Chapter 7
Polina
Getting out of the house had required three days of patience, one convincing performance of docile compliance, and the strategic sacrifice of my favorite Hermès scarf.
The scarf had gone to Molly, draped over her shoulders with a warmth I didn’t entirely have to manufacture, because the woman was genuinely kind and entirely too loyal to my father for her own good.
But Molly had a fondness for beautiful things and an even greater weakness for feeling seen, and twenty minutes of sincere conversation about her sister’s upcoming wedding had bought me exactly what I needed.
She would be occupied in the kitchen until ten.
Vlad had a standing Thursday call with his wife in Kyiv that ran long without fail.
Dimitri, sweet, uncomplicated Dimitri, had developed a very predictable habit of disappearing to the small sitting room off the east corridor at precisely eight fifteen to watch football on his phone with his earbuds in.
I had noted all of this the way my father had always taught me to note everything—as information, as leverage, as the architecture of a situation waiting to be used.
He would be furious if he knew I’d turned his own lessons on him.
Good.
I’d changed in the small bathroom off the staff entrance, not the UV dress, too conspicuous for the journey, though it was folded carefully in the bag over my shoulder, and slipped out through the garden while the city did what cities do at eight on a Thursday evening, which was to provide cover for anyone motivated enough to use it.
The quiet jazz and cheap pine air freshener inside the Uber offered a calm solace after the intensity of my time with Master Loki.
Three days of breakfast under my father’s careful eyes.
Three days of marble hallways and the particular silence of a house where every door was technically open and none of them actually were.
Three days of art books and my own thoughts and the restless, itching awareness of a life being lived in the wrong direction, too small, too managed, too precisely arranged to be anything as organic and unpredictable as an actual existence.
I had not been thinking about him.
That was almost entirely true.
I had been thinking about the scene. The rope, specifically.
The particular quality of surrender that shibari required.
Not passivity, nothing so simple as that, but a sustained active yielding that demanded as much presence as any performance I’d ever given.
The way my mind had gone genuinely, blessedly quiet for the first time in longer than I could measure.
The feeling, afterward, of having been somewhere real.
That was what I wanted. Not him. The experience.
Right up until I’d typed Tonight? And hit send before my better judgment could get its coat on.
One more time, I told myself, stepping out of the car. That’s all this was.
Nobody stopped me.
Nobody asked where I was going.
Nobody informed anyone I had arrived.
The exterior of Valhalla was quieter than Midgard, no line, no bass thumping through the walls, just a discreet entrance with warm light spilling from within and a doorman whose expression suggested he had seen everything and was surprised by none of it. My name was at the door.
I had not let myself think about how quickly he must have put it there.
I was not going to start now.
The interior was different from Midgard in the way a private library differed from a bookshop, smaller, more deliberate, every detail chosen rather than accumulated.
The lighting was lower and the spaces more intimate, alcoves and private areas clustered around a central lounge where perhaps thirty people moved with the comfortable ease of regulars.
No Viking murals here. The aesthetic was cleaner, more Nordic in the austere sense.
Pale wood, dark iron, candlelight in glass vessels cast everything in amber.
It was beautiful. I catalogued it the way I always catalogued beautiful things, automatically, helplessly, as though beauty were a language I couldn’t stop translating even when I was trying to focus on something else.
I was halfway through the ironwork doorway when I saw him.
He was already watching me.
He stood at the far side of the lounge with a glass of water and an expression of complete composure, and the sight of him did something immediate and entirely unwelcome to my pulse.
He looked exactly as I remembered, lean and dark and still in the particular way of people who have never once needed to fill a silence with movement.
My body, which had apparently not received the memo about this being a purely experiential exercise, responded with an enthusiasm that I found deeply unhelpful.
He was a stranger, I reminded myself. Practically.
We had exchanged numbers and very little else.
He knew my club name and that my life was complicated and that I responded well to jute rope and careful hands.
That was the full extent of it. Whatever I’d felt during that scene, the sense of being genuinely seen, of some internal lock finally turning, that was the dynamic, not the man.
That was what a skilled Dominant did. It wasn’t personal.
It felt personal.
He crossed the room without hurrying. Stopped in front of me and looked at me for a moment with those dark eyes that had the unsettling quality of arriving at conclusions before I’d finished the sentence.
“Hecate.”
“Master Loki.” My voice came out steadier than I felt. “You got my message.”
“I did.” Something moved across his face, brief, controlled, gone before I could name it. “I’m glad you reached out.”
I was not going to let three words do what three words had absolutely no business doing.
“I had a gap in my schedule,” I said.
His mouth curved at one corner. Just slightly. Not a smile exactly, more like the ghost of one, the suggestion that somewhere underneath all that careful composure was a man who found things genuinely funny and occasionally let it show by accident.
It was a very small thing.
It did a disproportionate amount of damage.
“I have two options for you tonight,” he said, moving us slightly away from the entrance with that characteristic near touch, his hand at the edge of my space without entering it, direction without demand. “There’s a public room available. Glass walled, observed.”
“And the other option?”
“A private room.” A pause, deliberate without being theatrical. “Just us.”
The sensible choice was the public room. The public room had structure and the comfortable formality of being watched. The public room was the choice of a woman who understood she was already in over her head with a man she didn’t know and had the good sense to limit the damage.
I thought about three days of marble hallways. The sensation of my own life being pressed flat and smooth as a pressed flower. Preserved, displayed, entirely without wildness.
“Private,” I said.
Something shifted in his expression. Briefly, completely controlled. I might have imagined it.
I didn’t think I’d imagined it.
“This way,” he said.
I followed him and told myself, with great firmness, that this was the last time.
One more scene. One more night of feeling like a person who made her own choices.
Then I would go back to the house and find a legitimate path out of my father’s orbit that didn’t involve an almost stranger in a private room at Valhalla and whatever this reckless warmth was that kept arriving in my chest without invitation.
Completely manageable. Which was usually the first sign that something wasn’t.
The door closed behind us. He turned to look at me. The room was quiet and warm and entirely private, and every sensible thought I’d brought with me became, quite suddenly, someone else’s problem.
I stood, rooted, my armor firmly in place. I may be a complete train wreck beneath, and quite possibly the quick staccato of my pulse gave me away, but on the inside I was a puddle of hormones and feelings. Our first very public session… how different could this one be in private?
My eyes traveled about the room, taking in the fine finishings and equipment. But what stole my breath was the ring that hung from the center of the ceiling with chains that dangled a pair of manacles, archaic when compared with the rest.
Already this was different, intense in a way I’d avoided. Until now.
Two more rings set in silver plates embedded in the floor, a chain and a manacle attached to each.
There was something so primitive about the metal that sparks of forbidden excitement spiked down my spine, swelling the lips of my pussy and hardening my clit in no time flat.
“How very barbarian of you, Master Loki.”
He didn’t have to look at where I indicated with a nod of my head. He knew. Of course he did, just as he knew how deeply I’d wished to fly free in bondage last time. This, however, would be an entirely different set of sensations.
Loki gave me the short tour ending with the collection of bullwhips that hung from the wall. “Yours?” I asked, boredom lacing my tone.
His wicked grin set off more sensations of desire that pooled in the tiny triangle of my G-string. This was dangerous. Not the play, but the wild beat of my heart. My body recognized what I was unwilling to admit to myself.
Loki wrapped one large hand around my throat. Barely squeezing, almost delicate. The message those twin pools of darkness held was heated in a way that belied his grip on me. He was turned on and looked to me to already be in Dom space.
His other hand trailed along my side as gently as a feather. Goosebumps rose, another giveaway, though whether he noticed, I couldn’t tell. He leaned in, his lips brushing the shell of my ear.
“Are you ready, Hecate?”
The question was delivered with easy confidence, as if he were asking about weekend plans.
“I’m always ready, Master Loki.”