Page 15 of Sinner’s Torment

Until the night I pushed too far.

I still didn’t know what went wrong. Even now, my mind raced through every second, every movement, searching for the mistake I must have made. We had done the scene a dozen times before. Breath play, restraints, sensory deprivation. She loved it. Craved it. Begged for it. We had our safe words, our signals, our carefully negotiated boundaries that we both understood and respected. But that night, something shifted. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, even now.

Maybe I had been too rough. Maybe I held on too long, lost in the moment, my focus slipping when it should have been razor sharp. Maybe she panicked, and I hadn’t noticed, hadn’t seen the subtle change in her body language, the shift from pleasure to fear. Maybe she tried to signal me, and I missed it entirely, too caught up in my own headspace to recognize the warning signs.

All I knew was that when I finally released her, when I finally stepped back and saw her face properly in the dim light of the bedroom, she wasn’t breathing. Her chest wasn’t moving. Her lips had taken on a bluish tinge that made my blood run cold.

I’d called 911. Performed CPR. Done everything I was supposed to do. But it hadn’t been enough.

She died in the ambulance, her hand still warm in mine.

The official cause of death had been asphyxiation. Accidental, they said. A tragic mishap during what should have been a consensual scene between two adults. The investigation had cleared me of any criminal wrongdoing. The detectives had reviewed everything. The contracts, the negotiations, and the safety protocols we discussed beforehand. The club had closed ranks, protected me, and made sure the story didn’t spread beyond the people who needed to know. Montana hired the best lawyers, managed the narrative, ensured that my name stayed out of the papers and off the internet.

But none of that mattered.

Not the legal exoneration. Not the support from my brothers. Not the therapist’s reassurances that it wasn’t my fault, that sometimes terrible things just happened despite our best precautions.

Because I knew the truth.

I lost control. I had gotten too caught up in the moment, too focused on the intensity of the scene, and I missed the signs. I failed to keep her safe. I failed in the one responsibility that mattered more than anything else in our dynamic. And she paid the price. The ultimate price. While I got to walk away with nothing more than guilt and nightmares that would haunt me for the rest of my life.

I walked away from the BDSM scene after that. Just packed up my gear, deleted my profiles, and disappeared without a trace. Stopped going to clubs, stopped taking submissives, stopped trusting myself with that kind of power. The community reached out at first. Messages, emails, people wanting to know if I was okay, but I ignored them all. I couldn’t face them. Couldn’t face myself.

I threw myself into my work instead, burying myself in case files and client sessions, into helping people like Marcus navigate the same darkness I had fallen into. It was easier to fix other people’s problems than to confront my own. Easier to be the guide than to admit I had once been hopelessly lost. My practice became my refuge, my penance, my way of making amends for what I had done.

But the guilt never left.

It lived in my chest, a constant weight, heavy and unrelenting, a reminder that control was an illusion. That no matter how careful I was, no matter how many safe words I established, no matter how much I prepared and planned and communicated, sometimes things just happened. Sometimes I missed the signs. Sometimes I pushed too far, read the situation wrong, let my own needs cloud my judgment.

And sometimes people died.

My phone buzzed again.

I pulled it out, expecting another message from Mercy.

But it wasn’t Mercy. It was Rage.

Rage: You coming tonight?

I stared at the message, my thumb hovering over the keypad.

Board meeting. Montana. The future of the club.

I should have been thinking about that. About what Montana would say when he found out, what difficult decisions we had to make in the aftermath of the Death Dogs attack, what it would mean for all of us moving forward, for our club, for our brothers, for everything we built together. But all I could think about was Marcus, sitting in that worn leather chair in his office, the afternoon light cutting across his face as he asked me if it was possible to come back from losing control. If someone could really find their way back after crossing that line. And Elise, lying in that ambulance as the sirens wailed around us, her hand still warm in mine while the paramedics worked frantically to stabilize her. The way her eyes had looked at me in those last moments before they closed, like she was trying to tell me something important but couldn’t find the words.

I typed a response.

Torment: Yeah. I’ll be there.

Then I set the phone down, leaned back in my chair, and closed my eyes.

Seven PM couldn’t come soon enough.

CHAPTER FIVE

Torment

Soulless Sinners’ clubhouse...