Page 80 of Spark of Madness

“Where did you learn to do this?” I ask quietly, hoping that speaking will distract me from the flood of chemicals rushing through my veins.

“From a book,” he says. “There’s a small library of texts hidden away on the third floor.”

“A library of books on how to bind women?”

“Not just binding women. It’s…” he hesitates. “There are many books there about the impulses and desires of men and ways to satisfy them. Most of them I find uninteresting.”

“But ropes were interesting to you?”

He grabs my arms and brings them behind my back, forcing my elbows to bend. My forearms touch as they draw parallel lines across the middle of my back. He ties me this way, and my breaths quicken as he shifts me from relative freedom to bound and at his mercy.

If Ifall, I won’t be able to catch myself withmy hands.

“It’s not the ropes that interest me.”

His hands fall away, and he’s silent through several pulsing beats. I can feel his eyes on my back, and they burn my skin.

I’m almost relieved when the ropes start to move again, as he continues to twist, loop, and tug. Each drawing of the braided twine whooshes as coarse fibers rub against coarse fibers. The dangling ends whip against my flesh, each grazing touch threatening to startle anxiety and trigger another rush of adrenaline.

“It’s the artwork of it that I find alluring.” I feel the touch of his hand against my thigh before the rope coils around it. I look down, turning my head back to see him on one knee behind me, nimble fingers twisting a knot. “The way it twists and coils, the way it lays across tender flesh is a thing of beauty—true beauty.” There’s a pause. “I don’t think I could ever dress another creature in bindings as beautiful as this, as natural as the way you look right here and now. The way you submit to it, with every inch of rebellion and every ounce of will that you have to fight...I’m overcome by your presence in front of me right now, Mercy.”

The rhythm of his words excites me. Each panting inhale draws in a heated breath that sinks through my stomach, pulses between my legs, and slickens my cunt. Before I realize any time has passed, my thighs and ankles are knotted. I feel the heat of him move as he rises behind me, and his fingertips gently graze the ends of my hair, lifting a strand from the back of my neck.

“I mourn the length of your hair, starlight. But I’m not sorry that I cut it. I don’t want any other man wrapping their hand around those perfect strands but me.” He bends over my shoulder and his lips move closer to my ear. “I kept your braid,” he whispers. “I couldn’t bear to part with it.”

A quake ripples down the length of my spine as he leaves me. He circles me, lifts a dangling end of rope that hangs from one of the many knots on my body, and reaches above me.

Looking down at myself, I find that I can see it—the artwork in his binding. The rope is so intentionally turned and twisted around my body, swooping across my chest and around each breast to cage them in, framing them as if they were paintings worthy of display. It’s twirled beautifully down my stomach, spread across my hips, wrapped tightly around my thighs. I feel every inch of the crisscrossing along my back, and part of me wishes I could see it, because I understand what he means about it being beautiful.

And it isn’t just in the rope itself.

Just as he said, I submitted to this. I stood still and let him position me, let him bind me in whatever way he wanted. All while standing at the edge of a cliff in a cavern so dark, I can scarcely see the opening through which we entered.

I submitted to Arlo Rainn.

I freely gave him reign to bind me, and in that, I gave him my trust.

Do I trust him?

How could I ever trulytrust him?

“Ready?”

I look up at him standing squarely at my side, and though I don’t know what he expects me to be ready for, I know that I am ready, regardless. With trust I didn’t decide to give him—trust I’m not sure he’s actually earned—I nod.

He tugs on a strand of rope at the center of my back that he must have fed through the metal loop above my head. I feel the pull of the binding as it shifts and scratches over my skin, and I yelp as my weight pitches forward with the lift. He tugs again, and I rise to my toes, calling out his name as the feeling of falling washes over me. His name echoes through the empty cavern as he works to fix a knot to hold me in place.

My body turns and sways as he works to do something, making my stomach lurch with nausea. But even the nausea draws a fear-induced desire down low in my gut.

My right leg rises as he tugs on a knot that’s settled on the back of my thigh. Once my toes are off the ground, he bends my knee back, lifting my ankle from another knot placed there.

He secures me as I dangle with the toes of my left leg still dancing across stone, but then he lifts that leg, too. Within moments, my entire body is floating, suspended, laying parallel to the ground. I’m facing down and my knees are bent and parted, toes pointing toward the metal hoop that holds me up from the center of my back.

Arlo touches my hip, sending a shockwave through my body, but his touch only exists for a moment. He pushes, and I spin slowly. I make the mistake of looking out as I circle toward the dark abyss of the cavern, out beyond the drop-off. Panic overcomes me, burning through my veins like wildfire through brush, sweeping me into outright terror.

“I can’t—” It’s all I manage before my panicked, panting breaths overtake me.

I sense him moving, tugging, lifting, adjusting.

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