Page 87 of Reaper
I push him back onto the bed, slip the makeshift blindfold around his head, and decide that’s not enough.
“Adriana?” He says, his blindfolded head turning left and right as I slip off the elegant bed and head to the nightstand, searching, hoping, because if there’s a place that’s likely to have something extra available bedside, it’s this suite in a Triad drug and gambling den.
I slide open the drawer of the nightstand and smile down at a pair of steel handcuffs and a set of keys, resting comfortably in the drawer next to a Gideon Bible and a comic book showing big-breasted women having sex with tentacle monsters.
I close the drawer and turn back to him, the cold metal warming in my palm. He's still blindfolded, still waiting, his chest rising and falling with measured breaths that betray his anticipation.
"Give me your hands," I command, climbing onto the bed and straddling his hips.
He hesitates for just a moment before raising his arms above his head. I guide his wrists to the ornate metal headboard, feeling the way his muscles tense as the steel clicks into place around first one wrist, then the other. The sound echoes in the quiet room like a promise.
Now he's completely at my mercy — blindfolded, bound, helpless beneath me. The thought sends a dark thrill through my chest, and for a moment I imagine how easy it would be to interrogate him like this. To demand answers about what Eng was really trying to tell me, about the shadows in Ricky's past that keep dancing at the edges of my vision.
The doubt creeps in like poison, whispering questions I'm not ready to hear. What if there's more to Vanessa's story? What if —
No, I push the thoughts away, burying them deep. I love him. That's what matters. Whatever truth might lurk in those dark corners, I'm not strong enough to face it. Not tonight.
Instead, I lean down and press my lips to his throat, feeling his pulse jump against my mouth. His skin tastes like salt and danger and something uniquely him. I trail kisses along his collarbone, mapping the landscape of scars and tattoos with my tongue, each mark a story I want to memorize.
"Adriana," he breathes, and my name on his lips sounds like a prayer.
My hands explore the hard planes of his chest, fingers tracing the ink that decorates his skin like a roadmap of pain and survival. I love this man beneath me. I love him, and I want to keep him. But even as my fingers wander over him, my mind wanders, too, and drifts to a single name: my sister, Vanessa. Reaper and I could die tomorrow, or even sooner, doing whatever vile favor it is we need to do for Charlie Eng and his Triads, and I wonder if my sister felt this way before she died — swept up in love, facing an unknown future, fighting desperately to avoid thinking about her death.
Am I just repeating her mistakes?
“Where’d you go?” he whispers, his voice warm, calming, inviting, consuming, and I shake my head and smile.
“Nowhere. I’m right here,” I lie.
Another shake of my head, a sigh that I exhale while leaning down and pressing my lips to his chest. A desperate attempt to keep myself anchored to this moment, to him, to not be thrown about by the storm that seems to surround this wounded, broken, loving man.
I want him.
I love him, and I want him.
I hope — hope — that doesn’t cost me everything.
My mouth finds the hollow of his throat where his pulse hammers against my lips. I can taste the salt of his skin, feel the way his breathing catches when I drag my teeth gently across his collarbone. His body responds to every touch, every kiss, arching beneath me despite the restraints.
I map the constellation of scars across his chest with my fingertips, each one a story I'm learning by heart. The long thin line near his ribs from a knife fight he told me about. The puckered mark on his shoulder from a bullet that missed anything vital by millimeters. These are the marks of survival, of a man who has walked through hell and somehow made it out alive.
When my hands slide lower, tracing the defined muscles of his abdomen, he makes a sound low in his throat that sends heat spiraling through me. This is what I need to focus on — the way he responds to me, the way his body knows mine even when he can't see or touch.
"You're thinking too much," he murmurs, and I wonder how he can read me so well even blindfolded.
"Maybe," I admit, pressing a kiss just below his sternum.
He's right, though. My mind keeps drifting to dark places — to Vanessa, to questions I'm not ready to ask, to a future that feels as uncertain as smoke. But here, now, with him helpless beneath me and trusting me completely, I remember why I fell for him in the first place.
It wasn't just the magnetic pull of his damaged soul calling to mine. It was the way he looked at me that morning in the kitchen of our hideout, making me breakfast like it was the most natural thing in the world to want to treat me right, despite everything that’s happened between us. The way his eyes — those bright, impossible eyes — seemed to see past all my defenses to something deeper. Something I didn't even know existed.
He sees the darkness in me and doesn't flinch. Doesn't try to fix me or save me or convince me I'm something I'm not. He understands I need to fight for people who can't fight for themselves, that violence sometimes lives in the same space as justice in my heart. And somehow, impossibly, he loves me for it.
My lips trail lower, following the path my hands have traced. He strains against the handcuffs, a soft curse escaping him when I lavish attention on a particularly sensitive spot.
"Adriana — "
“Shhh," I whisper against his skin. "Let me."
