Chapter 1
I had hoped the exhaustion might grant me reprieve, that even my owner’s relentless demands would respect the ragged state of my body. Another day, another cycle of survival.
He walked in with a leisure that mocked my terror, a massive, sweating bottle of amber liquor swinging carelessly in his hand. A broad, easy smile stretched across his face, fixed on some private, dark amusement. He never smiles at me. Never.
His visits followed a cold, brutal ledger: he walks in, uses me until I am broken, summons the physician to patch the commodity, confirms I am “fit and okay,” and then returns to repeat the transaction. My body’s trauma was never part of his calculation; only its readiness for the next servicing.
I lay there, naked and cold, a sacrificial lamb on the altar of his custom bed. I did not dare meet his gaze, focusing instead on the indifferent slice of moonlight that cut through the window. I prayed, a desperate, fading plea, for him to spare me tonight, to grant my ravaged flesh a night of empty silence.
The prayers died on my lips when he began to undress. It was a visual confirmation of my complete abandonment by fate, by God. Yet, I couldn’t help the tremor of perverse recognition. As he shrugged off his shirt, the magnificent, terrifying spectacle of his musculature—the iron-forged biceps, the extraordinary eight-pack—was on full display. I swallowed a spike of nervous appreciation, my gaze shyly averting. This man, Don Orfeo, was the only man I had ever seen naked, the only one who had ever touched me.
“Stand up,” he commanded.
I obeyed instantly, a reflex born of five months of conditioning. Obedience was the only currency I possessed for survival. But tonight, the rules were changing.
“Come here.”
I dropped from the bed, my feet meeting the cold marble floor. I stood before him, shaking, my body a leaf in a gale. This was wrong. He never spoke to me during these encounters. Our interactions were purely physical, mechanical.
“I am very hungry, Anna.” He spoke my name like a brand. His fingers brushed my nipples, cupping them with a rough, proprietary familiarity that made me jump.
“I need to get inside you, but before that, I need to eat you. I missed lunch and dinner because of you.” He murmured the words quietly, intimately, into my ear, before moving past me to the bed.
I froze. Rooted to the spot, shock paralyzing my muscles. Eat you. I remembered the one rule he had given me: disobedience meant the dark dungeons—a place of unimaginable filth, where I would be left to creatures that crawled and bit.
“Don’t just stand there, commodity. Come and sit on my face. I need to feed.”
I turned, my mind reeling. Sit on his face. I ran the instruction through a thousand paranoid loops. What if I suffocated him? What if I killed the great Don Orfeo, and the guards blamed the cheap piece of flesh that was me?
I couldn’t move. I didn’t know the proper protocol for this new act of service. He usually just came in, asked me to strip, and then thrust into me with the merciless precision of a general attacking a battlefield. We had no kisses, no intimacy; he often kept his eyes shut while pounding me, focusing solely on his own savage release. I had trained myself, over these five months of forced ‘marriage,’ to understand that I was only here for the sexual necessity of the Seller. To expedite the agony, I always lay waiting, stripped and ready, hoping the speed would afford me a few extra minutes to weep myself to sleep before the morning.
His behavior tonight was a cruel, confusing deviation from the script. I stood there, a useless commodity failing its basic function, wishing for the earth to open up and claim me. I was waiting for the worst. I was waiting for him to collect the debt of my hesitation.
