9. Kane
The penthouse is quiet when I arrive home at four-thirty. I set down my briefcase and take in the open layout of my place. Kitchen into dining area into living room. No barriers, no division, the kind of space that takes confidence to inhabit.
Then I turn toward the hallway.
My footsteps echo against the hardwood. Past the guest bedroom I never use. Past the bathroom with its marble counters, bath and rainfall shower.
I stop in front of the door at the end.
The only door in this entire penthouse that stays locked.
I reach out, fingers finding the keypad beside the frame. The numbers glow soft blue under my touch. I punch in the code — six digits I’ve never written down, never shared, never forgotten.
The lock releases. Soft as a held breath.
Warm amber lights rise gradually as I step inside.
The space is exactly as I left it. Perfect and controlled.
St. Andrew’s Cross against the far wall, dark wood polished to a gleam.
I run my hand along the smooth surface. The night I finished building it, I’d stood in this exact spot and believed I was finally whole. Then Vanessa walked in.
Five years ago. This same room. This same amber light.
I had prepared everything carefully. Done it right. Done it safe. Four years together, and I had read her responses as invitation when they were courtesy. Her laughter as yes when it was only comfort. I built the room believing it was a gift.
She called it a torture room. Said I was sick. Pathological.
I catalogued and filed those words. I know how to do that.
What I couldn’t file was the morning after. She was getting ready and I came to the doorway and she saw me in the mirror. She stepped back — not in surprise. Just back. Four years in my bed, and her face went blank the way a stranger’s does.
That was the moment. Not the words.
She left. I locked the door.
For two years I tried to be someone who didn’t need this space to exist. It wasn’t sustainable.
The need to be the person someone surrenders to — to carry that weight and be worthy of it — was structural.
Something I’d been designing around my whole life without ever naming what it was. Remove it and nothing held.
Then I found Eclipse, and Dominic took one look at me and knew. Three years of learning that what I needed wasn’t wrong. That it could be the opposite of harm.
And still. Vanessa’s words — sick, pathological — I never handed those back.
I know now what she was wrong about. I know what this is and what it isn’t, what it costs and what it gives.
I’ve seen it done with care, with honesty, with someone who chooses it freely, and I know it’s one of the most intimate things two people can build together.
I also know what it looks like from the outside to someone who doesn’t understand it. I know what it cost me when it was misread by someone I thought knew me. And I’ve never been willing to find out if the people I love most would see it the same way she did.
So Sloane doesn’t know. No one outside the community does. They see Kane Sinclair, architect. Controlled. Professional. Whatever normal looks like from the outside. They don’t see the part I locked behind this door.
For years that’s been enough. Two separate lives, clean edges, no overlap. Eclipse stays Eclipse. Everything else stays everything else. The system works because the people in one world don’t exist in the other.
And then there’s Vera.
Vera, who likes to argue with me about everything and challenges me in more ways than one. Who is woven into my life in ways that have nothing to do with this room — and who is also, undeniably, exactly what this room is for.
One person. And the clean edges dissolve.
I could stop it. The rational move — end the arrangement, return to the version of this where she’s only Sloane’s best friend and I’m only her brother. Restore the separation.
The thought lasts about three seconds.
Because if I’m honest — and I have been, with Dominic, in the way you can only be honest with someone who already knows what you are — she is exactly what I told him I was looking for. Exactly that. I just didn’t expect her to have a name I already knew.
I check every piece of equipment in the room. Test restraint points on the Cross. Verify padding on the spanking bench. Ensure everything is clean and maintained.
This room is years of learning what I need. Who I am. For five years — two locked in shame, three in cautious acceptance — it’s been a sanctuary I visited alone.
Now I’m sharing it.
By six-thirty, everything is ready.
I lock the room. Shower. Change into dark jeans and a black henley.
At six forty-five, the intercom buzzes.
“Mr. Sinclair? Ms. Beckett is on her way up.”
My heart kicks.
“Thank you.”
A minute later, the elevator opens and Vera steps out in fitted jeans, ankle boots, and a soft cream sweater. She walks off it like she owns the building. But her hands give her away, fingers curled before she smooths them.
“Hi,” she says. Then reconsiders. “I mean, good evening, Sir.”
“Hi works fine.” I cross to her, take her jacket. “We’re not in a scene yet.”
“Yet.” She catches the word.
“Yet,” I confirm.
We sit down and negotiate at the kitchen table.
It’s not glamorous. It’s a yellow legal pad — hers, pulled from her bag, covered in handwritten questions — two glasses of water, and the city lights coming on outside the window. She sits across from me, legs tucked under her, pen in hand, and works through every item.
She asks about frequency, about how scenes outside Eclipse work, about what she’s allowed to expect from me between sessions. She asks about Sloane — how we manage it, what the plan is, whether I have one. I tell her the truth: not yet. I watch the answer cost her something. But she accepts it.
She asks about limits. Which are fixed, which can shift, what that process looks like.
She asks, carefully, about orgasm denial. The soft limit from her intake form.
“You’re nervous but curious,” I say, and watch her flush. “We won’t implement anything you haven’t understood and agreed to. It’s a tool, not a punishment. It builds trust in a specific direction, your body learning to wait for my signal. We’ll discuss it before it ever applies.”
She nods. Makes a note.
“And if I change my mind about something?” she asks.
“Renegotiation is always available. Nothing is locked in.”
She makes another note.
An hour. We spend an hour on this, and by the end her legal pad has two pages of notes and my handwriting alongside hers where we’ve settled on terms together. When she finally caps her pen and looks up, the line between her brows is gone.
“Okay,” she says simply.
“Okay,” I confirm.
She stands, legal pad tucked under her arm, when her eyes catch the shelf above the bar cart.
“Is that a cactus?”
She says it the way she’d say is that a grenade.
I look at it. “Yes.”
“You have a cactus.”
“I do.”
“’Kane.”’ She turns to face me fully, a slow grin spreading. “You have one plant in this entire apartment and it’s the only plant on earth that survives deliberate neglect.”
“It’s low maintenance.”
“It’s the plant equivalent of a warning sign.” She crosses to it before I can respond, leaning in, studying it like it’s evidence. “Does it have a name?”
“No.”
“Of course it doesn’t.” She straightens. “How long have you had it?”
“Six years.”
She goes briefly still. “Six years and no name.”
“It’s a cactus.”
“It’s been alive in your home for six years.” She sounds almost reproving. Then the corner of her mouth turns up. “Who gave it to you?”
“Sloane,” I say. “She said it was the only plant she trusted me not to kill.” A pause I didn’t plan. “She was right.”
Vera looks at me for a moment. Then back at the cactus.
“She knows you well,” she says.
“Better than anyone.”
The word anyone sits in the air between us with its full weight. We both let it.
Then she sets her legal pad on the bar cart. “Okay. I’m naming it.”
“You are not naming my cactus.”
“Someone has to.” She tilts her head, studying it with the focused attention she brought to the negotiation. “Gerald.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Gerald is a perfect name for a cactus.”
“It’s a perfect name for an accountant.”
“Gerald the cactus.” She says it with finality, the tone of someone closing a contract. “Six years without a name is too long. Gerald deserves better.”
I look at her. Standing in my kitchen in her cream sweater, legal pad abandoned, naming my cactus with complete seriousness. I hadn’t expected her to be this.
“Gerald,” I say. Testing it.
She beams. It’s catastrophic. “See? It works.”
“It doesn’t work.”
“Kane.” She picks up her legal pad again, chin lifting. “You just said his name. It works.”
I don’t have an answer for that.
I look at the cactus.
Gerald.
God help me.
She turns, and her gaze moves through the space: the architectural models on the shelves, the clean lines of everything, the total absence of clutter.
“It’s very you. Like, aggressively you.” She tilts her head at the drafting table in the corner. “Do you actually work from home or is that a prop to make you seem more intimidating?”
“Both.”
She snorts, and drifts further, and then she stops at the display shelf.
She leans close to the model on the end. Tilts her head and studies it from the left, then the right.
“Is that the...” She squints. “Is that the Harlow building?”
“It is.”
She goes still. Then, carefully: “The one I called—”
“A dystopian refrigerator.”
The laugh bursts out before she can stop it. She claps a hand over her mouth, shoulders shaking.
I wait.
She composes herself. Looks back at the model, and this time she actually looks — leaning in, following the lines, the way the angles catch the light.
“Okay.” Quiet. Almost to herself. “I can see what you were doing with the glass. The way it would hit in the morning.” A pause. “It’s still cold.”
“It’s a corporate headquarters.”
“Yeah.” She straightens. “But it’s intentionally cold. That’s different.” She glances at me sideways. “Don’t make it weird.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”