Page 73 of Dominion’s Collar

"Who decides?"

Her breathing is ragged. The color in her skin extends from her face to her navel. She's shaking with the effort of not moving.

"You do."

"Then wait."

I let her come down. Give her enough time for the trembling to recede but not stop. When I touch her again, she flinches with sensitivity, and the flinch becomes a moan that carries across the floor.

I build her again. Slower. The patience is deliberate, and the cost of it presses against my leathers.

She's close. She's been close since the flame traced her stomach, and the denial is writing itself across her body in ways I can read like text.

Her hands are on the table. Her eyes are closed. Her lips are parted, and the sound of her breathing is the only thing I can hear.

She stops trying to manage the outcome. The observer inside her goes silent, and what's left is presence. The woman who watches everything has stopped watching.

She's lying beneath my hands with nothing held back.

I held fragments of what happened at Elysium and couldn't put them together in time. Now I hold the pieces, and the woman beneath my hands is the sister who came to finish what Claire started.

"Come for me."

She breaks apart. The orgasm takes her entire body, bowing off the table, her hands gripping the edge. The contractions around my fingers are rhythmic and fierce. I stay with her through every pulse until she collapses against the padded surface and goes still.

Silence settles over the stage. The ambient sound of Dominion returns around us: music, conversation, the distant clink of glasses from the bar.

My hands are shaking.

I withdraw carefully. Clean my hands with the wet towel.

She's bare except for the collar, on a stage in the center of Dominion's scening area. I wrap the blanket around her shoulders before she can register the exposure. Press a water bottle into her hands.

"Drink."

She drinks. Her eyes are half-closed, her breathing still unsteady. I check her skin while she recovers. The fire marks are diffuse warmth, no blistering, no lasting redness. Every surface the flame touched responds normally to my fingertips.

"Anything hurt?"

She shakes her head. Then she looks at me. The look is direct, stripped of the analytical distance she usually rebuilds within minutes of a scene ending.

Her eyes travel from my face to the front of my leathers, where the evidence of what tonight has cost me is impossible to miss.

"Sebastien."

"Yes."

"I asked you once about reciprocity. You said no."

"I remember."

"I'm asking again."

In the shibari, declining was the correct call. First scene. The right decision, made cleanly.

I'm done making that decision.

I pull the blanket tighter around her. Lift her off the table. She weighs nothing against my arms, or she weighs everything. Her head settles against my shoulder, and the collar presses into my collarbone through my shirt.