Chapter 1: Intrigued

The first time Irene Adler learned about Sherlock Holmes was through rather mundane circumstances. She'd finished with her last client hours ago and now, she was bored. So bored in fact, that she pulled out her rarely opened laptop and decided to surf the internet with no particular agenda in mind.

Irene let out a sigh. Normally she preferred surfing the web on her camera phone, or curling up on her favourite chair and reading a book. But she'd read everything in her shelf and hadn't had time to buy a new one.

Quickly, her eyes skimmed through the titles. While she had True Crime books here and there, others were related to her work: BDSM, Sex Toys, Roleplay, Doms & Subs, Masters & Slaves...just the usual stuff, and at this point in her life, she didn't even need them anymore. In fact, she hadn't needed them at all. She had a natural talent for knowing what people liked—their fetishes, their kinks—just by observing them, touching the right places, hitting the right places. She could pick people apart, men and women alike (especially men) and make them spill their darkest secrets with just a few sensuous words from her lips and the occasional crack of a riding crop.

Irene lay on her stomach and opened her web browser. Secrets. More than her work as a dominatrix, secrets were the key to the life she led now: a far cry from the penniless aspiring actress she once was—shuffling from one failed audition to the next, only to end up starring in some shady films which exposed her to the world of BDSM.

Secrets. There were a lot of them to go around and they became more valuable as her clientele grew and evolved to include the upper class.

She never extorted; not directly for money at least, but the intimate knowledge she held of certain clients have certainly helped her move up the ladder. She had a growing list of people—powerful people—at the palm of her hand whom she knew would stand by her rather than leave her to tear their lives apart.

It gave her a high, this power she had over people, and she realized why her past dommes had never wanted to play the submissive role again. It was to her a drug, and while she had entered the sex trade for much needed money, she couldn't deny that money had since become secondary to chasing this high.

But every high was followed with a crash, and Irene was experiencing it acutely. She couldn't understand why she was so bored. No, not bored. She was down. Down, when she had no reason to be. She was at the top of her game—clients pouring in, an increasing investment account, protection guaranteed...

"I guess it really is lonely at the top," she thought, then immediately dismissed it, inwardly cursing herself for falling into such cliché. She was being silly. She liked the solitude. The independence. She liked being alone.

Yeah, she thought, scrolling through the news, her eyes not looking at any article in particular. She liked being alone...

She stopped scrolling. There was an update on serial murder case she'd been following.

"Finally! Something interesting."

She clicked on the article and began to read. If she wasn't flogging clients or pouring them with candle wax, reading detective stories was a favourite pastime of hers. Unfortunately, news articles can only take you so far in terms of the actual work done behind the scenes. There were blogs, true, but they were rarely written by the people who carried out such investigations. Oh, she could probably wait for a true crime author to publish a book on the cases, but that will certainly take ages. She did have connections with the police (she knew what the chief of police liked) but it wasn't the same as speaking with the people who actually do the leg work.

As Irene delved further into the article, she became more intrigued and increasingly frustrated. The last victim, Jennifer Wilson had been clever enough to plant her mobile phone on the killer and scratch her email password on the floor so investigators could track the phone via GPS, but Irene needed more details. If this woman solved her own murder, then it would feel a bit anti climactic, and Irene felt a pang of disappointment towards Scotland Yard. To think they had been doing quite well as of late.

No, there had to be more. She opened another tab and searched for Jennifer Wilson's name, filtering the search results to show the latest published articles.

One press of a key yielded numerous results, but one entry stood out among the rest.

"A Study In Pink"

She moved a delicate, manicured finger over the tracking pad and clicked the link to Dr. John Watson's blog.

By the time Irene finished reading Dr. Watson's blog entry, she was giddy with excitement and curiosity. Whoever this Sherlock Holmes was, he was quite possibly one of the smartest people she had ever read about, if not the most obnoxious if Dr. Watson was to be believed.

"Consulting detective..." Irene read to herself out loud and smiled. Her interest piqued, she opened another tab, typed in Sherlock Holmes' name and found herself directed to his website with the header The Science of Deduction.

Irene spent the next hour reading through the website. There were interesting articles in regards to deductive reasoning and keen observation, but all of that was eclipsed by a writing style that was too technical for her taste. Then there were those pages dedicated to things she'd rather not waste time on. Like two hundred and forty three types of tobacco ash.

"The brain of a scientist, yet he chose to be a detective," Irene thought, and began her search anew for more about Sherlock Holmes. Apart from his website, there was little to no information about him: no social media accounts, no photographs, nothing.

It was frustrating.

It was intriguing.

With one more swipe of the tracking pad, Irene subscribed to Dr. Watson's blog. She'll probably learn more about this Sherlock Holmes in the coming weeks. After all, there was always a crime to solve in England.

"Which reminds me", she thought with a smile as she reached for her camera phone. "I think it's time I misbehaved..."