Kerris
Day five. I'd stopped fighting the maze.
There was no point anymore. Every path I tried led to walls that didn’t exist the day before. Every shortcut doubled back on itself. Every attempt to go anywhere except toward the skull formation ended in dead ends and wasted energy.
He was herding me. Had been from the beginning. The only question was whether I'd arrive at his Keep before the storm killed me.
I walked the path he'd carved for me and tried not to think about how badly I needed him to touch me again.
The edging had ruined me. Before, my body had been desperate but directionless, craving relief without knowing what that relief would feel like.
Now I knew. Now I had seven orgasms burned into my nervous system, seven memories of his fingers working me, his body pressing against mine, his cock nudging at my entrance.
Seven orgasms that hadn't been enough. Seven that had only made the need worse.
I could still feel where he'd touched me.
Every place his hands had gripped, every spot his fingers had pressed, every inch of skin that had been pressed against his massive body.
The memory was physical, tactile, impossible to escape.
My pussy clenched every time I thought about it, which was constantly, because the tonic wouldn't let me think about anything else.
The arousal had become a permanent state.
Not waves anymore, not peaks and valleys, just a constant burning need that saturated every cell of my body.
My nipples were hard against my ruined shirt, aching points that sent sparks straight to my core with every brush of fabric.
My clit protruded from its hood, swollen and rigid, catching on the seam of my pants with every step.
Between my legs, everything was hot and swollen and so wet I could feel it running down my thighs.
I was leaving a trail. Arousal dripping onto the bone with every step, marking my path as clearly as his scent marked the water sources. Anything with a nose could follow me now. Could track my desperation through the maze like a beacon.
I'd tried to masturbate again last night.
Four times. The first attempt had lasted an hour, my fingers working desperately, trying to recreate what his hands had done.
The angle was wrong. The pressure was wrong.
The temperature was wrong. Everything about my own touch was wrong, and my body knew it.
Build, peak, nothing. Build, peak, nothing. Build, peak, nothing.
I'd sobbed until my throat was raw and beaten my fists against the bone floor in frustration. I’d finally given up and curled around the fabric he'd left me, breathing his scent while my body clenched and wept for something I couldn't give it.
The tonic had won. I was programmed, conditioned, reduced to a creature that could only be satisfied by the monster waiting at the end of this maze.
I hated it. Hated him. Hated myself for the way my body responded every time I thought about the weight of him pinning me to that wall, the way his fingers had curled inside me, the way his cock had pressed against my entrance like a promise of things to come.
A structure that doesn't collapse. He'd said that. Right before he walked away and left me empty.
At least this monster was honest about trapping me. My family had used love and obligation and guilt, had wrapped their manipulation in the language of kinship. Jonah had smiled and promised and asked me to trust him, and I'd been stupid enough to believe that blood meant something.
The memory surfaced through the tonic haze, sharp-edged and bitter.
I was twenty-two when Jonah came to me with his business proposal.
He'd done the whole performance. The presentation slides.
The market research. The five-year projections that looked so professional I'd assumed someone competent had helped him create them.
He'd sat across from me in my tiny apartment, the one I'd worked three jobs to afford while finishing my engineering degree on a thirty-percent scholarship that my parents had complained wasn't as good as Jonah's full ride.
Jonah, who'd dropped out after two semesters. Jonah, whose full scholarship had covered a year of parties and bad decisions before the grades caught up with him. Jonah, who'd never worked three jobs or twenty-hour days or any of the things I'd done to get where I was.
He'd explained how this venture was going to change everything. How the market was ready. How he just needed a little help from his brilliant sister.
"I just need a co-signer for the startup loan," he'd said. "The bank requires collateral, and you're the only one with enough credit history."
I should have said no. Should have remembered all the projects he'd started and abandoned, all the schemes that had fizzled out the moment they required actual effort.
The band in high school. The podcast in college.
The "freelance consulting" business that had been an excuse to not look for a real job.
But he was my brother. My parents had spent my entire childhood telling me how special he was, how talented, how he just needed the right opportunity. How I should support him. How family meant sacrifice.
Maybe this was the opportunity. Maybe I could help him succeed. Maybe if I helped him enough, my parents would finally look at me the way they looked at him.
"How much?"
"180,000."
I'd co-signed the loan on a Tuesday. By Friday, Jonah had already spent 40,000 on office space he didn't need and equipment he didn't understand. By the end of the first month, he'd hired three friends who knew nothing about the business and leased a company car he couldn't afford.
The business collapsed in eight months. Jonah, who had structured the whole thing on the advice of a lawyer our parents paid for, emerged with his credit intact. The bankruptcy protected him.
It did not protect me.
180,000 credits of debt. At twenty-two, with a starting engineer's salary, with three years of student loans already crushing me. The bank didn't care that I'd never seen a cent of that money. I'd signed. I was responsible.
I'd paid off maybe 60,000 in the three years since, living in a converted storage unit because real apartments cost too much.
I ate meal replacement bars because groceries cost too much, took every overtime shift, every extra project, every opportunity to earn more money that I could funnel toward the debt.
My parents called a week after the bankruptcy finalized. First time I'd heard from them in six months.
"Jonah's having a hard time," my mother said. "He needs a place to stay while he gets back on his feet. You have that spare room—"
I'd hung up. Blocked her number. Blocked all of their numbers. Blocked Jonah on every platform I could think of.
That was three years ago. I hadn't spoken to any of them since.
The memory faded as another wave of arousal crashed through me.
I braced myself against the maze wall, panting, while my body convulsed with need. The tonic had been getting worse since he touched me. Every hour brought new peaks, new desperate clenching, new floods of wetness that left my pants completely ruined.
I couldn't walk without the seam dragging across my clit.
Couldn't breathe without smelling traces of his scent on the air.
Couldn't think about anything except the way his fingers had felt inside me, the way his cock had pressed against my entrance, the way he'd promised to give me everything when I was ready to ask properly.
What did properly mean? I'd begged. I'd said please. I'd offered myself to him in every way I knew how.
It hadn't been enough.
Maybe this was what he wanted. Maybe he got off on watching me suffer. Maybe the whole "waiting for her to choose" thing was just an excuse to torment me, to edge me until I was so broken I'd agree to anything.
The thought should have made me angry. Instead, it made me desperate. Because even if he was playing games with me, even if this was all manipulation, he was still the only one who could give me relief. The tonic had made sure of that.
The sky was changing. I'd been watching the pressure build all day, feeling the atmospheric shift that preceded something violent. The wind had picked up in the last hour, carrying dust and fragments that stung my exposed skin.
The storm. The one he'd warned me about. The one that stripped flesh from skeleton.
I walked faster. The Keep. I needed to reach the Keep before it hit.
The first bone shard caught me across the forearm.
I didn't see it coming. One moment I was walking, the next a sliver of ancient calcium had sliced through my sleeve and opened a three-inch gash in my skin. Blood welled up immediately, bright red against pale flesh.
Then the wind really hit.
I'd weathered storms on a dozen colony worlds. Had hunkered down in prefab shelters while hurricanes screamed overhead, had ridden out seismic events in reinforced bunkers. None of it prepared me for this.
The wind carried bone. Fragments of creature that had been dead for millennia, ground sharp by centuries of erosion, flying through the air like shrapnel.
They hit me from all directions, slicing through fabric, opening cuts on my arms, my legs, my face.
The pain was everywhere, constant, impossible to escape.
I ran.
Not toward the Keep. I couldn't see it. I couldn't see anything except white dust and flying bone, couldn't hear anything except the shriek of wind through the formations around me. I ran blind, arms raised to protect my face, blood streaming from a dozen wounds.
Another shard caught my thigh, deep enough that I stumbled. Another grazed my scalp, leaving a line of fire across my head. Blood ran into my eyes, mixed with dust, blinded me further.
I was going to die here.