16. Leandra #2
Not the pain. Not even the humiliation. The part I hate most is this; the way my body has learned to want it.
The way pleasure and pain have become so tangled together that I can no longer find where one ends and the other begins.
He did that deliberately. I know he did.
It was part of the design, part of the careful, patient architecture of everything he’s built around me these past months.
He has rewired me at the most fundamental level, taken the natural responses of my body and twisted them into something unrecognizable.
He has made my own flesh into a collaborator, an accomplice in my destruction.
“Ezekiel loves rough sex. Ezekiel loves to hurt. So, as a good wife, you will learn to love it, you will learn to want it…” Isaac’s voice echoes in my head, repeating the same words he’s said so many times now that I’ve lost count.
The words have become a kind of mantra, a prophecy he is determined to fulfil.
And the worst part, the part that makes me want to claw my way out of my own skin, is that it’s working.
I am learning to want it.
My body has betrayed me so completely that I no longer know where conditioning ends and genuine desire begins. I no longer know if there’s even a difference anymore.
I keep my eyes closed, I keep the other face in my mind as I move.
And despite everything, despite the metal biting into my flesh and the ache that radiates through me and the weight of his gaze on my skin like something physical, I feel myself beginning to unravel.
I hate that it feels good, I hate that I arch into it.
I hate that the sounds I make now are different from the ones he forced from me in the beginning, that he knows the difference, and that the knowledge of that sits in his eyes like a trophy.
I hate that my pleasure is his victory. I hate that every moan, every gasp, every shudder is another brick in the prison he’s building all around me.
He’s winning. He’s turning me into what he wants. His fucking creature.
The thought cuts through the haze of sensation like a blade.
His creature. That’s what I’m becoming. Not a wife, not a person, not even a victim, a creature.
Something shaped, moulded, and broken down until there’s nothing left but what he’s built to replace it.
Something that exists only to serve a purpose, to fulfil a function.
To be used, displayed, and passed along like property.
Because that’s what I am now. Property. My father’s property, given to Isaac, but soon to be Ezekiel’s property.
I am a thing to be transferred, a commodity to be prepared for market.
Somewhere beneath the sensation, beneath the careful blankness I’ve constructed over my face a thought surfaces, quiet and persistent, the way thoughts are when you’ve had too long alone with them.
The way thoughts are when you have no one to share them with, no one to tell you that you’re still human, still real, still worth something.
When he finally moves me, when he finally decides I’m ready, will it be better?
Will Ezekiel actually be as cruel as Isaac says.
or will I gain some freedom in my new surroundings?
Will there be a window I can look out of?
Will there be moments of solitude? Will there be anything at all that resembles the life I used to have, the girl I used to be?
I genuinely don’t know.
I’ve turned the question over so many times that it’s worn smooth, like sea glass, like something that’s lost all its edges from too much handling.
I don’t know what waits on the other side of this.
I don’t know if I’m being prepared for something worse or something merely different, and the not-knowing is its own kind of torture.
Hope is dangerous. Hope is a trap. But I can’t seem to kill it entirely, no matter how hard I try.
Some small, stubborn part of me still whispers that maybe, just maybe, there is something better waiting.
Some small, stubborn part of me refuses to accept that this is all there is, that this is all I’ll ever be.
I don’t know if freedom is even a real thing anymore, if I’ve simply traded one kind of cage for another, or if the version of me that eventually walks out of here will be recognisable to anyone who knew her before.
Will she still laugh at the same jokes? Will she still love the same songs?
Will she still flinch at the same things, or will she have been hardened into something that nothing can touch?
I don’t know if she’ll be recognisable to me.
That’s the question that haunts me in the quiet moments, in the dark hours when Isaac is asleep and I am alone with my thoughts.
Will I know myself when this is over? Will there be enough of me left to recognize?
Or will I look in the mirror one day and see a stranger wearing my face?
A hollowed-out shell that moves, speaks, and performs but has nothing real left inside?
His left hand finds my hips, gripping hard enough to bruise while his right wraps around the chain linking the metal biting into my nipples.
In one deliberate movement he yanks while driving his cock hard into me.
I cry out again, my whole body shuddering with the collision of pain and pleasure, and for one horrible, luminous moment I can’t tell which one is winning.
The sensations blur together until they’re indistinguishable, until pain is pleasure and pleasure is pain, and I am nothing but a body experiencing both.
A body that has been taught to accept both, a body that no longer knows how to tell the difference.
Pain.
Pleasure.
It doesn’t matter anymore.
Nothing matters except performing the way he expects, performing the way I’ve been trained to. Performing the way a good wife performs, the way a creature performs, the way something that used to be a person performs when it has forgotten how to be anything else.
He watches me come apart with that same detached satisfaction.
The satisfaction of a craftsman watching his work function exactly as designed, the satisfaction of an artist stepping back to admire his creation.
The satisfaction of a man who has taken a human being and reduced her to this- a body that responds on command, a voice that makes the right sounds, a face that shows only what he wants to see.
And I keep my eyes closed.
I keep the other face in my mind and I count. I count the thrusts, the breaths, the seconds. I count the days scratched into my wrist, I count the pieces of myself I’ve had to bury, I count the things I’ve lost and the things I’m still losing and the things I’m terrified I’ll never get back.