Page 31 of Jax (The Kansas City Reapers #3)

I leaned back again, arms folded tightly over my chest. “So you’re telling me if I suddenly woke up tomorrow and decided I wanted to be, I don’t know, tied up and emotionally unpacked like a suitcase , I’d be in good hands here?”

Bellamy’s grin was slow and wicked. “Babe, this house is full of men who would worship the chance to unwrap you.”

I made a face. “Gross.”

“Accurate.”

“That sounded like a threat.”

She chuckled. “You’re safe here, Stella. Whether you want nothing but coffee and sarcasm, or whether you eventually want someone to press you to a wall and make you forget how to lie to yourself.”

I stared at her. “That was specific.”

“I’m intuitive,” she said with a smirk. “Also, I’ve seen the way you look at Jax.”

I scoffed. “I don’t look at Jax.”

“You do. Like he’s a puzzle you’re not sure whether you want to solve or set on fire.”

“Okay, that’s fair.”

Bellamy’s smile was brighter now, and something about it made me feel lighter, too. Not unburdened, but a little less alone.

“You’re not broken,” she said, softer now. “You’re just not finished.”

My heart knocked once, hard.

“Jesus,” I muttered, rubbing my chest. “Do you rehearse this stuff?”

She laughed. “Nope. You just bring out my best material.”

I shook my head, grinning in spite of myself. “You’re impossible.”

“Maybe, but I’m also a good listener, and I don’t judge.” She said. “Anytime you want to talk, cry, scream, explore, or throw something breakable, I’m here.”

I looked at her for a long moment. And for the first time since I walked into this place, I believed someone meant it.

Bellamy’s words didn’t come with edges. No barbs. Just soft certainty. Like she wasn’t afraid of anything I might say.

I thought back through everything that had happened since I’d been kidnapped.

All the lies I was holding, the secrets I was keeping, what I was planning to do to keep my sister alive.

It was all too much, and I couldn’t tell a soul about it.

Sometimes it felt like it was going to burst out of me if I didn’t keep a death-grip on my resolve.

“Sometimes I don’t think there’s another person in the whole world who could understand what goes on in my head.” I said, trying to sound nonchalant.

She nodded. “Yeah. I get that.”

I looked away. “No offense, but I doubt you do.”

Bellamy didn’t miss a beat. “I used to flinch every time someone touched me. Even people I liked. I’d pretend I was fine, but inside I was locked. Waiting. Braced for something I couldn’t name.”

My stomach pulled tight. “And now?”

She smiled slowly. “Now I let someone tie me up and whisper filth in my ear while I cum so hard I cry.”

I huffed a dry laugh before I could stop myself. “Jesus.”

“Right?” she said, still smiling. “But that didn’t happen overnight. And it didn’t happen because I magically stopped being afraid. It happened because someone showed me I could be terrified and safe. I could let go and stay whole.”

I swallowed around the sudden thickness in my throat.

“What if I’m not built like that?” I asked quietly. “What if I can’t let go? What if that part of me got… cut out somewhere along the way?”

Bellamy shook her head, her voice like velvet over steel. “Then we work with what you have left. No one here wants to change who you are, Stella. But we’re damn good at helping people find the pieces they were told to bury.”

I didn’t answer right away. I just stared down at my hands. They were knotted together in my lap like I could hold my shit together through sheer force of will.

“I used to think being in control was the only way to be the person everyone expected me to be,” I murmured.

“It probably was,” she said softly.

“I don’t know how to unlearn that.”

“You don’t have to. You just have to learn when to put it down.”

I looked up at her then. Really looked.

“You’re serious about this.”

“As a flogger with a name,” she said with a crooked grin.

“That… should be a weird analogy, but it tracks.”

“You’ll meet her, eventually.”

“I don’t know if I want to,” I said, although the doubt in my voice was clear as day. It came out tense, hesitant, like I was trying to shove the curiosity back down before it showed.

Bellamy didn’t press. She just leaned against the arm of the couch, legs folding beneath her like a cat settling in.

“Most people think kink is about sex,” she said. “And sure, it can be. But mostly it’s about honesty. Control. Trust. Learning who you are in a space safe enough to be real. It’s like… your nervous system finally gets to exhale.”

I looked at her. “And if you can’t? If your body never lets go?”

Her smile came with a softness edged in sorrow. “Then we hold you until it does.”

The words hit like a bruise—warm, aching, unexpected. It wasn’t just what she said. It was how certain she was. Like she meant it. Like they all did. And it unraveled something I hadn’t realized I was holding together.

I didn’t know I was trembling until her hand brushed mine. Just for a moment. Just enough to ground me.

“You don’t have to decide anything,” she said. “This isn’t a pitch. There’s no deadline. No pressure. The only thing that matters is what you want. What you need.”

“I don’t know what I need.”

The words slipped out before I could stop them—quiet, frayed at the edges. Not defiant. Not defensive. Just raw. Honest, in a way I hadn’t meant to be.

Bellamy didn’t flinch. Didn’t rush to respond. She just gave me space.

Then she said it. Simple, calm, and devastatingly kind. “Then we start there.”

She didn’t add anything else. Just curled her legs beneath her, sipped her coffee, and gave me the same look she’d worn from the beginning, like she saw everything, and didn’t think any of it was strange.

I sat there a little longer, my mind spinning, trying to catalog each new sensation, every unexpected word, every tremor in my chest that felt less like fear and more like... awakening.

I didn’t like it. But I didn’t want it to stop. I should be focusing on escape, on saving Violet. But that would mean exposing all of these people to the mercy of the Dom Krovi, and that… that was feeling more and more impossible to go through with by the day.

Eventually, Bellamy leaned forward and set her mug on the table, her movements unhurried. “You’re thinking about it, aren’t you?”

I didn’t answer. Didn’t scoff. Just looked down at my hands, palms pressed together, thumbs twitching.

When I spoke, my voice was rough. “I don’t know. Maybe? Jax talked to me about what a scene would be like, how I would need to give him control. For the first time… it didn’t sound like a threat.”

Bellamy stayed quiet.

“And that scares the shit out of me,” I added, a bitter laugh slipping out.

She leaned back, exhaling softly. “That’s usually how it starts.”

The room went quiet again, not from lack of sound, but from something gentler. It was peaceful because no one here needed me to be anything. Not polite. Not agreeable. Not better.

Just… here.

Still, my thoughts buzzed. What did it mean to want something I didn’t understand? What kind of damage made you crave danger not for survival, but for connection?

“What do you mean by safe,” I asked finally. “When you say it?”

Bellamy looked at me like I’d asked something sacred. “I mean a place where you can fall apart and still be held.”

The answer was so clear, so exact, it knocked the air from my lungs.

Because I didn’t know if I’d ever had that. Not once. And now it was here, held out not as a promise or a trap, but as truth. It didn’t matter that it scared me. It mattered that something in me whispered yes.

I shook my head, letting out a breath that tried and failed to become a scoff. “You’re all so damn calm about this.”

Bellamy grinned. “Well, like I said, kink can be a lot of different things depending on what each person needs from day to day. Sometimes it’s the deep emotional shit, sometimes it’s letting go and finding peace, and sometimes it’s just about meeting each other’s needs.

That’s what’s so beautiful and freeing about it.

You get to make it what you want it to be. ”

I considered her words and measured them against the conversation I’d had with Jax.

I couldn’t find any contradictions. Maybe there was something to this, after all.

Maybe this was something worth at least considering.

If I was going to be stuck in this house for the foreseeable future, perhaps I could afford to want something, even if I didn’t understand it yet.

“It’s just hard to know how to trust it, you know?” I finally said, not meeting her eyes.

Her grin didn’t fade. “No one is going to force you to do anything you don’t want to do.”

My eyes flicked to hers. “And… what if I do want it?”

She didn’t blink. “Then you’ll be ready.”

I stared at her for a long moment. Let it sink in. Let the words wrap around the thought that had been growing like a thorny vine inside my chest since the second she started talking.

And then, so quietly I wasn’t sure she even heard it, I whispered:

“Maybe.”