Caris Roane on bondage and trust
Caris Roane, author of Savage Chains, shares how she logically incorporated BDSM into her Men in Chains series.
Caris: With the extraordinary success of Fifty Shades of Grey, the idea of "bondage" as a part of sex-play has become a topic of conversation everywhere. Does it come out of the nature of sex in our culture or is it something inherent in male-female relationships generally — though perhaps not at such an extreme as a bondage scenario.
Most of my heroes to date are vampires, but never your typical vampire. My tortured men, even with fangs, have hearts that beat, very human-like needs and, of course, can take the sexual experience to a new level for their women. When I decided to add a BDSM touch to the Men in Chains series, I needed an angle that made sense to me. In Savage Chains, I decided to explore the issue of sex-slavery as one more way to look at the concept of bondage.
My beleaguered heroine, Angelica, not only gets caught up in the world of sex-slavery through an unexpected abduction, but must come to terms with bondage in all its forms. She meets the hero, Reyes, in the context of a heinous sex-slavery machine called the Starlin Group. Reyes is one of its key players and she soon gets caught in his web. As an acknowledged slaver, Reyes frightens her. Having known him from a nightclub she attend in her hometown of Newport Beach, Calif., she doesn't know how she could have ever been attracted to this man. And now that he has her in chains, what does he intend to do with her? Will she die at his hands?
As the story unfolds, Reyes is not all he seems to be and Angelica has some hard choices to make. Will she stick it out with him? Will she play the bizarre role he wants her to play? Can she trust him?
I loved that Reyes has a mission to destroy the Starlin Group and that he has powerful personal reasons for going after the sex-slave operation. When he was a teenager, he was abducted and bound to a sadistic mistress and held in captivity for a century, always promising revenge. His whole life has been building to this mission and he's fully invested.
His prime goal has been to receive an invitation to join the Starlin Group, and he has spent millions of his personal fortune to develop and sustain his façade. Once he's able to get the much-prized invitation, he will be able to infiltrate Starlin, discover its administrative core, and tear the despicable organization down to cinders.
His plan was cooking along just fine, until a human woman he cares about gets abducted by a Starlin operative and she ends up at auction at a major black-tie Starlin event.
Throughout the story, Angelica will grapple with three issues: what it is to engage in sex with her man on an equal basis, what it is to experience bondage scenarios with Reyes, both as a dominant and a submissive, and finally what would happen to her if she ever fell victim to Starlin and ended up lost in the sex-slavery system of the vampire underworld.
Angelica had always been deeply attracted to Reyes, but when she discovers he's not only a vampire, but appears to be part of a horrible sex-slavery world, her disgust fuels her determination to escape. But she's torn because her desire for him is like nothing she's ever known before and on a deep, instinctive level, she trusts him.
In many ways, romance, whether with bondage or not, always comes down to trust. Can a woman trust her man enough to truly give herself to him? Will he treat her with respect throughout all the difficulties of their long-term relationship? Will he love her no matter what? Will he stick by her?
Bondage becomes a powerful metaphor of the issues in all passionate relationships and in the end we commit because we trust.
As the story unfolds, Angelica must choose to trust Reyes despite the evidence all around her. The deeper the game gets and the more entrenched her position as Reyes's sex-slave becomes, the more she must place herself in Reyes's hands whether bound in soft silk scarves or heavy chains.
When it comes to bondage, trust is everything.
Find out more about Caris and her books at www.carisroane.com.