Chapter 4 #2
I'm shaking. Full-body tremors that rattle the restraints against the wood.
I can't see behind me. Can't see the table or the implements or whoever enters the room next.
Can only stare at the grain of the wood inches from my face and feel the air on my bare skin and listen.
My breath comes in short, hitching gasps that aren't enough, aren't nearly enough.
One. Two. Three—
This is what Ellis meant. Prepped. This is what I was being maintained for—fed, hydrated, injected, kept in optimal condition like a racehorse before a showing.
Every protein bar. Every injection. Every clinical touch from the Nurse and her clipboard.
All of it leading here. To this room. To this cross.
To this moment where the product is unwrapped and put on display.
I think about Wren. Through the wall. Twelve days in. Has she been in this room? Will she be? The thought makes something inside me twist so hard I almost vomit.
The door opens again.
The guards leave.
The lock clicks behind them. The room goes silent except for the hum of the climate control and my own breathing—ragged, wet, the breathing of someone who's forgotten how to do it properly.
I'm alone. On the cross. Naked. Face pressed into the wood. Wrists above my head, ankles apart, every muscle in my body drawn taut between the four points of restraint. And I wait.
Minutes pass. Maybe a lot of minutes.
I try to angle my head—crane my neck to the right, then the left, trying to catch a glimpse of the room behind me.
But the cross holds me flush against the wood, and the angle is wrong, and all I can see is the edge of the wall and the faint amber glow of the lighting and the corner of that too-perfect mirror.
No door. No table. No clock. No way to measure how long I've been here.
Long enough that the adrenaline fades and the real discomfort sets in.
My shoulders burn—a deep, grinding ache from bearing the weight of my arms above my head.
My wrists throb where the cuffs dig in. My calves cramp from standing on my toes, trying to take pressure off my arms. The punch still lives in my stomach, a dull, hot knot that flares every time I breathe too deep.
The wood against my chest and cheek has gone from cold to warm, absorbing my body heat, becoming part of me.
I count breaths. Lose count. Start over. Lose count again.
The crying comes back—not the sobbing from before, just a quiet leak. Tears running sideways across my face and dripping onto the wood. I don't have the energy to stop them. Don't have the energy to do anything except hang here and breathe and wait for whatever comes next.
The lullaby surfaces in my head. Wren's voice, thin and sweet through the concrete. I hold onto it the way you hold onto a rope in the dark. Something real. Something human. Someone who knows my name.
Then the door opens.
Footsteps. Heavy. Deliberate. Unhurried.
One person. He crosses behind me—I hear him move through the room, hear the soft scrape of something being lifted from the table—and stops.
Close. Close enough that I can feel the displacement of air against my bare skin.
Close enough to smell him—clean sweat and latex and something sharper.
"So you're the one they're all worked up about."
A shiver tears up my spine.
"Number seventeen." His voice is deep. Low.
The kind of voice that fills a room without raising itself.
Not the flat, mechanical tone of the guards.
This voice has texture. Interest. The leisurely cadence of a man with nowhere to be and all the time in the world.
"The one Ellis won't shut up about. Scent profile off the charts, apparently.
Got clients lined up already—serious money, the kind of alphas who'll pay a premium for something fresh.
" A pause. I hear him set something on the table.
"Let's see if you're worth what they're offering. "
A hand closes around the back of my neck. Large. Warm. The grip isn't painful—it's possessive. Holding me in place the way you'd hold an animal for inspection. His thumb presses into the base of my skull, tilting my head forward against the wood.
"First things first."
A sting. Sharp. The side of my neck—not the crook of my arm where the Nurse puts the blockers, but higher, just below my ear. A needle sliding in fast and deep. Something cold floods the injection site, spreading outward in a wave that I feel ripple through my veins.
"Give that about thirty seconds," he says. His hand stays on my neck, holding me still. "Then we'll get started."
I don't understand. Not yet. My brain is still trying to process the needle, the cold, the casual tone—and then it hits.
The pilot light that's been flickering in my belly since the blockers started failing doesn't flicker.
It ignites.
The heat crashes through me like a dam breaking.
Not the slow, creeping warmth I've been feeling at the edges—the flutter I could ignore, the simmer I could push down.
This is a wall of fire. Every nerve ending in my body lights up at once.
My skin goes electric. My vision blurs. My spine arches involuntarily against the cross, a full-body shudder that rattles the restraints, and a sound comes out of me that I don't recognize—low, desperate, pulled from somewhere deep.
No. No no no—
The blockers. The injection didn't add blockers. It killed them. Whatever he put in me just stripped away the last pharmaceutical wall between my body and the full force of a heat cycle that's been chemically suppressed for days.
Everything hits at once. The fever—instant, consuming, my temperature spiking so fast I feel dizzy.
The ache—low, deep, a hollow pulsing need that radiates from my asshole outward.
And the slick. I feel it before I can deny it—warm, wet, my body producing what it's designed to produce, doing exactly what biology demands, and the shame is so total and so immediate that it eclipses everything else.
The fear, the pain, the punch still burning in my stomach—all of it disappears under the crushing weight of what my body is doing right now, here, on a cross, with a stranger standing behind me.
“Fuck,” I groan.
I'm hard. Achingly, desperately hard, my cock pressed against the wood, and there's nothing I can do about it. My body doesn't care about the cross or the restraints or the room or the man behind me. My body only knows one thing: need. Need so vast and primal it drowns out thought.
"There it is," he says. Satisfied. The way you'd say it when an engine turns over. "There's the omega."
The slick is running down my inner thighs. I can feel it—warm, damning, impossible to hide. Every part of me on display, including the parts that prove Ellis right. Omegas are built for this. My biology betraying me in real time, performing exactly as advertised.
"Look at you." His voice is close now. Right behind me. Right against my ear. "All that fight you had with the handlers, all that no—and your body's begging before I've even touched you."
"Please." The word comes out wrecked. Shaking. I didn't decide to say it—the heat ripped it out of me, or the terror did, or both at once because they're tangled together now, indistinguishable. "Please don't—I can't—please don't do this—"
My hips roll forward. Against the wood. Seeking friction on my cock against the smooth surface and finding it, and a sound escapes me—half sob, half moan—that makes me want to die.
Because I'm begging him to stop while my body is grinding against the cross, and he can see it, he can see everything, the slick and the erection and the involuntary rocking of my hips, and the words coming out of my mouth don't match what my body is doing and I can't control either one.
"Please—please—I don't want this, please stop—"
"You're going to learn something tonight, seventeen.
" His hand moves from my neck to my shoulder.
Down. Along my spine. Each touch sends fire cascading through sensitized skin.
In heat, every nerve is a live wire. Every point of contact is a detonation.
My back arches into his hand even as my mouth keeps begging, and the disconnect between the two is so total it feels like being split in half.
"You're going to learn that what you want doesn't matter.
What matters is what you are. And what you are—" His hand stops at the small of my back. "—is exactly what you were made to be."
"Stop—please—I'll do whatever you want, just don't—"
"What I want," he says, with the patience of a man correcting a slow student, "is for you to stop talking."
I can't. The words keep coming—please, stop, don't, please—a broken loop, half prayer and half panic, pouring out of me in a voice I don't recognize while my hips keep rocking against the wood and the slick keeps running down my thighs and my body keeps performing exactly the way it was designed to perform.
Even as I yank and pull on the restraints on my wrists.
"See, this is the problem with fresh inventory.
" He sighs. Conversational. Bored. "All that noise.
All that begging to stop." His hand wraps around the back of my neck again, squeezing once—a warning.
"I'm not here to train you to beg me to stop, seventeen.
I'm here to train you to beg for more. Your buyer will want that pretty mouth as eager as this wet little hole of yours.
And we're going to get there. But first—"
I hear the buckle before I feel it.
Suddenly, a leather gag presses against my lips, forcing my jaw open, and he buckles it behind my head without giving me a second to adjust. Panic claws up my throat.
The strap digs into the corners of my mouth.
My pleas compress into muffled, shapeless sounds—the language of a person who no longer has words.
"Better," he says.