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I see my mouth on the nipple she is playing with. Teeth closing just short of too hard while she comes around the toy and still cannot use her hands to stop any of it.

A floorboard somewhere below settles. I freeze for half a second, listening. Nothing follows. No footsteps. No radio. Only her breathing and the wet sound of the toy moving inside her.

She lifts her hips higher off the bench. Her thighs start to shake. The words come faster now, almost desperate.

“I’m so close… fuck, I’m going to come.”

I stroke harder, the base of my cock aching, the need to finish riding the edge of control I have never once lost in this room before. My free hand grips the doorframe hard enough that the wood bites into my palm. I keep my eyes on the mirror, on the exact moment her body starts to seize.

She comes with a sharp, broken sound she cannot fully swallow. Her back arches off the bench, the toy still buried deep while her free hand keeps working her nipple through the climax. The sight of it strips the last of my restraint.

I follow her over. The orgasm hits hard and clean, my cock pulsing in my fist as I come across my own fingers and the inside of my trousers. I stay completely silent. The only sound in the hallway is the harsh cut of my own breathing, held as quiet as I can make it while the last of the release drains out of me.

I do not wait for her body to settle. I free my hand, wipe it once against the inside of my pocket, and ease the zipper back up. My pulse is still too fast. My legs feel less steady than they should. I step back from the doorframe before her eyes can open and find the gap.

I’m gone from the hallway before her breathing settles back into something normal, moving fast and quiet down the back stairs.

Marek’s waiting at the bottom of the stairs when I reach the main floor, radio still in hand. “Find her?”

“She’s fine. East wing. Leave her be for now.” I keep walking toward my room. “Get Yuri for me.”

Yuri finds me a few minutes later.

“The east wing keypad. The one on the private room.” I keep my voice flat. “It wasn’t locked.”

“That’d be the panel reset.” He doesn’t even have to think about it. “Maintenance serviced the electrical on that floor three days ago. Anything on that circuit reverts to a default code until someone manually reprograms it. It was in Tuesday’s maintenance log. I flagged it, but I never followed up to confirm you’d actually reprogrammed it.”

“I didn’t see that flag.”

“I’ll reprogram it myself tonight. Nobody’s supposed to be up there anyway.”

“Do it before dinner.”

He nods and heads off without asking why it matters enough for me to want it done that fast.

I head for my own room instead of the study, stripping out of my jacket before I’ve even reached the door. The shower runs long, hotter than it needs to be, and it doesn’t do much to settle whatever’s still sitting oddly in my chest by the time I shut the water off.

9

HARPER

It’s been two weeks since the now-locked room in the east wing, and I’ve stopped counting the days out loud, though I still track them somewhere in the back of my head, the number climbing whether I want it to or not.

The days blur together in a way I didn’t expect them to. Breakfast, a walk around whatever part of the grounds nobody’s stationed near that morning, lunch, then long stretches of afternoon where I’ve run out of new rooms to discover and new exits to test.

I’ve started timing my walks against the guard rotation without even meaning to anymore, an old habit that’s quietly become just part of how I move through a day now.

I’ve started reading the books in the library downstairs, mostly because there’s nothing else left to do. I’ve gotten strangely good at telling which staff member is on shift just by the sound of their footsteps in the hall, Marek’s heavier and slower, the younger one light and quick, always a beat faster past my door than anyone else.

Artem lets Yuri bring my phone up every few days now, always with someone standing in the doorway while I hold it, always for exactly as long as it takes to glance at the screen and hand it back. I asked why the first time, and Yuri just said it was so I could see if anyone was trying to reach me, which felt less like a kindness and more like a test I didn’t know the rules to.

The lock screen fills up the same way every time. A story notification from a girl I barely talk to anymore. Someone’s birthday reminder. A handful of likes on a photo I posted before any of this started, one comment from a stranger asking where I got my sunglasses. None of it means anything. None of it is him, and I’ve started to dread the checking almost as much as I crave it.

I hand the phone back each time without saying much, and Yuri doesn’t push for conversation either. He takes it and disappears back down the hall like the whole exchange never happened.

Caleb hasn’t texted. Caleb hasn’t called. Caleb, who used to check in at least once a week even when things were fine, who FaceTimed me the day Poppy said her first word even though I was elbow-deep in someone’s bathroom grout at the time, hasn’t reached out once in two weeks.

He used to send me these ridiculous unprompted updates too: a video of Poppy trying solid food for the first time and immediately regretting it, a photo of some disaster in his kitchen with the caption send help, ten texts in a row about nothing in particular just because he thought of something and wanted to tell someone. My brother has gone completely silent, and the silence itself feels louder than anything he could have actually said.