Digression over. I’m sorry. I get verbose in first person, which is why I should never write it in. Let’s fix that, shall we?

Dear reader, just imagine Sheridan Stratford—an ingenue of Broadway, the sweet starlet of the small screen—sitting on an antique fainting couch in a moonlit conservatory on the roof of a Manhattan town house. Silver slip dress, strappy heels on stick-thin ankles, long pale hair in a loose knot, eyes wide and scared.

Scared but brave.

That’s my girl.

The First Session

Sheridan whispered something into her glass of wine and what she whispered The Mistress would never know. “Help me” perhaps. “What am I doing here?” maybe. Sheridan took a sip and then another before setting the glass down on the table next to the vase of white orchids. The Mistress merely waited in the shadows of the doorway and watched her for a moment, trying to read the girl’s body language. Shoulders slumped, head down, feet that never stopped moving even though she remained seated. The Mistress could glean two facts from the moves Sheridan made—one fact true and one fact terrible. The girl was terrified. True. And the girl was ashamed.

Terrible.

From Kingsley, The Mistress had learned why Sheridan had come to them. But her reasons didn’t really matter. The clients came from everywhere. They were everyone. And every last one of them told them a different reason for coming to the Underground.

My wife won’t tie me up....

My boyfriend can’t touch me right....

My mother said I was sick....

I have these dreams every night that won’t stop....

I need to be hurt or I can’t come....

I need to be punished to feel loved....

A thousand reasons that could all be boiled down, stripped bare and divided into one of two real reasons...

I’m here because I want this.

I’m here because I need this.

The Mistress was no prostitute. She never let a client touch her, never let a client inside her. Never inside her body anyway. Sometimes on rare occasions if the client was particularly beautiful or especially broken, sometime The Mistress let the client inside her heart.

Sheridan had wealth from her acting career, and wealth meant power. But it was a powerless little girl who sat under the glass roof that night. And when a tender leaf on one of the orchids dropped off the plant and landed on the floor, Sheridan stood up and walked quickly to the sink by the cutting station and poured out her glass of wine before refilling it with cold water and pouring it into the plant.

The Mistress smiled to herself as Sheridan turned wine into water so she could give a little drink to a thirsty flower she’d never met before. And that’s when Sheridan first crawled inside The Mistress’s heart.

Digging into her pocket, The Mistress found her silver lighter and brought a cigarette to her lips. She snapped open the lighter and flicked on the flame. Sheridan gasped at the sudden noise and spun around so fast she dropped her empty wineglass onto the floor, where it shattered into a thousand glinting shards.