certified bailey fucker

Something in his fucked up hindbrain orients to you like a ship to the North Star. It hangs onto the way your branded skin had turned warm beneath his palm, the fine trembling that ran through your body as your slick soaked his thigh, the relieved sound you made coming apart on his lap.

You came from just Bailey's hand, enduring Bailey's discipline across Bailey's lap.

And he's convinced you were thinking of Avery.

That part makes his cock stir against his will — trapped between disgust and want so tangled he cannot get Harper to separate them with a scalpel. You killed Avery, then crawled into your bed under Bailey's roof and fucked yourself to his ghost. The aspiring Crimson Hound now a mere ghost living rent-free in your skull that couldn't make you feel half of what Bailey's hand could. His palm was just the instrument of relief while your mind ran laps around a fucking corpse.

It sickens him.

It also does something to him that he refuses to acknowledge. The depravity of it make his hand drop from typing emails straight to his lap, squeezing himself once through the fabric before he forces himself back to work.

===

In the mean time, you scrape rent together. You spend your days still feeling the welts Bailey left across your ass that make every step a negotiation between dignity and pain.

Sam was nearly in tears when you showed up at the cafe to work a shift. He ran out of your secret ingredient for the cream buns three months ago. Briar gave you an attagirl and a slap on the ass (ow) when you showed up at the brothel, as if he knew you would come back in time. You worried while opening up the hookah parlor that your leave of absence had thinned the parlor's customer base, but it turned out the parlor has its own esoteric way of finding paying customers. You resent the fifty percent you have to set aside for Bailey, but you understand that part of the fee was for his protection. Nobody broke into your hookah parlor in your absence and you suspect that isn't quite coincidence.

The only workplace you avoided and refused to touch base with was Alex's farm. Alex struggled to keep the fields together without you there. He couldn't bring himself to look at the fields after Remy razed them that first time with the assistance of Bailey's goons. You also have been nearly kidnapped off of Alex's fields back to Remy's farm more times than you can count, and you'd rather avoid the man whose face you scarred. For now, at least.

Six months with Avery left you stranded from your usual friends, especially since Avery adopted you shortly after high school graduation. Your school friends have all gone their separate ways in town. Sydney was an easy enough find at the temple. He gave you a tight hug when he saw you and the two of you made light and easy small talk, neither of you touching on the subject of Avery at all. He caught you up on where everyone went. Kylar is holed up in his manor, having gone despondent after you were whisked off by Avery. Whitney works the docks now. His little gang upgraded from school bullies to street thugs. You imagine he's still doing odd jobs for Bailey, but you aren't quite certain.

And Robin stays at the orphanage, right down the hallway from you. He still sells lemonade and hot chocolate like it's enough. You do everything in your power to make him think it is.

It's only midway through the week that you find the time and energy to look into the storage unit Bailey gave you. The container holds not only your scattered clothing and possessions from Avery's mansion, but a handful of jewelry that you've never seen before. You reason yourself into thinking that Bailey's goons had fortuitously mistaken the jewelry to be yours. You try not to think about how Bailey had accounted for your stuff at all.

On your way to Landry's to sell the jewelry, you spot Bailey leaning against the brick wall outside of a bar, a cigarette burning between his fingers. A woman stands next to him, laughing at something he said. Bailey's smile almost looks real. His gaze slides over the crowd, scanning with the habitual, vigilant alertness he's honed for survival through decades. His eyes land on you.

The air between you goes brittle.

He sees you. His eyes flick down from the dark circles under your eyes down to the clothes you pulled from the storage unit. For a second, you see a flash of something complicated and volatile on his face. Then the woman slides her hand into his back pocket and whispers in his ear. Bailey's jaw tightens and loosens in one breath. He turns his head to her, breaking the eye contact, and says something that makes her laugh again, a grin stretching across his face, fake and beautiful and not meant for you.

You turn away, feeling a knot form in your stomach. It's not quite jealousy, because you don't think of your keeper as someone available to you. You think of him as a storm at sea—devastating, immutable, and a force of nature you were simply subjected to; not something you can ever try to tame and possess. But what exists between the two of you is uniquely yours. Bailey is a man who consumes and discards, and you are the one thing he refuses to swallow but also refuses to spit out. That is the only claim you have.

After returning to the orphanage, you toss the money into your desk drawer, where you used to leave money for Robin before Avery. It's just in case you get 'preoccupied' in town (sold, kidnapped, so on, so forth). You make sure that Robin will always be accounted for.

You exit your bedroom and head down the hallway to Robin's door. You haven't been avoiding Robin. Not exactly. You needed to make sure you have enough for rent for the two of you before you could face him for the week. You can't hang out with your best friend and sit around playing games with rent looming over you. Right now, you have some breathing space because of the jewelry Bailey misattributed to you.

The note on his door simply reads your name. When you knock and step inside, his face lights up with a smile so deliberate in its brightness that you know immediately something is wrong. He pulls you into a tight hug that softens something bone-deep in you that had gone hard in the last six months away from the orphanage.

"Thank you, Robin." You say to him, truly grateful that he had been there to carry you out of the wreckage. "For saving me."

A tiny part of your brain whispers to you that Robin carrying you out of a burning building only balanced the scales some after more than a year of handling Robin's debt as your own. You try to shove that part down, but that steady hum of spite that lived in the back of your skull has only grown louder and angrier with each payment you made and every piece of yourself you lost in the process. You threw your valuable body between Robin and the town's degenerates, and he still sold lemonade and hot chocolate like it's enough.

You shove the thoughts aside. You trace the edge of the gauze on his arm and he beams at you for a moment before his expression shifts towards pity. The conversation begins with the simple, awkward small talk of two friends who have too much to catch up on and not enough energy to get through it all. You listen to Robin ramble about a new game that he's been playing. Then, his voice tapers off, he glances at something on the wall before reaching over and taking your hand in his.

"I… I know it must be hard," he stammers, shifting his weight from foot to foot. "You lived with him for a long time."

He reaches out with his other hand, hesitant, and tucks a strand of your hair behind your ear. His fingers brush your cheek with gentleness that makes your stomach twist because the last hand to touch your cheek had been Bailey slapping you over a misunderstanding you decided to nurture. And the hand before that had been Avery stroking your cheek moments before he raised a knife over your chest.

"I saw you cut your hair short," Robin remarks, light and easy and oblivious. "It looks nice."

He loved braiding flowers into your hair, but your hair is far shorter than it was six months ago. Avery had forced you to cut it to his taste. It happened after a rough day at the office. He'd taken the scissors to them himself, fisting your hair in one hand while hacking away at it in messy snips with the other. You remembered watching listlessly at the locks of hair fell to the marble floor. Once his rage subsided, he'd taken you to a hairdresser the next day to make you presentable before his next party

.... "There, much better." His smile stretched wide. He ran his fingers through the short strands in soothing strokes, so unlike the grip he used when ruining it. "A doll needs a modern silhouette. Don't you think this suits you more, princess?" You look at yourself in the mirror, your jaw clenched so tight it hurts. Your smile still looked perfect to Avery. "Yes. Thank you, daddy." ...

"—...It's okay," Robin says softly, mistaking your silence for grief. "We'll get through this. I'm here."

You stare at him and let the misunderstanding settle into your bones. Another misunderstanding in a long line of them. You don't correct him. You let Robin believe you are mourning Avery, because you no longer feel like you could ever be understood by Robin. You've shielded him from the worst of the town and it has only cost you everything you could afford to lose. Telling him that you killed Avery might just kill Robin too, and that is the one thing you could never let happen.

You loved Avery once, in the beginning, when the money felt like safety and the compliments felt like true affection. He adopted you six months ago out of nowhere, sliding over a single sheet of paper across Bailey's desk. Whatever Bailey saw on the other side of it was enough for him to sell you to a man he labelled scum, a man who broke an orphan that came before you and was vying to do it again

.... "You're under Avery's protection now. He'll cover your debt." That fake smile you adorned around Avery faltered when you met Bailey's eyes, incredulous. You couldn't believe it. He has never allowed one of his orphans to be adopted in all the time you've known him. He's finally looking at you after pointedly avoiding your gaze and glaring at Avery the whole time. You'd never felt more betrayed. "I hope you got a good price," you said, looking back at Bailey. He looked away from you and said nothing. ...

Once you acclimated to your new living conditions, for the briefest of moments, you thought you just might find some form of happiness in Avery's mansion somewhere between the beautiful piano and the soft bed and the lavish pool. You didn't have to worry about you or Robin's rent here. You just have to cook and clean and be pretty. You already had to do all those things separately for the dozens of odd jobs you did to make ends meet. This was more luxurious than Eden's cabin. This should be easy.

Then, Avery revealed his rage to you. He chased you around his mansion with his belt readied, screaming profanities in your name. You realized that you much preferred Bailey's straightforward demands for rent and permanent anger over Avery's impossible standards and hard-to-predict rage. When the Brown Fox and Landry and Mickey told you that you were the one person primed to take Avery down, you latched onto the opportunity eagerly. You slowly killed yourself to keep up the act, cleaning and cooking day in and day out, enduring Avery's rage in his dungeon, kneeling in a maid dress at the front of the mansion, laying on that submissive and meek act

.... "Welcome home, master." Your head and palms pressed into the cold floor. "Dinner's ready. I made it exactly how you wanted. I cleaned up a--"

"Did you?" He scoffed above you, driving the heel of his shoe into the crown of your head. "The lounge looks like a rape scene."

You wait for the sneer to leave your face before you looked up with those wide, meek eyes he liked, "P-Please don't be mad, daddy. I'm s-sorry..." ...

You aren't mourning Avery.

You're mourning the girl who let herself foolishly fall for a monster. You're mourning the girl who learned to cook a hundred meals to please a man who never cared about the food. You're mourning the months you spent pretending, the lies you told, the way you slowly killed yourself to play the part. You're mourning the woman who realized she is capable of destroying the thing she tried to love.

You're mourning the realization that you've become something that may someday destroy Robin too. That stupid part of your brain pictures yourself kicking Robin off a tower. You would never do that to your childhood friend, to the gentle boy who held your hand now and traced your cheek with softness that felt worse than any violence inflicted on the same skin. You would never --

A year ago, you probably would have said you would never kill anyone.

"I... I need to go." You suddenly say, pulling your hand out of Robin's hold. He frowns at you, looking hurt, and the look is too much and you're already spinning on your heels and walking towards his door. You turn your head back slightly when you reach his doorframe. "I left rent for us in my desk drawer. Can you take it to Bailey if I'm not back by Friday?"

"Yeah, but... wait! What's wrong? Where are you going? Did I—"

You're gone before he can finish his question.

= TW =

Your brain is a broken reel on loop, flashing images of your abuser falling from a tower into the underground dungeon he punished you in with whips, of your caretaker's gentle hand on your head being the same violent hand lashing across your cheek, of the the look on your best friend's face when it shifted from compassion to hurt when you pulled away.

It all loops together over and over until the shame curdles into a need for lewdity.

You move through the damp alleyways like a ghost, seeking the kinds of shadows where the town's teeth are the sharpest. You know better than to walk the alleyways this late. You were looking for trouble, though, seeking the familiar danger of stray dogs and depraved men, or even Whitney and his gang.

Honestly, your high school bully would be a welcome sight at this point. You've only spotted him a handful of times since graduation, seeing him even less after Avery confined you to his mansion and restricted you to his posh social network.

Maybe he'll use you like an ashtray if you asked him to.

That desire to be defiled sat at the core of you. The town uncovered something in you that you wishes it had buried instead. You are nothing but a tangled knot of contradictions, twisted into this specific configuration of disgusting desires by every painful situation you endured. When the thoughts are too loud, you crave the brutality. You want to be hurt. You want to hurt. You want to be taken. You want to take. You want the world to remind you exactly what you were good for. You want the world to forever remember you by leaving a permanent scar on it in the shape of your pain. You crave the adrenaline of the fight and the thrill of the loss. You want to be used until there is nothing left of you but a hollowed-out shell that feels nothing.

You wanted Bailey to do all these things to you.

You find what you're looking for behind a slightly ajar door you push past because you hear the sound of sobbing. Under the flickering light of a dying bulb suspended from a rusted chain, three men circle a sturdy metal table like hyenas around a carcass.

The girl strapped to it is a fellow orphan—you recognize her face, if not the dull, empty terror in her eyes. She’s been gone a week, slipped through the cracks of Bailey’s spreadsheet, and now she’s here, wrists bound tight with plastic zip ties, legs splayed, her clothes torn away like gift wrap. One of the men is thrusting between her thighs with the rhythmic indifference of a man stirring paint, while the other two watch and jeer and smoke, passing a bottle of cheap liquor back and forth.

The self-loathing and hatred in your belly turns sharp and acidic. Your fangs have found something to bite into, to inject all of the venom that's been building in your bloodstream.

One of them is taking a swig when he notices you. He tilts the bottle down and sneers, "What are you doing here, girl?"

"Bailey sent me." The lie scrapes out of your throat immediately, pitched low, trying to emulate the flat, dangerous cadence of the man who owns you. "He wants his property back, or he'll take one of your heads."

"Bailey?" One of the smokers mocks, stepping closer. "Bailey doesn't send little whores out to collect debts. He sends men with guns."

They look unconvinced. Fair, you think. There was a time you managed to scare off two small time thugs from Bailey's car using just his reputation and your sheer willpower; these guys are clearly more dangerous than two opportunistic thieves.

You look at the girl on the table. Her body is covered in proof of what she's endured. Her eyes meet yours, swimming in tears, begging for a savior. You couldn't be her savior, but you've at least been in her skin before.

Your fingers find the lapel of your coat. You shrug it off, letting it fall into the muck.

Interest sharpened their postures instantly. The air hits your skin, cold and biting, but the heat from their gaze warms you. It’s a physical weight, crawling over your exposed skin, sizing up your tits through your camisole and you ass through your shorts. You cock your hip and give them that blinding smile that's carried you through a thousand nights at Briar's.

You’re valuable. You’re high-grade product. You’re a better toy than the one tied to the table, because you can take it. You can take all of it. You always have.

"Shit, I think I know her." The man holding the bottle says, gesturing towards you with it. His eyes focus intently on your breasts. "Seen her photos."

You don't ask which ones he's seen. It doesn't matter. Hundreds of photos and videos of you are being distributed everyday. Above ground photos of you selling cream buns and smiling politely as the Bailey Orphanage's star student. Below ground photos of your exhibitionism and deviancy taken by Niki or even some random stranger that asked you to flash them and you obliged because it made you feel in control. It is all good industry for the whorish enterprise that is your body.

"Come on," you smile at them, extending your arms in invitation. "Take me instead."

The smoker pushes off the wall. The one fucking the other orphan pulls out with a wet pop and tugs his jeans up, abandoning her like a half-eaten meal. They surround you.

"Deal," one of them says. "But we'll save the other girl for now. Just in case you don't last."

They descend. Rough hands grab your arms, your waist, your hair. You don't fight. You let them manhandle you, the thrill of submission flooding your veins like warm water. They shove you against the table, right next to the orphan, her eyes staring into yours but holding an uncomprehending blankness that makes it clear she isn't all there.

One of the men tears your camisole down the middle, the fabric ripping like tissue, exposing your breasts to the frigid air. They grope you relentlessly, squeezing your tits and pinching your nipples until you gasp. Hands shove your head down. You find yourself on your knees, the concrete gritty and freezing against your skin. A cock slaps against your cheek, heavy and smelling of stale sweat and precum.

"Open up."

You do. He feeds his cock into your mouth, letting it hit the back of your throat and making you gag. The taste of salt and musk fills your mouth. He groans, fingers tangling in your hair, holding your head still as he starts to fuck your face. You let out choked noises, eyes watering, but you don't pull away. You let him use you. You let the lack of air blur the edges of your vision. You look up at him through the haze, watching his face contort with pleasure, and feel nothing but a hollow, aching need to be filled.

Another pair of hands grabs your hips, yanking your ass upwards. Fingers probe your pussy. He spits on your hole for lubrication and then lines up and pushes in with a single, brutal thrust. You cry out around the cock in your mouth, the sound muffled into a wet choke. He doesn't wait for you to adjust. He sets a punishing rhythm, his hips slamming against your ass. The third man leans against the wall and watches, content in doing so.

The alley fills with the lewd sounds of you being used exactly as you wanted—the slap of skin against skin, the wet slurp of your mouth, the grunts of the men, the thud of flesh against the table. Your body responds to the violence like a flower opening to the sun.

This is what you are good for. This is how you earn your keep. This is how you prove your worth.

The man in your mouth swells. He grips your hair harder, forcing you down until your nose presses against his pubic bone. He’s close.

Now.

You look up at him. Your eyes meet his. He thinks he sees submission. He thinks he sees fear.

He sees the baring of teeth seconds before you bite down.

Your jaw clamps shut like a steel trap. Blood fills your mouth instantly, hot and copper-thick, pouring down your throat. He screeches—a high, garbled shriek of pure agony that echoes off the brick walls. He thrashes, trying to pull away, but you are locked on, tearing through the skin and muscle. You jerk your head back, ripping away a chunk of flesh from the man, and spit it into the dirt.

He staggers back, clutching his groin, still howling, blood pouring between his fingers and onto the floor. The other two men freeze for a heartbeat, stunned by the sudden shift from ecstasy to carnage.

You move, taking advantage of the chaos to pull yourself off the cock impaling you and towards the table. The other orphan's eyes have finally tuned back into reality, watching the violence erupt with unbridled shock. You scramble and reach for her zip ties —

A boot connects with your side.

The impact lifts you off the ground and throws you sideways. You slam into the brick wall, your shoulder taking the brunt, the air driven from your lungs in a wheeze. Before you can recover, a hand grips your hair and yanks your head back.

"You crazy bitch!"

One of the men whose penises you didn't just tear off was now looming over you, his face twisted in rage. He grabs you by the face, fingers digging into your cheeks hard enough to bruise, and smashes your head into the concrete.

The world explodes into white light and pain.

The grit of the ground tears at your cheek. Your vision doubles, triples, the alleyway spinning into a kaleidoscope of grey and red. Everything is far way to you. Your head hurts. Your ears ring. Your vision is blurry. Even like this, you try to prepare yourself to defend yourself against more violence that is sure to come.

Instead, you hear shouting. Footsteps.

= TW =

Outside the door you left open, headlights cut through the fog like white searchlights, blindingly bright, turning the mist drifting in into a glowing wall. Tires screech on the pavement outside the alley and come to a stop. A car door slams. The sound of heavy footsteps on concrete—calm, measured, approaching.

You look up, the world spinning around you. You catch the expression on the man who just smashed your face into the floor as it melts from rage into fear.

Bailey steps into the room, the white glow from the door framing his calm complexion and immaculate suit in a way that makes him look near ethereal. There is a specific cadence to the way he walks into violence—a loose-limbed, predatory grace he brings to everything, hands loose at his sides, coat flapping slightly with the movement, just enough that you can see he's armed.

Behind him, goons step inside. Men who have handled retrievals a hundred times, bulky shapes in dark jackets fanning out to block the escape route, similar to the goons he brought to save you from the stimulants dealers months ago, or the goons he hired to beat the shit out of you after you deleted his spreadsheet for Mickey. The exact type of men these chumps clocked to be Bailey's typical enforcers.

The man clutching his bleeding groin sees them and sags against the wall, his wails tapering off into wet, bubbling whimpers. The man who smashed your head into the concrete freezes, his hand still buried in your hair. The man who was inside your cunt at one point is running, but he's immediately intercepted by two of Bailey's goons.

Bailey stops a few paces away. The overhead light flickers, casting his face in intermittent shadow, but his red eyes are visible—flat and utterly unimpressed by the pandemonium. He takes in the scene with a single sweep: the girl tied to the table, the blood pooling on the concrete, the men realizing how badly they fucked up. Then he looks down at you: your bruised and battered form, your bloodied chin pairing up nicely with the chunk of indistinguishable gore on the concrete floor.

His lip curls. He looks at the men like cockroaches. His voice is quiet, but it carries the weight of a guillotine blade dropping.

"You used my property."

In this town, Bailey’s word is law. If he says you belong to him, then you belong to him, and the penalty for touching his property without authorization is the kind of thing that keeps people awake at night.

The men’s faces drain of color. The one holding your hair releases it and stumbles back a few steps, nearly slipping on the dismembered cock in his path.

"We didn't know— she offered—"

Bailey cuts him off with a level stare. His expression shifts to a sneer, slow and disgusted, connecting the dots of the situation faster than you want him to. "Offered?"

The men exchange terrified glances. The one with the bleeding dick slides down the wall to the floor, leaving a smear of red behind him. Bailey ignores him. His attention shifts downward, settling on you. You blink up at him, your vision swimming in and out of focus, the world tilting crazily. There are three of him, all frowning, all wrapped in expensive wool, all making your heart hammer against your ribcage.

A part of you hoped he would come, and you could strangle that part of yourself to death if you could only reach deep enough.

He clicks his tongue and shakes his head slightly, imperceptible to anyone but you.

"Idiot."

It's all he says to you before he signals to his goons with a tilt of his head and a flick of his wrist.

"Break their arms."

The violence is efficient. Two of the men go down under a flurry of blows and distressed cries, bone snapping with wet cracks that echo in the confined space. The third tries to run again, makes it two steps before being tackled. One of the goons frees the other orphan from her bondage and wraps her in a towel, escorting her out of the room.

Bailey doesn't watch. He’s already stepping over the twitching body of one man, his shoes avoiding the blood spreading across the pavement with a fastidiousness that borders on insult.

He reaches down and grabs you by the upper arm, hauling you upright. Your knees buckle immediately, the world tilting violently. Your face smears against the rough wool of his suit, leaving a streak of blood and dirt. He makes a sound of disgust, low in his throat, but doesn't push you away. His arm hooks around your waist, taking your weight, lifting you until your feet are barely touching the ground.

"You're getting blood on my suit," he mutters.

"...Are you serious?" You slur, the words thick and clumsy on your tongue. You must be concussed, you think. "Fine. I'll… fucking pay... Bill me. Asshole."

He laughs—one short, sharp exhalation that puffs against your hair.

Never mind the concussion, you must have suffered brain damage if you could picture something as absurd as Bailey laughing at you. In the decade or so you've known him, he's never once laughed because of you. He snarled at your disobedience and snickered at your misery. You've only heard his laugh at social events, across the room, when he feigned politeness and charm.

"You'll pay for a lot more than that, brat," he says. He half-drags, half-carries you to the car like a stray cat. The goons finish their work and fall in behind, wiping blood from their knuckles onto their trousers. Bailey dumps you into the back seat of a car, the leather cold against your bare skin. You shiver, your teeth chattering. He slides in next to you, the door slamming shut and sealing out the sounds of the men groaning in the alley. Bailey reaches over you and buckles you into the seat.

Silence fills the car, thick and suffocating. Compared to the beat up car Bailey normally drives, this one is quite nice. He must have been entertaining someone important. Maybe that woman you saw him with way earlier in the day. Maybe some foreigner he had to schmooze with and pull all the stops out for.

A goon gets in the driver's seat, meets Bailey's eyes in the rearview mirror and wordlessly raises the partition, giving the two of you privacy.

Bailey turns to you then. Under the interior light, the damage is clearer. Your lip is split, your cheek swelling rapidly, one eye already beginning to close. Your camisole is in tatters, your body a mess of bruises and scrapes layering on even older bruises and scrapes you got from emerging from a burning skyscraper just a few days ago.

He reaches out, his fingers gripping your chin, tilting your head from side to side to inspect the damage. His touch is clinical, impersonal, but his eyes are burning.

"Is this fun for you?" he asks, gesturing vaguely at your face, at the alley outside the windows, towards the chewed-up cock on the ground somewhere outside. "Eating cocks in alleyways? Sticking your nose where it doesn't belong?"

You try to retort with something clever and biting but your brain is sluggish. All that comes out of you is a whiny and pathetic excuse, "I had to do something."

"What did you think you were going to do?" Bailey’s hand tightens on your jaw, his fingers digging in hard enough to make you wince. "Break their knees and suck them to death? Get them to line up politely for a chance at you tearing their cocks off?"

"Why did it take you so long?" You challenge him. "That orphan's been there for... for a week."

Something in his face twitches at that. You think he's about to strike you, but he doesn't. Instead, he sighs and releases you. He runs a hand through his hair and shoots a cursory glance outside the tinted window before he turns his attention back to you.

You realize then that Bailey's arrival was not a coincidence. It never is. He must have had a tail on you. That must be how he wasn't able to find the orphan for a week and then showed up within an hour after you did. You feel a raw, genuine relief in knowing that you were useful, that you might have been the difference between the orphan being used for a week and being broken completely.

He reaches over for a decanter full of amber liquid that smells of expensive whisky and pours it into one of two glasses next to it.

That loud, stupid part of your brain whispers to you that Avery liked whisky once. He always perked up when you got his favorite drink right. Then you kicked him o--

"Rinse," Bailey says. He doesn't wait for you to try and take the cup. He reaches down to stabilize your head with a cold hand against the back of your neck. He presses the rim of the glass against your split lip and tilts it back for you. The liquid rushes in, stinging the cuts where your teeth tore into the inside of your cheek.

You swish the liquid around, allowing the expensive, sharp taste to wash away the lingering flavor of blood and cock. Bailey's reaching for the other glass when you swallow all the liquid down without thinking. The whisky hits your empty stomach like a stone, radiating warmth outward through your limbs, dulling the sharp edges of the pain in your face and the throbbing in your skull.

Bailey makes a sound you can't identify. Something that almost sounds like a laugh and definitely sounds like disgust. You look up and he looks almost bewildered by you, dragging a hand down his face, rubbing at the bridge of his nose as if trying to physically massage away the headache you have become.

"Disgusting," he mutters, though his eyes linger on the movement of your throat. He sets the glass back down with a clink. "I said rinse."

He reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out his handkerchief, though the thought of him pulling out his gun and executing you right here occurred to you for one brilliant moment. He unfolds the handkerchief with deliberate care and leans in, pressing it against your split lip with less concern than he had given the cloth. The pressure makes you hiss, but he doesn't stop. He wipes the blood from your face and whiskey from the corner of your mouth, the movements fast and precise, cleaning away the evidence of your stupidity.

Your head lolls against the leather, the concussion making the world tilt and spin like a carnival ride. You realize, through the haze of your thoughts, that the car is moving.

"Where are we going?" You slur out. "The hospital?"

"No, I'm taking you to the pound to be muzzled or put down as they see fit." He sneers, sarcastic and biting as he dabs at the wound below your eye. "You have a concussion. It needs to be checked."

Your hand shoots out before you can stop it, gripping at Bailey's arm further ruining the expensive fabric of his suit.

"N-Not Dr. Harper," you blabber out. Through dozens of hospital visits, it was always Dr. Harper who treated you and it was always Bailey who came to pick you up, even when he threatened multiple times that this would be the last time. It was Dr. Harper who looked over the brand on your ass at the Underground Farm, who tried to hypnotize you into becoming a complacent cow. Your distaste for him has only grown since the failed ritual and finding out Harper is part of the cult that plans on using you as a portal. "He... he'll take me back to the Farm, please. Anyone else."

Bailey pauses. He drops the bloodied handkerchief onto the seat between you and turns away from you, watching the city blur past, his jaw working, his hands adjusting his cuff. He checks his watch. Each movement is practiced. A way of reasserting control over a situation that has spiraled spectacularly out of hand.

He exhales through his nose, a long, sharp sound that deflates the tension in his shoulders and implies you are the single most burdensome piece of property he has ever owned.

"Fine."

His hand lifts. Two sharp raps against the black glass partition separate the front seat from the back. The barrier slides down an inch.

"The private clinic."

The goon nods. The partition slides back up.

The car makes a U-turn and the rest of the ride passes in a blur of streetlights that strobe against your eyelids, each flash sending a fresh spike of pain through your skull. You slump against the leather door, the vibration of the engine traveling up your spine and into the base of your skull where the headache lives, pulsing in time with your heartbeat.

The whisky sits warm and heavy in your stomach, softening the sharp edges of the pain into something duller and more manageable. You drift. Colors smear past the tinted windows. Orange streetlamps stretching into long, watery lines, the red of a traffic light blooming across the interior before bleeding away.

Your eyelids droop. Your head lists sideways, finds something solid — wool, warmth, the steady rhythm of breathing that isn't yours.

Bailey's hand lands on your head. Firm. Heavy. He doesn't stroke. He doesn't cradle. He plants his hand there the way a man plants a flag. It's ownership. It's staking a claim on territory, asserting that you belong to him and therefore you cannot be lost while he is present. His thumb moves once across the shell of your ear, a single, absent gesture, then goes still.

You let the darkness take you.