Page 54 of Dominion’s Collar

And the private room held what passed between us where nobody could see it. The main floor offers no such mercy.

"Savannah or red stops everything." His mouth is close to my ear, his breath warm against the skin above the collar. "Yellow slows it down. Green keeps it going. Tell me you understand."

"I understand."

"Color?"

"Green."

Nothing happens.

He's behind me. I can't see him. I can hear leather shifting, the quiet sound of him adjusting his grip on the flogger handle, but he doesn't touch me. Somewhere in the room, a glass clinks against a tabletop. A whispered negotiation goes silent. The air on my bare back feels like it has weight.

I wait. My skin waits.

He steps back. The distance opens between us and the air feels different without him close. The falls drag across my shoulders without warning, slow, leather tips trailing over bare skin like fingertips. My skin quivers under the contact. Every nerve ending wakes up and pays attention. He draws the falls down my spine, then lifts them away.

The absence sharpens the sensation rather than dulling it. Every place the leather touched is still humming, waiting for more.

The first strike lands between my shoulder blades. Light. A warm-up pass, the falls spreading across my skin like a broad, firm hand. The leather is soft, conditioned. The sound it makes against bare skin is a dull thud that I feel in my sternum. It doesn't hurt. It feels like a deep-tissue massage delivered through leather, and the warmth it leaves behind radiates outward like stepping into sunlight.

The second pass crosses the first, lower, across the middle of my back. Harder. The warmth blooms outward from the contact, sinking into muscle. My fingers tighten on the handles. The tension I've been holding between my shoulder blades for days starts to loosen under the impact, and the relief of it is startling.

He finds a rhythm. Each pass builds on the last, and my body starts meeting the flogger instead of bracing against it. Shoulders. Upper back. The sides of my rib cage where the sensation sharpens and my breathing catches.

The rhythm is hypnotic. My thoughts start to thin. The kitchen table, the red pen, the pattern with Gaudet's name across it—they're receding with every strike, replaced by something simpler. Impact. Warmth. The leather returning to my skin.

I can feel the room behind me. Eyes on my bare skin. The hush that falls when a scene is live. The flogger is loud enough for the nearest observers to hear each strike, and I'm not quiet either.

The falls land heavier. The warmth has become heat, spreading across my entire back in overlapping waves. My skin is alive with it, tingling in the pause between strikes, craving the next one before it arrives.

Something is shifting in my body. The pain—and it is pain now, sharper than the warm-up—is converting to something else. The heat spreads deeper than muscle. It pools low in my belly and between my thighs, and I understand, suddenly and physically, why people do this. The flogger isn't punishment. It's a key.

"Color." His voice behind me.

"Green." The word comes out thick.

He pauses. Fingertips trace down my spine, featherlight after the weight of the falls. The contrast buckles my knees. Then the flogger returns.

The next pass wraps lower, catching the curve where my buttocks meet my thighs. Sharper. Hotter. The heat rolls through my hips and settles between my thighs with a heaviness I can't ignore.

My thighs press together. My face burns. The flogger is doing this to me in front of people.

Sebastien pauses. His palm flattens between my shoulder blades. The contact on sensitized skin is electric—gentle after the flogger's rhythm, and my spine arches into him because gentle is almost harder to take. My body doesn't know what to do with tender after impact.

"Breathe."

The air reaches me on the third try. His hand lifts. The flogger resumes, and I sink into it. That's the only word. Sink. My body has learned the cadence and it's no longer bracing. It's opening. The flogger is dissolving every knot, every wall, every layer of control I built between Claire's death and this moment.

The hits come harder. Sweat runs between my shoulder blades. I can feel how wet I am every time my hips shift, the thong clinging to swollen flesh, useless. Anyone behind me can see.

The falls graze the outside of my upper thigh, trailing across the curve above the thong. My grip wrenches on the handles. The sound that rips out of me is guttural, raw, pulled from somewhere I didn't know was open.

The room hears it. I hear the room hear it.

Something cracks. Not my skin. Not the leather. The construct.

I walked into this building with a cover story and a dead sister's name. I'm on a St. Andrew's Cross while a man I'm lying to works my body like he owns the map of it.