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The pain was blinding. A white-hot agony that tore through my core as he ripped through the tight barrier of flesh inside me, stretching me beyond my body’s limit. I screamed—a raw, broken sound that echoed off the high ceiling—and tried to twist away, but the silk restraints held me immobile.

Warm blood welled around his invasion, spilling down my inner thighs and soaking into the torn white silk beneath my hips.

Then the world fractured.

I wasn’t on the altar anymore. I was somewhere else—someone else—lying in a narrow bed beneath a sloped ceiling, candlelight throwing soft gold across bare wooden walls. The same man moved inside me, but his face was unmasked, younger, his gray eyes fixed on mine with an intensity that made my chest ache. His black hair fell across his forehead, damp with sweat, and his hands cradled my face like I was something precious, not something claimed.

“Zinnia,” he whispered, his voice breaking on my name. “I love you. I swear it. No matter what comes.”

His body joined with mine felt like completion rather than violation—a bond being forged in shared breath and desperate tenderness, two souls recognizing each other in the dark. I felt the exact moment something locked into place between us, an invisible thread pulled taut and knotted, sealing us together long before any House or altar existed.

I didn’t understand who I was seeing. I didn’t know why the memory felt like mine.

Then the vision shattered, and I slammed back into the present with brutal force.

The audience erupted into a low, approving roar as the red spread across the pristine fabric like a stain.

Malachi had gone completely still inside me. His hands trembled where they gripped my hips, and beneath the horned mask I saw his jaw clench, his throat working as though he couldn't breathe. For one unguarded instant, the cruelty fell away. He looked stricken. Reverent. Horrified by recognition.

He knew. He’d seen it too.

Then his expression hardened. He buried whatever had surfaced, his fingers digging back into my flesh with renewed brutality, and the predatory mask slid back into place as though it had never slipped.

“There it is,” Malachi growled, his voice thick with raw lust as he stared down at the blood pooling beneath me. “The sacrifice bleeds for the altar.”

He began to move, each thrust deep, brutal, and deliberate. He used his full weight to pin me, dragging his thick cock out until only the head remained before slamming back in to the hilt, bottoming out against my cervix with enough force to make the altar shudder beneath us.

The pain was unbearable. Every thrust felt like being split open, the friction tearing at already damaged tissue. But beneath the agony, something darker began to twist through my body—a sick, involuntary pleasure that made me hate myself even more than I hated him.

“Don’t hold back, Zinnia,” Malachi commanded, leaning down until his horned mask hovered an inch from my face. His hand closed around my throat, squeezing just hard enough to make my vision darken at the edges. “Let them hear what the Devil does to you. Let the House take your screams”

He slid his other hand between our grinding bodies, his thumb finding my swollen clit and applying steady, punishing pressure with every violent thrust. The sensation was too much—the exhibition, the rough iron rings cutting into my wrists, the brutal stretch of his cock driving into my bleeding core, the suffocating pressure on my throat—it shattered my defenses completely.

“Malachi—” I gasped, my voice barely a whisper as his hand tightened around my windpipe.

“That’s it,” he snarled, driving in harder, faster, his hips slamming against my thighs with wet, rhythmic violence. “Break for me, sweetheart. Give the House what it wants. Give me what I want.”

My climax hit like a violent convulsion. My inner walls clamped down hard around his cock, milking him in frantic, rhythmic spasms. A broken, strangled scream tore from my throat as my entire body arched taut against the ropes, my vision whitening out from the intensity.

Malachi let out a guttural roar, losing his calculated control. He drove into me three more times with feral, unchecked power, burying himself to the absolute root before his own release tore through him. He stiffened, his fingers digging into my hips so hard his nails broke skin and drew fresh blood, and pumped his thick, hot seed deep inside my convulsing womb.

He stayed buried within me, chest heaving, his sweat dripping onto my collarbone and mixing with my tears and the blood smeared across the silk.

A sudden, sharp burning flared directly beneath my left ribs.

I gasped in shock as a searing pain carved itself into my skin. Beneath my flesh, a faint, dark mark bloomed—a sprawling, thorned crest, identical to the sigils carved into the altar. The House’s seal. A mark of contested ownership, branded into my marrow by the witnessed act.

Malachi slowly pulled out of me, his seed and my blood leaking freely over the ruined white garment. He stood, breathing heavily, and pulled a small dagger from his belt to slice through the silk ropes binding my wrists.

I rolled onto my side, trembling, clutching my aching stomach as the applause swelled into a deafening crescendo.

Then, the stage lights died.

A freezing wind swept across the platform, snuffing out the lanterns. The crowd’s cheering choked off into sudden, terrified silence.

At the very back of the dark stage, the wood groaned and split.

The red door materialized out of the shadows, its blood-hued panels glowing with a sickly, subterranean light. The iron hinges shrieked as the door swung open three inches.