Her face fell, but she caught it and shook her head. “No, you’re right. And same.”

I lifted a hand and cupped her cheek. “Also, I’m not too proud to admit that I’m in so much pain that I don’t think I can worship you the way you deserve right now.”

She nodded, her expression full of understanding. “I can wait until you feel better. I know it’ll be worth it.” She lifted a hand to show me her wrinkly fingertips. “And I’m starting to prune, so I’m good with getting out of here.”

I turned away so she wouldn’t see me smile. Should I have felt bad for lying to my girlfriend? Maybe. But I had a feeling that when I woke her up in a few hours, she’d be more than willing to forgive me for it afterward.

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Chapter 25Aly

Asound woke me in the middle of the night. I’d been having the nicest dream about…something. It was already fading as I cracked my eyes open, but I thought it involved cold beer and a warm, sandy beach. What I wouldn’t give for a mid-winter Caribbean vacation. I had some money saved up. Maybe sometime during the next two weeks, Josh and I could slip away to –

My ceiling was awash with red. Why was my ceiling red?

Oh, fuck, was my house on fire?

I tried to jerk upright, but a yank on my arms had me floundering back onto the mattress. I craned my head up, panicking, and froze. There were black silk cuffs around my wrists, and the ropes binding them led straight to my headboard, where a complex series of knots that looked impossible to unravel secured them.

Fear punched through my lungs, stealing my breath away. Josh wasn’t in the bed beside me. We’d been curled up together when I fell asleep, with Fred perched on top of us. They were both gone now, and I must have been half out of it with sleep because all I could think was that Brad wasn’t actually dead, and he’d broken back into my house to finish what he’d started.

“Oh, good,” a deep, modulated voice tolled out. “You’re awake.”

I snapped my gaze up.

There he sat facing the foot of the bed, shirtless and lit with the deep crimson light he often used in his videos: the Faceless Man. His mask looked more threatening than I remembered, the cheekbones sharper, the black eyes deeper. His massive frame dwarfed my small armchair, making it look like something made for a child. Why had I never realized how ominous his tattoos were? Dark, twisted forms crawled up his arms like gothic nightmares emerging from hell.

One hand grasped a wicked-looking knife I’d never seen before, curved and razor-sharp – something made for skinning prey. The way he held it so casually, half dangling from his fingers as he twirled it in an idle circle, made it seem even more dangerous. Only someone well versed with weapons handled them with such little regard, as if they knew the tool so intimately it had become an extension of their arm.

It’s just Josh, I tried to tell myself, but the knowledge did little to calm my racing pulse.

Gone was my kind, funny boyfriend. In his place sat a man who radiated menace. With the mask on, it was like he’d become someone else. Or maybe that wasn’t right. Maybe he was still the same Josh I’d grown to care about so deeply, and wearing the mask allowed him to bring out a darker side of his personality that he kept hidden during the day. One that craved my fear as much as my desire.

He lifted the knife and pointed it at me, head tilting sideways in an unnerving, almost alien way because it was such an un-Josh-like gesture. I checked him over again to reassure myself that it was, in fact, my boyfriend and not a different masked stranger who’d broken into my house. The bruised ribs confirmed his identity, but my heart raced on.

“Spread them,” he said.

I glanced down to see the sheets pooled at my waist. I still wore the matching black satin tank and shorts I’d gone to bed in, and for that, I was grateful. It was bad enough that I’d slept through being tied up, but if I’d slept through being stripped, I would have had to book an appointment with a sleep clinic to see what the hell was wrong with me.

The Faceless Man’s tone brooked no argument, so I propped myself up on my elbows and slowly parted my bent legs. He leaned forward just enough to drag the sheets off them, torturously slow, and my skin was already so hypersensitive that I felt every inch of cotton slide over me like wandering hands.

What was he about to do to me?

He stood in a fluid motion. The red light must have been set on the floor somewhere near the foot of my bed because he bisected the beam, his massive form outlined on my far wall like some kind of kinky bat signal.

Turn it on, and he will come – pun intended.

The thought made me want to smile, but I had a feeling that it would only get me into trouble, and I was deep enough as it was. Now wasn’t the time to taunt the man who’d tied me up. Maybe after this was over and I knew what his retribution entailed, I would start acting bratty, but until then, I was too chickenshit to pile any more punishable offenses onto my plate.

He twirled the knife again, and my gaze dropped to it. So far, we’d only briefly talked about our shared bedroom fantasies, but we hadn’t gotten around to outlining just how far each of us was willing to take them, and the realization that he and I might have very different stopping points suddenly made me nervous.

No safe words, I reminded myself. If he pushed me too far, I could simply tell him to stop. After everything we’d been through, I trusted him enough to keep his word that he would.

He slid a knee onto the bed between my spread legs. The hand not holding the knife landed by my hip, and he leaned forward, braced over me. Fuck, he was big. His shoulders were so wide they blocked my view of the ceiling. Muscles rippled across his chest and down his torso as he balanced in place. Somehow, being around him so much recently had numbed me to our size difference, but looking up at him now drove home just how large he was.

A flash of metal had me dropping my gaze to the weapon he held. I was tied up, with a knife-wielding masked man looming over me. This was a fantasy I’d had for months, but the reality of it was much different. Yes, I was turned on. I wasn’t wearing panties beneath my silk shorts, and I could already feel the fabric of them soaking through with my desire. But I was also more afraid than I thought I would be. All I had to go on was my instinct to trust Josh and his insistence that he didn’t want to hurt me. That it was the moment my fear turned to lust he craved. If I was wrong, this could go so, so badly for me.

It only made me wetter for him.

The sharp edge of fear tipped my desire into the realm of darkness and heightened my other senses, making my skin so sensitive that every inch of me was turning into an erogenous zone. The Faceless Man lifted his knife and dragged the tip up the inside of my thigh, and I shivered beneath him, fighting back a moan.

He studied the blade's progress before lifting his soulless eyes to mine. “You’re beautiful when you’re scared.”

God, that was fucked up.

I loved it.

Only the threat of the knife kept me still beneath him. If not for its presence, I would have been writhing. My pussy throbbed, and I needed something to ease the ache, friction against my clit, or better yet, his monstrous cock filling me up. I’d never forget the initial sting of stretching around it, trying to take something so large and hard into my body. I was still a little sore from our first tryst, and I knew it would make this second time so much better – more painful at first, but then pure bliss when he was buried to the hilt, and I relaxed into pleasure.

He sucked in a breath above me, no doubt seeing the desire writ across my face. I used to think it was bad to wear every emotion so openly, but the way he reacted to them made me never want to change.