Chapter 33
JENNA
Consciousness comes back slowly, warmth spreading through my body before my mind catches up. Something wet and soft moves between my legs, sending sparks up my spine. My back arches before I’m fully awake.
“Mmm.” The sound escapes me as I surface from sleep.
Nikolai’s mouth works against me, his tongue tracing patterns that make my thighs tremble. His hands grip my hips, holding me steady as he devours me. The mirrors above reflect our bodies—me sprawled across the breeding bench, him kneeling between my spread legs like he’s worshipping at an altar.
“Good morning, baby.” His voice rumbles against my sensitive flesh. “You taste like mine.”
My fingers clench in the restraints. “Nik—”
He circles my clit with the tip of his tongue, then sucks hard enough to make me cry out. The sound echoes in the mirrored room, multiplied into a chorus of desperate need.
“That’s it. Let me hear you.” He slides two fingers inside me, curling them to hit that spot that makes my vision blur. “You’re already so wet for me.”
I’m caught between sleep and sensation, my body responding before my mind can catch up. He eats me so fucking well, alternating between gentle licks and demanding pressure until I’m shaking.
“Please.” I don’t know what I’m begging for.
“Come for me first.” His fingers pump faster while his mouth latches onto my clit. “Give me what’s mine.”
The orgasm crashes through me, my back bowing as I scream his name. He doesn’t stop, doesn’t give me time to recover before he’s building me up again.
“Nikolai, I can’t—”
“You can. You will.” His tongue flicks against me relentlessly. “I want three before I fuck you.”
My hands grip the edges of the bench as he drags me toward the second peak. The overstimulation borders on torture, every nerve ending on fire. When I come again, tears leak from the corners of my eyes.
“Beautiful.” He presses kisses to my inner thighs. “One more, baby. Show me how much you need this.”
The third orgasm builds slower, deeper. He uses his whole mouth now, sucking and licking while his fingers work inside me. When it hits, I shatter, my whole body trembling with the force of it as I squirt into his mouth.
Nikolai rises between my legs, his cock hard and ready. His face glistens with my arousal. “Look at yourself.”
I glance up at the mirrors, seeing my flushed skin, my swollen lips parted as I pant. My legs are spread wide, my pussy glistening and ready for him.
“You look like you’re made for this.” He positions himself at my entrance. “Made to be bred.”
He pushes inside slowly, letting me feel every inch as he fills me. I’m so sensitive from the orgasms that even his gentle penetration makes me whimper.
“So tight. So perfect.” He bottoms out, his piercing pressing against my cervix. “Can you feel how deep I am? How fully I own you?”
I nod, unable to form words.
“When you’re pregnant, when your belly is round with my baby, I’ll still fuck you like this.” He starts to move, long, slow strokes that make my toes curl. “You’ll be even more beautiful than I believed possible. Even more mine.”
The fantasy shouldn’t turn me on, but it does. The image of myself, heavy with his child, still spread beneath him, still taking everything he gives me.
“Tell me you want it.” His thrusts grow harder. “Tell me you want to carry my baby.”
“I want it.” The words tumble out between gasps. “I want your baby, Nik. Want you to fill me up.”
He groans. “That’s my girl. My perfect little breeder.”
But then his expression shifts. A darkness I haven’t seen before.
“You know what else I want?” His voice drops to a whisper.
I shake my head.
“I want you to fight me.” He goes still inside me. “Really fight. Use a safe word if you need me to stop, but otherwise…” His smile turns predatory. “Try to get away from me.”
My pulse spikes. “What?”
“Fight me, Jenna. Pretend you don’t want this.” His hands move to my wrists. “Pretend I’m taking what isn’t mine.”
The suggestion sends ice through my veins and fire through my core simultaneously. My body knows the difference between him and my stepfather, but the echoes are there.
“Crimson,” he says quietly. “That’s your word if you need to stop.”
I nod, my heart hammering.
He pulls out suddenly, stepping back. “Run.”
I scramble off the bench, adrenaline flooding my system. But there’s nowhere to go in the mirrored room. I back against the wall, my hands pressed flat against the glass.
“Please don’t.” The words come naturally, my body remembering old fears even as new arousal builds. “I don’t want this.”
“Liar.” He stalks toward me, his cock jutting out from his body. “Your pussy is dripping for me. Your nipples are hard. You want this as much as I do.”
“No.” I shake my head, sliding along the wall. “Stay away from me.”
He lunges, catching my wrist and spinning me around. My cheek presses against the mirror as he pins me there with his body weight.
“You can’t escape me.” His breath is hot against my ear. “I’m going to take what’s mine whether you want it or not.”
I struggle against his hold, my body fighting even as my core clenches with need. “Let me go!”
“Never.” He kicks my legs apart, his hand tangling in my hair to hold my face against the mirror. “You belong to me. Every hole, every breath, every heartbeat.”
His cock presses against my entrance from behind. I try to close my legs, but he’s too strong, too determined.
“Stop, please—” My voice breaks as he pushes inside.
“You feel that?” He bottoms out with one brutal thrust. “Feel how your body opens for me?”
He fucks me against the mirror, hard and relentless. My palms press flat against the glass as he takes me with a violence that should terrify me but only makes me wetter.
“My good little slut, taking my cock even while you beg me to stop.” His grip tightens in my hair. “You love being used, don’t you? Love being nothing but a hole for me to fuck.”
“No!” But my hips push back to meet his thrusts.
“Yes.” He reaches around to rub my clit roughly. “Come on my cock while you pretend you don’t want it. Show me what a dirty girl you are.”
The orgasm builds despite my protests, my body betraying every word I speak. When it hits, I scream—part pleasure, part anguish, all need.
“That’s it. Milk my cock with that tight pussy.” He pounds into me harder. “I’m going to fill you up. Breed you full of my cum whether you want it or not.”
“Please don’t come inside me,” I whimper, the role-play and reality blurring.
“Too late, baby.” His rhythm falters. “Here it comes. Take every drop like the good girl you are.”
He explodes inside me with a roar, his cock pulsing as he empties himself deep. I feel each spurt, my walls clenching around him instinctively.
We collapse against the mirror, both panting. His arms come around me, gentle now, protective.
“You okay?” His voice is soft, concerned.
I nod, still catching my breath. The scene was intense, cathartic in ways I didn’t expect. Like exorcising ghosts by rewriting the script.
He turns me in his arms, studying my face. “You did so well, baby. So perfect.”
“I needed that.” The admission surprises me. “I didn’t know I needed it, but I did.”
He kisses me tenderly, his hands stroking my hair. “Sometimes we have to face the monsters to realize we’ve already slain them.”
He carries me back to a leather couch, settling me on my back before pushing inside me again. This time there’s no urgency, no violence—just gentle connection as he fills the space his absence left behind.
“Stay right here,” he murmurs, his forehead against mine. “Let me just… stay.”
We lie connected, his weight pressing me into the padding. The silence stretches, comfortable now instead of tense. His breathing gradually slows, but his body language tells me he’s not relaxed. My eyes find his in concern.
“What is it?” I smooth my hands over his shoulders.
He’s been quiet for so long, I think he won’t answer. When he finally speaks, his voice is barely a whisper.
“My first hunt. I was seven.”
My heart clenches. I don’t speak, don’t move, afraid any interruption will make him stop.
“They brought in another kid. Younger than me. Maybe five.” His hands tighten on my hips. “Told me if I could catch him in the maze, I’d get extra food. If I couldn’t…” He shudders. “They’d put me back in the dark room.”
I stroke his hair, offering what comfort I can while he’s still buried inside me.
“He was crying. Scared. Kept calling for his mama.” Nikolai’s voice breaks slightly. “But I was so hungry, Jenna. I’d been in isolation for weeks. I just wanted the food.”
“You were just a child,” I whisper.
“I caught him at the dead end. He looked up at me with these huge brown eyes, still crying.” His breathing becomes ragged. “And when I brought him back to the handlers, they praised me. Called me their little hunter. Gave me chocolate.”
Tears slide down my cheeks for the boy he was, for the innocence they stole.
“I ate that chocolate while they dragged him away screaming.” His whole body trembles now. “And you know what the worst part is? I felt proud. For a moment, I felt like I’d won something.”
For a long moment I can’t speak. The boy he’s describing isn’t a monster. He’s a child who was handed a monster’s choice before he was old enough to spell his own name.
“Who were they?” My voice barely works. “Who does that, Nik? Who puts a seven-year-old in a maze and calls it a hunt?”
He goes so still I feel it everywhere we’re joined.
“You really want to know.” It isn’t a question. It’s a warning.
“I want all of it.”
His breath leaves him slow. When he speaks again the words come flat, recited, like he’s reading them off a wall he’s stared at his whole life.
“There was a program. A facility. I don’t know how old I was when they took me—too young to keep anything from before.
No mother’s face. No name that was mine.
Just a number, and the dark room, and the first time anyone was ever kind to me was the day I learned to hurt someone smaller.
” His jaw works. “That’s how it’s built.
They take you young because young things are more pliable.
Starve you, freeze you, leave you in the black so long you forget the sun ever existed—then they open one door.
Food. Warmth. A hand on your head telling you you’re good.
You’d do anything for that door. Anything they demanded. ”
“And they asked you to hunt,” I whisper.
“They tell you that you will become a hunter.” His mind is somewhere far away, somewhere I can’t follow.
“They taught us to read and to kill out of the same books. Where a body breaks. How long a person lasts. To us it was just—school. We didn’t know other children learned anything else.
By the time you’re old enough to ask why, the why is already part of you.
I don’t know how to be anything else. They take any semblance of who you could be and twist it until you can’t remember being anything else.
They don’t just make killers, they make soldiers. ”
I think of his mask. Of the way he moved through the trees after me, patient, certain, made for it. Of how many times I called him a monster in my own head. My stomach turns over—not at him. At them.
“Us,” I say. “You keep saying us. Do you still know some of the other boys?”
Something shifts in his face, the only soft thing in the whole confession.
“Marcus. Darius. Ezra. Every man I’d die for came out of the same place.
” His arm tightens around me. “We didn’t meet on the outside.
We were forged in the dark together, and we got out of it the same way.
It’s the one thing they never planned for.
They built us to be weapons that couldn’t love.
So we learned that from each other, where they couldn’t see.
Turned the only people who understood the dark into the only family any of us has ever had. ”
“Nik.” I cup his face, forcing him to look at me. “You survived. That’s all you did—survive.”
“They broke me so young I don’t even remember who I was before.” His expression is rife with devastation. “Sometimes I wonder if there was ever anything human in me to begin with, or if I’ve always been a weapon.”
“You’re human.” I kiss his forehead, his cheeks, tasting salt. “You’re broken, but you’re human. The fact that reliving this for me causes you pain proves it.”
He buries his face in my neck, his shoulders shaking. I hold him while he falls apart, our bodies still joined in the most intimate of ways. The physical connection becomes emotional, a bridge between two damaged souls who found each other in the wreckage.
“I don’t know how to be anything else,” he confesses against my skin.
“Then don’t be.” I tighten my arms around him. “Be exactly who and what you are. Be mine.”
He kisses me softly, reverently, like I’m precious.
“Mine,” he breathes.
“Yours,” I confirm.
And in this moment, surrounded by mirrors that reflect our brokenness intertwined, I mean it.