My whole body goes rigid. I squeeze my eyes shut.
Cold metal touches my collarbone.
Not cutting. Tracing.
The edge of the scalpel follows the line of my clavicle from the hollow of my throat to the point of my shoulder. Pressure without penetration. A ghost of sensation that leaves no wound but feels more invasive than any cut. My skin shivers in its wake.
He moves to the other side. Same path. Same pressure. Mapping my bones through the thin layer of skin.
I open my eyes.
He’s not looking at the scalpel. He’s looking at my face. Those pale eyes tracking every micro-expression, reading my responses the way scientists read data. I am a specimen.
And yet—the intensity of his attention makes me feel more seen than I have ever felt in my life.
The blade moves lower. It traces the ridge of my sternum, the valley between my pectorals, the faint ladder of my ribs. Every line of my body recorded in the negative space between cutting and not cutting.
“Stop.” The word has no strength behind it. “Please stop.”
He doesn’t stop. The blade continues its inventory, moving to my left side. When it traces the lower edge of my ribs, I feel my body flinch away involuntarily.
He noticed. Of course he noticed.
The scalpel returns to my left side. It traces the same line again, slower this time. The flinch. The tension. The way my breath catches when the blade approaches a specific point along my lower ribs.
The place where my father’s belt buckle caught me wrong when I was fourteen. The place where the bone never quite reformed right.
He traces that spot again. And again. Each pass slower than the last.
My body is doing something I don’t understand.
The fear is still there, thick and choking, but underneath it something else is building. Something electric. My skin feels hypersensitive everywhere the blade has touched.
When his free hand presses flat against my chest to steady me for another pass?—
My heartbeat stutters.
Heat blooms in my stomach. My breath is coming faster now but the rhythm is wrong. Not the gasping pattern of panic but something deeper. I can feel my pulse in places I don’t want to think about. My body is responding to the pressure of his palm against my sternum.
The blade traces the line of my hip bone, just above the hem of the smock.
My body arches toward it.
No. No no no no.
This isn’t happening. This cannot be happening. This is survival instinct. Crossed wires. The body doesn’t discriminate between threat and touch.
But my cock doesn’t care about the distinction. It’s hardening beneath the thin cotton of the smock.
I am Nikolai Petrenko. I have bedded women who grace magazine covers. I am not this desperate creature trembling under a stranger’s hands, getting hard because a man with a scalpel is touching me in a room designed to break my mind.
My body doesn’t listen to what Nikolai Petrenko wants.
The blade pauses at the highest point of my hip. His hand is still pressed against my chest, fingers splayed across my sternum. I can feel him counting my heartbeats.
He knows. He has to know. And the shame of that knowledge is worse than anything the blade could do.
“Why do you protect your left side?”
