Page 85 of Ruthless Knot

I nod, because words are momentarily impossible.

She grins.

Wide.

Vicious.

Her tongue flicks out between her lips, wetting them.

“Good,” she purrs. “Because I have plans for you.”

Her hand is merciless.

Soft, then brutal.

Slow, then rapid-fire squeeze—alternating the rhythm the way a dancer alternates steps, never letting my body get used to it, always keeping me on the edge of something catastrophic.

Her scent suffocates me—cotton candy and cherry blossom, sugar so intense it’s almost painful. I inhale it, drowning, letting it erase any sense of control I thought I had.

The cuffs dig in with every pull.

Every time I tense, the metal bites a little deeper—a reminder that I’m hers, not by force but by choice. That I could break free, but I won’t.Not yet.Not until she’s finished proving whatever dark, beautiful point she’s trying to make.

I try to distract myself from the inevitable.

Catalog her instead.

Her shoulders—delicate but corded with muscle. The fine tremor running up her left arm, an OCD tell I recognize from years of my own tics and rituals. The way her right hand is so steady despite the chaos in her eyes. She’s a contradiction made flesh—soft but cruel, broken but invincible, laughably tiny but somehow more dangerous than anyone I’ve ever met.

The mattress creaks beneath her.

Her knees slide forward so she’s almost sitting on my thighs, the lips of her glistening pussy hovering just out of reach of my cock, just close enough that if I wasn’t restrained, I could arch up and bury myself inside her. Just smelling her arousal alone is going to drive me mad.

She knows this.

She’s taunting me with it.

I watch the way the light hits her skin—moonbeams catching on raised scars, pale blue veins visible beneath the surface, every inch of her mapped in hurt and healing. There’s blood tonight,too—old, dried to brown at the edge of her thumbnail. She must have picked at it, compulsively, while waiting for me to wake up.

“You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?” My voice comes out rough, almost a growl.

She shrugs, but the movement is a parody of apathy.

“I like power.” She says it like she’s confessing a secret. “It’s the only thing I get. The only thing they let us have, here and everywhere else. Better to be a little monster than someone’s victim.”

She’s right.

I know it in my bones.

Circus was no different.

You played the part—the chained angel, the escape artist, the boy in the glass box—because that’s what sold tickets. But offstage? Offstage, you had to be brutal. Had to be more monster than man, or they’d eat you alive.

I shiver.

Not from cold.

From something harder to define.