Sadie's Little Christmas - Maren Smith

Prologue

Lawyer Jared Stark sat in the sterile white-and-gray hospital waiting area, his business coat draped across his lap, wondering how much longer before police would finish interviewing the victim, Sadie Marie. He knew her, not well, but they had been introduced once, last night, in fact. That was how he knew—despite their having found her naked in a ditch two counties over with the blue hemp rope that had strangled her still wrapped around her neck—the abuse that had nearly killed her had originated in his BDSM club.

How? That was the question that kept running through his mind. Sanctuary was his home away from home. The place he had helped to build in his community and which, right up until he’d heard the news this morning, he’d thought was the safest, sanest, and most consensual outlet available for kinky players in the whole of Montana, if not the entirety of the United States. It may not have happened in his club, but that was where it began, and that was why he was here.

He was angry, but he held it in check, reviewing over and over in his mind who he had seen the young girl with last night. Sadly, he hadn’t paid much attention. At barely eighteen, she was young enough to be his granddaughter, and she’d been inexperienced. Her first time attending such a place, he remembered her saying. She hadn’t come alone. He remembered her saying that, too. So, who had she left with? He wished he’d paid better attention.

“Stark.”

Looking up from his hands, Jared locked eyes on the doctor in blue scrubs and a white lab coat coming toward him. Gathering his coat, he stood, extending his hand.

“Thank you for calling me, Matt.”

Although the rest of the hospital was busy enough, especially through the double doors that stood guard over the private patient rooms in this part of the I.C.U., they were the only two people in this particular waiting area.

“Our own place,” the doctor said. “I could kill someone.”

“They’ll catch him,” Jared replied, not just understanding his friend’s frustration but echoing it with every impotent fiber of his being. “I understand they’ve already got a name.”

“Her roommate, apparently.”

Jared swore.

“Yeah,” Matt agreed. “Poor kid.”

“Can you get me in?”

“You bet, but I don’t know how much good it’ll do. She was talking for a bit, but one of the detectives, a real jerk named Forrester, asked her what she thought was going to happen, going to a place like our dungeon play space, practically insinuating she deserved to be raped and nearly killed, and she just shut down.”

Infuriated all over again, Jared looked up at the ceiling, then down at his coat. A Dom in his own right, he knew how to control himself, but swallowing his anger back this time was hard.

“I’d still like to talk to her,” he said once he was sure his temper was firmly in check.

“Right this way.” Taking the lead, Matt escorted him through the double doors, down a long white hall past two nurses’ stations, until they reached a corner room. It was small, with a solitary hospital bed situated just past a tiny closet of a bathroom. A muted TV hung high on the wall. Someone had drawn the yellow curtains, but the tiny slip of a brunette on that bed curled on her side, facing them. Her face was swollen, her bottom lip split, her blackened eyes barely able to open. Now and then, she blinked.

“Sadie,” Jared softly called, slipping around the foot of the bed to sit down in a padded blue chair that had been set out for worried family members. He was a little surprised she didn’t have someone here for her already. It had been hours since he’d been notified. Surely her loved ones would have come by now. “Sadie, honey, do you remember me?”

She neither looked at him nor answered, although she blinked again.

“We met last night.”

She stared silently past him toward the covered window.

“My name is Jared Stark,” he tried again. “I’m a lawyer—”

She startled, which was good. Now he knew she was listening to him. What wasn’t good was how fast her gaze locked onto him, filling with tears right before she crumpled.

“I’m b-being arrested now, too?” she rasped, her voice little more than squeaks of breath. Her poor throat. She curled in on herself, cupping it as she sobbed.

“No,” he hastened to assure her. He cupped her shoulder, helpless not to offer some measure of comfort. “No, you’re not being arrested.