Silas unpacked her bags while she sat and supervised, watching where he put things so she’d be able to find them again. Of course, her closet would have to be unlocked for her to have access, but that was fine.
Next, he had her sit at the kitchen island, and she sipped iced tea while he took out every knife they owned and methodically sharpened them, one by one.
The sound of metal against stone was soothing, meditative. She watched his practiced hands, the slide and rhythm of it, and found herself sinking deeper into that warm haze, not just rested, but safe.Cared for.No pressure. Just the sound of Silas sharpening their world back into order.
The silence wasn’t awkward. It never was with him. But thoughts had encroached while she was away, her mind trying to make sense of her new life, trying to fit it into who she was away from her men, and the silence gave her a place to dare to put her thoughts to words.
“I’ve always craved structure,” she said, not looking at him. “Routine. Rules. Knowing what’s expected of me. It’s what made nursing work. It’s why I thought what James wanted might be enough even in the context of vanilla. It’s what makes me love my mornings with the three of you, the evening schedule in black and white, but…”
He didn’t answer, didn’t stop the slow rhythm of the knife on the stone, but his eyes flicked to hers.
“But what you do to me,” she said softly. “Whatyougive me… it isn’t structure. Not the kind I thought I needed. You strip everything away, and it’s all chaos, the opposite of structure, and yet, it’s like this key clicking something in me when I didn’t even know there was a damned keyhole in that part of my psyche.”
Silas tested the edge of the blade on his thumb. Went back to sharpening.
“When I’m here,” she said, voice quieter, “it makes sense. Iwantto be what you make of me, even when you break me down into a blubbering mess, a whimperingthing. But when I go back to the normal world… it doesn’t make any sense at all. At the hospital, the idea of being someone’s cocksleeve is fucking wrong, but here? Watching you work? Even though I’m not even a tiny bit horny right now, it makes sense.”
He glanced at her. Looked back to his work. Slowed a little.
“The French have a phrase for it,” he said. “‘La nostalgie de la boue.’ The literal translation is ‘nostalgia for the mud’.”
He stood straighter, rolled his shoulders, wiped the blade clean.
“They use it for people who claw their way out of the dirt and still ache to sink back into it. Women who marry rich and still sleep with the gardener. For men who build empires and beg to be degraded. For all the ones who got out and still crave the dirt.”
He tested the knife on his arm, shaved a few hairs. Put it with the sharpened knives to his left, reached to his right for another.
“For me, it’s older than French. It’s Genesis — man was formedfrom the dust of the ground,and then later we get the bit aboutdust you are, and to dust you shall return.You can dress it up however you like, but we’re all made of mud. Flesh. Rot. And it calls to us. Some spend their whole lives trying to forget. The rest of us remember.”
He glanced at her. Looked back to the knife and the stone. “We’re all made of mud. Maybe sometimes we want to crawl back into it. Strip away our humanity, be who and what we started as. Fuck society and it’s rules. Its expectations. Strip it all the fuck away and see what’s left.”
His voice told the story, words harsh, and yet his hands kept to the same steady rhythm.
“You were raised to think structure was safety, and polish was strength. But what you need — what youare— is buried under all that shine. The polish is just a disguise. Real strength lives in what’s feral. You feel real when I strip you down because that’s when youarereal. No mask. No manners. Just instinct and breath. Pain and need. Meat with a pulse. I reduce you to sensation without thought. Back to the beginning.”
Willow looked up at him, throat tight.
She wanted to argue, but how do you deny a truth so deep you feel it in your bones?
Meat with a pulse.
Stripped of titles, kindness, even purpose — and somehow, in that rawness, she’d never felt more seen. More understood. A breathless click, the final turning of the key she’d felt unlocking something earlier, exposing something terrible and true.
She’d thought surrender was about giving up control. About kneeling, obeying, pleasing. But this was something older.Wilder.
Not surrender.
Return.
“It isn’t just you,” he said, softer now. “Ineed it too. I need to ruin you. To strip away every pretense and watch you fall apart, not because you’re weak, but because I want theyouunderneath all that scaffolding. I wantthatversion of my little painwhore, not the Willow wearing society’s mask. I want the version of you that remembers what it means to be meat. To be mine.”
Silence again. He checked the edge of the blade with his thumb, went back to work, stone whispering over steel.
“You’re not crazy, little hawk,” he added, voice low and quiet. “You’re remembering where you came from. What you are. And lucky for you, my wolf never really let me leave.”
Willow had ten minutes to contemplate this, the silence stretching between them like a warm, steady pulse. Every thought led her deeper into the barbed truths he’d laid bare.
Hinduism says we’re created from dust, the Sumerians mixed clay with the blood of a slain god to create man, and she had no idea why it mattered that multiple ancient histories all said this, but it made itmoretrue, somehow.
