Top of the Chain

An MM Contemporary Romance — by Jace Wilder

Available at all major retailers

Book Details

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno (5/5)
Word Count: ~142,000
Length: 33 chapters + epilogue
POV: Dual (Dominic & Mason)
Distribution: Wide — All Major Retailers
HEA: Yes — absolutely

Tropes

Boss/Employee · Size Difference · Praise Kink · Power Exchange · Rivals to Lovers · Hurt/Comfort · Workplace Romance · Touch Starved · Slow Burn · Control/Surrender · D/s Dynamic · He Falls First · Coming Out

He walked through the door at 5:58. Dominic had been waiting fifteen years.

Dominic Varga owns Apex Athletic. He built it himself. Every plate, every photograph, every careful piece of brand image — his. He has run it for six years on his own terms, and he has not, in those six years, needed anything from anybody. He does not, by any measure, have a praise kink he hasn’t named to himself yet.

Then Mason Hale walks through his door at five fifty-eight on a Monday morning — six-foot-four, two-sixty, scapegoated out of Boston three years ago, hired by Dominic’s investor on an unbreakable contract Dominic was not asked about — and the careful arrangement Dominic has made of his own life starts coming apart at the corners.

It starts on the floor with a bar Dominic shouldn’t be lifting. It ends — if it ends — at the top of a chain Dominic spent fifteen years building so he wouldn’t need anyone to hold him up. Mason holds him anyway. Slow. Patient. With a hand spread flat on the center of his chest, and the kind of voice that does not, in fifteen years, raise.

An MM contemporary slow-burn rivalry-to-power-exchange about gym ownership, public-image control, the cost of being the man at the top of the chain, and what it takes for a man like Dominic Varga to learn to be taken care of. Dual POV. Heat 5/5. Full HEA, two bands at the base of two ring fingers, and the morning of October first marked, on the inside of the metal, where nobody but them will ever see it.

You’ll love this if you enjoy:

Slow, devastating power-exchange that earns every inch of the surrender
Praise kink written as actual emotional intimacy, not just dirty talk
Size-difference dynamics where the bigger man is the patient one
Workplace rivalry that turns into deep, careful, possessive partnership
Hurt/comfort with a hero who has been wronged and a hero who refuses to look away
Found family, sister-in-law support systems, and rebuilt brother relationships
Long, slow on-page sex written with full graphic detail and zero hedging
Dual POV where both men know they’re it — and one of them admits it before the other
An ending that lands at a lake with forty-three people watching

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🔥 Read the Bonus Chapter

Content Warnings

Explicit on-page sex (graphic, detailed, frequent). Power-exchange and praise kink dynamics. Workplace power dynamics that resolve clean. Brief discussions of past professional scapegoating, false accusations, and online harassment. Brief on-page family rejection (parents) with eventual reconciliation. References to a deceased parent (Dominic). Dog in non-peril (Whitman, gold star pup, perfectly fine throughout). All sex is between consenting adults, on the page, with full enthusiastic consent at every step. HEA guaranteed.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.

Chapter One

Dominic

I owned Apex Athletic in name from the day I signed the lease six years ago, and I owned it in the bones of my body for ninety seconds every morning between four and four-oh-one, when the lights came on in sequence — east wall, west wall, ceiling tracks — and the music hadn’t started yet, and the building was a held breath waiting for me to tell it what to do.

I came in through the side door because the front was for clients. I set my keys in the small ceramic dish on the reception counter, the same dish my sister had given me the day we’d opened — for whatever you forget, she’d said, which had turned out to mean, in practice, for the keys you will misplace once a week for the rest of your life. I put my phone face-down beside the dish. I did not look at the screen.

I walked the floor.

This was the part I didn’t tell anyone about, because telling people about it would have made it sound like a ritual, and I was thirty-four years old and I did not have rituals. I had routines. I had systems. Rituals were what people did when they couldn’t make themselves do the thing on its own, and I had never, in my life, needed to be tricked into doing the thing.

I walked the floor.

Twelve thousand square feet of polished concrete and powder-coated black steel and exposed brick the original architects had been smart enough to keep. The east wall was glass, floor to ceiling, facing the river. In an hour and a half the sun would come up over the water and turn the whole space gold for about twenty minutes, and the photographs I’d taken of that — of the empty floor in that twenty minutes — were the photographs I’d built the brand on. People paid four hundred a month for the chance to walk into a room I had already photographed.

I checked the rack on the south wall. Plates re-stacked, smallest on top, largest at the bottom, the way I’d had them stacked since the first day. I checked the dumbbells. The cleaners had put two of them back out of order — the forty before the thirty-five — and I moved them and felt the small, animal satisfaction of the world being correct again.

I went to the coffee machine.

The coffee machine was Italian, and I had imported it, and Karina had laughed at me for two weeks. You imported a coffee machine, Dom. From Italy. For your gym. I’d told her it was for the staff. She’d told me I didn’t have staff yet. I’d told her I would. She’d told me to come over for dinner.

I made an espresso. I drank it standing at the bar I’d designed myself, and I thought about the day.

It was Thursday. Thursday meant a six-thirty with Marcus — defense attorney, second divorce, hated his cardio days but did them — and a seven-forty-five with Priscilla, the morning anchor, on camera at nine, very specific about not being sweaty when she left. After that I had the floor until eleven, and at eleven Theo was coming in, which meant I had to be on. I always had to be on for Theo. Theo had one-point-two million people watching his feed every day, and a meaningful number of them were Apex members, and Theo knew it.

Then a two o’clock with Lev.

I almost set the espresso down too hard.

I hadn’t meant to think about Lev yet. Lev was the part of the day I was saving for after the floor work, after the calls, after I’d put on the version of myself that handled investors. Lev was — well. Lev was Lev. Lev had given me three hundred thousand dollars when I was twenty-eight and broke and burning to build something, and he had not asked for anything since except quarterly financials and the occasional dinner where he asked me what I was reading and corrected my pronunciation of the wines.

He was a good investor.

He was a better mentor, when he wanted to be, and a worse one, when he didn’t.

And he had emailed me at one in the morning, the alert for which I had seen on my phone face-down on the bedside table, and which I had forced myself not to read until I was in the building.

I picked up the phone.

I read the email.

I read it again.

> Dominic — > > I’ve taken the liberty of bringing on a new strength coach for Apex. Effective Monday. Mason Hale. Excellent reputation, recently free of his Boston commitments. I think you’ll find him valuable. Contract attached — standard one-year, with the buy-out clause we discussed in ‘21. > > Looking forward to dinner. Bring an appetite. > > — L.

I read it a third time.

The third time, I noticed that my hand was tight enough on the phone that the metal edge had pressed a thin red line into the side of my thumb.

I put the phone down. Carefully.

I made another espresso.

I drank it standing in the same place, looking at the same windows, with the same view of the river going from black to charcoal to the faintest dirty pre-dawn gray. The lights were the same lights. The music was on now — my morning playlist, low, the way I liked it before staff came in. The world was exactly the same world it had been ninety seconds ago.

Lev had hired a trainer for my gym. Without asking me. With a contract.

There was a clause in the partnership agreement — the one his lawyer had drafted, the one I had signed when I was twenty-eight and frantic and grateful — that gave Lev limited operational input on personnel decisions. Limited. Operational. Input. Words he had used, in 2020, when I’d asked him at dinner what they meant, with the easy hand-wave of a man promising never to use them.

He had used them.

I picked up the phone again. Opened the contract.

Mason Hale. Thirty-one years old. Six-foot-four. Two hundred sixty pounds. Bachelor’s in kinesiology from Penn State. Certified through the NSCA, two specialty certs in mobility and powerlifting programming. Five years at Cohen Strength in Boston. Termination listed as mutual, January.

Mutual.

January was eight months ago.

I scrolled through the contract. One-year. Standard clauses, except they weren’t, because Lev’s lawyer didn’t draft standard. The buy-out clause was the one I’d half-listened to at the dinner in 2021 when Lev had asked me, off-handedly, if I’d be open to including a placeholder for emergency staffing decisions, just in case I throw something good your way someday and you’re being stubborn. I had laughed. I had said sure. I had signed something a month later that I had not, in retrospect, read carefully enough.

Breaking the clause required me to buy out Lev’s interest in Apex.

I did not have the money to buy out Lev’s interest in Apex.

I sat down on the bench at the bar. Slowly.

Mason Hale started Monday.

I had four days.

I did not call Lev.

Calling Lev at four-fifteen in the morning to yell about a hiring decision he had made in a perfectly legal way, using a clause I had personally signed, would not get the decision unmade. It would get me a long, patient, faintly disappointed silence on the other end of the line, and then a dinner reservation I would have to honor, and then a glass of wine I did not want, and then an exquisitely calm explanation of why he had done what he had done. I knew this because I had tried, twice in six years, to push back on something Lev wanted, and I had lost both times before I’d finished the sentence.

I did not call Wren either, because Wren did not handle me well at four-fifteen in the morning, and because Wren would have opinions I did not want to hear yet, and because Wren had a perfect, inerrant instinct for the moment in any of my crises when I was actually open to advice, and that moment had not arrived.

I opened a new tab on my phone.

I searched the name.

Mason Hale Cohen Strength.

The first thing that came up was a video.

It was three years old, posted to the Cohen Strength YouTube channel, and the thumbnail was a man in a black t-shirt and gray shorts under a loaded squat bar. I tapped it.

The video was four minutes long. The man in the t-shirt was coaching a younger athlete through a program review, talking him through the previous block, the percentages he’d hit, the things he wanted to clean up before they started the next phase. His voice was low and steady and absolutely without performance. He didn’t look at the camera. He looked at his client. He used the word we the entire time.

He was enormous.

I had known he was enormous from the contract — six-four, two-sixty, those were not numbers you could misread — but the contract had not communicated the actual fact of him. He filled the frame. His shoulders were the width of two of mine. His thighs in the gray shorts were the size of my torso. His forearms, when he gestured with one hand to ask the client a question, were ropy with vein, scarred along the inner edge in the way men’s forearms get when they’ve spent twenty years dragging things heavier than them across surfaces that didn’t want to let them go.

He was — and I understood this in a way I did not have the bandwidth to examine — real in a way the men I hired were not real. The men I hired were aesthetic. They had been built carefully, on clean floors, by patient programming and good lighting. This man had been built on a job site somewhere, by carrying something he was not finished carrying.

He smiled, once, at something the client said. The smile was small and quick and went away immediately, and it changed his face in a way I did not have time for.

I closed the video.

I closed the tab.

I closed the phone.

I sat for a long minute on the bench at the bar, in the gold-going-pewter light of an empty gym I had built from a credit card and a borrowed three hundred grand, listening to the music I had chosen and looking at the photographs of myself on the walls, and I told myself, in the careful, measured, dispassionate voice I used on myself when I needed to be persuaded of things, that I was a professional adult man who had managed bigger problems than a trainer.

Then I stood up.

I made another espresso.

I drank it.

By five-thirty I had answered Lev with three lines: Got it. I’ll have everything ready Monday. See you at two. I did not say your trainer. I did not say thank you. I did not say we will discuss this at dinner. The sentences were so clean I could almost hear Lev reading them, and I could hear him not being deceived by them, and I sent it anyway.

By five-forty-five I had the welcome packet open on my laptop and a blinking cursor where the new hire’s name went. I typed Mason Hale into it and then sat looking at it for a length of time I did not enjoy.

The packet was twenty-three pages long. Most of it was the same for every hire — onboarding, payroll, code of conduct, the dress code I had written myself and was, I had been told once by a former trainer on his way out the door, a little aggressive, Dom — but the personalized sections asked me to imagine the new hire in the building. To think about which of the existing trainers would orient him. Which clients I’d want him to inherit. Where his locker should be.

I sat at my desk, and I tried to imagine him on my floor.

I couldn’t.

I could imagine the floor. I could close my eyes and walk it from the front desk to the back stretch room without missing a step. I could see Eli at reception with his stupid cheerful smile. I could see Wren behind the glass of her office, on her second coffee, headphones on, doing the schedule. I could see myself on the floor with Marcus or Priscilla, demonstrating something, taking a video for the gym’s account, putting on the face. The face was the easy part. I’d been practicing it for fifteen years.

But when I tried to put a six-foot-four man with scarred forearms and a Penn State kinesiology degree and a smile that went away too quickly into the picture, the picture refused to take him. The picture I’d built was scaled to me. To my proportions, my aesthetic, my photographs, my size. He didn’t fit. He was wrong for it. He was — I was not, I told myself even as the word arrived, threatening to it.

He was Monday.

I closed the laptop.

I went out onto the floor.

The lights were full now. The music was up. The first staff person — Eli, my morning reception, twenty-three, terminally cheerful, absolutely incapable of being intimidated by me, which was the only reason I’d hired him — would arrive in five minutes. The first client was at six-thirty. I had a day to run.

I walked the floor. Plates correct. Dumbbells correct. Glass clean.

I stopped at the wall by the front desk. Three framed photographs there — the three I’d put up first when we’d opened, the three Karina had hung herself with a level and a small hammer because she’d insisted I’d hang them crooked. The center one was the river-window shot. Gold light, empty floor, taken at six-twenty on a Tuesday in October the first fall we were open. I had taken it. I had set up the tripod. I had cleared the floor myself, three times, of any object that wasn’t supposed to be there.

I looked at it for a while.

I had built this room. I had bled into it — financially, physically, in every way a man could bleed without losing anything anyone else could see — for six years. Every piece of equipment in it had been chosen by me. Every photograph on the walls was mine. The lighting was calibrated to a number I had set with an electrician on a Saturday at midnight. The branded gear behind the desk had been through four redesigns because the third one had not, in my opinion, photographed correctly. The reason people walked in here and felt the way they felt was because I had decided they should feel that way, and I had made every decision in service of that feeling, and that was the gym.

The gym was my decision-making. Top to bottom. Wall to wall.

And on Monday a man Lev had decided on without asking me was going to walk into it.

I felt the tic start at the corner of my jaw. I made it stop. I cracked my neck, once, to the left, the way I had been doing since I was nineteen and had figured out it took the edge off being looked at.

The front door opened.

Eli came in with his coffee and his earbuds and his bright, indecent twenty-three-year-old’s smile, and he saw me standing at the wall and waved at me with both hands like I’d been gone for a week instead of standing exactly where he’d left me yesterday, and I gave him the version of my face that he’d come to expect, and I went to my office.

I closed the door.

I sat down.

I opened the laptop again.

I typed Mason Hale into the search bar one more time, on the desktop this time — bigger screen, better speakers, the office door closed and the music from the floor reduced to a low pulse through the glass — and the same video came up.

I watched it again.

I watched it twice.

The second time, I was watching for the smile. I caught it at two minutes and eleven seconds. I paused it. The frame was bad. He was looking down at the client, the lighting was poor, the smile was small and crooked and gone almost as soon as it arrived. It was not, by any measure I had been trained to apply, a good photograph. It was not a thing I would have hung on any wall.

I sat looking at it anyway.

Karina had told me, once — at the lake cabin the summer before last, drunk on something she’d brought from the city, the two of us out on the dock with our feet in the water — that the trouble with me was that I knew what I wanted things to look like and I had no idea what I wanted things to be. I had not, at the time, understood the distinction. I had laughed at her and pushed her off the dock and she had pushed me in after her, and we had gotten out and gone inside and not talked about it again.

I understood the distinction now, in a way I did not enjoy understanding it, sitting in my office at five-fifty-eight on a Thursday morning, looking at a freeze-framed half-second of a stranger’s face on a screen that was meant for editing my own.

I closed the video.

I closed the laptop.

I cracked my neck again, the other way this time, which I never did and which did not help.

I told myself I was a professional adult man who had managed bigger problems than a trainer.

I told myself a great many things, by six in the morning, when Eli knocked on the office door and stuck his head in to ask if I wanted my regular order from the coffee place and I said yes the way I always said yes, and not one of the things I told myself was true.

The truth was I had watched a four-minute video of a man I did not know and I had not been able, for the entire four minutes, to look anywhere but at his hands.

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🔥 An Exclusive Bonus Chapter

A 4,500-word extended scene set fourteen months after the wedding. The cabin. The dock. The last edge of an October sun. Established couple, full power exchange, full praise. Available free on this site only.

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