LOGINCalen’s POV
Karl’s weight lifted off me suddenly, and I gasped, dragging air into my lungs. My chest ached where it had been pressed against the floor. I didn’t move. Every muscle in my body had locked up, waiting for whatever came next.
“Get up.”
His voice came from somewhere above me, still rough but more controlled now. I pushed myself onto my hands and knees, my arms shaking. When I finally looked up, Karl was sitting on one of the wooden benches that lined the locker room, leaning back like he owned the entire world. His eyes were still that unnatural gold, but the wildness from before had settled into something colder and calculating.
He looked like a king on a throne.
“Come here,” he said.
It wasn’t a request.
My legs barely held me as I stood. Every instinct screamed at me to run, fight, or do anything except walk toward him. But I did it anyway. One foot in front of the other until I was standing directly in front of him, close enough to feel the heat still radiating from his skin.
Karl’s gaze traveled over me slowly. Then his lips curved into something that might have been a smile if it weren’t so sharp.
“On your knees.”
My stomach twisted. “What?”
“You heard me.” His voice dropped lower, dangerous. “On… your… knees.”
I hesitated, and his eyes flashed. The air between us grew heavier, and suffocating. This wasn’t a negotiation. This was a test… one I couldn’t afford to fail.
I sank down onto the cold tile floor.
Karl spread his legs slightly, making space for me between them. My face burned with humiliation, fear, and with something else I didn’t want to name. He reached out and caught my chin, tilting my face up so I had to meet his eyes.
“You’re going to do exactly what I tell you,” he said softly. “Understand?”
I couldn’t find my voice, so I nodded.
“Good.” His thumb brushed across my lower lip, and I flinched. “Now satisfy me.”
The command hung in the air between us. I knew what he meant and what he wanted. My hands trembled as I reached for him, and I hated myself for it… for the weakness, the compliance, and the fact that some small, twisted part of me was responding to the power rolling off him in waves.
I did what he asked.
My fingers fumbled at first, clumsy and uncertain, but Karl didn’t rush me. He watched, patient and predatory, while I unzipped his trouser. When I finally leaned in and took his cock into my mouth, his sharp inhale cut through the silence.
“Fuck,” he breathed.
The sound sent a jolt through me. I didn’t know what I’d expected… cruelty, or indifference… but not that. Not the raw edge of pleasure in his voice, unguarded and real. It did something to me. Made something hot coil low in my stomach even though I didn’t want it to.
I focused on the task, trying to shut out everything else. The taste of him. The heat. The way his breathing had gone ragged above me. But I couldn’t ignore it or the sounds he made… low growls that vibrated in his chest, quiet curses that slipped past his control.
And I couldn’t ignore what was happening to my own body.
I was hard. I could feel my cock rising slowly. The realization hit me like a punch to the gut, and shame flooded through me so intense I almost pulled away. How could I be responding to this? To this monster? To being on my knees on the locker room floor, terrified and trapped and…
“Calen.”
My name in his mouth sounded like a prayer and a threat all at once.
His hand tangled in my hair, not pulling but holding, keeping me exactly where he wanted me. I could feel the tension building in his body, the way his thighs had gone rigid on either side of me. His breathing came faster now, less controlled.
Then he moved.
Karl pulled me off him with a sharp tug and hauled me up onto his lap in one fluid motion. I barely had time to understand what was happening before he was kissing me… if you could call it that. It was all teeth and hunger, claiming and consuming. His hands were everywhere, stripping away my clothes, and I couldn’t think, breathe, or do anything except hold on.
“Tell me to stop,” he growled against my mouth.
I didn’t.
He positioned me above him, his fingers digging into my hips hard enough to bruise. Then he pulled me up, and I cried out as he thrust his cock into me. The pain was sharp and immediate, stealing my breath, but Karl didn’t slow, or give me time to adjust. He just took, his grip unforgiving as he set a brutal pace.
“Karl…” I gasped, not sure if I was begging him to stop or to keep going.
He buried his face against my neck, and I felt him inhale deeply again, the same way he had before. His lips brushed my weak point, and every nerve in my body lit up with warning.
“You smell so fucking good,” he muttered, almost to himself as he thrust deeper into me. “I feel like eating you up.”
The word should have terrified me. Instead, it sent heat racing down my spine.
Karl’s rhythm became faster, harder, more desperate. One hand slid up to cup the back of my head while the other kept me pinned against him. His mouth opened against my throat, and I felt the sharp press of his canines.
“Don’t…” I started, but the word dissolved into a moan as he bit down.
Not hard enough to break skin. Just enough to mark.
The pressure was exquisite and terrible, and my body arched into it without permission. Karl made a sound deep in his chest… satisfaction, possession, triumph… and the vibration of it traveled straight through me. His teeth stayed locked on my neck as he thrust into me one last time, and I felt the exact moment his cum melted inside of me, felt the way his whole body went rigid before the tension shattered.
He pulled his mouth away slowly, his tongue dragging across the mark he’d left behind. I shuddered, overwhelmed and undone, my own release hitting me so hard I saw stars.
We stayed like that for a long moment, both of us breathing hard, tangled together on the bench. My neck throbbed where he’d bitten me. I could feel it pulsing in time with my heartbeat, a constant reminder of what had just happened.
Karl’s hand was still in my hair, gentler now but no less possessive. When he finally spoke, his voice was rough and spent.
“That was…”
He trailed off, and I waited for him to finish. To say something that would make sense of this. But he didn’t.
Instead, he pulled back just enough to look at me. The gold in his eyes had faded slightly, more amber now than molten. Almost human.
His thumb traced the mark on my neck, and I winced.
“Pretty,” he murmured. Then his expression hardened. “You know what this means, don’t you?”
I shook my head, not trusting my voice.
Karl’s hand moved from my hair to wrap around my throat… not squeezing. A reminder of how fragile I was. How easily he could break me.
“It means you’re mine now,” he said quietly. “And if you breathe a word of this to anyone… if you tell them what I am, what we did, anything… I will find you.”
His grip tightened just slightly.
“And I will drain every last drop of blood from your body until there’s nothing left.“
Vivian’s POVI was halfway through a video when I heard the sound from the bathroom.Not dramatic, not a crash. The specific, quiet sound of someone dealing with something they were trying to handle without making it a larger event than it needed to be. I pulled out one earbud and listened and heard it again and got up.Rydan was at the sink with a cloth pressed to his face and the specific, careful posture of someone managing something messy with the minimum of fuss. The cloth had the evidence of what had been happening before I got there, and the mirror showed me the rest of it, the trail that had made it to his shirt before he had caught it.I went in without asking for permission and took over in the specific, practical way of someone who had decided that the situation required hands rather than questions. I got him clean and dealt with the cloth and ran the cold water and stood beside him while the bleeding finished doing what it was doing and stopped.When it was done he straigh
Rydan’s POVI was still talking when I noticed she wasn’t there anymore.Not physically, she was in the seat beside me, her hands in her lap and her face turned toward the passenger window. But the quality of her presence had changed in the specific way it changed when a person’s attention had gone somewhere that the body hadn’t followed, the particular absence of someone who was sitting beside you and was also somewhere else entirely.“Vivian,” I said.Nothing.I reached over and touched her arm and she came back the way people came back from wherever they had been, the specific blinking return of someone whose mind had been somewhere with more traction than the current conversation.“What?” she said.“You weren’t listening,” I said.She looked at the mirror she had been holding and then set it face down on her knee and turned toward me with the expression of someone who had been found doing something and was deciding what to do about having been found.Then she cried.Not the contai
Vivian’s POVThe old lady’s words from the previous visit were still sitting in me when Rydan pulled me back through her door.She was already at the table when we entered, which told me she had known we were coming back before we had decided to come back, the specific, unsurprised quality of someone who received visitors the way other people received expected deliveries. She looked at us with the flat assessment of someone taking inventory and finding the inventory roughly what she had anticipated.Rydan asked her directly what she and Sera had discussed.She looked at him and then at me and then back at him, and the looking had the quality of someone deciding how much of what they knew was going to serve the people in front of them and how much was going to complicate things unnecessarily.“Sera came here the day after you did,” she said. “She told me not to contact you. Not to help you.” She folded her hands on the table. “She said the sacrifice was the part that couldn’t be risked
Rydan’s POVI was already at the car door when Vivian’s hand closed around my arm.Not gently. The specific, firm grip of someone who had decided that the next thirty seconds required physical intervention rather than words, and who had positioned themselves accordingly before I had registered they were moving. She pulled me back from the door with the particular force of someone whose new capabilities still surprised her when she used them, and we ended up on the pavement beside the car with her facing me and her expression carrying everything she had apparently been holding since we left Sera’s house.She told me I was acting without sense.She said it in the specific, direct way of someone who had known me long enough to have earned the directness, which in Vivian’s case was measured in months rather than years but had been months dense enough to cover the ground that years usually covered. She said it without raising her voice because raising her voice was not how Vivian made her
Sera’s POVI was down the corridor before the call had fully ended.The lab had the specific quality of a room that had changed its register since I last left it, the particular atmosphere of people who were managing something that had shifted from stable to unstable and were working to contain the shift without losing composure. Two nurses at the monitors, one beside the bed, and beside the bed, Rydan and Vivian.Rydan looked up when I came through the door.His face was the face he had been wearing for days, the accumulated quality of someone who had been sitting at the edge of a situation they couldn’t fix and had been sitting there long enough that the sitting had become its own kind of damage. He looked at me and didn’t say anything, which told me the nurses had already told him enough that there was nothing left to ask.I went to the nearest nurse.She walked me through it in the specific, careful language of someone who understood that the information they were delivering had w
Sera’s POVThe file was not where it should have been.Not missing entirely, not taken. Returned, but with the specific quality of something that had been handled and replaced rather than something that had simply been sitting where it had always sat. The dust line on the shelf edge was interrupted in a way that dust lines were interrupted when something had been lifted and set back down at a fractionally different angle.I stood in the office and looked at the shelf and felt the particular quality of understanding arriving before I was ready to act on it.I picked up the Franklin research file from the desk, the one I had been looking for when I came in, and carried it to the living room.They were both there.The specific quality of two people occupying a shared space with slightly too much attention paid to what they were individually doing was the quality that told me what I needed to know before either of them looked up. Vivian was reading something on her phone with the focused
Karl’s POVI couldn’t focus.The entire morning had been a waste. I’d sat through two lectures without absorbing a single word, my mind circling back to the same thought over and over.Calen.The way he’d looked at me yesterday. The boldness in his touch. The sounds he’d made. The feeling of him wr
Calen’s POV“Karl, we’re in a library,” I hissed, my voice barely above a whisper.His hand didn’t move. If anything, his grip tightened slightly, sending a jolt of unwanted pleasure through my body.“I don’t care,” Karl said, his voice low and dangerous. “You need to understand something, Calen. Y
Calen’s POVI couldn’t stop thinking about it.About him, what we’d done, and the way my body had moved without permission, reaching for him, wanting him in a way that made no logical sense.I sat on my bed in my dorm room, staring at the wall, trying to understand what the hell was happening to m
Karl’s POVI’d been holding myself back the entire time.From the moment I’d woken up that morning, the urge to see Calen had been overwhelming. It wasn’t just desire… though that was definitely part of it. It was something deeper. More consuming. Like my body knew where he was and wouldn’t settle







