certified bailey fucker

He sits in a chair at the edge of the bed, looking up from his phone with a disinterested expression. Monitoring your concussion, probably. His suit jacket sits on the back of the chair. You see your own dried blood smeared across his shirt where your head rested at one point, against his chest and across his shoulder, on the opposite side of where his gun sat in its holster. His sleeves are rolled up. He turns off his phone screen and crosses his arms, watching you spiral.

"I-I have it." The words tumble out thick and clumsy on a tongue that feels swollen, your fingers whitening around the headboard. "I have rent. It's in my desk. Don't... Don't sell me — I can pay." The bargaining and lying begins before you can stop it. "I can pay more than Aver—"

The name snags in your throat. You remember. The eye in the blood moon, the sound Avery made falling, the skyscraper burning. Dead. He's dead. You killed him.

"Than… than Remy."

Your mind races through the concussion fog, assembling fragments from the last week. You remember the other orphans whispering in the hallways about the man with the bandaged face who came to the orphanage a week ago. Remy. At the orphanage. Talking to Bailey. You can't fathom a single reason for Remy's visit that doesn't end with a hood over your head and ropes on your wrists and the smell of the Underground Farm's grass filling your lungs.

He sold you to Avery even when you were paying up.

He'll sell you again if the price is right.

Bailey responds to your fear with flat composure. His hand extends toward you and you immediately wince and bring your arms up to defend yourself. He wasn't reaching for you. He places his phone face down on the nightstand next to you, on top of the gauze. Then he leans back and rests his hand on his knee. You see him tap his index finger twice against the fabric of his trousers.

"Remy." Bailey repeats the name with distaste. "Remy came to the orphanage because he thinks you work for me. He thinks you infiltrated Avery's operation on my orders. That you burned his tower because I told you to."

You frown at that. It's too much for you to process in this moment. When you aren't so concussed and tired, you'll have to think about whether this is a misunderstanding that works in your favor, if this is yet another lie you could wrap around yourself like armor.

"I'm not selling you to Remy," he says. "So long as you pay up."

You scoff at him. "I was good on rent when you let Avery take me."

That seems to get to him, his frown deepening with the truth you laid bare. His hand reaches up and drags across his jaw, the rasp of stubble audible in the silence. It almost sounds like hissing.

Your adoption by Avery was unprecedented. Two decades running the orphanage, and he never once allowed adoption. Then Avery slid a piece of paper across his desk and Bailey simply said done. You will never forget the storm of feelings that tore through you in that moment. The disbelief. The betrayal. The abandonment. The despair. The contempt. You thought you were beginning to understand his system, finally able to count the bars to the cage he built around you both, only for Bailey to reveal he is, indeed, a man with exceptions.

What you don't understand, what Bailey could never articulate, is that he doesn't have exceptions. He has one exception and that has always been the specific, irreplaceable, unpredictable variable that is you. He had to trust you in order to let you go. He had to trust your resilience and capability to survive outside his control. He had to trust that you would survive against all logic, that Avery would not break you, and that you would come home.

And you succeeded. You broke Avery first. You survived. You burned his legacy to the ground and dragged yourself home to the orphanage. You exceeded Bailey's expectations by every measure.

The exercise in trust that proved to him your tenacity also cost him what little existed of your trust in turn.

He folds his arms. The mask settles back into place and he's back to being a statue with a perpetual frown. Back to pretending that he had it all under control when you almost died a week ago trying to take a piece of the cult that Bailey has spent his adulthood starving.

"The arrangement I had with Avery is done," he says, his eyes set on yours, unyielding and direct. "The terms were violated. He is dead. The transaction is closed."

"And if someone else slides a big enough number across your desk?"

"Then we'll see."

You scowl at him. Unbelievable. This really is the best you're going to get.

If there is anything to appreciate about Bailey, it's his honesty towards you. When he isn't performing for the public eye, he is straightforward in his cruelty. He didn't make empty promises. He didn't lie to you about his intentions. Words are as good as promises to him. If he tells you he's going to make you pay, then that's that. He will find a way to extract value from you.

You already know Bailey isn't sorry. Even if he was hypothetically capable of guilt or any iota of regular human emotion, even if he was to admit his wrongdoings while licking your shoes, you would never forgive him. The two of you have long exceeded the point where words and apologies could fix or do anything.

"You're back. Your debt stands. Robin's debt stands. That is where we are." He uncrosses his legs and leans forward in the chair, elbows finding his knees, hands loosely clasped between them. "You were managing it before. You'll manage it again. So long as the money comes on time, I don't sell you. Simple as that."

"Fine," you mutter out. "Back to the usual, then."

The silence stretches between you. It's clear from your posture and tight expression that you're still trying to decide between fighting him or running from him, despite knowing both paths would end miserably for you. Bailey's index finger taps against his knee.

He recognizes you with the startling clarity of a man seeing his own reflection in a knife. When he was your age, he sought the same catharsis through destruction in these streets. You spread your legs; Bailey swung his fists. Bar fight after bar fight, bruise after bruise, scar after scar, just trying to feel something beyond the overwhelming emptiness the town carves into you. Most mornings, he'd wake up on a floor rather than a bed, bleeding and battered. Feeling stupid. Feeling better. Feeling something. The ache, the shame, the satisfaction of knowing you were still breathing because it still hurt.

"No," he says with the easy cadence of a man declining a second cup of tea. "Not the usual."

He looks over the wreckage that is you — the bruise flowering across your ribs, the crusted split in your lip, the four neat stitches pulling above your eyebrow with each shift of your expression. You glare back at him, instinctually pulling his coat up higher to cover your naked form. Your eyes don't leave him, always observing, always anticipating, always aware that the biggest threat in any room is Bailey. You're braced for his usual antagonism and violence.

His hand runs through his hair. You watch the muscle beneath the skin of his jaw shift, tense, release, chewing on his words.

"Throwing your body away like garbage in alleyways. Offering yourself to the first piece of filth who pays you the right kind of attention." Bailey says, lip curling at a memory far older than the alleyway. "It's pathetic. It stops now."

You scoff at him, shifting against the headboard. Why does he get to dictate what you do outside the orphanage and outside of paying rent? Why does he even care, so long as rent comes on time?

"Next time you want to get hurt, you come to me. I'll take care of it."

Your scowl shatters completely. Your face twists, eyes widening with confusion, lips pulling back with disgust.

The first thing he offers you beyond the rickety roof of the orphanage above your head that you didn't get to choose and the costly protection he extended to all of his property that you didn't ask to be. The first thing he ever offers you and it's more abuse.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" you ask him, completely baffled. "Let me guess. You'll hook me up with a client who can hurt me, but only in a way you approve of. A buyer you vetted. Someone who pays for the privilege of breaking me in a sanctioned, Bailey-approved manner—"

"I'll do it myself."

You freeze. Your mouth stays open, slack and stupid. You search his face for the joke. The sarcasm. But Bailey's expression hasn't changed. There is no performance here, no social function smile, no charitable caretaker warmth. Just the flat, unblinking stare of a man stating a business arrangement he has already concluded is non-negotiable.

Your hands curl into the sheets. Your jaw sets. The furious glare you level at him carries the weight of years of debt and every scar on your body.

Him.

Bailey.

You hate him. You hate all the parts of yourself that come from him. You hate the part so broken that it leaps at the offer, capable of wanting something as fucked up as this. You know his offer is entirely pragmatic. You know exactly the twisted mathematics that must be going through his head. He's simply taking care of his property before it goes and devalues itself.

The laugh that tears out of your chest is ugly and raw, scraping against your bruised ribs like sandpaper.

"You? You made me this way." Your voice shakes. The tears threaten, but you swallow them down into the dark place where you keep everything that could be used against you. "You want to sit there and tell me you'll 'take care' what you broke?" Your voice comes out shuddering in a way that you resented, that you couldn't stop. "I can't be normal anymore. I can't feel anything unless someone's hurting me or I'm hurting them, and you... you did that to me, Bailey. Now you want to — what? Take responsibility? Be my handler? My personal tormentor? Haven't you done enough?"

Something moves behind Bailey's left eye. A twitch. Barely perceptible. You press harder because pressing harder is what you do.

"I would never come to you." You spit out. The words come fast, sharpened by the need to wound, to get under his skin the way he gets under yours. "Have someone else do it. Sell me, if you have to." You pause briefly to think. "Whitney. Didn't the two of you have some kind of deal?"

His face doesn't change. He says nothing.

"Eden. He feeds me, at least. He doesn't starve me just because he's picky about his food."

His finger twitches. His jaw shifts. You catch it. You adjust. You know exactly where he's sore now.

"I'd rather Avery crawl out of his grave and drag me back to his dungeon. At least he paid me for it. Paid you for it."

That lands. You see it hit — not in his face, which remains frighteningly still, but in his hands. His fists form and release in the space of a heartbeat, the knuckles going white before the fingers straighten again.

Here it comes.

"Leave me alone, Bailey!" you scream at him, tears falling freely now, arms coming up to defend, to attack, to endure, to survive. "I have it handled."

Bailey moves.

He's out of the chair and on the bed before your slowed reflexes can register the shift even when you were waiting for it. One knee presses into the mattress beside your hip. His hand catches your wrist and pins it to the pillow with a grip that's firm enough to hold without hurting. His other hand finds your shoulder, pushing you flat against the sheets with controlled force, absurdly careful of your bruises, holding you down in a way you can't lift your head and tear your own stitches.

"Fight me off, then," he challenges you. His face is close. His breath is warm against your forehead. His eyes burn into yours. "If you got it handled enough to take on three men in the gutters, then you should be able to get out from under one man. Go on."

You try.

You fight with everything left in you, which isn't much. The concussion turns your coordination to soup. The hand he left free claws at his forearm, fingernails scraping tracks through the tattooed serpent's scales. Your legs kick, bare heels connecting with his shin, his thigh, any surface you can reach. You twist your hips, trying to buck him off, trying to roll, trying anything. He tanks it all.

It's hopeless. You know it's hopeless. The knowledge settles into your chest with finality and the burning behind your eyes spills over before you can stop it. You swing anyway. The punch comes from somewhere primal, fueled by years of rage and the desperate need to prove him wrong. His hand catches your wrist midair and holds it there. Your arm's fully extended. Trembling. Useless.

"Good." There's no mockery in his tone. No anger. No contempt. No sarcasm. Just a simple appreciation that you still ticked.

He looks down at you and the position alone mocks you. Both arms pinned, your strength nonexistent, your body a shaking wreck of adrenaline that has nowhere to discharge. You look back up at him, contempt pooling in your eyes. He's watching you struggle the way a man watches a fire burn itself out. Patient. Intrigued. Bored.

Your eyes sting. Tears spill, hot and involuntary, down your temples into your hair. His gaze follows the tracks left by your tears with a hunger he doesn't bother to disguise. His grip on your wrist tightens almost imperceptibly, his thumb pressing into the soft channel of tendons above your pulse point where he can feel your heartbeat hammering rabbit-fast against his fingertip.

He's enjoying this. Not the part where he overpowers you, because he has done that dozens of times before over rent and has only shown disdain over the time wasted or snideness over the effort expended. What he enjoys is that you will fight until there's nothing left, too stubborn to stop even when stopping is the only sane option. That you will swing at a man who could break you in half when you can barely hold your own head vertical. He appreciates that fighting is your first, instinctive answer to being cornered.

Most learned to go still like Robin. To avoid conflict, to fold inward, to make themselves small, to survive by disappearing. You stopped making yourself small after Remy. You made yourself bigger. Valuable. Irreplaceable. You occupied most rooms with the sheer, obstinate force of your presence and willpower. If Bailey plans to sell you off, then so be it. But you'll make sure he feels the absence you leave behind like a missing hand.

Your struggling slows. Your chest heaves, each breath rattling through bruised ribs. The fight drains out of you, leaving nothing behind but the trembling and the wetness on your face.

"Done?"

The answer wells up in your eyes. The tears fall, not from the agony in your skull, but from the proof that you cannot win. Your tears are hot and furious. He watches you for a moment before he lets go of your wrists, placing his hands on both sides of your head to push himself up.

"That's what I thought," he mocks. "Is this what you call handled?" He shakes his head slightly. "Useless."

You are not useless. You both know it, but he has a penchant for hitting you where you hurt. You learned how to hit low from him.

Your hand finds his holster.

The grip of his gun is smooth beneath your palm. It slides free from the leather with less resistance than you expected while also weighing far more than you anticipated. The metal is cold and grotesque in your palm, but you don't hesitate. You bring the gun up with both hands, pressing the barrel directly against his chest, right over his heart. Everything trembles. The barrel. Your hands. Your body. But you can't possibly miss from this close.

Bailey goes still.

He stares at the gun in your hands. Then at you. You look feral, ruined, and absolutely pathetic. A naked, concussed, battered orphan holding a gun she doesn't know how to use against her own caretaker. His eyes flicker through surprise and calculation and recognition before settling back into that unnatural calm.

"Put that down before you hurt yoursel—"

You pull the trigger.

Click.

Nothing happens. You blink, confused, your finger squeezing again with the frantic repetition of someone mashing an elevator button.

Click. Click.

The gun does nothing. Three times. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Three attempts to put a bullet through his chest.

"Why?!" you hiss at the gun, irate. "Why aren't you working?"

The gun does not answer you. It just trembles with you.

Bailey has not moved.

He stares down at the muzzle pressed to his chest. At your shaking hands. At your face, twisted with fury and spite so complete it has swallowed all the fear and pain and exhaustion and left nothing behind but teeth and purpose.

His eyes are wide. Wider than you have ever seen them in the decade you've known him.

Then, he slowly lifts one hand.

"Safety's on."

The words come out strange, caught somewhere between disbelief and something you can't identify. His hand moves to the side of the gun and he extends his index finger to point at a small lever you did not understand. The motion is casual, almost gentle, the way one might correct a child's grip on a pencil.

His hand closes over yours on the grip, fingers folding around your knuckles, warm where the metal is ice. He holds your hand there, pressing a gun against his chest, feeling the tremor rip through your forearm like current through a wire. His hand slowly, slowly tightens over yours. He draws the gun from your weakening grip in one smooth motion, thumbing the safety that stood between him and destruction as he places the gun back into its holster.

He stares at you. You stare right back, shaking.

"You stupid brat." he asks you, his voice having dropped somewhere low and soft and terrifying. "What was the plan? Suppose it had fired. Suppose you'd put a hole in me right here, in my flat, with my gun. Who did you think was going to clean up after you? Did you think you would just walk away?"

His hand finds your jaw, fingers digging in, tilting your wet face up toward his.

"They'd have you on that boat before my body cooled. Is that what you want? Prison. A life sentence. No rent to worry about. No Robin to protect." His fingers move from your lip to the back of your neck, closing around the column like a collar. "No one to clean up your messes. No one to bother fetching you."

You can't form a proper reply, still shaking where you sit, fearing whatever comes next. You are aware you did something outrageous. You can blame the concussion all you want, but you've dreamed of killing Bailey more times than you can count and you have just discovered yourself horrifyingly capable of doing it on a whim, if only Wren or Landry had thought to teach you how guns work.

The look on Bailey's face is one you have never seen in ten years under his roof. Something behind those red eyes has come undone. Whatever is moving behind his expression sends a chill worming down your spine. It's an expression he has never shown one of his wards, an expression reserved for faces he never planned to see again.

Something in the corner of his mouth cracks.

"You were really going to do it," he murmurs, more to himself than to you.

He throws his head back and laughs. The sound is feral. Unhinged. It is not the smooth, practiced warmth he deploys at social functions. It is not even the sharp snicker that escapes him when a ward does something impressively stupid. You've only heard him laugh once like this before, standing on the docks, surrounded by policemen moments before they took you to the prison island. It's the same manic, full-bodied sound dragged out of him by a situation his money and his threats and his gun couldn't fix. The officers had flinched. You watched him warily as he stood on the pier laughing like something inside him had come loose. Then he told you to behave and drove away as quickly as he swerved in.

Bailey releases your jaw. His hand covers his own face. His shoulders shake with a force that seems to genuinely surprise even him, the laughter ripping through his frame in waves, each one rougher than the last. The serpent in the enclosure stirs, tongue flicking toward the sound. The painted snakes on the ceiling watch from their frozen coils, witnesses to a rare and dangerous sight. All of them watch the biggest snake in the room lose grip on the mask he's maintained for two decades.

"You — you stupid, stupid little shit." He can barely get the words out. His free hand presses flat against his sternum, right where the barrel had been. Right where the bullet would have gone.

He drags his hand down from his face, through his stubble. His eyes are damp at the corners from the sheer physical force of his laughter. The smile he reveals is wide and real and so entirely wrong on Bailey's features that it makes your skin crawl more than any of his sneers ever have.

His hand reaches for the holster. You flinch, expecting the gun to be pointed your direction at last. Instead, he pulls the entire holster free, gun and leather strap tangled together, hurling both across the room. They strike the floor near the snake enclosure with a heavy, final thud.

Three pulls of the trigger. Each one a declaration you didn't know you were making.

Bailey is a man of contradictions, comfortable in his hypocrisy because he's at least aware of it. He rejects what he wants most. He holds tightest to what wounds him. His appetites have always lived in the territory between control and destruction.

He caters to rapists and monsters daily, resents every one of them, yet the thing he craves in the dark is a mirror of what they do. He holds a shameful, carefully partitioned hunger for a partner whose defiance is genuine, whose resistance must be overwhelmed rather than performed, whose reluctant submission must be earned and must cost them both something real when it finally arrives.

He has never found it. Two decades of faceless strangers in bars and back rooms, each one selected because he could forget their faces by morning, each one willing and pliable and utterly useless to fulfilling his hunger. He could find himself a victim if he wanted to but what he wants isn't a victim or one of his brats. What he wants requires consent. It also requires genuine conflict — a body that fights because it cannot stop, that can take everything he gives, that keeps fighting until it chooses to stop.

You are the only person in this godforsaken town who hates him enough for the defiance to be real. You are the only one who needs him enough for the surrender to mean something. You are the only one who can absorb the full, unmitigated weight of what he is and come back swinging, come back standing, come back home to the man who sells you, every single time, as though the act of returning is itself the middle finger you can't stop raising.

Three pulls of the trigger. Three attempts to end his life. Three proofs that you are exactly what he made you and exactly what he wants.

He smiles.

"You're more like me than you think."

You lose it.

"Fuck you. I'm nothing like you—"

You lunge at him, Your hands find his collar, fingers wrenching the expensive fabric, pulling him toward you with the full desperate weight of your ruined frame.

Bailey's snicker reaches you before his hands do — a single, sharp exhale through his nose, almost fond, as though you've told a joke he's heard before and still finds amusing. One arm hooks around your waist, the other hand clamps over your forearm, and in the space of a breath he's folded you backward against his chest, your spine pressed flat to his torso, your legs dragged apart and splayed across the broad shelf of his thighs. Your bare ass sits against the coarse fabric of his trousers. His coat has long fallen to the floor in the scuffle, and the chill of the room licks across every inch of your exposed skin before his heat swallows it whole.

"Let... let go of me!"

You thrash. Your head drops back against his collarbone, the stitches at your temple screaming, and you twist your hips with enough force that a lesser man would have buckled. Bailey does not yield. His arm tightens around your waist, cinching you in like a belt, and his chin drops to the crown of your head.

His free hand moves. He maps the landscape of damage he's catalogued a thousand times with his eyes and is now touching for the first time. It starts at your shoulder, where the bruise from the brick wall is already darkening into a mottled purple. His fingers trace its edge with a surgical slowness, following the border between damaged skin and healthy flesh. His thumb grazes a fading cigarette burn on your shoulder and his hand continues downward without pause. Over the swell of your breast, where fresh purple bruises bloomed. His palm cups the weight of you, lifts, lets go. His thumb drags across your nipple, and it stiffens under the unwelcome attention of his touch.

"Stop! Don't... Don't touch me!" You hiss out, mortified and elated all at once.

His hand slides lower. Over the plane of your stomach, where your muscles contract involuntarily under his touch, your body flinching away from the contact even as your hips cant forward of their own volition. His fingers trace the edge of your hipbone, dip toward the crease of your thigh, and stop.

"I can stop. Or I can give you what you need."

The sheer audacity of his words freeze you in place. You want to scoff. You want to bite. You want to scream. But the hand you've dreamed of is touching you in a way that was meant to only exist in your fantasies and your concussion-addled brain could not figure out fast enough how to respond. His fingers were so, so close—

His hand drops between your legs. Two fingers drag through the slick heat of your cunt, parting the swollen folds with a deliberate slowness that makes every nerve ending in your body fire off at once. His fingers emerge glistening, the evidence of your arousal stringing between his fingertips in thin lines that he brings up for you to see.

"You're soaked." The words lands against your ear, disastrously true. His chest vibrates with amusement, sharp and mocking. His cock is hard against your lower back, a thick ridge of heat pressing into you through the fabric of his trousers, and he makes no effort to hide it this time. "All that fighting. All that screaming. And you're dripping for me."

Your entire body flushes.

"I-I'm not—..." You start, but the evidence of your arousal is shameful and undeniable. "Get... Get off me, you... you miserable— ah—"

His fingers slide inside you.

Two of them, pushing into the wet clench of your pussy with a slow, curling pressure that steals the insult right off your tongue. Your head falls back against his shoulder, and the sound that comes out of you is nothing like the throaty, exaggerated moans you learned to please clients at Briar's with. The sound that Bailey pulls out of you, that you fail to hold back behind your teeth, is a small, broken whimper. A sound you have never made for anyone, because no one you hated this much has ever touched you with this specific combination of precision and possession and made you feel good.

You feel a change in Bailey's breathing, the way his chest expands against your back and holds for a beat too long before releasing into a slow exhale. His fingers stay inside you, motionless, waiting for you to adjust while processing what he's just heard.

Then his mouth finds your neck, shockingly and obscenely tender. His lips press against the column of your throat, just below your ear, where your pulse hammers so hard he can feel it against his mouth. His fingers begin to move again, thrusting slow and deep, curling on the withdrawal in a way that makes your breath stutter.

"S-Stop. Ah... mngh... n... no..."

He takes his time with you. He indulges. Each stroke of his fingers inside you is deliberate, searching for the spot that makes you clench around him, and when he finds it — when your back arches hard enough to press your shoulder blades into his chest and another one of those small, pathetic sounds escapes through your teeth — he stays there, working that spot with cruel precision.

His teeth graze your pulse point and another whimper of pleasure bursts past your lips. Wretched. Humiliating. Your hands flies to your face, palm pressing over your mouth, fingers splaying across your cheeks as if you might physically hold the sounds inside.

Bailey catches your wrists, scooping up both of them in one hand, his grip firm as iron, pulling your arms down and away from your face with the same efficient force he uses to subdue uncooperative wards.

"No," he chides. "Don't you fucking hide. Not from me."

Not from this. His fingers pump into you with a pace designed to dismantle you — slow enough to feel every ridge, every fold, every inch of slick, clenching flesh gripping him. His arm tightens around your waist, pressing you flush against him, holding you together while he takes you apart.

"You wanted this." His fingers curl inside you, pressing deep, dragging against the spot that makes your thighs shake. "My attention."

"No! I—nn..." Another curl of his fingers. The denial collapses. The whimpers spill out of you, uncontrolled. Small, broken syllables that carry none of the composure you're normally capable of feigning in front of him. "N-no, Bailey—"

He tilts your face up with the hand that was pinning your wrists, fingers closing around your jaw, forcing your gaze upward to meet his.

"Look at me," he demands.

You resist. Your eyes squeeze shut, tears leaking from the corners, your teeth clenched so hard your molars creak.

"Look at me."

Your eyes open, filled with tears and fury. The angle is awkward, your neck straining, but his eyes hold yours with an intensity that makes the rest of the room fall away. The mockery is gone. The amusement has been stripped away. What remains is raw and focused.

He sees the hate burning bright in your eyes, so full of it that it's spilling forth with your tears. Beneath it all, he finds what he's looking for: a desperate, convoluted wanting that you can no longer hide from him.

Years of unfulfilled want compressed behind his ribs. Years of one-night stands whose faces he made himself forget, whose resistance was theatre, whose moans were services rendered. Years of knowing exactly what shape his vulgar desire takes and building walls around it because the wanting is a weakness and Bailey could not afford to be weak.

The paradox of his deepest fantasy, of forcing himself on someone willing, is that the conditions which produce it are the same conditions that produced you. The fight is real because the damage is real, and the damage is real because he put it there. The surrender is genuine because the exhaustion is all-encompassing, and he's lived with that bone-deep tiredness far longer than you.

Tears track from the corners of your eyes, sliding across your temples into your hair. Your lips are parted, trembling, each exhale carrying another one of those stupid, stupid little sounds. The expression on your face is a war — want and revulsion, terror and need, the desperate, consuming desire that lives in the space between hating someone and being unable to exist without them. You're trembling around his fingers, crying in his bed because of him, hating him and wanting him with every cell of your body.

You have never looked more beautiful.

"There you are."

He doesn't look away. His fingers curl inside you, pressing against the spot he found that makes your whole body seize, and his thumb grinds your clit in tight, relentless circles. The pressure builds like a wave.

"That's it." His voice is rough, stripped of its usual polish. "Let go."

You feel it building in the tightening of your lower belly, the trembling of your thighs, the way your cunt clenches around his fingers in rhythmic, involuntary pulses around the hand that has ruined you for anyone else's touch. Your thighs clamp around his hand. Your breathing has gone ragged, each exhale catching on a moan you're trying to swallow. Your inner walls clench and flutter around his fingers in rhythmic pulses that tell him you're close. Your eyes — wet, furious, terrified, wanting — stay locked on his because he told you to look at him and some ridiculous part of you, some deeply damaged part, has never been able to look away from him.

You resist. You refuse to cum. Not from Bailey. Never —

"I've got you."

Those words are a mockery coming from the man who owns and sells you, but your body obeys regardless, traitorous and tarnished. Your orgasm crashes through you, a sob tears past your lips, your cunt spasming around his fingers, your back arching off his chest, every muscle in your body seizing at once before releasing in a cascade of shudders that wracks your frame from your curling toes to your shaking hands.

You half-sob, half-moan, forced by the hand on your jaw to let Bailey watch you come undone. His hand doesn't stop. His eyes don't leave yours. He watches the orgasm crest, sees it hit your expression like light through breaking glass, your mouth falling open, your wet eyes going half-lidded and dazed, every muscle in your face slackening into something raw and unguarded and ruinous.

He sees it all. Your eyes burn with hate that is indistinguishable from want, fear that has become inseparable from desire, and a revulsion so complete it has looped back around to devotion.

His mouth crashes into yours while you cum.

The kiss is violent, ravenous, consuming. All teeth and tongue, his lips crushing yours with a force that splits you lip open again. His hand comes up to the back of your skull, fingers tangling in your hair, cradling your head with a tenderness at odds with the ferocity of his mouth against yours. You taste the copper of your blood and the salt of your tears and the cigarette-smoke of Bailey's mouth.

Your orgasm is still rippling through you, aftershocks clenching your cunt around his fingers, which are still moving in slow, cruel pulses that make your oversensitive walls clench and spasm around him. Each aftershock draws a whimper from your throat, and he swallows every single one, his mouth sealed over yours, not letting you breathe, not letting you turn away. The hand he fists into your hair holds you exactly where he wants you. The kiss deepens. His stubble scrapes your chin raw, his nose pressing against your cheek, the angle so steep and possessive that your neck aches from the strain of it. A rough hum of satisfaction travels from his chest through his teeth and into your mouth.

You don't get to pull away. You don't get to breathe. You only get to take what he gives you, and if there's anyone who can take it, it's you. You, who is currently drowning in him, your hands no longer pushing or pulling him away, simply clutching onto the arm tilting your face up for dear life. You, his one and only exception, fucking up all of the carefully laid rules that has kept him and his operation functioning since before you were born.

He does not sleep with anyone whose face he remembers. He chooses foreigners, mostly. Beautiful strangers selected from bars and functions, each one impressed by his charitable personal, all warm and willing and pliable and utterly forgettable. He sends them off after taking what he needs. He never learns names he can't discard by morning.

He can't forget your name. It exists typed across the identification papers that he keeps tucked into his coat pocket, paired with Robin's, and pressed closed to his heart where he can't lose them. He knows you're devious enough to find them anywhere else.

He can't forget what you look like. He still remembers the pathetic look on you and Robin's faces when you entered his care around ten years old, back when he was in his late twenties and you were just some brat who stuttered and blushed and scrubbed at stains in the orphanage like you were going to be the one to scrub out years of rot and decay that had long set into the building. He remembers the look on your face when he backhanded you for the first time at eighteen for wasting his time, the shock and despair you wore learning that the dependable caretaker from the youth ward you once called daddy was merely his most perfected performance. He remembers the look on your face every time he sold you and every time you came back, growing progressively angrier and sharper and more beautiful.

There is no version of tomorrow where he wakes up and forgets what you look like when you cum.

He does not fuck his wards. This rule is structural and necessary. He has maintained this rule with an unerring discipline across two decades and thousands of transactions. It keeps the entire system from collapsing into something he cannot control. He sells their bodies. He does not touch the supply. This is an ironclad fact that his longstanding clients know, that they would never dare challenge.

He has never even lusted for one of his brats until you, the little shit who is skulduggerous enough to infiltrate your way into his goddamn dreams.

He does not fuck his wards, yet his fingers are buried to the knuckle inside one right now and his tongue is pressed to yours, your slick coating his palm, your orgasm still rippling against his hand in weakening aftershocks while you gasp against his lips.

He does not cuddle. He does not kiss. He takes and uses and consumes and discards and—

The separation is abrupt. His mouth leaves yours and the cold air rushes in, stinging your wet lips, the split throbbing fresh. His fingers slide free of you with a wet, obscene sound that echoes in the quiet room. Your cum coats his hand from fingertips to mid-palm, glistening in the low light. He holds his hand up between your faces, letting you see the evidence of what he just did to you, what you let him do, what your body begged him for even as your mouth formed the word no.

You watch him brings his hand to his own mouth. His tongue drags a slow, flat stripe across his palm, from the heel to the tips of his fingers, tasting you with unhurried attention. You catch the way his eyes close for half a second, the sound he swallows down before it fully forms.

His wet fingers find your mouth.

"Open."

Your lips press shut. Your jaw locks. The flat defiance you've aimed at him a thousand times in the orphanage hallways settles across your features like armor, and you glare up at him with everything you have left, which is mostly spite and the twitching wreckage of an orgasm that is still ebbing through you.

His thumb presses down on your split lip. The pressure sends a sharp bloom of pain through the wound, and the gasp it pulls from you opens your mouth enough for him to push two fingers past your teeth.

"Clean them."

You could bite. The thought crosses you with the same impulsive clarity that drove you to pull his gun. You could close your teeth around his fingers the way you closed them around that man's cock hours ago, and Bailey knows it. His fingers stay exactly where they are, resting on your tongue, daring you.

You suck.

His fingers slide deeper, pressing down against the flat of your tongue, and your mouth closes around them. The suction is instinctive, trained by dozens of fingers and dozens of cocks in dozens of rooms, except this time the taste is your own cunt and the fingers belong to the man who owns you. You suck and lick his fingers clean with the same thoroughness you'd bring to a paying client, running your tongue between them, lapping at the webbing, swallowing every trace of yourself from his skin.

The Bailey that watches you is more disheveled than you've ever seen him be anywhere. His hair is mussed where he dragged his hand through it. His shirt is untucked on one side, pulled loose from his waistband where your thrashing or his laughing had dislodged it. The top buttons of his shirt are open, revealing the hollow of his throat, the sharp line of his collarbone, more of the tattoo he hides from the public eye. His sleeves are rolled past the elbow, the serpent ink coiling around it. His jaw carries the shadow of stubble that he normally shaves off before arriving at the orphanage at 7AM.

He looks wrecked. He looks ravenous. He looks like a man who has been starving himself for a decade and is now eating his final meal.

The hunger on his face is not his usual controlled appraisal. It's not the clinical once-over he gives wards when cataloguing value, not the smooth, performative charm he deploys at social functions. His mouth is slightly parted, his lower lip caught between his teeth for a fraction of a second before releasing. His red eyes track the movement of your lips around his fingers with a fixation that borders on obsessive.

He pulls his fingers from your mouth with a wet pop. Your saliva and your slick trail between his fingertips and your lower lip. His thumb drags across your mouth one final time, wiping the moisture from your chin.

"You look like shit," you rasp out between shuddering breaths, unable to stop yourself from kicking him when you see an opening. The words come out hoarse, ruined by his fingers and your tears and the aftershocks still rippling through your thighs.

The corner of his mouth cracks. His thumb drags across your swollen lower lip, pressing the split open until fresh blood wells in the seam. You don't flinch, this time.

"Look who's talking," he scoffs. He pulls his hand back and wipes it on his already-ruined trousers without breaking eye contact.

Then, he shifts beneath you, repositioning your weight across his lap with a casual strength that reminds you of the size disparity between you — how your entire body fits across his thighs, how one arm controls your center of gravity, how little effort it costs him to move you where he wants. His cock strains against the front of his trousers, thick and rigid, pressing into the bare skin of your hip through the fabric. He makes no effort to hide it. He has stopped pretending.

"The deal." His voice is low, stripped of performance. His hand settles on the back of your neck, fingers curling into the hair at your nape. "You keep paying your rent. On time. I don't care how you get it." His grip tightens in your hair, tilting your head back until your throat is exposed, his eyes tracing the column of tendons from jaw to collarbone. "But when you get stupid enough to walk into alleys, looking for animals to chew on, you come to me first."

"You... You don't get to decide what I do."

His hands are already on you, flipping you until your stomach hits the mattress. His knee wedges between your thighs, spreading them, his weight settling behind you, his cock a rigid line against the small of your back through his trousers.

He presses flat between your shoulder blades, holding your chest to the mattress while his other hand works at his belt. The buckle clinks. The zipper follows. The sound of fabric shifting, and then the heat of his bare cock settles against the cleft of your ass, resting there, heavy and thick and pulsing faintly with each controlled breath he takes above you.

You go rigid.

You've taken hundreds of cocks. You've been paid for every hole, every position, every configuration the town's deviant imagination could produce.

But this cock belongs to Bailey.

The weight of it resting against the curve of your branded ass is obscene in a way that none of the others have ever been. You feel the heat of him seeping into the raised scar tissue of Remy's brand — CATTLE, spelled out in permanent, ruined skin that he put you in position to receive.

"I'm not going to fuck you," he says from above you, voice low. An arbitrary line drawn across a field of wreckage, as though this particular boundary matters when every other one has been obliterated. He has built an empire on top of these arbitrary, moral lines. His thumb drags a slow line down your spine, tracing the knobs of your vertebrae through the thin skin of your lower back. "You're concussed."

The hypocrisy is staggering. You want to scream. You want to laugh. You want to turn around and deck him, but then his cock drags downward and you forget how to think. The shaft slides along the cleft of your ass, the head catching briefly on the puckered ring of your asshole before continuing lower, slipping between your thighs. He pushes your legs together with his knee, tightening the channel of your thighs, and thrusts forward.

You bury the moan you make into a pillow.

His cock slides through the slick mess he made of you, the head emerging from between your pressed thighs, nudging the swollen folds of your pussy on each forward stroke without entering. The friction is devastating — his shaft grinding against your oversensitive clit with every pass, the ridge of his cock head catching on your entrance and pressing just enough to make your body hungry for more. The wet sounds are obscene: slick skin against slick skin, the squelch of your arousal coating him, the creak of the mattress beneath the rhythm he sets.

"This is what you wanted," Bailey says, each word landing between thrusts, dissecting you to pieces. His hand on your back slides upward, fingers curling around the nape of your neck, thumb pressing into the hollow beneath your skull where your pulse stamps a frantic rhythm against his skin. "Those men in the alley. You didn't go there to save that girl. You went there to get used."

His hips snap forward, harder. His cock drives between your thighs with enough force to shove you up the mattress, the sheets bunching beneath your stomach, your stitched temple throbbing against the pillow. His balls swing against your pussy on each downstroke, the contact sending jolts of sensation through your swollen cunt that make your thighs squeeze tighter around him.

"You let them put their hands on you. Their mouths. Their cocks." His grip on your neck tightens. His pace quickens. "You let them think they were winning, and then you took your pound of flesh."

A dark, rough sound escapes his chest — a laugh that turns into a groan. His free hand comes down on your ass, palm flat against the skin, and the crack of it fills the room. You cry out. Your hips buck forward into the mattress, the pain flaring white-hot across your branded cheek, chased immediately by a gush of wetness that coats his cock and drips onto his sheets.

"I know what you need," he rasps. "Someone to tell you when to stop. Someone to take it out of your hands."

You can't reply, your words dissolving into moans. The friction against your clit builds with each pass, the overstimulation from your earlier orgasm sharpening every sensation into pleasure that borders on unbearable. Your hands twist in the sheets. Your forehead presses into the pillow, your breath coming in shallow, stuttering gasps that fog the fabric. Your body trembles beneath his weight, pinned and held and used.

His hand lifts from your ass. Comes down again. The pain blooms across the opposite cheek, and the moan that tears out of you is mortifying — high, broken, shameless in its need.

You're close. The friction, the pain, the heat of him covering you completely, the weight of his hand on your neck, the scent of his cologne mixed with sweat and smoke filling every breath.

"That's it." His voice drops, rougher now, the polished edges sanded away by the rhythm of his hips. His hand leaves your neck, slides beneath you, finds your clit with unerring accuracy. Two fingers circle the swollen bud while his cock drives between your thighs, and the dual sensation makes your legs weak. "Give it to me."

"F-Fuck you —" The words break apart in your mouth.

His fingers speed up. His hips snap harder. The wet sounds grow louder, filthier, the slick of your arousal coating his cock, his hand, the sheets beneath you, the juncture of your thighs a mess of heat and friction. Each near-penetration sends a spike of want through your belly that makes your teeth ache.

"Mine." His breath is hot against the back of your neck. His stubble grazes the sensitive skin below your ear. His fingers press harder against your clit, grinding in tight circles. "You come back to me."

The orgasm builds. Your thighs shake. Your back arches, pressing your branded ass against his stomach, your body bowing beneath his weight. The friction of his cock between your thighs is maddening — close, so close to where you need him, the head dragging across your swollen lips with each stroke without ever pushing inside.

"Say you understand."

"I…" Your voice breaks. Your hips grind back against him of their own volition now, chasing the friction he's providing, overriding every desperate, hate-filled refusal your brain can construct. The second orgasm builds like a tide, slow and inevitable, pulled by the gravity of the man beneath you who made you into exactly the kind of creature who can only be satisfied by him. "…I understand."

"Good." The word comes out rough, bitten off, barely controlled. His hand on your clit stills. His hips drive forward once, hard, his cock grinding through the tight channel of your thighs, the head pressing against your clit with devastating precision. "Good girl."

Your second orgasm rips through you. Your entire body seizes beneath him, your thighs clamping together so hard around his cock that he makes a grunt of appreciation. Your fingers tear at the sheets, sobbing.

The wet clench of your thighs around him pushes him over the edge a heartbeat later. Bailey's hand slams down on the mattress beside your head, fingers twisting in the sheets hard enough to tear the fabric. His hips stutter, lose their rhythm, drive forward in three sharp, brutal thrusts that shove you up the mattress. His cock swells between your thighs, thick and pulsing, and then he comes with a sound that you will hear in every silence for the rest of your life — a low, ragged snarl, dragged from the base of his throat through clenched teeth.

His forehead drops to the space between your shoulder blades, his breath scorching against your skin in short, sharp bursts. His cock jerks between your thighs, ropes of thick cum spurting across the sheets beneath you, across your inner thighs, across the swell of your ass where it stripes over Remy's brand like a claim laid over a claim.

His weight settles over you, controlled. Even now, even mid-orgasm, he manages his mass so you can still breathe, careful of your injuries. His chest rises and falls against your back in rapid, uneven intervals that he is visibly fighting to regulate. The hand beside your head unclenches from the torn sheets and find the back of your skull. His fingers tangle into your shortened hair, his thumb tracing the edge of your stitches with a gentleness so at odds with everything else that it makes your chest ache beneath the bruised ribs.

Bailey does not move. His cock softens between your thighs, his cum cooling on your skin, his breath evening out against your shoulder. His thumb traces one final circuit around your stitches before the weight of him lifts.

You make a weak sound when he peels himself away, his warmth leaving your back and his cock sliding out from between your thighs. The cool air of the flat fills every space his body occupied, leaving you shivering. The mattress dips as he stands. His footsteps cross the room — bare feet on hardwood, then tile, then the sound of water running from somewhere behind a door you can't see through the curtain of hair fallen across your face.

You lie in the wreckage of his sheets. His cum cooling on your inner thighs, your own slick smeared across your hips and stomach, dried tears crusted on your cheeks. Every muscle in your body feels wrung out, twisted and released like a rag hung to dry.

When he returns, the mattress dips behind you again. A warm, damp cloth presses against the small of your back. You flinch in response.

"Hold still."

The cloth moves downward. Bailey scrubs his cum from the inside of your thighs and the curve of your ass. He passes the damp cloth through the folds of your pussy where his cock dragged through your slick without ever pushing inside. The warm water stings where your skin is raw. Your hips jerk when the cloth passes over your clit, oversensitive and still pulsing with aftershocks.

Your hand reaches back, fingers catching weakly at his wrist. "I can do it myself—"

He pushes your hand away without a word. The cloth continues its path, tracing the ridge of Remy's brand, pressing into the scar tissue. His free hand grips your hip, holding you in place when your body tries to curl away from the contact.

Bailey folds the cloth once, sets it on the nightstand, and retrieves a second damp cloth. This one he drags across your shoulders, your arms, the plane of your back where Avery's whip marks crosshatch over older damage. Each scar receives the same methodical attention. Through the towel, his fingers map every ridge of raised tissue, following the lines the way a man reads a ledger — each entry a transaction, each scar a receipt stamped with his approval. The cigarette burns on your shoulder blade. The faded dog bites along your calf. The collar scar circling your neck from Eden's cabin. Every mark on your body exists because Bailey's system placed you in position to receive it, priced you for it, collected revenue from it.

He knows this. He does not flinch from it. His hands do not slow.

The second cloth comes away dirtied with dried blood and the grime of an alley you sought trouble in last night. He drops it on top of the first and sits back on his heels, looking down at the full measure of what he's done to you.

Your breathing has slowed. The trembling has faded to a fine, intermittent vibration in your limbs. You lie on your side, knees drawn toward your chest, your body a tight curl of exhaustion and bruised ribs and a concussion that presses against the inside of your skull like a fist. Your eyes are half-open, watching him with the wary, spent attention of an animal too tired to run.

Bailey reaches across you to the nightstand. His arm brushes your shoulder. He uncaps the bottle of painkillers the private clinic sent and shakes two tablets into his palm.

"Open your mouth."

"Just... let me sleep..." The words come out slurred, heavy with a fatigue so deep it has become its own gravity.

"Open your mouth, or I'll hold your nose and shove them down your throat. Your choice."

You sigh and open your mouth. He places the pills on your tongue with a care that borders on absurd, given everything else his fingers have done to you tonight, and tilts the glass of water to your lips. You swallow, grimacing as the tablets scrape down your raw throat.

His hand finds your jaw, turning your head toward the lamp. He leans in, examining the four stitches above your eyebrow. His thumb presses the skin around the wound, checking for swelling, auditing his own property for depreciation.

You try to push yourself upright. The effort costs you — your arms shake, your ribs scream, the room tilts so violently that your hand shoots out and grabs the edge of the mattress to keep from falling. Bailey's palm lands flat on your sternum and presses you back down with a firm, unyielding pressure.

"Lay down, you brat, before you tear your stitches."

You make a small, furious sound that is more breath than protest. The exhaustion wins, dragging your eyelids down, collapsing the fight out of you in slow increments.

Bailey pulls the blanket from the foot of the bed and settles it over your body. The weight of it presses you into the mattress, warm and solid, cocooning you from the cold room. His hand lingers on your shoulder through the fabric.

He watches you fight sleep the way you fight everything else. Stubbornly. Uselessly. Your fingers twist in the pillowcase. Your jaw works around words you can't form. Your eyelids droop and snap back up, searching for him in the dark, tracking his silhouette as he moves around the room.

He picks up his coat from the floor, folds it once, drapes it over the back of the chair. He retrieves the gun and holster from near the enclosure and sets them on the dresser, well out of your reach. He collects the soiled cloths and carries them into the bathroom. The sound of water running reaches you, distorted and distant through the fog settling over your brain.

When he returns, he sits in the chair beside the bed. His elbows find his knees. His hands hang loosely between them. The lamp casts his shadow across the far wall, enormous and still, the serpent ink on his forearm swallowed by the dark.

Your breathing evens out. Your grip on the pillowcase loosens. Your eyes drift closed for the last time.

Bailey watches you sleep in his bed, under his blanket, wearing his damage. Your resting face loses none of its hardness — the set of your jaw, the furrow between your brows, the downward turn of your mouth that even unconsciousness cannot fully smooth away. You look like a soldier who fell asleep in the trenches. You look like something that will wake swinging.

He sees every scar he put on your body, every mark he enabled, every wound he was complicit in because the pain would teach you what comfort never could. He sees the desires he planted in you — the need for violence indistinguishable from want, the hunger for degradation dressed up as control, the inability to separate hurt from care because every person who ever claimed to care for you expressed it through pain.

You ache with something you cannot name. He knows the shape of it — the thing that drives you into alleyways looking for teeth, that makes you offer your body to strangers to numb the noise, that turns your own survival into a weapon you sharpen against yourself. The craving for something you will never ask for because asking would mean admitting you need it, and needing things in this town is how people die.

He is the only one who can give you what you need.

No client at Briar's can break you correctly. No thug in an alley can take you apart with the precision your damage requires. No amount of self-destruction will fill the space carved out by a decade of his careful, systematic dismantling.

Bailey does not feel guilt, because guilt implies he would do it differently, and he would not. You are what he made you. The weapon, the product, the one piece of inventory that came back more valuable after being sold.

The snake in its enclosure has settled back into its coils, tongue flicking once toward the warmth of the bed before tucking beneath its body. The painted serpents on the ceiling hold their frozen poses, unbroken lines looping endlessly around themselves.

You sleep. He keeps watch.