Le Milieu One: Chapter Five

In Montréal’s criminal underworld, Alex Bélanger has been sold at auction for fifteen million dollars and delivered naked and collared to the estate of Marc Ricci—a man who has been obsessively watching him since high school. What begins as a clinical inspection of purchased property unravels into fourteen years of pent-up confession, fury, and a desperate, broken plea to be seen by the one person who never once looked up. By dawn, the line between ownership and surrender has blurred beyond recognition for both of them.

The story to date in EPUB format can be downloaded HERE if you prefer to read longer material on your Kindle or other device.

I narrated a podcast version of this chapter so you can listen to it instead of the robo-reader. It may or may not be better. You can find it HERE or in the Audio Editions section.

[NOTE: This is a hefty chapter. A lot happens this night. I did my best to kill the southern accent and recorded a quick podcast version if you prefer to listen rather than read. It’s not really edited but should be relatively clean. Hopefully I didn’t butcher the French too badly and it sounds better than the robo-reader Substack uses. You can find the podcast at the link above. Also, here is where things start getting dark. Also, I goofed and released the audio instantly so here’s the story earlier as well.]

Alex’s Point of View

The car was black and silent and smelled like the driver’s aftershave. Marc had been in the back seat with me when we left the Chalice, his hand on the chain where it attached to my collar. Not pulling, just holding, the way you hold a leash on a dog you’re not sure is trained yet. He hadn’t spoken since the six words he said when we got in the car. Neither had I. The city had slid past the windows in fragments. The cobblestones of Old Montréal, the lights of the port, the expressway opening beneath us like a river of asphalt.

Twenty minutes into the drive, his phone buzzed. He had looked at the screen. His expression had changed. Not anger, not surprise, something more calculated, the focus of a man who’d just received information he needed to act on. He’d told the driver to pull over. A second car pulled onto the shoulder. It was black and identical, a redundancy that spoke of operational paranoia. He’d gotten out without a word. Dubois had gotten in. The cars had separated at the next exit, Marc’s vehicle heading back toward the city while ours continued north into Saint-Léonard.

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Now Dubois was in the passenger seat. He hadn’t spoken since he’d replaced Marc. He’d held the door for the transfer like a chauffeur and then ignored me like luggage. Big. Not tall, but wide. The kind of big that came from lifting things other people couldn’t lift and not caring whether anyone noticed. He had looked at me once in the rearview mirror when we pulled onto the expressway. The look had been assessive and unreadable and had lasted a minute too long.

I catalogued the details the way I catalogue everything. The chain had fifty-three visible links. The leather of the seat was cracked along the seam where my thigh pressed against it. The air freshener dangling from the mirror was a little green tree, pine-scented, the kind you buy at gas stations. It was fighting a losing battle against the smell of cigarettes embedded in the upholstery. The driver’s name was something that started with M. Marc had said it when we got in, a single syllable I hadn’t caught, and I’d been trying to retrieve it ever since because my mind would rather chase a missing consonant than sit with the fact that I was naked and collared in the back of a stranger’s car being driven to a house I had never seen by men who belonged to the person who had just bought me.

I remembered the stone facades. Wrought iron. Landscaping that looked expensive and impersonal, the way wealth looks when it hasn’t figured out what it aspires to be yet.

The chain was cold against my stomach. I’d been aware of it constantly since the Chalice attendant fastened it in the private room. The collar had a weight that seemed to increase the longer I wore it, not physically, but in the way my body was learning to accommodate its presence, like a tongue keeps finding a new filling. I kept touching it. My fingers would drift up to my throat without my permission, trace the edge of the gold where it met my skin, and I’d make myself stop. I didn’t want Dubois to see me doing it. I didn’t want to give him anything.

The driver took a left onto a residential street. The houses here were large and quiet and set back from the road. Stone facades. Circular driveways. Heavy drapes visible through lit windows. The neighborhood had the muted silence of a place where people had been living for thirty years and had stopped noticing each other. The car slowed. Turned into a driveway flanked by concrete lions that were weathered and impassive. Ornamentation that had felt aspirational in 1992 and now just felt permanent, like they’d been here long enough that removing them would be more noticeable than keeping them.

The house was brick and stone. Two stories. A double garage. Lights were on in the downstairs windows, but no one was visible. The front door was solid oak, heavy even to look at, the door you installed when you wanted visitors to feel the weight of your prosperity before they crossed the threshold. Security cameras blinked red above the garage. Motion lights clicked on as the car approached, flooding the driveway with pale white.

Dubois got out first and opened my door. The air hit me cold, April-cold, bearing the sharpness of a Montréal spring just starting after dark. The chain clinked when I stood. The driveway was interlock paving, uneven in places where the ground had settled over decades. It was rough on my skin and the cold traveled up through the soles of my feet and into my ankles. I catalogued it like everything else because cataloguing was easier than feeling.

“This way.” Dubois’s voice was as flat as his face. He gestured toward the front door with a motion that didn’t require me to look at him.

The foyer was marble. A chandelier drifted overhead, too large for the space, with crystals that had been expensive once and never cleaned since. A mirror in a gilded frame. A small table where keys and mail accumulated. The stairs went up to the right, carpeted with a dark wood banister. The house smelled of old leather and something cooking. Onions, garlic, the warmth of a kitchen where someone actually cooked. The incongruity of it stopped me for a moment. I’d expected the house to smell like Marc. Cold. Closed. Like the clinical tone of his voice. Instead, there was soup on the stove and a radio playing a classical station somewhere in the back of the house, the volume low enough that I could hear the announcer’s voice without catching the words.

“In there.” Dubois pointed to a doorway off the foyer. The living room. “Wait.”

He disappeared down a hallway toward the back of the house. The driver stayed by the door. His hand was on the frame, his weight shifted onto one hip, the posture of someone who’d done this a hundred times and would do it a hundred more. He didn’t look at me. I was cargo that had been delivered. The paperwork was signed. Whatever happened next wasn’t his problem.

I stood in the foyer on the cold marble with the chain pooling at my feet and the collar heavy on my throat and the smell of someone else’s cooking in the air. The radio announcer finished his sentence and the station cut to a piece I didn’t recognize. Strings, something minor key, the languid melancholy of classical music playing in a house where no one was listening.

“You must be Alexandre.”

The voice came from the kitchen. Not Marc’s voice. Older. Warmer. An accent I couldn’t immediately place. Québécois, but with something else underneath, the rounded vowels of someone who’d grown up speaking French in a house where English was also spoken but never quite comfortably.

A man appeared in the hallway where Dubois had gone. Fifties, maybe. Trim. An apron over his clothes. Not the kind you buy at a kitchen store, but the kind that’s been washed a thousand times and has softened into something that fits the body it belongs to. He was drying his hands on a dish towel.

“I’m Roger.” He didn’t offer to shake. His hands were full. “I’m the cook. Have been for eight years. You want something to eat? There’s soup. Nothing fancy. Just . . .” He gestured vaguely toward the kitchen. “Soup.”

I stared at him. I had been naked and collared for hours. I’d been appraised, displayed, auctioned, transferred, driven across the city in the back of a car while two men ignored me. No one had offered me anything. No one had spoken to me like I was a person. The warmth of the question You want something to eat? was so unexpected that my voice caught in my throat before I could answer.

“I’m not hungry.” My voice finally came out, steadier than I’d expected. “Thank you.”

Roger nodded. His eyes moved to the collar and then away, quickly, the way you look at something you know you’re not supposed to notice. “He’ll be here in a while. He had some business to attend to. You’re to wait in the living room.”

He said he the way people said the boss. It was a pronoun that carried weight. There was no judgment in it. Just information. This is how things work here. The cook has been here eight years. The cook knows when to be invisible. The cook offers soup to naked strangers in golden collars because that’s what you do when someone shows up in your kitchen who looks like they haven’t been treated like a person in a while.

“Through there.” He pointed to the living room doorway. “There’s a . . . well. It’s not warm. The thermostat’s never been adjusted. But there’s a rug. Standing on the rug is better than standing on the hardwood.”

He went back to the kitchen. The radio was still playing. The soup was still simmering. The driver had moved to the front door and was checking something on his phone. Dubois hadn’t come back.

I walked into the living room. The first thing I noticed was the cold. Roger hadn’t been exaggerating. The air sat at a temperature where it wasn’t quite uncomfortable enough to complain about but wasn’t warm enough to forget. The second thing I noticed was the furniture. Leather sofas, dark brown, the kind that had been expensive in the early nineties and hadn’t been replaced since. They faced each other across an Oriental rug that was slightly too large for the room and its edges curled up against the baseboards. Dark wood paneling on the walls made the room feel smaller than it was. A bar cart in the corner, crystal decanters, bottles I recognized as expensive. Floor-to-ceiling windows facing the street, heavy drapes half-drawn. The grid of city lights through the glass was the room’s only warmth. Pale yellow-orange, the pallid color of streetlights filtered through spring air.

This was Marc’s father’s room. I knew it without being told. The furniture was a generation too old for Marc, the taste a generation too confident. A man had chosen these sofas. A man had decided on the dark wood. A man had hung these drapes and never opened them. Marc had inherited the space and changed nothing. He moved through it the way he moved through his father’s role. Competently, resentfully, without ever asking whether this was what he actually wanted.

I stood on the rug. The chain pooled at my feet. My reflection in the dark window was transparent, a ghost overlaid on the street outside, the collar catching the light, my face unreadable even to myself. I catalogued the room. The bar cart held Macallan 18, Glenfiddich, something in a crystal decanter that was likely older than I was. The sofas were eight feet apart, the distance of a conversation that never happened. The rug was wool, hand-knotted, the pattern worn smooth in the center where feet had passed. The windows framed the street outside, a car going by, its headlights sweeping the ceiling and then gone.

The cold settled into my skin. My feet were numb on the rug. The chain was colder now than it had been in the car. The collar had absorbed the temperature of the room and was conducting it straight into my throat. I didn’t move. There was nowhere to move to. The sofas weren’t for me. I understood that without being told. The room was for waiting. The rug was the designated waiting spot. Roger had known this. Roger had told me the rug was better than the hardwood, and he’d been right, but the distinction was academic. I was standing in a room full of furniture I wasn’t allowed to use, naked and collared and chained, waiting for a man who’d spent fifteen million dollars for the privilege of doing whatever he wanted to me.

Time passed. I don’t know how much. The classical station moved through something by Debussy and into Boléro by Ravel. Oddly fitting for tonight. The soup smell from the kitchen had faded, replaced by the faint odor of the leather sofas. Old and dry and slightly sweet, the smell of things once expensive that were now just old. Somewhere in the house, a door opened and closed. Footsteps on the hardwood. Marc’s voice, clipped and quick, answering a question I hadn’t heard. Then Dubois’s voice, lower, the words unintelligible through the walls.

The front door opened. Cold air swept through the foyer and into the living room bringing the smell of dry leaves and exhaust. The door closed. A car started in the driveway. Dubois and the driver were leaving. The house settled back into silence.

More time. The Ravel ended. The announcer came back and said something about a performance at the Maison symphonique. The heat of the kitchen had faded entirely now. Roger had turned off the stove. I could hear him moving around in the house, followed by the small domestic sounds of someone closing up for the night. A cupboard door. Water running. The click of a light switch.

Then footsteps on the hardwood. Not Marc’s, these were lighter, more deliberate. Roger appeared in the doorway of the living room. He’d taken off his apron. His shirt was flannel, worn at the elbows, the kind of shirt you keep because it’s comfortable and not because it looks like anything.

“He’s in his study,” Roger said. “He got a call. Something about . . .” He stopped. Shook his head. “It’s not my business. He said to wait.”

He looked at me. Actually looked. Not the way Dubois had looked in the rearview mirror, assessive and calculating. The way you look at someone you’re trying to figure out how to help.

“You’re cold,” he said.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re standing on a rug in a room that’s fifty-eight degrees with nothing on but a collar. You’re not fine.” He disappeared back into the hallway. Came back a moment later with something in his hands. A blanket. Wool, gray, the kind that lives on the back of a couch and gets used for naps and never gets folded properly. He held it out.

“I can’t . . .” I looked at the blanket. Looked at him. “He might not want me to have that.”

“Then he can tell me.” Roger’s voice was mild. “I’ve been here eight years. He’s told me a lot of things. He’s never told me to let someone freeze in his living room.”

I took the blanket. Wrapped it around my shoulders. The wool was scratchy and warm and smelled faintly of whatever detergent Roger used. The same smell that would be on the towels upstairs, though I didn’t know that yet. The collar was still cold but the rest of me had started to warm, minor relief after hours of exposure.

“Thank you.”

Roger nodded. “He’ll be down when he’s done. The call sounded . . .” He paused. “It sounded like the kind of call he doesn’t like getting.”

He left before I could ask what that meant. The kitchen light clicked off. His footsteps retreated down the hallway toward whatever part of the house he occupied when he wasn’t cooking. The house settled into a deeper silence. The radio was off now. The soup was off the stove. The only light came from the living room, from the grid of city lights through the window, pale yellow-orange against the ceiling, and a single lamp in the corner I hadn’t noticed before, with a tilted shade casting a warm circle on the rug.

I stood on the rug with Roger’s blanket around my shoulders and waited.

Rémi’s Point of View

The meeting had been running for forty minutes and had covered nothing that required a meeting.

De Santis’s office was on the second floor of a building that had once been a bank, before the banks moved to taller buildings and the old ones became the kind of real estate that changed hands without ever being listed. The windows were tall and narrow. The radiator hissed. The desk was old wood, scarred in places, polished in others, the patina of furniture that had survived people who hadn’t.

Five of us were in the room. De Santis behind the desk, Gauthier in the chair by the window, not taking notes because Gauthier never took notes. Two others whose names I’d known for years and didn’t think about. And me, against the wall, where I always stood.

The subject was the Bélanger situation. The Chalice auction had concluded a couple of hours ago. The Ricci boy had won the contract. De Santis’s people had confirmed the transfer. Alex Bélanger was at Ricci’s house in Saint-Léonard, the chain on, the collar on, the five years started. The question in the room was what De Santis wanted to do about it.

“The contract is clean,” Gauthier said. He was older than De Santis, one of the old guard who’d been in the room for decisions that predated most of the people making decisions now. His voice had the particular flatness of someone who’d been delivering bad news for so long it had stopped feeling like news. “The Chalice protects its own. We can’t touch him directly.”

“I’m aware of the Chalice’s protections.” De Santis’s voice was dry. Not impatient, De Santis was never impatient, but the dryness was a signal. Gauthier missed it. Gauthier missed a lot of signals.

“There are indirect approaches,” Gauthier said. “People around him. People he cares about.”

“I’m aware of those, too.”

The radiator hissed again in protest. Outside the tall window, a car passed by on Sherbrooke Street. The sound of it faded and left the room in the silence of a conversation that had reached an impasse no one wanted to breach.

I’d been in De Santis’s organization for fifteen years. I’d started when I was twenty-one, which was young for the work but not young for the neighborhood. My father had done this. My father’s father had driven a truck for people who didn’t keep records. The work wasn’t something you chose. It was something you were already in, the way you were already in a family, already in a postal code, already in a body that looked a certain way and moved a certain way and made people assume certain things about what you were capable of.

I didn’t hurt civilians. I didn’t hurt people outside the world. I didn’t go further than the situation required. These rules weren’t written down anywhere. They’d arrived from somewhere private and had held for fifteen years without much strain. Most of the time, the work didn’t test them.

De Santis looked at me. “Rémi.”

I didn’t move from the wall. “Yes?”

“The Ricci house. You know it?”

“Saint-Léonard. Stone facade. West of the expressway.”

“Keep an eye on it. Nothing active. I want to know if anything changes.”

I nodded. De Santis didn’t need more than a nod. That was one of the things I valued about working for him. He didn’t require you to perform your agreement. A nod was a nod. He knew what it meant.

The meeting ended. Gauthier left first, then the other two. I waited. De Santis was looking at something on his desk. A folder, old with the edges worn. He didn’t open it. He just looked at it.

“Something bothering you?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. The folder sat on the desk between us. After a moment, he put it in a drawer. The drawer closed with the soft thud of old wood meeting old wood.

“Just keep an eye on the house,” he said.

I left. The stairs were marble, the same marble the bank had installed in 1923. My footsteps made no sound on the way down. Outside, the air was cold and smelled like rain that hadn’t decided whether to fall. I walked to my car. There was a crime novel in the passenger seat. A Swedish one, the kind where the detective was divorced and the weather was always bad. I’d been reading it for two weeks. I wasn’t in a hurry to finish it.

I sat in the car for a moment with the engine off and the window down and the novel unopened on the seat beside me. The Bélanger situation was none of my business except in the way that everything in De Santis’s orbit was eventually my business. I’d keep an eye on the house. If nothing changed, nothing changed. If something did, I’d handle it. That was the work.

I started the car. The novel remained on the passenger seat. I’d read some of it later, after the gym, after I’d done the thing I did every night, which was go home to an apartment that was clean and quiet and exactly the way I’d left it.

Alex’s Point of View

The study was somewhere above me. I could hear the muffled cadence of Marc’s voice through the ceiling. Not the words, just the rhythm. Sharp at first, then sharper. The rhythm of someone who’d received information he did not want and was making decisions based on it. The call lasted maybe ten minutes. When it ended, there was silence. Then footsteps. A door closing. Water running somewhere, a bathroom maybe, or a bar. Then more footsteps. Coming down the stairs.

Marc walked through the living room doorway. He’d changed since the auction. He wore no jacket now, his sleeves rolled to his forearms, the top button of his shirt undone. He looked tired. Not the tired of a long day but the tired of a long life, the exhaustion of a man carrying something for years who had just been handed something else to carry.

He didn’t look at me. He walked to the bar cart and poured himself a whiskey. Two fingers. No ice. The ritual of it was practiced. The weight of the decanter, the precision of the pour, the way he held the glass afterward like it was a tool he knew how to use.

“There’s been a development,” he said. Still not looking at me. “A contact in my distribution network flagged something unusual. Your name. In cartel channels. Someone on that side has been asking about the auction. Who won it. What was paid.” He drank. Set the glass down. “I don’t know how a cartel operation connects to a Chalice auction. That bothers me.”

He turned and looked at me for the first time since he’d entered the room. His eyes moved from my face to the collar to the blanket around my shoulders. He registered the blanket. Registered its source. Something flickered across his face that was not anger, but not quite amusement. Acknowledgment. Roger had broken no rule that Marc had actually made.

“I see you’ve met Roger.”

“I have.”

“He’s the only person in this house who doesn’t need my permission to do things.” He picked up his glass. Took another drink. “Don’t mistake it for weakness. On his part or mine.”

He set the glass down. Circled me. Slowly. The way he’d circle me again later in a proprietary assessment, an inventory of what he owned. But more subdued now. The call had distracted him. Whatever he’d been planning to say when he walked in had been displaced by whatever he’d heard on the phone.

“The communication came through my own people. A name I don’t recognize routing inquiries through cartel channels about you. Specifically you.” He stopped behind me. I couldn’t see him. But the heat of his body, the smell of whiskey, all registered. “You don’t know anything about that.”

It wasn’t a question.

“No.”

“Then we’ll leave it for now.” He circled back to face me. His expression had closed again and he wore the clinical mask from the auction, the controlled surface. “Take off the blanket.”

I did. The cold rushed back in. The chain clinked against itself. The collar caught the light from the window and the lamp and glowed soft gold against my throat. He stared at me for a long moment. Then he picked up the chain where it hung from my collar. Let it run through his fingers. The gesture was proprietary. Possessive. How you grip a leash.

“Roger’s right,” he said. “The thermostat’s never been adjusted. My father liked it cold. Said it kept people from getting too comfortable.” He gave the chain a small tug. Not enough to pull me off balance, but just enough to remind me it was there. “I never bothered to change it.”

He let the chain drop. Walked to the window. Stood with his back to me, his silhouette against the layer of city lights. Outside, another car passed. Its headlights swept the ceiling. Then darkness ruled again.

“There are things I’m going to tell you tonight,” he said. “Things I’ve been waiting to say for a long time. You’re going to listen. You’re not going to interrupt. And when I’m done . . .” He turned. His face was half in shadow, half in the pale yellow-orange light. “. . . you’re going to understand exactly what you are to me. What you’ve always been.”

He walked back to the bar cart. Poured another whiskey. This time he filled the glass higher.

“The call can wait. Whatever’s developing can develop without me for an hour. I’ve been waiting fourteen years for this conversation. I will not let someone else’s timeline interrupt it.”

He faced me with the glass in his hand, the chain at my throat. The cold air between us. His expression was the same one he’d worn at the auction. Controlled and assessing, the mask of a predator who had learned to hide everything except the things he wanted you to see. But underneath it, something was moving.

Marc didn’t speak at first. He circled instead. Slowly. The way someone inspects a purchase they’ve already paid for. Not checking for flaws so much as confirming that the thing is really theirs. The possession of it. The chain dragged behind him with a soft metallic whisper against the hardwood.

The air was cold. He hadn’t adjusted the thermostat. He wouldn’t. Nothing in this house was accidental except the things that mattered.

He stopped behind me. I couldn’t see him but I could feel his presence at my back, an awareness of someone standing where you can’t turn without being told to.

His hand touched my shoulder. Warm. The first warm thing in the room besides the whiskey. His fingers traced the line of the collar where it sat against my throat.

“This suits you.” His voice was clinical. The same tone from the auction. “Better than the suit did. The gold against your skin. Very . . .” he paused, choosing the word “pretty.”

“It’s never coming off.” He said it conversationally. “The collar. You understand that? Five years, and this stays right here.” His fingers brushed the metal. “It may be the only thing you’re ever allowed to wear. I haven’t decided.”

He resumed circling. The chain remained in his hand now. Proprietary. Unhurried. How you hold a leash.

“I’ve thought about this,” he said. “What I’d say. How this would go.” He completed the circuit. Faced me. “I had a speech. Rehearsed it, even.”

He reached down. Took my cock in his hand. Not roughly. Clinically. The way a doctor palpates for an exam except no doctor would hold the weight of it the way he did, turning it in his palm like he was appraising produce.

“I’m not going to use it.”

His thumb moved. Once, along the underside. My body responded before my mind could intervene.

He watched it happen. Watched me harden in his hand despite everything. Despite the cold, the collar, the chain, the degradation of being naked and leashed in a room where he was fully dressed and holding a drink. My body didn’t care about any of that. He’d known it wouldn’t.

He stroked me slowly. The motion was expert with deliberate pressure, deliberate pace, a touch that demonstrated knowledge rather than desire. He wasn’t trying to get me off. He was proving something.

“I had to make sure it worked,” he said. Still clinical. Still unhurried. “The Chalice documentation was thorough, but some things you want to verify in person.”

He released me. My erection stood between us, evidence I couldn’t manage away. He let it sit there. Let me stand there with it. The chain hung from my throat to his hand.

“Good boy.”

He stepped closer. His free hand found my left nipple. Rolled it between his fingers once, almost gently. Then he pinched. Hard. The pain was sudden and bright and specific. I didn’t make a sound. He hadn’t asked for one.

“Do you know how long I’ve been waiting to be in a room with you where you couldn’t leave?”

He released the nipple. Moved to the other one. Same rhythm, gentle, then brutal. My body jerked. He noted it. Gave the chain a sharp tug. “Still.”

“Since I was fifteen.” He said it the way someone else might say since Tuesday. “You were thirteen. A freshman. I was a junior. You walked through the east corridor every day at 12:20. You sat on the low wall by the gym with your . . . what was his name? The tall one. Gagnon. You sat with Gagnon and laughed at something on his phone and you never once looked up.”

He stepped back. The chain went slack. He walked around me. I felt his hand on the small of my back, then lower.

“I looked up. Every day. For two years.”

Both hands now. On my ass. He squeezed once, assessing the weight and the give, then spread me open. The chain clinked against the floor as he moved. The air hit places air shouldn’t hit. I was exposed in a way that went beyond nakedness. This was architecture. He’d planned this. The position. The timing. The way he could talk about high school while holding me open like a thing he’d bought at market.

“Vincent was in my year. Did you know that? Same class. Same corridor. He didn’t notice me either. None of you did. The two of you,” his thumb traced the edge of my hole, a threat of entry, “in your own world. And I was just . . . there. Watching.”

He released one hand. I heard him set the glass down. Then his finger was back. Wet now. Whiskey. He pressed. Not entered. Just pressed.

“I saw you. I saw everything. I’ve watched every moment of your life since you were thirteen. I know about the night with Vincent. I know you don’t talk about it. I know he’s been carrying it the same way, like something he doesn’t know how to hold and can’t put down. I know what you ate for lunch on a Tuesday in March of your sophomore year because I was three tables away and you didn’t see me then either.”

He paused. The finger stopped pressing. Still there. Still threatening. But he’d remembered something.

“Your sister’s at Brown. Margaux. She’s doing well academically. Better than you’d expect, actually, given that her brother was just sold at auction. She thinks you’re in a difficult position. Working something out. You’re a good liar when you need to be.”

My heart stopped. He’d said her name. He’d said her school. He’d known what lies I’d told her. The cold in the room was nothing compared to the cold that went through me then.

“I’ve had someone in Providence since three weeks before you entered the Chalice. You didn’t know that. You thought you were protecting her by signing. You were. But I was already protecting her. From people whose names you haven’t heard yet. People who wanted to use her as leverage before you ever stepped into that assessment room.”

He let that land. The chain was slack in his hand. He wasn’t pulling. He didn’t need to.

“She’s safe. For now. Because I decided she was safe. You understand what I’m telling you. Her safety isn’t in the contract. It’s in my hands. It’s been in my hands since before you knew my name was on the bidder list.”

“Marc—” I heard the fear in my own voice. Margaux at the whim of Marc.

“Don’t beg until I ask you to, Bélanger.”

His finger pushed inside me. Slowly. The whiskey burned.

“Look at this,” he said. His voice was different now. Still controlled, but with something underneath, a heat that hadn’t been there before. The tone of a man who has been imagining this exact moment for years. “Look at you. The saintly Bélanger boy. Spread open on my finger like you were made for it.”

He worked it deeper. Found the spot that made my body involuntarily respond. My cock jumped, my breath caught. He made a small sound. Satisfaction.

“There it is.”

He held the pressure. Didn’t move. Let me feel it. Let me stand there with his finger inside me and my erection leaking and the golden collar circling my throat and the chain lying slack against my spine.

“Do you know what you are now? Legally?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “You’re property. My property. Every inch of this,” he pressed deeper, “belongs to me. I own the contract. I own the terms. I own every limit you named and every absence of a limit you didn’t. I know what you want. The things you couldn’t say out loud. I read the documentation. All of it. You gave them more than you think you did.”

He withdrew his finger. Wiped it on my thigh. Picked up the chain and walked around to face me.

“The money wasn’t about the money. Fifteen million. I liquidated assets my father spent thirty years building. I made myself a joke in rooms where reputation is currency. You know what they said? ‘Ricci spent fifteen million on a piece of ass his father could have gotten for free.’” He looked at me. “I heard that. I heard all of it. I didn’t care.”

He reached down. Took my cock again. Squeezed. Not gently.

“I wanted you to understand that there was no amount I wouldn’t pay. No threshold you could set that I wouldn’t cross. No humiliation I wouldn’t absorb.” He stroked once. Hard. “I wanted you to finally . . .”

The sentence broke. He released me.

“. . . finally be in a room with me where you couldn’t pretend I didn’t exist.”

He moved behind me again. Both hands on my ass. Spread me wide, as far as he could. The chain hung over my shoulder. His breath was warm against my ear.

“I’m going to destroy this,” he said. Quietly. Intimately. Directly into my ear. The heat was back in his voice, arousal and anger tangled together in a feral blend. “This beautiful hole. I’m going to ruin it. Every day. For five years. I’m going to fuck you until you can’t remember what it felt like before me. Until the only thing your body knows how to do is open for me.”

He pressed a thumb against me. Not entering. Threatening. His breath was unsteady now. “And when I’m done I’m going to fill you up. Pump fifteen million dollars’ worth of cum into this ass until it’s dripping down your thighs. Every night. I’m going to breed you so full you’ll taste it in the back of your throat.”

He was hard. I could feel him through his pants. The degradation was arousing him, the words as much as the touch. This wasn’t clinical anymore. This was something he’d been holding in for fourteen years.

“And when my balls run dry . . .” He pulled me back against him, the chain pressing into my throat. “. . . I’ve got men who’ve been waiting. You met Dubois in the car. Big guy. Big hands. Big dick. He’s been looking at you since the auction like he’s already planning what he’s going to do to you. And he will. I’m going to let him. I’m going to let him bend you over this couch and fuck you until you scream, and then I’m going to let Gagnon have a turn . . .”

The name landed like a second finger.

“. . . yes. Gagnon. Your friend from high school. The one you laughed with on the low wall every day. He works for me now. Has for years. Not everyone had the privilege of becoming a saint. I showed him the Chalice’s auction materials. All Alex, in your finest glory. He saw you exposed. And he’s been asking about you ever since. Very curious about what the saintly Bélanger boy looks like on his knees. I told him he’d find out soon enough.”

He turned his head. His lips were against my ear. His voice was a whisper now. Intimate. Relishing.

“I watched Gagnon with a girl once. In the back room of a club in Saint-Leonard. He had her over a table. Didn’t care who was watching. Didn’t care that she was crying by the end. He just kept going. And when he was done, he looked at me and said, ‘Your turn.’ Just like that. Like she was a thing. Which she was. Which you are.”

He pulled the chain. My head came back. His mouth was at my throat, just above the collar.

“He’s going to fuck you,” he said against my skin. “And I’m going to watch. And then I’m going to fuck you while you’re still wet from him. And then Dubois. And then whoever else I decide deserves a turn. You’re going to be the most popular thing I own.”

He released me. Walked back around. His face was flushed. His eyes were bright. He’d enjoyed that. Every word.

Then the heat in his face began to recede. The brightness in his eyes dimmed to something else, something he’d been holding back behind the performance. The flush on his cheeks settled into a harder line. He was coming down. The arousal was still there, but it was no longer driving him. Something older was surfacing.

He reached out and touched my face. Not the inspection now, something else, his thumb along my jaw, just above the collar.

“You did something to me.” The words came out lower. Less controlled. The heat was still there but shifting with anger overtaking arousal. “I wasn’t like this before you. I was . . .” He stopped, his jaw tight. “I was fine. I was normal. And then you looked at me. Once. In the corridor. You looked at me and you . . . you knew. You had to have known. What you were doing. What you looked like. What it did to me. And then you just . . . went on. With your life. With Gagnon at lunch and Vincent at . . . whatever. You never asked. Never followed up. Never gave me the conversation I . . .”

He stopped. Swallowed. His thumb was still on my jaw.

“I needed you to be there. After. To answer . . . I had questions. I had . . . I was fifteen. I didn’t know what was happening to me. And the one person who could have, who should have, the person who started it . . .” He stopped again. “You were just. Living your life. Like nothing had happened. Like I wasn’t losing my goddamn mind because you existed.”

Silence.

The wound was real. That was the thing I kept coming back to. He was wrong about what I’d done. Wrong about what I’d intended. Wrong about almost everything he believed about me. But the wound itself, the fourteen years of carrying something alone, the isolation, the confusion, the fury of being invisible to the person who had rearranged you, that was real. I could hear it in his voice. I could feel it in the way his thumb had trembled against my jaw. Whatever I’d done, whatever he thought I’d done, the damage was genuine. And he’d been alone with it. The way I was alone now.

I spoke.

“I don’t remember that.”

His hand on my face went still.

“I don’t know what I did.” My voice was subdued. Not defiance. Truth. “Whatever it was, whatever you think I did, it wasn’t intentional. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’m sorry.”

The stillness was different now. Not the stillness of arrival. The stillness of a fault line finding its moment.

“You’re sorry?”

He said it flatly. The clinical register had returned, but it was strained now. Thin ice over something moving dangerously underneath.

“You didn’t mean to.”

His hand dropped from my face.

“You didn’t mean to make me this way.” His voice was rising. Not loud but tighter. “You didn’t mean to ruin my entire life. You didn’t mean to steal grandkids from my parents. You didn’t mean to make me . . .”

He couldn’t say it. Even now. Even furious. The word wouldn’t come.

“. . . to make me this.”

He was close to me. His breath was uneven. The composure was gone. The clinical mask, the circling, the proprietary hands, the chain, all of it stripped away by four words. I don’t remember that. Worse, I’m sorry.

“You did this to me by accident.” The wonder in his voice was horror. “You destroyed everything I was supposed to be and you didn’t even notice you were doing it. It wasn’t even . . .” He choked on the word. “. . . intentional.”

His hand came up. I saw it coming. I didn’t have time to move. To flinch.

The slap cracked across my face. Open palm. Hard enough to turn my head and stagger me. I went sideways and caught myself against the arm of a leather chair, the chain swinging, the collar biting into my throat from the sudden motion. The room tilted. I straightened. Slowly. The side of my face was on fire. I could feel the shape of his hand blooming on my cheek.

When I met his eyes again, something shifted. The cold stillness of the early inspection with the clinical appraisal and the circling, that was gone. In its place was something raw and ungoverned. I’d seen what had been driving him since high school. It wasn’t rational. It wasn’t predictable. And it was all centered on me.

He stood there. Breathing hard. His hand still raised, trembling heavily with the effort of not hitting me again.

Then he lowered it.

He was looking at me but not at me. His eyes were focused somewhere in the distance, the way people look when they’re doing math in their head.

“I could kill you,” he said. It wasn’t a threat. It was a calculation. “Right now. With my hands. It would take about four minutes. Less if I used the chain. The Chalice would void the contract. I’d lose the fifteen million. My father’s assets. My reputation. My . . .” He stopped. Blinked. Looked at me. Actually looked. “I’ve done that math. More than once. I keep getting the same answer.”

He didn’t tell me what the answer was.

He turned away and walked to the window. His back was a wall. I could see him rebuilding it in real time, his shoulders squaring, his breathing slowing, the mask slotting back into place. It took maybe twenty seconds. When he turned around, he was calm and cool Marc again. The man from the auction. The man who had bought me.

He reached out. I tensed up but his hand was gentle this time. He straightened the chain where it had twisted against my shoulder from the slap. The gesture was almost solicitous. The way you adjust someone’s collar before a photograph.

“I’m going to do things to you tonight,” he said. His voice was even. Conversational. “Some of them you’ll like. Your body will like them even if you don’t. Some of them you won’t. Some of them you’ll remember for the rest of your life.”

He smoothed the chain flat. Looked at me.

“Whether that’s five years or fifty is really up to you.”

The threat was so quiet that I almost missed it. Five years was the contract term. Fifty years was a lifespan. He was telling me he could kill me without saying the word. He was telling me my obedience determined which one I got. And he was saying it while straightening my chain like he was dressing me for an event.

“That’s the deal,” he said. His voice was steady now. The clinical style was restored. “You belong to me. I own your time, your body, your compliance. But here’s what the contract doesn’t tell you. The Chalice prohibits bodily harm outside the limits set in the contract. What they don’t say is that there are ways to hurt someone that don’t leave marks. Ways to hurt someone the Chalice inspectors will never find. I know all of them.” He paused. “And I own you. So the only limit on what I do to you is what I decide the limit is. You understand?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He walked toward me. Straight line. Not circling.

“And in exchange, I’m going to give you something no one else can. I know the shape of the wanting you’ve been managing your whole life. The things you couldn’t name. The things you told the Chalice without even knowing you were telling them. I’m going to give you all of it. Things you didn’t know you could ask for. Things you’ve never let yourself want because no one ever gave you permission to want them.”

He stopped at arm’s length. The mask was perfect now. Only the slight reddening of the palm of the hand he’d hit me with betrayed that anything had happened.

I understood what he was doing. He was building a justification. A framework that made what he was going to do to me sound like an exchange rather than what it was. Ownership in return for fulfillment. As if I’d consented to any of this. As if the three things I couldn’t name for the Chalice Coordinator meant I’d agreed to have them taken. He needed to believe he was giving me something. It was the only way he could live with what he was about to do.

“You’re going to hate some of it. You’re going to hate me. That’s fine. I don’t need you to like me. I need you to obey. I need you to be here. I need you to . . .”

The sentence broke. He caught it, but the catch was visible.

“I need you to stop walking past me like I’m nothing.”

The word he wanted was see. The word he said was obey. The distance between them was the shape of everything he couldn’t name.

He picked up the chain. Wound it once around his fist. Pulled me closer.

“Say my name.”

The pivot. No transition. No framework. Three words and the power shifted but not to calm. To something else.

“Say it.”

I said it. “Marc.”

He went still. For a moment, one breath, the same stillness as before. The name landing. The architecture pausing. But then something in his face changed. The stillness wasn’t enough. One time wasn’t enough. Fourteen years of being invisible couldn’t be cured by a single syllable. He needed more. He needed to hear it until it became real.

“Again.”

I said it again. “Marc.”

“Again.” Louder.

“Marc.”

His grip on the chain tightened. His teeth were grinding. The mask was cracking.

“Again.”

“Marc.”

He was breathing harder now. His eyes were wet. I couldn’t tell if it was rage or something worse.

“Again. Say it again. Say it like you mean it. Say it like you know who I am. Say it like . . .”

His voice broke. He pulled the chain. My face was inches from his.

“Again.”

I said his name. Quietly. The same way I’d said it the first time. Without fear. Without contempt. Just the name.

“Marc.”

He made a sound. Something between a growl and a sob. His free hand came up and I braced for another slap but instead his fingers closed around my throat above the collar. And squeezed.

“Again.” A whisper now. Desperate.

My airway narrowed. The collar bit into the skin beneath it. I couldn’t speak. The chain was wrapped around his fist and my throat was in his hand and the name he wanted was trapped somewhere behind the pressure. I held his eyes. Forced the word through.

“Marc.”

He stared at me. His hand was on my throat. The chain wound around his fist. The collar heavy between us. My vision was starting to go at the edges. His face was inches from mine and for a moment, just a moment, the mask was completely gone. No performance. No cruelty. No clinical distance. Just a man who had been waiting fourteen years to be seen, and didn’t know what to do now that it was happening.

Then he released me. Stepped back. The chain went slack. I gasped involuntarily and ugly, the sound of my body reclaiming air it had been denied.

He turned away. Set the glass down. His hand was shaking even more.

When he spoke again, his voice was hoarse.

“Go upstairs. First door on the left. Wait for me. Do not sit.”

I went. The chain followed me. The collar glinted with the light from the hallway.

At the stairs, I stopped. Looked back. He was at the window, his silhouette against the city. He hadn’t moved. He was holding the glass, but not drinking.

I understood something I hadn’t understood before. He wasn’t going to stop. Whatever this was—the inspection, the confession, the slap, the choking, the desperate need for me to say his name—it wasn’t a first night. It was a pattern. A cycle. He would hurt me. Then he would need me to see him. Then he would hurt me again for having seen. And I would be here, in this house, with the chain and the collar and the men he’d named for five years. Unless I found a way to survive him that wasn’t just endurance. Unless I learned to read the pattern before it completed itself.

I climbed the stairs. The first door on the left was open. The room was dark. The bed was large. I stood in the center of it and waited.

Behind me, in the dark room with his father’s furniture, Marc poured himself another whiskey. He did not come upstairs for almost an hour.

The door opened without a knock. Ownership doesn’t knock.

I heard him before I saw him. The weight of his footsteps on the hardwood, the soft click of the door closing behind him, the silence that followed. He didn’t turn on the light. The darkness was complete except for the pale yellow-orange of the city lights through the window. The chain made a sound when I shifted, a small metallic whisper against my collarbone. I’d been standing in the center of the room for almost an hour. My feet were cold. The rest of me had gone somewhere beyond cold, into a kind of suspended awareness, the apathy of a body that knows something is about to happen and has stopped trying to predict what.

He moved through the dark like he moved through his own house. With the ownership of someone who didn’t need to see where he was going because the space was his. I felt him before I saw him. The displacement of air. The smell of whiskey, sharper than before. He’d had more than one. His hand found the chain hanging from my throat. He didn’t pull. He just held it. The weight of it shifted from my neck to his grip.

“On the bed.” Not quiet now. Commanding. The hoarseness made it rougher. “On your stomach. Arms above your head.”

I did what he said. The sheets were cold but good cotton, dense, the kind that got warmer the longer you lay in them. I stretched my arms up. Gripped the headboard. The chain pooled between my shoulder blades. The collar pressed against the mattress. I heard him undressing behind me. First his watch came off, set casually on the nightstand. Then fabric, a buckle, shoes kicked toward a corner. Then silence. The appraising silence of a man looking at what he owned.

The first touch was his palm on my ass. Not a caress. An assessment. The way you test the weight of something you’ve bought.

“You’ve been fucked before.” His voice was clinical again. The same tone from downstairs. “I know you have. Gabriel. Vincent. Michael.” He said each name like an indictment. “They were inside you. They had this,” he squeezed, hard. “But none of them owned it. None of them paid fifteen million dollars for the right. This is mine now. This hole. This body. I’m going to use it until I’ve used it up. Until there’s nothing left of the Alex Bélanger who let other men inside him before me.”

He spread me open. No preamble. No reverence. Just the clinical appraisal of property. His thumb pressed against me. Dry. The friction was deliberate because he wanted me to feel it.

“This is what you are now,” he said. “A hole for me to fuck. That’s it. That’s the whole job description. You’re not a person in this room. You’re not the saintly Bélanger boy. You’re a warm place for my cock.”

He spit. I heard it. Felt it land. His thumb pushed through the wetness and into me. Not the exploratory pressure from downstairs, that had been medical. This was use. He worked it in and out without regard for my comfort, stretching me open for what was coming.

“You’re going to take all of it,” he said. “Every inch. I don’t care if it hurts. I don’t care if you’re ready. You belong to me. Your body adjusts to me now. Not the other way around.”

He withdrew his thumb. Replaced it with two fingers. The stretch burned. I gripped the headboard harder. Didn’t make a sound. He hadn’t asked for one.

“That’s right,” he said. “Take it. Open up for me. You’re going to learn to open for me on command. By the time I’m done with you, your body won’t remember what it felt like before I was inside it.”

He fucked me with his fingers. Not looking for the place that made me respond, deliberately avoiding it instead. This was preparation, not pleasure. He was getting me ready to be used. The distinction was the point.

Then he stopped. Fingers gone. The emptiness was relief and anticipation at the same time. I heard him spit again. The sound of him slicking himself. The head of his cock pressed against me.

“Don’t move.”

He pushed in.

The stretch was different from his fingers. It was fuller, hotter, more. Too much, for a moment. I had yet to see his cock but already knew it was the largest I had encountered. My body resisted but he didn’t stop. He pushed through the resistance, forcing me open around him, and the sound I made was involuntary. Not pleasure, not quite pain, something in between that my body hadn’t decided how to process yet. He didn’t pause to let me adjust. He buried himself to the hilt in one long, unrelenting thrust. His hips slammed against my ass. The chain rattled. The collar bit into my throat.

“There,” he said. His voice had changed slightly. A crack in the clinical register exposing something hotter underneath. “That’s where I belong. Inside you. This is where I’ve been trying to get for fourteen years.”

He didn’t move. Held himself there. Let me feel the fullness of him, the stretch, the weight of his body pinning me to the mattress. His breath was hot on the back of my neck. His heartbeat through his cock was a pulse inside me that wasn’t mine.

“I used to think about this,” he said. His voice was lower now. Less controlled. “In class. In meetings. While my father was talking to me about the business. I’d be sitting there nodding along and all I could think about was what it would feel like to be inside you. What you’d sound like when I pushed into you. Whether you’d fight me or take it.”

He pulled out. Slowly. The drag of him against my insides made my cock pulse against the sheets. Then he slammed back in. Hard. The bed frame cracked against the wall.

“You’re taking it,” he said. A kind of wonder in his voice. “You’re taking all of it. Like you were made for it.”

He fucked me.

There wasn’t a transition. One moment stillness, the next moment motion. Deep and hard and punishing, it was the rhythm of a man holding himself back for over a decade who had finally stopped. The bed frame banged against the wall. The chain rattled with every thrust. The sound of his skin slapping against mine was wet and rhythmic and obscene. He was using my body the way he’d promised downstairs. Like a thing, not a person. Every thrust was ownership. Every sound he made was possession.

And my body was responding. I hated that it was responding. I hated that my cock was hard and leaking against the sheets, that my hips were pushing back to meet his thrusts, that the sounds I was making into the pillow weren’t sounds of pain anymore. The documentation. He knew where to touch. He knew what rhythm. He knew what angle would make my body light up from the inside even while my mind was still cataloguing all the reasons this shouldn’t feel good.

He found the spot. The one his fingers had found downstairs. The one the Chalice assessment had mapped and the documentation had recorded and he had memorized like scripture. When the head of his cock hit it, my whole body clenched around his shaft and the sound I made wasn’t muffled enough.

“Yeah,” he said. It came out raw and naked. “Yeah. Right there. That’s it.”

He drove into that spot again. Again. Again. The clinical distance was gone. The performance was gone. He was just a man fucking me now. Not his property, not his purchase, not his revenge. Just a man who’d wanted this for fourteen years and was finally getting it. His rhythm changed. Less punishing. More precise. He was chasing something. The way his body was moving, the tension building in his thighs against mine, the way his breath was getting ragged, the sounds he was making that he probably didn’t know he was making.

I pushed back against him. Met his rhythm. Took control of the angle. His hand came down on my hip, not the brutal grip from before, but something almost grateful. He let me set the pace for a moment. Let me take what I wanted from him. The shift was small but seismic. He’d spent the whole night trying to own me, and now he was letting me fuck myself on his cock. The difference was the difference between possession and . . . something else.

“Marco,” I used the Italian, his birth name. Not the French demanded by Québec society. Quietly. The same way I’d spoken downstairs.

His whole body went still. The name landed in him and he stopped. Everything stopped. The thrust he’d been about to make, the breath he’d been about to take, the fourteen years of narrative architecture. All of it suspended at the sound.

Then something broke.

He grabbed my hips with both hands and flipped me onto my back without pulling out. A feat of coordination that would have been impressive if I’d had the presence of mind to appreciate it. The chain slithered across my chest. He was above me now. Inside me. His face inches from mine. The city lights caught the sweat on his forehead, the wetness in his eyes, the expression on his face that was nothing like the man who’d inspected me downstairs. This was someone else. Someone who’d been buried under fourteen years of shame and rage and was surfacing now whether he wanted to or not.

He started moving again. Not the punishing rhythm from before. Something deeper. Slower. More deliberate. Every stroke was aimed at that spot inside me, and every stroke hit it. His eyes never left mine. His hand found my cock. Stroked me in counterpoint to his thrusts.

“I want to feel you come,” he said. His voice was hoarse. Almost desperate. “I want to feel it from the inside. I want to know what it feels like to have you . . .”

The sentence broke. He thrust deep and held there, grinding against the place that made everything else fall away, and his hand on my cock was expert and relentless and exactly what I needed. I came. Harder than I’d come in months. The pleasure crested and held longer than usual, sharper than usual, the kind of orgasm that erases thought. I felt myself clench around him in rhythmic pulses. Heard myself make a sound I didn’t recognize. Felt the wet heat of my cum spreading across my stomach and his hand and the space between us.

I was still pulsing around him when he started moving again.

“Not done,” he said straining. “I’m not . . . I need . . .”

He pulled almost all the way out. Slammed back in. The overstimulation was almost painful, my body still clenching in the aftershocks of my own orgasm, and he was fucking me through it, harder now, faster, the rhythm building toward something that felt inevitable. I watched his face. Watched the mask crack and fall away. Watched the fourteen years of wanting surface in his eyes like something drowning finally breaking the surface.

“This is it,” he said, and his voice was barely a voice anymore. Just a rasp, a growl, something coming from deeper than speech. “This is what I thought about. Every man. Every time. Every single time. I’d close my eyes and it was you. Always you. No one else. My hand on my cock and your face in my head. What it would be like to be inside you. To come inside you. To empty everything I had into . . .”

His thrusts were losing rhythm. His body was tensing. He was swelling inside me, getting thicker and harder, the prelude to something enormous.

“Say my name.” Not a demand now. A plea.

“Marc.”

He made a sound that was almost a sob.

“Again.”

“Marc.”

“Again. Keep saying it. Don’t stop. I need you to . . .”

“Marc. Marco. Marco . . .”

He came.

It started deep, a guttural roar torn from somewhere below his ribs, a sound that wasn’t human or animal but something in between, the noise of a man whose entire body had just been hijacked by something he couldn’t control. His hips slammed into me like a meteor and locked there. His hands gripped my shoulders hard enough to bruise. His whole body went rigid as every muscle, every tendon, every fiber of him pulled taut as a bowstring. And then the first pulse hit.

I felt it. Inside me. A hot, thick flood against the place he’d been grinding against for the last five minutes. The sensation was so specific and so intimate that my own spent cock twitched in response. Then the second pulse. Bigger than the first. I felt him swell and release, swell and release, his cock jerking inside me with each ejaculation. He was crying out in something not words, not anymore, just sounds. Grunts and roars and a sound that could have been my name, mangled beyond recognition.

He didn’t stop.

The third pulse. The fourth. The fifth. He kept coming. Kept emptying himself into me. His hips kept grinding, kept pressing deeper, like he was trying to push his whole body inside mine. His forehead was pressed against my collarbone. His breath was shredded. The sounds he was making had changed. There was less roaring now, more whimper. The cries of a man being wrung out.

Six. Seven. Eight pulses. I counted them the way I count everything. A list, a system, a way of staying present by breaking the present into manageable pieces. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Each one smaller than the last, but still coming, still pulsing, his body refusing to stop. His cock was still jerking inside me. The wet heat inside me was building, spreading, filling every available space. I’d never felt anything like it. I’d never been this full. I’d never been this claimed.

Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen.

One for every year he’d been waiting.

He knew it too. I could see it in his face when he lifted his head, the awareness surfacing through the pleasure. Fourteen years of wanting. Fourteen years of imagining. Fourteen years of his own hand and his own mind and the face of a boy who’d never once looked at him. And now he was inside that boy. Cumming inside him. Marking him from the inside out with a sheer volume no one else ever had.

“Mine,” he said. Not a shout. A rasp. The word torn out of him on the last pulse, the fifteenth, smaller than the others but more desperate, more honest. “Mine. You’re . . . this is . . . mine . . .”

The pulses stopped. His body went slack. But he didn’t pull out. He stayed inside me, still hard, still buried, his weight collapsing onto my chest. Not beside me. On me. All of him. The muscle, the bulk, the raw power of a man who’d spent his life in rooms where presence was its own form of violence. He was heavy. He was crushing me. I could barely breathe.

And he was holding on. His arms wrapped around me. His face buried in my neck, just above the collar. His breath was hot and uneven against my skin. His cock still inside me, still half-hard, still pulsing with the aftershocks. My stomach was wet with my own cum. His was leaking out around him and dripping down the inside of my thighs. I was wrecked. Absolutely wrecked. No one had ever fucked me like that. Not Gabriel, whose hands knew the topography. Not Michael, whose hands were practiced and attentive and strategically deployed. Not Vincent, whose single night with me had been urgent and unfinished and never repeated. None of them had overwhelmed my body the way Marc just had. The sheer physical reality of him, the weight and the volume and the fourteen years emptying into me was beyond anything I’d experienced. None of them had emptied themselves into me like I was the only container that could hold what they’d been carrying.

I couldn’t move. He was too heavy. And he was holding me too tightly. And somewhere in the middle of cataloguing the sensations, the weight, the heat, the wetness cooling on my skin, the ache in my ass, the pulse of blood in the places he’d touched, the collar still heavy on my throat, I stopped cataloguing.

The list ended.

My body was singing. My mind was quiet. The man who had threatened to kill me four hours ago was lying on top of me, still inside me, breathing into my neck, his arms wrapped around me like I was the only thing keeping him on the earth. The chain was somewhere between us, twisted and warm. The city lights had shifted on the ceiling. The house was silent. Roger had turned off the kitchen light. The smell of sex was settling into the sheets.

I fell asleep like that. Covered in my own cum. His cock softening inside me. His weight pressing me into the mattress. The collar wet with our sweat. The chain tangled between us. His breath slowing, deepening, evening out into sleep.

I fell asleep at peace for the first time since the raid.

Marc’s Point of View

I woke because the arm under me had gone numb.

My face was in Alex’s neck. My body was still on top of his. My cock, soft now and spent, was still inside him, the heat and gentle grip of his ass enveloping it. I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep. The city light through the window had shifted. An hour. Maybe more.

I lifted my head. The movement was slow. Everything was slow. My body felt hollowed out. Emptied. The sex had been . . . there was no word for what the sex had been. Fourteen years of wanting, and then the wanting had become something physical, and then the physical had become something I couldn’t control. I’d felt my own orgasm coming, and I had tried to hold it and I couldn’t. I’d tried to stop saying his name, Alex’s name, and I couldn’t. I’d come fourteen times. I’d counted. I’d felt each one leave my body like a separate involuntary surrender, and by the end I’d been crying and I didn’t know if it was from pleasure or exhaustion or the terror of finally having what I’d been imagining since I was fifteen years old.

It was better than I’d imagined. It was worse. In the fantasies, I’d been in control. In the fantasies, Alex had been beneath me, and I had been taking what I wanted, and it had felt like victory. The reality was messier. The reality was that Alex had pushed back against me and taken over the rhythm and then said my name, Marc, and the name had cut through me. The reality was that the orgasm had seized me like a seizure and I’d made sounds I’d never made in front of another person and I’d held onto Alex afterward like he was the only solid thing in a room that had stopped making sense.

I didn’t know what to do with any of that. So I did what I always did. I got up.

I pulled out of Alex slowly. The body beneath me didn’t stir. Alex was out. Genuinely, deeply out, the sleep of someone who had been pushed past every limit his body had and had finally stopped fighting. I stood beside the bed. Looked down at him. In the pale yellow-orange light from the window, Alex looked wrecked. The collar was still on his throat. The chain was tangled between us. His own cum was drying on his stomach. My cum was leaking out of him onto the sheets, pearlescent in the dim light even now. The proof of what I’d done. Fourteen pulses. I’d emptied everything I had into this body, and this body had taken it, and somewhere in the middle of it this body had said my name and I . . . I had stopped being the person who owned it and became something else. Something I didn’t have a word for.

I pulled the blanket up from the foot of the bed. Covered Alex to the shoulders. The motion was automatic. I didn’t think about it. I just did it. Then I unclipped the chain from the collar. The little clasp was harder to work than it should have been, my hands weren’t steady yet, but I got it. Coiled the chain on the nightstand. It looked small there. A length of gold in a neat circle, harmless.

I stood in the dark for a moment. Looking at Alex’s face. At the mark on his cheek where I’d slapped him. At the raw skin around the collar. At the way his hand was curled on the pillow. Open, relaxed, the hand of someone who was not afraid in his sleep.

I’d done that math. The killing math. Seven, eight times, over fourteen years, I’d run the numbers. The answer was always the same. It would be easy and it would cost me everything and the cost would be worth it if I could just stop wanting. Except the wanting never stopped. The wanting was the one thing I couldn’t kill. I’d tried. I’d tried with contempt and I’d tried with cruelty and I’d tried with Gagnon’s invitations and Dubois’s looks and the whole architecture of humiliation I’d built around the auction. None of it had worked. The wanting was still there. And now the wanting had been inside Alex’s body and Alex had said my name while it was happening and the wanting was worse than ever.

I had won the auction. I had beaten Vincent. Vincent Lefebvre, with his legitimate business and his moral seriousness and his face that lit up every time Alex walked into a room, the face I’d been watching since high school and hating since high school because Vincent got to be in Alex’s orbit and I never did. I had beaten Gabriel, who had touched Alex first and known the topography before anyone else. I had beaten Michael, who had called himself a fiancé and then disappeared the moment the money did. I had beaten all of them. Alex was mine. Legal. Irreversible. The contract said so. The collar said so. Alex’s body, wrecked and leaking my seed and sleeping beneath me, said so.

And yet. And yet Alex had said my name not like a prisoner but like a person. Like someone who was choosing to say it. Like someone who saw me. And I . . . I had spent fourteen years trying to be seen by this exact person, and now that it was happening, it didn’t feel the way I’d thought it would feel. It felt like standing on something that was giving way beneath me. It felt like falling asleep on top of someone and waking up with your arm numb because you’d been holding on too tight.

I left the room. I didn’t look back. I didn’t go to my own bedroom. I went to my study and sat in the dark and didn’t pour a drink. I didn’t do anything. I just sat. The house was silent. Roger was asleep. The kitchen was dark. The thermostat had never been adjusted. I’d been cold for fourteen years and I hadn’t noticed until tonight, when I’d been warm for the first time, pressed against a body that had taken everything I had and said my name anyway.

I didn’t know what I was going to do tomorrow. Tonight I had won. Tomorrow the winning would start to feel like something else. But tonight, tonight Alex was sleeping in the guest room with the chain on the nightstand and the blanket pulled up to his shoulders and the evidence of what I’d done inside him. And I was alone in my father’s study, doing the same math I’d always done, and getting the same answer I’d always gotten, and not knowing why I kept running the numbers when the answer never changed.

Alex’s Point of View

I woke to darkness and silence and cold.

He was gone. The weight on my chest was just the blanket now. Someone had covered me. The sheets had been pulled up to my shoulders. The pillow under my head had been adjusted. I didn’t remember any of that happening.

The chain was gone from my throat.

I sat up too fast. My hand went to my neck. The collar was still there, the familiar weight of it, the gold against my skin, but the chain had been unclipped. I found it on the nightstand, coiled neatly, the way you coil something you intend to use again. The gesture was almost careful. Almost tender. If you could call anything about this night tender.

The bathroom was across the hall. I found it by touch. The cold tile, the faint glow of a nightlight plugged into the wall. My reflection in the mirror was a stranger. The collar on my throat. The mess on my stomach, dried now, flaking. The mark on my cheek where he’d slapped me, the shape of his hand fading but still visible. The skin around the collar was raw. My hips had bruises where his hands had gripped too hard. My ass ached and burned in a way that would last for days.

And inside me was still wet. Still full. His cum had been leaking down my thighs when I stood up. I could feel it. The evidence of what he’d done. Fourteen pulses. I’d counted them. Fourteen years of wanting, emptied into me, and I was still carrying it.

I ran cold water over my wrists. The ritual. The thing I did when I needed my body to remember it was mine and not his. The cold shocked my system into a small reset, the parasympathetic nervous system responding to temperature the way it was designed to. My heartbeat slowed. My breathing steadied. I looked at myself in the mirror. Noted, with the honesty the ritual required, that I looked like someone who’d just been fucked senseless by a man who’d spent fourteen years imagining what it would feel like.

I looked like someone who’d let it happen. Whose body had responded despite everything. And not just responded but surrendered. Given itself over completely. Fallen asleep under the weight of the man who had choked me hours earlier.

I thought about Vincent. His face at the auction. The fact of his having stayed. The way he’d bid knowing he’d lose, as if the bidding itself was a form of acknowledgment. I see you. I can’t save you. But I see you. Vincent’s hands knew the topography. Marc’s hands had the documentation. The difference was the disparity between a map and the territory itself. Marc had found the right places, the documentation was thorough, his research was meticulous, he’d known exactly where to press and when to stroke and what rhythm would make my body respond. But Vincent wouldn’t have needed the documentation. Vincent’s hands remembered what my body liked because they’d been there before.

And yet. And yet Marc had come inside me fourteen times. Vincent had never done that. No one had ever done that. The intimacy of it—the sheer physical reality of carrying so much of another man’s cum inside your body—was something I hadn’t expected. Something the documentation hadn’t prepared me for.

I wondered where Vincent was right now. What he was doing. Whether he was asleep or awake. Whether he was alone or with someone. Whether he was thinking about me the way I was thinking about him. I wondered if he’d gone home after the auction or if he’d stayed somewhere else. A bar, a hotel, the empty room. I wondered if his face had done the thing it always did when he saw me, the specific lightening I’d noticed for years and never let myself analyze. I wondered if it was doing it now, wherever he was, whatever he was doing. I wondered if I’d ever see it again.

I turned off the water. Dried my wrists on a towel that smelled like laundry soap. Roger’s domain, the kitchen warmth downstairs, the only uncomplicated thing in this house. I looked at myself one more time. The face in the mirror was composed. I looked fine. I always looked fine.

I went back to the bedroom. The sheets were a disaster. The blanket was still warm where he’d pulled it over me. The chain lay on the nightstand, coiled and waiting. The collar was still around my neck. It would be there for five years. But the chain was off. Someone had unclipped it. Someone had covered me with a blanket.

I got back into the bed. Not his bed. The guest room. The first door on the left. The mattress still held the impression of his weight. The pillow smelled like him, whiskey and salt and the pungent musk of sex and sweat, fainter now. I lay on my back and looked at the ceiling. The grid of city lights had shifted again. Hours had passed. It was almost dawn.

I catalogued the night. The inspection. The confession. The slap. The choking. The desperate need for his name. The sex. The fourteen pulses. The weight of him on my chest. The chain coiled on the nightstand. The blanket around my shoulders.

Some of the items on the list didn’t have names yet. The part where he’d said “mine” and it sounded like a prayer. The part where he’d held onto me like something was going to take me away. The part where I’d fallen asleep peacefully for the first time since the raid, pinned down by the weight of someone who’d done the math on killing me.

The part where I didn’t know if the math had changed now that he’d been inside me.

And beneath every item on the list, a face. Vincent’s face. At the auction. Staying after. The way he’d looked at me across the room while Marc’s hand closed around the chain. I see you, that look had said. I can’t save you. But I see you.

I closed my eyes. The collar was cold against my throat. The chain was on the nightstand instead of in his hand. Somewhere a clock I hadn’t seen yet ticked. Marc was in his own bed, or at his window, or doing the math again. I didn’t know which. I didn’t know if Vincent was awake. I didn’t know what he was thinking about. But I knew he’d stayed. After everyone else had gone, Vincent had stayed.

That was the last thing I thought before the light changed from orange to gray. Vincent, alone in the empty auction room. Staying after I’d been led out.

Rémi’s Point of View

The alley was behind a bar on Hochelaga that I didn’t know the name of and wouldn’t remember later.

I’d taken the long way home. The meeting with De Santis had ended early enough that the gym was still an option, but something about the folder on his desk and the way he’d looked at it without opening it had made me want to drive. Not to think. Just to be in the car with the window down and the city moving past and nothing in particular ahead of me. I’d looped through Saint-Léonard, past the Ricci house, noted the lights on downstairs and the single car in the driveway, and kept going. The surveillance wasn’t active yet. I’d start tomorrow. Tonight was just driving.

I heard the sound before I saw anything. A voice, not shouting, something tighter than shouting, and then the wet, specific noise of something hitting something soft. I pulled over. Turned off the engine. Got out of the car.

The alley ran between the bar and a boarded-up laundromat. The streetlight at the mouth of it was out. The only light came from a window on the second floor of the building opposite, a pale blue rectangle that made the shadows deeper than they needed to be. The air was rancid with garbage and old grease.

Three of them, young, early twenties maybe, the sort of young that hadn’t learned yet that three on one wasn’t a fight, it was just what it was. One was holding the victim against the brick wall. The second was going through a wallet. The third was standing back, watching the mouth of the alley, and he saw me before the others did.

“What do you want?” The voice was higher than I’d expected. Nervous. The other two stopped what they were doing and looked up.

I didn’t answer. I walked toward them. Not fast. Not slow. The way I walked through every room I’d ever been in. Like I belonged there, like the space had already adjusted to my presence and was waiting for everyone else to catch up.

The one holding the wallet dropped it. The one against the wall slid down to his knees and then onto his side. He made a noise that was not crying exactly, but a wet exhale that had blood in it. His face was a mess. I couldn’t tell how old he was. Older than the three who’d done it. Better dressed. The wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time, or the right person in the right place for someone who wanted what he had in his wallet.

The three ran. I let them. I wasn’t a cop and I wasn’t interested in being one. What I was interested in was the man on the ground.

I crouched beside him. The concrete was wet with something not rain that I didn’t want to identify. His breathing was shallow. One eye was swelling shut. His nose was broken, or close to it. His hands were scraped, the palms raw, the kind of abrasions you get from trying to catch yourself on brick. No weapons. No defense. Just a person who’d been in the wrong place and hadn’t been able to do anything about it.

“Can you hear me?”

A nod. Small. Cost him something.

“I’m going to get you out of here. Can you stand?”

He tried. Got halfway up before his legs gave out. I caught him. He was lighter than I’d expected. Lean with the build of someone who spent his days at a desk or a drafting table, someone whose body wasn’t something he thought about until it failed him. He smelled like blood and wool and something else, something sharp and green, the way some plants smell when you crush them.

“My apartment’s closer than a hospital,” I said. It wasn’t entirely true. The hospital was six blocks away . My apartment was eight. But a hospital meant questions. A hospital meant forms. A hospital meant someone asking this man what had happened and whether he wanted to press charges and why a man my size was bringing him in at one in the morning with no explanation. I didn’t have explanations. I had an apartment with a clean bathroom and a first-aid kit and the number of a doctor who didn’t ask questions.

I half-carried him to the car. Got him into the passenger seat. The crime novel was still there. I moved it to the back without thinking. He didn’t notice. His head was against the window, his eyes half-closed, his breathing the rhythm of someone focusing on staying conscious.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

He turned his head. The eye that wasn’t swelling looked at me. Hazel, I noted, a detail I filed without knowing why I’d filed it. “Simon,” he said. His voice was rough. “Simon Campbell.”

“Rémi Bouchard.” I started the car. “You’re going to be fine.”

He didn’t answer. The city slid past the windows. The light from the streetlamps moved across his face in stripes. Light, dark, light, dark. Somewhere between Hochelaga and my apartment, he passed out. His breathing evened. His hand, which had been gripping the door handle, relaxed and fell open on his thigh. His palm was scraped, the fingers curled, the hand of a man who had stopped fighting.

I drove the rest of the way in silence. The radio was off. The crime novel was in the back seat. I didn’t know why I was doing this. I didn’t examine it. The decision had already been made. Not dramatically, just the decision of a man whose private code included not leaving people in alleys. The rest of it, the apartment, the first-aid kit, the doctor’s number, the questions I wasn’t going to ask and the forms I wasn’t going to fill out, was just what followed.

I pulled into my parking space. Turned off the engine. Simon was still out. The street was silent. The city was asleep. I sat for a moment with my hands on the wheel, looking at the man in my passenger seat, at his broken face and his scraped hands and the way his chest rose and fell in the rhythm of someone whose body had decided to trust the situation even if his mind hadn’t caught up yet.

Then I got out. Went around to his side. Opened the door. “Simon,” I said. “We’re here.”

He didn’t wake up . I lifted him out of the seat, all of him, one arm under his knees, one behind his back, the way you carry something that matters. He stirred but didn’t open his eyes. His head fell against my shoulder. I carried him up the stairs to my apartment and laid him on the couch and went to find the first-aid kit.

Outside, the city was still. Inside, the apartment was quiet in a way it hadn’t been quiet before. The silence of a space that had been mine for fifteen years and was now, for reasons I didn’t examine, shared.

Théo’s Point of View

Vincent was still asleep. I’d been awake for forty minutes. The coffee was made, the kitchen counter wiped down, my phone checked and set aside. I’d found my shirt draped over the back of the dining chair where I’d left it the night before. The apartment was quiet like a Sunday morning. No traffic on the street, no construction, just the hum of the refrigerator and the sound of Vincent’s breathing from the bedroom.

I’d done this enough times to know the shape of it. Wake first. Make coffee. Wait for him to surface. The waiting used to feel like anticipation. Now it felt like a question I’d stopped asking because I already knew the answer.

The arrangement was eighteen months old. It had started the way these things start, a late night at the office, a look that held a beat too long, a decision that felt inevitable in the moment and unexamined afterward. Vincent had never made promises. I’d never asked for any. The warmth between us was real. The asymmetry was also real. Both things could be true at the same time, which was the part I was still learning to hold without bruising myself on it.

I poured a second cup of coffee. Set it on the nightstand. The sound of the mug against the wood was enough to stir him.

Vincent opened his eyes. Took a moment to orient himself, going from the ceiling, to the window, to me. His face did the thing it always did when he woke up and found me still there. A flicker of something that might have been surprise and might have been relief and might have been neither. I’d catalogued it for eighteen months without ever deciding what it meant.

“Coffee,” I said.

He sat up. Reached for the mug. His hand brushed mine and neither of us commented on it.

“You’re up early,” he said.

“You’re up late.”

A flicker of a smile. It didn’t reach his eyes. His eyes had been somewhere else since the auction, still watching a room in Old Montréal where something had happened that he hadn’t told me about. I’d filed the change in his attention without pressing. Pressing wasn’t what I did. What I did was make coffee and check my phone and wait for him to come back from wherever he’d gone.

He didn’t come back that morning. He drank his coffee and looked at the window and said nothing about the auction. I didn’t ask. I’d learned not to ask. The arrangement survived on the things we didn’t say to each other, and I was very good at surviving.

I gathered my things. His voice stopped me at the door.

“Théo.”

I turned.

He was still sitting in bed, the mug in both hands, looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read. For a moment I thought he was going to say something real, something that would shift the shape of what we were to each other. Then the moment passed.

“Thank you,” he said. “For the coffee.”

“You’re welcome.”

I closed the door behind me. The hallway was quiet. The elevator took a long time. I stood in the lobby for a moment, looking at my phone, not really seeing it. Then I walked to my car and sat in the parking space for twelve minutes, assembling a picture I didn’t want to assemble, wondering how much of Vincent had been sold last night too.

Alex’s Point of View

I woke to footsteps on the stairs. Not Marc’s. Marc’s were heavier, deliberate, the footfalls of a man who owned every surface he walked on. These were lighter. Quicker. The gait of someone who moved through spaces that weren’t his with the confidence of someone who didn’t care whose they were.

The door swung open. Hit the wall. The sound was a gunshot in the quiet room and my body jerked upright before my mind caught up.

Standing in the doorway was a tall, lithe man with dirty blonde hair and a face I knew.

Gagnon.

He’d filled out since high school. The lanky frame had hardened into something wiry and coiled. Facial scruff darkened his jaw, not the cultivated stubble of someone trying to look a certain way but the indifference of a man who hadn’t shaved in three days and wasn’t going to apologize for it. His grin stretched wide and hungry across his face, like he had just been handed something he’d been waiting for.

The morning light from the window caught the edge of his teeth.

“Well, well, well.” He leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, taking his time. “What do we have here? The better-than-us Bélanger boy. Back with us thugs. Look at that.”

My mouth was dry. The collar was still on my throat. The blanket had slipped to my waist when I sat up and the cold air hit my chest and I didn’t pull the blanket back up. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing me cover myself.

He pushed off the doorframe. Stepped into the room. Closed the door behind him with a soft click that was worse than the slam had been.

“Mr. Ricci said you hadn’t been broken in yet.” His fingers found the top button of his shirt. Worked it loose. “Gave me the morning off to fix that.”

Second button. Third. His eyes never left mine.

“I’m good at breaking things in.”

The shirt came off. Dropped to the floor. His chest was lean and corded with muscle that hadn’t come from a gym. The kind of muscle that came from using your body for things other than looking good. A tattoo curled over his left shoulder, something black and angular I couldn’t identify, the ink faded in places where the sun had gotten to it.

He crossed the room. Not fast. Not slow. The pace of someone who knew I wasn’t going anywhere. The rug was soft under my feet when I stood. I didn’t remember deciding to stand. My body had done it without asking me.

He stopped a foot away. Close enough that I could smell him. Cigarettes and something sharper underneath, a cologne that had been applied too heavily two days ago and was now just a ghost of itself. His eyes moved down my body and back up. Deliberate. Unhurried.

“Look at you.” He circled me. Slowly. The way you circle a car you’re thinking about buying. “Still pretty. Even with the collar. It suits you.” He stopped behind me. I couldn’t see him. The heat from him registered on my bare back. “Prettier than the photos, actually. The Chalice documentation doesn’t do you justice.”

His hand landed on my shoulder. The touch was light. Almost friendly. The way you touch someone you haven’t seen in years.

Then his fingers traced down my spine. Slow. The way you don’t touch an old friend.

“Gotta say, Alex.” His voice was closer now. Right behind my ear. “I always wondered what you’d look like naked. Back in school. Sitting on that wall every day with your perfect hair and your perfect grades and your perfect little life.” His hand reached the small of my back. Stopped there. “Never thought I’d get to find out.”

He circled back around to face me. His grin had settled into something less theatrical. More focused. His hand came up and he took my chin between his thumb and forefinger. Turned my head to the left. To the right. Inspecting.

“You’ve still got the cheekbones. Good bone structure. That’s important.” He released my chin. Let his hand drop to my chest. His thumb found my nipple and pressed. Not hard. Testing. “Lean. Good proportions. Not too much body hair.” His hand moved lower, over my stomach, stopping just above my cock. “Yeah. I think I’m going to enjoy breaking you in.”

The words were Marc’s. The performance was Marc’s. But something in his eyes didn’t match the grin.

He leaned in. His mouth was at my ear. His stubble scraped my jaw and his breath was warm and smelled like coffee.

“I don’t have a choice about this, Alex.”

The words were a whisper. Barely air. His lips brushed my earlobe and the intimacy of it was so at odds with the performance that my mind stumbled over the register shift.

“I’ll be as gentle as I can. But we have to sell it.”

His head moved. Almost imperceptibly. A nod toward the dresser against the far wall. The dresser with the mirror above it. The mirror that was angled slightly toward the bed.

The room was under surveillance. Marc was watching. Of course, Marc was watching.

My heart was a fist in my chest. The part of me that had been cataloguing since the Chalice, the part that counted chain links and identified Ravel on the radio and measured the distance between sofas, that part understood immediately what Gagnon was telling me. This wasn’t a visit. It was a performance. And Gagnon wasn’t the only one being watched.

He pulled back. His hand found my shoulder again. The grin was back in place but his eyes held something else now. Something that might have been the boy I’d sat with on the low wall every day at lunch. The boy who’d shown me stupid videos on his phone. The boy who’d laughed at my jokes and saved me a seat and never once looked at me the way Marc looked at me.

“Down on your knees, choir boy.” His voice was loud again. Performing. His hand pressed down on my shoulder. “Let’s see what you can do.”

I went down.

The rug was rough against my knees. Wool, like the wool I’d stood on last night while I catalogued the distance between sofas. Now I was on it. Looking up at a man I’d known since I was eleven. A man who’d been my friend. A man who now worked for the person who owned me.

Gagnon’s hands went to his belt. The leather slid through the buckle with a sound I’d heard before. Different context. Different life. He unzipped his fly with the same unhurried deliberation he’d used to unbutton his shirt. The performance was for the mirror. His cock sprang free.

Of course it was big. Everything about this morning was calibrated. Everything about this house was designed to remind me of my place.

He stroked himself once. Twice. Getting harder. His cock was thick and uncut and already slick at the tip. He took a step closer. The head of it was inches from my face. I could smell him. Salt and skin. The heavy musk of an active man.

His hand came down. Not on my shoulder this time. On the back of my head. Not pushing. Just resting there. A reminder.

Then he slapped my cheek with his cock.

The impact was light. Deliberate. The weight of it, the heat of it, the wetness at the tip that left a trail across my skin. My face burned. Not from the slap. From everything else.

“Look at that.” His voice was steady. Still performing. “The saintly Bélanger boy. On his knees. About to get his mouth fucked by the kid whose lunch table wasn’t good enough for him.”

I didn’t know if that was part of the script or something else. Something real.

He slapped me again. Harder this time. The head of his cock caught my cheekbone and the sound it made was wet and profane and echoed in the quiet room.

“Open up.”

Third slap. Across my lips. I felt them part. Felt the heat of him drag across my mouth. Tasted salt and something bitter at the back of my tongue.

Fourth. The head of his cock glanced off my jaw. A pearl of pre-cum strung between his skin and mine before it broke and cooled on my chin.

Fifth. Softer. The tip against my closed lips. A question.

I looked up at him. His face was flushed. His breathing was heavier than it had been. But his eyes . . . his eyes were the same eyes from the whisper. The eyes of someone who was doing what he had to do and trying to tell me with a look that he wasn’t enjoying it.

I opened my mouth.

End of Chapter Five.

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