Chapter 3: The Morning After
The light was wrong.
It wasn’t the soft, forgiving dark of his dorm room, or the familiar streetlamp glow filtering through his childhood blinds. It was a thin, mineral gray, leaching in through a single high window, flat and cold. It painted the spare room in shades of dust and forgetting.Colton woke, and the remembering was a physical blow.
It settled in his stomach first—a solid, nauseous weight—then climbed into his chest, squeezing his lungs. The images replayed on the inside of his eyelids: his father’s bowed back, the stark white scar of the brand, the way Stetson’s wiry forearm had looked wrapped around his throat from behind.Not choking.Claiming.
He lay on the stiff, unfamiliar sheets, smelling of dry sage and something vaguely sour.The iron bedframe was a cage of its own. He listened to the absolute silence of the house, a silence so deep it had a texture, like packed earth.Maybe it had been a nightmare. A terrible, waking nightmare born of six months of dread and unanswered texts.Then he heard it.
A low, rhythmic creak from the main part of the house.The muted shuffle of bare feet on saltillo tile. Then a voice, Stetson’s, too low to decipher the words, just a rumble of authority. A answering sound—his father’s—not a word, but a soft, bitten-off exhale that was unmistakably submissive.Colton’s body moved before his mind could counsel him. He was off the thin mattress, the cold floor shocking his bare feet. He went to the door, his ear hovering near the rough, unpainted wood.The sounds were clearer now. The wet, rhythmic slap of skin on skin.His father’s shallow, hitched breathing. Stetson’s grunted command: “Arch.”
A cold sweat broke out over Colton’s spine. He shouldn’t.He absolutely should not. But his hand was on the wrought-iron latch, lifting it without a sound, pulling the door open a mere inch.
The view was a merciless slice of the main room.The kitchen table, heavy pine, was now the center. His father was bent over it, his powerful torso pressed against the wood, his face turned to the side. His arms were outstretched, fingers splayed as if trying to grasp the table’s edges for stability. He was naked but for the perpetual steel cage and the thick black collar. Stetson stood behind him, fully clothed in worn jeans, his body moving with a lean, efficient force. One hand was fisted in James’s hair, pulling his head back. The other was clamped around the front of the collar, using it as a leash, a handle.
Colton’s breath fogged the crack in the door.Disgust rose, hot and acrid, in his throat.This was violence. It had to be.This was degradation.But his father wasn’t fighting. His eyes were squeezed shut, then they fluttered open, glassy and unfocused. They swept across the room, past the cold hearth, and landed directly on the sliver of Colton’s face in the doorway.Colton froze.James’s eyes held him.There was no shock, no embarrassment. There was a deep, drowning pain, yes, but beneath it, something else. A terrifying clarity.A plea, but not for rescue.For witness. For Colton to see the raw, unvarnished truth of him. His mouth, slack with pleasure-pain, formed a silent word: See.
Stetson’s rhythm changed, becoming harder, deeper.He leaned over James’s back, his mouth close to his ear. “You’re dripping,” he muttered, the words rough but intimate.“Making a mess on my table. That’s what you are. A leaky, devoted thing.”
James whimpered, a sound that went straight through Colton, twisting something low in his own gut. The disgust was still there, a hard kernel in his stomach.But it was intertwined now with a hot, unwelcome thread of fascination. His father, a man who’d once thrown a rival through a plate-glass window, was being reduced to this—to a trembling, obedient animal—and he was letting it happen. He was, in some horrific way, thriving.
Colton felt his own body responding, a traitorous tightness in his jeans.The shame was instantaneous, scalding. He tore his eyes away from his father’s pleading gaze, but they landed on Stetson’s hands—the ropey tendons in his forearm standing out as he tightened his grip on the collar, the possessive sprawl of his fingers over James’s flank.
It was then that Stetson’s head turned, just slightly. His sharp blue eyes didn’t look at the door; they seemed to look through it.A faint, knowing smirk touched his chapped lips. He’d known.He’d known Colton was watching all along.
The realization was a bucket of ice water.Colton stumbled back from the door, letting the latch settle with a soft, definitive click. He pressed his back against the cool adobe wall, squeezing his eyes shut, trying to erase the image.But it was burned in.The arch of his father’s spine. The raw, animal sounds. The sheer, absolute power radiating from Stetson—a power that didn’t just command the body, but dismantled the will.
He heard the final, strained grunt from Stetson, the corresponding cry from his father—not of pain, but of shattered completion. Then silence, heavier than before.
Colton slid down the wall to the floor, drawing his knees to his chest.His heart hammered against his ribs.The confusion was a swarm in his head. This was sick.It was wrong. But the echo of his father’s face, that look of pained acceptance, wouldn’t leave him. What if this was what his father had always needed? What if the man he’d known—the tense, angry, always-on-edge father—was just a shell waiting to be cracked open?And Stetson had done it.
The fear he felt now was different.It wasn’t just fear for his father. It was fear of the man in the next room, whose quiet confidence could reshape a person so completely. And it was a new, chilling fear of himself.Of the part of him that had watched, fascinated. Of the part that wondered, with a thrill that felt like falling, what it would be like to have that absolute attention turned on him.He heard the sound of a faucet running, a kettle being filled. Normal, domestic sounds.The world was just moving on. In the next room, his father was probably cleaning the table now, moving with that quiet, obedient efficiency Colton had seen in glimpses last night. A concubine making breakfast.Colton buried his face in his knees. The scent of the old sheets, the dust, his own cold sweat, filled his nose.He was trapped here. His truck was outside, but leaving felt impossible.It felt like running from a truth he had only begun to glimpse.
A truth that felt, somehow, like destiny. A terrible, seductive, and inescapable destiny.
A terrible, seductive, and inescapable destiny.The latch lifted.
The door didn’t swing open; it was pulled inward by an unseen force, the decision made for him. Stetson filled the frame, backlit by the kitchen’s weak morning light. He’d pulled a shirt on, but his presence was still raw from the table.“Time you joined us,” he said, his voice not loud, just final.Colton’s protest died before it formed. Stetson’s eyes held no room for debate, only the calm expectation of obedience. Colton pushed himself up from the floor, his limbs stiff with cold and dread.He followed the lean figure into the main room.
His father was on the low sofa by the dead hearth, not cleaning.He was arranged. A faded Mexican blanket was draped over his lap, but his chest was bare. It was different than Colton remembered from the chaotic glimpses of the night before.Fuller.Softer. The proud musculature was still there beneath a new layer of flesh, but the pectorals were rounded, swollen with a deep, unnatural fullness that made the old gang tattoos stretch and distort.The brand over his heart seemed to pulse.
“Come here, boy,” Stetson said, not looking at Colton. He was standing behind James, his hands resting on his shoulders. James’s head was tilted back against Stetson’s thigh, his eyes closed, long lashes dark against his skin.His breathing was shallow, quick.
“What did you do to him?” Colton whispered, the words ash in his mouth.
“Gave him what he needed. A purpose deeper than muscle.” Stetson’s thumbs began to circle James’s nipples, which were darkened, puffy. “His body knows its true use now.It provides. Come and take what’s offered.”
Colton’s feet were stones on the floor.“No.”
James’s eyes opened. They found Colton’s, and in them was that same liquid plea from over the table. This was another thing he needed his son to understand, to accept. A low moan escaped him as Stetson squeezed gently, a bead of opaque white welling up on one nipple. The smell in the air shifted, sage and smoke now undercut by something sweetly mammalian.
“He wants you to,” Stetson said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial rumble.“He’s been waiting for this. For you to come home.Really home.”
Colton moved without deciding to. Each step was a crack in the foundation of his old life.He knelt on the rough wool rug before the sofa. Up close, the change was more profound. The heat radiated from his father’s skin, a febrile, fertile warmth.The scent of milk was stronger.
“Go on,” Stetson commanded, his hand moving to cradle the back of Colton’s head, not gentle, but guiding.
Colton leaned forward.He closed his eyes as his lips met the hot, swollen skin. He tasted salt and something fundamentally altered.Then he suckled.
The taste was warm, slightly sweet, with a faint metallic tang.It flooded his mouth. James gasped, a shudder running through his entire powerful frame, and then a long, trembling sigh of release. His hand came up, not to push Colton away, but to clutch weakly at his son’s hair, holding him there.
“That’s it,” Stetson murmured above them, his voice thick with ownership. He worked James’s chest with both hands, squeezing rhythmically, forcing the flow.“Drink it down. It’s your inheritance. All that fight he used to carry… all that anger… I turned it into this.Into nourishment. You’re drinking his submission right into your guts.”
Colton wanted to vomit.He wanted to scream. But a deep, shameful part of him was ravenous.He swallowed, again and again. The warm liquid filled his stomach, a heavy, primal comfort. With each pull, the image of his father—proud, tense, always watching the door for threats—dissolved.This was what remained.This providing, whimpering creature. And he was consuming it.
“You felt it, didn’t you?” Stetson’s words drilled into his ear.“Watching me break him over my table. That wasn’t all disgust in your jeans.”
Colton moaned against his father’s chest, a sound of denial that became one of absolute defeat.
“Say it,” Stetson pressed, his fingers tightening in Colton’s hair. “Your daddy’s not the only one who needs truth.”
Colton pulled his mouth away, a thin strand of milk connecting his lips to his father’s nipple. He was panting.His erection was a painful, undeniable pressure. “I was hard,” he choked out, the confession tearing something vital inside him. “When you were… when I saw him… I was hard.”
James whimpered, a sound of pure approval, his glassy eyes swimming with adoration for both men above him.
“You got a taste for it,” Stetson stated, his hand leaving Colton’s head to unbutton his own jeans. “A taste for how right real power feels. Now see where it leads.”
What happened next was a blur of commanding hands and shattered boundaries.Stetson’s rough guidance was everywhere. Colton’s own hand was placed, forced to work himself over his father’s kneeling form as Stetson narrated his descent in a low, relentless growl. He was being defined, his new role etched into his flesh with every touch.
The climax, when it ripped through him, was utterly silent for a frozen second. Then a broken cry tore from his throat as he spent himself across his father’s branded chest, stripes of white stark against dark skin.
“Now tell him,” Stetson breathed, his own satisfaction palpable in the charged air. “What’s in your heart.”
Colton looked down at the ruin he’d made, at the man who had raised him. “I want it,” he whispered, then louder, his voice raw.“I want what he has. I want you to make me… make me like this.”
James’s smile then was beatific, unhinged. He looked to Stetson, awaiting permission.A barely perceptible nod. Then James leaned forward, his tongue sweeping out to clean his son’s release from his own skin with a slow, devoted reverence. He gathered Colton’s face in his hands, milk and salt and spend mingling on their lips.
The kiss was deep, passionate, and tasted of a horrible, welcoming home.