As she’d said, she hadn’t given Jorge power over her, a drug dealer who’d nearly beaten her to death. Her will was far beyond a mere physical thing.

She took a swallow of the whisky, put it down. “When Matt came up to the bar to refresh his drink order, he put his business card down in front of him. He was close enough I could see it, and he’d written his cell number on it in large print. He never looked at me, but he spoke. ‘Memorize it, and if you ever need a friend, call me’.”

She shook her head. “When it was all over, later, I asked him what had made him do that. He said as he watched me that night, he saw certain things in my body language, my expressions, which told him I was in trouble. I was standing on a ledge where I was willing to be free or die, which likely meant I would end up dead. He knew Jorge’s connections, knew better than to speak to me directly or give me something Jorge would find on me later. Matt has that canniness to him, you know.”

When Max nodded, confirming it, Janet’s lips twisted. “Matt said he figured if he’d read me wrong, I’d simply see him as a crazy person and forget the number. Or tell my cartel boyfriend this gringo was hitting on me, and they’d dump his body in the trash.”

She sat down on the barstool across from Max, rotated the shot glass in one hand. “My opportunity came about two months later. There was a war going on between competing cartels. I plotted out every detail, had everything ready. Late one night when Jorge was asleep on the couch, I hit him in the head with a skillet until he stopped moving. Then I took a power drill and drilled out his eyes. Used a butcher knife on the tongue. It took a heavy-duty meat cleaver to sever the head. Fortunately, his cook kept one stored in the pantry.”

She delivered the words in a flat monotone, but the air vibrated with everything behind them. Max found he had one hand clenched on his knee, the other on his forgotten drink. She lifted blank eyes to him. Those perfect nails tented over the top of her glass, spun it in circles, over and over, like a nervous tic, except all of her had gone so still.

“That’s the way the competing cartel was dressing their kills. Jorge had found some of his dealers left that way. I didn’t care if they took revenge on the other cartel for what I did, as long as they weren’t hunting me. But when I took the head, something funny was going through my mind, like this absurd knock-knock joke. ‘What comes back after you cut off its head? Absolutely fucking nothing’.”

She nodded in a decided sort of way, finished the whisky. She shook her head when Max offered to refill it. “I broke up some furniture, cut my wrist to leave blood and tore off a fingernail. I wanted it to look like I’d been kidnapped. If they couldn’t find me, they’d assume I’d been used and killed, or sold on the black market. Another huge insult to Jorge, selling his woman into white slavery.” Her lips curved grimly. “Because I was so free with him, right?”

Max remembered a night he’d slipped into a dingy gasoline restroom, washing gunpowder off his hands as he thought of two weighted bodies, shoved into the river. He hadn’t been thinking of the horror of that, but going back over all the important details. All the brass policed and bullets dug out of the corpses, no ID left on them. Yet he remembered the look in his eyes when he’d glanced up in the mirror. He’d seen that look in Janet’s face, that night in the hospital bathroom. Because of what he himself had done and experienced, he could reconcile the brutal images she was painting with the woman before him now. A human being was capable of incredible, terrible things.

“I called Matt. I never questioned that was the right thing to do. He really could have been some idiot, living dangerously, flirting with the drug dealer’s girl, but I knew it wasn’t that. He was back in Texas. He asked me if I could get to the border, and I said I could, but I didn’t have a passport, any way to get through. Jorge had locked up my passport, which probably wouldn’t have done me any good anyhow, since the picture had been before my face reconstruction. Matt told me not to worry about that, and set up the time to meet me there. I had the cash I’d taken off Jorge, but I didn’t take anything else that might connect me back to him. I slipped past the guards he kept posted on his grounds—to keep threats out—and stole a car, which I planned to ditch at the border.”

She shook her head. “When I arrived at the border, they made me leave the car and come into their office for further questions. I figured I was about to go to a Mexican jail, where I’d be tortured and killed by Jorge’s associates as retribution. Instead, Matt was waiting for me. I assume he bribed whoever needed to be bribed, because he merely thanked the guards as if they were returning an errant, mentally defective relative to him. He took my arm, and I walked with him to the American side. He walked me around to the passenger door of his car, held it open for me.”

That seemed important to her. She closed her eyes, her fingers stilling on the glass a long moment before she continued. “He’d brought his own vehicle, no driver. I remember him driving twenty miles without either of us saying a word. I looked at all the empty, flat land around us, nothing significant, but all of it U.S. soil. I looked down at my hands, and saw I still had blood under the nails, staining the cuticles.

“It wasn’t until he pulled the car off to the side of the road and put his arms around me that I realized I’d started crying. It took me a couple hours to stop trembling.” She lifted a shoulder. “Shock.”

She rose then. “I want you to go home now, Max.”

What the hell? “No.”

“Yes.” She met his gaze. “It’s not a request. I need the space. You wanted to get a sense of what’s going on between us, what it means to me. You needed some kind of reassurance that you’re different from Thor, or any of the men I’ve dominated at Progeny.”

He rose as well. “Then don’t fucking treat me like one of them.”

As soon as he said it, he could have bitten through his tongue. She’d just told him something only one other person knew. But his response wasn’t based on that. It was based on his own demons, the empty face of his mother in his mind, forever beyond his reach. There was no way in hell he could countenance leaving Janet now, not when he hadn’t been there to protect her, irrational as that kind of thinking was.

But that was obviously what she wanted. She was showing him a window in her soul, then slamming it down on his fingers, shutting him out. It fucked with his mind, twisted in his gut and became something ugly, cutting the intent connection they’d shared.

She didn’t say anything, remaining still as a statue. Her expression didn’t change, but he could feel a radical shift in the air, as if she’d physically stepped onto a whole different continent.

“Is that what you do?” he asked. “Give them that vibe that tells them they’ve fucked up, earned your displeasure? It cuts them, slices out their guts and makes them willing to do anything to make it better, right? Don’t work me, Janet. I’m not wired that way.”

“No,” she said. “You’re not. I’m not like most women you know, Max. When I let down the shields, I need you to stand at a distance for a while, so I’ll be sure you’re not going to rush over the boundaries, attack what I’m revealing.”

“I won’t. But we can’t figure out how to make the different pieces of who we are fit together if you won’t let me close enough to get a good look at them.”

“Do you usually walk into an enemy compound to check things out, or do you survey things at a distance first, moving in closer as you verify the safest approach? The shape of those pieces?”

“I don’t see you as an enemy. But maybe that’s how you see me.”

A muscle twitched in her jaw. “No. But your lack of trust, the way you pulled back earlier, that disappointed me. I do understand trust must be earned, and a lot of this is unfamiliar territory for you. You’re adjusting, but I have to adjust too. We both feel it’s worth it, because neither of us has backed off yet.”

Now she seemed to be talking to herself more than him, but then she brought her attention back to him. “I need you to trust that I mean what I say. Give me space. Go home. I’ll contact you when I’m ready.”

“Your terms, your way.”

“Yes. On that I don’t compromise. I’m sorry. If you can’t accept that, then it’s time to finish this.”

Wow, just like that. His emotional radar was screwed up here, things spiraling in a wrong direction that he didn’t really understand. He wanted to make it better if he could, but she seemed locked out at all levels, frustrating him.

“Do you have to hold on to all the control? Is it the only way you can feel anything? Can’t you let yourself be a normal person for one minute?”

“No. Being a deviant is what works for me. And until now, that hasn’t seemed to bother you.”

Okay, so the wrong tactic. When she gave him a searing look and began to pivot on her heel, he moved to stand in front of her. This time he didn’t touch her, but he held up a hand. “Damn it, just wait a second. That’s not what I meant. Yeah, being a Domme is real for you, but sometimes it’s not. I don’t want to make you mad by saying that. But earlier tonight, being a Mistress was something you embraced for your own pleasure, your own reasons. It was real. Now you’re using it as a wall, hiding that real part of you. One’s your true face, the other’s a mask. Tell me if I’m wrong, Janet. Tell me.”

Damn it, he couldn’t even touch her, hug her like he would any other woman when he acted like an ass. She obviously wouldn’t welcome that. All he could do was what she demanded. Which was what the whole Domme thing was about, wasn’t it?

Her gaze was frosty, mouth set. “I need you to go,” she said, her voice jagged glass. “Now. Don’t make me say it again.”

Everything about her body language, her eyes, rejected him. It did cut him deeply, such that he realized exactly why Thor and the others were willing to do whatever was needed to stand within the circle of her approval. Even now, he remembered the warmth of her body, her generosity in the hot tub and in her bed. But he couldn’t take back what he felt was truth. He wasn’t sure what he was seeking from her at this exact moment, but whatever it was, she wasn’t in a giving mood.