Page 32 of Magnum, Volume 2

“The john pays for the room by the hour, plus the fee to the dancer. We provide security, so we take twenty percent of the fee. We also handle attorney fees if necessary, from our twenty percent.”

“The dancers know this when they hire in?”

I shook my head. “No. We don’t trust just anyone with our secrets. They think the other dancers are taking breaks. They have no idea this is an option until they’ve been with us at least ninety days.”

“And if they don’t want to whore themselves out?”

“Then they don’t. If they’re a good dancer, they get along with the others, show up on time and have a good attitude, don’t create drama… we aren’t going to fire them.”

She nodded. “Okay. What else?”

“Our spa is a front for actual working girls — both the vanilla variety as well as pro-subs and pro-Dommes. We only hire women already in the profession, we don’t allow drugs of any kind, we have a retired doctor on the payroll who handles blood tests and each girl’s preferred birth control method, and everyone knows if you rough up one of our girls and you didn’t pay up front for the privilege of doing so with one of our girls who lists that as a service, we’ll do everything you did to the girl three-fold as well as just all-around beating the fuck out of you.”

“I’m guessing you take a lot more than twenty percent of their take.”

I tilted my head. “It’s actually different for each… class, I guess. We provide a safe space, a doctor, legal fees, and all booking, so yeah, we take forty percent for some of them, but they’re still pulling in well over 100K per year if they’re working thirty hours a week, and one of our pro-subs pulls in half a million a year and only works one or two scenes per week.”

“That’s the most you take? Forty percent?”

“We only take thirty percent for the pro-Dommes, because they don’t need a monitor. The pro-subs, though, we have a man sitting in a closet inside the room, and that costs us a lot more, right? We don’t actually do that on a percentage basis. The guy everyone wants is three hundred an hour, because that’s what he charges. The cheapest are a hundred an hour. The pro-sub gets to set her prices. She pays from fifty to two hundred an hour for the room, depending on whether it’s bare bones or a complete dungeon setup, and that includes our paying someone to sanitize the room and every tool used, booking, doctor, and legal fees, plus whatever each guard charges per hour. Our pro-subs charge from $500 an hour up to $10K an hour, depending on the scene and their popularity.”

She considered that for nearly a minute before saying, “Okay. What else?”

I shrugged. “The restaurant is on the level. So’s the construction company. The laundry services double as money-laundering tools, but nothing about what we do at those locations is illegal, it’s just the accounting part of it.”

“And?”

“We beat the shit out of people who deserve it, and don’t ask me more than that. If we hypothetically killed people, it would be off limits to talk about, and you have to understand that.”

“If you hypothetically killed people, it would only be for, like, when there are no other options though, right?”

I nodded and changed the subject. “I have a really big secret, not exactly a club thing, more a family thing, and one of the restrictions on sharing the secret has to do with being able to show this is my person for life. I may or may not be able to share it with you once you’re officially moved in, but selling your house and moving across country might be enough for me to get permission, and…” I sighed. “It’s a big deal, okay? Something I’ve wanted to tell you for a while, but we have to do it right. It doesn’t involve something illegal, more a genetic kind of thing.”

“We’ve never discussed whether either of us wants kids,” she noted.

“No, we haven’t. Do you want kids?”

“Eventually, maybe, but I honestly don’t know how I’d fit them into my life. I don’t want to hire the job out, but I’m not prepared to stay home and do it right, either. I mean, I’d probably want to homeschool kids, if I had them, and…” She shrugged. “How about you?”

“It doesn’t feel important to me at this stage of my life, but I don’t know how I’ll feel a few years from now,” I told her. “I’m not opposed to them, but it isn’t like I’ll feel as if my life isn’t complete.”

But turtles have a nearly impossible chance of impregnating a human. It happens occasionally, but not often. No way for me to tell her that, though. There’s a geneticist who’s working on ways to pull sperm from reptile shifters, merge them with a human egg, and get viable offspring. She’s had limited success and is working to improve the odds, but it isn’t a sure thing yet.

“If your genetic thing means kids are a problem, I mean, if we want them, we can figure it out, right? Find donor sperm or something, or maybe even adopt.”

I nodded. “Not a conversation we can have today, but yes, all of those options would be fine with me.”

Chapter 15

Storm

I’d thought I’d known what to expect when I’d returned to his house after being away, when I returned openly, no longer hiding out. Mostly, I’d been right, but a few things had caught me off guard. The visual of my new five-inch heels on the Ionic Greek column, for instance, and how my clit throbbed and pulsed every time I saw them there, which was often, since that’s where they live when they aren’t locked onto me.

When he’d first slid the new, even taller shoes onto my feet and locked them around my ankles, I’d felt both terror and arousal. He hadn’t checked in with me, of course. He’d just bought the three sizes around what I usually wear, made me walk around in all of them while he asked questions, and then told me which we were keeping.

It’s the very definition of our power exchange — him authoritatively, arrogantly deciding things that affect me in every way possible without giving me any say whatsoever. And yet, he’d taken care to make them fit, right? I need to be owned; he needs to own me. We work.

Also, it wasn’t just that the shoes were new, it was that they look so damned good on the column. Society’s fucked-up definition of femininity, of how women should look to please men (sore feet and aching backs bedamned) sitting on a chunk of fake Greco-Roman architecture, and the aesthetic sends blood throbbing into my clit every damned time. Maybe someday I’ll analyze it, but for now, I don’t really care why.