Chapter 9: Inspection
The house had settled into a deep, waiting silence. The only sound was the faint, rhythmic murmur of the television from downstairs where Katja had retired. The hallway was a tunnel of shadows, the doors to the three girls' rooms standing slightly ajar, unable to latch properly, each offering a sliver of view into a private world.
Derek moved on quiet feet, the floorboards familiar now with their specific groans. He stopped first at Sabine’s door. Peering through the crack, he saw her lying on her stomach beneath a rumpled duvet, her head turned toward the doorway. Her long black hair was splayed across the pillow. Their eyes met in the dimness. Her gaze was not just angry; it was a sharp, focused lance of pure resentment, a silent accusation for the stinging humiliation he had delivered to her backside just hours earlier. The memory of her sharp cry and the heat rising from her skin seemed to hang in the air between them.
“Good night, Sabine,” he whispered into the stillness.
She offered no reply. Her eyes simply narrowed a fraction before she deliberately turned her head away, burying her face in the pillow, dismissing him completely.
He moved on, down the hall to the room at the far end. Petra’s. The air here felt different, charged. A soft, rhythmic sound, like wet skin sliding against wet skin, reached his ears. He leaned closer to the doorjamb.
Through the narrow opening, he saw her. Petra was on her back, the blanket kicked down to her waist. The dim light from the hallway carved out the pale slopes of her breasts and the tense plane of her stomach. Her legs were spread, knees bent, and both of her hands were busy between her thighs, working with a frantic, focused energy. Her head was thrown back, her auburn hair a dark mess on the pillow.
“Ahhh, yes…,” she breathed, the words a thready exhalation. “Mhmmmm… so hard… me naughty girl… need it…”
Her hips arched off the mattress, a small, desperate motion. One hand cupped herself, fingers digging into the flesh of her inner thigh, while the other worked in a furious, circling rhythm. She was lost in it, a world of her own making, a rebellion enacted upon her own body. The sight was raw, profoundly intimate, and utterly captivating.
“Good night, Petra.”
Her entire body seized. Her hands flew away from between her legs as if burned. Her head snapped toward the door, eyes wide with sheer, unadulterpanic. For a heartbeat, she was frozen, a deer caught in the act.
“Ohh, g…good night..” she stammered, her voice strangled and high. She scrambled to pull the blanket up to her chin, her face a mask of hot shame.
He said nothing more, leaving her wrapped in the terrifying uncertainty of how much he had seen, how much he had heard. He continued to the last door.
Fiona’s room was the quietest. She was curled on her side, facing him, deep in sleep. Her delicate features were smoothed of the day’s distress, her lips slightly parted. In the faint light, he could see it clearly: her thumb was nestled securely in her mouth, her cheeks hollowing gently with each soft, sucking motion. It was a gesture of such profound, unconscious vulnerability that it stole his breath. The girl who had endured the soap, the spanking, had regressed to the most fundamental comfort of infancy.
“Sleep well, little one,” he whispered, the words softer than a sigh.
He retreated to his own room, closing the door behind him. The images played behind his eyes: Sabine’s furious glare, Petra’s shocked, guilty pleasure, Fiona’s innocent surrender. All three of them, in their own ways, bearing the physical and emotional marks of the day. All three, ending their first day with him with reddened bottoms and unsettled spirits.
He lay down in the dark, a slow smile touching his lips. The flat share was certainly unlike any he had ever imagined.
He liked it already.