Page 41 of Dominion’s Collar

I'm not most people.

"Everything all right?"

"Fine." The word arrives with a smile that doesn't quite match the rest of her face. "Just checking the time."

She wasn't checking the time.

I let it go. Asking is the wrong approach for a woman who manages the distance between what she shows and what she carries.

By the time she's talking again, I see the rest. She starts a question about a former member and then circles away from the name she intended to say. When her phone vibrates once against the table, her mouth tightens and she doesn’t look at it.

Individually, nothing. Together, a woman managing information she doesn't want examined.

I've watched a room for five years. I know what concealment looks like when it's practiced and when it's new. Natalie's is new.

She's carrying a weight she hasn't told me about. External. Not there, or not pressing this hard, a week ago. She's chosen to manage it alone.

I don't know whether that's because she doesn't trust Dominion with it. Or because she doesn't trust me.

She makes her way to the submissive’s lounge and changes back into street clothes before returning to me.

I remove the collar in the corridor. The click of the lock releasing. The leather lifting away. She reaches for the bare skin at her throat.

Her gaze moves over the block before she gets into the car. Parked cars. Sidewalk. The mouth of the side street. I've watched her leave before. She didn't do that last time.

"Lock your doors."

The same instruction I gave her last time. She gives me the same answer.

"I always lock my doors."

"Lock them anyway."

She drives away. I watch the taillights until they turn the corner.

I return to the club. Back inside, I retrieve the scotch from the private room. Take the booth. Sit with the glass and sort through what I learned tonight.

She surrendered. Genuinely. The space between compliance and what I felt when she stopped fighting the outcome is the most honest thing she's given me since the contract.

And she's managing something she won't show me. The two facts sit side by side, and neither one resolves the other.

Marion was right. I think I'm aware, and the distance between thinking it and being it is going to cost me.

I lift the glass. Drain it.

The scotch burns on the way down. I set the empty glass on the table. I can't remember the last time I finished a drink at this club.

The held glass has been a ritual, a pacing mechanism, a way of occupying my hands while I watched a room.

The ritual failed. I don't order another.

CHAPTER NINE

Natalie

The hangover from last night's scene isn't physical. It's the residual ache of muscles that held tension for hours and haven't fully let go. And the sharper ache of knowing my body did things during that scene that weren't in any script I wrote.

I'm sitting at my kitchen table with coffee and Claire's photograph angled toward me from the shelf.