I make note of the names. The information appears genuine—his body language indicates no deception markers.
I should stop now. Document the intelligence. Exit the room.
Instead, I attach the second electrode.
He cries out when the sensation doubles. The sound is not entirely distress. There are harmonics in it that I recognize from different contexts. His body arches against the restraints, caught between the overwhelming input and something that wants more.
“Alexei.” My name emerges from his mouth like a prayer. “Please. I can’t—I don’t know what?—”
I increase the intensity.
His words dissolve into sounds without meaning. His body writhes in the chair. I watch the muscles of his stomach contract in waves. I watch his throat work as he swallows between gasps.
The electrodes were meant for verification, for stress-response. Not for this. Not for watching his body betray him in ways he cannot control.
His response is not consent. The restraints eliminate agency. The duress eliminates choice. What I am doing is not interrogation anymore. It is something that exists in the dark spaces between the protocols I was taught to follow.
The clinical part of my mind catalogs what I am becoming: interrogator transformed into something else entirely. The part of me that was built to execute protocols cycles through error messages it cannot resolve.
The part of me that I did not know existed—the part that wants—is drowning out everything else.
I reach forward and press my palm flat against his stomach, just above the waistband of the smock. His skin is hot under my glove, slick with sweat, the muscles twitching beneath my touch. His eyes snap to mine, wide and wild.
I increase the electrode intensity.
He comes apart under my hand.
The orgasm rips through him with the force of a seizure, his body convulsing against the restraints, his voice emerging in a broken cry that contains my name. I feel the spasm in his abdominal muscles, feel the pulse of his surrender under my palm.
I did not intend this. The electrodes were calibrated for sensory overload, not arousal. But the nervous system does not distinguish cleanly between types of overwhelming sensation. Fear and pleasure share neural pathways. The result was predictable if I had been thinking clearly.
I wanted to watch.
The realization arrives with horrifying clarity. I wanted to watch him come apart. I wanted to own that moment, to catalog it. I told myself I was reasserting control. I told myself I was verifying information.
I was lying. To myself, to the mission parameters, to every principle the Kennel ever instilled.
I wanted him. Not the information. Him.
The moment lasts seconds. Then he collapses against the chair, his chest heaving, his eyes closed, his entire body trembling with aftershocks.
I deactivate the equipment.
The silence that follows is different from the silence before. It is the silence of two people who have crossed a line that cannot be uncrossed.
I remove the electrodes. I check his vital signs. I note the physical evidence of what occurred, which will require cleaning.
I retrieve a cloth from the supply cabinet and clean him myself, my gloved hands moving over skin that still shivers at every touch.
He opens his eyes while I work. He looks at me with an expression I cannot immediately classify. There is no fear in it.There is no anger. There is something closer to recognition—and beneath that, something darker. Confusion. Horror at his own response. The beginning of shame.
“That wasn’t about information,” he says. His voice is destroyed, barely a whisper.
I do not respond.
“You didn’t ask about the Geneva accounts until I was already—” He swallows. “You were testing something else.”
I complete the cleaning. I dispose of the cloth. I stand before his chair with my hands at my sides and my face carefully blank.
