He picks up something from the table. I hear it—the snap of a fresh glove, the click of a cap. I can't see any of it. Can only hear and wait and press my forehead against the wood and brace.
Cold fingers. Slick—notmyslick, something thicker, clinical—spread between my ass cheeks. Then pressure against my hole. Something blunt and firm pushing against my entrance, and my body tightens against it on instinct even as the heat screamsyes, open, let it in—
"Relax, seventeen. This goes easier if you don't fight it."
I can't relax. Every muscle in my body is locked. The plug presses in—slow, inexorable—and a sound comes through the gag that's half scream, half something else. Something that makes my face burn. Because the heat has turned the invasion into sensation, and the sensation is—
He doesn't just push it in. He works it. In and out. Slow, deliberate strokes, each one pressing into my asshole deeper, stretching me wider. The plug fucks into me slow at first and then my tormenter pushes harder, and my body responds with devastating obedience—clenching around it, pulling it deeper, slick gushing around the intrusion. My hips push back. I can't stop them. Can't stop any of it. The moan that leaks through the gag sounds like I'm enjoying this, and the horror of that sound—of what it means, of what it proves about what I am—
Atlas.
The name surfaces like a gasp. Not a thought—deeper. Something in my chest reaching for the only safety it knows. Atlas in the kitchen. His hands on my face. His thumbs onmy cheekbones. The way he looked at me like I was something breakable and precious and worth the effort of being careful.Breathe with me. Cedar and control and the low steady certainty that nothing bad could happen as long as he was in the room.
I'm here. Hold onto me.
He didn't say that. He never said that. But I hear it anyway, and I cling to it while the man behind me works the plug in slow, punishing strokes and my body betrays me with every thrust.
He pulls it out. I gasp—the sudden emptiness a shock, my hole clenching on nothing, and the whimper that escapes me is needy. Desperate. The sound of an omega in heat who's been emptied and can't bear it.
I hate myself for making it.
Then something bigger presses against me.
The second plug is wider. I feel the difference immediately—the stretch is sharper, the burn brighter, my body resisting even as the slick eases the way. He pushes it in with one long, steady motion that doesn't stop when I scream against the gag. Doesn't pause when my spine bows and my wrists wrench against the restraints. It fills me completely—heavy, invasive, a constant pressure against every sensitized nerve—and my cock jerks against the wood and I come.
Not an orgasm. Not really. A helpless, shuddering release that rips through me without buildup or permission—my body emptying itself against the cross, hips stuttering, vision whiting out. No pleasure. Just biology completing a circuit. Just the machine doing what machines do.
"See?" he says, behind me. "That's what you are, seventeen. That's what all that fight was about. Your body already knows. We're just teaching the rest of you to catch up."
I hang against the cross. Tears dripping off my chin. Come cooling on the wood beneath me. The plug heavy and fullinside me. Every inch of my skin electric, oversensitized, the heat still rolling through me because one forced orgasm doesn't stop a cycle—it barelytouchesit. The need is still there. Vast. Consuming. A hunger that doesn't care about dignity or consent or the fact that I'm strapped to a cross in a room that smells like leather and shame.
Bane.
He comes to me like a breath. Not the Bane who called me nothing at the first dinner. The other one. The real one. The one who sat down next to me in the library chair without asking, shoulder inches from mine, and read in silence like being close to me was the easiest thing in the world. The one who caught me when I slipped—hand around my arm, face inches from mine, those hazel eyes startled open for a half-second before the walls went back up. The one who came to my room and saidI was scared. I cared from the first minute I saw you. And then kissed me so slowly I forgot every cruel word he'd ever said.
I'm here too. You're not alone.
He never said that either. But I build it in my head like a room I can live in—Bane's voice, rough and uncertain, saying the thing he'd never say out loud. And I crawl inside it and close the door.
The man moves behind me. I hear him set the rod down on the table. Hear him pick up something else. Something that sounds different—heavier, with a whisper of movement. Leather strips, maybe. Multiple. A sound like fingers dragging through fringe.
"Your buyer requested a preview of how you take marks," he says. Casual. Like reading from a work order. "Wanted to see how the skin holds up. Some clients prefer their purchases... pre-seasoned."
Marks. Not the pink sting of the rod that fades by morning.Marks. The kind that stay. The kind that bruise andsplit and scar. The kind that mean the product isn't being preserved anymore—it's being broken in.
My whole body goes cold. The heat retreats for one awful second, drowned by pure animal terror, and I pull against the restraints so hard the leather creaks and my wrists scream and I don't care—
Zero.
He's there. In the dark behind my eyes. Not gentle like Atlas. Not uncertain like Bane. Zero is standing in the stairwell with his black eyes and his predator's stillness, looking at me the way he always looked at me—like I was the only real thing in the room. Like everything else was scenery and I was the point.
You're mine, he said once. Or almost said. Or said with his eyes and his scent and the way his body angled toward me in every room like a compass finding north.
You're mine and no one touches what's mine.
He didn't say that. None of them said any of it. But my heart builds them anyway—three voices, three anchors, three points of light in a room that's about to go very dark. My heart knows something my head refuses to believe. My heart reaches for them the way a plant reaches for the sun—blindly, desperately, with the certainty of something that doesn't need permission to know where it belongs.
The first crack of the whip splits the air before it touches my skin.
