She heard the tenor of her voice changing and she coughed to clear her throat. She didn’t care about her clients. Not any of them. They were paychecks and nothing more.

“You do care about them.”

“You’re a Backstreet Boy. What do you know?”

He laughed then and she had to laugh, too.

“I think you and I are both full of shit,” she said.

“We are. You respect your clients.” It wasn’t a question. She answered it anyway.

“I do respect them. It’s the scariest thing you can do—walk into a room where you know you’re going to meet your real self. Would you do that? If there was a mirror out there and you knew if you looked into it, you’d see the real you...would you look?”

“I think I’d cover that mirror with a sheet and then smash it with a sledgehammer.”

“Exactly. Me, too. But these guys, they look. So yes, I respect them, I care about them and I give them what they want and what they need. Then after an hour or two, I send them back out into the world that thinks they’re sick perverts. In my dungeon I can protect them, I can make them feel safe and even normal. But out there—” she pointed at the world outside the Rolls-Royce’s window “—they’re on their own.”

“You can’t save everybody.”

“I can’t save anybody.” She gave him a half-hearted smile. “But it doesn’t matter. That’s not what they pay me for.”

The Rolls brought them to a grey door in a grey parking garage. Dante didn’t seem impressed. That was okay. No one was ever impressed by The 8th Circle until they were inside it.

“This is it?” he asked as the driver opened the door for them.

“This is it,” she said, pulling her key ring out and letting him into the front hallway. “But don’t be misled. The 8th Circle is like the ugly chick you take home from the bar at last call because you struck out with everyone else. Then you get her home, drop your pants and discover she gives the world’s best blow jobs.”

“I like her already.”

“All I’m saying is don’t judge the joint by appearances. Oh, watch out,” she said, grabbing his arm to steer him from a stain on the floor. “You almost stepped in cum.”

He started to look back over his shoulder but no one really needed to see that. With her hand on his arm, she led him down the dimly lit hallway to a door inside the coat-check booth.

“This is the shortcut to the dungeons,” she explained as they took a narrow staircase down. “Otherwise we’d have to take the elevator to the main club floor. Big crowd tonight. Lots of people playing. You’d definitely get recognized.”

“Glad we skipped that part then. I’m trying to be a little anonymous here.”

“Hence the guyliner, the sleeveless shirt showing off all your tattoos, the professionally messed-up hair and the boots that probably cost more than my mortgage payment?”