Page 6 of Jax (The Kansas City Reapers #3)

Jax

There’s nothing quite like suspending your best friend’s girlfriend and watching him edge her by candlelight to remind you how painfully single you are.

The playroom was warm. Not just physically, though the sconces and floor candles kept it a few degrees above comfortable, but emotionally.

It radiated something old and sacred. The air always felt charged in here, like static before a storm, humming with held breath and friction waiting to happen.

Candlelight flickered against the deep red walls and black leather accents like a heartbeat you could see, and every sound—the creak of jute, the sigh of skin—was holy.

I sat cross-legged on the padded floor just outside the drop zone, hands resting on my thighs, trying not to adjust my jeans while my entire body hummed like a tuning fork. Maddy was suspended in front of me, already flying.

Her arms were pinned tight behind her in a chest harness that framed her breasts and pulled her forward, while her legs hung bent at the knees, ankles tied together with the kind of decorative precision only Niko bothered to maintain mid-scene.

Her skin glowed pink and gold in the firelight, flushed where the rope bit deepest, sweat shimmering at the curve of her throat.

She was trembling, but not from pain. Not from fear. From something far more delicious.

Niko stood behind her shirtless, his back taut with focus.

The light caught on the sheen of sweat across his chest, highlighting every muscle as he moved around her like a shadow.

One of his hands was tangled in the rope, and the other drifted over Maddy’s hip, fingers grazing her skin with maddening slowness.

“Such a good girl,” he murmured. “Open for me. That’s it. Let it stretch you. You can take more.”

Maddy whimpered, her body shifting toward the sound of his voice even as the ropes held her still.

Every part of her moved in small, carefully allowed ways.

Hips flexing, toes curling, lips parted on a broken gasp.

Her thighs quivered with tension, her mouth was slack, and her eyes were half-lidded.

It was art. It was control. And I was sitting here like a monk watching a sex tape in slow motion, holy and hard at the same time.

Niko had asked earlier, when I volunteered to run safety for the scene, “You okay?”

It wasn’t the question that bothered me. It was the way he’d meant it.

Like he knew.

And he probably did. When you lived in a house that was as full of emotional wreckage, sensory overload, and unresolved power dynamics as ours was, it could be hard to hide the fact that you were starving in plain sight.

I used to crave this space. The tension.

The control. The way rope could turn chaos into structure, body into language.

But lately, I felt more like the dungeon’s concierge than its craftsman.

Need a flogger cleaned? I’ve got you. Need six carabiners, a blindfold, and two aftercare blankets by 9 p.m.?

I’m your man. Want me to tie someone? Sorry, I’m fully booked helping other people live their best cathartic kink lives while I spiral quietly in the corner, watching like some kind of emotionally repressed dom-turned-stagehand.

Tonight wasn’t the first time I’d sat cross-legged on this floor, watching someone else break open while I stayed carefully, professionally closed.

But it was the first time in a while that I felt it in my gut.

That sharp little twist behind the sternum.

The ache you get when your hands itch to create something beautiful, but know they won’t be asked to.

Maddy let out a soft moan, a high, breathy sound that hit low in my stomach, and Niko responded instantly.

His palm slid up her thigh, deliberate, thumb pressing into the soft flesh just inside the rope’s edge.

She gasped, sharp and needy, and arched like a puppet on strings, her back bowing into the suspension like she was offering herself to the firelight.

My mind automatically ran a dozen simulations, calculating rope tension, stress points, and potential failures.

The percentage remained within acceptable limits. No need to intervene.

“Fuck, you’re beautiful like this,” Niko murmured, voice so low it blended with the sound of rope creaking. “Tied up, needy, wide open for me.”

My jeans were too tight. Or maybe I was just too far gone. My cock had been half-hard since Niko cinched the first knot, and now it throbbed with the kind of pressure that didn’t fade with time. I ground my teeth and shifted just enough to ease the ache, grateful for the shadows and the low light.

Maddy whimpered again, soft and cracked like glass cooling too fast.

“You like that?” he whispered, mouth near her ear. “You want more? Say it.”

“I…please,” she gasped. “Niko, God…please.”

My arousal wasn’t the problem. I could handle that.

Hell, I’d lived with it coiled under my skin for months now.

It was the ache behind it. The tight coil in my chest that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with touch.

With meaning. With building something sacred and breaking it open together.

Craving had a hierarchy, and I was so far past wanting to fuck that I barely noticed anymore. What I wanted was to build. To bind. To bruise. To bring someone down with me into the quiet, charged hum of the space I knew better than anyone. I didn’t want meaningless. I didn’t want casual.

I wanted to be held. I wanted to be trusted. I wanted… who was I fucking kidding? I wanted a submissive.

Niko’s hand fisted in Maddy’s hair, tilting her head gently to the side as he bit down on the curve of her neck, just enough to leave a mark. She moaned again, her body trembling in place, suspended and needy and goddamn luminous.

“You’re mine like this,” he growled, low and rough. “Rope-drunk and begging.”

My pulse thudded behind my teeth. I looked away, half out of respect, half for self-preservation.

Yeah, I wanted things. But lately, that part of me had been on silent mode, muted by a house full of shifting trauma, off-limits bodies, and sex so loud it rearranged the air vents.

Carrick and Bellamy were fucking everywhere.

Literally everywhere. I’d had to reschedule a tactical training block last week because they were ‘testing gravity on the kitchen counter’.

I hadn’t made eye contact with either of them since.

Bellamy had just smirked. Carrick had looked smug. I’d almost punched him on principle.

Carrick himself hadn’t punched anything he shouldn’t have in over two weeks. Which meant Bellamy had probably said something terrifyingly honest again, and instead of imploding, he’d just… held it. Sat in it. Let it rearrange him like it was architecture, not damage.

She was healing. Slowly. But she laughed now. Out loud. The first time I heard it, I dropped a full tray of coffee mugs. Of course, I had never admitted the truth. It had been too easy to blame Sully.

They keep saying this house runs on caffeine and adrenaline.

Nah.

It runs on trauma recovery and denial.

And I was still here. Managing the rope. Adjusting the lights. Making sure nobody fell, physically or otherwise.

God, I loved them. I did. But sometimes I felt like a ghost in my own goddamn home. A phantom in the wings. The guy who held the camera, but never stepped into frame.

The thing no one ever tells you about building a safe house for broken people is that eventually, it starts to feel like the drywall’s soaked in trauma.

It didn’t matter how many coats of paint we slapped on the walls, or how many security systems we installed, the air always felt just a little too heavy.

Like it was carrying things it didn’t know how to let go of.

Like maybe… it was carrying us.

They called us “The Reapers,” but this place? It was a recovery ward. A halfway house. A very expensive, very well-armed emotional rehab center, disguised as a compound in the woods. And don’t get me wrong, it worked. Sort of. Just not for all of us at the same time.

Sully had started humming again, maybe a sign of peace, maybe the lead-up to a breakdown. Hard to tell. But he smiled more. Deacon joked more. Carrick and Niko almost had a real argument last week instead of solving things with grunts and death stares. So… yeah. Progress.

And Maddy? She was still here. Still standing.

Not a witness. Not a flight risk. Not even a guest anymore.

She belonged . Took up space like someone who’d had to fight for the right to exist and wasn’t about to give an inch back.

The house felt different with her in it.

Calmer. Like someone had poured honey into the floorboards.

And then there was me. The rope guy. The planner. The one who kept everyone else’s damage labeled, tracked, and tucked neatly into boxes I never opened for myself. I'd spent so much time shining a flashlight into other people’s darkness, I’d forgotten how long mine had gone unlit.

It wasn’t like I didn’t have options. I could always head over to the Dungeon, which all of us were members of, to get a quick fix.

But I didn’t want a hit of connection that disappeared with the bruises.

I didn’t want someone who needed me just until the adrenaline wore off.

I wanted permanence. Someone who looked at the mess inside me and didn’t flinch.

Someone who could point to the confusing tangle that was my mind and say, I see it, and I still want in.

Someone who wanted to build, not just burn.

But right then? I had a suspension rig at my back, a house full of half-healed wounds, and a to-do list that still included cleaning the garage and restocking the med kit.