“I followed him last week. He didn’t come inside, but I saw him park and sit in his car for twenty minutes staring at this door. I came back today because the booking was on his calendar.”
She’d compromised my location. That was a security issue. I operated out of a rowhouse basement that most people walked past without a second glance.
“Mrs. Baker,” I said. “I understand that you’re in pain. And I’m sorry for what you’re going through. But your husband is a grown man who makes his own choices. I don’t recruit clients. Idon’t pursue them. They come to me, they pay for a service, and they leave. What they do with their money and their marriages is not my responsibility.”
“Not your responsibility?” Her voice pitched upward and her eyes filled with fresh tears. “You take hundreds of thousands of dollars from a married man and it’s not your responsibility?”
“He gives me that money willingly. Eagerly. I have never asked him for a dollar he didn’t offer. If you have a problem with how your husband spends his money, that’s a conversation for you and him. Not for you and me.”
She stared at me with an expression that moved through about five emotions in three seconds—shock, rage, grief, desperation, and finally something that looked like defeat. Her shoulders dropped and her chin trembled and she suddenly looked ten years older than she probably was.
“You don’t care at all, do you?” she whispered.
I did care. Somewhere behind Dame CoCo’s mask, Mehar cared. Mehar had been the wife who didn’t know what her husband was doing with money. Mehar had been the woman blindsided by a man’s hidden life. But I couldn’t afford to be Mehar right now because Mehar would crumble and Dame CoCo couldn’t.
“I think you should leave,” I said. “And I think you should talk to a lawyer, not a dominatrix.”
She stood there for another few seconds, searching my face for something human. Then she turned and walked out of the dungeon and the steel door closed behind her with a sound that echoed off the matte black walls.
I stood in the middle of my throne room in my leather and my boots and my perfect cat eye and I felt the Dame CoCo armor crack in a place it had never cracked before. Not the joints or the seams—somewhere deeper, in the foundation. In the part of me that knew exactly what it felt like to be Allison Baker, standing ina room you didn’t belong in, begging a stranger to give you back the man who was supposed to love you.
I changed out of the bodysuit. Wiped off the makeup. Put my hoodie back on and became Mehar again, which was the harder costume to wear because Mehar felt everything that Dame CoCo didn’t.
On the drive home, I thought about what Janelle had said,“There’s a difference between processing trauma and performing the opposite of it.”I thought about Allison Baker’s shaking hands and empty college fund. I thought about the ten thousand dollars sitting in my CashApp from a man whose wife had just stood in my dungeon and begged me to let him go.
And I thought about Quest. About the roller rink and the flickering hallway light and the way he didn’t kiss me even though we both wanted him to. About how he’d given me a night that cost nothing; no tribute, no transaction, no power exchange. Just two people on wheels under neon lights, one of them falling and the other one picking her up every single time.
Janelle was right. The dungeon wasn’t healing me. It was just the other side of the same room.
I blocked Judge Baker again. This time I deleted his number too.
19
QUEST
I left Justice’s office feeling better than I had in weeks. The casino was done. Construction complete, inspections passed, liquor license approved, staff hired. The grand opening was in a month, and Justice had the numbers laid out in that meticulous way he did everything—spreadsheets color-coded, projections conservative but promising, every line item accounted for down to the napkins. We dapped each other up in the parking lot and I told him I was proud of him because I didn’t say that enough and he needed to hear it. He nodded the way Justice always did when something hit him in the chest—quiet, controlled, eyes a little glassy before he blinked it away.
The casino was going to change everything for us. Legitimate revenue. Clean money flowing through a business that had our name on it without any dirt underneath. Banks Reserve had survived on grit and shadows for twenty years. The casino was supposed to be the light.
I drove to Rita’s estate because I hadn’t seen her in two weeks and that was too long. Her house sat in manicured grounds, the circular driveway behind a gated entrance in one of DC’s most exclusive neighborhoods. It had been paid for with decades of building Banks Reserve from the ground up. Rita had been therefrom the beginning. Every major decision in family history had been made in her kitchen. Every crisis managed from her living room. And every grandchild who walked through that door got fed, whether they were hungry or not, because Rita didn’t believe in empty stomachs or empty hearts.
She opened the door before I knocked because she always heard the Maybach in the driveway and she always beat me to the door and she was eighty-four years old and still faster than most people half her age.
“There he is,” she said, pulling me down for a hug. She smelled like cocoa butter and cinnamon and something baking in the oven that I was absolutely going to eat before I left. “My favorite grandson.”
“You say that to all of us.”
“And I mean it every time. You seem tired.”
“I’m always tired, Grandma.”
“That’s because you’re always running. Sit.”
I sat at the kitchen table and she put a plate of sweet potato pie in front of me without asking. I didn’t argue because you didn’t argue with Rita about food. You ate what she put in front of you and you said thank you and if you were smart you asked for seconds.
“How’s the casino coming?” she asked, settling into the chair across from me with her tea.
“Done. Grand opening’s in a month. Justice has everything locked down.”
