If you could fight, you still wouldn't dare. Not when the fear puncturing your spine has your limbs dangling uselessly at your sides. Not when his grip threatens to rend the flesh of your cheeks like paper, tears prickling hot in your eyes. You pray, instead, when he tilts his head, slow and hawkish, for someone, anyone to come—

"My wife," he drawls, a thick, singsong lilt. "My wife, and my little brother. My little brother and my wife. That doesn't make sense." The tears threaten to spill over as his nails break flesh. "That doesn't make sense at all."

“Please, Shion,” you whisper, the words ill-formed and pathetic as your heartbeat hammers in your ears. “Please, I never wanted to take anything from you—“

“Ah?”

The whites of his eyes stretch around his narrow irises. A comical sight, if not for how it sends every nerve ending in your body flaring with the same animal urge to run. His grip on you is ironclad. You dare not breathe.

“‘Take’?” He rolls it over his tongue like a tasting. “Take.” Again. “Take, take, take. You would concern yourself with that, wouldn’t you, sweet little Inspector?” His nose brushes yours. “If you never wanted to take, wouldn’t you agree—now’s the perfect time to give back.”

He lunges forward. You flinch away, expecting a bite, a blow, a flash of pain—just as his mouth collides with yours.

Revulsion rears up in you. As soon as your lips seal shut he wrenches your jaw back open, tongue dragging over the ridges of your gums as it forces its way inside. His teeth clash against yours when he angles your head to probe at the sensitive webbing that anchors your tongue, sticky and invasive as his other hand wrapping around your neck. He's not letting you breathe, you realize faintly. A distant panic grips you; nausea whirls in your gut as your useless hands hook on his collar, claw at his neck, head growing dizzy as spittle pools on your tongue and leaks from the corners of your mouth—

When he finally releases you, the rush of air into your senses is agonising. Immediately you double over retching, throat raw, head threatening to split open in your hands, and only realise that you are crying when you wipe haphazardly at your mouth and feel tears as well as saliva smear across your skin.

"You didn't like that?" His voice pierces through the din. You heave another sob, the sound obscene. "Mio did that. I saw you two in his workroom." When your trembling eyes flicker upward, his nose is scrunched, chin still gleaming with spit. "It smelled like bog water. I didn't stay long."

It seems a million years ago, now. A tainted memory. Waning sunlight and Mio’s soft smile, his fingers slipping over your own.

(Where else has Shion been lurking, a voice whispers in the back of your mind. What else has he seen. What else could he use to bruise you, here and now. Did Mio know this would happen; the world tips before your eyes at the thought—)

“That’s not a bad face you’re making.”

In a flash Shion is crouched before you. You don’t know when you collapsed to your knees. You can only squeeze your eyes shut and hold back the bile in your throat as a papillated wetness drags a long strip up your cheek, viscid residue cooling rapidly in its wake.

“But Mio doesn’t like it when you cry,” he murmurs. His long fingers snake around your wrists, shackle you to the ground while he continues lapping at your skin. “I don’t get it. Nothing about you two is right.”

The rush of fear that had seized you earlier has dulled, now, into a hollowing kind of despair. You squirm weakly beneath him, filthy.

"You're so nice. You give so much." He inhales, long and slow, against you. "Our perfect, charitable little Inspector. You'd do anything to help us out, wouldn't you?"

Let me go. Let me go. Someone help me, someone help me, please please please—