Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Torment
The kid sitting across from me was twenty-eight years old, though he looked younger.
Pale skin, dark circles under his eyes, hands that wouldn’t stop shaking no matter how many times he pressed them flat against his thighs.
His name was Marcus, and he had been coming to see me for two years now, ever since his girlfriend had found him in their apartment bathroom with a belt around his neck and his wrists raw from rope burns.
He hadn’t been trying to kill himself. That was what he had told the paramedics, the ER doctors, the crisis counselor who referred him to me. He had been trying to recreate something. A scene, an experience, a high he had chased and lost control of.
Now he sat in my office, staring at the floor, trying to find the words to explain what had happened.
I waited.
Patience was the foundation of my work. I couldn’t rush trauma. I couldn’t force someone to speak before they were ready. All I could do was create space, hold it open, and let them step into it when they felt safe enough.
Marcus took a shaky breath. “I thought I knew what I was doing,” he said finally, his voice barely above a whisper. “I thought... I thought I had it under control.”
“Tell me about the scene,” I said, keeping my tone neutral, clinical. “What were you trying to achieve?”
He flinched at the question, his shoulders hunching inward as if he were trying to make himself smaller. “It was supposed to be... intense. But safe. We talked about it. We had a safe word. We had rules.”
“And what happened?”
“She—” His voice cracked, and he pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “She used the safe word. And I didn’t stop.”
The words hung in the air between us, heavy and damning.
I didn’t react. Didn’t let my expression shift, didn’t let the weight of what he just confessed show on my face. This was my job. To listen. To hold space for the worst parts of people and not flinch. But inside, something cold and familiar twisted in my chest.
“Why didn’t you stop?” I asked.
Marcus shook his head, his hands dropping to his lap.
“I don’t know. I heard her. I heard her say it.
But I was... I was so far gone. I was in this headspace where nothing else mattered except the scene, the control, the—” He broke off, his breath hitching.
“I thought I was in control. I thought I could handle it. But I wasn’t. I couldn’t.”
“What happened after she used the safe word?”
“She started crying. Really crying. And that’s when I... when I finally stopped. When I realized what I’d done.” His voice was thick with self-loathing. “She left. Packed a bag and left that night. I haven’t seen her since.”
“Have you tried to contact her?”
“She blocked me. On everything.” He looked up at me, his eyes red-rimmed and desperate.
“I don’t blame her. I fucked up. I hurt her.
I violated her trust. I—” His voice broke again, and he buried his face in his hands.
“I don’t know who I am anymore. I thought I was someone who could do this, who could be trusted with that kind of power.
But I’m not. I’m just... I’m a monster.”
“You’re not a monster,” I said, the words automatic, practiced. “You made a mistake. A serious one. But that doesn’t define who you are.”
“Doesn’t it?” He looked at me, his expression raw. “How do I come back from this? How do I trust myself again? How does anyone trust me again?”
I didn’t have an answer for him. Not one that would help, anyway. Because the truth was, I didn’t know. I had been asking myself the same questions for years, and I still hadn’t found an answer that felt true.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
I ignored it.
“Marcus,” I said, leaning forward slightly, “what you’re feeling right now. The guilt, the shame, the fear—that’s normal. It’s a sign that you understand the gravity of what happened. That you’re taking responsibility.”
“But it doesn’t change what I did.”
“No,” I agreed. “It doesn’t. But it’s the first step toward making sure it doesn’t happen again.”
He stared at me, his expression a mix of hope and despair. “How do I do that? How do I make sure I never lose control like that again?”
My phone buzzed again. I pulled it out, glancing at the screen.
Mercy: Montana’s out. Called for a board meeting tonight. 7 PM.
I felt the words settle into my chest like stones.
Montana was out of the hospital. That was good news.
Better than good. It meant he survived, that he was strong enough to come back, to lead.
But a board meeting—that was something else entirely.
A board meeting meant decisions. Big ones.
The kind that would shape the future of the club, determine whether we stayed patched over with the Golden Skulls or tried to rebuild on our own.
The kind that would force us to confront everything we lost and everything we still had left to lose.
I typed a quick response.
Me: I’ll be there
Then I slipped the phone back into my pocket.
Marcus was still watching me, waiting for an answer.
“You start by being honest,” I said, refocusing on him. “With yourself first. About what you want, what you’re capable of, and what your limits are. And then you communicate those limits to anyone you’re in a scene with. You don’t push past them. You don’t test them. You respect them.”
“And if I can’t trust myself to do that?”
“Then you don’t scene,” I said bluntly. “Not until you’ve done the work to understand why you lost control in the first place. Not until you’ve rebuilt that trust with yourself.”
He nodded slowly, his expression thoughtful. “That’s going to take a long time, isn’t it?”
“Probably,” I admitted. “But it’s worth it. Because the alternative is living with the fear that you’ll hurt someone again. And that’s no way to live.”
Marcus was quiet for a long moment, processing. Then he looked up at me, his eyes searching. “Have you ever... have you ever lost control like that?”
The question hit me like a punch to the gut. I kept my expression neutral, my voice steady. “This session is about you, Marcus. Not me.”
“I know,” he blurted. “I just... I guess I’m wondering if it’s possible to come back from something like this. If someone like me can ever be trusted again.”
I held his gaze, weighing my words carefully.
“Yes,” I said finally. “It’s possible. But it requires work. Real, hard, uncomfortable work. And it requires you to forgive yourself eventually. Not right away. Not until you’ve earned it. But eventually.”
He nodded, his shoulders relaxing slightly. “Okay. Okay, I can do that.”
“Good.” I glanced at the clock on the wall. Our session was almost over. “We’ll pick this up next week. In the meantime, I want you to journal. Write about what happened, how you felt, and what you think triggered the loss of control. Don’t censor yourself. Just write.”
“Okay,” he said, standing. “Thank you, Dr. Dunaway. I... I really appreciate this.”
“You’re doing the work,” I said, standing as well. “That’s what matters.”
He left, closing the door softly behind him, and I stood there for a moment, staring at the empty chair where he had been sitting, my mind still caught on his question.
Have you ever lost control like that?
Yes.
God, yes.
I didn’t go straight home after Marcus left.
Instead, I sat at my desk, staring at the wall, letting the memories I had spent years burying claw their way to the surface. The office had grown dark around me, the city lights filtering through the blinds in thin, broken strips. I should have turned on a lamp. I didn’t.
Elise—that was her name.
She had been twenty-six, a graduate student studying art history at Columbia, with dark hair that fell in waves past her shoulders and darker eyes that seemed to see right through me.
She had a need for control that mirrored my own, or rather, a need to surrender it completely, which was the other side of the same coin.
We met at a BDSM club in Brooklyn, one of those underground places tucked away in converted warehouses where people went to explore the parts of themselves they couldn’t show the rest of the world.
The kind of place where you checked your everyday identity at the door along with your coat.
She had been a natural submissive from the very beginning.
Eager, trusting, willing to push her limits because she believed, truly believed, that I could keep her safe.
That I knew exactly how far to take things.
That I would never let anything truly harm her.
She had placed her complete faith in me, surrendering control with a vulnerability that was both beautiful and terrifying in its totality.
And I had.
For months, I kept her safe. I learned her body, her mind, her boundaries with meticulous care and attention.
I studied every reaction, every tremor, every breath.
I learned what made her feel secure, what pushed her to the edge, and what brought her back.
I had given her what she needed. Structure, discipline, release, and she had given me the same.
She had given me her trust, her submission, her raw honesty, and we built something together that felt unshakeable.
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.