Chapter 2: The Collar's Pull
The dawn was a liar. It painted his sterile apartment in clean, hopeful light, exposing everything. The crumpled sheets. The dried, flaking streaks on his stomach. The collar.
It lay where he’d thrown it, a black serpent coiled on the pale grey floor.
Marcus moved through the morning like a ghost. He scrubbed his skin raw in the shower, the water so hot it turned him pink. He made coffee, drank it without tasting it. He stared at the newsfeed on his wall screen, the words swimming meaninglessly. His hand kept drifting to his throat, feeling for the pressure that was no longer there. The memory of it was a phantom limb.
This was the weapon. Not a bomb, not a ray. A piece of leather. A mind virus housed in a fetish object.
He had to destroy it.
He pulled on a pair of sweats, avoiding looking at the bed. He picked up the collar with two fingers, as if handling toxic waste, and carried it to the kitchen compactor. He lifted the lid. The dark maw hummed.
His fingers wouldn’t open.
They clenched around the leather, gripping it tight. A tremor ran up his arm. His breath came short. A warmth, immediate and insidious, bloomed in his groin.
“No,” he growled, the sound torn from somewhere deep. “No, fuck you.”
He willed his hand forward. His muscles locked. A war played out in the ligaments of his wrist—a spastic, visible shaking. The compactor’s hum grew louder, accusatory.
It’s just an object. It’s nothing. Throw it in. Be a hero.
But his body was screaming it was everything. It was release. It was silence. It was Selene’s approval, warm and liquid in his veins.
With a choked sob of rage, he stumbled backward, away from the compactor. He slammed the lid shut. He leaned against the cold steel of his refrigerator, forehead pressed to it, panting. He was still clutching the collar. He brought it to his face. The smell of leather, and underneath, a faint trace of her perfume—jasmine and ozone. His cock thickened, trapped and eager in his sweats.
“You sick bastard,” he whispered to himself.
He didn’t walk to the bedroom. He retreated there, a beaten animal crawling to its den. He sat on the floor, back against the bed, staring at the thing in his hand. The fight was leaving him, draining away into a hollow, needy ache. The shame from last night was still there, but it was morphing, blending with the hunger until they were inseparable. The shame was the hunger.
His thumbs stroked the leather. It was so soft.
He didn’t want to. He had to.
The buckle was easier this time. The snap-click was a homecoming. The weight settled, perfect and final. The mental static of his own thoughts fuzzed out, replaced by a single, clear channel.
Good.
The voice was hers, but it was inside his skull, velvet and absolute.
He moaned, his head lolling back against the mattress. His hands were all over himself immediately, not with last night’s frantic panic, but with a slavish, devoted purpose. He tugged the sweats down his hips. His cock sprang free, already weeping a clear bead of precum. He fisted it, a rough, tight grip.
“Selene,” he slurred. The name felt good in his mouth. Better than ‘Hypnotica.’ Intimate.
Say it again.
“Selene. Fuck. Selene.”
You’re my good thing. My empty thing. Show me.
He pumped his fist, his hips jerking off the floor. The rhythm was crude, pounding. He twisted his other hand in the collar, pulling it, using the constriction to heighten the blinding pleasure-pain. Spit dripped from his open mouth. He was grunting, animal sounds he didn’t recognize.
“Gonna… gonna come for you, mistress. Gonna fucking ruin myself.”
The title slipped out, unexpected. It ignited something in the void where his mind used to be. It was true. It was right.
Mistress. Yes. Come for your Mistress. Paint your pathetic chest for me.
The command was a detonation. His orgasm ripped through him with no grace, a brutal seizure of pleasure. He cried out, a high, broken sound, as his cock pulsed violently, jetting thick, hot ropes across his abdomen and chest. It seemed to go on forever, each spasm wringing more intelligence from him, leaving only base, grateful sensation.
He slumped, spent, swimming in the afterglow. The collar felt like a part of him now. He made no move to remove it. He traced patterns in the mess on his skin, giggling softly. His thoughts were syrupy and slow.
You are beautiful like this.
A flicker on his peripheral vision. The wall screen, still on the newsfeed, glitched. The anchor’s face dissolved into static, then reformed.
It was Selene.
She was in a opulent room he didn’t recognize, sipping from a crystal glass. She smiled directly into the camera—directly at him.
“Hello, pet,” she said, her voice emanating from his surround-sound speakers. “I see you’re enjoying my gift. I knew you would. A hero’s will is so… brittle. All posturing. Underneath, you just want to obey.”
He could only stare, his bliss-numbed brain struggling to comprehend. This wasn’t a broadcast. It was an intrusion. She was in his system.
“Don’t bother trying to trace this. You can’t.” She took a slow sip. “I just wanted to see you. To watch the change in real time. Your eyes are already getting that lovely, vacant sheen. Do you feel it? The thoughts are harder to hold onto, aren’t they? Like trying to clutch water.”
He felt a dull throb of fear, but it was muffled, wrapped in layers of warm, post-orgasmic cotton.
“The collar stays on for one hour today, Marcus. Not sixty seconds. One full hour. You will wear it under your uniform. You will feel it against your skin while you fly your little patrols. And the entire time, you will be mine. You will feel this good, this empty, this owned.”
The screen glitched again. The news anchor returned, speaking calmly about a city infrastructure bill.
Marcus Vance sat on his bedroom floor, covered in his own cum, a black collar locked around his throat. The order was embedded deeper than any hypnotic suggestion. It was a fact of his new reality.
He had a patrol in twenty minutes.
A slow, stupid smile spread across his face. He couldn’t wait to fly.