This is what Ellis meant. Prepped. This is what I was being maintained for—fed, hydrated, injected, kept in optimal condition like a racehorse before a showing. Every protein bar. Every injection. Every clinical touch from the Nurse and her clipboard. All of it leading here. To this room. To this cross. To this moment where the product is unwrapped and put on display.
I think about Wren. Through the wall. Twelve days in. Has she been in this room? Will she be? The thought makes something inside me twist so hard I almost vomit.
The door opens again.
The guards leave.
The lock clicks behind them. The room goes silent except for the hum of the climate control and my own breathing—ragged, wet, the breathing of someone who's forgotten how to do it properly.
I'm alone. On the cross. Naked. Face pressed into the wood. Wrists above my head, ankles apart, every muscle in my body drawn taut between the four points of restraint. And I wait.
Minutes pass. Maybe a lot of minutes.
I try to angle my head—crane my neck to the right, then the left, trying to catch a glimpse of the room behind me. But the cross holds me flush against the wood, and the angle is wrong, and all I can see is the edge of the wall and the faint amber glow of the lighting and the corner of that too-perfect mirror. No door. No table. No clock. No way to measure how long I've been here.
Long enough that the adrenaline fades and the real discomfort sets in. My shoulders burn—a deep, grinding ache from bearing the weight of my arms above my head. My wrists throb where the cuffs dig in. My calves cramp from standing on my toes, trying to take pressure off my arms. The punch still livesin my stomach, a dull, hot knot that flares every time I breathe too deep. The wood against my chest and cheek has gone from cold to warm, absorbing my body heat, becoming part of me.
I count breaths. Lose count. Start over. Lose count again.
The crying comes back—not the sobbing from before, just a quiet leak. Tears running sideways across my face and dripping onto the wood. I don't have the energy to stop them. Don't have the energy to do anything except hang here and breathe and wait for whatever comes next.
The lullaby surfaces in my head. Wren's voice, thin and sweet through the concrete. I hold onto it the way you hold onto a rope in the dark. Something real. Something human. Someone who knows my name.
Then the door opens.
Footsteps. Heavy. Deliberate. Unhurried. One person. He crosses behind me—I hear him move through the room, hear the soft scrape of something being lifted from the table—and stops. Close. Close enough that I can feel the displacement of air against my bare skin. Close enough to smell him—clean sweat and latex and something sharper.
"So you're the one they're all worked up about."
A shiver tears up my spine.
"Number seventeen." His voice is deep. Low. The kind of voice that fills a room without raising itself. Not the flat, mechanical tone of the guards. This voice has texture. Interest. The leisurely cadence of a man with nowhere to be and all the time in the world. "The one Ellis won't shut up about. Scent profile off the charts, apparently. Got clients lined up already—serious money, the kind of alphas who'll pay a premium for something fresh." A pause. I hear him set something on the table. "Let's see if you're worth what they're offering."
A hand closes around the back of my neck. Large. Warm. The grip isn't painful—it's possessive. Holding me in place theway you'd hold an animal for inspection. His thumb presses into the base of my skull, tilting my head forward against the wood.
"First things first."
A sting. Sharp. The side of my neck—not the crook of my arm where the Nurse puts the blockers, but higher, just below my ear. A needle sliding in fast and deep. Something cold floods the injection site, spreading outward in a wave that I feel ripple through my veins.
"Give that about thirty seconds," he says. His hand stays on my neck, holding me still. "Then we'll get started."
I don't understand. Not yet. My brain is still trying to process the needle, the cold, the casual tone—and then it hits.
The pilot light that's been flickering in my belly since the blockers started failing doesn't flicker.
Itignites.
The heat crashes through me like a dam breaking. Not the slow, creeping warmth I've been feeling at the edges—the flutter I could ignore, the simmer I could push down. This is a wall of fire. Every nerve ending in my body lights up at once. My skin goes electric. My vision blurs. My spine arches involuntarily against the cross, a full-body shudder that rattles the restraints, and a sound comes out of me that I don't recognize—low, desperate, pulled from somewhere deep.
No.No no no—
The blockers. The injection didn't add blockers. It killed them. Whatever he put in me just stripped away the last pharmaceutical wall between my body and the full force of a heat cycle that's been chemically suppressed for days.
Everything hits at once. The fever—instant, consuming, my temperature spiking so fast I feel dizzy. The ache—low, deep, a hollow pulsing need that radiates from my asshole outward. And the slick. I feel it before I can deny it—warm, wet, my body producing what it's designed to produce, doing exactly whatbiology demands, and the shame is so total and so immediate that it eclipses everything else.
The fear, the pain, the punch still burning in my stomach—all of it disappears under the crushing weight of what my body is doing right now, here, on a cross, with a stranger standing behind me.
“Fuck,” I groan.
