His To CONTROL

CHAPTER 1 - JAMERSON

CONTENT NOTE

This novel contains consensual b**m, coercive and controlling behaviour, breaches of consent, domestic and s****l violence, strangulation, trauma, hospitalisation, and recovery.

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The rain over Oxford Road is relentless, turning Manchester's pavements into streaks of oil, neon and reflected brake lights.

I stand beneath the narrow awning outside the student union, my collar turned up against a northern chill no expensive coat seems capable of defeating. Three weeks into my first term, I have already learned two things about Manchester: rain arrives sideways, and nobody cares who my father is.

The second should feel liberating.

Mostly, it leaves me unsure where to place myself.

At eighteen, I am six foot two and broad enough to look older than I am. My posture comes from generations of Summers men who regard slouching as evidence of moral failure. My future has been discussed at family dinners since I was old enough to understand the word legacy. Three years studying Management with Marketing. A junior position at Summers Global Advertising the Monday after graduation. A gradual climb through departments everyone will pretend I have earned without assistance.

My life is not a question.

It is a timetable.

The door opens behind me, and Joshua Remington steps outside, sheltering a cigarette in one hand. He is an inch or two shorter, black-haired, grey-eyed and already carrying himself like a man accustomed to being obeyed. His Italian mother's colouring warms features sharpened by his father's aristocratic bloodline. Lord Remington has given his son a title to inherit, a corporate-marketing empire to enter and enough confidence to make both look inevitable.

Everyone on our corridor calls him Remi.

I call him that because he informed me on our first night in halls that Joshua makes him sound like a choirboy.

Nothing about Remi suggests innocence.

"You look like you're awaiting execution, Summers," he says.

"I've spent seven hours analysing brand-equity models."

"So you would welcome execution."

"It has become a competitive option."

He laughs, and flicks ash into the rain. Remi studies Management with International Business Economics, a course selected with the same degree of paternal consultation as mine. We are both heirs pretending our degrees represent choice.

"Your problem," he says, "is that you've never done anything your family couldn't put in a Christmas newsletter."

"And your solution?"

"An education neither of our fathers would fund."

I watch him carefully. Remi has spent the last three weeks disappearing after dark and returning in the early hours, looking energised rather than exhausted. He never volunteers details. I have never asked.

Tonight, curiosity wins.

"Where?"

His smile is small and knowing. "Behind Piccadilly."

Twenty minutes later, we stop before an unmarked timber door in a canal-side alley. Damp stone and diesel fill the air. Nothing advertises what lies beyond the brick wall. Remi produces a brass token and taps twice.

Warmth greets us first.

Then beeswax, aged cedar and leather.

The basement beyond the door is quiet enough that every voice feels deliberate. People sit at a mahogany bar or gather near heavy velvet curtains. Nobody is drunk. Nobody shouts. A list of rules is displayed beside the entrance, not hidden in small print.

I read the list twice.

Remi waits without mocking me, which is how I know he considers the rules important. At university, he interrupts my revision, steals food from my shelf and treats deadlines as personal insults. Here, his restlessness disappears. He greets the door monitor by name, accepts a coloured wristband and explains that mine marks me as an observer. No one may invite me into a scene while I wear it.

"Why the distinction?" I ask.

"Because curiosity isn't consent."

It is the kind of answer Remi delivers as if everyone should already know it.

We surrender our phones at a locked desk. A staff member explains the emergency signals, the locations of the exits and the absolute prohibition on recording. I expect embarrassment. Instead, the formality steadies me. This is not a chaotic underground world waiting to swallow the naive. It has procedures more explicit than most corporate offices.

Consent.

Negotiation.

Safewords.

Aftercare.

"If anyone touches you without invitation, tell the monitor," Remi says. "Looking is permitted in the open space. Participation is not assumed."

"You've done this before."

"Enough to know the difference between theatre and truth."

He leads me through the curtain.

A woman kneels on a raised oak dais while a man speaks quietly beside her. My first instinct is to look away from the intimacy of it. My second is to study every detail.

There is no chaos. No swagger. The woman is not passive. She answers questions, adjusts her own position and smiles when the man checks the fastening at her wrist.

The scene begins.

The Dom stood behind the submissive, his broad, warm palms resting flat against her bare collarbones. He murmured low words against the curve of her neck, checking her breathing, confirming her state of mind. With meticulous precision, he unfastened the buttons of her silk blouse, folding the fabric away with reverent care. Every gesture was a study in psychological anticipation. He smoothed his hands over the swell of her breasts, warming the skin with firm, circular strokes, teasing the tight peaks between his thumbs and forefingers until her breathing broke into a ragged rhythm. Only then did he apply twin brass clamps with soft rubber tips to her hardened n*****s.

The woman did not flinch away; she arched into the pressure, letting out a low, guttural moan that echoed softly off the brickwork.

"Look at her face," Remi murmured at Jamerson's shoulder. "She isn't being broken. She is surrendering. Pain isn't destruction here, Jamerson. It is negative stimulation, calibrated to strip away the noise of the outside world. An exchange. In return for her surrender, he gives her absolute clarity, safety, and a release she could never reach on her own."

Jamerson could not tear his eyes away. He watched as the Dom drew a soft suede paddle across the backs of the woman's thighs, warming the flesh with light, rhythmic taps before delivering a single, stinging crack across her round bottom. The woman gasped, her hips shifting on the leather bench, flooded with endorphins. When the Dom leaned down, soothing the fiery sting with the broad heat of his hand before lifting her chin to capture her mouth in a deeply possessive kiss, Jamerson felt a sharp, electric hum tighten in his chest.

It was the ritual of it all, the absolute control, the negotiated boundaries, the meticulous care woven through the discipline.

The wording of my own thoughts changes after that night.

Before, I understood control as never revealing uncertainty. I have watched my father dominate rooms through silence, money and the expectation that others will rearrange themselves around him.

Here, authority looks different.

The man on the dais notices everything. A change in breathing. A tightened hand. A momentary withdrawal. His control depends on attention, not entitlement.

"What happens if she changes her mind?" I ask.

"He stops."

"Even halfway through?"

Remi looks at me as though the question disappoints him. "There is no halfway through consent. It exists now, or it doesn't."

The answer lodges somewhere deep.

We remain for another hour. Remi introduces me to the language without introducing me to anyone's private history. A dominant is not automatically male. A submissive is not weak. A contract records intention but cannot create permanent permission. Alcohol limits participation. Silence never means yes.

The distinctions appeal to the part of me trained to search for the mechanism beneath appearances.

At Summers family dinners, power hides beneath manners. Here, people name what they are doing, and refusal requires no defence.

I glance at Remi.

He notices. "What?"

"Nothing."

"You disapprove of my charm now?"

"I'm studying its ethical applications."

His laughter follows us towards the bar.

After the scene, the man releases the woman, wraps her in a blanket and sits on the floor with her. The moment after is quieter than everything that comes before it, yet it holds my attention longest. Power does not end when the restraints come off. Responsibility remains.

On the walk back to the halls, Remi talks about pressure, physiology and the private gatherings he has attended since arriving in Manchester. He likes the darker edges: endurance, pain, the places where a person's limits become visible. I am drawn to the framework surrounding them.

"You analyse everything," he says.

"Someone should."

"You'll make a terrifying Dom."

"I haven't agreed to become one."

He glances at me, rain shining in his black hair. "You decided before we left the basement."

I want to deny it.

Instead, I look back towards the hidden door.

Back in our student flat, I cannot sleep. Rain taps the window while Remi lies on the opposite sofa reading through notes for a morning seminar he has not mentioned once.

"How do you know you won't hurt someone?" I ask.

He lowers the page. "You will hurt someone eventually. Even within consent. A bruise may last longer than expected. A restraint may pinch. The point is not pretending risk doesn't exist. The point is knowing what you are doing, listening and taking responsibility when something goes wrong."

"And if they ask for something unsafe?"

"You say no."

"So the dominant has limits too."

"Of course. Surrender doesn't absolve either person of judgement."

At eighteen, the idea is almost revolutionary. This world treats responsibility as something actively renewed a decision made before, during and after every exchange.

I borrow one of Remi's books the following morning.

By the end of the week, I have filled its margins with questions.

My family has built my entire life around the power I will inherit one day.

For the first time, I understand that real control is not the freedom to take whatever I want.

It is the discipline to hold another person's trust without closing my hand around it.