I want to reach for him. The wanting is so intense that my hands strain against the restraints. I want to touch the place where the scar hides beneath his sleeve.
My father’s belt. His trainers’ methods. Different tools, same result.
We are both broken things.
“Alexei,” I say softly.
He flinches. The use of his name affects him in ways that commands and pleas never could.
“Touch me.” The words escape before I can stop them. “Please. I need—I need to feel something that isn’t pain. Something that isn’t clinical.”
His breath catches. I watch his hands curl into fists at his sides.
“That would be a deviation from established parameters.”
“We’re already past parameters. We’ve been past them since last night.”
He stands frozen. The amber light catches the angles of his face.
Then he does something I don’t expect.
He reaches for my left wrist restraint and unlocks it.
My hand falls free. The sensation is disorienting—I’ve been bound so long that the absence of metal feels like floating. I flex my fingers, staring at my own hand as if I’ve never seen it before.
“If you want this,” he says, his voice low and rough, “tell me now. If you don’t, I stop. I leave. We do not speak of it again.”
He’s giving me a choice. An actual choice, with one hand free and a clear verbal option to refuse.
It’s not real freedom. I know that. I’m still his prisoner. But it’s something.
I reach up and touch his face.
His skin is warm. Slightly rough with stubble. Human. Real. My fingers trace the line of his jaw, his cheekbone, the hollow beneath his eye where exhaustion has carved shadows.
“This is inadvisable,” he murmurs, but he doesn’t pull away.
“I don’t care.”
“You should care. Attachment to an interrogator is a textbook trauma response.”
“Don’t tell me what I’m feeling.” I slide my fingers into his hair, gripping the short strands. “I know what Stockholm syndrome looks like. This isn’t that. This is me, choosing you, even though you’ve given me every reason not to.”
His pulse jumps against my palm.
“Kiss me,” I say. “Not as an interrogator. Not as the Monster. Just kiss me.”
Something breaks in his expression. The last remnant of the mask crumbles, and underneath I see hunger—raw and desperate and matching my own.
His mouth crashes into mine.
The kiss is nothing like I expected. It’s not clinical or controlled. It’s consuming—his tongue pushing past my lips, his hand tangling in my hair, his body pressing against mine. I moan into his mouth, my free hand clawing at his shoulder.
His other hand moves down my chest, pushing aside the thin fabric of the smock. When his fingers find my nipple, I gasp against his lips.
“Sensitive,” he murmurs. Not a question—an observation. But now that clinical attention is focused on my pleasure.
He rolls the nipple between his fingers, and I arch into the touch, my cock hardening beneath the smock. He notices—of course he notices—and his hand slides lower.
