Page 71 of Jax (The Kansas City Reapers #3)

She let go, not in a sob, not in a scream, but in quiet surrender.

It moved through her like a release engineered at the cellular level, softening fascia, unraveling muscle memory, coiling down her spine like tension being exhaled.

Every line of resistance melted. Her limbs hung weightless in the shape I’d designed.

Arms bound. Legs folded. But the static had gone.

No more hum beneath the surface. Just stillness.

Not the numb kind. The weighted hush that follows real collapse.

Her breath steadied, shallow but even. Her body rocked gently in the rig, and her face tilted up like she was trying to memorize what peace felt like.

I didn’t move. Just watched, hands open, fingers still slick with what she’d given me. My chest throbbed with the ache of restraint and reverence. Then, barely, her lips parted, and instinct leaned me forward before thought had the chance.

“You…” she rasped, voice raw and hollowed. “You burned it out of me.”

The words hit center mass. Not a metaphor.

Not an exaggeration. Physiological response.

My breath vanished. My ribs contracted like they’d been struck.

Because she was right. She hadn’t just unraveled.

She’d been stripped to substructure, scraped down to bone and truth.

And now, suspended in stillness, in a shape sculpted for sanctuary, she wasn’t shattered.

She was aligned. She was home. And I had brought her there.

Her voice still echoed through me as I reached for the lines.

No words. No disruption. Her body had told me everything.

She wasn’t crashing. She was still in the tail end of release.

And that required precision. This wasn’t recovery, not yet.

It was transition. I wasn’t rescuing her. I was guiding her through.

I took the pulley and lowered her inch by inch; the rope unwinding like breath drawn from deep in the chest. Her body followed gravity slowly, hair spilling forward, posture softening by degrees.

When her knees touched the mat, she folded, not collapsed, not broken.

Just fluid. Her upper body curved toward the floor as if her bones had surrendered.

She didn’t fall. She gave herself over—to gravity, to stillness, to me.

I knelt behind her, palms resting lightly on her shoulders. No weight. Just touch. She was warm, slick with sweat, breath low and even. The kind of calm that can’t be faked. Not after release. Not after unraveling that precisely.

My fingers found the rigging clips, brushing over rope as I released her harness. The mechanism clicked, soft and clean, and she exhaled, long and low, a sound of something settling at last.

“You with me?” I asked near her ear, already knowing the answer before she spoke.

She nodded, loose and slow. “Yeah,” she whispered. “Still floating… but here.”

That was enough.

I didn’t rush the rope. Unraveling has a language. Too fast, and it fractures meaning. Too abrupt, and the body doesn’t register closure. Rope finishes best in silence. In hands that linger. In the weight of someone staying.

So I stayed. One hand rested at the curve of her back, letting her body feel not just contact, but continuity. The air between us pulsed with heat and jute, skin and sweat. My cock still throbbed with everything I hadn’t taken. But this wasn’t mine. This was her aftermath. Her breath. Her shape.

I let my fingers drift along the raised lines at her side. “You’re not broken,” I murmured.

She didn’t answer. Just hummed, soft and low. A sound I felt more than heard. It moved through my palm, through the rope, into the space between us.

“You’re bound back together.”

I moved to the knots at her shoulders, loosening them with quiet hands. Letting the rope fall where it wanted, like it knew the work was done. It didn’t cling. The fibers slid from her skin without resistance, leaving heat in their wake. Memory, not damage.

She didn’t lift her head. Didn’t speak. But her fingers curled gently on her thighs, her spine rising with each breath.

I paused at her legs, rubbed behind her knees to warm the skin, careful and slow.

Not to rouse her, but to anchor her back into herself.

I murmured to her, a rhythm to help her breathe her way down from the high.

When the last coil slipped free, I gathered it in one hand and set it aside. Then I crouched in front of her and offered my palm.

“Come here.”

She didn’t speak. What came next wasn’t silence; it was a return to homeostasis.

It was a stillness that only followed something sacred.

The moment after impact, when nothing shakes.

She hadn’t unraveled. She’d arrived. And I wasn’t there to catch her because she fell.

I was there because someone had to see her land.

That was the part most people missed. This wasn’t about power, or control, or even pain.

It was about connection. About building something strong enough to hold what someone thought they had to carry alone.

Rope and pressure were tools. The real work is what happened when the noise faded and someone stayed, anyway.

So I wrapped my arms around her, not to claim her, not to soothe, but to prove she was still here.

That I was, too. That what broke didn’t stay broken.

That softness, when built right, is stronger than armor.

Her body tucked into mine, breath syncing with my breath, her cheek pressed to my chest like it knew the sound of home.

I didn’t whisper promises. Didn’t offer praise. I just stayed. Still. Anchored. Present. Because sometimes love doesn’t sound like poetry. Sometimes it sounds like rope falling quietly to the floor. Like a hoodie pulled over trembling shoulders. Like breath shared in silence.