Chained in the Demon's Lair (Hellfire Circus) by Crystal De la Cruz

 
Hellfire Circus: Chained in the Demon’s Lair
     
     
    It was dark and warm, humid even, in the way
that the engines of an enormous cargo ship must be be, its
labyrinthine passageways filled with the strident hiss of thick
steam and the grunts of muscular stevedores shoveling coal. Or so
Julie imagined, since she’d never actually been anywhere remotely
near the engines of a cargo ship. In fact, she’d never been on any
kind of ship at all.
    Just eight months ago she’d been a
reporter for a small-town Minnesota newspaper, a job that was even
less exciting than it sounded and she’d never strayed much further
than the county line. Back then she’d never imagined anything much
of interest at all could ever happen to her, but now here she was,
stripped down to her underwear in some kind of industrial holding
cell, with a shiny chrome collar locked tight around her throat,
the other end chained to a bolt in the metal wall. She’d been taken
here by an elegant femme fatale (a woman she’d scorned by winning
the love of her beau) and the handsome, yet irrevocably cruel
cowboy, whom all the evidence seemed to suggest, was not even human
at all. One thing was for sure, Julie wasn’t in Minnesota
anymore.
     
    ***
     
    She lifted her chain and dragged it as
quietly as possible over to the corner of the small metal room. She
was fairly certain that whatever the original purpose of this
diminutive room had been, it was likely not intended for housing
prisoners. There wasn’t even a bench, let alone a bed. It was
probably supposed to be a storage area or something, Julie guessed.
Or, judging by the apparent impenetrability of its walls, a
safe.
    But there was one flaw in the fortress, a
tiny air vent in the lower corner of the room which led directly
out into a wide open space, a huge chamber that had filled Julie
with a mixture of dread and awe the first time she’d seen it. It
looked like something out of a James Bond movie. All over the room
there was high-tech computer equipment and machinery, all pointing
towards a huge computer screen on the far wall. Just who the hell
were these people, she wondered?
    Well she knew the answer to half that
equation at least. The woman who’d brought her at gunpoint to this
place (or at least as far as the truck that brought them here. The
truck where Julie had been blindfolded and knocked unconscious
before presumably being crammed into the trunk like some
disorganized traveler’s cheap luggage) was Cassandra, the
unofficial second in command of the Hellfire Circus. And the
Hellfire Circus was the carnival of sexual expression that had
changed Julie’s life and awoken her to pleasures like she’d never
dreamed of. Unfortunately, as she was starting to learn, there was
a dark side to the circus too…
    Julie didn’t know who the other guy was, that
steely-eyed and infinitely dark cowboy, who commanded Cassandra’s
every move with a gravelly voice that was friendly at the same time
as it was contemptuous, all the while brimming with a dark
undercurrent of seductive control. Whoever he was, he was almost
infinitely powerful and by some of the things that he alluded to,
Julie had begun to doubt if he was even a man at all.
    But one thing was for certain. The cowboy had
some unfinished business with Julie’s lover and personal dom, the
Ringmaster of the Hellfire Circus. From what Julie could deduce,
the Ringmaster had slighted him sometime long ago, in a way that
had irked him enough to make a pledge for tireless vengeance. And
now here he was.
    As Julie crept over to the vent, bending
down on her bare knees to get a closer look, she spied the cowboy
striding across the huge command center like some kind of timeless
general, with the garb of the civil war on his back and the
machinery of the most up-to-date international conflicts at his
disposal. Julie suspected that the weaponry available to him in his
own arsenal was even more fantastical than anything human science
could ever