Chapter Twenty-Five
Tori had managed to retrieve her coat and get out of the club and into a taxi before she lost it and started crying.
Get ahold of yourself. She repeated the mantra silently over and over on the ride home. You were playing with fire. What did you expect to happen?
Swiping at her tears, she couldn’t stop a sob from escaping.
Her friendly doorman, Johnny, looked at her questioningly, but she ran right past him. “Evening,” she called, rushing into the elevator.
In her flat, she walked straight to her liquor cabinet, not even taking off her coat before pouring herself a double shot of gin, straight up. She usually didn’t drink hard liquor alone, but tonight she needed it. Tipping her head back, she swallowed the stinging liquid in one long draft. Once the burning subsided, she helped herself to another slightly larger serving.
The straight gin hit her almost immediately, and she lurched unsteadily in her high heels to the bathroom. She took the bottle with her. After a short struggle, her corset and the rest of her costume landed on the floor. She took a long, hot shower to rinse off the revulsion that had settled like a patina of slime on her soul.
Drying off, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and froze, staring at her reflection.
She had forgotten to give it back.
Absentmindedly, she reached up to caress the elegant slave collar with its sparkling multicolored Swarovski crystals dancing in the light. She hadn’t seen it on herself back in the club, and the sight momentarily distracted her from her wrath. Stretching her neck, she tilted her head and turned this way and that, fascinated by how the gold choker transformed her into something exotic. The woman in the mirror was someone new—a seductive, enticing plaything men would fight to claim for themselves.
She thought in wonder, I really am this alluring vision.
Delight seeped into her disillusionment. Unbidden, memories of their wildly erotic sex came flooding back, followed swiftly by a profound sense of loss.
Was all that excitement now in her past?
She tried to replace her sadness with a stronger emotion. It’s a slave collar, meant to subjugate and humiliate me.
The righteous anger, good and fortifying, strengthened her…but her conscience put up a good fight, too. It forced her to admit what she knew in her heart to be true—Ian had given her the collar for good reasons, not immoral ones. Although it irritated her to give him any credit at all, she accepted that the collar had been for her protection within the club, and for their mutual pleasure.
And oh, what pleasure it had been!
Regardless, the collar had to go.
She reached up to remove it but couldn’t undo the clasp. After fumbling for several minutes, she gave up. It must be the alcohol. Honestly, she couldn’t be that much of a loser that she couldn’t undo a simple catch.
She trudged to her bed, her whole life stretching out before her, empty and bleak. After climbing under the covers, she fell into a deep, alcohol-induced sleep, the collar still firmly fastened around her neck.