Chapter 39 Mehar
MEHAR
Mateo Rios was becoming a problem. Not in the way Judge Baker was a problem.
Baker was pathetic, desperate, a man who’d lost control of his obsession and was now screaming declarations of love in parking lots.
Rios was the opposite. He was controlled.
Measured. Every session with him felt less like a man submitting and more like a man studying.
And tonight he’d crossed lines that nobody had crossed before.
It started normal. He arrived on time, paid the tribute without being asked, and took his position. I went through the opening protocol.
The commands, the positioning, the verbal degradation that most clients absorbed like medicine.
Rios absorbed it differently. He took it in with those dark eyes and that slight curve at the corner of his mouth that wasn’t quite a smile and wasn’t quite defiance but was something in between that made my instincts prickle.
Then he looked at me.
Direct eye contact. My number one rule. You do not look at me unless I tell you to look at me.
Every client knows this. Rios knew this.
He’d followed it perfectly in his first session.
And now he was looking me dead in my eyes from his knees with an expression that said he was choosing to break the rule, not forgetting it.
“Eyes down,” I said.
He held my gaze for three more seconds before lowering them. Three seconds doesn’t sound like a lot but in a dungeon where I am God, three seconds of unsanctioned eye contact is an eternity. It was a message. He was letting me know that his obedience was voluntary and could be revoked at any time.
“That’s a thousand-dollar infraction,” I said.
He pulled out his phone and CashApped me without a word. No protest. No groveling. Just payment, like a man settling a parking ticket.
I picked up the leather paddle and went harder than usual.
Each strike was a correction and a warning.
Don’t test me in my own space. He took every hit without flinching.
Didn’t gasp, didn’t wince, didn’t make a sound.
Most men broke by the third strike. Rios absorbed them like his skin was made of something thicker than human.
“You requested fire poker play,” I said. “You understand the risks?”
“I understand everything.” His voice was calm from the floor. Too calm.
I heated the poker and pressed it against his back, a quick, controlled contact that left a mark but no lasting damage.
He inhaled sharply through his nose and his fists clenched, but he didn’t cry out, and he didn’t move.
When I pulled the poker away, he exhaled slowly, almost peacefully, like the pain had given him something he needed.
“Another,” he said.
That was the second rule he broke. You don’t make requests once you were in the dungeon. I decide what happens and when. But before I could correct him, he CashApped me three thousand dollars. I felt the notification buzz in my pocket.
“I’m paying for the privilege of asking,” he said. Still on the floor. Still calm. “Another. Please.”
I gave him another. And he took it the same way.
He was silent and controlled. When the session ended and he stood to dress, there wasn’t a tremor in his hands.
No tears, no shaking, no post-session vulnerability.
He buttoned his shirt with steady fingers and adjusted his cuffs and when he turned to face me at the door, he looked exactly the same as when he’d walked in.
Untouched by everything I’d done to him.
That had never happened before. Every man who walked into my dungeon left different than when they arrived. That was the whole point. But Rios walked out the same way he walked in—composed, measured, with that unsettling stillness behind his eyes that I still couldn’t name.
“Same time next week?” he asked at the door.
“If you can follow the rules.”
“Rules are made to be broken.” He smiled and it didn’t reach his eyes. “I will see you soon, Dame CoCo.”
The way he said soon made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Not a threat exactly. More like a promise that had nothing to do with the dungeon and everything to do with something I couldn’t see yet.
The door closed behind him, and I stood in the middle of my space, surrounded by candles and tools and the faint smell of heated metal, and I felt something I rarely felt in this room.
Unsettled.
I changed out of the catsuit, wiped off the makeup, and drove to the warehouse because I needed to remind myself what real control looked like.
The warehouse smelled worse than the last time.
Decay and waste and something sharp and chemical underneath it all that I’d stopped trying to identify.
I went in through the side entrance with my gun in one hand and a bottle of water in the other because I wasn’t bringing him food tonight.
Tonight was just a check-in. A reminder to him and to myself of who was in charge.
Thad was on his back in the cage, staring at the ceiling.
He’d lost more weight since my last visit.
His arms were skeletal and his cheekbones jutted out at angles that made his face look like a skull wearing skin.
His eyes were closed when I walked in, and for a second I thought he might be dead and something in my chest lurched before I saw the shallow rise and fall of his chest.
Still alive. Still rotting. Still mine.
“Wake up,” I said.
His eyes opened slowly and he turned his head toward me. The hatred in his face used to bother me. It didn’t anymore. Hatred was the only thing keeping him alive, and we both knew it.
“You look like shit,” I said.
“And you look like a pussy-ass bitch who ain’t got the guts to finish what she started.
” His voice was a rasp now, dry and cracked from dehydration and disuse.
“It’s been months, Mehar. Fuckin’ months and you still can’t pull the trigger.
You know why? Because deep down you know you ain’t about this life.
You playing dress-up. Playing gangster. Playing tough.
But you’re still the same scared little girl who let men run her whole life. ”
I crouched down to his level and looked at him through the bars.
“The next time I come here,” I said, and my voice was quiet and steady and came from a place so deep inside me that it didn’t sound like Dame CoCo or Mehar or anyone he’d ever met, “I will be slitting your throat. That’s not a threat and it’s not a deadline you can negotiate.
It’s a fact. So if you’ve got prayers to say or a God to talk to, I’d start now. ”
His jaw tightened, but something behind his eyes shifted. A flicker of something that might have been fear, quick and gone, but I caught it. After months of defiance and threats and promises to slit MY throat, he finally believed me.
“Good,” I said. “Now drink this water. I don’t want you dying of dehydration before I get the satisfaction of doing it myself.”
I slid the bottle through the slot and walked out without looking back.
In the car, I sat with my hands on the steering wheel and thought about the two men I’d just left behind.
Rios, who knelt for me voluntarily and walked away untouched.
And Thad, who I’d broken completely and was about to end permanently.
Two extremes of the same dynamic—power and submission, control and surrender.
Neither one of them made me feel the way Quest did.
That was the difference Janelle couldn’t see. The dungeon was work. The cage was revenge. But Quest was something else entirely, something that had nothing to do with power and everything to do with the terrifying possibility that I could be loved without having to be in control of it.
I started the car and drove home. I needed to get ready for tomorrow because it was the casino’s grand opening.