Page 38 of Suite 7

I’m circling. I never circle. I’m the person who identifies the load-bearing truth and walks straight to it and delivers it without flinching, and I’m standing here trying three different angles on the same sentence while Kane Sinclair watches me with gray eyes that are giving me absolutely nothing to push against.

“I should go,” I say.

I turn toward the door, and his voice finds me.

“Vera.”

I stop. My back is to him, my hand not yet on the door.

“Tell me what you came here to say.”

Four seconds of silence.

“I want you to be my Dom.”

The sentence hangs in the air between us. I count three heartbeats, waiting for anything that tells me how he’s received it.

“Turn around.”

I turn before I’ve decided to, but my eyes go to the floor, to the wall, to anywhere that isn’t him, because saying it out loud was already everything I had and I don’t know what looking at him costs on top of that.

“Look at me.”

Three words, quiet and absolute, and my eyes come up before I’ve consciously agreed to it. His find mine and hold them, gray and steady and completely present, and the room feels smaller than it did a moment ago.

“Say it again.”

“I want you to be my Dom.” Steadier the second time, because I’ve said it once and the world didn’t end and he’s still standing there.

“I want more of last night — not one scene, not one night. I want you to teach me, actually teach me, the way Dominic’s materials describe. The structure, the dynamic, what power exchange means when it’s real and ongoing and not one session in Suite 7.”

The weight of it settles over me.

And then he walks toward me.

Unhurried. Measured. Each step carrying the weight of a decision already made.

I don’t step back. I never step back. But my heart rate doubles and every nerve ending I have snaps to attention.

He stops close enough that I have to tilt my chin slightly to hold his gaze. Close enough that I catch his cologne.

The same scent that was on my skin when I woke at one twelve AM and understood that everything had already changed.

His eyes don’t leave mine.

“You understand what you’re asking.” Not a question. The preliminary to one.

“Yes.”

“Do you.” His voice drops lower. “Because what you’re asking isn’t another scene, Vera. It’s a dynamic. An ongoing structure between two people with rules, expectations and accountability that exist outside of a room at Eclipse, outside of one evening, outside of anything you can close a door on when it gets complicated.”

“I know what it is. I spent two hours reading about it.”

“Then tell me. What exactly did you like about last night? What exactly can’t you stop thinking about.”

“Everything,” I say.

“Be specific.”