Does she want to meet again?
That one I shut down faster. Irrelevant. The job required contact. Whether she wanted to see me again was a variable I needed for professional reasons only. The fact that the thought had arrived with a particular quality of dread that I didn’t recognize from any previous professional context was simply… information. Data point. Filed and set aside.
I checked the phone.
Still dark.
The door opened. Cold air moved through the room. A familiar silhouette in a charcoal three-piece suit crossed toward me with the unhurried ease of a man who had never once been anywhere he wasn’t welcome.
I flipped the phone face down.
He dropped into the opposite seat without asking, which he never did, ordered a drink with a nod to the barman that suggested long familiarity with a room he’d entered for the first time twenty minutes ago, and looked at me with the particular expression that meant he’d already read the situation and found it entertaining.
“You’re early,” I said.
“You’re distracted.” His gaze dropped to the phone, face down on the table, then came back up. “Three days and nothing. Has the great Master Loki finally lost his touch?”
“No.”
“No?” He settled back, amused. “Because from where I’m sitting, it looks like a woman walked out of your aftercare room and hasn’t reached out since, which, correct me if I’m wrong, has never once happened to you before. Usually they’re texting before the Uber arrives.”
“She’s cautious. Her situation requires it.”
“Mmm.” He swirled his glass. “Or perhaps she needs a different approach. Someone less”—a brief, considering pause, the kind he deployed like a scalpel—“intense.”
I looked at him.
“I’m only saying,” Nikos continued, with the mild innocence of a man saying nothing of the sort, “that if you need someone to follow up. Keep her warm. More conversational, less—“
“We’re done with that line of conversation.”
The words came out quieter than I intended. Nikos blinked. Not dramatically, just the small realignment of a man who had touched something he hadn’t expected to find. There was a beat of silence between us.
Watching him now, relaxed, amused, faintly proprietary about a woman he’d never met, I felt something shift in my assessment. Not intensely. Just a quiet recalibration. The kind you didn’t want to examine too closely because of where it led.
The shibari had been the right call for a first meeting. Intimate but controlled. She’d responded to the rope with an intelligence that most people didn’t bring to sensation, processing each new tether as information rather than just experience, her body and mind working in concert rather than opposition. She’d been unusually responsive.
A second scene would need a different approach. The whip, perhaps. Impact play after rope was a natural progression, and I had equipment at Valhalla that hadn’t been touched in months because nobody had come along who seemed worth the particular care it required. She could take it. The question was less about her capacity and more about what she’d do with the space it opened. Whether the composure would hold or whether something underneath it would finally surface.
I wanted to know what was underneath it.
The thought came with an unsettling clarity that had nothing to do with operational planning, and I set it down deliberately, the way you set down something sharp.
“Tell me about the secondary sweep,” I said.
Nikos reached into his jacket and produced a slim folder, placing it on the table with the care of a man delivering a verdict he’d already made peace with. His expression told me he’d clocked exactly where my head had been for the last thirty seconds and had filed it under useful information.
“She’s clean,” he said. “Completely. Financial records, communications, travel. All of it. Ivan keeps her in a separate compartment from the business. She doesn’t know the operation exists in any meaningful way.” A brief pause. “She’s also been blocked from three curatorial positions in the last eighteen months. All traced to pressure from Ivan’s network. He’s been systematically closing her exits.”
I looked at the folder without touching it.
“She’s not a participant,” Nikos continued, his tone carrying the mild interest of a man reviewing a property assessment. “She’s a prop. Decorative. High functioning enough to pass at his social events, isolated enough not to ask inconvenient questions. The attachment she’ll have formed to anyone who treats her like a person will be significant.” A small pause. “Shouldn’t take long.”
The words landed with the clean efficiency of good operational analysis.
I thought about what that actually meant. A woman whose exits had been quietly closed off one by one.
The thought sat badly with me.
