Chapter 3: Breaking In the Lamb
She needed to erase the echo.
Will's face, that last look of wounded confusion, kept superimposing itself over the bustle of her week. The silence in her apartment had taken on a new texture—not empty, but expectant. It was listening for his return.She despised it. The one quiet space in the city, polluted by the ghost of a bewildered boy.
So, she conjured a remedy.
Daniel was nineteen. A literature major at NYU. He’d been in her peripheral vision for weeks at her favorite coffee shop, all earnest glasses and knit sweaters, buried in dense Russian novels. He watched her with the safe, worshipping distance of a scholar admiring a forbidden text. Unlike Will’s artistic ambition, Daniel’s attraction was purely literary. She was a symbol, a myth. It was clean. It was predictable.
He nearly choked on his chai when she slid into the chair opposite him that Thursday afternoon and said, without preamble, “You’re always reading. Does any of it make you want to act?”
He blinked, adjusting his glasses. His cheeks went pink. “Act?”
“Not perform. Act.Do something. Feel something that isn’t mediated through a page.” She leaned forward, her voice dropping. “Or do you just want to keep watching me?”
He swallowed hard. The book closed with a thump. “I… I didn’t think you’d noticed.”
Anne smiled. It was a practiced, soft curve of her lips. “Come over tonight. I want to hear about…” She glanced at the book’s cover. “Dostoevsky. And other things.”
The invitation was a key turning in a very simple lock. There was no flicker of Will’s earnest curiosity, just the stunned acquiescence of a dream coming abruptly true.
Now he was in her sanctuary.
He stood awkwardly by the four-poster bed, tracing the velvet duvet with a fingertip, as if verifying its reality. The expensive sandalwood perfume she’d fogged the room with smelled alien on him.
“Your apartment is…” he searched. “It’s like a painting.”
“It’s a room, Daniel.” She poured two glasses of a dark, potent bourbon. “Stop analyzing it.”
He took the glass, his fingers brushing hers. A tiny jolt. He downed half of it in a gulp, grimacing. He wasn’t a drinker.
She steered the conversation, letting him talk about Raskolnikov’s guilt. His voice gained confidence in the academic lane, his hands moving to illustrate points. She watched his mouth.Soft. Probably never used for anything more demanding than parsing complex sentences.
She moved to sit beside him on the edge of the bed. His monologue faltered.
“You’re very articulate about fictional sins,” she murmured, taking his glasses off. The world blurred for him. She saw his pupils dilate. “Let’s talk about real ones.”
She kissed him.
It was slow, deliberate. She let the spell seep into him not as a shocking bite, but as a slow, warm syrup. She felt the exact moment it took hold. His thoughtful tension melted. The analytical glint in his near-sighted eyes was replaced by a hazy, awed devotion. The novel fell from his lap to the floor.
“Anne,” he breathed. It was a sigh of revelation.
“See?” she whispered against his mouth. “No subtext needed.”
She undressed him methodically. The sweater, the button-down, the khakis. He was slender, almost delicate. He trembled under her gaze, not with fear, but with a kind of religious rapture. This was the worship she knew. Clean, untroubled by messy aftermaths. He would remember everything in a glowing, pleasant fog. He would write bad poetry about it. It would be simple.
He was a virgin.
He whispered it as she touched him, his cock already hard and leaking against his stomach. “I… I haven’t…”
“I know,” she said. It was obvious in the way his whole body vibrated, a coiled spring of untouched sensation. “Don’t think. Just feel what I let you feel.”
She laid him back on the silk sheets. She climbed over him, pinning his wrists above his head with one hand. He was surprisingly pliant. His whimper was high, sweet.
“You belong to me right now,” she told him, her voice flat, instructional. “This is my page. My story. You’re just the ink.”
He nodded, eyes wide.
She guided him inside her. He cried out, a sharp, broken sound. The feeling was exquisite—a tight, hot, untried clenching around her. She began to move, setting a ruthless, rhythmic pace. He was helpless beneath her, his hips stuttering upward in clumsy, desperate syncopation.
“Oh god, oh god, Anne…” His prayers were litanies. He was drowning in sensation, every nerve raw and screaming. She watched his face contort, a beautiful map of overwhelmed pleasure.
He came quickly, a shocked, guttural shout, his body arching off the bed. It was over in minutes. He collapsed, panting, a sheen of sweat on his pale chest.
Anne didn’t get off. She hadn’t expected to. She watched him, detached, waiting for the blissful fade. But as his breathing began to slow, she felt him, still hard, still insistently thick inside her. The spell wasn’t letting go. It was burning through his virgin stamina, demanding more.
She raised an eyebrow. “Well.”
She rolled her hips, experimentally. He gasped, his eyes flying open. “It’s… it’s not over?”
“Not even close.”
This time, she rode him in earnest. It was raw, almost clinical in her execution. She used him to chase a release of her own, grinding down on him, the slick, tight friction building a low coil of heat in her gut. The headboard tapped a sporadic rhythm against the wall.
“Fuck,” she hissed, leaning forward, her hair a curtain around their faces. “You take it so well. Just a good, dumb vessel. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” he sobbed, his hands gripping her thighs. “Anything. Please.”
His second climax built slower, deeper. It wasn’t a surprised eruption, but a tidal wave. His whimpers grew more broken, more continuous. He chanted her name, his voice hoarse. When it broke, it wracked his entire frame, a series of violent shudders that squeezed her own climax from her in a sharp, clenching rush. She bit down on her own lip to stay silent, her body rigid for a long, burning moment before collapsing beside him.
The room was a symphony of ragged breaths.
Dawn bled around the edges of the blackout curtains. They were both slick, the sheets damp and tangled.
Daniel turned his head on the pillow. Tears had tracked through the sweat on his temples. His expression was one of shattered, ecstatic awe.
“I…” He was speechless. He reached for her hand, his fingers intertwining with hers with a tender reverence that felt, for the first time, like a barb.
She extricated her hand. “You should go. Your Dostoevsky awaits.”
“But… can I see you again? Tomorrow?”
The question was so earnest, so laden with the spell’s glowing afterbirth. It should have been the perfect exit line. A clean, adoring send-off.
Instead, it scraped against the raw place Will had left. This was what she’d wanted, wasn’t it? Uncomplicated devotion. Yet looking at Daniel’s tear-streaked, blissful face, she felt nothing but a hollow, contemptuous fatigue.He was parchment. Will had been… something else. A cracked lens, distorting the image.
“No,” she said, the word brittle. “You won’t see me again.”
The spell didn’t allow for hurt, only a profound, melancholy acceptance. He nodded, his adoration undimmed. “Thank you,” he whispered. “For everything.”
He dressed in the grey dawn light, moving slowly, his body aching and used. He looked at her one last time, a beatific smile on his young face, and let himself out.
The silence descended. It was the same silence as after Will, but now polluted with the scent of sandalwood and sex and virginal tears. She felt used. Not by him. By herself.
She got up, showered until her skin was red. She scrubbed at the feeling of him, the sticky, devoted residue of the spell.
Wrapped in a towel, she stared at her phone. Will hadn’t called. He hadn’t texted. The boy who’d pounded on her door, whose eyes had cleared with such devastating clarity, had simply vanished back into the city. The one who hadn't been fully erased by the ritual.The outlier.
Daniel had been a failure. A perfectly executed procedure that had left the infection untouched. She needed a more powerful purge.
Her thumb scrolled through her contacts. It landed on a name she hadn’t touched in months. Leo.Older. Not a boy.A man. A graphic designer with a cruel mouth and hands that knew exactly what they were doing. Their past encounters had been transactions of mutual, frankly cynical pleasure. No spells needed. Just two adults using each other’s bodies efficiently.
She typed a message. You free tonight? I need to get fucked. Properly.No talking.
The reply was almost instantaneous.9pm. Bring the good gin.
Anne put the phone down. This would work. Leo was a sledgehammer. He would smash the lingering fragility, the unwanted curiosity. He would obliterate the ghost of Will’s confused eyes and Daniel’s tearful worship.
She looked at the rumpled, damp bed. The grand four-poster felt like a stage. And she was tired of performing. Tonight, she decided, she wouldn’t be a goddess or a myth. She would just be a body. And for the first time in a long time, that thought felt like a relief.