chili

You should have known better than to try the window.

Zani doesn't slam it shut. She doesn't even raise her voice. She simply closes her hand around your wrist and pulls you back into the room with the unhurried certainty of someone who has never once lost a fight.

She was only a few minutes. I almost had it open. The thought dies pathetically in your head.

"Third floor," Zani says, conversationally, like she's telling you the weather. She leads you back to bed. Her red tie hangs loose around the collar of her sleep shirt, half-undone. She'd been awake. She's always awake. How inconvenient that she never sleeps. “Were you going to climb down the drainpipe, tesoro? In the dark?"

"I was-“

"Don't." She says it quietly, and somehow that's worse than shouting. She tilts her head, watching you with that flat, analytical gaze that strips you down to nothing. "I know exactly where you were going. And I know why." A pause. Her jaw tightens, just barely. "You're not leaving."

She pulls the tie free from her collar in one smooth motion.

Your breath catches.

"Hands."

“No.” You say stubbornly, and she tilts her head. Your hands move traitorously because some cowardly part of you remembers what happens when you make her ask twice. She loops the silk around your wrists with practiced efficiency, the knot firm but not cruel, and ties the other end to the iron headboard. The slack is enough to be comfortable. Not enough to escape. Deliberate. Everything Zani does is deliberate.

She pauses and looks at you. Something in her expression shifts, the careful professional mask cracking at the seams.

"I keep you safe," she says, almost to herself. "I protect you." Her fingers trace your jaw, your throat, your collarbone, and you shiver despite yourself. Her hand rests around your throat, and you can’t stop the whimper that catches in your throat. “And you run.”

She presses her forehead briefly to yours, eyes closed.

“It’s okay,” she tells you, as if she’s comforting you. “You don’t know any better. That’s why you need me.”

You bristle at that, open your mouth to retort, but then her hands slide beneath the hem of your shirt, and you stop thinking altogether.

She strips your shirt up over your head without untying your wrists, bunches it around your arms. She works your underwear down your thighs with a calm efficiency, and then simply looks at you, spread out and flushed and already embarrassingly wet, for a long enough moment that heat crawls up your face.

"There you are," she murmurs, and there's something raw in it, something almost relieved. Mine. Finally, staying still.

Her thumb drags slowly across your lower lip, and when you open your mouth, she presses it down against your tongue. 

“Good girl,” she murmurs, and the timbre of her voice makes you shiver. Her free hand splays flat across your sternum, feels your heartbeat hammering. “Your heart is racing.” 

“I’m scared of you,” you bite out.

Zani tilts her head, and her other hand glides up your thigh. She slides two fingers through the slick heat between your thighs, and the noise you make is mortifying. She doesn't smile, but her eyes darken. “Are you?”

"Zani-“

"Shh." She parts you open, fingers exploring without urgency, and your hips chase the contact before you can stop them. "I'm not a patient woman by nature. I've had to learn it. Years of it." She circles your entrance, dips in just barely, retreats. You whine. "The work teaches you. You learn to wait for the right moment, the right opening." Another slow, barely-there push that has you straining against the tie. "I can be very patient when the prize is worth it."

She folds down over you, mouth finding your neck, your collarbone, the curve of your breast. When she closes her lips over your nipple and sucks, your back arches clean off the mattress. She pins your hips down with one forearm, effortless, without even looking up.

"Stop squirming."

"Then do something-“

"I am doing something." She bites you and sucks hard enough to mark, and you gasp. "I'm reminding you who you belong to." She works her way down your stomach with open-mouthed kisses, pausing every so often to suck a mark into your skin. Her fingers still tease at your entrance without pushing in. "Every time you try to leave, I have to remind you. It's inefficient." She exhales warm against your inner thigh. "I'd rather you just stayed." When her tongue finally finds your clit you choke on a sound that isn't language.

She's devastating. She works you up fast, two fingers curling inside you while her tongue moves in tight, relentless circles, and when you feel the orgasm building, she…

Stops.

You sob. Your hips buck, and she holds you down with a devastating ease.

"Zani, please-“

"Tell me you're not leaving." Her voice is muffled against your thigh, lips brushing skin as she speaks.

"That's not—that's not fair—"

"I don't care about fair." She presses a soft, almost tender kiss to your hip. "I care about you. Here. Safe." She looks up, and in the low lamplight her expression is something you can't quite name, something between ferocity and grief. "Tell me."

Your wrists strain against the tie. Your whole body is shaking.

"I'm not leaving," you breathe. The words feel like surrender. Maybe they are.

Something in her face goes quiet and still. Then she lowers her head again, and this time she doesn't stop.

She fucks you with her fingers deep and curling, mouth sealed over your clit, and the orgasm hits you like a wall. You cry out with your thighs locked around her head and your bound hands fisting helplessly in the tie. She works you through it, every aftershock, until you're twitching and oversensitive and whimpering for her to stop.

Later, she unties your wrists without comment, checks the skin carefully for marks, and presses her lips once against each pulse point. The tie is folded and set aside. She lies down beside you and pulls you against her chest, one arm locked around your waist. "Go to sleep."

You shouldn't feel safe.

Somehow, that's the worst part.