Chapter 4
They don't take me through the corridors I know.
Instead of turning left toward the Nurse's station, toward the route I've mapped in my head over thirty-six hours of listening to footsteps and counting doors, they turn right.
Then up. A set of stairs I didn't know existed—concrete, narrow, industrial—and then a door that opens onto cold air and the smell of exhaust and the first sky I've seen in two days.
Night. The orange-gray wash of city light against cloud cover. I have maybe three seconds to see it—three seconds of outside, of a world that still exists beyond concrete walls—before they pull a hood over my head.
"Move."
A hand on the back of my neck, shoving me forward. My bare feet hit gravel, then metal—the floor of a van. No seats. I'm pushed down onto my knees, cuffs catching on something bolted to the floor. The van smells like diesel and bleach.
The door slams. Engine starts. We're moving.
I try to track the route the way I've seen people do in movies—count the turns, estimate the distance.
Left turn. Straight for a while. Right. But the hood is disorienting and the van takes corners hard enough to throw me sideways, my shoulder slamming into the wheel well, my cuffed hands unable to brace.
One sharp turn sends me sprawling and a boot finds my ribs—casual, corrective, the way you'd nudge a suitcase that slid out of place.
"Stay down."
I stay down. Cheek pressed against the cold metal floor, ribs throbbing, tasting the inside of the hood. The van rumbles beneath me and I count heartbeats because it's the only thing I can count.
Prepped.
The word has been rattling around my skull since I heard it through the cell door. Ellis wants the omega prepped. I've been turning it over, trying every possible meaning, and every possibility is worse than the last.
The van stops. Twenty minutes, maybe. Maybe less. The door opens and hands haul me out—stumbling, disoriented, gravel under my feet again and then smooth concrete, then a door, then the hood comes off and I'm blinking in a corridor that looks nothing like the facility.
Polished concrete floors. Recessed lighting, warm-toned. The antiseptic smell is layered over something else—leather, maybe, or oil. This place is cleaner. More designed. Nothing like the concrete cells and fluorescent hum of the facility.
Oh god. Is this it? Am I being sold?
The thought hits me like a wall of ice water. Ellis said buyer. Ellis said auction. And now they've driven me somewhere new, somewhere polished and warm, somewhere that looks like it was built to impress someone—and my brain fills in the rest before I can stop it.
This is a showroom. I'm the product. Someone is here to buy me.
My bare feet leave smudges on the polished floor. My lip stings where I bit it during a sharp turn, and my ribs are sore from the boot, but nothing's broken. Just rattled. The metal cuffs bite into my wrists with every step. One guard in front, one behind.
They stop at a door. The guard in front scans a keycard. The lock clicks—not the wasp-buzz of my cell, a clean electronic click, like something expensive. Like something designed.
The door opens.
The room is warm. Not cell-warm—deliberately warm, the temperature calibrated so that bare skin won't prickle with goosebumps.
Amber lighting, low and diffuse, casting everything in tones of honey and shadow.
The ceiling is higher than my cell. The air smells like leather and something chemical I can't name.
In the center of the room: a wooden frame.
X-shaped. Bolted to the floor. Padded leather restraints at each point—wrists, ankles.A St. Andrew's Cross.
I know what it is because a girl named Tasha who came into Cornerstone every Tuesday spent twenty minutes one shift describing her search for a specific BDSM reference guide we didn't carry.
She talked about furniture the way other people talk about throw pillows—casually, enthusiastically, with diagrams on her phone.
I nodded politely and shelved her special order and filed the information away the way I file everything away, and now here I am, and the information is telling me to run.
Against the far wall: a table. On the table, arranged with the precision of surgical instruments: crops, floggers, restraints, plugs of varying sizes, a leather gag. Laid out like a catalog. Like a menu.
Thanks Tasha for the information, but what the actual fuck?
One wall is different from the others. Darker. Smoother. Glass—or something like it. Floor to ceiling, polished to a black mirror shine. I can see myself in it. A pale, barefoot figure in metal cuffs, lip swollen, standing in a room full of things designed to hurt him.
My legs stop working.
The guard behind me shoves me forward. I stumble—ribs aching as I suck in a sharp breath—and stand in the center of the room staring at the cross and the table and the dark mirror, and the terror is so complete it's almost peaceful.
Like drowning. Like the moment you stop fighting the water.
The moment I’d stop fighting Linda.
"Strip."
I turn. The guard who spoke is the one from behind—broader than the other, a face like a closed fist. The other is holding a pair of medical shears.
"No."
The word comes out before I can weigh it. Reflexive, animal, the last shred of something that refuses to be erased without protest. No. The only word I have left.
The broader guard doesn't hesitate. Doesn't argue.
He crosses the room in two strides, grabs the chain between my cuffs, and wrenches my arms above my head so fast my shoulders scream.
I'm yanked off balance—feet scrambling, weight hanging from the cuffs, metal biting into already-raw wrists.
He pins the chain against the wall with one hand.
I'm dangling, toes barely touching the floor, and he's holding me there like it costs him nothing. Like I weigh nothing.
I thrash. Can't help it—my body rejects what's happening before my brain can calculate the odds. I twist against his grip, kick out, try to wrench my arms free. My heel connects with something—his shin, maybe—and for one stupid, hopeful second I think—
He drives his fist into my stomach.
The air leaves my body in a single, violent rush.
My vision goes white. My legs give out and I'm hanging by my wrists, mouth open, trying to breathe and getting nothing.
The pain radiates outward from my center like a shockwave—ribs, spine, lungs that have forgotten how to expand.
I'm gagging on nothing, spit dripping from my lip, and the guard holds me there and waits.
Patient. Bored. Like he's waiting for a microwave to finish.
When I can breathe again—shallow, hitching, each inhale a knife—the other guard steps in with the shears.
He cuts my shirt from collar to hem. One clean motion.
The fabric parts and once he cuts through the arms, it falls.
My pants next—waistband to ankle, both legs.
I flinch at the cold blade against my skin but I don't fight.
Can't fight. My stomach is a ball of fire and my lungs still aren't working right and every muscle in my body has received the message: you are outmatched. Completely. Totally. Stop.
Underwear. One cut. Gone.
The broader guard lets the chain drop. I crumple—knees hitting the polished concrete, cuffed hands catching myself before my face does.
Naked. On the floor. The cold seeps into my knees, my palms. I'm shaking so hard my teeth are clicking together.
My breath comes in short, wet gasps that sound like an animal caught in something.
A boot nudges my ribs. Not a kick. A nudge. The way you'd roll over roadkill to get a better look.
"Get up."
I can't. My arms are trembling too hard to push myself upright. My stomach is still clenched around the punch, my lungs still grabbing at air in shallow little sips. I try to push up and my elbows buckle.
The broader guard grabs the back of my neck and hauls me to my feet.
My legs barely hold. He turns me—one hand on my shoulder, spinning me—so I'm facing the mirror.
Facing myself. Pale. Shaking. Naked. Cuffed.
Eyes wide and wet and animal-terrified. The bruise starting on my ribs.
My stomach muscles twitching from the hit.
This is what they see. This is what I am in this room. Not a person. Not Max. A body that said no and got hit until it stopped saying anything at all.
Breathe. In through the nose. Hold. Out through the mouth. Breathe with me, match my rhythm—
Atlas's voice. The kitchen. His hands on my face.
His eyes steady and certain and there. But Atlas isn't here.
Atlas said no. Atlas is somewhere in a city that might as well be another planet, and I'm here, and the breathing exercise is just noise.
Just moving air through lungs that don't want to cooperate.
They uncuff me to strap me to the cross.
For three seconds my hands are free. I don't fight.
The punch taught me what fighting costs in this room, and my stomach is still on fire, and I can barely stand, let alone swing.
I let them move my arms into position because the part of me that wanted to resist is curled on the floor, wheezing.
They press me face-first against the wood.
My cheek hits the smooth surface, my chest flush against the center beam.
Wrists above my head—the leather cuffs padded but inescapable, tightened until I can feel my pulse beating against them.
Ankles apart—wide, spread. My back and ass exposed.
Every part of me open to the room, to the amber light, to whoever wants to see.