Or was he plotting and conniving like Thad? Was he trying to butter me up for the kill? Was he playing nice to get in my panties, only to let me down? I wouldn’t let that happen. If he tried to fuck me over, he would end up in that cage right next to Thad.
My obsessive thoughts had me clenching the sheets so tightly that my nails stabbed into my palms. This stress never ended. Day in, day out. Always there. I had to get a handle on it.
Therapy helped to an extent but I was still mad all the time. I felt at peace when I was domming a man, but that peace faded as soon as they were gone. The flood of angry thoughts drowned me as soon as they exited my lair.
Then I was right back to where I started, clutching my gun with my head on the swivel. But?—
Quest. Whenever I was around him, some of that subsided. Actually, a lot of it did. I felt almost normal around him. I was at peace in his company. He made me laugh. And I had the most fun with him that I’d had in years.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand and pulled me out of the spiral. It was a booking request through my Dame CoCo line—a private encrypted app I used exclusively for clients. Thursday evening, six o’clock, the usual rate. The name attached to the booking was one I knew well. Judge Timothy Baker. One of my highest-paying regulars and one of the most pathetic men I’d ever met, which was saying something given my client list.
Judge Baker was a federal circuit court judge who spent his days sentencing people and his evenings on his knees begging me to tell him he was worthless. He was married with two kids in private school and a house in Bethesda and a reputation that would disintegrate if anyone ever found out that he paid a twenty-something Black woman in thigh-high boots to spit on him and call him a dog. The contradiction would’ve been funny if it wasn’t so depressing.
I confirmed the booking and got up to shower. As I was drying off, my phone buzzed again. A text this time, not through the app but through the burner number I gave to select clients for emergencies only.
Dame CoCo, I am unworthy of you. I have been a disobedient, pathetic piece of shit and I don’t deserve your time or your attention. Please forgive me. I need to see you. I’ll do anything.—Timothy
I stared at the screen and felt my jaw tighten. He’d texted outside of the app. He’d used the emergency number for something that was clearly not an emergency. And he’d reached out without paying a tribute first, which was a rule I had established on day one and reinforced every single session. You don’t speak to Dame CoCo without an offering. You don’trequest her attention without proving you’re worthy of it. That was the foundation of everything I built in that room, and he knew it.
How dare you text me without paying tribute first. You know the rules. BLOCKED.
I blocked his number and set the phone down. Brushed my teeth. Started on my makeup. Took my time with the eyeliner because Dame CoCo’s cat eye had to be razor sharp—it was part of the armor, part of the transformation from Mehar to the woman who made powerful men crawl.
My phone buzzed again. CashApp notification.
$10,000 from Timothy B.
No message. Just the money. Because he knew that was the only language I responded to.
I looked at the notification for a second and felt that familiar rush. It was the one Janelle would probably call a dopamine hit tied to a control cycle, the one that made me feel ten feet tall and untouchable. Ten thousand dollars because I blocked a man for sixty seconds. Ten thousand dollars to earn back the privilege of my attention.
I unblocked him. The tribute was paid. Protocol was restored. That’s how it worked—you break the rules, you pay the penalty, you get reinstated. Dame CoCo didn’t hold grudges. She held invoices.
By five-thirty, I was at the dungeon. I lit the candles, checked the equipment, and settled into the throne the way I always did before a session. Shoulders back, chin up, Mehar gone.
I changed into my session outfit. I slipped into a black leather bodysuit, thigh-high boots, gloves, and checked my reflection. Dame CoCo stared back at me. Mehar was gone. The scared girl with the clenched fists and the racing thoughts and Quest’s cologne still haunting—she didn’t exist in this room. In this room, I was God.
At six o’clock sharp, there was a buzz at the door. I checked the camera and frowned. The angle wasn’t great but the person standing outside didn’t look like Judge Baker. The build was wrong, the height was off, and there was no briefcase. Baker always brought a briefcase because he came straight from chambers.
I pressed the intercom anyway. “You may enter.”
The door opened and the person who stepped into my dungeon was not Judge Timothy Baker.
It was a woman. Mid-forties, blonde, thin in a way that suggested she didn’t eat enough, wearing a Burberry trench coat and holding her purse against her chest with both hands like it was a shield. Her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen and she was trembling from her jaw to her fingertips.
I knew who she was before she said a word. I’d seen her face in the society pages. It was Allison Baker. The judge’s wife.
“You’re Dame CoCo?” she asked, her voice cracking on my name like it physically hurt her to say it.
I didn’t answer. I sat there on my throne in my boots and my cat eye and let the silence do what silence does—it made her fill it.
“I found the charges on his credit card,” she said. The words came out in a rush, tumbling over each other like she’d been rehearsing them in the car and couldn’t hold them in anymore. “Thousands of dollars. Tens of thousands. I didn’t know what it was at first. I thought it was gambling or drugs or something. But then I found the texts on his phone and I saw the name Dame CoCo and I Googled and I searched and I—” Her voice broke. She pressed her hand to her mouth and breathed through her fingers. “He’s spent over two hundred thousand dollars on you in the last year. Do you know that? Two hundred thousand. My daughter’s college fund is gone. Our savings account isempty. He refinanced the house without telling me and I only found out because the bank sent a letter.”
I still didn’t say anything. Not because I was being cruel and not because I didn’t feel something—I did, somewhere underneath the leather and the persona, there was a part of me that looked at this woman and saw every wife who had ever been destroyed by a man’s secret life. But Dame CoCo didn’t flinch. Dame CoCo didn’t apologize. And Mehar couldn’t afford to either, because the second I let this woman’s pain become my responsibility, the entire structure of what I’d built would collapse.
“Please,” Allison said. She stepped closer and I saw that her hands were shaking so badly she could barely hold her purse. “Please stop seeing him. I’m begging you. He won’t stop on his own—I’ve tried talking to him, I’ve tried threatening to leave, I’ve tried everything. He’s addicted to whatever this is.” She gestured at the room, at the walls, at me. “He’s addicted to you. And it’s destroying our family.”
“How did you get this address?” I asked. My voice was calm and flat. It didn’t sound like the voice I used with Quest or with Bryce or with Zainab. It was the Dame CoCo voice—detached, authoritative, and completely in control even when the room was falling apart.
