Prove Your Obedience(4)

Daddy didn’t stop. His hands tightened on my hips, holding me against the cold edge of the desk. My legs were already shaking, my knees threatening to buckle, and he held me there without mercy.

“Take it, Grace,” he said against my ear. “Our guest is watching.”

The guest stood at the side of the desk, watching, waiting his turn. I could hear his breathing, rough and heavy. I sobbed into the wood, the sound broken and small.

What came next blurred. The cold wood against my cheek. The sting of Daddy’s teeth at my shoulder, hard enough to leave a mark. The heat of his breath against my neck. Everything narrowed and sharpened until I couldn’t separate one feeling from another.

I tried to hold on to something solid. The grain of the wood. The ticking of the clock on the mantel, faint and far away. Every anchor slipped, one after another, until I was only a body in a room, and the room belonged to them.

Somewhere beneath the fear, I recognized the thing I had been trying not to name for weeks. I had wanted to belong to someone. I had never imagined what that wish might cost, or how many hands it could end up in.

“That’s my greedy girl,” Daddy said. “Taking everything we give you.”

My whole body shook. My arms gave out, and I cried out into the desk, the sound muffled against the wood. Daddy didn’t ease up. He carried me through it until I couldn’t tell where one wave ended and the next began.

My mind went blank. All the thoughts I had held on to, the doubts, the reasons, the promises I had made myself, dissolved until nothing remained but the sound of three people breathing.

Daddy squeezed my waist, and his breath broke hot and uneven against my neck. For a few seconds he held me still, heavy and silent, while the room seemed to hold its breath with us.

Then he stepped back. The cold rushed in where he had been, and my body trembled with the loss of him.

“Our guest isn’t done with you,” he said.

The words should have terrified me. They did. But the fear had worn so smooth by now that it no longer cut, only dulled everything it touched.

They turned me over, and my head tipped back over the edge of the desk. The room spun. The lamp threw long shadows across the ceiling, and I stared up at them, upside down and dizzy, trying to remember how to breathe.

The guest moved around the desk and stepped up in front of me. His hand closed in my hair, and he tilted my head up so I had no choice but to look at him. His eyes were dark, focused, unreadable.

“Look at me, Grace,” he commanded.

I looked.

There was nothing in his face I could argue with. No cruelty, no kindness, only patience, the patience of someone who knew exactly how this night would end.

Daddy moved up beside him. I felt them both there, close, the heat of them pressing in from either side. What followed came to me in fragments: the burn in my jaw, the roar of my pulse, tears running hot down my face. I couldn’t pull away. My hands stayed flat on the desk, fingers curled against the wood.

I thought: this is what it costs. I thought: I agreed to this. Neither thought helped. Neither made it stop.

Beside me, the guest’s breathing had changed. It was slower now, deliberate. I felt him watching me, studying every reaction.

Daddy’s hand found the back of my neck, and for one strange moment it almost felt like comfort. I hated that it did.

The study had shrunk to the size of the lamp’s glow, and everything outside it had gone dark. I clung to the edge of that light and to the sound of his voice, even though I knew whose voice it was.

My eyes watered until everything blurred. My lips were raw. My throat burned. The sounds in the study came to me from a long way off — my own breath, theirs, the clock, the low murmur of voices above me that I could no longer follow.

Daddy’s voice wasn’t steady.

“Stay with me, Grace.”