“Votre Maîtresse,” she said, completing the conjugation. The Mistress. His Mistress. Your Mistress.
“Oui,” he said. “Ma Maîtresse.”
My Mistress.
“Mistress Nora,” she said, rolling the name around her mouth and loving the way it tasted—sweet and spiked like Christmas punch.
“What’s my name?” Nora asked.
“Mistress Nora.”
“Who am I?
“Mistress Nora.”
“Who will be Queen of the Underground?”
Kingsley smiled. “Mistress Nora.”
“Fuck yes, I will,” Nora said, beaming.
Nora.
That was her name.
Not Elle like her friends called her.
Not Ellie like her mother called her.
Not Eleanor, which Søren called her in public.
Not even Little One, which he called her in private.
And not Nor because that wasn’t quite right.
Nora.
Mistress Nora.
“Mistress Fucking Nora,” she said aloud.
“Well, Mistress Fucking Nora,” Kingsley said, “if you’re going to be queen, you’ll need a throne room. I’ll start working on your dungeon tomorrow.”
“Finally.”
“Go, get some rest. We’ll start fresh tomorrow.”
“Do I get to play with the whip?”
“You can’t even flog a towel off the wall. Now go to bed. There’s a naughty Haitian submissive in my bed who will be wondering where my cock has gone to. Sleep well.”
“I plan to.” She stood up. When she’d sat down she’d still been Elle. When she stood up she was Nora. Mistress Nora.
She headed to Kingsley’s office door.
“You really topped Griffin?” he asked.
“I did. Like a boss,” she said, laughing. “But don’t be too impressed. Like I said, he’s a puppy.”
“You were gone for a year. So was I. Tessa told me that while we were gone, Griffin became one of the most sought-after doms in the club. He’s brutal when he wants to be. When we were gone, he wanted to be. Tessa had bruises for two weeks after a session with him—inside and out. He’s made grown men bleed, and he’s not even a sadist. He says he does it for ‘shits and giggles.’ If Griffin seems like a puppy to you, it’s because you’re a tiger.”
Nora narrowed her eyes at him and raised her hand in a claw. “Rawr.”
Kingsley laughed. “Go to bed.”
“Yes, Master.”
“Goodnight, Mistress.”
“Mistress... I could get used to that.”
Truth was, she was already used to it.
She walked out of his office intending to go straight to her bedroom. She’d take a long bath, sleep for twelve hours, eat all the food for breakfast...
But she didn’t make it to her bedroom. She stopped at Kingsley’s playroom first. Inside she turned on the light and walked around gazing at the array of BDSM toys hanging on the wall. He had ten floggers of various sizes and materials hanging on evenly spaced hooks—red floggers, blue floggers, black, brown, elk-hide, cowhide, deer-hide, vinyl and vicious rubber floggers. He had canes, too, over a dozen of them. Tiny little white ones that burned like a bee sting on sensitive skin. Large rattan canes that could put a full-grown man in the hospital if wielded with too much force.
When she came to the crops, she smiled. Oh, yes, these were her favorite. Something about a riding crop. The feel of it, the balance, the elegance. Riding crops were designed for humans to use on horses, for striking thick skin and driving a ton of pure muscle. Perhaps that’s why she loved the crop so much. Kingsley had told her a dominatrix would never be physically stronger than the men she topped. It wasn’t about physical strength. It was about control, about taking command over a beast bigger and stronger but with a will that could be bent, a drive that could be directed, power that could be restrained, channeled, dominated.
Nora reached out and took a particular riding crop off a brass hook. It was red, bloodred, and about two feet long. A shorter crop had less give to it. It hurt more than one with more swish in its swing. She knew this instinctively, not from her few weeks as a dominant, but her years as a submissive. She’d long been on the receiving end of a riding crop. How good and right it felt to wield it by the handle.
She spun it in her hand like a baton. She hadn’t twirled a baton since she was a little girl pretending to be a majorette, but it all came back to her. Pure muscle memory. It danced lightly over her fingers as she turned it. Testing out the old skills she walked the perimeter of the room, twirling it in her hand as she walked. A few times she almost lost it, but she caught it and soon the rhythm was hers again.
Her own dungeon. She would have a room like this soon enough. All the toys she could ever want. A dream come true. A dark and decadent dream. A secret dream like playing Daddy’s girl with Søren. She’d had the dream of being a domme all her life. She remembered sexual fantasies from long before she’d met Søren. When she was fourteen, she’d snuck into an R-rated movie and saw her first sex scene with a woman on top. That fantasy had given her some of her earliest orgasms.
Wasn’t it strange that Søren had never picked up on those domination fantasies of hers? He could read her so well that he could sense from her fascination with the couple at the club that she had a Daddy’s-girl fantasy. Why hadn’t he known she’d had this side to her? He was a smart man, a brilliant man, an insightful man. There’s no reason he shouldn’t have known. Kingsley had known.
“Oh, you son of a bitch,” she said out loud. “You knew.”
“Who knew?” Kingsley asked from the doorway.
She turned and faced him.
“I came for a flogger,” he said. “I thought you were going to bed. Tell me...who knew?”
“He did. He knew everything about me. The more private it was, the more personal, the more humiliating... He knew it. He could read me like a book. He knew I wanted to be a domme. He had to know.”
“Of course he knew. I told him when you were sixteen that you were a dominant or a switch.”
“Why didn’t he tell me?”
“Did he have to?”
“It would have been nice if we could have talked about it,” she said.
Kingsley gave a little scoffing laugh as he plucked a large black flogger off the wall.
“If you’re looking for someone ‘nice’ you picked the wrong priest.”
“I can’t believe he knew all this time, and he never said a word.”
“I can,” Kingsley said. “He loved you. He didn’t want to lose you. He’s a dominant and a sadist. If you were a dominant, too, he couldn’t switch for you. He knew he’d lose you if you let your domme side out to play. I suppose we proved him right.”
“That’s why you didn’t want me to tell him I topped you.”
Kingsley nodded.
“I didn’t leave him because I have a domme side,” she said. “I left him because he tried to leave the church for me, and because he ordered me to marry