Page 34 of Emperor of Lust

“Good girl.”

My eyes dart to his, my cheeks flushing. Damian just smirks, his violet eyes flickering like dark magic in the low light.

“Now clasp them together.”

My pulse skips as I do as he says, lacing my fingers together.

“Now what,” I mutter.

“Now…this.”

He reaches into his jacket pocket. When his hand withdraws, there’s a length of thin black string dangling from his fingertips. Without any preamble, Damian leans forward and deftly wraps the length of it around both my wrists.

Initially, my pulse jumps and my brain short-circuits as the immediate reaction hits me.

Don’t tie me up. Please. Not my hands…

But as he starts to wrap the soft string around my wrists, then my hands, something changes. The panic begins to melt. The fear doesn’t spike like usual.

Damian keeps going, wrapping the string around each finger and thumb, lacing it back over my hands and wrists, until they’re…

I look at them.

What the fuck.

While he was doing it, it seemed random. But when I look now, it’s not random at all. It’s meticulously neat and symmetrical. It looks like art.

Dark, erotic art.

“I’m curious,” he growls quietly. “You seem to think—and assert quite loudly—that you don’t like being bound.” I shiver as he leans forward. “Andyet, every fucking time I do it to you, you look like you’re seconds away from begging me to make you come.”

He hooks a finger into one of the loops around my hands and uses it to tug me closer across the table toward him.

“Why is that, Hana?”

My throat bobs. “I…” I shrug. “You’re delusional. That’s not what I look like, and I have no interest in you trying to make?—”

“Nottrying,” he chuckles. “I already have.” He leans in more. “Twice.”

Suddenly, he pulls me even closer. His other hand slips under the table, and I gasp quietly when I feel it on my knee.

“The fact is, Kitsune,” he murmurs. “You reallydolook like you’re telling the truth when you profess to hate being tied up. And yet, even now for example, I’m sure if my hand were to explore…”

He pulls my knees apart. His fingers tease up the smoothness of my inner thigh and under my skirt.

“I bet I’d find your little pussydripping?—”

Reality hits me like a punch to the face, shaking me from whatever trance he’s got me in. Instantly, I yank away from him, stumbling out of my chair as I rip my bound hands from his grip and back away from him. I scrabble at the string with my teeth, wrenching it off my hands and wrists and pulling it off completely before tossing it onto the table between us.

“Stop trying to play my therapist,” I hiss, my head swimming with nausea. “And stay the fuck away from me.”

He doesn’t follow when I bolt from the club.

…Ihatethe disappointment that wells inside me when he doesn’t.

I drive backto the house in a numb haze.

Damian has invaded every corner of my life, and I’m running out of ways to push him back.

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