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It is the sound a person makes when they worked out early that nobody was coming for them.

So, I put her down and I went and got what she needed. And she ran, but of course she ran.

After all, the girl wasn’t stupid. She was simply out of her league. So, I carried her back and stood her exactly where I had put her, and then I fed her chocolate in pieces off my own fingers while she cried.

Here is the part that will not leave me alone.

I had killed men and felt nothing at all. I had once watched a man drown in his own bathtub and thought about what I would eat afterward. And I stood in an infirmary with a shaking girl and felt something turn over in my chest at the sight of her swallowing.

I do not have a name for that. And I don’t intend to go looking for one. Because simply put, I do not need one. It is just what it is. A fact. Knowledge. The inevitable.

Then there was the taste of her.

I hadn’t intended to do that, but I was led by pure primal instinct at that point. If she had any idea what she was doing to me, she would have felt every bit as powerful as I did with her pinned against that wall. Powerful, because I was holding something beautiful and for once I did not want to watch it break. A tear came down her face and something in me simply moved, and I put my mouth to her cheek and took it. Then she made a sound against me that I hadn’t stopped hearing since.

Salt and skin and that sugar underneath it all.

Do you have any idea how rare that is? I asked her, those exact words coming out of me before I could stop them. But she didn’t understand me, and how could she. Everything I have ever put my mouth to in my adult life has tasted of blood or metal or nothing at all. Thirty years of that. And then one frightened nurse cried in front of me, and I found out there is a whole world of it that I have simply never been permitted to have.

And the bite.

Christ, the bite.

I’d had her throat between my teeth, yet she would never know just how close that came to being something else entirely. Because the noise woke up when I did it. That primal roaring begging me to do it. Ever since she walked through the door, every single thing within me was screaming at me to close my jaw and taste her blood like the bloodthirsty beast I had been accused of being most of my life. Like some fucking mortal vampire, when in reality, I was just a fucked-up man with a blood kink.

Yet I hadn’t done it.

Not for her sake… not entirely. No, I stopped because I wanted to see what she would do. And what she did was go completely still under me, the way prey does when it finally understands that it’s been caught. Then I held her there, trembling and waiting to find out what I had decided.

So, you can be trained.

I told her this, shocking myself as I have never in my life wanted to praise anything. But her, fuck when she took my thumb into her mouth, I don’t think I had ever been harder in my whole life. I swear I could have bludgeoned someone to death with my cock.

That was another moment I keep coming back to, and I am not ashamed of how many times I have played it out in my head. It wasn’t the fear. It wasn’t the fight. It wasn’t even the sight of her subdued against the wall.

It was her mouth.

It was her lips closing around my thumb with the tears running off her jaw. It was her doing as she was told because I had told her to. That was the whole of it in the end. Not pain. Not the chains. One order, spoken quietly, and she opened for me. And looking up at me the whole time with those enormous eyes full of hate.

Good girl.

Not one hour has passed since that I have not thought about it. And when I asked whether I affected her, I knew she lied to my face as I had felt that shiver trickle through her for myself. Not one of fear but of arousal, as both of us knew what it was.

Mine.

Her lies, her fear, her dark pleasure… all of it was mine.

That is the beginning and the end of it. There is no more complicated version. I’d had a great deal of my life explained to me by men who were paid to explain things, and none of them ever got near the simplicity of it.

She walked into a room with a monster in it and asked eight bleeding men if they needed her first, and I decided in that moment.

I would claim her.

That was all. That was the end of it.

But there was one more thing I did that night.

I waited for the count. I waited for the lights and for the wing to settle into that long animal noise it makes after dark. The sound of a hundred and fifty men breathing and coughing and turning over. Then I brought her ruined scrubs to my face and I breathed her in… over and over again. And all the while, I took my hard cock in hand and jerked off like an adolescent.