When the session ended, he dressed, paid the exit fee, and stopped at the door.
“Same time next week?” he asked.
“If you can afford it.”
“I can afford anything.” He smiled, and there it was again—that thing behind his eyes that I couldn’t name but my body recognized as a warning. “Thank you, Dame CoCo. This was exactly what I needed.”
He left. I sat on the throne and stared at the door he’d walked through and thought about the distance between the man who’d just left my dungeon and the man who’d been between my thighs last night.
Would Quest be okay with this? With knowing that the woman he’d laid down and kissed and made cum on her own couch spent her evenings in a leather catsuit telling men to crawl? That she charged them for the privilege of breathing her air? That a federal judge had screamed “I love you” at her in a parking lot this afternoon and another man with dangerous eyes had just paid a thousand dollars to kneel?
I thought about it for exactly three seconds and then I stopped.
Who cares what he thinks? This was my life. My money. My dungeon. My throne. He didn’t control me. No man did. Not my father, not Ahmad, not Thad in his cage, and not Quest Banks with his cognac and his cufflinks and his tongue that I could still feel if I thought about it too hard.
I changed out of the catsuit. Wiped the makeup. Drove home.
But the question followed me all the way to my apartment and sat with me while I locked the door and turned off the lights and got into the bed that still smelled like his cologne from the night before.
26
QUEST
I woke up in the hotel and the first thing I thought about was her. Not in some romantic movie bullshit way where birds are chirping and sunlight is streaming through the curtains. More like a haunting. Mehar Ali had set up permanent residence in my brain and wasn’t paying rent and I couldn’t evict her because every time I tried, I’d remember the way she tasted and the whole eviction process would collapse.
I could still feel her on my tongue. Still hear the way she said my name when she was close—not screaming it, not performing it, just breathing it out like it was the only word she had left. I’d been with a lot of women. Two at once for two years. But none of them had ever made me feel like last night did. Like I was doing something sacred and filthy at the same time. Like she was trusting me with something she’d never given anyone and I’d better not fuck it up.
But that was the problem, wasn’t it? Trust.
I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall and let the other part of my brain do what it always did after I got close to somebody. It built a case. Peanut betrayed me in a way that I still couldn’t talk about without my chest getting tight. Camille betrayed me with a pregnancy that wasn’t mine and alie designed to trap me. Two women. Two devastations. Both of them dressed up in love and commitment and the illusion of partnership.
Mehar was different. I knew she was different. She didn’t play games, she was too angry and too honest for games. I knew all about the cage, about Thad, about her father and Ahmad and the whole ugly history of her life without flinching. She didn’t perform vulnerability. She just was vulnerable, reluctantly, furiously, like someone handing you a weapon and daring you not to use it against them.
But knowing she was different and trusting that she was different were two separate currencies and I was bankrupt on the second one. Every woman I’d ever loved had taught me the same lesson—don’t. And my body was out here ignoring fourteen years of education because a pretty girl with box braids and a bad attitude let me between her thighs.
I showered, got dressed, and drove to the office because work was the only thing that had never betrayed me. Banks Reserve’s headquarters occupied the top three floors of a sleek glass tower in downtown DC, and my office sat at the top with a view that I never got tired of.
I had meetings all morning—insurance adjusters still dragging their feet on the warehouse claim, a marketing team presenting the casino launch campaign, a call with our distribution partners about rerouting shipments while the warehouse was being rebuilt.
I was reviewing the casino’s final budget when my assistant buzzed in.
“Mr. Banks, there’s a Mr. Rios here to see you. He doesn’t have an appointment but he says it’s urgent.”
Rios. I knew the name. Mateo Rios. Real estate developer on paper, cocaine supplier underneath. He’d been using our distribution network to move product for the last five years—his shit riding alongside our liquor shipments the same way everybody else’s did. It was a clean arrangement. We transported, he paid a premium, and neither of us asked the other questions that didn’t need asking.
But his product had been in that truck that was robbed by Dimonte. And I’d been expecting this visit since the night of the fire.
“Send him in.”
Mateo Rios walked into my office wearing a tailored charcoal suit, no tie and with his hair slicked back. He moved with a calm that most people mistook for relaxed but was actually calculated. Every step measured. Every glance intentional. This man didn’t do anything by accident.
“Quest.” He extended his hand and I shook it because business was business even when business was about to get uncomfortable. “I appreciate you seeing me without an appointment.”
“You caught me on a good day. Have a seat.”
He sat in the chair across from my desk and crossed one leg over the other and looked at me with those eyes that had something behind them that my gut didn’t like. Not hostility exactly. More like patience. Predator patience. The stillness right before something moves.
“I’ll get to the point,” he said. “I lost two point three million in product in that robbery. Product that was moving under an agreement that guaranteed security and discretion. Neither of which was delivered.”
