Like the lollipop.
Like everything in this room that was ever clean.
I press my palms against the wall. Both hands. Hard. Feeling the cold move through the skin, through the compass ink, through whatever is underneath both of those things that used to feel like certainty and now just feels like the outline of something that used to exist.
The slot opens.
I don’t look up. I know the sound of it. I know every sound this door makes.
“Nazareth.”
Her voice. Real this time. Not from the walls. From the slot. From the specific small rectangle of slightly less dark that appears at eye height when she wants to look in at what she’s made.
I don’t move.
“You were screaming.” A pause. The quality of her attention comes through the door like something physical. “The name.” Her voice is careful. The careful of a surgeon. “Who is Sophia?”
Something in my chest moves. Protective. Automatic. The last reflex of a man whose defenses have been stripped to almost nothing.
“You know who she is.”
“I’m afraid I don’t.” A beat. “I’ve heard you say the name before. In your sleep. When the drugs thin. I’ve been curious.”
“You’re not curious.” My voice. Flat. “You don’t get curious. You get strategic.”
A sound that might be approval. “Tell me anyway.”
“Fuck you!”
The door opens.
Valeria comes in like she always does—unhurried, elegant, like the room rearranges itself to accommodate her. She stops a few feet away and looks at me.
Really looks.
The inventory. The assessment. The specific quality of attention that has never once been about me and has always been about what I represent.
If my hand wasn’t chained, I’d…fuck, the things I’d do to her.
“You can’t fathom how much I hate you.”
She grins. “It didn’t feel like hate when your cock was inside me.”
The horror and self-loathing twist together into something feral. I lunge against the chain again, wrist tearing open, blood running hot down my arm. “I’m gonna rip your fucking throat out with my teeth.”
“Oh, Nazareth,” she purrs. “We both know you’ll be begging for it again soon enough.”
“Fuck!” Spit explodes from my mouth. Because I know…I fucking know she can make it happen again. And again. And again.
My eyes drop to her hand—the small glass vial she’s holding between her fingers, the liquid inside catching the dim light and turning it that sick, golden color I both hate and crave with every cell in my body.
The sight of it hits me like a physical blow. The craving surges instantly, vicious and undeniable, crawling under my skin, making my muscles twitch and my mouth go dry in that familiar, humiliating way.
She has it.
She always has it.
The one thing that can make the voices stop. The one thing that can dull the sharp edges of this nightmare. The one thing that turns me into something pliable, something she can use however she wants.
