Sacred Revelations by Harte Roxy Read Free Book Online Page B

knees scraping against the hot pavement. “Please, stop,” I begged, hoping for release, but he didn’t release me right away. I writhed in agony on my knees, finding no escape from the strength held in just one of his hands. “You’re hurting me!”
    “Isn’t that the point, Sophia? I can hurt you. I will hurt you, whenever I want. This pain isn’t because you didn’t obey me with immediate obedience, although you would have earned it for that reason alone, this pain is to make you focus. I am the center of your world now. No one and nothing else will distract you from me.”
    I laid my forehead on his knee, saying “I’m sorry.” I think I meant it, but more I was just trying to escape the power of his eyes and the truth caught there.
    He released my arm to rummage in his saddlebag, I kept my head on his knee, soaking in the warmth of his leg, beginning to feel how right it could feel to sit, neck bowed, on my knees. With my head in his lap, I wondered, if I surrendered completely would it stop being role-playing? It seemed like with Garrett it was role-playing.
    The sun pounded into my back, heating me, baking me, but I didn’t lift my head. A drop of sweat trickled down the side of my face, but I didn’t wipe it away, and even when my knees were too sore to kneel any longer and my curiosity got the best of me because he held something in his hands that I felt him twisting, I didn’t move. I didn’t look. I surrendered to the nothingness that pressing my forehead into his knee afforded me. With no thought, no cares, I seemed to float and even the pain in my knees disappeared.
    “Lift your face to me.”
    I obeyed.
    “I think you need something to focus your attention, so I’ve made you a collar out of hemp rope.” He held it out to me. “Feel it.”
    I touched it and it felt rough. It looked like something I would have created in junior high art, macramé or something very similar. I watched him lift it, fitting it around my throat like a choker, adjusting it until he was satisfied. “Bend your head down.”
    I did and he cinched it down, looping the ends to close it, completing the knot pattern with it on my neck, leaving no loose ends, nothing to untie. It was a solid circlet of rope.
    Swallowing hurt, the roughness of the rope pressed directly over my larynx. “It’s too tight,” I complained.
    “You’re not turning blue, it’s not too tight.”
    “It hurts when I swallow,” I tried to explain.
    “Then it’s perfect. Every time you swallow, you’ll remember that I am the center of your universe.”

Chapter 3
    “For, what other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!”
    -Nathaniel Hawthorn, The House of Seven Gables
    Thomas
    I enter her small room, but she is unaware I am here. Caged, her head droops, cushioned only by the cervical collar I added to help her sleep.
    She is beautiful in sleep, beautiful always, but especially asleep. I hate to wake her. For the first time in months, she glows. She is healthy, well-fed, eating six to eight high-protein, high-carbohydrate meals a day, and oddly, caged, she sleeps.
    Kneeling by her cage, I stroke her face, softly, until she becomes aware.
    “Wake-up!” I shout.
    She blinks and rolls her eyes up at me, but doesn’t move her head. Wide-eyed by her abrupt awakening, her ocean-colored eyes remind me of the blue-green waters surrounding my homeland. Her eyes are made even more exotic by their almond shape and the utter trust that rests in their depths.
    It is hard for her to lift her face to meet my eyes, her joints painful and tight from lack of movement. The last twelve hours she has barely moved at all, and when she does, I see the pain written on her face. The next hour will be the worst for her. I don’t plan to make it easy.
    Dialing the combination on the four locks holding the cage closed, I watch her, and her eyes follow my every move. Her tongue darts out to lick her lips in anticipation