That was what I wanted. Not him. The experience.
Right up until I’d typedTonight?And hit send before my better judgment could get its coat on.
One more time, I told myself, stepping out of the car. That’s all this was.
Nobody stopped me.
Nobody asked where I was going.
Nobody informed anyone I had arrived.
The exterior of Valhalla was quieter than Midgard, no line, no bass thumping through the walls, just a discreet entrance with warm light spilling from within and a doorman whose expression suggested he had seen everything and was surprised by none of it. My name was at the door.
I had not let myself think about how quickly he must have put it there.
I was not going to start now.
The interior was different from Midgard in the way a private library differed from a bookshop, smaller, more deliberate, every detail chosen rather than accumulated. The lighting was lower and the spaces more intimate, alcoves and private areas clustered around a central lounge where perhaps thirty people moved with the comfortable ease of regulars. No Viking murals here. The aesthetic was cleaner, more Nordic in the austere sense. Pale wood, dark iron, candlelight in glass vessels cast everything in amber.
It was beautiful. I catalogued it the way I always catalogued beautiful things, automatically, helplessly, as though beauty were a language I couldn’t stop translating even when I was trying to focus on something else.
I was halfway through the ironwork doorway when I saw him.
He was already watching me.
He stood at the far side of the lounge with a glass of water and an expression of complete composure, and the sight of him did something immediate and entirely unwelcome to my pulse. He looked exactly as I remembered, lean and dark and still in the particular way of people who have never once needed to fill a silence with movement. My body, which had apparently not received the memo about this being a purely experiential exercise, responded with an enthusiasm that I found deeply unhelpful.
He was a stranger, I reminded myself. Practically. We had exchanged numbers and very little else. He knew my club name and that my life was complicated and that I responded well to jute rope and careful hands. That was the full extent of it. Whatever I’d felt during that scene, the sense of being genuinely seen, of some internal lock finally turning, that was the dynamic, not the man. That was what a skilled Dominant did. It wasn’t personal.
It felt personal.
He crossed the room without hurrying. Stopped in front of me and looked at me for a moment with those dark eyes that had the unsettling quality of arriving at conclusions before I’d finished the sentence.
“Hecate.”
“Master Loki.” My voice came out steadier than I felt. “You got my message.”
“I did.” Something moved across his face, brief, controlled, gone before I could name it. “I’m glad you reached out.”
I was not going to let three words do what three words had absolutely no business doing.
“I had a gap in my schedule,” I said.
His mouth curved at one corner. Just slightly. Not a smile exactly, more like the ghost of one, the suggestion thatsomewhere underneath all that careful composure was a man who found things genuinely funny and occasionally let it show by accident.
It was a very small thing.
It did a disproportionate amount of damage.
“I have two options for you tonight,” he said, moving us slightly away from the entrance with that characteristic near touch, his hand at the edge of my space without entering it, direction without demand. “There’s a public room available. Glass walled, observed.”
“And the other option?”
“A private room.” A pause, deliberate without being theatrical. “Just us.”
The sensible choice was the public room. The public room had structure and the comfortable formality of being watched. The public room was the choice of a woman who understood she was already in over her head with a man she didn’t know and had the good sense to limit the damage.
I thought about three days of marble hallways. The sensation of my own life being pressed flat and smooth as a pressed flower. Preserved, displayed, entirely without wildness.
