Scully beheld the broken glass on the bar and the light cut on one of her hands. It seemed to snap her out of her inactive state as it fully sank in that the man behind her was beginning to hook his fingers into the waistband of her panties with the obvious intention of dragging them down her thighs and taking her from behind in full view of the other club patrons. It still shocked her despite the shameful arousal she felt that such an encounter could blatantly occur in the middle of a nightclub- and Scully was sure that the obvious attention from the crowd would spur the man on into fucking her with gusto.

She found herself reaching back and preventing the man's actions, gently removing his hands from under her skirt, aware of the aroused stain forming in her underwear as she did so.

"No." Scully found herself saying huskily. "I'm not in the mood for games right now."

Straightening her clothes and slowly turning to face the obviously disappointed man, Scully saw indeed he was naked before her and her refusal to accept him as a sexual partner had not diminished the considerable erection he was sporting despite her decision. In fact, Scully had to stifle a near-gasp at just how big the man's cock was- it had to be be pretty much close to eleven inches in length and her mind spun as she contemplated the struggle she would have taken to accomodate him had she allowed him to have sex with her. Trying to wipe away the mental visions of herself with her skirt pulled up to the waist and her exertions to take him inside her, Scully became aware of Carlos standing opposite them, his face once more curled into a wide smile. She was torn between her confused responses to his visible unrestrained delight at what he had seen transpiring and didn't know whether to enjoy the fact or strike him.

"Definitely not in the mood for games." She responded more tersely as the naked man began to shuffle away to the dancefloor, exchanging a secretly acknowledged look with Carlos.

"Well I hope you'll reconsider..." the man replied. "My name is Dixon and I'm always here if you change your mind, Red...any night..."

As his muscular form was enveloped by the crowd, Scully walked angrily over to Carlos, who continued to seem amused by her response.

"I see exactly how this place operates now..." She stopped inches from him, a sharp defiance visible in her features. "And I don't believe you were searching for someone who knew Lynette. I'm still not sure whether to accept she ever came to this place. As far as I'm concerned, bringing me here was your vicarious thrill for the evening and I'm not here to help you get yourself off. I'm serious about finding Lynette and I have no desire to waste my time with a man like you..."

As Scully moved to pass him, Carlos took hold of her arm and pulled her back towards him, the action jolting Scully with the same impact as when he had touched her earlier. As he held her firmly and closely to him, for a moment Scully found herself back in an apartment in Philadelphia being held by a man with equal strength, equal burning intensity. Once more she was enjoying the way his grip lightly bruised her skin and the all the ways she could see he wanted her in the depths of dark and hungry eyes...She remembered moving closer and preparing her lips for the animal contact she knew was coming...closer...closer...

Just as their lips came within metres of touching, Scully pulled away. The memory was gone and she faced Carlos full-on knowing she had betrayed her inner feelings to him in a fleeting second, a second she wished she could pull back and control.

"I didn't deceive you..." Carlos' tone was so serious that it threw Scully. "Your friend was here and I did just speak to the man I told you about. I wouldn't bring you here unless I knew this was a place you needed to be, Dana..."

His use of her first name for the first time in that deep hypnotic voice of his made her stomach turn over, not with revulsion or shock, but with the way his voice massaged every syllable as though he was having intercourse with it. No one else she had ever known had spoken her name in such a way.

"The man's name is Dario, in his spare time he makes underground movies..." Carlos relinquished his grip on Scully's arm slowly as he imparted the information to her. "Seems Lynette had expressed a desire to appear in one and he sent her out to the location to prepare for the shoot..."

This world kept offering more and more surprises for Scully.

"An underground movie?" she enquired, still partly incredulous. "A pornographic underground movie?"

Carlos' grey eyes filled with affirmation.

"Of course."

Scully restored the gap between the two of them as she straightened up once more.

"So this was three weeks ago? And she's still there? Waiting to shoot it? Is that what you're telling me?"

"The shoot was last week..." He noticed the barrier that Scully had tried to impose between them as he continued to speak. "She told him that she needed some time away afterwards...as Dario's shoots tend to be on the strenuous side...she told him that she would be back soon and that she would want to see a copy of the movie when she returned...He told me he was so impressed with her performance that she could have a career in the business..."

Scully interrupted him.

"I don't need to hear any more...so you're telling me she's safe, she just decided to take a vacation after shooting this...film?"

Carlos smiled.

"That's what seems to have occured. Maybe she just couldn't tell you about it. People are like that at times. They fight what they are."

Scully began to move away, her mind still reeling with this new bit of information but still harbouring some suspicion as to its truth. But there was the way that Carlos had looked at her as he told her. She wanted to believe him.

She wanted to believe. Ironic.

But in what? The secret life her friend had apparently lead? Or a secret life she had never dared to want to live?

"Well, I guess our night out is over with then..."

Carlos seem unperturbed by Scully's obvious intention to leave the club.

"I guess it is. It was nice to meet you, Dana."

Again the way he spoke her name. What was it about this man she hardly knew that could do such things to her with just looks, just words.

Just touch.

Touch.

"I guess I should thank you for the information." She continued facing away from him, part of her not wanting to look back and see the way he was looking at her. "But I swear if I hear nothing from her soon, I'll be back and the questions won't be as polite. Goodnight."

As she made her way towards the darkened passageway, Scully felt almost light-headed and unable to breathe. Trying to ignore the noises of deviant activity that sounded around her as she made her way to the entrance, Scully found the doorway and crashed through it ignoring the doorman's curious stare and gulping down cold night air like it was essential to her life. As she stood in the street adjusting herself, she became aware of the doorman speaking from behind her.

"I hope you'll come back soon, honey."

--

He had reached her. Just momentarily but the contact was enough to erode the wall she kept around herself. For all her strength, she had doubts about herself, about her needs. More so than ever because of the personal pain he knew and felt she had recently experienced. He wanted to take away the pain and set her truly free from it. He didn't promise there wouldn't be other kinds of pain, after all it was only through other pain that ultimate pleasure could sometimes be reached. He pictured her letting go with him, her lips turned into an animal snarl as she implored him to do forbidden things with her, to her. As she hissed her cravings at him and met his torrid and unbidden responses. He imagined what she would sound like screaming her release into his own mouth as he introduced her to a world she'd long stayed on the borders of. He imagined and he drank from the thoughts.

Soon he would drink from her for real.

--

As Scully turned the key in the lock of her Georgetown apartment after a restless walking of the nearby streets, she couldn't really believe how she'd walked away from Provocation without real definite proof of the information Carlos had provided her with about Lynette. It was so unlike her to turn away without making a determined attempt to find answers that satisfied her. But she'd had an overwhelming need to escape the stifling carnality of the club and the spark that Carlos seemed to light in her soul, despite her hardly knowing anything about him. She played back the event of her nearly entertaining sex with the man called Dixon almost unbelievingably and yet part of her shivered at how it would have felt to act so wanton with the black stranger, to just give up her body to him to satisfy them both. When this dark part of herself reared its head, Scully scared herself. And at the same time aroused herself. That if she was honest was what had made her run without further checking out Carlos' story.

She was broken out of her thoughts by the small padded brown envelope lying at her feet as she opened her apartment door. Startled by its appearance, she couldn't help but come to the conclusion it was connected to the events of this surreal evening. Long gone were the days when her and Mulder's shadowy informants would leave such packages on their respective doorsteps and slowly reaching down to pick up the package, she swallowed hard as she already felt what was unmistakably the shape of a video tape contained within.

"The man's name is Dario, and in his spare time he makes underground movies..."

Quickly stepping back into the building hallway, Scully looked furtively around. Someone had been here either before or after her trip to Chances and Provocation and dropped off a tape. If it was before she was in no doubt she was being played from the word go by Carlos, if after...maybe this was another kind of game...

Surprising herself by how quickly she locked and bolted the door, Scully traversed the rooms of her apartment to make sure she was alone. When she had satisfied herself that she was, she found herself throwing her keys to the kitchen table and heading to the living room where she instantly turned on her TV set switching it to the video channel. Almost tearing the envelope apart, she did indeed produce an uncased single black video cassette with a tiny note taped to it.

"You'll see I wasn't lying. Enjoy this first scene. Carlos."

Now there was no doubt in Scully's mind as to what she held in her hand and that Carlos was continuing whatever began in the club between them. She slammed the tape into her VCR and waiting several moments of shaky static that left her biting into her bottom lip, her eyes eventually were exposed to an opening shot of an old apparently deserted warehouse. She could see the glass in the window panes was broken and dirtied as a camera slowly panned into the building taking in the water trickling down cracked walls of brick, rusting metal chains and pulleys hanging from the high ceiling and several torn and damp mattresses lining the uneven floor. The quality of the camerawork surprised Scully given its underground nature- this was no cookie-cutter film but an almost professionally shot opening that would befit any serious thriller. She was so momentarily distracted by that fact that when the blonde woman standing in black bra and panties before the brickwork on the far side of the warehouse came into view she was startled.

It was Lynette alright, her back to the camera and head to the side, both arms behind her back and held locked together by a pair of shiny metallic cuffs. The long dark stockings that adorned her shapely legs and the black high heels that she wore on her feet completed what was obviously intended to be an erotic and arousing visual. Scully, even though she had been pre-warned, was nonetheless still uncomfortable watching her missing friend on the screen in front of her. She was unaware of just how much her hands were digging into the soft material of her sofa as she continued to watch.

A man stepped from the shadows dressed in what appeared to be flowing black robes, his features obscured by a dark hood that completely covered his face. In his hand was a long whip. Scully trembled inside as she watched the mysterious man run the whip suggestively down Lynette's back, Lynette's back muscles twitching in anticipation as he ran the rough hide over her naked flesh. Scully had been unaware of just how in shape her friend's body was now she was seeing it so exposed and despite her trepidation at seeing Lynette in such an edgy predicament, there was part of her that was excited by what she saw, that was stirred by it.

When the man locked his fist into Lynette's long blonde hair and wrenched her face roughly back to him to receive a searing animalistic kiss of ownership, Scully found her palms were almost bleeding because of how deep her fingernails were digging into her now bunched-up hands. The camera zoomed in on the ferocity of their mouths joining, their tongues mixing, the pool of saliva the man was drooling into Lynette's mouth as he kissed her. Scully sat shaken as the torrid scene continued to unfold, an undeniable warm and potent rush between her thighs telling her what watching this tape was really doing to her.

"Are you my bitch, Lynette?"

The question echoed around the disused warehouse as the man reinforced the need for an affirmative by tugging hard on Lynette's hair.

"I need to hear you say it to me. I need to hear you say the words."

As he wrenched hard on the long blonde hair again, Scully could ascertain that the rough treatment obviously excited her friend and she had deliberated in answering the man because she had wanted his treatment of her to become courser.

"Are..."

Pull.

"You..."

Pull.

"My..."

Pull.

BITCH?!"

PULL!

Lynette's reply was a pleasurably tortured whisper that made Scully's throat dry.

"I'm your bitch...you know I am. Lynette is your bitch and only yours..."

"Prove it to me."

Scully debated switching off the tape because of how much it was getting to her. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat and went to press stop on her remote but as she witnessed Lynette drop to her hands and knees before the mysterious figure and beheld the man exposing his powerfully erect cock from his black robes Scully chose to watch further. The oral sex that followed was intense, aggressive, primal. As Lynette knelt and allowed her mouth to be willingly violated by the man's almost brutal thrusts, Scully felt a cold shiver run down her spine. It wasn't one of disgust more a shiver of fear at how much part of her enjoyed what she was seeing play out on her TV screen. The fact that Lynette was seemingly so willing to participate in what was very clearly violent sex made Scully breathless and Carlos' words came back to haunt her from the recent past. Words about no judgement, no limits to expression. Part of her began to understand what a place like Provocation offered to people even though it still seemed so alien to her. Or did it?

The sex that followed was equally aggressive, Lynette was thrown face-down on one of the torn mattresses, her panties and bra ripped away and subjected to some of the roughest sex Scully had ever laid eyes upon, primarily extremely forceful rear-entry anal sex which added to the edgy and forbidden nature of what Scully was witnessing. The man's face was still covered with his dark hood as he pummelled Lynette whose naked body was barely protected from the hard floor by the thinness of the mattress but the rest of his body was exposed, a muscular dark quality to it much like the man Dixon that Scully almost had found herself having sex with back at Provocation. As the camera moved around to film Lynette from the front submitting to her master's pounding, Scully saw the look in her friend's eyes and the breath caught in her throat at the pure unadulterated lust that was burning in them.

As her flushed face filled the screen, the man behind her who was yanking on her hair stopped for a second, reached around and held her head steady with the camera line as he continued to move intensely in and out of her.

"Tell everybody how much you love it this way, just what you are, Lynette. Tell them."

Lynette's voice came in short gasping broken-up sentences punctuated by the impact of the man's hips on her perspiration-soaked bottom.

"I...love...it...because...I'm...a...slut..."

The man held the dominant pace with Lynette until the time eventually came for the camera to come close again and capture the full dark rapture of Lynette's screaming orgasm as her mystery master brought her over the edge with him, the orgasm intensified even more by the man's control of her release of it, forcing her to hold it back for what seemed like an eternity before letting her display it in a bucking flailing crescendo.

As the screen went black, Scully sat silently for more time than she seemed aware seeing other visions in the now empty glass of her TV. A warehouse. A man in the shadows. A redheaded woman standing in black underwear, hands cuffed behind her back, having the man's hands run over every inch of her tripwire-tense body. Strong male hands tangling hard in the woman's red hair, pulling her back, asking the question.

Are you my bitch?

She pulled her mind away from the visions before she had a chance to see the man or woman's face. But as much as she tried to deny it, she knew inside who they were meant to symbolise.

--

Scully tried to sleep but her mind was tortured by thoughts that would not leave her since she had exited Provocation and the mysterious Carlos. Every time she attempted to close her eyes, she saw Lynette submitting to the mystery man's control in the warehouse and every mental replay exaggerated the action even more until Scully felt her mind was drowning in the excess. As she sat up in her bed, her body wet through the silk of her nightclothes, Scully started when the ring of her bedside phone cut through the night air. She hesitated for several seconds on answering it, part of her subconscious warning her that if she picked up the receiver, she would fall deeper still into the strange hold tonight's events had placed over her.

"Dana."

It was as she'd suspected. It was Carlos. She didn't reply to the mention of her name, she was afraid of what answering to it might mean to the man at the other end of the line.

"I know it's late, but I wanted to know if you liked what you saw on the tape."

He was more direct than Scully had thought he would be and that surprised her given the way he'd mostly offered only implication back at the club. She figured she might as well be equally direct but she was shaking inside.

"It was...different. What do you want me to say?"

There was silence on the other end of the line. Scully imagined those penetrating grey eyes and how they would be regarding her right now. She continued talking.

"Just what did you want me seeing that tape to make me do? Why are you calling me, Carlos? I'm not very partial to being stalked."

Carlos' voice was caressing each carefully chosen word even from afar.

"Did it make you feel like doing something, Dana?"

Scully tried to keep a wall between her and her caller.

"I won't answer that. I just want to sleep. Goodnight, Carlos."

"The warehouse..."

She was stopped from replacing the receiver by those two words.

"I'm surprised you don't recognise the location. It's only two blocks from where you are now. It's closer than you can imagine. I'm closer than you imagine."

Scully looked into the darkness beyond her bedroom doorway half-expecting to see Carlos standing there. Damn herself for wishing for a moment that he was.

"I told you, I don't appreciate being stalked, Carlos. I mean it. Goodnight."

"Why aren't you hanging up, Dana?"

He had her. In whatever way he did it he was holding her in the moment, suspended in action, decision. She should have felt threatened. Instead she felt strangely electrified.

"N street, three rows down. Meet me there in 20 minutes, Dana."

Scully's voice was a whisper. Imploring. Needing to know.

"Why?"

There was silence again for several minutes. Just as Scully was about to re-whisper the question, Carlos finally replied, his voice even deeper than before, his tone aggressively assertive.

"Because I want you there. And I know you want to be there, Dana. 19 minutes, 54 seconds. No more talk."

The line went dead and what scared Scully more than anything was that her first thought was that she would have time to watch the video again before she left.

--