a climax, and trying to claw away from it is like trying to climb up from the depths of the sweetest hell.
“Mine.” His voice is demonic. “Never getting away from me.”
His fingers tighten until I gag.
I try to say his name, to tell him to let go, panic morphing into real fear.
“Sp... Spi…”
He rumbles and his mouth rakes mine. I scream and he tongues my mouth hard, loosening his grip, then tightening it again.
My head goes light, and somehow the pleasure he’s calling up in me doubles until my hips are trying to rock into him.
“Fuck!” His grip slips from my throat, and his palms slap the posts to either side of me. His thrusts turn savage, and he lets a long string of curses.
I thrash and my thighs shake, helpless to close my legs or stop him. With my legs and arms tied in place, I can’t do anything except lie there and take him.
The tide careens closer, threatening to swallow me whole. Screams tear from me, filling the room and bouncing off the walls. The whole clubhouse must hear me. They hear me, and they know.
Spider grunts his pleasure, taking me viciously. His pelvis scrapes the welts his belt left behind, and the sting makes the tide rush faster. I scream louder.
As if my helplessness makes him hotter, his nails scrape the wood on the posts, and the bed rattles against the wall as he goes wild.
“Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck, yeah!”
The whole clubhouse has to hear him now.
The riptide sucks me under, drowning me in its depths. White lights flash, my body convulses, and the euphoria washes over me.
Spider gives me a handful of sharp thrusts. He roars in release.
Then he collapses on top of me. His chest heaves against my back, his breath hot and ragged on my neck.
I breathe hard, too spent, too broken by what’s just happened to fight him.
Hatred for him infuses my blood, blazing like an inferno. The weight of my own sin crushes me, shame eating me alive.
“God, baby,” Spider groans softly in my ear. “So good.” His arms close around me tight, and he lies there holding me in the silence of our completion.
Baby. This is the first time he’d called me that since the night Cap was shot. He’d called me that while we lay together, while telling me about his parents and the spider bite that earned him his road name.
That night seems a million years ago, a different time, a different life. It seems as if that endearment was spoken by another man, to a woman who wasn’t me. Hearing that single word—baby—makes me feel as if I’m seeing a tiny flash of someone else inside him, a man beneath the monster who managed to scratch through the dark prison in which the monster holds him.
Rather than drawing closer to that tiny ray of hope, I shy from it, as if shrinking away from a burning flame. It isn’t really there. Spider was just caught in the moment. If he’s experiencing anything like the euphoria I just was, it’s addled his brain. He’s caught in the rush, a high so powerful that he’d have said anything if it crossed his mind.
As the last of the tide ebbs from my body, I let logic and sense reassert themselves, let my hatred harden my heart to the cold, unvarnished truth. Allowing myself to believe in the emotion I hear in him now is not only dangerous, but foolish. The high is temporary, and when it’s over, there will be only the darkness, the animal who cares nothing for me, who will torture me if he has a mind to, and who will kill me with the right provocation.
Spider’s breathing slowly returns to normal. Mine slows.
“So fucking perfect.” His fingers brush my hair off my sweat-slicked face.
Fighting will only encourage him, so I lie there, staring at the window, letting my brain shut down. Retreating inward.
Between my legs, his cock twitches. He makes a deep rumbling sound in his throat.
“Fuck, I’m getting hard again. See what you do to me? All I have to do is think of you, tied up and bucking like a wild animal, and I wanna hammer fuck you into this bed all over again.”
His tongue rakes over my cheek.
No, no, no.
It takes all my effort not to buck him off. He’d only toy with me.
At last, his weight lifts off of me. He backs up as if assessing what he’s done. His palm skates over my