Chapter 4 #3
Something touches the back of my neck. Thin. Firm. Leather, maybe—smooth and cool against my heat-flushed skin. I crane my neck to the side, desperate to see, and catch a glimpse: a long, narrow rod with a small leather paddle at the tip. Some kind of riding instrument.
Something designed for animals.
It traces down my spine—slow, precise—and every inch of contact is a lit fuse.
My skin tightens. My breath catches. The leather tip moves between my shoulder blades and my whole back arches into it, chasing the pressure without my permission.
A sound pushes through the gag—low, throaty, nothing like a scream.
My face burns. My cock throbs against the wood.
I'm pressing into the touch like a cat being stroked and I can't stop.
I can't stop.
The tip drags lower. Down my ribs. Along my flank.
Each point of contact sends heat cascading outward in ripples—skin flushing, muscles twitching, nerve endings firing so hard my toes curl against the concrete.
Slick pulses between my legs in a warm rush that I feel run further down my inner thigh.
My hips roll forward against the cross—once, twice—grinding into the wood, desperate for friction, and the moan that leaks through the gag is so raw and so wanting that I bite down on the leather hard enough to make my jaw ache.
The first strike lands across my upper back.
Bright. Sharp. A sting that blooms outward like a sunburn and my body—my treacherous, broken, heat-sick body—reads it as good.
The cry that rips out of me sounds like pleasure.
Sounds like begging. Sounds like every shameful thing I've spent eleven years hiding, broadcast through a leather gag for a stranger to hear.
The second across the backs of my thighs. I lurch against the cross, forehead grinding into the wood. The impact sends a shockwave straight to my core—my cock jerks, my hole clenches around the emptiness, slick pooling between my legs so fast I feel it dripping.
My body is screaming for something to fill it and the struck skin sings with heat that my nervous system can't distinguish from arousal.
The third a little higher—the curve where thigh meets ass—and my hips slam forward against the wood so hard the cross shudders.
Seeking. Grinding. A keening sound leaks through the gag, high and desperate and animal, and I can feel myself leaking pre-come against the smooth surface, my body performing every function it was designed for, right here, right now, for a man I don’t know and against my will.
"Good," he says. Like a command obeyed. Like a test passed.
I'm sobbing. The tears are hot and constant and I can't wipe them because my hands are above my head and the restraints dig into my wrists every time I pull.
My skin is tight and burning where the rod landed.
My cock aches against the wood. My thighs are slick and trembling.
And I know there won't be marks tomorrow.
The product stays undamaged. That's the point.
That's always been the point. Everything—the blockers, the meals, the calibrated temperature, the padded restraints, and now the injection that stripped me bare and put my heat on display—is designed to show a buyer exactly what they're getting.
He sets down the rod.
I have three seconds of silence. Three seconds where nothing touches me and the only sound is my own ragged breathing and the wet hiccup of sobs I can't control.
My body throbs—every welted inch of skin pulsing, my cock still hard and leaking, the heat rolling through me in waves that crest and ebb but never stop.
Three seconds to think it's over, maybe it's over—
He picks up something from the table. I hear it—the snap of a fresh glove, the click of a cap. I can't see any of it. Can only hear and wait and press my forehead against the wood and brace.
Cold fingers. Slick—not my slick, something thicker, clinical—spread between my ass cheeks. Then pressure against my hole. Something blunt and firm pushing against my entrance, and my body tightens against it on instinct even as the heat screams yes, open, let it in—
"Relax, seventeen. This goes easier if you don't fight it."
I can't relax. Every muscle in my body is locked. The plug presses in—slow, inexorable—and a sound comes through the gag that's half scream, half something else. Something that makes my face burn. Because the heat has turned the invasion into sensation, and the sensation is—
He doesn't just push it in. He works it.
In and out. Slow, deliberate strokes, each one pressing into my asshole deeper, stretching me wider.
The plug fucks into me slow at first and then my tormenter pushes harder, and my body responds with devastating obedience—clenching around it, pulling it deeper, slick gushing around the intrusion.
My hips push back. I can't stop them. Can't stop any of it.
The moan that leaks through the gag sounds like I'm enjoying this, and the horror of that sound—of what it means, of what it proves about what I am—
Atlas.
The name surfaces like a gasp. Not a thought—deeper.
Something in my chest reaching for the only safety it knows.
Atlas in the kitchen. His hands on my face.
His thumbs on my cheekbones. The way he looked at me like I was something breakable and precious and worth the effort of being careful.
Breathe with me. Cedar and control and the low steady certainty that nothing bad could happen as long as he was in the room.
I'm here. Hold onto me.
He didn't say that. He never said that. But I hear it anyway, and I cling to it while the man behind me works the plug in slow, punishing strokes and my body betrays me with every thrust.
He pulls it out. I gasp—the sudden emptiness a shock, my hole clenching on nothing, and the whimper that escapes me is needy. Desperate. The sound of an omega in heat who's been emptied and can't bear it.
I hate myself for making it.
Then something bigger presses against me.
The second plug is wider. I feel the difference immediately—the stretch is sharper, the burn brighter, my body resisting even as the slick eases the way.
He pushes it in with one long, steady motion that doesn't stop when I scream against the gag.
Doesn't pause when my spine bows and my wrists wrench against the restraints.
It fills me completely—heavy, invasive, a constant pressure against every sensitized nerve—and my cock jerks against the wood and I come.
Not an orgasm. Not really. A helpless, shuddering release that rips through me without buildup or permission—my body emptying itself against the cross, hips stuttering, vision whiting out. No pleasure. Just biology completing a circuit. Just the machine doing what machines do.
"See?" he says, behind me. "That's what you are, seventeen. That's what all that fight was about. Your body already knows. We're just teaching the rest of you to catch up."
I hang against the cross. Tears dripping off my chin.
Come cooling on the wood beneath me. The plug heavy and full inside me.
Every inch of my skin electric, oversensitized, the heat still rolling through me because one forced orgasm doesn't stop a cycle—it barely touches it.
The need is still there. Vast. Consuming.
A hunger that doesn't care about dignity or consent or the fact that I'm strapped to a cross in a room that smells like leather and shame.
Bane.
He comes to me like a breath. Not the Bane who called me nothing at the first dinner.
The other one. The real one. The one who sat down next to me in the library chair without asking, shoulder inches from mine, and read in silence like being close to me was the easiest thing in the world.
The one who caught me when I slipped—hand around my arm, face inches from mine, those hazel eyes startled open for a half-second before the walls went back up.
The one who came to my room and said I was scared.
I cared from the first minute I saw you.
And then kissed me so slowly I forgot every cruel word he'd ever said.
I'm here too. You're not alone.
He never said that either. But I build it in my head like a room I can live in—Bane's voice, rough and uncertain, saying the thing he'd never say out loud. And I crawl inside it and close the door.
The man moves behind me. I hear him set the rod down on the table. Hear him pick up something else. Something that sounds different—heavier, with a whisper of movement. Leather strips, maybe. Multiple. A sound like fingers dragging through fringe.
"Your buyer requested a preview of how you take marks," he says. Casual. Like reading from a work order. "Wanted to see how the skin holds up. Some clients prefer their purchases... pre-seasoned."
Marks. Not the pink sting of the rod that fades by morning. Marks. The kind that stay. The kind that bruise and split and scar. The kind that mean the product isn't being preserved anymore—it's being broken in.
My whole body goes cold. The heat retreats for one awful second, drowned by pure animal terror, and I pull against the restraints so hard the leather creaks and my wrists scream and I don't care—
Zero.
He's there. In the dark behind my eyes. Not gentle like Atlas.
Not uncertain like Bane. Zero is standing in the stairwell with his black eyes and his predator's stillness, looking at me the way he always looked at me—like I was the only real thing in the room.
Like everything else was scenery and I was the point.
You're mine, he said once. Or almost said. Or said with his eyes and his scent and the way his body angled toward me in every room like a compass finding north.
You're mine and no one touches what's mine.