Page 33 of Salt in the Wound
It was the way Mark looked at me when I was cuffed to his furniture.
I cleared my throat. “Hello. I’m here for the celebration.”
“I know,” she said and closed the door behind her. “Mark sent me to help you get ready. He’d do it himself, but he’s glad-handing the early guests. I’m Dinah, the club manager.”
I took her offered hand as she approached. “I’m Isolde Laurence.”
“The fiancée,” Dinah said. “I can’t say I’ve wrapped my head around this engagement yet, but anyone brave enough to let Mark collar them is someone I’m honored to meet.” She gave me a small smile. “God have mercy on your soul, and all that. Now, follow me to your dressing room. I believe Mark has already set aside everything you’ll need.”
Walking with Dinah through the club was like walking with the mayor. People stopped her, called out to her, fell in step beside her and handed her things. Though the celebration wouldn’t officially start for another hour, there were already plenty of small catastrophes brewing: the bar was out of the vintage cognac the Canadian ambassador preferred; there was some mix-up with a C-drama actor’s room and the number of submissives waiting for him there. Some of the early guests were already drinking heavily enough that they’d need to be barred from the playrooms later. A lube-warmer had broken in a playroom and no one could find a replacement.
Dinah handled it all easily, naturally, with the knowledge and authority of someone in her element, and I wondered how she’d come to work for Mark in the first place. Was this the kind of position that could even be advertised for?
“How much has Mark told you about Lyonesse?” Dinah asked, and I wondered how much he’d told her aboutus, about the real nature of our engagement.
With a glance at the easy set of her shoulders and relaxed expression, I decided to answer truthfully, if vaguely. “Not much. Most of our conversations involving kink have been about us, not the club.”
“Well, then, since you’ve only been here once before, let me give you a proper introduction to how the club works.” Dinah stopped by an elevator and pressed a button. The doors opened immediately.
“Lyonesse is not a brothel,” she said as we stepped inside and she selected our destination. The doors closed silently and we whooshed down two floors. “Legally speaking, guests don’t pay us for sex.”
“Ah,” I said. Doubtfully.
“I know, it looks like that on the face of things. But our guests are members, and as members, they are allowed to use our facilities for their needs. They’re also allowed to do anything they’d like with those facilities, including fuck inside them.”
“But you have submissives who work for the club.” The elevator doors opened, and we stepped out into a glass-walled space overlooking the open center room of the building, the same one Mark’s nook had overlooked on New Year’s Eve.
“We have Dominants too,” said Dinah. “But our members don’t pay for our employees’ use. They are here to serve in the same way the bartenders and kitchen staff serve—as part of a member’s benefits and part of the experience Lyonesse provides. No extra payment required.”
We were walking to the far end of the space now, toward a glass door leading to a hallway. The room below was empty for now, the stage at its front curtained off from the rest.
“Of course, this gets sticky from the law’s perspective. Lyonesse dodges this in two ways. Firstly, that our Dominants and submissives work for our clubonlyto meet the kink needs of members. Meaning that they are there explicitly for a scene and nothing else. Kink does not have to equal sex, and indeed, we do have several members who have a need for kink separate from sex. If a member would like sex along with a scene, this is a distinct and private negotiation between the Dominant or submissive and our member. Our Dom or sub is not paid for consensual and spontaneous sex, of course. But if they happen to receive gifts of money or valuables after…”
We reached the door and Dinah opened it with a press of her narrow silver watch to a pad next to the door.
“Would that really hold up to scrutiny?” I asked. “Especially if Lyonesse were to facilitate those private negotiations?”
“Of course not,” Dinah said crisply as she stopped in front of a door. “That’s why Mark bribes and blackmails half the district’s officials to look the other way.”
“Oh.”
“It’s only half, because the other half are already members here,” Dinah added with a wicked grin.
My belly flipped to see her smile. Did I have a secret weakness for wicked grins? Or just for beautiful Dominants in general?
“You’ll see your things are already waiting,” said Dinah, opening the door to a dressing room paneled in black wood and with a single window looking over the low DC skyline. “The glass is one-way, don’t worry. Just dress, and soon you’ll be led to the stage and your scene. You and Mark are the first on tonight, and the crowd will be easy to impress. They worship Mark, so all you have to do is be pretty and helpless and they’ll be creaming themselves.”
I walked over to the open closet door. There was a short white dress inside, thin enough to be translucent, along with a long white ribbon for my hair. There were no shoes, but there was a pair of boy shorts. My eyes lingered on them, not sure what to think. I appreciated that Mark was giving me these small nods to modesty, that the plan was to pretend as much as possible, but if I wanted him to feelsomethingfor me, then we needed to…progress.
Physically.
Unfortunately, I was also certain that Mark would not like it if I went off script and disobeyed his tacit command to wear what he wanted.
“Thank you,” I told Dinah, already taking the dress from the hanger.
“Happy to help,” she said, and then she paused with her hand on the door, her coffee-brown eyes on mine. “You are the most composed submissive I’ve ever seen—composed enough that I’m already wondering what it would take to fracture all that gorgeous control of yours. Just be you out there on the stage, and I know you’ll give us all a hell of a show.”
And then she left me to dress alone.
