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I look at him. His face doesn’t change.

“Tav broke it,” he adds, and walks on.

I’ve worked in bars long enough to know what happens at the end of a night. People drink, people flirt, people disappear into bathrooms and back seats and come out with their shirts on inside out. I’ve had to knock on a few doors. I’ve seen a lot.

I’ve never seen anything like this.

Lenart walks through the room the way I’d walk behind my own bar. He knows where everything is. He nods to a woman restocking the bar, who has silver hair to her waist and feathered ears that swivel toward us as we pass. A thick-shouldered man with the curling horns of a ram is replacing candles in the alcoves, and Lenart stops to say a few words to him about a booking on Thursday. Nobody acts as if there’s anything unusual about the owner giving his new partner a tour of the sex dungeon on a Monday.

There are three couches near the bar, and the middle one is enormous. It’s long enough for six people and deep enough to lie down across sideways, and the frame under the upholstery is black iron instead of wood.

“Who’s that for?” I ask. “A whole bachelorette party?”

“Trolls, mostly. Some of the larger demons.” He glances at it. “Merek has opinions about that couch.”

“What kind of opinions?”

“Loud ones.”

He shows me the alcoves first. They’re for talking, he says. Nobody goes straight to a private room here. Members meet in the lounge, have a drink, and work out what they want and what they don’t before anything happens. There are hosts on the floor every operating night, trained staff who know every rule and every member, and their only job is to watch the shared spaces and step in if they need to.

“Like bouncers,” I say.

“Like very well-informed bouncers.”

He takes me down the left-hand corridor. The doors are dark wood with brass numbers, and most of them are open while the rooms are made up. Some of them look like expensive hotel rooms with nicer lighting. Some of them don’t.

In one, there’s a padded bench, like a weight bench from a very upscale gym, with leather cuffs on short chains at either end. In the next, there’s a big wooden frame shaped like an X, bolted to the wall. In the third, there’s a bed with a wrought-iron headboard that looks as if it’s been designed with a lot of specific uses in mind, and a row of hooks along the ceiling.

I recognize more of it than I expected. The internet exists. I’ve read things.

I also realize I don’t know what half of it is for.

“What’s that?” I point at a padded sawhorse-looking thing in the corner of the third room.

“A spanking bench.”

“Okay. And that?”

“Also a spanking bench. For a different angle.”

“There are angles.”

“Of course,” Lenart says.

I stare at him. He’s standing in the doorway in his perfect suit with his hands in his pockets, explaining the geometry of spanking benches in the same voice he used to explain payroll. He isn’t embarrassed. He isn’t trying to shock me. He’s just answering the question.

It’s the funniest thing that’s happened to me all week. Then it stops being funny, because I look back down the corridor at all those open doors, and it lands.

“Lenart.”

“Yes?”

I point at the bench, the X on the wall, the hooks in the ceiling. “Are you telling me this is a sex club? That I own part of an actual, entire sex club?”

“A members’ pleasure club,” he says. “Yes. This whole level.”

“Did Dez know?”