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After a few years, the casual hookups and vanilla sex did nothing for me, and I sought more extreme encounters to temporarily fill the void.

That’s when I found La Lune Noir, a BDSM club hidden inside a 19th-century gothic cathedral, accessible only by invitation, or on the arm of a VIP customer. I sought it out deliberately, surveilling the entrance for a week, tracking the comings and goings of each person until I found my way in—a hedge fund pussy who thought he was a god.

All it cost me was a blowjob, and I was in.

It rained that first night—apocalyptic, even for November. My Uber driver slid uneasy glances at me as we turned down the dead streets of Bed-Stuy, before finally letting me out at the curb. Carmack, or Carl, whatever the fuck his name was, waited for me outside the entrance. It was two degrees above freezing, and he was wearing only a thin windbreaker, drumming his hand on the steel door as if lack of insulation was a test of his manhood.

Men like him would always choose discomfort over dignity.

He finished his cigarette, stubbed it on the church stoop, and grinned at me as I made my way up the slick steps.

Inside, noise hit me like a fever—synthesizers, laughter, the wet slap of flesh on flesh somewhere in the nave, as rows of flickering candelabras led the way to the altar. I passed a nun in latex, a ribbon-necklaced sub licking whiskey from a mistress’s stiletto. Everyone glistened with sweat and bodily fluids.

I caught myself in a gold-framed mirror—eyes ringed in black, lips wet and parted. My hair was up in a high ponytail, lashes spiked with rain. I watched myself the whole way in, moving like someone waiting to be hunted.

The hedge fund bastard led me straight to the bar. He ordered me a vodka tonic and proceeded to drop the word “shadow banking” at least four times in five minutes. I smiled, laughed, and let his stories wash over me. If I tilted my head just right, I could hear the slap of a paddle and the ragged breathing of a body strung up on display four pews down.

“Here’s to vices,” he said, clinking his glass to mine.

I drank. I always did.

The first hour wasn’t sex, it was theater—all rehearsals and audience. They paraded around the stage covered in raw stripes and fresh welts that didn’t rouse any pity in me.

On the contrary, I was turned the fuck on.

At a place like this, all family ties dissolved in sweat and velvet and the smell of spilled gin. That was the first night I let someone tie my wrists. At first, the rope burned. Then, it was all I could feel. I forgot the world outside of my bruised skin, forgot about my brother’s mutilated body, my mother’s gaping mouth, and my father’s marble heart.

A girl dressed in a sheer nun’s habit with rabbit teeth and a rosary wound around her wrist, caned my thighs for an hour. In between my beatings, she pressed her tongue to my clit, and fucked me with a pink vibrator.

Every time I would get close to coming, she slapped my thighs with her cane, removed her tongue and vibrator, and left my cum dripping down my pink thighs. The cycle of being brought to the edge, only to be yanked back repeatedly, caused my vision to pixelate.

I expected it to break me.

But it never did.

After she realized I wouldn’t break, she let me come, and I bled, but I didn’t cry. I melted, and pooled, and needed more. When it was over, she kissed my raw thighs and whispered, “Forgiveness is for the weak,” before untying me.

Staggering home at four a.m., I showered until the water ran cold. I looked at my body in the mirror, counting the marks like merit badges. I could still feel the ghost of the rope, the rhythm of the cane, the wet heat of her tongue. I wondered if Luca would have recognized me now. I wondered what he’d say if he saw how I’d let myself be ruined instead of killed. I ran my finger along my hipbone, found a new ligature bruise, and pressed it until the pain bloomed.

That’s how I knew I was alive.

After that, the club became a second home. I traded my cigarettes for black-market Valium, learned to drink without losing control, and built up something close to a reputation. Most nights I was there, perched on the balcony overhanging the nave, an unlit cigarette between my teeth, watching people play. Sometimes I would let myself be chosen, and sometimes I would choose. No one ever touched me the same way twice. I liked that. I liked feeling new each time.

Madame Isadora ran La Lune Noire, and after watching my interactions with her staff, she offered me a job as a submissive and paired me with Zephyr—the house dom. With corded arms, Marine tattoos, and a shaved scalp, the regulars called him “The Ice Man” because his hands never shook, not even when he had a girl screaming and babbling for mercy beneath the violet spotlights.

He wasn’t my type, not really. But he was good at what he did, and he listened. Most doms cared about the performance, the show, the public gasp. Zephyr stalked the private win.

I respected that.

The first time we worked together, he made me crawl between the pews on my knees, a collar around my neck, as he beat cadence into my thighs with a stick. He didn’t lecture, degrade, or pretend I was less than him. His silence had that Frank quality to it—pure brute force and unexpected mercy.

Afterwards, he held me in the club’s private aftercare room. I was curled up into him, still vibrating and stinging from the session, while he pulled my hair off my sweat-drenched neck. I fell asleep against him, content for the first time in years. When I woke, he’d covered me with his jacket and disappeared, because my exhaustion was a gift he’d been waiting to accept.

That became our routine. Session, aftercare, vanish. We never spoke outside La Lune Noir, because we didn’t have to. He knew what I needed, and I never had to explain the difference between pain and suffering.

On slow nights, he’d sit with me in the loft and drink tea—never alcohol, Zephyr was picky about clarity—while we watched the city crumple and glitter through stained glass.

Sometimes, I drifted into him, cheek against the cold tattooed band of his arm, and I’d let myself be almost held. Nothing ever happened between us, not that way. He was the only person who hadn’t tried to fuck me, even though he’d had his hands all over me.