4. Vera
This is insane. This is Kane. The man who once spent twenty minutes explaining why my preferred coffee shop has “structurally unsound seating arrangements.” Except the way he’s looking at me right now, dark and controlled and absolutely certain. This isn’t that Kane at all.
And I have no idea what to do with that.
My mouth is dry. My skin feels too tight. And every nerve ending is screaming contradictory instructions.
Run. Stay. Stay quiet.
I retreat to the thing I do best when cornered in the same room as Kane Sinclair.
“Are you going to stand there all night, or actually do something?”
He rolls his shoulders. When his eyes find mine the man I’ve been talking to is still there — but underneath, something certain and unhurried has arrived that takes up all the space without apologizing for it.
This is Dom Kane. The one I never knew existed.
“Kneel.”
My knees want to buckle before my brain catches up. One word. No negotiation. No room for argument.
Years of fighting him, and the reflex fires before I can stop it.
“Make me.”
His smile is slow. “No. You’ll kneel because you choose to. Because you want what I can give you.” A pause. “Submission isn’t something I take from you, Vera. It’s something you give. Your power, offered freely to someone worthy of holding it.”
Oh fuck. He’s good at this.
“So choose.” Patient. Inexorable. “Kneel because you want to. Or leave because you don’t. But make a choice.”
He guides me back two steps with a hand at my shoulder, away from the bed, onto the rug at the center of the room. “Here.”
My knees hit the floor.
His hand settles on my shoulder, firm, grounding, warm.
“Good girl.”
Heat pools low and immediate.
“Color?”
Right. This is a scene. Negotiated.
“Green.”
“Perfect.” His hands adjust my position with precision. “Knees wider. Hands resting on your thighs.”
I obey.
“Stay.”
Every muscle wants to move to defy him. I hold still. My mind doesn’t. Already cataloguing — the distance between us, what comes next, how I’ll handle it when it does.
“You’re already trying to think your way through this.” A pause. “Analyzing. Planning. Maintaining control even while kneeling.”
He’s right. I hate that he’s right.
“I’m just —“
“I didn’t ask you to speak.”
My mouth closes.
Who does he think he is?
He moves in front of me, tips my chin up with one finger. “Close your eyes.”
I hesitate, because closing my eyes means giving up the last ground I have.
“That wasn’t a request, Vera.”
My eyes flutter shut.
Darkness. Only his presence and my own heartbeat, too loud in the quiet.
“That’s better.” His finger traces my jaw, light, almost teasing. “You came here to rest. To let someone else carry the weight. But you can’t do that while you’re busy trying to run the room.”
My eyes fly open. “I’m not trying to —“
He holds my gaze. Doesn’t blink. Doesn’t look away.
I press my lips together.
“Eyes closed.”
I shut them.
“The only words I need to hear from you are your safewords. Nothing else.”
A pause. The air shifts. “Now. I’m going to blindfold you. And you’re going to stop managing this. Understand?”
I’m not managing anything.
“Vera?”
“Yes, Sir,” I say, through my teeth.
He ties the blindfold back into place and I feel him move away, footsteps crossing the room, a drawer opening. He returns and his hands find the zipper at my back.
“Lift your arms.”
He removes the dress in one clean movement. Cool air hits my skin everywhere except the black strapless lace. Without sight to orient me, the room opens up, unknowable, and my brain immediately starts compensating: tracking his footsteps, reading his breathing, calculating where he is in the room.
There. Behind me. About two feet.
Something soft wraps around my wrists. Silk — cool and smooth. He binds them with practiced efficiency, each wrap distinct, the knot landing firm and considered against the inside of my wrist.
“Too tight?”
“No, Sir.” And then, because I can’t stop myself: “You’ve done this before?”
“Yes.”
“How many —”
“Vera.” The warning is quiet. Absolute. “This is not conversation. This is a scene. You don’t get to interview me while I have you bound.”
Heat floods my face. Because he’s right. He lifts my arms and secures the silk above me. The restraint pulls taut. I’m kneeling with my arms extended overhead and the position cracks my strategy open: I can’t move, can’t track him, can’t prepare. Just the sound of his breathing, and mine.
“Color?”
“Green. Though I’d note that the suspension point could be —“
“Could be what?”
“It could—” I stop.
“Go ahead,” he says. “Finish the sentence.”
“I just — the angle is —”
“Is it uncomfortable?”
“No.”
“Is it painful?”
“No.”
“Then it’s exactly where it should be.” He lets that land. “I’ve been doing this for years, Vera. I’ve thought about the angle. I’ve thought about all of it.” His voice settles into something certain. “Your job isn’t to assess my rigging. Your job is to feel it.”
I say nothing.
“Say it back to me.”
“My job is to feel it,” I say. Flat.
“Again. Like you mean it.”
“My job is —” I stop. Breathe. Something in my chest resists the words because meaning them requires releasing control I’m not sure I can release. “My job is to feel it.”
“Better.”
Then silence. And the waiting.
I count his footsteps; he moves left, pauses, moves again. I track the sound of a drawer. And hear ice shifting in a glass.
Ice.
I’ve read enough to know what comes with temperature play. So when the cold touch lands at my throat I’ve already braced for it, already calibrating my response.
I gasp anyway. Louder than intended.
Because knowing it’s coming and experiencing it are not the same thing, and my body doesn’t care what I’ve read.
He trails the ice slowly down between my breasts. Cold water follows, trickling down my sternum, and I shiver despite myself. He circles my nipples through the lace, the cold magnifying every nerve, and a sound escapes me that I didn’t choose.
Then his mouth, hot and immediate where the ice was.
The contrast detonates. My head falls back. I’m already bracing for where he’ll go next, chasing it in my mind before he’s moved.
He lifts his mouth away.
“Breathe,” he says.
“I —”
“You’re anticipating. Stop thinking. Try to feel it.”
He returns. And this time I try. Every thought I reach for, I let go. Not chasing where he’ll move next, not mapping it, not —
“You’re holding your breath,” he observes against my skin.
“I’m concentrating.”
He lifts away again. “That’s not the same as feeling it.”
“How is it not? You can’t just switch awareness off. If I’m not paying attention, how am I supposed to know what I’m even feeling, let alone—“ I stop myself, restart. “Concentration is how I feel things. It’s how I feel everything. You’re asking me to do the one thing that doesn’t work.”
A pause.
“Did you just correct me?”
“I’m making an argument.”
“Vera.” His hand settles warm at my hip, and it doesn’t move.
“There’s a difference between paying attention and running an analysis.
One lets the feeling in. The other stands guard at the door and inspects it first.” His thumb traces a slow circle.
“You’ve been doing the second one all night.
So stop arguing with me and let me show you the first.”
I close my mouth.
He returns to the ice, to the heat that follows, and I try, I genuinely try, to stop monitoring. To stop bracing and calibrating and rating my own responses. But my brain keeps running its commentary: Is this right? What does he want? What should I be giving him? Am I doing this correctly?
His hands move to the front clasp of my strapless bra. With one precise movement, it falls away.
Then his mouth is on my breast without warning and I cry out.
“There,” he says with approval. “That reaction was honest.”
His hand smooths down my side. Down further. Finding the edge of my panties.
“I’m going to touch you,” he says. “And you’re going to receive it. Not direct it. Feel it.”
“I know how to —”
“Vera.” The patience in his voice has a ceiling and I found it. “The next time you tell me what you know how to do, I stop. And we sit here in silence until you’re ready to stop managing and start trusting.” A pause. “Are we clear?”
My jaw tightens.
“Are we clear?”
“Yes, Sir.”
His fingers slide the lace aside.
Cool air skims my skin. Then his touch, slow, one single fingertip, barely there.
Then the lace slides back.
“No —” The protest escapes.
His hands still.
I shift my hips toward him, encouraging, offering a better angle.
“That,” he says, “is you steering.”
His palm presses flat against my hip.
“I wasn’t —“
“You were,” he says, patient but certain. “You’re trying to guide me to get what you want.” A pause. “I want you to notice that you’re doing it. Not because I’m angry. Because you need to see it.”
I say nothing. Because I did see it. I saw it and I kept doing it anyway.
His fingers return through the lace, stroking slowly, building without giving me anything to hold onto.
Then a vibrator, low setting, pressed directly against me. I jerk against the silk above me.
“Color?”
“Green.” And then, before I’ve decided to: “If you moved it slightly left—”
The device disappears.
Silence.
The silk at my wrists is the only thing keeping time.
After what feels like forever, the vibrator returns — higher setting, his position, not mine. Not where I angled for. He works me higher, patient and relentless, and when I arch toward the sensation, chasing more, he’s already moved.
He isn’t there.
I wait for the frustration to rise the way it always does. The need to redirect, recalibrate, find another angle.
It doesn’t come.
My hips settle. My hands stop pulling against the silk. Something in my chest that has been braced since I walked through that door goes — not quiet exactly. Empty. The way a room sounds after everyone has left it.
And into that emptiness, something else arrives.
Not surrender. But his voice. Damon’s. Arriving without warning the way it always does, from somewhere I thought I’d filed it.
Look at you. An hour and you still can’t stop steering. You can’t stop managing.