vii
I was still mulling myself over when the lights in the room guttered and dropped like a candle flame. There was rustling by the fucking bed, but I barely heard it, and didn’t turn to look. I didn’t turn to look yet, not until the screen flickered back to a tinted window and I heard a low, hissing voice far behind me: “Ahh…” There was a sound like the smacking of lips. “Dinnertime at last… Come, my plump little Argent. Fly toward the flame.”
I sat up on the couch. A single light sputtered at the far edge of the room, an orange glow behind the gauzy silhouette of the fucking bed. A semi-sheer canopy had descended from the frame above the bed, and swags of drapery drooped around the posts and up to the walls and fell to wispy heaps on the floor. It seemed like … like a den, or a nest. A dark figure crouched deep in the nest’s shadowed center – she was obscured in the folds of the curtains, but her hand slipped out, and a hooked finger beckoned. “Welcome to my parlor.” I left the robe and the slippers by the couch and descended the stairs of the reverse dais, slow to feel each step in the dark. As I reached the bed, I realized that the drapery was patterned with spider webs.
A gloved hand caught my wrist and pulled me through the curtain, twisting it behind me to pin me face down on the bed. Immediately I was swaddled between sheets and thighs, fingers and pillows, and the not-infrequent nibbling kiss. A blindfold slipped over my eyes. Over the next several minutes, as the sheets continued to tighten around me, I was rolled onto my back and each of my limbs was drawn free in turn and stretched toward a corner of the bed, where it was tied into place. My captor hummed contentedly as she crawled over me, working efficiently. I didn’t struggle, but I don’t think it would have mattered – she was quick and deliberate and surprisingly strong. Each time she flipped me or repositioned me or tightened the silk sheet cocoon, she ended the motion with a pin that kept me pressed, immobile, between her body and the mattress.
Then she was done. I was on my back and spread-eagled, though my body was still firmly swaddled. I could tell she was satisfied with her work – I felt her strum each of my bonds and heard her cluck her tongue.
She settled back onto my hips and pushed the blindfold up over my forehead. My eyes had adjusted, so even in the low light I could see her clearly now. There was no trace of the sweet, saucy schoolgirl from my apartment; she had been replaced by a dark, lustily wicked monster. Her full lips, painted a bright, bloody red, stood out from a porcelain-white face and twisted into a closed, satisfied smirk. Her eyes were heavily shadowed, and her black lids drooped dangerously beneath arched brows. Her black hair was sleek and smooth, and pulled back to a tight knot behind her head.
She had begun to carefully loosen the sheets swaddling my chest, exposing my tender neck and chest. She wore a black stocking catsuit that clung to her curves and wrinkled at just the right places; her belly was covered by a satin hourglass, red as her lips. The hard, curved points at the fingertips of her gloves stroked like claws down my cheek, under my jaw, to the soft part of my neck above my collarbone. Her smile parted, and she bared a pair of sharp, glistening fangs. Her tongue flicked against them as she spoke, giving her a slight lisp.
“Such a gift for me to unwrap. And now that I’ve caught you in my web, my juicy argent, you must know your doom is near. Do you fear me? Before I have my way with you, I’ll tell you a truth: all spiders bite, but it isn’t the bites that are deadly. It’s what we do afterward…” She licked her lips. The lights of the room disappeared as her shadow fell over me.
