24. Ivy
IVY
The first thing I wasn’t prepared for: being taken to a dressing room on my arrival, though I’m already prepared the way I was last week.
“Mr. Russo needs time to ready himself for you,” one of the other employees informed me before directing me here.
It’s simple, narrow, with a rack stuffed with various costumes.
I guess not everyone has their own collection like I do.
The mirror mounted along one wall is lined with warm bulbs that make everything look softer than it is. I don’t feel soft.
The wig is in place, and the makeup is done. The corset is laced, and the camera is pinned exactly where it was last week, angled outward at chest height. My hands are steady, because they’re always steady. It’s the rest of me that’s a different story.
I keep thinking back to this morning, no matter how I remind myself to focus.
Nick’s face when he asked me what happens after tonight.
The silence I filled with practicality because I didn’t have anything better in the moment.
Let’s get through tonight first. As if tonight is the reason I don’t have an answer, when the truth is I wouldn’t have one regardless.
I’ve never thought about the future. Not the way he means it.
The future was always the next assignment, the next identity I pulled from the cabinet and wore until it was no longer useful.
Life happened in the spaces between, but it was never the point.
The point was the mission. The mission was the structure, and the structure was the only thing holding me together.
Without it, what am I? A woman with a drawer full of passports and no idea which name is really hers.
A weapon without a hand to aim it. Nick wants to build something, and I can see it in his eyes every time he looks at me—a vision he has of a life that includes me.
Permanently. Not as a mission or an objective, but as a person who stays.
I don’t know how to stay. I’ve never stayed anywhere.
Every place I’ve ever lived was temporary by design.
Every person I’ve ever trusted has eventually revealed themselves to be something other than what they promised.
Vincenzo promised me a family and gave me a leash.
My handlers promised me purpose and gave me a kill list. Even Elena, the one person who showed me genuine kindness, was taken from me the moment Vincenzo decided she’d gotten too close.
So when a man lies beside me in the morning light and asks me to imagine a future, the first thing my mind does is search for the trap. Where’s the hook? What’s the cost? What will he take from me once I’ve given him enough to make the taking worthwhile?
I hate that I think this way. I hate it even more that I can’t stop.
Nick is not Vincenzo. I know that. He’s proven it in every way a person can prove something without words.
Through patience and presence, through his stubborn, infuriating refusal to walk away no matter how many times I’ve given him a reason to.
But knowing something and believing it are two different animals, and the distance between them is more than a decade wide.
A knock on the door pulls me back into the room. The bouncer who led me here. “He’s here. Whenever you’re ready.”
“One minute, please.”
The door closes, and I look at the mirror one last time. The woman staring back isn’t me. She’s a role, a performance. A thing someone built from the ground up to be whatever the situation required. How ironic that I’m about to use his own creation against him.
I check the camera. The tiny green light pulses once. Live.
“Feed’s up,” Nick confirms in my ear. His voice is taut but controlled. Professional. Whatever he’s feeling, he’s packed it away for now. Good. I need him sharp tonight.
I make sure the mask is in place, take one breath, and step out of the dressing room.
The corridor is dim. My heels click against the floor as I walk toward the room at the end of the hall. The same room we used last week. I push it open and step inside.
Then I stop.
Vincenzo Russo is on all fours in the center of the room.
He’s wearing nothing but a leather collar buckled snug around his throat, a leash attached to the D-ring and pooled on the floor next to him.
His clothes are folded neatly on a chair by the wall: jacket, trousers, shirt, all arranged with the same brutal precision he brings to everything. His head is bowed. He hasn’t looked up.
I can’t move for what feels like forever. This is the man who controlled every aspect of my life. The patriarch, the iron hand. A man whose voice could silence a room and whose name made powerful men careful with their words.
He’s naked and collared and waiting on his hands and knees for a woman he thinks he’s never met to tell him what to do.
“Holy. Shit,” Nick whispers.
Yes. That’s roughly the whole situation in a nutshell.
I need to get myself together. I’m supposed to be prepared for this, but nothing could have prepared me for the sight of this man wearing a collar and a leash, waiting eagerly for whatever is supposed to come next.
“Let him take the lead,” Nick advises me. “Let him show you what he wants.”
He’s right. His good sense shakes me out of the worst of my shock, and I remember in time to put on a German accent—the one I’ve used for jobs I was sent on by the man now waiting on his hands and knees.
“What is it you require this evening?” My voice is flat, full of command. Exactly the way I need to sound.
It doesn’t occur to me until he begins crawling toward the table along the wall that he doesn’t intend to talk. Of course. He’s a dog, isn’t he? He wouldn’t be able to speak.
“I cannot fucking believe this.” I can’t tell if Nick is still in shock or whether he thinks this is funny. I’m not sure how I feel about it either.
Vincenzo crawls to the table and then crawls down its length, studying the toys and tools, waiting before finally panting, like he’s excited. Dear God, he even wiggles his ass a little the way a dog would before nudging one of the toys with his nose and panting louder.
It takes a moment for me to understand what I’m looking at. A butt plug, smooth and gleaming in the low light. It’s the long, fur tail attached to the flared base that makes my heart stutter.
He wants me to put that in him. No. There was no way to prepare for this.
“You better do it,” Nick urges, and he’s still walking the thin line between concern and amusement. “Don’t forget the lube.”
I won’t forget it. “Yes, a tail. Like the dog you are.” I allow disgust to leak into my voice. It isn’t difficult. And it has nothing to do with the act I’m currently going through, opening the small bottle the club provided and pouring clear gel over the plug.
Here we go.
“Turn,” I demand, holding the toy, using my other hand to gesture for him to present his ass. I cannot believe I’m doing this. Nothing I came up with in my wildest imaginings came close to touching this. Gazing at Vincenzo’s bare ass, which he lifts, eager to be filled.
I take a deep breath, brace myself, and slowly guide the plug into his ass. His short, excited breaths get faster, like he’s enjoying it. I’m sure he is.
“Now,” I announce once he’s good and full, “I expect you wish to be walked.” His head bobs, tongue hanging out of his mouth like he’s excited. He’s given no indication of recognizing me. I need to remind myself what this is about, that I need as much embarrassing evidence as possible.
So far, so good.
I pick up the end of the leash and loop it around my fist once, twice. “Now walk,” I demand, my heels snapping against the floor while I lead him around the edges of the room. He pants happily, grunting, growling.
“He’s loving this,” Nick observes with something like wonder in his voice. “This is what gets him off. Tell him what a bad boy he is.”
“You’ve been a very bad boy,” I scold, clicking my tongue. “Bad boys don’t get treats, do they? No, they do not. Bad boys are punished.”
Vincenzo gazes up at me for the first time, which might be the worst part of all of this so far.
Looking him in the eye. This man, who sat across from me at dinner countless times, who taught me, molded me.
Who struck fear into the hearts of so many powerful men with nothing more than a glare, maybe the flaring of his nostrils.
Here he is, my bad dog, and I think he wants to be punished.
“What does my dog want? Does he want pets?” I ask as we continue our stroll around the room’s perimeter.
He pants louder, harder, even getting up on his knees.
His hands hang in front of him like a dog’s paws.
Now I see what’s hanging between his legs.
It’s almost pathetically small—really, I’m not surprised.
If there’s anything the man has always radiated, it wasn’t big dick energy.
“I don’t think he deserves it,” I decide. “Only good dogs get pets. Bad dogs get punished, don’t they?”
He whines—it’s a high-pitched sound, nasal, and I actually have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. “He is really into this,” Nick muses in my ear. “I wonder exactly how far he’s willing to go.”
I would swear he can hear Nick, because he now scrambles around on the floor, turning in circles on his hands and knees, whimpering louder now. “What is it? What do you want?” I ask. He leads me to the corner opposite the table full of toys.
At first, I don’t realize what I’m looking at. When he lifts his leg, angled toward the corner, I don’t understand until I hear the sound of piss hitting the floor. “Holy fuck,” Nick mutters. “Rub his nose in it. Humiliate him.”
Yes. I have to remember this is all for the sake of footage.
The more of this I can get, the better. “You filthy pig!” With the end of the leash, I strike his back once, twice, while he yelps and whimpers.
“How dare you? Doing your business here without permission. Because you’re a bad dog, aren’t you?
Bad, bad!” I punctuate the words with more lashes from the leash.
Then I reach out, thread my fingers through his hair, and pull his head back.
The frantic, almost ecstatic light in his eyes turns my stomach.
“You know what happens to dogs who do their business wherever they feel like it, don’t you?
” I ask, pulling his hair until he whimpers again.
“They get their noses rubbed in it. Is that what you want? Do you want me to rub your nose in that puddle you just left?” His tongue hangs out of his mouth as he pants his agreement, and the tail swings as he wags it back and forth.
Jesus Christ.
Without warning, I shove his head down into the mess he made.
“There you go. You’re disgusting. You bad, filthy boy.
” This time, he whimpers almost like he’s apologetic, and the sound turns my stomach.
Not because this is what he likes—I literally could not care less, having seen much worse from much better people than him.
No, it’s the fact that it’s coming from him, this man who does everything he can to project power and confidence, who would most definitely cut anyone out of his life if he so much as suspected they were involved in this kind of role-play.
Yet here I am, watching him enjoy it. Fucking hypocrite.
“I am very disappointed in you,” I grunt, shaking my head. “I don’t even want to look at you.”
He gets up on his knees, whining, panting.
And now, much to my horror, I find him getting hard.
He’s sniffing, nudging my knee with his nose, running his nose down the length of my calf.
It takes everything I have not to shudder and move away.
Instead, I allow every ounce of disgust to leak into my voice when I ask, “What is it you want? What do you think I’m going to let you do when you’re such a filthy, naughty boy, who relieves himself in a corner without permission? What do you think I’ll let you do?”
He shows me by getting up on his knees again, one of them on either side of my right foot until he’s basically straddling my leg.
Then he starts to hump. Breathing hard, heavy, fast. Moving his hips, grinding his dick against my leg the way a dog would.
And that’s what does it. I angle my body to make sure the camera picks up every humiliating moment until finally, I can’t take it anymore.
“No!” I shout, kicking him away with my other foot.
“No! Only good boys get to come, and you’re not a good boy.
You are very, very bad, and you are being punished for it.
I want you to think about that the next time you decide to be so filthy and naughty. You make me sick.”
And that’s the truth. He does. Not because of this, but because of who he is. Because of everything else. If anything, I’m glad this gave me the opportunity to tell him exactly how I feel about him, even if this is just a role.
I can’t look at him for another second. I drop the leash, then walk toward the door, turning to look back at him one more time to make sure he’s picked up on camera.
“I want you to think about what you’ve done,” I snap coldly, the way I’m sure he likes it.
“And maybe next time, if you’re a good boy, I’ll let you have what you want. But not tonight, you filthy beast.”
For all I know, he’ll jerk off once I’ve left the room. For all I know, that’s exactly how this was supposed to end.
Really, I can’t be bothered to find out. There’s only so much I can take, and I’ve reached my breaking point.
“You did well,” Nick tells me once I’m on the other side of the door, almost frozen in a daze.
I hope I did. I hope it was enough. Because honestly, I doubt I could ever go through that again. Maybe with anyone else, but not with a man I used to respect and fear in equal measure.