Chapter Two

DANTE

Dante thought the Halloween party was a stupid idea. He didn’t want to get dressed up. He didn’t like how it took away from the discipline of the dungeon. He told as much to Istvahn, the head of security at both Club Inferno and Couture.

“It’s not for us,” Istvahn said. “Just another workday.”

“Besides,” Steve, one of the other Doms, said, “the guests entertain themselves on theme nights.”

Dante grunted. “I’m not dressing up as the devil.” Some things were just too clichéd to be tolerated.

“Unclench a bit,” Steve said. “It’s a party.”

Dante gave him a cold look, but it was lost on him.

“I hear Jana and Leo are going to be vampires,” Steve said.

It was hard for Dante, but he controlled his eye roll. “They will dress up or not dress up at my pleasure.”

“Don’t be such a hard ass.”

“I don’t tell you how to handle your subs. Don’t tell me how to handle mine.” Dante dismissed him with a glance, turned on his heel, and walked away.

The party in the dungeon was an irritation, but he was more concerned about Couture’s Halloween party this weekend. Emma had been bustling around the past two weeks putting together a fairy-tale theme, complete with castles and real horses made out to be unicorns.

He had planned to stay far, far away from that nonsense—until he saw her Little Red Riding Hood outfit. Little was the operative word. While he had been skulking around Couture, decidedly not stalking Emma, he had walked in on her costume fitting. She had her back to him and had been balancing precariously on a high stool. Anya had been busy making adjustments on the front of the costume. It was obvious that she had designed it.

The cape and hood were made of red silk that clung to Emma’s luscious backside. The cape was cut high, falling just barely above the back of her knees. Dante allowed himself the fantasy of licking that sensitive spot. Then Emma had turned around. The skirt was a tight leather that barely covered what it should. The top was a leather bustier that pressed the tops of her breasts up into perfect globes.

Emma had given a little squeak when she had seen Dante standing there.

“Oh, good,” Anya had said, coming around Emma. “I need a man’s opinion. I can’t decide if I want to put her in knee high boots or fishnets and heels.”

Dante almost choked on his tongue. “The boots,” he said when he was in control of himself.

“Perfect,” Anya said. “Help her down from there. I’ve got to see if we’ve got her size in the closet.”

He walked over to Emma, but instead of taking her outstretched hand, he had caught her around the waist. Pulling her into him, he had lifted her off the stool and put her on the ground. It had been too much of a temptation not to drag her down the length of him on the way down. She had felt like heaven.

He might have even tried to kiss her if Anya hadn’t come back into the room. Emma had jumped away from him as if Anya had caught them fucking instead of just standing close to each other.

Dante had left before Emma tried on the boots. He knew there would be other meetings full of similarly torturous temptation, where her beauty and vibrancy would test his fortitude. But he would endure it, over and over, without ever crossing the line. Joey’s friendship, Dante’s chosen family, meant far too much to risk it all on mere lust.

No matter how deliriously tantalizing the temptation might be.

But he hadn’t been able to get the memory of her out of his mind. So now, he was going to the Couture party to keep an eye on Emma and make sure no one treated her with disrespect.

It wouldn’t be the first time that he had to draw a line in the sand where Emma was concerned. She had always been a shy little thing. Bookish and sweet, with a smile that would light up a room. But she also had a vulnerability about her that attracted bullies.

Before his asshole parents had shipped him off to boarding school, Dante and Joey had been able to track down anyone stupid enough to make Emma cry. He wasn’t above beating the shit out of some snot-nosed punk, but Joey didn’t want things to get physical. Toward the end, Dante had stopped telling Joey about the football players. It made plausible deniability so much easier when the jocks had bruises the next day.

“Rough practice.” Dante would shrug, and that would be the end of it.

Until it happened again. There was something about Emma’s vulnerability that made her irresistible to assholes who looked for easy prey. And assholes didn’t have a gender, it seemed. Punishing the boys had been easy. Disciplining the girls who were bitches to Emma had been a little bit more difficult. Dante had to get creative. As a rule, he didn’t hit women unless they asked him to do it or if they hit him first. Then all bets were off. He hadn’t minded if they snubbed Emma. She was better off without them anyway. But when they tried to booby trap her locker or catfish her, then Dante stepped in.

He rigged a glitter bomb on one girl’s locker and hid rotting meat in another. The pranks stopped after that. He hadn’t found out about the catfishing until it was too late to stop Emma from heartbreak. But it wasn’t hard to find the guilty parties and make them pay. One girl’s tires were slashed, another had sugar put in her gas tank. Jill, the third bitch—the one who had made the fake account and strung Emma along—well, Dante paid her boyfriend three hundred bucks to dump her hours before he was supposed to pick her up for prom. The best part of that was the boyfriend tried to get back together with the chick the next day, telling her he only did it for the money.

Yeah, that had been a mistake. Jill went nuclear on him and then stormed over to Dante’s house to read him the riot act. Dante wound up hate-fucking her in his father’s office while she clawed the hell out of his back. Then he had ghosted her. Not his proudest moment, but he was confident she now knew how Emma had felt and that was all that mattered to him.

Unfortunately, Dante got used to the taste of chaos and violence, and it hadn’t looked good for his college prospects. So his parents shipped him off to boarding school. He and Joey tried to stay in touch, but high school had been challenging and all too soon Joey was headed off to the army and Dante off to college.

He never forgot, though, that when things got really bad at Dante’s house, Joey always had a warm place for him to sleep and a hot meal. Sometimes Emma and Joey’s parents knew about it. A lot of the time, they didn’t.

So now that Emma was back in his orbit, Dante was going to make damned sure that no one laid a finger on her or made her feel like she was less than wonderful. Kiki Pretty was on his shit list for that stunt she tried to pull in Colleen’s office. Istvahn had told him about it. She was one of Dante’s submissives. She liked to be punished for being a spoiled brat. She picked the wrong person to act out on, though.

Dante was going to mention to Colleen that Kiki didn’t have the maturity to coexist with Club Inferno and Couture. Kiki would have to find another Dom because Dante would have nothing more to do with her, and hopefully she’d find another dungeon to play in. Emma wouldn’t ever have to worry about Kiki again.

Now all he had to do was try to keep Emma out of Club Inferno. When she was here, in his realm, it was hard to keep seeing her as Joey’s little sister. His fingers itched to reach out and brush back a stray lock of silken hair that had fallen across her face. To cup her cheek and pull her into a hungry, devouring kiss. She was sweet and curvy and he’d love to teach her all the ways of surrender. If she was anyone but Emma, she’d already be tied up in his dungeon.

“Master?” Jana approached him timidly and knelt before him, bowing low enough to touch her forehead to the floor.

Dante frowned. She and Leo were supposed to be set dressings in a scene with Creed and Bella. Creed was training to be a Dom, but Dante and Colleen didn’t think he had what it took. Still, he was willing to apprentice to Simon, and if anyone could teach discipline to a Dom, it would be Simon.

Dante gripped Jana by the hair and pulled her to her feet. Jana’s bare nipples tightened and she smiled at him.

“Why are you here?” he asked sternly. “Disobeying orders.”

She bowed her head. “I deserve to be punished for that, but you need to come and see this scene. Simon had to leave on an emergency, and Creed decided to go on without him.”

That was absolutely against the fucking rules. “You were right to come and get me,” he said to Jana. He caught the flicker of disappointment over her expression. “But that doesn’t get you out of your punishment.”

If the situation wasn’t so serious, Dante might have chuckled at her arousal and relief. “Go.” He shoved her forward. “I’ll be watching over the scene.”

“Thank you, Master.” Jana hurried back to the dungeon.

Creed did a double take when Dante opened the dungeon door using his master key. But the nasty snarl on his face died when Dante merely glared at him.

“You may begin,” Dante ordered.

A muscle ticked in Creed’s jaw, but he turned back to Bella.

Bella was bound in an intricate rope suspension. It wasn’t bad. Nowhere near the skill of Max, one of Club Inferno’s shibari specialists, though. But Creed was still learning the ropes, so to speak.

The crack of the flogger against bare skin echoed through the dimly lit dungeon. Dante monitored the scene from his usual vantage point, arms crossed over his chest as he studied Creed’s technique.

Bella trembled with a heady mix of pain and pleasure with each strike. That was, until Creed’s strikes became more erratic, more punishing. Dante’s brow furrowed as he detected the subtle shift.

“Red!” Bella’s cry pierced the air. The safe word should have brought the scene to an abrupt halt.

Except Creed didn’t stop. His arm reared back, flogger raised high as he prepared for another brutal lash. Dante was across the room in three long strides, his hand clamping down on Creed’s wrist before the blow could land.

“She safe-worded. It’s over.” Dante forced calm into his voice, but he was close to losing his shit on this asshole.

Creed’s nostrils flared with rage at the interruption. “This is none of your fucking business, Ashton. I’ll finish my scene how I want.”

With a twist of his wrist, Dante wrenched the flogger free and tossed it aside. “Not if you can’t follow basic safety protocols.”

Bella hung in her bonds, whimpering quietly at the mounting tension. Dante snapped his fingers and Jana and Leo rushed to help her down.

“Don’t you fucking touch her.” Creed whirled on Dante’s subs, who didn’t even acknowledge Creed’s words.

In a blur of motion, Dante shoved him away with enough force to send him stumbling back several paces. “Get out of my dungeon before I throw you out.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jana press the panic button hidden in the wall. Security should be here any second.

Creed steadied himself, fists clenched as he took a menacing step forward. “You’ll regret laying your hands on me.”

A harsh laugh pushed past Dante’s lips. “Walk away while you still can.”

The first punch came like a wildcat’s swipe, swift and vicious. Dante deflected the blow with reflexes honed from years of defending himself, countering with a crushing jab that snapped Creed’s head back.

And just like that, the storm unleashed.

Jana screamed, but it was a soft sound over the roaring in Dante’s ears. Dante saw an opening and seized it, twisting his body to drive his shoulder squarely into Creed’s midsection. They crashed to the ground. Dante dropped his full weight down hard on Creed, whose breath exploded from his lungs as he was driven into the concrete floor.

With his opponent pinned, Dante was able to rain down a series of short, blistering strikes to his ribs and kidneys. Only when security managed to latch on to Dante’s arms and haul him bodily off did Dante come back to his senses.

Panting, blood trickled from the corner of Dante’s mouth where Creed had managed to split his lip. But he wore the damage like a badge of honor, chest heaving as adrenaline still thrummed through his veins.

“Get this piece of shit out of here,” he growled at the security team, who were already hauling the worse-for-wear loser to his feet. “If I see him again, he’s leaving in a body bag.” The threat landed with a sort of quiet, lethal promise, as he glared at Creed being dragged away.

Only when Creed was gone did Dante finally allow tension to bleed from his shoulders. He scooped up the discarded flogger, using its tails to gesture the attending Dungeon Monitor over.

“See that Bella gets treated,” he said, voice softening just enough to convey genuine concern for the shaken submissive. “Then we’ll debrief and discuss what happened with Colleen.”

Creed was about to be removed permanently from Club Inferno and smacked with enough gag orders that he wouldn’t even dream of leaking anything to the press.