The words dissolve into choking breaths as tears pour out of me, thick and humiliating, every muscle in my body seizing while I thrash helplessly against restraints that don’t give an inch. “And after…” I choke, my voice shredded raw, “after the game they banned me— they banned me! They said I bet— they said I bet against my team—but I didn’t! I fucking didn’t!”
My chestcaves in on itself and my voice splinters into something fragile and wrecked. “I was clean,” I whisper. “I was clean before all of it… and I only— I only started using after… after I lost everything.”
Kai’s face doesn’t change, but something in the room does as the air tightens, darkens, and sharpens like a blade has just been drawn somewhere between us. He places a hand on my heaving chest—not to soothe and not to hurt, but simply to hold me there—and murmurs, “Good boy.”
And it’s the worst, most merciful thing anyone has said to me in years.
Of course he doesn’t stop. Kai stands over me like a surgeon with a fresh incision, clinical and calm while the entire world narrows to the tremor of my breath and the way my body jerks helplessly against the leather straps. I’m sweating through the sheet beneath me, my throat raw, my wrists burning, my mind peeling open under whatever truth-serum hell he stabbed into my neck.
He watches me break like it’s just another stage of the experiment.
Then, in that soft, almost gentle voice—the one that somehow hits harder than any slap—he asks, “Who’s in your nightmares?”
My jaw locks as I try, God I try, because saying his name again feels like stepping barefoot onto broken glass, like letting him win again, like letting the past bite me in the throat all over. My whole body pitches upward as my back bows off the table and my breath catches like a scream trapped inside my ribs.
But the drug doesn’t care, and nothing stops the truth from tearing its way out.
“Nathan.” It comes out a sob. A wounded sound. Not angry—broken. The kind of sound I haven’t made since the night everything went to hell. Since the night the league tossed me into the street like trash. Since the night I watched my whole life drop into a fucking sinkhole built by one man with a ring on his finger and a smile he didn’t deserve.
Kai’s jaw flickers—sharp, irritated, almost disgusted—but he just nods like he’s marking another box on a chart.
My chest heaves, my throat tightens around another sob I can’t swallow, and then his shadow leans closer.
“What are you trying to quiet,” he asks, “when you beg for drugs?”
I choke. The straps creak under me as I jerk, trying to curl in on myself, to hide anything he might see, anything he might pry out of me. But there’s no hiding. Not tied like this. Not under this chemical truth dragging the inside out. “Nathan.” It’s a gasp. “Nathan—Nathan—NATHAN—”
Tears spill out again, hot and relentless. Down my temples, into my hair, over the tape residue still clinging faintly to my throat. My voice shreds itself raw with every syllable. My lungs can’t keep up. I’m shaking so violently the table vibrates.
Kai moves slowly to my side without any rush or panic, his fingers brushing lightly over my bicep—not soothing and not cruel, just enough to make sure I feel him there as his voice stays calm.
“What’s in the video?”
My face collapses instantly and I buck so hard against the restraints that the leather bites into my skin. “Fuck—Kai—stop—don’t—” I choke out, because I can’t say it and I can’t hear it, but the serum doesn’t care. It digs deeper, claws through every defense I have left, and forces the words out dripping humiliation.
“Nathan and me,” I sob, my voice splintering. “Fucking.”
A violent shudder tears through my entire body as my hands clench into fists above my head, bound tight in the straps while my hips twist and my back arches, every piece of me writhing with disgust and shame and rage.
Kai’s expression shifts—only slightly—but it’s there, a cold spark lighting behind his eyes like a surgeon discovering the rot in a wound is deeper than he expected.
I’m panting now, choking on tears and memories and the filthy stain that tape carved into my life when Kai asks the final question, the one that slices clean through the noise.
“Who do you want now?”
The words hit like lightning, like a blade sliding free of its sheath and driving straight through my ribs, and before I can stop it—before I can breathe, before I can even think—the truth explodes out of me.
“RAFE.”
My whole body goes still as the air in the room shifts, heavy and electric and dangerous, tears sliding down my temples while the restraints hold me in place like I might float away if they loosened.
And in that moment I realize something brutal and absolute: I don’t want drugs, I don’t want pain, I don’t want Nathan, and I don’t want silence.
I want Rafe.
Kai smiles, and it isn’t the cold clinical twitch he usually wears; this one is different—still sharp and unreadable, but quieter, almost satisfied, like the experiment ended exactly the way he predicted and now all that remains is the cleanup.
He steps to my side and begins undoing the restraints without any rush or commentary, the only sounds in the room the quiet click of buckles unlatching and the soft slide of leather slipping free while my arms drop limply to my sides like I’ve been crucified for days and only now remembered I still have a body. My legs barely respond when he unfastens them, and my torso aches when the strap across my chest lifts away, every breath dragging painfully through my ribs.
