Instead, something in my chest tightened.
Not because of the confidence in them.
Because I believed him.
That was the truly alarming part.
I closed my eyes and told myself, for perhaps the hundredth time that evening, that this was temporary.
One more scene.
One more night.
One more mistake.
The lie was beginning to lose its shape.
Chapter 8
Jared
Valhalla during the day was a different creature entirely.
Without the carefully orchestrated atmosphere, the club showed its bones. Cleaning staff moving through with quiet efficiency, the bar stripped and restocked, the private rooms airing out with their doors propped open. The dungeon equipment stood clean and idle in the main space, the St. Andrew’s cross catching the flat afternoon light in a way that made it look almost sculptural. I had always found something clarifying about the club in this state. Just a building. Just a space. What happened here after dark was brought in by the people who came.
I had left my jacket in the private room.
This required a moment to sit with because I did not leave things behind. It was not a personality trait or a point of pride; it was simply the way I was built. Eleven years of work that required clean exits had trained certain habits into the very structure of my behavior. You checked the room before you left it. You accounted for everything you brought in. You did not walk out of a private session at Valhalla and take a cab home in December without your jacket because your mind was somewhere it had no business being.
The jacket was hanging on the hook behind the door exactly where I’d left it, which was its own small humiliation. I took it down and stood in the room for a moment longer than was necessary.
The lighting was different in here during the day. Flatter. The room was just a room, leather furniture, a wall mounted rack of implements, a hardpoint in the ceiling that served the suspension rig. Nothing remarkable. The kind of space that required darkness and intention and two specific people to become what it had been last night.
She hadn’t been what I expected.
I had processed this in the hours since she’d left. In the cab home, through the sleepless stretch of early morning, over coffee I’d made and not drunk, I turned it over with the same systematic attention I gave any piece of intelligence that didn’t fit the original assessment. The file had said: sheltered, controlled, drawn to BDSM clubs as rebellion. I had built a model from that. A woman who sought sensation as defiance, who came to rooms like this one to feel powerful by surrendering somewhere she could walk away from. A thrill seeker. Someone who used submission the way some people used extreme sport. For the adrenaline, for the proof of survival.
I had been wrong.
She submitted because the rest of her life gave her nothing to submit to that was worth anything. Every decision made for her. Every exit closed before she reached it. Every attempt at an autonomous existence redirected back into the shape her father had decided she should occupy. She had no agency out there, and in here, in the space a scene created, she chose to give it up willingly, and that choice was everything. The surrender wasn’t escape. It was the only place she got to exercise any real control over what happened to her own body and mind.
Every wall she dropped was an act of genuine courage.
I was in deeper than I had any right to be. That was the honest assessment, delivered without softening. A week ago she had been a name in a file and a photograph and an operational access point. Now she was a woman whose courage I was cataloging in an empty private room on a Friday afternoon, holding a jacket I should have remembered to pick up twelve hours ago.
I had crossed it with my eyes open and I had no particular plan for what came next.
“You’re brooding.”
The voice came from the doorway. I didn’t startle. I’d heard the footsteps in the corridor, registered them as familiar, and filed them under not a threat without consciously deciding to. Some processing happened below the level of thought.
Declan leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed and the expression he’d been wearing since college; the one that suggested he’d arrived at his conclusions about you some time ago and was waiting with infinite patience for you to catch up.
“I’m not brooding,” I said. “I forgot my jacket.”
He looked at the jacket, already in my hand. Then at me. Something moved behind his eyes that in a less composed man would have been a smirk.
“You forgot your jacket,” he repeated.
