He lifts his arms. Slowly—wincing, the movement pulling at the welts on his back. I work the scrub top over his head, clumsy with my zip ties, and ease it down over his shoulders. He hisses when the cotton touches the broken skin. I slow down. Guide it the rest of the way with my fingertips, avoiding the worst of the marks.
The pants are harder. He has to stand, and standing takes effort—his legs are shaky, unsteady, and I brace him with my shoulder while he steps in one leg at a time. I pull the waistband up with both hands. Tie the drawstring.
He's dressed. It's just scrubs—thin and shapeless and too big—but something in his posture shifts the second the fabric settles over his skin. His shoulders drop a fraction. His breathing comes a little easier. Like he's been given back one small piece of himself.
I guide him back down to the floor. Sit beside him. He leans into me immediately—shoulder against shoulder, then his head dropping to rest against my collarbone and I put my arms around him again.
"They hurt you," I say. Not a question.
"I'm okay."
"Max."
"I'm—"
"Don't lie to me. Not here. Not in this room."
A long silence. I feel his jaw work against my collarbone. Feel him deciding whether to trust me with it. And I understand—I understand—that trust is the most expensive thing I could ask for right now, because I spent months making sure he couldn't afford to give it.
"They put me on a cross," he says. "Stripped me. Used a—like a riding crop, or something. Hit me with it. Then they—" His voice catches. Steadies. "Plugged me. Gagged me. There was a man. Big. He talked to me like I was... livestock."
Every word lands on top of what I already know. What I watched. The cross I can put a picture to now—Max's face pressed against wood, his back open to the room, the first strike landing and the sound that came through the glass. But hearing it from him—hearing the flatness in his voice, the careful distance he's putting between himself and the memory—is different. Worse. Because the glass gave me the image. His voice gives me what the image couldn't: what it felt like from the inside.
My arms tighten around him. I can feel the raised welts under my forearms where they cross his back. Each one a line I will trace back to the hand that made it.
"He injected me with something that killed the heat blockers. And then my—" A shuddering breath. "My body just... responded. To everything. I couldn't stop it. The sounds I was making—I couldn't—"
"You don't have to explain."
"I want to." His voice cracks. "Because you're going to find out eventually. And I'd rather you hear it from me than see it on whatever footage they probably have."
He tells me. Not everything—I can hear the gaps, the places where the words hit a wall he can't climb over yet. But enough. The heat flooding back. His body betraying him on the cross. The sounds he made. The shame.
I saw it. The flush spreading across his skin. His hips moving against the wood. The involuntary arch of his spine. And I know—because I'm an alpha, because my biology is the mirror of his—that what his body did wasn't choice. It was chemistry. It was a system designed to respond to stimulus, responding.
It was like blaming someone for bleeding when you cut them.
But he doesn't know that. He thinks it means something aboutwhohe is.
By the end, his voice is barely a whisper and my jaw is clenched so hard my molars creak. Not at him. At every person in this building. At the man with the whip. At the guards who punched him and cut his clothes off. At the polished man who sat across from me at dinner and discussed Max's scent profile like he was reviewing a wine list.
Max is quiet for a long time. Then, barely audible:
"He made me come."
The words fall between us like something dropped from a height.
"On the cross. With the—with the plug, and the heat, and I—" His voice splinters. "I didn't want it. I wasn't—it wasn't—but my body just—and he saidgood. Like I'd done something right. Like that was the point."
My arms are around him and I can feel him shaking and I want to kill someone so badly my vision pulses.
"That wasn't you," I say. Low. Certain. The most important thing I've ever said. "That was chemistry. That was a system being manipulated by someone who knew exactly which buttons to push. You couldn’t help it."
He doesn't respond. But his hand finds the front of my shirt again. Holds on.
"There was a wall," he says after a while. Quieter now. Almost thoughtful, like he's trying to work something out. "In the room. One wall was different—dark. Like a mirror. Too perfect. Too... placed. I kept thinking—" A pause. "What if someone was on the other side?"
My chest tightens.
