Chapter One

Officer Kate Morgan

Officer Kate Morgan stood dumbstruck by the scene before her. It felt as though she had somehow stepped into a frame from a horror movie, and it was no more welcoming to her than it would have been there. Seeing her fellow officer’s patrol car parked outside, she hadn’t known what to expect when she entered. There had been talk about Officer Marlow, whispers amongst the force about his idiosyncrasies and his general oddness. There had been talk that he was a “dirty” cop, but she had never known whether to believe it. When she’d received the report from a local that a police car was seen driving down an out-of-the way road a few times, she’d been suspicious. She’d assumed that he was involved in drugs or one of the many other mundane things that bad cops were always drawn to. But the questions and whispers she had heard about him had not prepared her for the scene before her.

The room itself was small and outfitted like some sort of torture chamber. It was the sort of setting you would expect to see in a haunted house, not in an old and abandoned mill. But, where those scenes were often cheap and clearly fake, there was nothing artificial about what she was looking at now. The stocks and racks and chains that filled the room were nothing short of real. That much was obvious even beyond the way in which they were currently being used.

The first girl was standing up high on her toes with her back to Kate. She couldn’t see the captive girl’s face, trapped as it was on the other side of the heavy wooden stocks that enclosed her neck and wrists. Kate could see the distress in the other girl’s trembling body, however, forced to remain high up on her toes with her legs pressed together, making herself as tall as possible to avoid the obvious pressure of the wood against her throat. With each little motion the girl made, Kate could hear the tight handcuffs on her ankles clank together.

The second girl knelt on the floor. Where the first girl wore a harness of black leather straps around her body, the second was adorned in white. Kate winced at the way that the second girl’s upper body was compressed by the tight leather corset that pressed into her. She wore knee-high boots of matching white leather, but where there would normally be feet, Kate could see the hoof-like shapes of their bottoms. She could see the way that the boots held the girl’s heels up aloft, but without the support that heels would offer. The girl’s arms were trapped behind her back inside some additional leather contraption that Kate could only glimpse from her position.

The second girl’s face, however, was the most shocking sight to Kate. Thin white