Total pages in book: 60
Estimated words: 58987 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 295(@200wpm)___ 236(@250wpm)___ 197(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 58987 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 295(@200wpm)___ 236(@250wpm)___ 197(@300wpm)
I pull up the Ivy and Logan scene from my head… maybe tonight it'll work.
Maybe tonight my body will remember how to want something.
I slide my hand between my thighs.
Nothing.
I try anyway. Force myself to focus on the scene—Logan's fingers inside Ivy, the strangers watching through the curtain, the humiliation and desire tangled together.
I give up after five minutes and blank my mind.
This is my life now.
Coffee shops, and gyms, and yoga classes, and support groups I don't belong to.
Running from nothing. Toward nothing.
Pretending I'm fine.
Pretending I'm normal.
Pretending I don't spend every night trying to masturbate to fantasies that don't work anymore because the only thing that gets me wet is the memory of a man ejaculating on a corpse.
I turn off the light.
I turn off my life.
I turn off everything.
Because if I don't turn it off then I'll have to admit that what Caleb did…
How he did it…
How he looked—his eyes, his jaw, his grip on his cock, the way his come spewed out in streams…
Was… hot.
Chapter 2
Caleb
Snow fills my vision. Her footprints, already disappearing under fresh powder. The shape of her body in the drift where I tackled her.
I stand naked at my bedroom window, forehead pressed against the cold glass, looking out at the summer forest of lodgepole pines and quaking aspen.
I'm focused on the exact spot where she screamed.
Help! Someone help me!
The forest doesn't look anything like it did that morning. The snow has been gone so long now, it's about to come back. The leaves of the aspen grove are already starting to yellow and the elderberry bushes are heavy with clusters of nearly-black berries.
Time.
It passes whether you want it to or not.
That morning last Christmas I chased her naked through the snow. Watched her stumble and fall and get up and run again, her bare feet red from the freezing cold.
My cock was hard the entire time. It had every right to be. What we were doing—her running, me chasing—this made sense. I'd been fucking her like a monster for eight straight hours.
Of course, I was hard.
Scarletta herself had written these chase scenes. Dozens of times. It's arousing. The chase, the capture, the surrender. A common fantasy. Perfectly normal.
Except…
I pace away from the window, then back.
Except when looked down at her as I pinned her in the snow and she looked back at me—really saw me—there was nothing in her eyes but fear.
Not the fear she writes about. Not the fear that bleeds into arousal, that transforms into trust.
Just fear.
Raw. Animal. Survival.
The kind that says this man will kill me.
I stuck a needle in her thigh anyway.
I told myself it was necessary. She was hypothermic, irrational, putting herself in danger. I was protecting her from herself.
I was so fucking sure.
Now, as I stare at the place where I held her down, I'm not sure of anything.
Turning away, I walk over to the bed and sit down on the edge. Elbows on my knees, face in my hands.
Story Island.
The maze.
Volk.
That was nothing like Christmas morning. It was supposed to be better. Less clinical, more challenging. Climbing rope ladders into trees. Bending over punishment benches sixty feet in the air. A zip-line taxi to the next station.
It was supposed to be fun.
The maze wasn't a punishment, it was her deepest, darkest fantasy come to life. The fantasy that filled her with so much shame, she hid it away. Denying its existence.
We got to know each other better after her safe word in station 2. We came to an understanding.
At least… I thought we did.
I see it from her perspective now. What she must have seen.
Scarletta crouched in the mud, covered in blood that wasn't hers, watching a headless body leak out onto the platform where I was supposed to fuck her. She was screaming her safeword and nobody came. She thought the attendants were part of the scene. She thought I'd scripted her terror.
Then I arrived.
Naked. Erect. Already hard from watching her preparation on the monitors.
She watched me torture a man.
Cut off his fingers. His cock. His balls.
She watched me stroke myself while I did it.
My hand moves to my dick automatically. The memory shouldn't arouse me.
It absolutely does.
Volk's screams.
The way his body convulsed when I severed the femoral.
The hot spray of arterial blood across my chest.
I came on his corpse.
Scarletta saw all of it.
I told myself it was justice. I told myself Volk trafficked five hundred children and deserved worse than I gave him. I told myself she'd understand because I'd already confessed to killing Derek.
But Derek happened off-camera. Derek was a story I told her. A monster I'd already slain before she knew it existed.
Volk was different.
Volk was immediate. Visceral. Real.
I made Scarletta watch me become the thing I actually am.
Not the controlled dominant who edges her, and praises her, and makes her feel safe while she surrenders.