CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The room was smaller than the private rooms at Kinky Kritters.
That was the first thing Rodney noticed, because his brain had decided to cope with the situation by cataloguing details, the way it did when he was anxious, counting ceiling tiles during dentist appointments, reading ingredient labels during arguments.
The room was small. The walls were concrete.
The single dim red light was overhead and buzzed faintly, like an insect trapped in glass.
The second thing he noticed was that Inuit was not alone.
Two other men stood in the shadows near the back wall.
Both large, both pale, both carrying the stale-ice-and-fish smell that marked them as bears.
Polar bears, like Inuit. One was covered in thick black hair that was too dense to be fully human, a man who spent too much time in his animal form.
He wore a leather mask that covered the top half of his face, leaving only a thin-lipped mouth visible.
The other was younger, broader, with a flat expression that suggested he was there for a job, not for pleasure.
"We've been looking forward to this." Inuit circled Rodney the way Mordechai had done on the auction platform.
But where Mordechai's circling had been studying, curious, almost reverent, Inuit's was predatory in the way that word was actually meant.
Not the controlled, consensual predation of a Dom who wanted his sub's fear to bloom into trust. The real thing.
The kind that ended with something caught and consumed.
Inuit took hold of Rodney's chin and turned his face from side to side, studying him.
His fingers were thick and rough and cold.
Everything about him was cold, his skin, his scent, his eyes.
Mordechai ran hot. Mordechai was cedar and leather and warmth.
This man was the negative space of everything Mordechai was.
"I was most disappointed when your panther outbid me," Inuit said conversationally.
"I had plans for you that night. But patience is a virtue, and here we are.
" His thumb pressed hard against Rodney's jaw, forcing his head back.
"I've had a panda before. Years ago. I know the sounds you make.
The whimpering, it's distinctive. Almost musical. I want to hear it again."
Rodney said nothing. His heart was pounding so hard he could feel it in his teeth, but he kept his face still. He thought of Mordechai. Of the calm, steady voice that said you don't get to hide from me. He wasn't hiding now. He was just refusing to give Inuit what he wanted.
A bright flash of light. Rodney flinched. The man in the leather mask had stepped out of the shadows holding a phone, and the flash was a camera.
"There," the masked man said, with a low laugh that had no humor in it. "I'll get that up on the forum. We'll have an audience in no time."
A forum. A photo. Of him, in this room, with these men. Posted publicly, for anyone in the shifter world to see. Including—
Including anyone at Kinky Kritters.
Rodney held onto that thought like a lifeline. If the photo went up, someone would see it. Amani, who was always online, always watching, always plugged into the network of shifter gossip and drama that flowed through the community. Amani would see it. And Amani would tell Mordechai.
Just hold on. Just hold on and someone will come.
Inuit released his chin and stepped back.
He nodded to the younger bear, who moved forward with the efficiency of someone following instructions.
Before Rodney could react, his arms were seized and he was spun around, his chest slammed against the concrete wall.
Something cold and metallic closed around his wrists, real restraints, not leather with a quick-release tab.
Real chains, bolted to the wall, holding his arms above his head with no give and no escape.
The panic hit him in a wave so strong his mind emptied out, nothing but white noise and the animal scream of get free get free get free.
He pulled against the chains, hard, desperate, with every ounce of strength his panda body could generate, and they didn't budge.
Not an inch. The metal bit into his wrists, nothing like the soft leather of KK, and the pain was sharp and immediate and real.
"There's no Lady Leo here," Inuit said from behind him. His voice was close. Amused. "No safe word. No concerned bartender waiting to walk you through the process. Whatever training your panther gave you, forget it. Different rules here. Or rather—" A cold laugh. "No rules at all."
The first blow landed across Rodney's upper back. Not a hand—something else. A whip, or a strap, something that cracked against his skin with a sound like a gunshot and left a line of fire that made him cry out before he could stop himself.
"There it is," Inuit breathed. "There's the whimper."
The second blow crossed the first. The third landed lower, across his shoulder blades.
Rodney bit down on his lip hard enough to taste copper and tried to keep the sounds inside, but his body betrayed him, each strike pulled a noise from him, gasps and whimpers and half-swallowed cries that he couldn't contain no matter how hard he clenched his jaw.
What he endured was not the spanking Mordechai had given him.
That had been measured, each strike deliberate, the pain controlled and purposeful, building toward something that felt like release.
This was the opposite. Pain for the sake of pain, administered without care or calibration, escalating because Inuit liked the sounds it produced and wanted more of them.
Other hands joined in. The masked man, the younger bear.
Rodney couldn't see them but he could feel them, their strikes landing from different angles, overlapping, the pain compounding until his back was a single sheet of fire and he couldn't distinguish individual blows anymore.
Someone's teeth found the meat of his shoulder, not a controlled bite like Mordechai's, but a savage tearing that broke skin and made Rodney scream.
He retreated.
Not physically, there was nowhere to go, chained to the wall as he was.
But inside. Some part of his mind, the part that had gotten him through bullying in school and loneliness in Vegas and the grinding despair of debt and the terror of the auction, that part knew how to go small.
How to curl up inside himself and close the doors and wait.
Pandas were good at it. They were built for endurance, not combat.
They survived not by fighting but by outlasting.
By being still and small and patient until the threat moved on.
Rodney went still.
The blows continued. His body flinched and jerked and made sounds that were no longer voluntary, just the animal responses of flesh being struck.
But inside, behind the closed doors, Rodney was somewhere else.
He was in a private room at Kinky Kritters, kneeling on a pillow, with Mordechai's hand in his hair.
He was at the Thai restaurant, licking butter off fingers.
He was in the office, lying on the floor in panda form, with a panther's tail wrapped around his leg.
He was at the bus stop on the first night, pulling out his phone and typing a message to Lady Leo, making the choice that started everything.
Hold on. Someone will come. Amani saw the photo. Mordechai will come.
He didn't know how long it lasted. Time had stopped functioning as a measurable quantity.
The blows came and came and eventually slowed, and eventually stopped, and Rodney hung from the chains with his forehead against the cold concrete and his back on fire and his wrists bleeding where the metal had bitten through skin.
"Disappointing," Inuit said. He sounded genuinely let down, like a child whose toy had broken. "He went quiet. They always go quiet eventually. The interesting ones fight longer."
"Want me to wake him up?" The masked bear's voice.
"No. Let him hang there for a while. Maybe he'll come back to us." Inuit's voice receded. A door opened. "I need a drink. Watch him."
The door closed. The room was quieter. Only his own breathing, ragged, wet, labored filled the space.
He could feel his back, not individual injuries anymore, just a landscape of pain that extended from his neck to his waist. His pants were still on.
They hadn't taken them. The violence had been savage, but it hadn't been sexual, and Rodney held onto that fact the way he held onto everything else, with the numb, desperate grip of a man who was running out of things to hold onto.
His phone was still in his back pocket. They hadn't taken it. They hadn't even searched him.
The masked bear was somewhere behind him. Rodney could hear his breathing, the occasional shift of weight. But the younger one had left with Inuit. One guard. One guard between Rodney and the phone that might save his life.
He couldn't reach it with his arms up though. He hung from the chains and kept his breathing slow and his body limp and waited, because patience was the one thing pandas had in abundance, and Rodney was going to use every second of it.
Somewhere outside the desert warehouse, in a city full of neon and noise, he had to believe that someone was looking for him.
He had to believe it, because the alternative was giving up, and Mordechai had taught him that giving up was no longer something he did.
Hold on.
He held on.