My Hunger

San Francisco

“How long did you know Rebecca, Mr. Compton?”

“Asked and answered, Detective Grant,” I reply, leaning back in my steel seat in the tiny room that makes the airplane I’d left an hour before seem downright roomy.

“All right, then,” he replies. “Let’s try something new. Is it true Rebecca called you ‘Master’?”

Tension ripples down my spine. “Yes. She called me Master.”

“Having such a beautiful young girl call you Master must have been a real power rush.”

“What’s the point?”

“I’ll get to the point when I’m ready. See, I’m the Master of this conversation. I’m in control. Now, what exactly did being her Master mean to you?”

“The dynamics of a Master and submissive relationship are defined by each couple, but the basics are the same. It’s the Master’s job to protect the submissive, and put his or her pleasure and safety before all else.”

He snorts. “Clearly you failed on the protection end of things.”

The words successfully hit the open, bleeding wound that no doubt he intends them to. Anger that I would normally contain prickles easily. “Mocking her death does not become a man in your role,” I say tightly.

“I’m not mocking her death. I’m mocking you.”

“Which makes me concerned about your competence to get this job done.” As does his wrinkled shirt and suit jacket that he’s accented with bloodshot eyes and a scruffy salt-and-pepper beard that match his thick¸ rumpled hair.

He arches a brow. “How is my mocking you any indication of how I do my job?”

“A Master in any role, which I would assume a homicide detective should be of his, does not disrespect those who have put faith and trust in him based on that role.”

“I think you’ll discover, Mr. Compton, that we have more in common than either of us would like. Nothing I do is an accident, as I suspect is the case with yourself.”

I narrow my gaze on his, seeing the calculation behind his look. “Whatever head game you’re trying to play with me, I choose not to play. I came down here to assure that you deliver the justice Rebecca deserves. If you want my help, it’s freely offered, but from this point forward, through my attorney.”

“Why, Mr. Compton, would you need an attorney?”

“I don’t, but apparently you do. People who get off task need those of us who know how to get them back on task, to help them remain effective. I’ve been in town all of an hour. If there’s some point to all of this, get to it now.”

“Ava claims her confession was protecting you, the man she loves, because she found out that you and Sara McMillan killed Rebecca.”

“This again?” I ask, irritated by the illogical claim that anyone with two bits of sense could dismiss. “Aside from it being untrue, Sara never even met Rebecca, nor did she become involved with the gallery until Rebecca had resigned. So clearly that claim is impossible.”

“I’m just relaying what Ava’s defense will say.”

“Ava’s defense, or you?”

“Anything that could present as a reasonable doubt has to be dealt with. What do you know about Rebecca’s father?”

I blink at the sudden change of topic. “What does her father have to do with this?”

“Just being a Master of my job, Mr. Compton. Every possible suspect other than Ava has to be wiped off the list.”

“Rebecca didn’t know her father.” I push to my feet. “I’m done. I came back from New York early, with my mother barely out of cancer surgery, expecting this was going to be productive. So far, it hasn’t been. If you want to ask about Ava or anything actually related to the case, I’m available. For nonsense, I’m not.”

“Before you go,” he says, pulling a red journal I know is Rebecca’s from an accordion file, “I want to read you something.” He flips to a marked page. “The moment that he promised there was pleasure in pain. The moment when the blade traveled along my skin with the proof he would be true to his words. And I knew then that I had been wrong. He was not dangerous. Nor was he chocolate. He was lethal, a drug, and I feared . . .” He glances up at me and shuts the journal. “Who do you think a jury would think killed Rebecca?” He leans back in his seat. “Ava? Or one, or both, of the two men mentioned in this journal entry?” He taps the desk. “Her writing is about her Master, which you’ve already told me was you. Who’s the other man?”

I see how Rebecca’s words sound damning and could be easily twisted against me. “I want justice, and I will do everything in my power to help you see it delivered. You have my full cooperation, but I’m smart enough to have an attorney present when I do it.”

“To keep me focused.”

“As we’ve already established.” I head for the door and he follows.

“My focus, Mr. Compton, is on evidence. Confessions are given and retracted all the time. They don’t hold up. If you have any influence, as one would assume a Master would, use it to get Ava to produce Rebecca’s body.”

A body. Rebecca’s body. I feel like nails are being drilled into my skull, and though control is second nature to me, it’s all but lost to me now. It is all I can do to not pull him over the desk and shake him for fucking breathing, when Rebecca isn’t. “If I have to hear her tell me where the body is,” I say, “you’d better have glass between us or a guard nearby.”

“Understood. When?”

“I’ll get my attorney to set it up with you.”

“Today. Get him to set it up today.”

I walk to the exit and leave without looking back. But I am looking back—at every moment I’d ever spent with Rebecca.

Thirty minutes later, my attorney has promised me a call-back after he assesses the situation, and I’m pulling into the driveway of my house in the Cow Hollow area of San Francisco. Killing the engine, I sit there. My skin is twitching and my nerve endings feel like they’re standing on end. I’m drowning in emotional quicksand that spells trouble I don’t need. What I do need, I cannot have. She’s gone—and just the idea creates a burning sensation in my chest.

Fighting the urge to pound the damn steering wheel, I shove open the Jaguar’s door and step outside, walking the sidewalk leading to my porch. The cool early evening air washes over me but it’s nothing compared to the ice in my veins. My role was protector to Rebecca, and Detective Jerkoff was right. I failed.

Had I not convinced Rebecca to return to San Francisco for me, she’d be alive today. Hell, had I not convinced her to be my sub, she’d be alive today. How am I supposed to live with that? How do I ever trust myself to be anyone’s Master again? Who am I, if I’m not that person?

Opening the front door to my house, I try not to think about the first night Rebecca came to my home, the night she started on the path to being my sub. But I remember all too well the way I’d stood at the window, watching her walk the very sidewalk I just did, in a skimpy dress I’d sent her to wear. I’d opened the door and she’d gone to her knees in the entryway.

Stepping inside the foyer, I don’t bother with a light. I’m feeling out of my skin, becoming a person I’ve not known for a decade, and don’t want to know. Control is how I left that person behind. Control is how I survived hell once before. It’s the only way I’ll survive now, and I have to survive. I have to do more than survive, since I’m faced with more than the monster that is Ava. I have the monster that is my mother’s cancer.

“She’s healing,” I remind myself, and I know she’ll be home soon and probably trying to work before she should.

And what do I do when her interim manager stops by my hotel room to have me sign off on a major purchase? With nothing more than a verbal agreement that it was “just a fuck,” I got naked with a woman so far from the submissive type she’s practically the poster child for dominant women.

Dropping my jacket on a black leather chair in my bedroom, I pull off my tie and kick off my shoes, then go to the bar in the corner that I rarely use. With a glass filled with expensive scotch and the bottle in hand, I settle onto the mattress of the four-poster bed I used to share with Rebecca. It’s far more empty than it’s ever been. Setting the bottle and my cell phone on the nightstand, I kick back the warm liquid, letting it roar a path down my throat. For a man who doesn’t like the lack of control that comes with alcohol, I’m definitely liking the way it burns away a bit of the acid eroding my veins right now.

Snatching up my phone, I check my messages and see one from Crystal. I punch the Play button, remembering her use of that word in the bathroom, then hear, “I have a problem I need to discuss. You said to call and, well, I’m calling.”

A problem. I suspect I’m her problem, and the variety of ways that could be true bite far more than the booze. And so does hearing her voice, all sweet and sexy with a hint of anxiety and vulnerability in its depths. The very fact I care that I might have put it there stirs even more guilt in me, when I’m already overflowing with the damn stuff. Crystal might have had a taste of BDSM, but she’s not a submissive, and she’s inside my head and too close to my family to be an escape. I need to find my escape at the club, to trust myself as Master again, and do it the way Chris Merit used to. A different submissive every visit.

I set my phone on the nightstand by the bottle and open the drawer beneath it. Removing Rebecca’s red leather journal, the one I’d found months ago between the mattresses, I open it. Having read it cover to cover several times over, I know there’s nothing inside it that would help put Ava behind bars, and I’m not offering up more of Rebecca’s private thoughts to anyone unless I’m forced. It’s mine—like she could have been, had I let her—and somehow, I keep thinking that the answers to what I don’t understand are in these written words.

I begin to read. . . .

March 2011

My father. My father . . . I can’t say those words out loud without them sounding strange. I never knew the man. I wanted to, but my mother wasn’t having that. I know this because she confessed it to me on her deathbed, when she told me everything I needed to know about him. As I’d suspected, he didn’t know I was alive. My mother had kept her pregnancy from him. I’d been furious until she’d told me his name. Then I understood, though the anger didn’t go away. Kenneth Burgendy: the notorious crime lord deeply rooted in the mob. It was a shock to digest. He was the man I’d hungered to know, who I’d been certain was the missing link in my life. The hole I could never fill.

And then I’d met . . . him—my Master. And I started to believe he was the missing link. Only he has no desire to love me. He just . . . wants me. He has his business and his private club, where he is Master of both, as he is of me. I wonder if the coldness that allows him to be with me, but not love me, makes him like my father? But my father has hurt people, and I don’t believe my Master wants to hurt me. He thinks he’s protecting me, but while he does, I fall more in love with him. And love is as brutal as it is sweet, when you’re doing it for two people. When you’re experiencing it and living it . . . alone.

I shut the journal, tormented by how badly I’d hurt her and how blind I’d been to it. Though the club would be an escape right now, I refill my glass, not able about to trust myself to be Master of anyone right now.

Maybe Crystal’s real appeal is that she isn’t a damn submissive. She let me tap into the raw sexuality that I funnel all the shit in my life into, with none of the pressure to protect and guide that I’d had with Rebecca. I didn’t call her mine, and she didn’t call me Master. The way Rebecca had.

My lashes lower, and I try to hear Rebecca’s voice and see her face, but she’s just out of reach. It’s pure torture. The harder I try to bring her to life, the more it feels like a blade is slowly slicing my throat from one side to the other, and I can’t breathe.

My cell phone rings, jerking me from the spell of Rebecca’s words, and I see it’s Crystal’s number. Avoiding her isn’t the answer, nor is it the action of a Master. I take the call. “Ms. Smith. What can I do for you?”

“I have a problem.”

“There’s always a problem.”

“This one is named Mac Reynolds. He left a message on your mother’s voice mail, which I’m clearing for her right now.”

At the mention of Riptide’s largest and most difficult customer, I drain my glass. “And what exactly did his message say?”

“More than you want your mother to know right now. I deleted it to be sure she doesn’t hear it. But the jist was that you had one dead employee and another involved in counterfeit art, and he’s threatening to take it to the New York papers.”

“Of course he did. Have you met him?”

“Yes. Several times.”

“Then you know he enjoys being sucked up to. He just needs to know you’re the new resident ass-kisser and that you have the power to negotiate whatever he’s after.”

“He’s a power-play guy, Mark. That’s why he went to your mother. He’s going to want to talk to you.”

My cell phone beeps and I say, “I have to take this call.”

“But Mark—”

“I’m a power-play guy, and you do just fine with me. Handle him, Ms. Smith.”

I end the call and confirm my attorney is on the line, clicking over to the other line. “Talk to me, Dean.”

“What it boils down to is they have no body and no evidence, and it’s an election year,” he announces without preamble. “They need a fall guy.”

“Are you suggesting that’s me?”

“I’m suggesting it’s whoever they can get their hands on. He mentioned the club.”

I curse and he adds, “Yeah, right there with you on that one. I don’t need my membership made public.”

“How does he even know about the club?”

“Ava for one, and Rebecca’s journals for another. How damning are they?”

I glance at the one on the bed. “I’ve only read one of them and there was nothing about the club, but a lot about the lifestyle.”

“Which an attorney would demonize. I’m going to have a conflict of interest if this gets too much further along.”

“You think it will?”

“It depends on what those journals say, and how convincing they are that you and the club are problems. They could get a warrant to see the club records, in which case we need another attorney on standby, to motion to have the records kept closed. I have a guy I trust. I’ll talk to him.”

“I need to go see Ava and get her to hand over the body.”

“No fucking way. They have no case against you now, and everything will be filmed. Ava’s defense team is already using you as her reasonable doubt. If she twists things on tape it could end up in court.”

“I’m not going to let her twist things.”

“They’ll find a way if they want to—not to mention how it could drag Sara further into this.”

“Sara didn’t even know Rebecca.”

“That won’t stop them from saying she did. It’s about reasonable doubt.”

“It’s only a matter of time before the press gets hold of this. They already ran an article about my gallery being wrapped up in counterfeit, scandal, and murder. It won’t be long before they pull the club into it. If I can talk to her—”

“It’s insanity, and you aren’t crazy. Just wait. I’m meeting with the detective tomorrow. Let me feel him out in person. Maybe we can get them to sign a waiver that nothing in the conversation with Ava is admissible in court. But that works two ways. If she confesses again, it’ll be off the record.”

“Put me on the hot seat, and get everyone else but Ava out of it. I don’t care how you do it, but do it. This isn’t about me. It’s about Rebecca, and it’s about no one else getting hurt.”

There’s a moment of silence. “I’ll call you after the meeting with the detective.”

“Whatever we’re doing, I need to get back to New York for my family.”

“Understood.”

We end the call and I push to my feet. I need to clear my head and take control, and I’m not going to get it in this room. My cell phone starts ringing again and I cross to the nightstand and grab it, leaving the scotch I want no more of. When I see the caller ID that reads “Ms. Smith,” I hit the Ignore button.

And that’s a compliment she’ll never understand. I’m offering her the reins and with them, the control I never give away—except to her, it seems.