Then walk out onto a plank.
Suspended in the air.
Above a jungle.
Naked.
I can't. I can't do this. It's notpossible. I'm not capable of this. It's not within my abilities. I'm not—I don't have the capacity for this. I'm not the kind of person who climbs trees. I'm not athletic. I barely leave my apartment. I'm the girl who gets winded walking up four flights of stairs.
Climbing sixty feet up into a tree isn't in my… my…constitution.
Constitution? What the hell, Scarletta? The word floats through my panicked brain like it's auditioning for a role it doesn't deserve. It's not in my constitution. My fuckingconstitution.
Who even says that? What am I, some regency-era damsel clutching her pearls? Some fantasy princess fainting onto a chaise lounge because the prospect of physical exertion is too vulgar to contemplate?
Christ. I sound ridiculous. I sound like I'm writing dialogue for a character I'd mock in someone else's manuscript.
Oh, my God. I'm spiraling. I need to chill. Zen. Calm…
This is… safe. It has to be. I crane my neck back, squinting up through the canopy at the distant platform—barely visible through layers of leaves and dappled sunlight. The wood upthere looks thick. Solid. Sturdy, even from this impossible distance.
Don't think about how far away it actually is. Don't think about how you can't possibly assess its structural integrity from sixty goddamn feet below. This is the masked man we're talking about here. Control freak extraordinaire. The man who orchestrated an entire auction, who rigged every detail of my arrival, who probably has backup plans for his backup plans.
He's obsessive. Meticulous. Pathologically thorough.
It's got to be safe. It has to be. He wouldn't put me in actual danger—not the kind that involves plummeting to my death from a tree platform in the middle of the jungle.
Right?
I take a breath and hold it as I read the poem again. Slower this time.
Bend yourself across the wood and wait for what's in store.
He's going to spank me.
He's going to make me climb up there, restrain myself, and then he's going to?—
My pussy clenches.
Oh god.
I picture it. His hand coming down hard on my bare ass while I'm bent over a beam sixty feet in the air, helpless and exposed and completely at his mercy. Will he use his palm? A crop? That leather paddle I wrote about inPrey?
Will he make it hurt?
Or will he alternate—pain and pleasure, the way he did at the mansion when he spanked me and fingered me at the same time until I didn't know which sensation to focus on, until my brain short-circuited and I came so hard Iblacked out?
I watched that footage so many times.
Sitting in my glamping tent, wearing his Harvard shirt, laptop balanced on my knees. I'd replay the part where he strapsme to the exam table. The part where he makes me recite my own story while fucking me with a pen and his fingers. The part where I squirt for the first time in my life and sob afterward because I didn't know my body could do that.
I watched it until I memorized every angle. Every camera view. The way my face looked when I came. The way his masked face looked when he watched me fall apart.
I want him to touch me like that again.
Ineedhim to.
Even if it means climbing this nightmare tree.
