“You wanted power?” he murmurs near my ear, his voice soaked in heat and mockery and dark amusement. “Then here. Hold still and feel how powerless you really are.”
My cheek presses against the silk sheets, face turned to the side.
I can’t see him anymore, can only hear him moving behind me.
I only hear the ominous sound of him undoing his belt—slow, measured, each clink of metal against metal deliberate and cruel—and the hiss of the leather sliding free from fabric loops makes my stomach twist with sick anticipation.
I know he’s not going to use it on my skin, not immediately.
Not yet, not until he’s made me wait for it, made me imagine it, made me beg for it.
He’s going to use it in my mind first, let the fear build and compound.
He always does—the psychological torture always precedes the physical.
“Say thank you,” he whispers into the charged air.
I don’t speak, lips pressed together in stubborn silence.
So he waits with that infinite, terrifying patience.
“Say it, Tahlia.”
Still, I stay silent, clinging to the last shred of defiance.
Then the belt hits the bed beside me with a sharp crack that echoes through the room—and even though it doesn’t touch my skin, even though it’s nowhere near me, I jerk violently, body betraying my fear.
“Say. It.”
I swallow hard, throat clicking.
Breathe through my nose.
Grit my teeth until my jaw aches.
“Thank you,” I finally whisper, the words tasting like ash.
And then comes the worst thing of all—silence again, heavy and expectant.
Which is worse than the threat, worse than the anticipation, worse than anything because when Hook punishes you, it isn’t fast or straightforward or merciful.
It’s slow, methodical, designed with surgical precision.
Deliberate in its cruelty.
Designed to make you feel it not just in your body but in your identity, in the parts of yourself that no one else ever got close enough to wound, in the secret places where you keep the things that make you who you are.
He shifts behind me, the mattress dipping under his weight.
Then warmth—his palm—spreads across the curve of my arse, squeezing once like he’s testing how much of me still belongs to me, like he’s taking inventory of what he’s about to claim.
“I’ll let you cum again one day, little fairy,” he says, almost gently, almost tenderly if you didn’t listen to the words themselves. “But not before you learn how to bleed for it, how to earn it properly.”
The first strike doesn’t come fast, doesn’t arrive with the sudden violence I’ve braced myself for.
It doesn’t need to rush—he has all the time in the world, and he knows it.
He presses the belt flat against my skin first, trailing it like a line of fire from my hip to the curve of my arse, dragging the cool leather across heated flesh, and it’s worse than if he’d just hit me already.
