They weren’t in a show tonight, but Mistress Hell had said they could come any night they wanted, and so they did. The night after a man named Cal Dugan stepped out of the darkness to speak to her, they decanted themselves from a bedroom window onto a wide tree branch, dropped to the ground and escaped to Persepolis.
The other girls chattered and gossiped—who did they want to see tonight, who did they want to fuck? She stayed silent through all of it. She didn’t make it their business what she did at Persepolis, she didn’t make it her business to know theirs. And she hadn’t told them about Cal yet, even though he could bring hell raining down on their heads the moment he decided to do his job.
But she watched for him. As they crawled out of the window, as they drove, as they parked. She watched for him. She’d only gotten the barest sense of him in the moonlight, but it was enough to make it hard to shake the thought of him. He was older, forty maybe, and built like a fucking wall. Over six foot five, surely, with broad shoulders and wide swathes of muscle that his black T-shirt couldn’t hide. He could have picked her up, tossed her over his shoulder and disappeared with her into the dark, and she wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it.
It was shocking how inflaming that thought was.
His face, too—even hidden in the moonlight, there had been the stubbled edge of a proud jaw, the flash of eyes that spoke of experience and worldliness and knowledge—and all of that had been in his hard voice too. Everything about him screamed of the kinds of secrets she’d come to Persepolis to learn, only she hadn’t felt half as terrified, half as wildly aroused at the sight of canes and cuffs as she had at the sight of Cal in the dark. Cal was the kind of dangerous she’d been craving, Cal was the kind of knowledge she was so desperate to know.
And when she’d woken up and the day went as it should, teaching the classes of younger dancers, her father yelling at her but no more than usual, she knew that Cal hadn’t betrayed them.
Yet.
Persepolis was busy tonight—a high-profile Dom and sub were showing off tonight—and it was a Friday. The rich and powerful were out to play, and not for the first time, Tamsin sent up a prayer of thanks to whichever deity had seen fit to send Mistress Hell to their spring show. Whichever fit of attraction had compelled Hell to approach them and offer to introduce them to the club.
She supposed the line between kink and ballet was fairly blurry when you considered it. Pain and beauty in constant exchange. Entire lifestyles built on passion and discipline.
The girls flitted off the moment they stepped into the playroom, little wisps of sex on pointe shoes, caught by eager hands before they could drift very far. Tamsin herself, she decided to watch the show. She’d been back in a private playroom once or twice, and it’d never carried the taste of taboo she craved, not really. It all felt so…sedate. So safe. A leap with no risk of a fall. And so she was glad the other girls were happy enough here, but she didn’t need to engage in disappointing liaisons night after night to know that she wasn’t going to find what she was looking for.
“Back again?” a rough voice asked from behind her. It felt like that voice leaked into every crack in her armor; it blew in like cold, exhilarating rain.
She hadn’t gotten to this point in her ballet studies to let her posture betray her for anything, and so she knew she remained perfectly composed as she turned to face him. In the indoor light, she could see him so much better than last night, and the effect it had on her was…disturbing. He had the kind of gold-infused skin that hinted at Latinx heritage, thick black hair trimmed short, military-style. His eyes were a dark green framed by thick, black lashes, framed by eyebrows that seemed permanently fixed in a suspicious furrow. His jaw was squared and dusted with dark stubble, his cheekbones and forehead were high, his nose the only imperfection in an otherwise perfect face. A crook at the bridge, like it had been broken.
But for some reason that twisted Tamsin up even more. Cal Dugan seemed like the kind of man who would take a punch to the nose and keep fighting, like the kind of man who would refuse to see a doctor about it. Like he’d drink half a bottle of whiskey, grab a mirror, and reset the broken nose himself. So different than the meticulously groomed ballerinos she danced with. So different even than the sleek suits that frequented Persepolis. This was a man who worked and fought with his hands.
And she wanted those hands on her.
“You didn’t tell my father about last night,” she said, skipping past his question and any of the other normal greetings. “Why?”
“You,” he said simply. “I need you to tell me that you’re going to be okay if I tell him, and you haven’t yet.”
And she wasn’t going to. There was a difference between taking her father’s blows and lying about them, and the closer to freedom she got, the clearer that line became. But still, that Cal cared, even as a casual stranger, about what happened to her felt foreign, exotic and enticing and good.
Cal studied her for a minute, then took her arm and led her without asking to a chair in the back. She expected him to offer the chair to her, but instead he sat and pulled her into his lap. Within an instant, she was enfolded in muscle and warmth and a heady masculine scent, wood smoke and skin.
“What are you doing?” she asked breathlessly.
“Enough people here know what I do for a living. It’s going to raise questions if I’m here interrogating you, and neither of us are ready for that. We’ll blend in better this way.”
And they did blend in this way, just another couple getting ready for the show, anonymous in their pose of affection. But the upshot was that Tamsin couldn’t restrain her body’s reaction to Cal like this, not with so much warm, hard body pressed against hers.
The lights fell and the couple took the stage to applause, the Dom fastening his submissive wife to a St. Andrew’s cross. Which was when Cal leaned forward and whispered in Tamsin’s ear. “Now, what am I going to do with you?”
He meant about telling her father. She knew that, yet it was hard to remember with his lips at her ear and his warmth at her back. Hard to remember he didn’t mean the kinds of dangerous, dark things she wanted him to mean.
“Whatever you like,” she said, meaning that he should do his job or not—she didn’t have any expectation of changing his mind. But the moment the words left her mouth, she knew they sounded much more breathless and eager than she intended.