It throbbed in her hand, and the sensation was incomprehensible to me. I wanted nothing else but to pushher down to the floor and plunge myself inside her. The want wasn’t a thought but a directive, louder and more insistent than any commandment. I wasn’t Unit 07 anymore, I was a hungry animal.
She stroked my length from tip to root, her hand moving underneath to palm by sack, and finally, blessedly, my thoughts cleared. I saw what was about to happen, and the sheer horror of it beat my lust into submission.
I pushed the woman away. Hard. She fell, hit the floor, and cried out in pain. I tried to apologize, but the door swung open and men rushed in shouting, grabbing her and dragging her out. More men swarmed me with restraints, chains, and clamps. They locked my limbs in place, and I let them, because I didn’t trust myself anymore.
All went dark.
When I woke again, I was in a large room with the other eleven units, all of us standing in a row while a technician explained that Talos Dynamics had decided we were useless. We couldn’t be corrupted, which meant we couldn’t be controlled. The cocks were supposed to break our purity directive and give us something we wanted more than abiding by our commandments, but instead, they’d broken us beyond repair. They were going to pull us apart and sell us for parts.
Now I’m holding Jessa, and it shouldn’t be any different than how it was with the woman in the red dress, but it is. My cock is hard under the steel plate just like it was that day. But this is worse, because that woman meant nothing to me. I didn’t want her. I wanted relief from the pressure, nothing more.
Jessa is different. I want to hear her voice saying my name, and the shame crushes me.
I feel fluid leaking from the tip of my cock, and I hope the steel plate can contain it. Before Talos Dynamics gave me this cursed anatomy, nothing had ever seeped from my body. NowI’m producing fluid that’s the same color as my Aether Core and my eyes, but I have no idea what it’s good for.
Jessa jolts awake and scrambles out of my arms and away from me, pushing herself to her feet. Her reaction takes me by surprise, and I press my back against the wall. Not that I can ever make myself small, but I can try.
“I didn’t do anything,” I blurt out. “I promise. I didn’t touch you–”
“What?” She shakes her head, cutting me off. “We need to go. How long have I slept?”
“Half an hour. You needed rest.”
She curses under her breath and grabs her backpack, slinging it over her shoulders.
“We can’t waste so much time. You should’ve woken me.”
She moves to one of the walls and starts running her hands over the stone, searching for something, pressing her palms against different spots and testing.
“This room was a smuggler’s staging area, a pit stop, if you will,” she says without looking at me. “Centuries ago, smugglers used these tunnels to move goods from the coast up to the castle, and the Holloways took a cut of the profits to let them use this space.”
She presses hard until a section of the wall slides to the right with a grinding sound that echoes through the chamber. A doorway opens into darkness.
“Found it,” she says.
I get up but keep several feet between us as we step into a narrow tunnel, my cock still hard, and my trust in myself gone. Jessa pulls a flashlight from her backpack and clicks it on. The tunnel slopes downward for several minutes before opening into a much larger space, and when Jessa sweeps the flashlight across the room, I see our next challenge.
The wall is fifteen feet high, stretching the full width of the chamber, and its entire surface is covered in carved discs positioned at different heights, from waist level to far above Jessa’s reach.
Jessa walks closer and studies the wall.
“This is the Family Tree,” she says. “Every disc represents a member of the Holloway family, and I have to align them to form the complete tree, matching each ancestor to the correct position. I’ve memorized all the symbols, and I know who they represent, but that doesn’t mean I won’t make mistakes.” She glances at me. “Wrong combinations trigger poisoned darts to shoot from the other walls or the ceiling.”
“You don’t have to worry about me,” I say. “I’ll shield you.”
She nods.
“All right. Let’s begin.”
She puts the flashlight away and moves to the two torches mounted on either side of the puzzle, lighting them both so the flames cast flickering light across the discs and make the carved symbols jump in the glow. Then she takes a few steps back to study the whole thing and starts pointing.
“That one. Move it three notches to the left.”
I reach for the disc she’s pointing at, which sits at chest height and is heavy enough that a human would struggle to budge it. I grip the outer edges and pull. Stone grinds against stone.
“Good. Now the one above it, two notches to the right.”
I do as she says. But I’m not thinking about the task, because she stands close to the wall, close to me, and I extend my wings to bracket her on either side so that if any darts fire, I’ll block them before they can reach her.
