Prologue: Good Boy
ZAHRA
The most powerful man in the city was on his knees for me and I stood over him in the low amber light of his penthouse office, still dressed in my pencil skirt and heels because we hadn't gone that far yet.
Power didn't require undressing, it required the right person looking at you like you were the only solid thing in a room that was spinning.
Callum Voss was looking at me exactly like that
“Don't move,” I said and he didn't.
That was the thing about him that had undone me first, back when I still thought I could keep this clean, categorised and controlled. Not his money, not the architecture of his face or the way a room rearranged itself around him when he walked in, it was this… the way he listened to me, the way the man who boardrooms go quiet with a single look would absolutely, devastatingly become still the moment I dropped my voice and told him what to do.
Callum Voss, who terrified everyone, was terrified of nothing except disappointing me.
I walked a slow circle around him, my heels were quiet on the dark hardwood. He tracked the sound of them with his whole body. His shoulders tight, head slightly bowed, and hands resting open on his thighs exactly where I'd placed them twenty minutes ago. He hadn't moved them a centimeter and he never did.
“Look at me,” I said and he lifted his head.
God, that face. I had spent two years looking at that face across conference tables, through glass walls and over the rims of coffee cups I'd placed on his desk without him once truly seeing me.
Those green eyes had passed over me like I was furniture and nothing else but now they were dark, unguarded and fixed on me with an intensity that had nothing to do with business and everything to do with the fact that I was the only person alive who had ever seen past the fortress of his. The only person he'd ever let in.
And that look was the most dangerous thing in this room, it was even more dangerous than the man wearing it.
“You've been patient,” I said and his jaw tightened. A muscle flickered and he said nothing.
He knew better than to speak without permission and the knowing of it, the fact that he knew, did something low and warm to my centre of gravity.
I crouched down slowly in front of him, bringing myself to his level not to equalise us but to make the point more precise that I chose when to come down to him, and when to stand above, and he would wait for whichever I decided.
His breathing changed.
I reached out and took his chin in my hand, tilted his face up and he let me. He always let me and it never stopped feeling like the most extraordinary thing I had ever been given.
“Tell me what you want,” I said quietly.
He wallowed and I felt it in my palm against his jaw.
“You,” he said, his voice came out lower than usual, stripped of the boardroom precision, and stripped of every layer of Callum Voss The Untouchable and brought down to just a man. Not just a man but a man on his knees asking for the one thing in his life that was real.
“Just you, please.”
The ‘please’ was what wrecked me every time. This man did not say please to anyone, he did not ask, he acquired them, he built them and he cleared whatever stood between himself and what he needed with the cold efficiency of someone who had never once in his adult life been denied.
He said please to me.
I smoothed my thumb across his jaw and let him feel the deliberateness of it. I let him sit in the wanting for another breath, then another and another until his shoulders dropped and the last of the tension that he carried like armor in every other room on earth began to dissolve.
There he was, there was the man underneath, the man only I could ever see and want.
“Good boy,” I said softly.
Something broke open in his expression, it was not weakness but the opposite. The specific relief of a man who has been holding up the weight of his own facade for so long that being allowed to set it down is the closest thing to grace he has ever felt.
I leaned in, my lips at his ear.
“Now… strip.”
