The hot tub waits for me on the back deck, steam rising off the surface like mist on a hot, wet road. I step to the edge and look down at the churning water, lit up red from below.
Scarlet.
Scarletta.
I step into the water. It's scalding. The heat coats the cold chill as I sink down. When the water reaches my collarbone, I close my eyes.
Silence. Steam. Tonight's work surfaces unbidden.
My cock is fully hard now.
I wrap my hand around it. The groan comes unbidden as I start stroking, slow and deliberate. Then I reach for the remote. I press the button, and the feed appears on the hundred-and-fifty-inch screen on the other side of the floor-to-ceiling windows.
And there she is.
My current obsession.
ScarletSins.
In this edit, she’s typing. Furiously. Hair unwashed for two days, clothes rumpled, hasn’t eaten since the day before. I've got a split screen going. One side from her webcam—looking directly at her face. the other side, her document, watching every single keystroke.
My pulse throbs in my cock, demanding and insistent.
The story she's writing in this cut is called "Prey."
It's a hybrid piece. PartThe Shining—hedge maze in a blizzard, heroine running from something she can't name. PartMeet Me in the Dark—damaged man trying to un-fuck a mind-fucked woman who doesn't trust salvation. Part Apollo and Daphne mythology—get back here, you beautiful fucking victim.
She has no idea that I read every word before she posts it. That her laptop connects to my server the moment she opens it up. That I see her corrections, her deletions, her moments of doubt when she highlights entire paragraphs and hovers over the delete key before changing her mind.
Prey was released last month. I watched her type every fucking sentence. This is my favorite part here…
His hand closes around my throat from behind. I don't scream. Can't. The maze walls press in on both sides, snow falling so thick I can't see three feet ahead. "Did you think you could run from me?" His voice is calm. Reasonable. Like I'm the irrational one for trying. "Did you really think I'd let you go?"
I claw at his wrist. He doesn't flinch.
"You're mine," he says against my ear. "You were mine the moment you walked into that room. The moment you signed your name. The moment you decided your body was worth selling."
My pulse throbs against his palm. He can feel it. I know he can.
"Please," I whisper.
"Please what?" His thumb presses into my jugular. Not enough to cut off air. Just enough to remind me he could. "Please stop? Please let you go? Or please fuck you right here in the snow until you forget you ever wanted to leave?"
She writes this shit because she needs it. Not wants—needs. The same way I need to cancel the darkness with the light of blood, she needs to be owned by something bigger than her small, suffocating life.
The stories aren't fiction. They're blueprints. Architectural renderings of her psyche laid bare in first-person present tense because that's how she experiences her own desperation—immediate, inescapable, happeningnow.
Every dominant in her stories sees through the protagonist's walls. Every one of them stalks, claims, corners, traps. Every single fucking one refuses to let her run.
And she comes back to this trope again and again.
Hedge mazes.
Basements.
Isolated cabins.
Locked rooms.
