She stared at him a few minutes. “It just hit me, what he did, Sir. Boone with the size stuff, Kenny with the ritual, the schedule, and you were chaos. In my head, it was like Kenny was on drums, Boone was the bass guitar, and you were the crazy guitarist jumping around on stage doing crazy shit, but it was all like, a composition. A symphony of pain.”
She looked at Kenny. “Thank you, Sir. Seriously. I mean, it was hell, but I sank into it.”
“Good. That was the idea.”
“I’m asking the questions right now,” Silas said before everyone went all sappy. “Serious question. Do you need me to back off the degradation a week or two?”
“I don’t know. Maybe, Sir, but maybe not. I need a couple of days to process what happened. Kenny paused the whole schedule until the day after Christmas. Maybe we talk before stuff starts back?”
“That was my plan,” Kenny said. “Morning schedule starts back the day after Christmas, evening schedule the following day, and you don’t go back on your full routine until we all go back to work.”
“On a scale of one to ten,” Silas asked, “with ten being your actual psychological breaking point that you might not come back from, where were we?”
“After twelve hours, maybe a three or four? Three days of that, the shock collar, toilet, constantly dehumanized, maybe a seven?” She blew out a breath. “Sir.”
So, they’d barely scratched the surface. Silas’s dick would’ve gone hard if it hadn’t fucked her a zillion times the day before.
He’d already known shame and arousal were all twisted up in her head, and he’d made use of it plenty before last night, but he saw so many new possibilities now. New boundaries to push her past, new lines to cross. But not right away. She clearly needed to process this before he took her deeper. Darker.
But Silas was the king of mindfucks, so he had to ask, “What did we not push hard enough? What do you wish we’d forced harder?”
It wasn’t idle curiosity, it was reconnaissance. Every answer was ammunition for next time. Or the next.
“Two things, Sir, and both had the time element, so you did the best you could, but… I’ve already told you I want days of the dehumanization thing, but…” She sighed. “I had no idea the hell of the pony. Ya’ll made it worse to try to enhance it, so… what, an hour worked like the long stretches usually do?”
“You were on it twenty-five minutes,” Kenny said.
“Well, I’d be open to discussing a regular horse with four good legs, a flat top, no weights on my ankles, and no sandpaper, for long enough to give me the full treatment. Sir.”
Her honesty floored him more than he’d admit. Wanting days-long scenes, the pony long enough to hurt, the cage, the dehumanization — things he’d expected to need years to normalize, she was asking for now. His cock twitched in his jeans, but he stayed still, lazy smile pasted in place. Wolves were good at playing the long game.
He couldn’t help but poke at her, though. “Eight to ten hours,” Silas said. “Rocking back and forth, deciding whether to hurt your clit, your cunt, or your asshole. Your core exhausted. No escape. Takes a long time to fully experience it.”
“Four or five hours,” Kenny said. “I’ll put it on the list to discuss in two weeks.”
He ignored Kenny and asked, “Did you learn something new about any of us?”
She nodded. “Yeah, actually. Kenny enjoyed some things that surprised me. Boone, too.” A huff. “More things for me to add to Kenny’s list. What did you learn about me?”
The hell with staying away with mindfucks. She’d asked, so he’d tell her. “More of when to push and when to pull back and let you simmer. Other ways shame and arousal work for you. Ideas for a few more things to throw at you based on your reactions. I figure you have a few taboo kinks you’ve never shared with anyone. The goal is to get you to trust me enough to tell them to me, eventually.”
She shook her head. “I wrote the biggest stuff down for Kenny. I didn’t hide anything. Didn’t hold anything back, Sir.”
He gave her a sly smile. “Oh, these will be things you haven’t admitted to yourself. Might take a year or two, but we’ll find them.”
“Did we cross any lines you didn’t know you had?” Boone asked, his voice soft.
“I thought shaving my head was too much, but fuck if it didn’t shoot me out of myself and make me someone else in the mirror.” She looked at Kenny, then back to Silas. “I don’t want ya’ll to do it much because I want to keep it extreme and unique, you know? But yeah, that’s going to be a shortcut to stripping my identity, Sir. I can’t think of anything besides the nasty food that went too far, and even that did the job of fucking with my head, making me less human.”
Silas leaned forward enough for her to feel the heat of his gaze. “That’s why I said it wasn’t just about the pain. It’s about stripping you clean.” He tilted his head. “And you loved it. Don’t bother denying it.”
Her cheeks flushed. Her scent betrayed her. He sat back, smug, and asked, “Do you remember everything? Are there gaps?”
“The thing on the table, tits-asshole-clit, it gets hazy toward the end, Sir. Not sure I took in everything said, or that happened. It isn’t that I don’t remember, just that I didn’t really take it in enough to remember it. Same with the last hour or so of the night. It’s just a long blur of being used nonstop.”
Silas nodded, satisfied. “That was one of my goals at the end of the night, for you to lose the thread. For it to be so much you couldn’t hold onto it all.”
He could’ve pushed again. Could’ve asked about fantasies she hadn’t named, could’ve pressed until she gave up something she wasn’t ready to admit to herself. Instead, he let the silence stretch, let her eat, let the weight of the night linger.
