CONTENT WARNING 18++
This book contains mature themes and graphic content that may be disturbing to some readers.
Reader discretion is strongly advised.
Please prioritize your mental health and well-being.
If these themes may trigger trauma or cause distress, we encourage you to consider whether this book is right for you at this time.
Prologue
I used to wear the sentence
they will leave me because I am not enough
like a coat two sizes too small—
every goodbye tightening the seams,
every silence proof I should shrink.
I counted myself in deficits.
Too much. Not quite. Almost.
A math problem where I was always the mistake.
I checked my ribs.
My voice.
My gentleness.
Then it hit.
What if it wasn’t a flaw,
but a luxury item,
and they were shopping with empty hands?
Because not everyone who touches gold
knows how to hold it.
Chapter 1
The silence hit harder than the electricity. My heart hammered against my ribs like something trying to escape.
The steel table seemed to vibrate beneath me. I was wrecked. My mind was an empty, echoing chamber.
They took my eyes first. Not with hands, but with technology that felt criminal.
The edges molded to my cheekbones and sealed the world away behind polished black.
Then came the suction.
Negative pressure kissed my eye sockets until vision collapsed into velvet darkness. I saw nothing.
Then my ears. Foam pushed deep, plugging out all sound.
My own pulse became monstrous and amplified, pounding inside a coffin.
I tried to speak, but the gag swallowed my voice. A silicone plug fused to straps welded beneath my jaw.
I was locked onto the restraint frame. A fixed horizontal slab of slick black polymer.
My position was absolute: flat on my back, arms and legs spread wide like a specimen mounted for inspection.
My back arched painfully, forcing my diaphragm upward and locking my breath into shallow, frantic gasps.
My wrists and legs were wrenched into a maximal stretch. The pressure on my shoulders and thighs screamed.
Heat began to build in my lower pelvis, radiating from the pressure of the probe.
The voice came last. Not Ardent's. The machine's.
"Sensory inhibition complete. Neural stimulation commencing."
I sensed the final intrusion. Something blunt, oiled, and patient pressed against me.
I grunted and thrashed in a desperate reflex. The steel ratchets on the spreader bars bit into my skin with sharp bruises.
The blunt head pushed forward, then sank with a hydraulic sigh.
It entered slowly, stretching me until I burned. The anal probe was a cylinder of metallic warmth packed with electrodes.
It forced my spine into that painful arch and ignited a deep internal fire.
The shock came everywhere at once. Chest to cock to ass to brainstem.
A net of lightning yanked my body into a single, screaming chord.
My muscles seized and locked solid. Drool burst past the gag in white froth.
I gagged on my own heartbeat, choking on air that wouldn't stay in my lungs.
The day before, my body had failed me. It rattled against the frame like a puppet jerked by lightning.
Thick drool pooled behind the gag. I tried to roar, but the cloth caught the sound and turned it into a wet gurgle.
Back then, I thought that was the worst it could get.
I woke to white light. Not soft, but weaponized. Light sliced across chrome walls like scalpel blades.
Everything gleamed like polished bone. My throat tasted of antiseptic and iron.
My limbs felt heavy, anchored by matte-black leather restraints that bit into my skin.
Footsteps cut through the hum of machines. Precise. Unhurried.
Then he appeared. Dr. Ardent. He looked like a predator in sterile skin.
His white coat fit like a funeral shroud over gloves as black as oil.
"Mr. Vey," he said. His voice was smooth as an engine.
My tongue felt glued to the roof of my mouth. I closed my eyes.
For a second, the white room vanished. I saw flashing bulbs on the red carpet.
I heard my mother's frantic whispers, reminding me to smile because the mortgage was due.
I was the Golden Boy. Since the day my father walked out, I had been the fix.
I was the paycheck that kept my siblings fed and the lights on.
I worked until my soul felt like frayed wire. I pushed through exhaustion with pills, then more pills to sleep.
The Golden Boy became just a shell held together by chemicals.
I had tried to end the noise once—thinking of hotel nooses and bathtub pills—but even my death would have been too expensive for my family to afford.
"You understand why you're here," Ardent continued, breaking my trance. "Detox isn't punishment. It's precision. We remove the noise."
I choked out a dry laugh. "Noise? It's screaming static. A constant tear in my brain."
"Exactly," he whispered. "The boy the world used. The boy who carried a family on his back until he broke. We are going to erase that version of you."
The straps cinched over my wrists, pulling them wide above my head until my shoulders burned.
Polymer cuffs clamped my thighs and ankles. I was spread wide, opened like a book no one asked me to write.
Ardent peeled away my clinic gown. He moved with mechanical patience.
"Baseline contact points—nipples, penile root, perineal access." Servo arms slithered down from the ceiling like chrome vipers.
When the first disc touched my skin, it was freezing. Electrodes clamped down.
A low current hummed, and my chest seized. My muscles twitched violently.
He applied lube. Clinical, odorless, obscene. He wrapped my member in a polymer sheath coiled with conductive threads.
It was snug like a second skin. It cinched at the base with a hiss. The lock clicked.
The hum in the table deepened. A jolt stole my breath and hit my system.
My hips arched upward against the spreader bars, then slammed back down as the current ebbed.
"Good," Ardent said softly. "That is coherence. You'll learn to crave it."
I jerked against the cuffs. My mind flashed to my mother and sisters—the people I had destroyed myself to save. "Go to hell."
"Hell," Ardent said, leaning closer, "is loud. It's the sound of people needing things from you. We are going to make you quiet."
