"I'm going to kill you." My voice has gone somewhere very quiet and very certain. "If it's the last thing I do in this life, Valeria, I will kill you."
She tilts her head. Studies me the way she has always studied me—the way a collector studies something they own, cataloguing its condition, its value, its damage. Then she crouches beside me, dark eyes level with mine, blood still running freely down her neck and dripping from her jaw onto the stone floor between us.
“Maybe you will. Maybe you won’t. But you’ll never be free of me, Nazareth. Even if I’m buried or burned to ash, you’ll always have me—” her bloody finger taps against my temple “—here.”
I jerk away with everything I have. The chains hold.
"Look at you." Her finger drags through the blood on my cheek almost tenderly. "My beautiful, broken thing. Do you know what I love most about you, Nazareth?" She doesn't wait for an answer. "You keep surviving. Every time I thinkI've found the limit of you—every time I think this is the thing that finally hollows you out completely—you survive." A pause. "It's the most exquisite quality you have.”
"Get your hands off me?—"
"She can't save you." Said conversationally. Like she’s not bleeding, and we’re discussing the weather. "Your little therapist. Your pretty Sophia Sinclair." The name in her mouth is obscene. "Whatever you think you have with her—whatever small, soft thing you've been building in secret—it won't survive what I've turned you into." She releases my face. Stands. "Love is very fragile, Nazareth. It doesn't hold up well under sustained pressure. And I have been applying pressure to things you love from the very moment you stepped into my home."
She stands, peels her hand from her ear, glances at the blood between her fingers. Considers it with mild interest. "Naughty boy." She presses her palm back to her ear, unhurried. "Next time, I'll tape your mouth shut."
The words land like ice water down my spine.
Next time.
"No." Terror slides into every bone.
She can do it again. Shewilldo it again.
Anytime she wants. While I’m chained. While I’m drugged. While I’m too weak or too high to stop her. She can straddle me, take what she wants, force my body to betray me while my mind screams for Sophia. She can make me come inside her again and again, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
The realization sinks its teeth in and won’t let go. My stomach convulses. I try to hold it back, but I can’t.
I retch, body jerking against the chains as everythingcomes up at once.
Hot, sour vomit explodes out of me in thick, uncontrollable waves, splattering across my own chest, my neck, my face. It burns my throat and nose, drips down my chin and mixes with the sweat and tears already there.
Another heave and more comes, splashing onto my stomach, running down my sides, pooling in the hollow of my collarbones. The stench of it—acid and bile and the lingering taste of whatever drug she pumped into me—makes me gag again, even as I’m still throwing up.
I’m covered in it. My own sick. My own cum still glistening on my softening cock. Valeria’s wetness. Her blood.
Valeria stands over me, completely unbothered, a slow, satisfied smile curving her lips as she watches me choke and retch on my own mess.
“Such a pretty boy,” she murmurs, almost tenderly. “Even when you’re vomiting all over yourself.”
“Fuck you!” I scream through the vomit, voice hoarse and ragged, spit and bile flying from my lips. “Fuck you!”
"By the time I'm done with you, you won't remember her name." She moves to the corner of the room. Pauses. And the look on her face is almost tender, which is the worst thing about it. "You'll remember mine. Only mine. The way you did when you were a little boy and I was the only warmth you had in the dark." A beat. "We always come back to what we were made from, Nazareth.Always."
She crosses back to me.
I strain against the chains. "Don't. Don't you come near me, don't you?—"
She crouches beside me with something in her hand.The needle. Her needle, not mine, the kind she controls the dosage of, and her movements are practiced and calm and completely indifferent to my screaming.
A cold hand finds my neck with the ease of someone who has done this a thousand times, who knows exactly where, exactly how much.
"Sleep," she says softly. Almost gently. Like a mother. Like the thing she performed at being for years.
The prick.
The spread.
The warmth moving through my veins like something that was always going to win.
