Page 54 of Jax (The Kansas City Reapers #3)

I moved slowly, reverently, hands on the lines as I began the descent.

One pull, then another. Tension released like an unspooling promise.

Her torso dipped first, legs still curved and bound in the futomomo , body arched as I guided her back to earth, inch by inch.

I didn’t speak. I didn’t need to. Her exhales came staggered, body swaying with every shift, hips trembling, skin glistening with sweat and something softer, something dangerously close to surrender.

She landed with the barest sound. First her foot. Then her hip. Then the rest of her, slow and aching and so goddamn beautiful it nearly split my chest open.

I knelt beside her. Not like a Dominant. Not like a man ready to gloat or tease or drag another orgasm from her just because I could. I knelt like someone who had just witnessed divinity and didn’t know what to do with the miracle in his hands.

Her legs twitched. Her arms were still bound.

Her hair had fallen across her face, damp and curling, stuck to her cheek like flotsam washed up on shore in the aftermath of a storm.

I reached up and tucked it behind her ear, letting my fingers linger just long enough for her to feel me.

She didn’t flinch or pull away. Her eyes fluttered; hazy, dazed, but present.

“Color?” I asked, my voice barely more than a breath. Her lips parted.

“Green.” It was so quiet I almost missed it.

I let the word settle, simple and whole, before reaching for the knot at her ankle.

The rope released with quiet sighs, each coil slipping free like a kiss in reverse.

Her thigh twitched as sensation returned, and I worked slowly, tracing circulation, watching pink bloom where jute had pressed.

She was marked and magnificent, glowing with the aftershock of chosen pain.

At her chest, I kept my hands steady. Rope had mapped her body in ridges and curves, geometry drawn in tension.

I unraveled it with care, feeling her begin to sink with every breath.

The rope slipped away like silk relinquishing its hold, and when her arms fell to her sides, she exhaled - fuller, freer.

A deeper kind of release passed through her, like she’d finally stopped bracing for something that never came. She hadn’t shattered. She’d let go.

I leaned in, pressed my forehead to her shoulder, and breathed her in, sweat and surrender and that last spark still alive beneath her skin.

Then I whispered, “I’m going to show you what it means to be worshipped.

” She didn’t speak, just tipped her head back and opened her legs, not because I asked, but because she wanted to be seen.

To be taken. To be devoured. I moved between her thighs, lifting her hips into my hands with quiet reverence, easing her leggings down inch by inch, my mouth trailing heat along every strip of skin I revealed.

When the damp fabric peeled from her core, she gasped, still trembling, still aching. I didn’t hover. Didn’t tease.

I kissed her like she was sacred. Like she was the answer to every question I’d ever asked about power freely given.

My tongue moved in slow, purposeful strokes, savoring the taste of surrender.

Her thighs opened wider, fingers drifting to my shoulders, not to guide, only to hold.

She was quiet, grateful, unraveling again.

I moaned into her. She cried out. And when I sucked her clit into my mouth, when I matched the rhythm of my tongue to her breath and pulse, she came, softer this time, but deeper.

Her body curled around it like an exhale she’d held too long, and she sobbed my name.

Not because she was breaking, but because she’d survived the fall. And I had caught her.

She lay still, luminous in the aftermath, chest rising in slow, shallow breaths, legs parted from the way I’d worshipped her.

Her fingers curled against the mat, hands open, like even gravity knew not to rush her return.

The ropes were gone, but their imprint remained, reddened lines across her skin, like echoes of a language only her body could translate.

A poem under pressure. A story no one else had the right to read.

I sat beside her without trying to fill the quiet.

There was no need to ask how she felt, no impulse to offer water or wrap her in a blanket.

Not yet. She wasn’t ready for warmth. She wasn’t in pain.

She was in mid-transformation. So I waited, silent, steady, as her breath slowed, her pulse settled beneath flushed skin, and awareness returned in soft waves.

Her lips twitched first, just barely, a flicker of something tender surfacing from below.

Then her hand moved, not with certainty, but with something braver.

Fingers crawled toward mine in a slow, vulnerable reach.

I didn’t meet her halfway. I let her find me.

Let her lace our fingers together, slow and shy, and I brushed my thumb across hers, not to soothe, but to say: I see you.

She didn’t thank me. She didn’t need to.

“That…” Her voice cracked the silence, raw and reverent.

“That was more than I expected.” I turned just enough to look at her, flushed cheeks, glassy eyes, mascara smudged beneath one like the aftermath of a war she hadn’t yet realized she’d won.

“It’s always more,” I said quietly. “That’s the point. ”

She went quiet again, brow furrowing like she was chasing a sentence before it dissolved.

Then she exhaled, slow and full, like she was finally letting herself feel the weight of what she’d done, of what she’d chosen.

“You made me feel like…” She stopped, lips pressing together before tipping her gaze toward the ceiling like the word she needed might be scrawled up there, just out of reach.

I didn’t rush her. I waited, letting the silence hold space for whatever truth she was trying to surface.

When she looked back, her eyes met mine, unguarded, unflinching, stripped of pretense. “You made me feel like I was allowed to be myself.” It cracked something open inside me. Not enough to split, but enough to let the light in.

I reached out, brushed a knuckle along her jaw, and whispered the only thing that mattered. “You. That’s all I want. To give you back to yourself. One rope at a time.”

Her eyes shimmered again, not with pain or the collapse of pleasure, but with something far more dangerous, recognition, not of me, but of herself.

Stripped bare beneath all the scaffolding she’d once mistaken for safety, she didn’t reach for me like someone seeking comfort; she folded into me like a theory returning to proof, like the quiet surrender of a question that had finally found its answer.

Her skin, still marked by rope, carried the residue of meaning in pressure and pigment.

Her mouth, parted in the softness of the aftermath, held the echo of submission not demanded, but offered.

And her breath, when it broke against my chest, wasn’t just air, wasn’t just life.

It was data. Intimacy. Trust, voluntary and unguarded.

I didn’t ask her to define it. Didn’t try to name something that had never needed words.

Some truths are meant to be worn, not spoken, felt in the body, etched into fascia, filed under memory and something deeper than memory.

Identity. She hadn’t shattered in my hands.

Hadn’t splintered or scattered or ceased to be.

She had aligned, finally, fully, devastatingly, every frequency of her fire synched to a design I didn’t just understand, but would spend the rest of my life mapping, protecting, and revering, like a cathedral built not of stone, but of skin and surrender.