Chapter 24
Tobias
It’s a peculiar pleasure, watching something you’ve acquired begin to acclimate.
I’d always taken satisfaction in seeing my specimens settle, their colors brightening, their movements changing from frantic to exploratory, their sleep cycles regularizing as they realized the world would not, in fact, end overnight.
But nothing had ever gratified me the way Cove did.
It had been almost two weeks since I’d moved him upstairs.
Two weeks of watching him transform from a creature of pure survival instinct into something softer, more pliant, more…
mine. He still wore the monitor, of course.
He was still, technically, a prisoner. But the distinction had begun to blur, at least for him.
I could see it in the way he moved around the home, even more comfortable in the space than when he was working here sans murder-sighting.
I could see it in the way he looked at me when I entered his room—not with the sharp, assessing fear of prey, but with something more complicated.
Anticipation, need, waiting for something he’d learned I could give him.
I found myself craving those evenings together.
Not just for the sex, though that had exceeded every expectation I’d harbored.
The way his breath hitched when I touched him.
The sounds he made, involuntary and raw, when I found the right angle with a toy.
The way he looked at me afterward, pupils blown, skin flushed and slick with sweat, as if I were the only thing in the world that mattered.
It was intoxicating.
This evening, I found him in his room, splayed out on his stomach, reading one of the texts I’d recently given him. He didn’t turn his head to look when I entered, but I saw his shoulders relax, the subtle shift in his posture that meant he knew it was me.
“Good day?” I asked, settling onto the edge of the bed, and placing his feet in my lap to massage out any lasting stress.
He shrugged, still looking at his book. “Yeah. You didn’t join me for dinner though.”
“I’m sorry, precious. My work call ran over.”
Cove’s toes curled against the inside of my knee and I made a show of kneading the arch of his foot until he squirmed.
“Are you going to make it up to me, Daddy?”
“Sweet siren, of course I am,” I said, working up his feet to his calves, lightly tickling the faint red hairs that covered his legs.
Slowly, my hands climbed, petting the back of his knees, then his thighs until he gave up the pretense of reading and leaned into the pressure, pushing his hips up and out in a way he knew would drive me mad.
“Do you think,” he said, voice studiously neutral even as he let out soft sighs in response to my wandering touch, “that I’ll ever see the ocean again, outside this house?”
It wasn’t a question I’d expected, especially not right at that moment, though perhaps I should have. Cove had grown soft and attentive, but never unobservant, and though he rarely spoke anymore of leaving, it had to still itch at him.
I forced the smile, the unhurried confidence of a man who believed love—affection, at the very least—could sedate anything, even captivity.
“Of course you will. We could go for a drive this weekend, if you’d like. There’s nothing that says you have to stay inside.” I let my hands drift lower still, to the softest crease right beneath his ass, and he made a sound like a yelp disguised as protest.
He twisted around, looking up at me with his messy halo of copper hair, mouth set in a line that was both challenging and hungry.
There were times—mostly at night, when I thought I heard him pacing the floors in the dark, or found him staring at the dark water through his windows—that I wondered if he was simply waiting for the opportunity to run.
Other times, he seemed perfectly satisfied with his new reality, happy, enriched, and addicted to my attention.
Tonight, though, he seemed less restless, and more… restless in situ. Hungry for change but unwilling to trade his comforts for it.
“You mean that?” he asked, voice flattened and careful.
I rolled my eyes. “What am I, a politician?”
I nudged behind his knee until he kicked a little, and I laughed, delighted, because he was finally, finally allowing himself to be petulant. “You have been a model guest. Long as you promise not to bolt, I don’t see why you shouldn’t have a little sun on your face.”
He let the moment hold, cracked it with a sideways smile. “You trust me that much? And don’t think I missed how you just told a fucking joke, mister. I’m never forgetting that.”
“Mhm, laugh all you want.”
“But, really, do you trust me to not run away?”
“Are you asking if your leash is off?” I said, pitching my voice into that low, secret register I knew made his pulse accelerate. “Or do you want to know what happens if you test the boundaries?”
He made another of those pretty little, involuntary sounds, muffled by the pillow, and I wondered if he realized how easy he was to read, how every inch of his skin telegraphed, a living Morse code just for me.
“I—I would be good,” he murmured, arching his back with a cat-like stretch.
“Would you,” I said, my fingers pausing, splayed with theatrical hesitation just above his tailbone, “or would you let your curiosity get the better of you?”
He looked at me sidelong, his eyes half-closed and heavy with the dreamy, reckless confidence of someone who had finally gotten a taste of the thing they’d starved for.
“I’m curious,” he admitted, as though confessing to minor theft, “but it’s not the same. Not since—” He cut off, biting down on the rest, tugging the pillow closer.
I waited, as any good handler does. The best training is patient, gentle, and absolute. He would finish the thought, eventually, or let it seed some later conversation, when hunger or nostalgia or night-fear pushed it to the surface.
Instead, it was me who broke, who reached between his shoulderblades to push the mess of hair away so I could see his face, pale and moonlit.
“Not since what, Cove?”
His lips parted to deny me, but I waited, hands still and warm on his skin. He shivered, not from cold, but from the intensity of the lay-bare stare I fixed on him. When he did finally answer, his voice was so faint I had to lean in, drink the words off his tongue.
“Not since it stopped feeling like a prison,” he whispered, and glanced away as if ashamed.
For a brief moment I let myself savor it—the admission that he was changed, that my shaping of him was working, had worked, was ongoing and inexorable. Then, I kissed the nape of his neck. Never a quick, consumptive thing, but instead the slow pressure of ownership.
I left him marked, the ghost of my mouth pressed into his skin, and rose from the bed.
He made a protest—quiet, wounded, a noise designed to summon me back—but I ignored it, striding over to the bag that had sat, pointedly, on my armchair all evening.
Its contents reflected back with a muted gleam in the lamplight—the coil of silicone, a narrow vial, and stainless-steel gleaming against velvet.
When I returned, his gaze flicked from my face to the implements and back.
He swallowed, the column of his throat moving beneath the red bloom I’d left.
He didn’t speak, but his body performed a kind of question—half-turned, prepared to be pulled, arranged, even dismantled if that was what the evening required.
I pressed the length of the beads—longer and more impudent than anything I’d used on him before—against his lips, not to be coy, but to test the degree of his willingness to be filled, to be claimed.
He didn’t flinch, not even when the largest sphere nudged at his mouth.
He opened, and took the first bead between his lips, letting the feel of the first bulb linger on his tongue before he drew it away and began, gently, relentlessly, to work it further into his mouth.
Cove’s jaw flexed, tongue flattening as if to steady it, eyes already gone glassy with anticipation and, just beneath, a tiny hint of self-alarm. When I stroked a finger along the seam of his lips, he let the bead rest heavy on his tongue, waiting.
“You know what I want?” I asked, softly. I didn’t need to. He nodded, the motion barely perceptible.
I let the string drop with a little flourish onto the duvet, then thumbed the lube open. He watched, silent, as I worked a slick rope down the beads, watching the way the viscous shine caught and magnified even the faintest tremors in my hand. It was not nerves. It was precision.
I was greedy for the way he looked when I surprised him, how he tensed to receive, how quickly he acclimated and learned to want it.
My hand drifted to his waistband, and he made a sound, high and sweet, as I drew his shorts down, exposing the pink-white of his hip.
He was hard already, as needy as any animal caught up in its conditioning, his cock leaking and flush against his belly.
I held him by the back of the neck and guided him upright, settling him between my knees, so that his back pressed to my suit and my chin could rest on the jut of his shoulder.
He was breathing shallowly now, eyes unfocused, knees drawn up.
Even through my shirt I could feel the heat radiating from him.
I pressed my mouth to his shoulder, teeth grazing the skin in a way that made him seize, then melt, boneless, onto my lap.
I didn’t have to urge him down; he rolled his hips back into me, as if desperate to erase even the memory of space between us.