Chapter 7: Collared Service
The silence that settled in their little room after they'd untangled themselves was colder than any they'd known before. They cleaned up in the dimming light, avoiding each other's eyes. The frantic coupling had been a valve, a release of a toxic pressure, but the vessel itself was still full of poison. Dressing in silence felt like draping a cloth over a bomb.
A soft knock came at dusk. It was not the house servant, but Sharmin. She leaned in the doorway, holding two bundles of dark fabric.
"Put these on. Then come with me. Do not dawdle."
She left the bundles on the single chair and glided away, her footsteps silent on the tile.
The garments were not tunics. They were minimalist, sleek robes. Rick’s was a simple wrap of black silk that tied at the waist. Kate’s was identical, but in deep burgundy. Underwear was not provided. The silk was heavy, cool, and slid over their skin like a permanent, knowing caress. It felt more like a uniform than clothing.
They did not speak as they dressed. Kate’s hands trembled slightly as she tied her sash. Rick watched her, the memory of her tongue on him, of their violent, despairing sex, burning between them like a third presence. The recollection brought a flush to his skin, and a corresponding ache to the lingering soreness.
They were led not to the dining room or a public space, but down a different corridor, deeper into the compound. The air grew cooler. The faint, ever-present scent of spices gave way to the clean, mineral tang of water. The passage opened into a sprawling indoor grotto, a room carved from or built into the natural stone of the mountainside.
It was a bathhouse, cavernous and humid. A large, irregularly shaped pool dominated the center, its water steaming gently. Dozens of candles flickered in niches carved into the rough stone walls, their light reflecting off obsidian mosaics on the submerged ledges. The ceiling soared into darkness, the stone hung with delicate ferns and pale vines that dripped with moisture.
Kofi was in the pool, submerged to his chest, his powerful arms resting on the stone edge. Sharmin stood at the shallow end, still dressed, watching them approach. The air was thick, hard to breathe.
"Remove the robes," Sharmin said. "Leave them there." She pointed to a low stone bench.
The command was simple. In any other context, after what they'd just shared, it would have felt natural. Here, it felt like another step off a cliff. They obeyed. The silk whispered as it fell, pooling at their feet. They were naked, lit by the warm, flickering candlelight, their bodies a canvas of recent marks: the fading imprints on Rick’s hips, the slight puffiness of Kate’s ass, the shared hollowness in their eyes.
"Into the water. Stand before me, here." Sharmin had not moved from her spot on the shallow stone steps leading into the pool.
They waded in. The water was hot, almost painfully so at first, and it smelled of minerals and frankincense. It felt like submerging into a fever dream. They stood chest-deep before Sharmin, steam curling around their shoulders.
Sharmin studied them, her gaze analytical. "Your connection interests me," she said, her voice echoing softly in the cavern. "Yesterday, you were bound by marriage and shared guilt. A brittle, civilized thing. Now, after the table... after your own little exorcism in your room... what are you bound by?"
Neither of them could answer. Her words, with their crystal clarity about what they'd done, flayed them open.
"I think you're bound by a deeper truth now," Sharmin continued, stepping down into the water. She wore nothing beneath her simple shift dress. She untied a string at her shoulder, and the damp silk slid away, revealing her body—willowy, strong, the curves elegant in the flickering light. "You're bound by the knowledge of your own depravity. By shared ruin. It's a stronger glue than love."
She walked between them, trailing her fingers over the water's surface, then over their skin. A fingertip traced the faint line of Rick’s collar mark. "He feels your shame," she said to Kate, who stared rigidly ahead. "You feel his violation. You’re in a loop of mutual corruption." Her hand came to rest on Kate’s wet hair. "Isn't that right, Katherine?"
Kate flinched. She gave a tiny, nearly imperceptible nod.
"On your hands and knees, both of you. In the water."
They sank, the hot water rising to their chins, then they lowered themselves to their palms and knees on the smooth, submerged stone floor. The water came to their shoulders now. It was a posture of supplication, of animal readiness.
"Kate, to me.Turn around. Present yourself. The exacting Detective Beckett, presenting her pussy for inspection."
Kate moved slowly, rotating on her knees until her back was to Sharmin, her hips just breaking the surface of the water. She closed her eyes. Steam rose in tendrils from her skin. Sharmin waded closer, her hands settling on the crest of Kate's ass, thumbs pressing the plump flesh, spreading her open.
"Hmm," Sharmin murmured, a clinical sound. "Still a little pink.Good."
From the deeper end of the pool, Kofi watched, a distant, powerful silhouette. He was leaning back against the rocks, his arms spread. The water lapped at his chest.
"It wants discipline," Sharmin said, her fingers tracing a slow, possessive circle around Kate's exposed opening. "It wants to be reminded of its place. Doesn't it, Kate?"
Another tiny, agonized nod from Kate. A whimper escaped her throat as one of Sharmin's fingers slipped inside her, not deep, just a testing press.
"You're already dripping wet. And it's not just from the bath.Is it? This cunt responds.Even now. It knows what it deserves."
Rick watched from his position, the water distorting his view. He saw the ripples from Sharmin's movements, the rigid line of Kate's spine. A sickening coil of heat tightened in his own belly.
Sharmin withdrew her finger and turned her attention to him. "Richard, come here. Wriggle forward like a fish."
He crawled through the water, the motion awkward and degrading, until he was parallel to Kate, his face near her hips.
Kofi spoke from the shadows, his voice a low rumble amplified by the stone. "You remember the command I gave you, don't you, little writer?"
Rick's blood went cold.Yes. The echo of Kofi's voice from the dinner table roared in his memory. 'Lick your wife's pussy clean of my cum…' It had been a fantasy, a horrific, arousing boast in the moment. Now, apparently, it was to be made literal. His stomach heaved.
Sharmin's hands guided him, pushing his head down, positioning his mouth. "Katherine is holding Kofi's essence inside her. She's been holding it since dinner. Keeping my husband's seed tucked away in her womb like a dirty little secret."
It was both cruelly untrue—they had fucked since then, violently—and psychologically perfect. Kate, hearing it, let out a choked sob, her head dropping between her outstretched arms, sending ripples across the water.
"You have a new duty now," Sharmin continued, her grip in Rick's hair tightening. "Clean your wife of his possession. Erase the final trace. With your tongue."
Kofi spoke again, closer now. Rick hadn't heard him move through the water. "And do a thorough job, boy. Don't be shy. Open her up and get in deep. If I smell my own seed on her lips after you're done, I'll fuck you dry right here on this stone and Kate will watch. The water won't ease it this time."
The threat was a tangible weight. The memory of that stretch, that pain, surged in Rick's body. He stared at the patch of wet, flushed skin an inch from his mouth. His wife's cunt, offered up by another woman. He could see the faint, involuntary clench of it.
A sudden, sickening image flashed in his mind: of some part of that afternoon, a stray drop, a half-formed thought, still being inside her. The irrationality of it fused with the undeniable, animal command in the hot, humid air. He tasted bile and incense at the back of his throat. Then, with a shudder that went through his entire body, he extended his tongue and pressed it flat against her.
The taste was of warm skin and her unique, musky salt. He licked a slow stripe upward, from her entrance to the hood of her clit. She gasped, a sharp intake of air that hissed through her teeth. He felt the vibration in her mound against his mouth.
"Open her," Sharmin demanded, her hands gripping Kate's asscheeks, pulling them wider apart.Rick obeyed. He pressed his face in, his nose nudging at her seam. He used his tongue to part her lips, to delve into the hot, slick channel. He licked deeply, thoroughly, tasting her arousal, her fear, the imagined ghost of a foulness he believed was there. He lapped at her inner walls, swirling his tongue, filling his senses with her. She tasted like Kate.Like despair. Like home and exile simultaneously. He felt her trembling, her hips making tiny, unconscious rotations against his face.
"You like it," Kofi observed, his voice low and close. Rick hadn't realized he had moved to stand right behind him. "You're worshipping it. Licking her clean for me. Does it make you hard, playing the little sanitation worker?"
It did. Rick's cock was rigid, bobbing in the heated water, fully aroused by the debasement of the act, by the press of Kate's desperate, answering need under his tongue. He ate her with a frantic, growing hunger, pushing his tongue as deep as it would go, then flicking rapidly over her clit. A low, guttural moan escaped Kate. Her hands fumbled on the stone floor.
"Keep her still," Sharmin instructed, and Rick felt Kofi's strong, broad hands clamp down on Kate's shoulders from behind, pinning her to the spot.
He increased his pace, licking and sucking, his jaw working. Kate's moans became continuous, a muffled, agonized chanting against the wet stone. She was close. He could feel the tension coiling in her thighs. The taste of her flooded his mouth, and with it, a maddening sense of power and pathetic servitude.
"Do it, baby," he found himself growling against her flesh, the first words he’d dared speak since entering the cavern. "Come on my face. Come for them. Show them how much your filthy little pussy loves this."
That was the trigger. His vulgar permission, in that tone of utter degradation, snapped the last thread of her resistance. She cried out, a short, sharp bark that echoed off the stone, and her body bowed. Her cunt clenched violently around nothing, pulsing against his tongue in hot, rhythmic spasms. Her slickness gushed, mixing with the heated pool water, flooding his mouth as he kept his mouth locked to her, drinking her down as he’d been ordered to.
Kofi held her through the shaking climax, his hands firm on her shoulders.
As the waves subsided into quivers, Sharmin pulled Rick’s head up by the hair. Water streamed down his face. He gasped for breath. Kate was slumped, panting, her face still pressed to the rock.
Sharmin leaned down and sniffed delicately near Kate’s soaked sex, then looked at Kofi. "He did a good job. She’s clean. Of you, at least. For now. I can only smell her." She paused, a speculative look in her eye. "Perhaps you can do better. Mark her in a way that can't be so easily cleaned."
Kofi let go of Kate's shoulders. She slid sideways, her body limp, and slumped against the sloped stone of the pool edge. Her eyes were glazed.
Kofi waded around to her front. He pulled her up roughly by her hair until she was on her knees before him, the water at her chest. She looked up at him, dazed and utterly spent.
"The mouth is a filthy thing," Kofi said, cupping her chin. "Always needing to be fed. Tasting things. Swallowing lies. It's almost as filthy as a cock." He looked at Rick, a sharp, cold amusement in his eyes. "But there’s a function to filth. You can water plants with it. Cleanse waste. Feed the roots."
With his other hand, he guided his already hard, thick cock to her lips. She opened them without being told, like a sleepwalker, and took him into her mouth. Her throat worked on a dry swallow as he pushed past her lips.
"There, you see? Thirsty thing." He held her head still and then, with the same casual authority as a man relieving himself in the bushes, he relaxed.
It wasn't a torrent. It was a slow, controlled stream, hot and pungent, smelling strongly of the day's food and filtered bodily waste. It filled her mouth and pooled. She gagged instantly, a horrible, choking sound. But she did not pull away. Tears sprang from her wide, horrified eyes as her mouth overflowed, piss trailing down her chin and into the bathwater. She gagged again, swallowing convulsively, a mixture of pride, shock, and animalistic obedience locking her mouth around his shaft.
"Hmmph," Kofi grunted, continuing until his bladder was emptied, the sound a direct, mortal affront to every boundary she had ever held. He finally let her go with a small, wet pop of his cock leaving her lips.
Kate fell back, sputtering, coughing. She wretched, but nothing came up but a gush of tinted saliva that swirled on the water's surface. She wiped her mouth frantically with the back of her hand, her breathing ragged.
Sharmin addressed Rick, who was frozen in horror, staring at his wife coughing up piss and humiliation.
"Now, sanitation worker. Your final duty." She pointed to Kate's face, her chin, the mess trailing from her mouth. "Get her clean. Don't use the water. Use your mouth. Finish the job."
Kate stared at Rick, her eyes pleading and full of self-loathing. The mixture of pity, disgust, and a shivering, awful excitement in Rick’s gut was unbearable. He crawled forward on his knees through the steaming, fouled water. He cupped Kate’s face, his thumbs gentle against her wet cheeks. For a second, it was just them, in a shared nightmare.
Then he leaned in and kissed her.
He licked the taste from her trembling lips. It was bitter, sharply chemical, indescribably wrong. He delved his tongue into her mouth, sharing the filth, taking part of it for himself. The act was an ultimate perversion of their marriage vows—in sickness and in health, for better or for worse. He took her sickness into himself. She clung to him, weeping openly now, her fingers clawing at his shoulders.
The kiss deepened out of a shared, brutal necessity. It was confession and absolution, administered by the devil. Rick cleaned the inside of her mouth as he had cleaned her cunt, swiping his tongue over her teeth, her palate, until the acrid taste was mingled and diluted between them.
He pulled back, panting, their foreheads touching. The shared bitterness coated his own tongue. It was inside him now.
Sharmin and Kofi had pulled themselves from the pool, robes casually donned. They stood at the edge, side by side, watching them—a king and queen surveying a particularly successful and intimate experiment in deconstruction.
"That," Sharmin said, her voice soft but carrying perfectly in the humid air, "is a stronger bond than the one you brought here. You are bound by unspeakable things now. Things a court of law could not process. Things your friends could never imagine. This is not friendship. It is accompliceship. You are each other's keeper, forever, of a secret that would destroy your world if told. Be careful with it."
They left, their wet footprints dark on the stone. The steam seemed to swallow them.
Rick and Kate stayed in the water, clinging to each other as the hot pool slowly leached the immediate horror from their bones, replacing it with a deep, marrow-deep chill. They had begun this voyage into the darkness by submitting their bodies. Tonight, they had crossed a different threshold. They had knowingly, willfully, participated in the soiling of their own souls. And they had done it for, and to, each other.
The water around them was now their baptismal font, and they had been baptized in bile.
The morning came as a slow seep of grey light through high, narrow windows. Kate was gone. Rick sat up on the thin cot, the emptiness beside him a physical ache. His mouth still held the ghost of that foul, shared bitterness, a taste that seemed to have settled into the cracks of his teeth.
He found her sitting on the floor in the antechamber, her back against the wall, staring at nothing. She was wrapped in the burgundy robe, her hair a dark tangle. She didn't look up when he entered. Her gaze was fixed on her own hands, lying limp in her lap. The silence wasn’t cold; it was dense, like packed earth.
“Katie,” he said, his voice a dry scrape. It wasn’t a question.
She took a long, shuddering breath, but her eyes remained vacant. “I can still feel it. The way it hit the back of my throat.Hot. Like a betrayal from the inside.” She finally turned her head. Her eyes were red-rimmed, but dry now. They looked old. “You kissed me after. You fucking… cleaned me.”
“I had to.” The words were useless.
“Did you?” Her voice gained a sharp edge. “Or did you want to? For a second, when you were… down there… when you were licking me. I heard your voice.You were aroused. You were coaching me. Telling me to come.”
He had no defense. He knelt on the stone floor in front of her, not touching her. The memory of his own hardness in the pool water rose up to accuse him. He looked at the floor.
“Why does that part feel worse?” she whispered. “The physical stuff… it’s hell. But it happens to you. You endure. But that… my body’s reaction.Your voice. Our participation. That feels like we made it. We created that ugliness together. They just provided the stage.” She wrapped her arms around her knees, making herself small. “I’ve been a crime scene. Now I feel like I am the crime.”
A soft knock at the door. A servant, his eyes averted, placed a tray of fruit, bread, and coffee on the low table and left without a word. The normalcy of it was obscene.
They ate in silence, the food tasting of ash. The caffeine was a low-grade shock to their systems, pulling them unwillingly back into the present. The dull hum of the compound around them—a distant door closing, the murmur of a radio—felt like the world continuing on a parallel track, one they’d been permanently derailed from.
In the late afternoon, a different summons came.
They were led to a room they hadn’t seen before, a library of sorts. It was warm, lined with books in languages they couldn't read. A large, low desk dominated the center, its surface a slab of polished black stone. There were no chairs. Kofi stood by a window, looking out. Sharmin was seated on a wide, leather chaise lounge, sipping from a small ceramic cup.
"You seem tired," Sharmin said, gesturing for them to stand before the desk. "Heavy."
"We are," Rick answered, the honesty torn from him. Politeness, deflection, the armor of his wit—all of it felt like plastic trinkets now.
"You've tasted your edges. Swallowed them, even." Kofi turned from the window. He wore simple linen pants and nothing else, his torso a sculpture of hard planes. "That's a gift. Most people live their whole lives without knowing what they truly contain. Without feeling the walls of their own capacity."
Sharmin put her cup down. "Today is about pressure. And architecture. The architecture of the mind under pressure." She walked to the desk. On it lay a single item: a smooth, polished piece of pale wood, perhaps ebony, about a foot long and tapered. It was unmistakably, deliberately, a phallus. Not a toy, but an object. "Your mental walls are cracked. We saw that in the bath. This is about building a new structure. One based not on what you should be, but on what you are when all the 'should's' are gone. Kate, come here."
Kate’s legs felt like wood as she walked to the desk. Her eyes were locked on the ebony shape.
"Pick it up."
The wood was warm, almost alive in her hand. It was heavy. The craftsmanship was exquisite, the tip rounded and smooth, the shaft ridged with subtle, artistic patterns.
"Hold it. Feel its weight. Your husband has submitted his body, has taken my cock in his ass and has tasted my piss from your lips. He has been… receptive. But you, Kate." Sharmin circled her. "You have been… ceremonial. A vessel.Beautifully passive. I want to see your action. I want to see your hunger. Not the hunger of a wife starved for affection. I want to see the hunger we woke in that pool. The one that came on command."
Kate's knuckles were white around the dildo.
"In your career, you wielded a gun. It was an extension of your will, your authority. This is no different. It’s a tool of a different truth." Sharmin stopped behind Rick, who was still kneeling on the floor near the chaise. She placed a hand on his shoulder. "Take your husband.Here. On this floor. Not as a lover. Not for mutual comfort. Do it because you want to. Do it because you need to prove, to yourself and to us, that you can still want something, that your desire isn't just a polite echo of someone else's demands. Fuck him with this. See the animal you've been hiding from your own self."
Kate looked from the object in her hand to Rick’s hunched form. Her breath hitched. The command was to violate, but the space Sharmin had opened was one of agency, however warped. It wasn't about servicing Kofi. It was about wielding power herself, however she’d been given it.
"Show me the cop who knows how to get a confession," Kofi added, his arms crossed, leaning against the window frame. A casual, almost bored tone. "Use your tools."
Rick felt a strange stillness settle over him. The victimhood he'd been clinging to was being ripped away. He wasn't just a recipient anymore. He was the object of a drama Kate had to enact. He lowered his shoulders, presenting his back to her.
Kate walked to him, the weight of the ebony in her hand an anchor. She knelt behind him. With clumsy, shaking fingers, she untied the sash of his robe. The black silk fell open. She pushed it off his shoulders. She stared at the landscape of his back, the faint marks, the vulnerability. She felt a surge of something terrifyingly close to contempt. And beneath it, a molten thread of pure, undiluted arousal.
"Do it, Kate," Rick said, his voice muffled against his arm. "Don't think. Just fucking do it."
Her hand came down, not in a caress, but in a stinging slap on his ass. The sound was sharp in the quiet room. Rick jerked, a low grunt escaping him. The sting blossomed into heat. She slapped him again, harder. A grunt this time, followed by a sharp intake of air.
"Yes," Sharmin whispered from the chaise. "Like that. Find your rhythm. He's your instrument."
Kate's breathing grew ragged. She was falling into the rhythm of it, the sharp feedback of flesh on flesh. Each slap was a word she couldn't say.Filthy. Complicit. Ours. She leaned over, her mouth near his ear. "You liked it. When I sucked his cock under the table. You watched. You got hard." Her voice was a raw, unrecognizable thing.
"I did," he gasped as her hand cracked down again.
"You wanted to be me."I did."
She fumbled with a small bottle of oil that had been placed beside the desk, slicking the ebony shaft until it gleamed. Her other hand gripped his hip, her nails digging in.
"It's still in me," she hissed, not even sure what she meant—the piss, the seed, the shame. All of it. "You didn't get it all."
Then she guided the cold, hard tip to him. He was tense. She didn't gentle him. She used her weight, her free hand pressing down on his lower back, pinning him. She pushed.
The invasion was shocking. Not the liquid, living heat of a cock, but the unyielding, sculpted pressure of polished wood. It forced its way past his resistance with a brutal, impersonal efficiency. He cried out, a harsh, guttural sound as it breached him, the stretch a deep, internal burn that erased every other sensation. She didn’t stop. She drove it home in one relentless stroke until the base was nestled against him, the intricate ridges dragging inside.
"Oh, fuck," he sobbed, his face pressed into the rug. The fullness was immense, a solid, unmoving occupation of his core. It felt less like sex and more like a burglary, a forced entry into a private, dark room.
She pulled back, almost to the tip, and rammed it back in. He screamed this time. The sound seemed to ignite something in her. A feedback loop ignited: his pain, her power. His degradation, her agency. Each brutal thrust was a distillation of their shared, poisoned dynamic. He was taking this not for pleasure, but for her. She was giving it not for love, but because she fucking needed to, because she was furious and broken and this was the only language left.
She fucked him with the dildo like she was trying to kill a part of him, or perhaps trying to resurrect a part of herself. Her muscles bunched and strained. Sweat beaded on her forehead. She found a punishing, mechanical rhythm. The wet, slapping sounds of the oil, the rhythmic grunts of her effort, his choked, wordless cries—it was a raw, ugly symphony.
Kofi watched, his expression one of detached analysis. Sharmin's lips were parted, her breath slightly quickened. This was what they’d wanted to see: not mere submission, but the creation of a new dynamic between them, forged in violence.
"Is this the marriage counselor's office?" Rick managed to gasp out between thrusts, a flash of his old, dark humor through the pain. It was a surrender to the absurdity, a final casting off.
Kate answered with a harder, deeper thrust that stole his breath. Then she dropped the act. "Shut up," she snarled, her grip tightening on the tool. "Just… shut up and take it."
And he did. He went quiet, his body shuddering with each impact. She fucked him until her arm burned, until the initial sharp burn inside him subsided into a deep, throbbing ache that bordered on something else. A numbness. A resignation so complete it felt like a kind of peace. His body began to move back against her, not in pleasure, but in a desperate synchronization, trying to meet the force, to complete the circuit of their mutual destruction.
She felt an orgasm building in her, a dark, seismic tremor that had nothing to do with her clit. It was in the pit of her stomach, a convulsion of pure, unadulterated power. When it hit, it was soundless. Her body locked, the dildo buried to the hilt inside him. A wave of icy fire crashed through her veins, leaving her trembling and empty.
She pulled the slick, dark wood from him with a sickening, wet sound and collapsed beside him on the floor, the tool clattering away. They lay there, panting like sprinters, not touching. The air was thick with the smells of sweat, sex, and linseed oil.
Sharmin stood. She walked over and picked up the discarded dildo, holding it with a strange reverence. "Good," she said, her voice soft. "You found a new language. It's brutal. It's honest. Remember it."
Kofi pushed off the window frame. "Tomorrow, we leave the compound.The city. You've been broken down in private. Now you'll learn to wear your new shapes in the light."He left. Sharmin lingered a moment longer, looking at the two broken, panting forms on her library floor. A small, almost imperceptible nod, then she followed her husband out.
They were alone. The aftermath was a vast, hollow space. Rick finally rolled onto his side, facing her. His eyes were red, his face streaked. He slowly, painfully, reached out a hand. It hovered in the air between them.
After a long moment, Kate lifted her own. Her fingers, which had moments ago wielded such brutal force, were trembling violently. They didn't clasp. They didn't interlace. They simply met in the middle, palm to palm, applying the faintest, most essential pressure. An anchor point in the void.
It was the first tender thing they had shared since stepping onto the plane, and it felt more transgressive than anything else they had done.