Okay, King. You’re going to love this one. Don’t pretend you weren’t drooling over this guy when he walked into Headquarters. We all were. Lean but muscular, perfect bed head, two full sleeves of tattoos, big damn smile...remember him?

  He came to you with a stack of Benjamins an inch high and a request for “a couple hours with your hottest dominatrix.” I remember it well. Not that I was eavesdropping from the next room or anything. I just happened to be in the next room standing by the door with my eye at the keyhole.

  What? I was practicing picking locks.

  You told him that you had the perfect dominatrix to meet all his needs. Beautiful, intelligent, extremely experienced, and ready and willing to perform any sort of sadistic service for him.

  Of course you were talking about me.

  The Case of the Reluctant Rock Star

  Dante said he merely wanted a tour of The Underground.

  “We’re making a video,” he said. “It’ll be kinky, something like old Nine Inch Nails. Like the vid for ‘Closer’ but with fewer dead pigs. I’m not into any of this stuff—the ball-gags and riding crops—but it makes for good visuals. Seriously...I’m not one of those guys. We’re just scouting locations.”

  Yeah sure, kid. And I’m the Virgin Mary.

  The Mistress had every right to be skeptical. First of all, while she didn’t know much about the music industry, she was fairly certain the lead singers of world-famous, award-winning, many-times platinum-selling bands didn’t do their own location scouting for music videos. Maybe Dante was something of a diva who demanded control over every aspect of his band’s career trajectory. Certainly plausible. Perhaps he genuinely did want to try his hand at directing and producing, which is why he’d taken this task upon himself.

  Whatever the reason he’d come knocking on Kingsley’s door, The Mistress really didn’t care. He’d paid twice her usual rate for nothing but a tour of the dungeons, the clubs, and a couple hours of picking her brain about the job. Easy money, right?

  Not quite.

  The Mistress met Dante in Kingsley’s office. From the moment their eyes met and she shook his hand, she had a hunch about him. The second she appeared, Kingsley seemingly disappeared to Dante. Not once did Dante glance at Kingsley after The Mistress made her entrance.

  “So you’re The Mistress?” Dante’s eyes grazed her body from head to boot and back again. “Very nice to meet you.”

  “Very nice to beat you,” she said, giving him her most dangerous sort of grin.

  “No beating.” He wagged his finger at her like a teacher to a naughty pupil. For a split second, she considered how much force she’d have to exert to break that finger. “Here for the tour and nothing more.”

  “Yes, for your music video, you said. How nice. We lifestyle dominants love it when outsiders take our entire world, our culture, and our people and turn it all into a fake Hollywood bubblegum backdrop for a pop song.”

  She said with words with a smile and enjoyed watching Dante squirm in his punk boots.

  “It’s more alternative than pop,” he said sheepishly. “Really good alternative. My band’s hardcore.”

  “Hardcore? So am I. Poured scalding candle-wax on a client’s balls yesterday. Your band does that sort of thing?”

  “Um...” Dante went pale underneath his tan. “We say fuck a lot.”

  “Yeah, so did my grandmother.”

  “Maîtresse?” Kingsley gave her a stern stare. She only winked at him. “This is Dante Burns. He’s been hailed as the next Trent Reznor.”

  “Who?”

  “You don’t know who Trent Reznor is?” Dante said, sounding aghast.

  “Is he a client, King?”

  “Non.”

  “Have I ever fucked him?” she asked.

  “Not to my knowledge,” Kingsley said. “His band, Nine Inch Nails—”

  “Not ringing a bell. Sorry.” She turned to Dante and shook his hand. “So you’re the next Someone-I’ve-Never-Heard-Of. Congrats.”

  Dante looked heartbroken. Poor baby.

  The Mistress took her hand back. “King? We good to go?”

  Kingsley stared at her with wide eyes, then waved them from the office. The stack of hundreds on his desk would go long ways toward taking care of the headache she’d just given him.

  “Ready, Mr. Burns?”

  “Sure.” He sounded doubtful now. Gone was the cocky rock star. “I’m all yours.”

  He said the words casually, too casually. Behind them she heard something. Something hungry, something wistful, something true.

  “This is HQ,” The Mistress said as they left Kingsley’s office. “Kingsley lives here, works here, and reigns here. He takes the King part of Kingsley very seriously. You should too. You might be more famous than he is and you might even have more money, but there’s no one in the house who would take your side against him, who would take an order from you that he had contradicted, who would even take a step out of this house with you without his permission.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. King doesn’t have employees. He has slaves and submissives. Well-paid slaves and submissives, of course. But they don’t work for the money. They work for the kink. None of his employees are vanilla.”

  “Vanilla...that means like straight-laced and normal, right?”

  The Mistress smiled at him. “Vanilla means ‘not kinky.’ It’s what we call people outside the scene, the straight types. You, for instance, are vanilla.”

  “No way. I have more tattoos than Brian Setzer. We counted one day.”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s not clean versus ink, goth versus normal, gay versus straight, Mohawk versus buzz cut. If you don’t do kink, you’re vanilla. And didn’t you just say yourself a few minutes ago up in King’s office that you’re not one of those guys? Or did I mishear you while I was eavesdropping?”

  “I said that, yeah. Just not used to be described as, you know, vanilla.” He winced at the word as if she’d called him something really offensive, like “impotent,” or “racist,” or “a politician.”

  “Get used to it, Vanilla. If you aren’t kinky, that’s what you are. There’s no shame in being vanilla. Some of my best friends are vanilla.”

  “Really?” he said with some hope.

  “Nope. Come on. Let’s get to the club.”

  Kingsley had a Rolls Royce waiting for them outside his townhouse. The driver hopped out and opened the door for them.

  “Nice car,” Dante said, studying the interior. “Total pussy wagon.”

  “You have no idea...” The Mistress said as Dante got comfortable on the bench seat where she’d seen Kingsley fuck at least a dozen different people over the past year. “So tell me about this video. What are you envisioning?”

  Dante looked at her and shrugged. Pretty boy. Rock star pretty. Eyeliner, pierced ears, good tan, good smile.

  “I don’t know. The song’s about a guy really in love with this woman, so in love with her he wants to be her slave. You know, all guys feel that way when they fall in love with a woman. They feel...”

  “Owned?”

  “Yeah. Exactly. Like she could order us to do anything and we’d do it. And in bed, we’d do anything she told us to. It’s not kinky. It’s just love. All guys feel like that.”

  The Mistress studied him as street lamps cast their glow through the Rolls window. His face went from dark to light, dark to light, with every lamp they passed.

  “Do you ever feel that way when you aren’t in love?” She stretched out her leg and rested her booted foot on his thigh. He looked down at her foot but made no attempt to remove or even ask her to take her dirty shoe off his pants.

  “What do you mean?” His eyes narrowed at her.

  “I mean...do you ever think you’d like to do that, I don’t know...every day of your life? Maybe with a woman you weren’t in love with. Maybe just a woman you found attractive. Maybe all women.”

  “I told you, I’m not one of those guys.”

  “What guys?”

  “One of those guys. Kinky guys who want to get used by dominatrixes, who want to crawl on their hands and knees for a woman, who want to get ordered around and treated like a fuck toy. That’s not me.”

  “Really? Wonder why you have an erection just talking about it then...”

  Dante glanced down at his lap and laughed. “I don’t. You can’t even—”

  “You looked down to see if I could see it through your pants. If you weren’t hard right now, you wouldn’t have needed to look.”

  “Maybe I’m just...” He paused mid-sentence to take her leg by the ankle and move her foot back onto the floorboard. “…turned on because I’m in a fucking Rolls Royce with a beautiful woman with black hair and amazing tits in a leather skirt and corset. I think about any guy on the planet would pop one in this situation, even if he was vanilla.”

  “Which you are, right?” She batted her eyelashes at him.

  “Yeah. Right. I’m...vanilla.”

  “Don’t feel bad. Happens to the best of us. Anyway, the club we’re going to is called The 8th Circle. It’ll give you a boner, too, but don’t get excited. You can’t film there. King has a couple other smaller kink clubs that you can use for a location shoot if you want. But The 8th Circle’s off-limits. It’s his baby.”

  “Why are we going there then?”

  “Because that’s where my dungeon is. It’s where I see my clients. Thought you’d be interested. Aren’t you?”

  “Why would I want to see your dungeon?” He shifted in his seat.

  “Research for your video, of course.”

  “Yeah, of course. Research.”

  On the way to the club, Dante asked her a few questions about her background.

  D: How did she become a dominatrix?

  M: Created by God. Trained by Kingsley.

  D: Is it hard being a dominatrix?

  M: More wet than hard.

  D: Is it fun?

  M: Define “fun.”

  D: What’s the craziest thing you’ve done as a dominatrix?

  M: I can’t answer that without an attorney present.

  D: Do you ever have sex with your clients?

  M: No.

  At “no,” she saw a flash of disappointment cross his face. Why? Why would he be disappointed she didn’t have sex with her clients? Did he consider himself a client because he’d bought two hours of her time to take a stroll through Hell?

  Technically, he was. He’d paid for a kinky service and she’d agreed to provide it. Not that she wanted to have sex with him. He was a gorgeous kid with probably enough talent to earn that attitude of his, but nothing about him made her want to jump in bed with him.

  No...she had no desire to fuck him. There was no challenge in it. If she came onto him this second, they’d be fucking in five minutes. Fuck fucking. She wanted to get this bad boy to admit he was a sub. She could see it in his eyes that watched her for her pleasure and approval, read it in his body language—passive but alert, eager to please. And yes, aroused...so aroused from merely being in her leather-clad, thigh-high boot-wearing presence.

  “Ask me another question,” she ordered.

  “What’s the hardest part about being a dominatrix?”

  A good question, she had to give him that. And a thoughtful question. She liked thoughtful. Maybe there was more to this guy than a pretty face, tattoos, and an uncomfortable erection.

  “The hardest part...I’m not going to make the obvious penis joke I could make. I’m not. I just made it in my head but I’m not going to say it out loud.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “Seriously, the hardest part is caring about my clients. I try not to care about them because my job gets a lot harder when I do.”

  “Why?”

  Sighing heavily, she leaned back in the seat, stretched out her legs and rested them on the seat next to his thigh.

  “I have some fucked-up clients, and I say that with affection. These guys...they have fetishes like you can’t believe. They want to drink urine. They can only get off if you beat their cocks with belts. They need me to put puppy ears on them and make them drink out of the dungeon toilet like a dog. I don’t care. It doesn’t bother me, doesn’t freak me out, doesn’t gross me out. They’re fetishists and that’s fine. Takes all kinds. Sex is weird and wonderful and these guys are harmless. They love their wives, their kids. But they have this deep itch inside them that only coming to me can scratch.”

  “That’s pretty crazy. Drink urine?”

  Now it was her turn to wag her finger at him.

  “Don’t judge, Little Grasshopper. Some of these men could break you in half. They’re strong, smart, complicated. That’s the thing. They’re not boring enough to be vanilla. Most of the men in this country, they’re meat-and-potatoes when it comes to sexuality. Gay or straight, they like it plain and simple. Penetration, thrust, orgasm, sleep. That’s it. But then you have my clients. These are the guys who crave escargot, shark fin soup, boiled duck embryos, fucking blowfish. Exotic fare. Those are my people. You eat crazy shit like that and people call you a foodie. You want exotic fare in the bedroom, though, and people call you a sick freak. These men cut their chest open and show me where they keep their souls. It’s heartbreaking to care about them. So I don’t.”

  She heard the tenor of her voice changing and she coughed to clear her throat. She didn’t care about her clients. Not any of them. They were paychecks and nothing more.

  “You do care about them,” he said, pressing her.

  “You’re a Backstreet Boy. What do you know?”

  He laughed then, and she had to laugh too.

  “I think you and I are both full of shit,” she said.

  “We are. You respect your clients.”

  It wasn’t a question. She answered it anyway. “I do respect them. It’s the scariest thing you can do—walk into a room where you know you’re going to meet your real self. Would you do that? If there was a mirror out there and you knew if you looked into it, you’d see the real you...would you look?”

  “I think I’d cover that mirror with a sheet and then smash it with a sledgehammer.”

  “Exactly. Me too. But these guys, they look. So yes, I respect them, I care about them, and I give them what they want and what they need. Then after an hour or two, I send them back out into the world that thinks they’re sick perverts. In my dungeon I can protect them, I can make them feel safe and even normal. But out there...” she pointed at the world outside the Rolls Royce’s window, “they’re on their own.”

  “You can’t save everybody.”

  “I can’t save anybody.” She gave him a half-hearted smile. “But it doesn’t matter. That’s not what they pay me for.”

  The Rolls brought them to a gray door in a gray parking garage. Dante didn’t seem impressed. That was okay. No one was ever impressed by The 8th Circle until they were inside it.

  “This is it?” he asked as the driver opened the door for them.

  “This is it,” she said, pulling her key-ring out and letting him into the front hallway. “But don’t be misled. The 8th Circle is like the ugly chick you take home from the bar at last call because you struck out with everyone else. Then you get her home, drop your pants, and discover she gives the world’s best blowjobs.”

  “I like her already.”

  “All I’m saying is don’t judge the joint by appearances. Oh, watch out,” she said, grabbing his arm to steer him from a stain on the floor. “You almost stepped in cum.”

  He started to look back over his shoulder but no one really needed to see that. With her hand on his arm, she led him down the dimly-lit hallway to a door inside the coat-check booth.

  “This is the shortcut to the dungeons,” she explained as they took a narrow staircase down. “Otherwise, we’d have to take the elevator to the main club floor. Big crowd tonight. Lots of people playing. You’d definitely get recognized.”

  “Glad we skipped that part then. I’m trying to be a little anonymous here.”

  “Hence the guyliner, the sleeveless shirt showing off all your tattoos, the professionally messed-up hair, and the boots that probably cost more than my mortgage payment?”

  “You don’t let me get away with anything, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Wanna tell me why?” They reached the bottom of the stairs. He leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms over his chest. For a single, beautiful second she saw the real Dante underneath the rock star uniform and the eyeliner and the well-cultivated tan. She saw the man, the musician who cared about his work, his art, and who put on the stupid clothes and the attitude because the world expected it of him. And in that split-second she decided she might like him.

  “Because the rest of the world lets you get away with murder. Don’t deny it. If you committed an actual murder, would you spend the rest of your life in prison? Or would your handlers cover it up, buy you the best attorneys, and get you off scot-free?”

  “I’m not a murderer. I’m a nice guy.”

  “I don’t care how nice you are. No matter how nice you are, you can’t be as nice to the world as the world’s been nice to you. How much money are you worth?”

  “That’s kind of a personal question.”

  “You asked me if I have sex with my clients, but me asking you your net worth is a personal question?”

  “Point taken. I’m at about 97 million at the last audit.”

  “Good. Now are you 97 million dollars worth of nice to the world?”

  He shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t know if anyone could be that nice. That’s a lotta nice.”

  “You really need 97 million to get through the night? How much does your fucking hair gel cost?”

  He laughed out loud then and ran his fingers through his hair. “It’s pricy shit.”

  “Wonder what brand of hair gel that homeless guy in the parking garage uses?”

  “You’re giving me shit because I haven’t given all my money to the homeless?”