Chapter 7

seven

On a frigid New Year’s Eve, I stepped out of a black car and shut the door. I pulled my coat tighter around me as I looked across the narrow glass and steel footbridge to the island in the Potomac.

This close to shore, the river was a broken mosaic of ice, and I could see loose chunks of it sliding in the channel farther out. On the other side of the bridge was a glass building four or five stories high, its angles striated by deep pink and purple lights. They glowed over the slushy Potomac and against the flat stretch of DC and Alexandria behind them, like the building was a glass casket for a setting sun suspended inside.

There was no way to get there but by foot, by crossing over the bridge.

The piercing wind found its way under my long wool coat, scraping at my thighs and breasts through the thin silk of the dress Mark had sent for me to wear, and it chased me across the bridge as the car idled behind me. Charitably, I wondered if Mark had given the driver instructions to make sure I made it inside safely.

Less than charitably, I wondered if Mark had told the driver to make sure I made it inside, period.

I was here for my first appearance as Mark’s fiancée and submissive, and I was determined to acquit myself from our rehearsal a month ago. I wasn’t going to let something as simple as crawling knock me off-kilter; I wasn’t going to panic just from sitting in his lap.

The tall glass doors slid open automatically as I approached, and I stepped inside the lofty space, my eyes sliding to the stairs, elevator, and smaller door just behind the front desk. The same pink and purple glow from outside was muted in here, softer, complemented by a subdued gold light from strategically placed sconces and pendants. I was the only one in the lobby, aside from the two employees who’d opened the doors and the employee behind the front desk.

Hesitantly, I walked toward the desk, not sure what to say exactly. Was there some kind of sex club etiquette? Would I need to sort out a temporary membership? Could I treat it like a normal meeting? Yes, hello, I’m here to see the owner? I’m his fiancée, I promise he knows me?

But the woman—also dressed in black, in a pencil skirt and a leather corset over a silk blouse with a tie-neck—smiled at me as I came forward.

“Miss Laurence,” she said warmly. “We’ve been expecting you.”

Of course, Mark would have made all the arrangements. There was a strange feeling that came with the realization, almost like a thrill, to know that he’d thought about me while we weren’t together. I had the same feeling whenever he emailed me about my ongoing education in kink, especially when those emails came late at night. I imagined him in bed in that Billionaire’s Row penthouse, his phone in his hand and his thoughts on me.

I imagined him here, watching other people play, his thoughts straying to his bartered future wife.

It was a dangerous thing, that thrill. I had to ignore it.

“If you’ll follow me,” the woman said. She had pale gold skin and thick black hair that was twisted into a neat chignon at her neck. “And over here is our coat check, if you’d like to leave your coat.”

The narrow door behind the desk opened and another employee came out, hands outstretched to help me remove my coat. I only hesitated a moment—it would have to come off at some point, anyway. No sense in being bashful about revealing my skimpy outfit now.

But as the young man slipped my coat off my body and the cool air of the lobby brushed against my shoulders and thighs, self-consciousness pulled at me like a cloak made of iron. Mark had chosen my wardrobe tonight, so I knew it would be pleasing to him, but there was no denying the sexual promise it embodied: a short dress made of white silk, with thin straps and a row of fabric-covered buttons marching down the front.

I can easily be undone, it said to anyone looking at it. I can be lifted up, tugged down, torn off.

And yet the white…it was practically bridal, especially with the embroidered white ballet flats he’d sent along with the dress, and his very clear instructions to wear my engagement ring. Bridal was Mark’s point, I supposed.

But neither of Mark’s employees gave my barely-covered body a second glance, and I anticipated that a white negligee was the least scandalous of what anyone inside this glass box wore anyway.

I was in Mark’s world now, his kingdom, and apparently, I would be its queen. I needed to look like it.

We mounted the floating metal stairs and wound our way up to the second story, where we then pushed through another glass door and into a hallway. Though the lobby had been completely silent, music played in here, a slow, electronic pulse. We passed more glass doors, some frosted, some opaque, and then windows. The windows opened into some of the rooms, and some were full of people laughing and drinking, and some were full of people doing so much more…

A man had a woman bent over a bench and was swinging a paddle at her backside. She was sobbing; he was smiling. And she had her hand between her legs, masturbating herself with a desperation that sent heat flooding through me to witness.

I wrenched my eyes away, face burning. Luckily, my guide was ahead of me and didn’t seem to notice. And perhaps it was years and years of situational awareness, of martial arts, of being a social spy, but I couldn’t stop looking at the windows. At the people inside, naked or clothed, writhing or stalking around benches, all sorts of pairings and sharings.

The sexual parts of Catholic dogma had never much preoccupied me; I had planned on being a nun, so it wasn’t like any of the rights and wrongs would be applicable to me, anyway. But some of the things I saw through the windows tonight quickened my breathing. Made lust kick deep, deep in my belly.

A woman riding another woman’s face while she drank something amber-colored from a glass. Two men taking turns with another man, whose cock was trapped in a cage and was leaking semen in long, pearly threads onto the floor between his spread feet. A tangle of people fucking at one man’s command while he watched with an unsettling but very sexy sneer.

I had known—of course I had known—that there were things I dreamed about that didn’t match up with what my Church said about sex and desire. I knew there were images, impulses, thoughts that came when I saw other girls sometimes. Things that, if I’d confessed them, my confessor would have told me were wrong.

So I’d never confessed them—because they didn’t matter—because I was going to be a nun.

But what now?

What now when I wouldn’t be a nun…or at least not a nun until I’d served long enough for Mortimer to think I’d earned an annulment? What now when my future husband owned a place where the windows were full of this? And not just the women together, but the raw sex, the freedom of it, everyone being with everyone, the paddles and crops and hot wax and people arching in agony with stiff nipples and spread legs, like the agony was everything, everything.

I was flushed and shaken when we pushed out of the hallway to the far door, another glass one. Beyond it, lights danced and bounced, and when the employee opened the door, sound poured in, thick and pulsing and thrumming. Music for dancing instead of fucking.

“Right this way,” she called and led me onto a balcony that wrapped around the perimeter of the space. Below us, the dance floor beat like a heart, bodies lifting, dipping, moving as one. Above us were two more floors, also ringed with balconies. I thought I could make out more windows too—more private rooms, these overlooking the raucous party below.

Out here, there were no longer any rooms, but rather nooks open to the space, most of them filled with plush, semicircular booths, but some filled with rows of chairs, like at the opera. One nook was larger than the others, and there I saw him.

Mark in a black leather armchair that looked like a throne, surrounded by four or five people I didn’t recognize.

I followed my guide there, my hands shaking and my stomach twisting, the same way it did right before a judge lifted his hand between me and an opponent at a sparring match. Like for a single, crushing instant, I’d forgotten everything I’d ever known about anything, and I was a complete beginner all over again.

Then Mark looked over and met my eyes, and everything else stopped.

The shaking, the nerves, the vigilant prickle at the back of my neck, constantly reminding me that I was in a new place, a dangerous place, that I had a job to do.

He commanded my attention, and somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that wasn’t good. Around him, I would need to be warier and more watchful than ever—but it couldn’t be helped right now as I was seeing him in his domain for the first time. As I was being led to his dark throne like a sacrifice.

Mark Trevena looked like he owned every space he moved through anyway: stalking me in a grimy dojo with bare feet and a rubber knife in his hand; dancing at a rooftop party; wearing rolled-up shirt sleeves in his penthouse. He radiated complete control and dominion wherever he was.

But here? Here in the world he built for himself?

This was beyond an owner in his club, a king in his kingdom. This was more like some shadow god in his underworld, sprawled on his throne while his glittering eyes assessed the tribute being brought his way. The space matched him, reflected him, spoke for him. It was an extension of his will, and I could feel it as I walked toward his nook, the music pulsing, the glass and lights turning everything into a dizzy dream. He was the center of it all, high above his guests, watching them all cavort in his care.

He was the locus, the pivot on which the entire night turned. It was in the way the people in the other nooks watched him, the way people looked up from the dance floor, as if everyone were performing for him. Hoping to impress him.

We stopped in front of his chair, and I allowed myself a quick catalog of the nook before I respectfully dropped my eyes. Mark himself wore a black suit with a black shirt, vest, and tie. With his golden hair and the bored way he lounged back in his chair, he looked every bit the fallen angel.

Next to him was a woman with deep brown skin and close-cropped hair, wearing a dress of something shiny and red. She reminded me of Mark in the way she sat, leaning back with her elbow over the back of her armless chair and her eyebrow arched in a delicate crescent. There was a pale, dark-haired woman next to her wearing a tailored blue suit and a watchful expression that made me uneasy.

Two men sat on the other side of Mark, one in another armless chair in a black tuxedo, the other wearing leather pants and nothing else, kneeling on the floor next to him. Both men had dark olive skin, and the sitting man had a stubbled jaw and shoulder-length hair.

The fifth man was sitting too far back in the shadows for me to see much, other than the suggestion of wide shoulders and gleaming eyes.

“Ah, my bride,” Mark said. “Thank you for bringing her to me, Ms. Lim.”

“Of course, Mr. Trevena,” she said crisply. “Will there be anything else?”

“I think our needs are met for now, thank you.” I could feel his eyes on me even though I couldn’t see them.

Ms. Lim left us, and I saw Mark’s fingers lift from the arm of his chair. I knew what he wanted; we’d exchanged emails about tonight and about my performance. I would kneel; I would be silent unless asked a question. I would call him Sir or Mr. Trevena. He might touch me, and I’d already sent over a list of my soft and hard limits, so however he touched me would be something I’d already assented to.

I hadn’t had as many hard limits as I’d thought. I wasn’t sure what to make of that.

Hyssop,I reminded myself as I knelt in front of his black dress shoes. Hyssop. I could stop this at any moment, although I already knew I wouldn’t. It was too important for selling our story, the image of me as a financial princess turned submissive turned wife. And if it bothered me that Isolde Laurence—black belt, perfect student, devout Catholic—would be reduced to that timeline, I wouldn’t let it change anything about my decisions.

Whatever impression of me the world had, I would use it against them to get what I wanted. If they saw me as weak, depraved, unimportant, under someone else’s control…all the better for what I needed to do.

“Lovely,” the woman next to Mark said admiringly. “If young.”

“I didn’t know you liked them so fresh and untrained, Mark,” said the suited woman next to the first. “You’ve always gone for more seasoned types. The ones who can keep up with your…tastes.”

Mark reached forward and tucked a strand of blond hair behind my ear. I kept my eyes down—Mark himself preferred eye contact with his submissives, he’d said, but around other Dominants, it would be polite to keep my eyes on the floor—until he took my chin and lifted my face to his. In the flashing lights and dancing shadows, it was impossible to tell if his eyes were blue or black. “Andrea thinks you can’t keep up with me, darling. Do you think that’s true?”

What could be true between us when this was all a lie? “No, sir.”

“I think you’re right. And half the fun will be showing you my tastes, one by one. Training you to serve me how I like,” Mark said. He was still studying my face, raising my jaw even more to study my throat and clavicles. Like he was wondering what a collar would look like there. “Isn’t that right, Ash?”

A noise of assent from the shadows.

“Ash here had a submissive of his own when he was young, although I don’t think he knew enough to call it that,” Mark explained.

“It didn’t need to have a name,” the man called Ash said. His voice was deep and strong. “We just called it us.”

“Hmm,” Mark said, running his thumb along my jaw, like a new buyer mapping some freshly bought vase at auction. “And what do you call it now? Or your infatuation with that former vice president’s granddaughter?”

A laugh from the shadows. “Hopeless.”

The music behind us changed as Mark released my face. I tilted my face back down the moment he did, and he ran his thumb over his fingertips. Our agreed-on signal for good.

A thumb in the middle of his palm meant watch me. A thumb and a forefinger pressed together meant stop. A subtle way for him to guide me through any club etiquette we hadn’t anticipated.

The conversation ebbed into club gossip as I stayed between Mark’s planted feet, watching the arrow-straight cuffs of his suit trousers shivering on the tops of his shoes. The floor was polished concrete, but I was unbothered by the pain of kneeling there. Kneeling had been the closest I’d come to corporal penance on my own, kneeling on a hard surface for as long as I could stand it, and I had lots of practice embracing the discomfort.

It was cool there in my slip of a dress, so much of my thighs exposed, along with my arms and the tops of my breasts, and after a while, I felt goose bumps pebbling my skin. I wondered how the other submissive on the floor was faring, the shirtless man, but when I tried to slide my gaze sideways without moving my head, I could only see his leather-clad thigh. He didn’t seem like he was shivering or anything. Maybe this was another thing subs were expected to endure without complaint.

And then without warning, I was picked up, just like I had been in Mark’s penthouse, and nestled in his lap. He didn’t miss a beat in the conversation he was having with the man next to him about the increase in international membership applicants, and no one else seemed to react either. My flat-clad feet dangled on the other side of the thick leather armrest; I was resting against his blissfully warm chest with my eyes on my lap. He had a strong arm wrapped around me, also warm, and his free hand drew idle circles on my knee as he spoke.

Like the last time, it was startlingly pleasant. That hypnotic, rainlike scent. His firm body, his chest moving against me as he breathed. And this time I could hear the rumble of his voice against my ear as he murmured back and forth with the other Dominants.

And here with Mark tonight, I understood why Mortimer was so keen for this engagement. No one paid me the slightest bit of mind while they discussed other members and other potential members. Andrea and the woman next to Mark both worked at Lyonesse, I gathered; the man with the kneeling submissive was a regular. Same with the man in the shadows, who barely spoke throughout it all. I could feel when Mark evaded certain answers or changed the angle of his questions just enough to deflect around something, but I didn’t know enough about the people or situations they were discussing to say why.

As it was, I knew it was all information my uncle would be ravenous to hear—these wouldn’t be the crumbs brought from the parties of the well-heeled on their best behavior, but hills and mountains brought from the darkest corners of their sins.

The Bulgarian attaché who drank martini after martini at the bar and was far too loose with his words.

The Oscar-winning actor who could only orgasm after watching his wife get railed by someone else.

The princess from Averna who came four times a year to have a mistress lock her in a cage.

The megachurch pastor. The socialite. The billionaires and almost-billionaires and former billionaires.

And this was casual conversation. I couldn’t even imagine what kind information Mark actually held close and secure.

As they talked, Mark’s hand on my leg kept circling, drifting until he was stroking the inside of my knee. Electricity skittered up my thigh—something like ticklishness, like a thrill, but that left warmth in its wake too. His fingers never went any higher than my lower thigh, but it was like the more they stayed there, the more I began to wonder why. During our emailed exchanges over hard and soft limits, I’d said Mark could touch my vulva for the purposes of public display, of performance, and also my backside and breasts. I’d even agreed to full nudity in public, although I had mentioned that I might need time to work up to it.

I’d told myself that I’d agreed to so much because I needed to do more than sell our story to the denizens of Lyonesse; I’d need to eventually win over Mark’s allegiance too. His respect, if not his affection. Only then could I count on accessing everything my uncle wanted from Lyonesse.

But the honest truth was that going through that list, limit by limit, was like the first day with a new weapon at the karate school. It was a promise—so many promises, in fact, beckoning me to test myself against them. Promises that were already things I’d longed for under a different context.

Rewards. Punishments.

It would all be different, of course, pain for my future husband rather than for God’s love, but it called to me nonetheless.

So anyway, I had anticipated him doing more tonight than stroking my knee. The inside of my knee, over and over, slow, slow caresses that made my nipples pull taut under my dress. My clit surged, swelling in abrupt kicks, and I began to invent half-delirious fantasies with my clit at the center of them.

Stroked over my panties. Played with while his free hand pulled the crotch of my panties aside.

Fantasies where he’d told me beforehand to wear nothing underneath my dress and then spent the night petting my wet, exposed sex in plain view.

I closed my eyes. What was happening to me? Six months ago, I couldn’t believe my father would allow a man like Mark at a party, and now here I was silently keening to be treated like a whore.

Was it Mark? Did he make me want this somehow?

Or had I always been this way?

My knees had parted even more somehow, the hem of my dress falling down my thighs. Anyone could see my panties now, if they wanted, but I didn’t care. I wanted Mark to know he could touch me more. If he wanted. If he thought it would be good for our illusion.

Not because I felt my clit like a beating heart between my legs. Not because I was panting softly against his chest while he continued to stroke my leg and talk to the others like nothing was happening.

It wasn’t until the DJ on the dance floor put up the countdown to midnight and Mark shifted underneath me that I realized my bottom had been nestled against a thick erection, long enough to make me swallow.

I had left oral, vaginal, and anal sex blank on the question of my limits, not marking yes or no, marking nothing at all. Saying yes would feel too much like saying goodbye to another Isolde, to an Isolde without a honeysuckle ring on her finger. But saying no was foolish; to marry Mark and not use every tool I could to win his trust was worse than a half-sacrifice. It would be a wasted one.

And now here I was in his lap, his hard cock pressed against me.

If I had marked yes, he would be able to turn me in his lap, unbutton his pants, and—

The countdown got to ten, and Mark stood with me in his arms, setting me on my feet in front of him. Another man was rushing toward our nook, tall and suited with a flag pin in the lapel—and familiar somehow, although the moving lights of the dance floor below made it hard to get a good look at his face. He reached the quiet guest in the shadows just as the building exploded with cheers and Happy New Years and the guest yanked him down to his mouth and kissed him passionately.

I looked back up to Mark, who was staring at me with something I couldn’t decipher written on his face. He pressed his thumb to my lower lip until my mouth opened for him, and then with a flash of his eyes, he leaned down and slotted his mouth against mine, leaving his thumb between us.

His lips were warm and firm, his breath minty and cool, and something about that thumb was so demanding, almost callous, and I should hate that, I should hate that—

I licked the tip of it, tasting clean skin and a hint of whiskey, and he drew in a sharp breath. And then, like I’d broken through some wall of control, his other hand dug into my hair to hold me still and he pressed his tongue into my mouth.

Our tongues grazed, flickered, fused, and I was panting against him, my hands coming up to fist in the lapels of his jacket to hold myself upright, because my knees were going soft.

My first kiss.

Mark seemed to want every secret my mouth had ever held and searched them out relentlessly. His tongue was stroking and seeking and wicked. His hand in my hair was implacable, and his thumb was still holding my mouth open for him to use.

He pulled my hair the tiniest bit and it was pain and it was ownership, and for a bare, sharp second, everything in the entire world made sense.

And then he dropped his hands and stepped back, licking his lips. I was pleased to see the fast heave of his chest, the wary look in his eyes.

He was doubting himself now. I’d surprised him.

Perhaps I could play this game with him after all.

Perhaps I could win.

When he spoke, his voice was barely audible over the cheers and music. “Happy New Year, Isolde.”