Page 84 of Dominion’s Collar

"You."

She watches me for a long time. I let her look. Whatever she's searching for, she deserves to find it or fail to find it on her own terms.

"I need to know this part was real," she says. "Not what you told me. Not what you hid. This."

Her hand moves between us. The gesture encompasses the room, the collar, every scene we've shared. "If what I felt from you was another lie, tell me now."

"It wasn't."

"Then don't decide for me again. You took my choice away once. You don't take it again by telling me what I can or can't handle."

Everything in me is saying I've lost the right to touch her. That accepting what she's offering after what I just told her would be another version of the thing I despise.

She reads my hesitation and her eyes harden. "That's you making the decision again."

Refusing her now would mean my guilt matters more than her choice. I've already decided for her once. The result of that decision is standing in front of me with dry eyes and a collar she hasn't removed.

"Kneel," I say.

She kneels.

Not because she's forgiven me. Not because everything is settled between us. She kneels because the submission is hers, and she refuses to let my failure make it false.

"Hands behind your back."

Her hands clasp at the small of her back. Her spine is straight. Her breathing deepens.

I walk a slow circle around her. The corset frames her waist. The thong is a thin line across her hips. The collar holds the only light in the room, the ruby a dark ember against her skin.

"I choose this," she says. And the words carry a weight they've never carried before, because she knows everything and she's choosing anyway.

"This doesn't fix us," she adds.

"I know."

"And it doesn't mean I forgive you."

"I know."

I reach down and hook one finger under the collar. Tilt her chin up until her eyes meet mine.

She isn't offering the trust I had before. What's in her face is harder and more expensive. A woman claiming something that belongs to her, from a man who nearly ruined it.

I unlace the corset with unhurried slowness, each hook releasing the structure that holds her shape. The fabric loosens. Her ribs expand with a breath that shudders through her.

I draw the corset away and drop it on the floor. Her skin is bare except for the collar and the thong, and the flush spreading across her collarbones has nothing to do with temperature.

"On the table. Face up."

She climbs onto the padded surface and lies back. Her hands stay behind her until I pull them free and press them flat against the table at her sides.

"Don't move your hands. I don't care what your body wants. Your hands stay where I put them until I tell you otherwise."

Her fingers splay against the leather surface. Her eyes stay on mine. Daring me.

I start with my hands on her shoulders. Press down. Not restraint. Weight. The kind of pressure that tells a body to stop fighting.

I drag my palms slowly across her collarbones, down the center of her sternum, over her ribs. Her skin is warm under my hands, and the warmth deepens everywhere I touch, as if her body is answering a question I haven't asked yet. She arches into the contact, and what escapes her is small, involuntary, shorn of every defense she brought into this room.