I lean forward, lowering my voice to something more intimate—almost kind, if you didn’t listen to the words themselves.
“I don’t want your submission, Tahlia. I want your complicity in your own destruction.”
Her breath stutters in her chest, the rhythm breaking.
There it is, visible in the way her body tenses.
That’s the moment of true recognition.
The second her body registers the real danger—not the pain I can inflict, not the physical restraint—but the truth that’s far more terrifying: I’m not trying to break her against her will. I’m trying to make her want to break, to make her crave it, to make her complicit in her own unravelling.
She does want it, on some level she’s not ready to acknowledge.
Not in some romantic, soft-hearted way that would make this easier to stomach. Not in the fairytale she stopped believing in a long time ago after whoever hurt her first taught her that love was just another word for control.
In the way survivors sometimes get addicted to the edge of a blade, in the way pain becomes familiar and therefore safe.
The way moths learn to fall in love with fire because at least the heat is honest.
“You’ll thank me again,” I say, rising slowly from the chair. “But next time, I want you to mean it from somewhere deeper.”
I leave her like that without another word.
Bound. Ruined. Thinking.
Because that’s where the real transformation happens, in the spaces between.
Not in the act itself.
In the silence that follows, when she’s alone with what she’s becoming.
She thinks silence means I’m not watching her anymore.
That just because the monitors don’t hum audibly, and the house doesn’t creak with my footsteps, and her throat isn’t screaming my name into the empty air, I’ve disappeared into shadow and left her alone.
I watch her every second I’m not physically in that room—her pacing like a caged animal, her clawing at the walls, her pathetic little rebellions stacked like shattered glass around the cell she calls a bedroom.
She thinks she’s clever for moving the bed in front of the door like I couldn’t rip it off its hinges if I wanted to, like that flimsy barricade could stop me. She thinks she’s winning something because she didn’t cry last night, because she curled her body against the wall like a weapon and waited for the monster to strike.
The real horror isn’t when I enter the room.
It’s when I don’t, when I leave her suspended in anticipation and now, she’s learning that lesson.
I watch her stumble back from the sink through the camera feeds, shirt damp with water, fingers trembling—not from fear exactly, not from withdrawal, but from rage that’s still burning hot. God, that fucking rage of hers.
That’s what keeps me from storming through the door, from putting her on her knees just for the way she looked at me yesterday when I told her she was mine and she had the audacity to laugh.
She doesn’t believe me yet, doesn’t accept the reality.
That’s fine, perfectly fine.
They never do at first, in the beginning.
I press my thumb to the screen, right where her lip bleeds from where she bit it too hard in defiance, the mark of rebellion cracked red across a mouth that should be wrapped around my cock instead of spitting curses.
It isn’t about sex, though. It never was.
It’s about truth—and how she fights it, how she twists beneath it, how she can scream all she wants but she still ends up naked in my house with a collar she pretends not to feel tightening around her throat.
