Page 68 of Jax (The Kansas City Reapers #3)

Jax

Grief doesn’t always scream. Sometimes it lingers, quiet and unbearable.

It takes up residence beneath the skin, dense as static, low as a pressure front.

Violet had been missing for weeks. Stella had carried that weight with a kind of brutal grace most people wouldn’t recognize until it broke her.

She’d turned panic into steel, kissed me like a woman who knew time was finite, and stood in front of Quinn with her shoulders squared and her voice like sharpened glass as she spoke a truth that should have leveled her.

But silence…that’s the real killer.

Not the absence of sound. The absence of an outlet.

It seeps into marrow, fills up the spaces between heartbeats, and stretches the hours so wide they start to feel like they might split.

It makes everything feel louder: a fork tapping porcelain, a chair scraping the floor, the crack in someone’s smile when it doesn’t quite reach their eyes.

When the knock shattered the silence in my room late that evening after Quinn left the property, I was already on my feet.

Three taps. Then one slow drag of knuckle down wood, steady and deliberate. Not a request. Not hesitation. Just a request rendered in sound: I’m here. I need you. Don’t make me explain.

I opened the door.

Stella stepped inside barefoot and silent, wearing one of my old hoodies like armor.

It clung in all the places that mattered; the hem brushed her thighs, sleeves shoved to her elbows.

She wasn’t trying to seduce me. She didn’t have to try.

Her body spoke louder than desire; panties damp, breath uneven, skin flushed with something raw and restless, but it was the way she stood that broke me.

Still. Completely still.

Not with peace, but with pressure. As if motion might splinter her, as if one breath too deep would rip the silence wide open.

“I can’t do it anymore,” she said. Her voice wasn’t loud or broken.

It was worn. Flat. The sound of something that had stopped trying to be understood.

“I tried to be strong today, when Quinn made me go through everything again, but I can’t be strong anymore.

I feel like I’m burning from the inside.

Like there’s a scream inside me that won’t come out.

And if I stay quiet a second longer, I’ll disappear. ”

She didn’t look into my eyes. She looked at my mouth. My hands. The slope of my chest. She drank in my body like it held the blueprint she needed to find absolution. Like she’d already done the math, and decided pain was safer than drowning in the unknown.

“I need something else,” she said, soft but certain. “I need you to pull me out of my own head.”

The air coiled between us, taut with need. I stepped towards her slowly, close enough to feel the heat rising from her skin before we touched. The backs of my fingers skimmed her cheek, jaw, the slope of her throat, like I was retreading terrain already carved into my memory.

Her breath didn’t stutter when I touched her. It vanished.

“You want to feel something else, do you?” My voice was low and deliberate.

She nodded, lips parted, eyes fixed just past me now. “I want the ache to be real. I want you to take it. The panic. The helplessness. I want to feel something I understand.”

She wasn’t breaking. She was offering. A raw plea, wrapped in the stillness of someone who’d lived for weeks without a name for her pain. This was the breaking point. The night she stopped running. The night she asked me to hold her steady while she walked into the storm.

I stepped back. Let gravity decide. “Strip,” I said. “Then kneel.”

She was moving before I even finished my sentence.

She peeled off the hoodie like it weighed too much.

Her body gleamed, flushed, slick, nipples drawn tight with anticipation.

Shame had no place here. She knelt with the feel of something deeper than obedience; legs parted, spine tall, hands resting open.

She was the perfect picture of submission, but what I felt from her was something more feral.

I didn’t touch her, not at first. I circled slowly, letting closeness speak louder than contact.

She tracked me with breath alone, steady, centered, and surrendered.

When I stepped behind her, her knees shifted wider and spine lengthened, like her body had already released the weight of holding itself upright.

I gathered her hair, coiled it in my fist, and drew her head back until her throat stretched long and bared beneath me. “You came here to surrender,” I whispered. “You want the voices to quiet down.”

She nodded. Barely. “Yes,” she breathed. “Please.”

“I’ll give you silence,” I whispered against her temple, each word wrapped in breath and intention, “but not gently. I’ll carve the noise from your body one knot at a time, strip it out until pain becomes the only language your nervous system trusts.

Until stillness stops being a punishment, and starts being home. ”

My hand glided down the center of her chest, between the soft swell of her breasts. Her nipples tightened, a delicate flush blooming beneath my fingertips. The tremble that moved through her wasn’t fear. It was need. A current I answered without hesitation.

“What we’re going to do tonight isn’t about pleasure,” I said, voice low and steady. “It’s about choosing submission, and finding release. You won’t cum until every fractured thought has been rewritten into something that belongs to me.”

Her breath caught, fragile and wrecked. “God, yes. Please, Jax.”

That sound gutted me. Not the words, but the conviction. The trust. The way she gave me her unraveling, not as a burden, but as a blueprint. Take me apart , she said without saying it. Make me whole again, in a way I can recognize .

I let her hair slide from my grip, fingers trailing reverently along her spine as I reached for the rope. It was already warm, alive with waiting and intent.

“Don’t be gentle,” she breathed, the words soft enough to vanish.

I didn’t smile. Didn’t tease. Just exhaled like a man kneeling at the altar of a divine being. “I don’t know how to be gentle with sacred things.”

And I sank behind her, slow and sure, into that holy space where pain becomes prayer, and a woman doesn’t break, but returns to herself through fire.

The rope wasn’t just a tool. It was an offering.

It held everything she couldn’t say, and everything I was about to translate into tension, heat, and deliberate care.

Even before I touched her, I felt her body pulse with readiness, breath stretching longer, her essence humming like worship waiting to be given.

My hand settled on her shoulder, grounding the moment. “Color?” I asked, the question soft but sure.

Her voice didn’t waver. “Green.” Everything inside me aligned.

“Limits?” I asked, voice lower now, almost clinical, stripping the heat to help her find her center. That too was part of care, knowing when to burn, and when to cool.

She swallowed. “No gag. No blindfold. If you need to…” her voice broke, “...you can cover my mouth, hold me down. But don’t take my air.”

I nodded, letting my fingers drift down her spine, stopping just above her waist. She didn’t lean in. Didn’t flinch.

“I want you to make me fly,” she said. “I need to be wrapped up tight.. I want to feel like I can’t move.”

It hit like a low chord in my chest. I breathed through it.

“Sexual touch?”

She didn’t answer at first, but her back arched. Her breath hitched. Her body said yes long before her mouth did. “Yes. Please.”

“And orgasm control?”

She turned toward me, her voice unsteady, like the words were clawing their way out before she could stop them.

“I want you to hold me there. Push me past the edge until it’s not just pleasure anymore.

I want to beg. I want to forget myself. I want to break apart, and I want you to be the one who puts me back together. ”

The way she said it, ragged, almost broken, it wasn’t rehearsed. It was need. Pure and bare.

The words tore through me. Not just arousal, though that burned hot and immediate, but something deeper.

Hunger braided with reverence. She wasn’t offering arousal, or desire.

She was giving me surrender in its most dangerous form: intentional, aching, intimate. And God, I wanted to be worthy of it.

I leaned in, mouth near her ear. “You want to fall,” I whispered, voice slow as a dragged kiss, “but only if you know I’ll catch you.”

She trembled. “Yes. Only then.”

I stood and crossed the room to where the rope waited, coiled in perfect stillness. Eight lengths of jute, chosen for strength, for texture, for memory. Rope that had known her before. I gathered them in one hand, letting the weight settle.

She hadn’t moved. Still kneeling. Still gloriously naked. Still brimming with desire. Spine tall. Thighs parted. Palms open on her legs like a psalm waiting to be read. A body composed of breath and tension. A prayer aching for hands.

I knelt behind her. The air shimmered, thick with anticipation. I didn’t bind her yet. I dragged the first coil across her chest, slow and deliberate, pressing it to the frantic drumming of her heart.

She gasped. The sound tore loose like it had been pulled from the center of her.

“You’re not here to be hurt,” I said, voice low and even. “You’re here to be framed. Held. Restrained until the storm inside you has no room left to tear through.”

She didn’t speak, but her breath unfurled like a prayer—long and low, stitched with surrender.

Her panic retreated, dissolving into something slower.

I pressed my palm to her chest, fingers wide over rope and skin and the frantic flutter of her heart, and waited.

No commands. No pressure. Just weight. Beneath it, she quieted.

Her breath thickened. Her body loosened.

The storm inside her gave way to something warmer.

Hungrier. A hush so full of ache it felt holy.