Sinner’s Binding (House of Lustz #5)

Sinner Chapter 1

Four thirty in the afternoon on a Friday.

The end of most people’s work week. If nothing disaster-wise happened, it would be the official end of the work week for my people and me.

However, in this business, my company and I were on-call twenty-four-seven.

One never knew when something would happen, and I’d get the call to come running.

Sure, most owners and CEOs leave the actual hands-on work, the dirty stuff, to their employees.

It’s what they got paid for. And I did at times, just not all the time.

I still loved to do the work that was the backbone of my company.

I hadn’t forgotten the years when I was the one doing the work, getting sweaty, evading danger, saving lives, and more.

I never wanted to give that up totally. It was one of the things I believed made me a good boss.

I never asked my people to do something I hadn’t or couldn’t do myself.

Some in the industry snorted when they first heard the name of my company, Caldwell’s Catastrophes.

They’d go with the more boring Caldwell’s Emergency Disaster Response or something along those lines.

I found names like those boring. And catastrophes were what we dealt with.

Whether they were nature-made or manmade, we handled them all.

While I enjoyed all aspects of what we did, my favorite would always be the rope access team.

It was where I started. God, that had been seventeen years ago.

Sometimes it was hard to believe it had been that long ago.

The scared, yet determined eighteen-year-old me, who knew I had to get a job that would not only support myself but also my fourteen-year-old brother, Rowan.

I lucked out finding someone willing to teach me the ropes, no pun intended.

Rope teams were part of rescue teams. They were specialized units within the team trained to use rope systems, lifting equipment, and harnesses to perform safe rescues, typically of people, though they could also rescue structures.

A rope team member was trained to access and evacuate people from confined spaces, elevated heights, and steep slopes using high-angle and low-angle techniques.

I learned to ascend, rappel, use hauling systems, and rig litters to evacuate people to safety.

There were three main areas in which companies like mine worked.

There was wilderness rescue. Think steep slope evacuations, cliffside rescues, and mountain rescues.

If it were an industrial rescue, it would involve tower climbing, confined spaces, and industrial facilities where work was done.

Urban rescue became more diverse, and you could be tasked with rescuing at a construction site, on a bridge, or in a building.

The most common places to find such teams were fire departments and private companies, like mine.

We helped in disasters and other situations.

Yes, it could be nerve-racking, but I found that the challenge and excitement kept me enjoying my work.

“Hey, are you ready to get out of here?” An unexpected yet familiar voice said from my office door. No knocking, no “excuse me,” just immediate talking. I raised my head from the papers I’d been finalizing on my desk before I got lost in my thoughts.

Coming through my door into my office was Rowan. He was grinning and practically skipping. He acted more like a college party guy than a thirty-one-year-old man. Often, I wondered if he’d ever fully grow up. And if his inability to take things seriously was my fault.

Was I wrong to hire him? Maybe, but if I hadn’t, I wasn’t sure if he’d survive in another job.

However, his unwillingness or inability to act like a grown-up was wearing thin.

It was time to be an adult and take full responsibility for his life.

That had been the bone of contention between us for the past year.

When he turned thirty, I said enough was enough.

“Rowan, this is my office. Knock and wait to be asked inside,” I admonished, though he knew it by heart.

He plopped down in one of the chairs across from me. He rolled his eyes. “Ah, come on, Reign, don’t. Do you always have to play the hardass boss and older brother?” There was a trace of a whine in his tone. That, too, was familiar.

“Yes, I do, and it’s not playing, Ro. Just because you’re my brother doesn’t give you the right to do things I don’t tolerate from others. Have you finished everything that needed to be done before the weekend? Are all your reports done?” I asked.

My brother slumped in the chair and cast me a frustrated glance. “Yeah, I’m good. It’s almost five. Why don’t you head out early for once? Maybe go out on the town and have fun. Find someone to help ease the tension. All work isn’t good for you. You need to de-stress.”

He and I had very different ideas about what constitutes relaxation and fun.

For Rowan, it was going to bars or clubs, drinking like a frat boy, and picking up women.

He’d have sex with them and by the next morning, not even remember or care to know their names.

He had a group of guys he called his friends who were the same way.

I disliked them all. They were old enough to have gotten out of that mode.

After a weekend of partying, it was a waiting game to see whether Rowan would make it to work on time on Monday.

Even if he did, he was usually hungover.

I knew I had to choose to cut him loose soon.

What had stopped me was the perpetual hope that he’d straighten himself up and stay to do the work the way it required.

I’d been praying for that for the past two years.

I wondered what he’d say if I told him what my kind of relaxation and fun consisted of.

When it was time to relax, there was one place I always went.

The House of Lustz, the premier kink club in Nashville, was the one place I could go and let everything release.

There, I could indulge in another passion.

This one was connected to my work in a way.

At least my work led me to the fascinating art I now practice.

I never shared that I was a patron of a BDSM club with my brother.

The reason was twofold. One, I knew he’d have shit to say, and I didn’t want to hear it. He had no right to judge me. The other was that I didn't want him to try to join. I wanted one place that was all mine. I loved Rowan, but he was intense.

“I’ll be leaving once I get these last couple of things done. If you’re finished, then leave. Try to stay out of trouble. I’ll see you on Monday,” I told him.

“Why don’t you come hang out with the guys and me?” he suggested.

“You know I can’t stand that, Ro. They drive me crazy. I’d choke one of them before the night was over,” I reminded him.

He gave a weary sigh as he stood.

“Fine, be an old stick-in-the-mud. I’m going out and having a great time. Life is too short to do nothing but work and make money. Later. I’ll see you on Monday.”

“Be careful,” I reminded him.

He waved his hand dismissively as he sauntered out.

When he was gone, I dropped my pen and turned my chair to stare out the window.

My office was in downtown Nashville. I saw the other high-rises surrounding mine.

My office was on the fourteenth floor. We had the entire floor to ourselves.

I reflected once again on where things had gone wrong with Rowan.

As the oldest, I’d always been expected by my parents to take care of my little brother.

The lessons started the day he came home from the hospital and never stopped until our parents died when I was eighteen.

They’d been on vacation in Colorado, on a ski trip.

There had been a freak avalanche, and they had been caught in it.

By the time the rescue team found them, it was too late.

I was left to mourn their loss and finish raising Rowan. He was a high school freshman, and I’d just started college. Instead of continuing with school, I chose to find a job that would pay enough to keep a roof over our heads and prevent us from starving to death.

We hadn’t been left destitute. Our parents had a will and life insurance.

They hadn’t had a mountain of debt, other than the mortgage.

I could’ve used the money to live off of, but I put it into investments.

Six months after their deaths, I sold the house.

We moved into an apartment to save money.

I tried to keep things the same for Rowan, and overall, I succeeded.

But looking back, I knew I should’ve started teaching him that he wasn’t entitled to have others always take care of him and bail his ass out of messes.

By the time I started that, it was too late.

I spent his young adult years partly helping him while trying to make him realize he had to grow up.

It didn’t work. The only recourse was to cut him off and let him figure it out. I just had to do it.

I knew when I did it that I had to be able to stand back and let him fail or succeed without helping or rescuing him.

He lived in an apartment, not with me, thank God.

He’d moved into it after his last failure, the one where his latest business scheme had failed.

That’s when I offered him a job at Catastrophes.

I thought that if he were around a bunch of hardworking individuals and saw what could be accomplished if one set his mind to it, he’d finally take the initiative and run with it.

I was wrong. Two years was more than enough time to learn and make changes.

As soon as the acquisition of the small family response company I was negotiating for was complete, I’d terminate him. At the moment, the last thing I needed was to deal with his whining and tantrums, which I knew would come on top of the due diligence and closing activities we had on the horizon.