliriously thrilled with Elysium's popularity. They were thriving in a harsh economy that had sunk many a start-up business before they ever got off the ground, but Elysium had defied the trend and was growing, with plans for expansion looming on their horizon. Money was flowing into his and his partner's pockets in insane quantities and their notoriety had spread such that they could barely accommodate the volume of interested people on their intake tours. In addition to the regular folk who frequented the club, their reputation had attracted wealthy members from all parts of the globe who travelled to the city just to be able to play at Marcus's dream club.

He should have felt proud that his club attracted the elite, both in the BDSM lifestyle and in the financial world - people who could afford to buy anything, go anywhere and do whatever their deviant hearts desired - they chose his club to come play at. This fact alone should have provided a sense of satisfaction for the accomplishment he, and his partners, had achieved.

Elysium was a rousing success and Marcus should have been ecstatic.

He had every reason to be happy...and yet he wasn't.

Somewhere on the level below, the sharp snap of a whip cut through the buzz of noise, creating a momentary vacuum of sound, only to be filled a split second later by the high-pitched shriek of the submissive on the receiving end.

Marcus didn't even flinch.

The air drifting up into The Heights was redolent with the heady scents of sex and sweat as Dominants and submissives of all ages and sizes worked themselves into a sexual frenzy. The sounds of pleasure, pain and the smells of debauchery filled the air, but Marcus was numb to it all. His heart had become a stone - heavy, unyielding and bristling in burrs that grated in his chest, turning every heartbeat into an agony he couldn't ignore. Focusing his attention on the actions below him was pointless, no matter how hard he tried, his mind kept circling stubbornly back to one name and a pair of stunning emerald eyes.

Supervising the patrons using the dungeon area was a wasted effort. Whom was he kidding? He'd dragged his ass in to work every day for the last month, but his mind and heart hadn't come with him. Instead of actively running his business, he'd turned most of the day-to-day operations over to his partners and had resigned himself to haunting the club like a ghost trapped in limbo, lost in his thoughts and going through the motions of living.

Tonight was no different. Marcus prowled the upper deck, his agitation making him as unpredictable as a starving grizzly. He suffered from a toxic frustration that chewed at his guts like a horde of ravenous parasites, watching but not really seeing the action on the level below him. His mind was a chaotic mess of emotions swirling around the desperate anxiety that something crucial, something vital that he needed to survive, was slipping further out of his reach with every passing day.

The reason for his turmoil was painfully simple.

Tabitha.

...She was the angel who had stolen his will and woken his inner beast with nothing but a broken smile...

...She was the beautiful siren whose cry for help had enslaved his imagination and tormented his dreams...

It had been four, long, torturous weeks since Marcus had last seen his green-eyed angel.

...Four weeks since her demented boss had tried to rape her, thrusting her into Marcus' life.

...Four weeks since Tabitha had bewitched him with her vulnerable beauty and sweet innocence.

...Four weeks since he had chosen to give her the space she needed to heal and then walked away from her.

Four fucking weeks... and he had felt each hour pass by like a razor sharp knife slowly whittling away pieces of his soul.

As much as he abhorred what that sick bastard had tried to do to her, he felt a twisted sense of gratitude to him.

Without his attack, Marcus would never have found Tabitha.

He owed the man a debt that he intended to repay with his fists.

The need to see her, to touch her, consumed him. His brain dwelled constantly on her: when awake, he saw her ghost from the corner of his eye, when he slept, all his dreams were pornographic wishes brought vividly to life. Every blink brought flashes of her face, her smile, her eyes, so that he couldn't escape his obsession with the enchanting young woman.

His memory taunted him with echoes of her enticing scent, tricking him into believing that she was standing right beside him. Even his own hands added to his misery, the memory of the feel of her soft skin lingered in his fingertips, reminding him of the unusual, electric connection he had experienced every time he had touched her. The constant deluge of erotic fantasies blending with his vivid memories had brought him to the point where his dick was hard nearly all the time - awake or asleep, it didn't matter.

There was no respite, no safe place, where he could go to escape her. She was with him wherever he went because she lived in his mind.

He had lost track of the wasted hours he had spent with his fist wrapped around his cock, coming with Tabitha's name scorching his lips. The blinding hunger that drove him to seek release, immediately morphed into a gnawing loneliness that strangled him as his balls emptied themselves into the shower, or onto the floor, or into his hand.

When it was over, in the place where all that lust had burned so hotly only minutes before, was an angry, hollow feeling of being cheated - as if fate had pulled the ultimate bait-and-switch on him, leaving him destitute and wanting. Then an errant thought - the memory of her sweet scent or the soft, lovely curves of her body - would pop into his head and the vicious cycle would start again.

His own brain tormented him in the most exquisite form of self-torture any man could concoct, but he was powerless to stop because, no matter what he did, he couldn't hide from his own thoughts.

It had driven him to the point where he dreaded every minute of the time he spent masturbating. What had once been a pleasurable pastime had been perverted and twisted into a vulgar compulsion that stripped him of the ability to resist. His body desperately needed the release to ease the painful arousal, but the accompanying depression that followed, attacked his mind like a caustic acid that slowly ate holes into his sanity.

He was damned if he did and double damned if he didn't.

His hand would never be the warm embrace of his angel's mouth or replace the silken depths of her sweet pussy. It was just a stand in - taunting him with a pathetic imitation of the real thing that his body was yearning for.

He had thought that distance would have cured him of the insatiable need for her. Out of sight, out of mind as that bullshit saying went. He had learned during the course of the last four weeks that out of sight definitely didn't mean out of mind.

Out of sight had only flung him head long into obsession.

As much as he wished that he could forget Tabitha, his greatest fear was that he would do exactly that. He clung to those memories, cherished them, protected them and craved them because they were all that he had of his angel. They were just as much a source of happiness as they were of madness. It was unthinkable to him that he could lose those precious memories...yet it would save his sanity if he only could forget her.

Now, he was about as stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place as he could be and it was making him lose his mind.

Petra had kept him up to date, feeding him bits of information on how Tabby was doing, but it wasn't enough.

In some ways, the tidbits of information only made his situation more unbearable.

It had bothered him to know that she still suffered from reoccurring headaches as a result from the concussion she had sustained in the attack.

It had ripped his heart from his chest to hear that she woke up screaming from nightmares almost every night.

It had almost destroyed him to find out that in the depths of those terrors, it was for him that she screamed for, and he wasn't there to save her from the demons that haunted her dreams.

Yes, Petra had tried to keep him informed, but instead of reassuring him that Tabby was okay, as she had intended, the shreds of knowledge had only crippled him.

He knew that she was still suffering but couldn't do anything about it because when she was awake, she didn't want to see him.

CHAPTER 2

Petra pried and prodded, trying to find out what the reason was behind Tabby's refusal to see or speak to him.

"She is definitely interested in you, Marcus, because she asks about you, not directly, but in a roundabout way. It's as if she doesn't want anyone to know that she is curious about you, but she does ask." Petra had told him when he had spoken with her at the club a week ago. She had meant the information to be comforting but instead, her words had spilled a jar of angry bees inside of his chest, the stinging pain coming from everywhere at once.

Why won't she speak to him? Why won't she see him? How the hell, was he supposed to live like this?

A sharp cry from somewhere on the dungeon floor caught his attention and wrenched him from the agony of his thoughts. The strained tones hadn't sounded quite right to his trained ears and his eyes roved the crowd below looking for the possible source. The crack of a whip split the air and a second later, the submissive on the receiving end cried out in pain again. Marcus pinpointed the location and jogged along the maze of walkways suspended over the dungeon room until he was over top the whipping section where a young Dom was wielding a bullwhip.

As the young man flexed his arm for another strike, Marcus took time to study him carefully. He scowled at the man's sloppy, amateurish technique and winced when the lash landed badly, obviously causing the submissive more pain than she could handle.

Palming his cell, he quickly dialled the number for Callum, one of the Dungeon Monitors patrolling the floor that night. As the phone rang, the Dom let loose another poorly executed strike that set his bound submissive crying out and pulling against her restraints. Over the din of the crowd, Marcus clearly heard her sob, "Red! Red!"

Her Dom was either oblivious or sadistic, because he ignored her use of the club's generic safe word and sent another vicious lash licking fire over her reddened back. Marcus' blood boiled over with fury, just as Callum's voice came over the speaker. "What's shaking, boss?"

"Where are you now?" Marcus demanded.

"Uh, over by the med play rooms. What's up?"

"Get your ass over to the whipping area. There's a motherfucking moron over there that just ignored his sub's safe word. There's no way the asshole went through our training program for whip proficiency, he's behaving like he's beating an ox."

Peering over the guardrail, Marcus scanned the crowd, relaxing as soon as Callum's blond head appeared, weaving through the crowd with two other monitors in tow. Marcus grimaced as the asshole Dom unleashed another savage strike and his submissive's body went rigid with the biting pain, a fresh line of bright red welts erupting on her back to join the others that Marcus could easily see even from his raised vantage point.

Callum reached the man just as his arm reared back for another strike, grasping him by the wrist and twisting his arm until the whip dropped to the floor from his useless hand. While Callum dealt with the angry Dom, the other two monitors went over to assist the submissive, who hung limply from her bound wrists in shock.

"We got him, Boss."

"Good, take him to the security office and make sure he doesn't try to leave. Have Dillon and Mace take care of that sub and find out if she needs medical attention. Ask her if she wants to press assault charges on the asshole."

"You got it. You gonna come down to deal with this guy?"

"No. Cooper's in tonight. Have him review the security footage and impress upon the fucker that his membership has been officially revoked, effective immediately. If she doesn't want to press assault charges, kick his abusive ass out the door. I don't want to see him anywhere near my club again."

"Aye-Aye Captain." Callum replied, a hint of query in his tone.

Normally Marcus would have handled disciplining misbehaving members himself, but tonight he just didn't have the stomach for it. He ignored Callum's unspoken question, disconnected the call and stalked back to his office. With his temper so volatile, he didn't trust himself to deal with the Dom personally. He was liable to beat the shit to a pulp; he sorely deserved it just for ignoring his sub's safe word alone.

If Marcus could have his way, the jerk would find his sorry ass bound to that same whipping pole and treated to a real whipping. Unfortunately, the law would frown upon that and the best Marcus could do was to revoke his membership and kick his miserable ass out of his club.

Safe.

Sane.

Consensual.

Those three basic tenets formed the cornerstones that governed responsible play in the BDSM world and separated the kinky from the abusers. They were ones that Marcus strictly adhered to in his club and adamantly weeded out any who violated any of those terms.

He and his partners had decided to take matters to the next level and added education on top of those basic precepts. Elysium differed from most public BDSM clubs in that for any member to use any of the dungeon's equipment or scene areas, participants had to prove their proficiency and knowledge beforehand and earn approval. Making sure that all participants had, at very least, basic training, helped to cover the club's legal backside against accusations of negligence and keep their reputation unsullied.

He and his partners had decided to take matters to the next level and added education on top of those basic precepts. Elysium differed from most public BDSM clubs in that for any member to use any of the dungeon's equipment or scene areas, participants had to prove their proficiency and knowledge beforehand and earn approval. Making sure that all participants had, at very least, basic training, helped to cover the club's legal backside against accusations of negligence and keep their reputation unsullied.

Marcus and his partners wanted their club run in the safest manner possible, especially in light of the inherent risk involved in some of the activities that members engaged in on their premises. Training and education helped to reduce that risk and prevent accidents caused by ignorance.

Elysium ran regular training classes from everything from beginner play all the way up to advanced techniques in areas such as rope work and impact play; so that all members could learn the correct way to safely play with their partners. Workshops, classes and social groups brought the members together to learn and share information in an open and inviting manner and their membership fee covered it all.

They did everything possible to safeguard against situations such as the one Marcus had just witnessed. Unfortunately, the program wasn't perfect and sometimes an inexperienced member slipped through the cracks, and injuries were usually the result. As much as they strived to keep everyone safe, all players were still required to sign hefty liability waivers protecting the club from blame should something ultimately go awry.

Applicants went through a rigorous screening process and background checks before being accepted and had their qualifications posted in a public directory that was available for all registered members to see. Dominants and submissives could log in to Elysium's Dungeon Role website, or use one of several terminals provided in the club, to research prospective play partners to see if their needs matched with the other's skills.

Each member could also leave feedback and comments, good or bad, relating to their experience with another member. A rating system had turned it into a veritable who's who in the BDSM community, both locally and internationally, and currently hosted over two thousand entries. The website also allowed private messages to flow between members, setting up meetings, just like a regular on-line dating site and had become a vital way for single members to find casual or serious partners.