Hard to Serve: A Hard Ink Novella Read Free

ass.”
    “Uh, it’s kind of the other way around.” Mia chuckled at her friend’s awesome ridiculousness as they hung up.
    But now she almost felt like she could do just that. Or, at least, drive some Dominant ass totally crazy with lust. Thoughts of exactly what that might involve lanced heat through her whole body.
    Within a half an hour, she was dressed and catching a cab across town, a long trench coat covering the indecency of her outfit until she got inside the club.
    “Here we are,” the cab driver called over his shoulder as he pulled to the curb.
    As she paid, Mia peered out the window. The neighborhood was heavy on old warehouses and light on actual residences. And her destination was no exception. The large brick building ran the whole length of the block. Lights illuminated a set of double doors and a sign that read, “Club Diablo.” A line formed at the dance club’s door and snaked into the dimness.
    “Thank you,” she said to the cabby as she got out.
    Giving her ticket another once-over, she approached the bouncer, but before she’d even gotten close enough to hand it to him, he spotted it and directed her inside the foyer and through a door off to one side. The door led her down a long hallway that must’ve run along the mainstream club, judging by the way the bass beat echoed like a heartbeat inside the narrow space, but then finally sent her back outdoors again into the well-lit courtyard of what appeared to be a huge, old church. Outside the arched doors of what had once been the church’s front stood another mountain of a man in an exquisitely cut black suit. He pointed her in the direction of a ramp that sloped down and around the outside of the long, rectangular nave to another set of doors and a third bouncer, again wearing a black-on-black suit.
    A shiver ran over Mia’s skin because she was here, and she was really doing this. She held out her ticket, which the bouncer scanned with a device in his hand. Then he opened the door, his voice deep and inviting as he said, “Welcome to Blasphemy. Have a good night.”
     

Chapter 2
    Kyler sat in the control room at Blasphemy, his gaze half on the monitors as he shot the shit with Isaac Marten, another of the club’s twelve Masters—experienced Dominants who possessed an ownership stake in Blasphemy and took turns running and monitoring the club. Kyler had bought his share of the business with a chunk of his own savings and the money his grandfather had left him, and now his investment paid him back in spades.
    This wasn’t one of Kyler’s nights to be on, but many of them dropped in to hang out or play outside of their scheduled shifts, so no one thought anything odd about Kyler being there on a random Wednesday. Unlike on the force, here at Blasphemy Kyler wasn’t the one who was hurt or the one on medical leave or, now, the one under investigation . Here, he was just Master Kyler, and none of the other men tiptoed around him like they were starting to do in the department. Here, the only ones who did the tiptoeing around him were the subs. As it should be. The thought almost eked a smile out of him.
    “You heading out onto the floor?” Isaac asked, turning dark eyes toward Kyler. In his day job, Isaac ran a security business—high-tech gadgets were his thing, a principle that extended in interesting and creative ways into his scenes.
    Shrugging, Kyler scrubbed his hands through his brown hair. Longer than he usually let it get. “At some point.” While he’d fulfilled most of his duty rotations as one of the Masters here, he hadn’t done any scenes since before getting shot. Early on, that’d been because he’d been in too much pain. Later, it’d been because even as he healed, his arm was too weak and had too little control to feel confident that he could adequately wield a paddle or support a woman’s weight. Now, fucking target-shooting qualifications aside, he was feeling more his usual self, his body almost back to