Page 24 of Shame

Grace is on the other side, still in her studio clothes.

She’s looking down at her phone, rage radiating off her.

My heart sinks as I stand in the doorway, waiting for her to look up, realizing that she’s not going to.

“You fucking asshole,” she hisses, her hand shaking, her face still hidden. “Why does she call you Master?”

And just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it does.

11

Grace

I can’t believeit took me a week to actually read some of the text messages I’d taken screenshots of,actuallyread them, carefully, word by word.

Something about the way Luke behaved in the garage earlier made something in my brain go…wait a second. It took hours of sculpting for the thought to surface properly, that instinct to go look again at the text messages.

And there it was, in one message. She called him master.

There’s only one reason for that, and I want fucking answers.

“Come inside,” he says, trying to touch my arm.

I shrug him off and step into the spartan bachelor loft. He’s clearly bought some furniture. A couch, a bed. No table or chair. No TV.

There’s a book on the couch and his laptop and work papers are strewn across the bed. It looks like a nicely finished dorm room.

Oh, how I wish I’d made different choices twenty years ago.

The door clicks shut behind me. I pull a letter from my pocket and hand it over. I’ve already taken pictures of it.

“I went through your stuff last week. Somehow I missed this. Maybe it fell out when you were packing.”

He opens it, then drops it, his face going ashen. Good. I hope he feels like the monster that he is.

I lift my chin. “I’ll find everything. I’m smarter than you think.”

“I think you’re the smartest person in the world,” he says dully. It doesn’t sound like a compliment.

“You claimed you wanted to fix us,” I say, my voice shaking. “While you were writing her shit like that?”

“It’s not what you think,” he says, his voice thick and hitching at the end.

I glare at him. “She called you Master.”

“It’s just a…sex word. A name. It doesn’t mean anything.”

How gullible does he think I am? “And you call her Kitten. With a capital K. Capital M. Capital K.”

“So what?”

Hysterical laughter bubbles up from deep inside my aching chest. “You’re her Dom, Luke.”

He blanches. “What?”

“You’re. Her. Kinky. Fucking. Dom.”

“How do you…”

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