I sent back a quick message.
You’re welcome, trickster. I look forward to our next engagement. Not yours, Hecate.
There was too much risk involved in giving him my name.
I placed my phone back in my bag,
Before turning down the hall to reception, I spotted Loki in the bar having a serious conversation with another man. His mien was all darkness. Whatever the base of the discussion, he didn’t like it.
His brow furrowed for only a moment. His smoky gaze alighting on me and traveling down and up one last time, as if memorizing me, before pulling himself back to the conversation left me weak-kneed.
Outside in the cool Philadelphia evening, I took deep lungsful of air, finally able to breathe. My Uber was ready, and with one last backward glance, I climbed in and headed back to my gilded cage.
Chapter 6
Loki
The Ashford Club smelled the way old money always did, of leather, woodsmoke, and the quiet confidence of men who had never once worried about a bill. I’d been a member for eleven years. Long enough that the staff knew my drink without asking, long enough that the corner booth near the fire was understood to be mine on Thursday evenings, and long enough that nobody asked what I did for a living.
That last part was the point.
I’d arrived early, unusual for me, ordered my water, taken my corner booth, and proceeded to do something I was not trained for and not particularly good at.
Waiting.
Not for Nikos. For a notification that hadn’t come. The phone sat face up on the table like a provocation, its screen dark and unhelpfully silent. Three days. Long enough that I’d stopped checking it every hour and started checking it every twenty minutes instead, which was not an improvement by any measure I cared to apply.
I picked up my glass. Set it down. Watched a log shift in the grate.
In eleven years of working the floors at Midgard and Valhalla, I had never once sat in a leather chair wondering if a submissive was all right. That wasn’t arrogance, it was design. My scenes were clean. Precise. I took women to the exact edge where pleasure tipped into pain and held them there, gave them the experience they’d come for, and when it was done, it was done. The aftercare was handled by the monitors. The emotional fallout, if there was any, was not my problem to carry. Not because I was indifferent to the women I played with, I wasn’t. I had standards, I had protocols, consent was the only religion I practiced consistently, but because I understood the transaction clearly and I made sure they did too.
One scene. Maybe two. Never a pattern. Never a preference.
I had a reputation for being the best at what I did and completely unavailable for anything more. That reputation had served everyone involved, including me, for over a decade.
Polina was fine. Of course she was fine.
She’d walked out of that aftercare room with her spine straight and her chin up and a goddess quip ready on her lips, the kind of composure that took years to perfect and hers had been effortless. She didn’t need me checking in. The framework for checking in didn’t exist. We had exchanged numbers, that was all, people exchanged numbers every day and felt nothing particular about the silence that followed.
I checked the phone.
Dark.
The rational assessment was simple. She had a complicated life. Guards, a controlling father, a schedule she didn’t set herself. Reaching out to a man she’d met at a BDSM club carried risk, and she was not a woman who moved without calculating it first. The silence meant her circumstances were difficult. Nothing more.
Except.
I knew what sub drop looked like when it was delayed hours after a scene, when the endorphins had finished their quiet exit and left the nervous system to manage alone. I had observed it from a professional distance more times than I could count. I had never sat with it. Never needed to.
With her, the thought kept returning anyway.
She’d gone home to a house that functioned more like a fortified position than a refuge, with nobody there who would think to offer chocolate and water and a blanket and the specific uncomplicated comfort of being told she’d done well. The scene had been deep, deeper than either of us had perhaps planned for. Deep scenes required deep aftercare, and I had cut mine short because she’d made it easy for me to let her go and I had let her.
That was the part I couldn’t stop turning over.
I had stayed longer than I ever had and it still hadn’t been enough, and I had let her walk away anyway. Because she’d been composed. Because she’d made a joke about witching hours. Because I was not built for the conversation that would have required me to say… what, exactly? Don’t go yet. Stay. Let me make sure the person I’m supposed to be using as an operational asset is genuinely all right.
Even in my own head that sentence had problems in it.
