Chapter 14
Magnum
The next two weeks went by way too fast, but three days before what I thought would be Storm’s last day with me for this trip, she asked if we could go out on the boat.
It was late October and chilly, but I’m nearly always up for going out on the lake. She brought beer, potato chips, and homemade dip.
“Since I’ve been here,” she started, once we were anchored and sitting across a small table from each other, “on top of the main missing person rabbit hole I’m currently lost in, I’ve covered two smaller stories in Atlanta, one in Mobile, and another in Nashville.”
I nodded. I was well aware of all of that.
She’d also met with Sloan and Ember before she’d put together a video about how to hide from law enforcement.
They’d helped her hide from the fight ring by telling her a few things the public isn’t supposed to know, and she was following through with her promise that she wouldn’t make them regret helping her.
I was beyond proud of her for that, too.
“It occurs to me,” Storm told me, “that I may not need to go to New York and DC as often as I was. There are stories all over the place. I was focused on those cities because I was close to them.”
I liked where this was going, but I took a long drink of beer instead of responding.
“I put my house on the market three days ago. I’ve hired a moving company, but the soonest they can get to me is ten days out.”
On the one hand, this was the best news possible. On the other hand, she’d just done it, without talking to me about it.
And yes, it’s her assets and her business, but it felt like something she should’ve kept me apprised of.
“I considered using my house as a bargaining chip,” she continued, “you know, like… if only maintenance was never more than twice a year, maybe I’d sell my house and move in permanently.
” She shrugged. “Maybe it would’ve worked, maybe it would’ve backfired, but either way, that isn’t where I want our power exchange to go, so I put it on the market first, and now I’m telling you. ”
I set my beer down and stared at her, speechless. I needed to say something, so I said, “Okay.”
She smiled. “I do have a few things I’d like you to agree to, but this isn’t me threatening not to move in if I don’t get my way. It’s me telling you what I think worked and didn’t work about this month.”
“I have some thoughts on that, too. Mind if I go first?”
“Not at all.”
“I feel better when you have Mason with you, especially on the nighttime stakeouts the two of you did, but you were awake all night and then came home to sleep, and I wasn’t happy about how the schedule just didn’t work for us while you were sleeping days and working nights.”
She nodded while I was composing how to tell her my solution, which I hoped was a good sign.
“The new rule is that the rigid times only work when you’re working a nine-to-five workday, or even ten-to-six workday or whatever, something close.
If you get too far from that, the schedule wraps around your sleep schedule.
As long as I’m home to do it, you get put into your evening gear and then fucked before you go to sleep, and then fucked when you wake. ”
“I want to make sure you’ll take into account how tired I am and how long I’m going to be able to sleep, but I know you will. I don’t have to ask, so…” she shrugged. “Yeah, I’m not going to argue.”
I nodded. “I once said there was no need to keep a running tally of how often the schedule gets subtracted from or added to, but I’ve changed my mind.
I’m going to note it on a spreadsheet, and we’re going to assume twelve hours per day in high protocol, twelve out.
The schedule normally gives thirteen hours in, meaning you can fudge an hour of it safely.
” I gave her a few seconds for that to sink in, and asked, “With me on the math?”
The truth is, I’ve never accommodated a woman around my schedule like this.
I like the routine to be set in stone, but that was never going to work for Storm, and if I want her in my life — which I absolutely do — then it means I have to work it around her career.
However, I also realized she needed me to keep her honest, and I hoped this would work.
She nodded. “Yeah, I was actually going to bring this up, a way to keep me from…” She blew out a breath.
“Again, I’m going to need to trust that you’ll allow for some deviations.
If I’m following a story that truly needs every waking minute of the day from me, then you may need to lift the rules until we get past it, but for normal, everyday work, it sounds like we’re on the same page. ”
“Hear me out before you ask for that, because I’m going to say that anytime you end up with a seven-hour deficit, it’ll require a meeting between us during high-protocol hours.
We’ll discuss how we got here, and we will either not do anything, or I will schedule a day in the near future where you stay in high protocol long enough to wipe out the time.
Totally my discretion, but the idea here is that if I realize this is just a busy period, then I can let it go until the story is finished, and then we can decide whether to spend a weekend playing catch-up, or whether it’s best for me to just wipe the time and start over. ”
“And by we,” she said, “you mean you.”
I considered that and said, “We’ll discuss it, and I’ll decide.”
A nod. “Okay.”
“That’s all I had. Did you have something else?”
She sat back, finished the last half of her beer in a single long drink, set it down, met my gaze, and said, “No more safeword. Ever. Not just during maintenance.”
My dick threatened to grow hard, but I ignored it. “You needed to drink half a beer before you could ask for it?”
“Not because I’m unsure of the request, but because it’s hard to say out loud.”
Her micro-expressions and scent told me that was the absolute truth, so I nodded and said, “Done, and we’ll talk about it in six months. You can’t rescind it until then. You need to live with it a while before we make possible changes.”
She seemed surprised, but then nodded. “Yeah. Okay. You’re going to test it, probably…
” she shrugged. “Such is the life of a slave. One more request, and this is probably more about the biker thing than power exchange, but I need to know exactly what your club is involved in that’s illegal.
What has to happen before you can tell me everything? ”
“I’ve been giving you plausible deniability,” I noted, and then waited for her to respond.
“If I’m going to share my life with you, that’s a cop-out.
I need to know exactly what I’m getting into, and…
again, I’ve already listed my house, and the Realtor thinks it’ll go fast. Unless you’re trafficking humans or building bombs for terrorists, I don’t think we’re going to have a dealbreaker, and I can’t imagine anyone in your club would be okay with that.
I’m banking on anything illegal you do still conforming to your morals.
Not yours individually, but all of you in the club. ”
I decided to start with the least-bad and work up. “The strippers can take men next door to the hotel. We have rooms set aside for their use.”
She blinked at me. “How much do they keep?”
“The john pays for the room by the hour, plus the fee to the dancer. We provide security, so we take twenty percent of the fee. We also handle attorney fees if necessary, from our twenty percent.”
“The dancers know this when they hire in?”
I shook my head. “No. We don’t trust just anyone with our secrets. They think the other dancers are taking breaks. They have no idea this is an option until they’ve been with us at least ninety days.”
“And if they don’t want to whore themselves out?”
“Then they don’t. If they’re a good dancer, they get along with the others, show up on time and have a good attitude, don’t create drama… we aren’t going to fire them.”
She nodded. “Okay. What else?”
“Our spa is a front for actual working girls — both the vanilla variety as well as pro-subs and pro-Dommes. We only hire women already in the profession, we don’t allow drugs of any kind, we have a retired doctor on the payroll who handles blood tests and each girl’s preferred birth control method, and everyone knows if you rough up one of our girls and you didn’t pay up front for the privilege of doing so with one of our girls who lists that as a service, we’ll do everything you did to the girl three-fold as well as just all-around beating the fuck out of you. ”
“I’m guessing you take a lot more than twenty percent of their take.”
I tilted my head. “It’s actually different for each…
class, I guess. We provide a safe space, a doctor, legal fees, and all booking, so yeah, we take forty percent for some of them, but they’re still pulling in well over 100K per year if they’re working thirty hours a week, and one of our pro-subs pulls in half a million a year and only works one or two scenes per week. ”
“That’s the most you take? Forty percent?”
“We only take thirty percent for the pro-Dommes, because they don’t need a monitor.
The pro-subs, though, we have a man sitting in a closet inside the room, and that costs us a lot more, right?
We don’t actually do that on a percentage basis.
The guy everyone wants is three hundred an hour, because that’s what he charges.
The cheapest are a hundred an hour. The pro-sub gets to set her prices.
She pays from fifty to two hundred an hour for the room, depending on whether it’s bare bones or a complete dungeon setup, and that includes our paying someone to sanitize the room and every tool used, booking, doctor, and legal fees, plus whatever each guard charges per hour.
Our pro-subs charge from $500 an hour up to $10K an hour, depending on the scene and their popularity. ”
She considered that for nearly a minute before saying, “Okay. What else?”
I shrugged. “The restaurant is on the level. So’s the construction company. The laundry services double as money-laundering tools, but nothing about what we do at those locations is illegal, it’s just the accounting part of it.”
“And?”
“We beat the shit out of people who deserve it, and don’t ask me more than that. If we hypothetically killed people, it would be off limits to talk about, and you have to understand that.”
“If you hypothetically killed people, it would only be for, like, when there are no other options though, right?”
I nodded and changed the subject. “I have a really big secret, not exactly a club thing, more a family thing, and one of the restrictions on sharing the secret has to do with being able to show this is my person for life. I may or may not be able to share it with you once you’re officially moved in, but selling your house and moving across country might be enough for me to get permission, and…
” I sighed. “It’s a big deal, okay? Something I’ve wanted to tell you for a while, but we have to do it right.
It doesn’t involve something illegal, more a genetic kind of thing. ”
“We’ve never discussed whether either of us wants kids,” she noted.
“No, we haven’t. Do you want kids?”
“Eventually, maybe, but I honestly don’t know how I’d fit them into my life. I don’t want to hire the job out, but I’m not prepared to stay home and do it right, either. I mean, I’d probably want to homeschool kids, if I had them, and…” She shrugged. “How about you?”
“It doesn’t feel important to me at this stage of my life, but I don’t know how I’ll feel a few years from now,” I told her. “I’m not opposed to them, but it isn’t like I’ll feel as if my life isn’t complete.”
But turtles have a nearly impossible chance of impregnating a human.
It happens occasionally, but not often. No way for me to tell her that, though.
There’s a geneticist who’s working on ways to pull sperm from reptile shifters, merge them with a human egg, and get viable offspring.
She’s had limited success and is working to improve the odds, but it isn’t a sure thing yet.
“If your genetic thing means kids are a problem, I mean, if we want them, we can figure it out, right? Find donor sperm or something, or maybe even adopt.”
I nodded. “Not a conversation we can have today, but yes, all of those options would be fine with me.”