Page 8 of Dominion’s Collar

"Margot doesn't need to touch anyone to make her point."

"Neither do you." She meets my eyes. Holds them. The look carries the specific weight of a woman who has spent a year under my hands and has formed opinions she keeps to herself. Most of them. "Ready when you are."

She leaves to change, and I finish the sweep I interrupted. The room has settled. The incident was small and contained, exactly the way Margot designed the system to work.

Natalie is watching me. She thinks she's being careful about it. She isn't.

I leave the booth. The path to the scening area passes the bar.

"Excuse me."

Two words in command register. She steps aside before the sentence finishes landing, her weight shifting, her chin dipping. The compliance is instant and unscripted. Nothing like the delayed performance she's been running all evening. The difference is so sharp it stalls my stride for half a beat.

There it is.

Genuine surrender, buried under layers of study and strategy. The performance is what she built. The response to my voice is what she carries underneath. Two words just proved what an hour of observation could only suggest.

She catches it. Her chin comes back up. Her jaw tightens.

I keep walking. But the information stays.

The open scening area is configured for what I need. Padded bench, positioned restraints. My equipment is in my locker: the leather blindfold, the crop, both broken in and shaped to my use.

Marion is waiting in a black corset and boy shorts, her hair pulled back, her hands folded.

When I scene, my sweep of the room stops. Marion is under my hands. Marion gets my full attention. That's the agreement, spoken and unspoken.

"Color."

"Green."

The blindfold goes on first. I settle it against her temples, check the fit, and secure the strap.

The darkness changes her. Her inhale deepens. Her lips part on the exhale, and the line of her spine softens into a curve that wasn't there when she could see me.

Without sight, she has permission to stop managing and start receiving. Twice a month she comes here and hands the control to me. The speed of tonight's surrender says her week was worse than usual.

"The shorts."

She hooks her thumbs into the waistband and slides them down without hesitation. Steps out of them and returns to position, the corset framing her waist while everything below is bare.

The exposure is complete and deliberate. The slight catch in her breathing when the air meets bare skin tells me she's already anticipating where the crop will land.

I position her. Hands on the bench, fingers spread, weight forward. "Don't move your hands."

She nods.

The first tap lands on the outside of her thigh. She doesn't flinch. The second is higher. The third is sharper. It draws a response from her, small and earned, from a woman who knows what she wants and doesn't waste energy pretending otherwise.

The crop traces from outer thigh to hip. Each stroke harder than the last, and the tension across her back loosens by degrees. Her body is telling me she wants more before her voice does.

I give her more. The leather shifts to the inside of her thigh, and the dynamic changes. Her thighs part wider, opening toward the contact. She's flushed and swollen between them, slick enough to catch the low light.

"Wider," I tell her.

She obeys. The sound she gives me drops lower, rawer, the place where pain crosses into arousal and she's stopped caring which is which. She rocks against the bench.

When you can't see the stroke coming, you can't brace. When you can't brace, what surfaces is honest.