She didn’t know me as well as she thought she did. Vivica thought the truth would destroy me. But the truth was just another fire. And I’d been walking through fire since I was eighteen years old.
Mehar leaned her head against my shoulder. I let her. And for a few minutes, parked above the city, with one of the worst nights of my life behind me.
39
MEHAR
Mateo Rios was becoming a problem. Not in the way Judge Baker was a problem. Baker was pathetic, desperate, a man who’d lost control of his obsession and was now screaming declarations of love in parking lots. Rios was the opposite. He was controlled. Measured. Every session with him felt less like a man submitting and more like a man studying. And tonight he’d crossed lines that nobody had crossed before.
It started normal. He arrived on time, paid the tribute without being asked, and took his position. I went through the opening protocol.
The commands, the positioning, the verbal degradation that most clients absorbed like medicine. Rios absorbed it differently. He took it in with those dark eyes and that slight curve at the corner of his mouth that wasn’t quite a smile and wasn’t quite defiance but was something in between that made my instincts prickle.
Then he looked at me.
Direct eye contact. My number one rule. You do not look at me unless I tell you to look at me. Every client knows this. Rios knew this. He’d followed it perfectly in his first session. And now he was looking me dead in my eyes from his knees withan expression that said he was choosing to break the rule, not forgetting it.
“Eyes down,” I said.
He held my gaze for three more seconds before lowering them. Three seconds doesn’t sound like a lot but in a dungeon where I am God, three seconds of unsanctioned eye contact is an eternity. It was a message. He was letting me know that his obedience was voluntary and could be revoked at any time.
“That’s a thousand-dollar infraction,” I said.
He pulled out his phone and CashApped me without a word. No protest. No groveling. Just payment, like a man settling a parking ticket.
I picked up the leather paddle and went harder than usual. Each strike was a correction and a warning. Don’t test me in my own space. He took every hit without flinching. Didn’t gasp, didn’t wince, didn’t make a sound. Most men broke by the third strike. Rios absorbed them like his skin was made of something thicker than human.
“You requested fire poker play,” I said. “You understand the risks?”
“I understand everything.” His voice was calm from the floor. Too calm.
I heated the poker and pressed it against his back, a quick, controlled contact that left a mark but no lasting damage. He inhaled sharply through his nose and his fists clenched, but he didn’t cry out, and he didn’t move. When I pulled the poker away, he exhaled slowly, almost peacefully, like the pain had given him something he needed.
“Another,” he said.
That was the second rule he broke. You don’t make requests once you were in the dungeon. I decide what happens and when. But before I could correct him, he CashApped me three thousand dollars. I felt the notification buzz in my pocket.
“I’m paying for the privilege of asking,” he said. Still on the floor. Still calm. “Another. Please.”
I gave him another. And he took it the same way. He was silent and controlled. When the session ended and he stood to dress, there wasn’t a tremor in his hands. No tears, no shaking, no post-session vulnerability. He buttoned his shirt with steady fingers and adjusted his cuffs and when he turned to face me at the door, he looked exactly the same as when he’d walked in. Untouched by everything I’d done to him.
That had never happened before. Every man who walked into my dungeon left different than when they arrived. That was the whole point. But Rios walked out the same way he walked in—composed, measured, with that unsettling stillness behind his eyes that I still couldn’t name.
“Same time next week?” he asked at the door.
“If you can follow the rules.”
“Rules are made to be broken.” He smiled and it didn’t reach his eyes. “I will see you soon, Dame CoCo.”
The way he saidsoonmade the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Not a threat exactly. More like a promise that had nothing to do with the dungeon and everything to do with something I couldn’t see yet.
The door closed behind him, and I stood in the middle of my space, surrounded by candles and tools and the faint smell of heated metal, and I felt something I rarely felt in this room.
Unsettled.
I changed out of the catsuit, wiped off the makeup, and drove to the warehouse because I needed to remind myself what real control looked like.
The warehouse smelled worse than the last time. Decay and waste and something sharp and chemical underneath it all that I’d stopped trying to identify. I went in through the side entrance with my gun in one hand and a bottle of water in the otherbecause I wasn’t bringing him food tonight. Tonight was just a check-in. A reminder to him and to myself of who was in charge.
