The cherry on her left breast — his teeth found it. Bit through. The juice, sweet and dark, ran from the corner of his mouth and landed on the curve of her breast, trailing down the soft inner slope where fabric didn’t cover.

He followed it with his tongue.

The trail of cherry juice, down the inside curve, to where the bra cup ended and her skin began — his tongue pressing flat against her flesh there, following the juice with the thorough, unhurried attention of a man who does not believe in wasting things.

She made a sound.

Not the compressed, controlled sound she’d been making until now.

The actual sound. The sound from the place below the composure, below the maternal dignity, below all of it — the raw, involuntary, helpless sound of a woman being eaten by something that knows exactly what it’s doing.

"Hngh~—"

"The porridge," he said, without lifting his mouth from her chest.

She bit down on her lip. Held the sound behind it. Her head pressing back into the pillow — carefully, so carefully — the porridge sitting on her forehead like a small, absurd, comprehensive test.

He ate the second cherry.

Off her right breast. The same way — the bite, the juice, the trail, the tongue following.

Her hips moved.

He put his hand flat on her stomach without looking up. The apple slices there compressing under his palm. Holding her.

"Still," he said.

She was still.

Shaking slightly, but still.

He worked down her body.

The apple slices — each one lifted from her stomach with his lips, teeth catching the edge, the cold-sweet crunch of them between his molars — eaten one by one from the landscape of her belly, his mouth pressing briefly against her skin between each one.

Her stomach flinched inward each time his lips made contact.

The small, involuntary tightening of a body that is being touched somewhere it hasn’t been touched with any kind of attention for a long time.

He could feel it. The specific, tightly-wound response of skin that has been practical and functional and unglamoured for years and is now receiving the focused, deliberate attention of something that finds it genuinely worth tasting.

She was staring at the ceiling.

Her jaw. The specific, clamped-tight set of it. The tears collecting at the corners of her eyes from the sheer, overwhelming, nowhere-to-put-it intensity of being dismantled piece by piece by a man who looks like he was made to do exactly this.

His fingers found the string of her panty.

One side.

The bow gave — a single pull, the fabric loosening, the string falling sideways. He left it there. Didn’t remove the panty. Just — untied it, the fabric now held only by the other string and the press of her thighs together, the dark, thick hair at her center now framed by the loose, displaced fabric on one side.

He looked at it.

"I’m not getting hair in my mouth," he said conversationally.

She made a sound.

The sound of a woman who is horrified and cannot express it through any conventional channel because she has porridge on her forehead.

"Please—" The word came out strangled. Humiliated. Raw. "Please don’t say things like—"

He had moved upward.

Her armpits. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

Her arms were raised by the bedpost binding, the full, vulnerable exposure of them — the dark hair there, honest and unashamed, the soft hollow of the armpit where her arm met her body.

He put both his fists against them.

Pressing into the soft, yielding flesh on either side of the hollow with the direct, unhesitating grip of a man who has decided this is the next thing and is not asking.

She arched.

The specific, involuntary full-body bow of a woman who has been grabbed somewhere unexpectedly — her spine lifting from the bed, her head rolling back, and the porridge on her forehead — which had been perfectly balanced through everything else — slid.

Slowly.

Inevitably.

Gravity and a ceramic bowl and fifteen minutes of carefully maintained stillness all arriving at the same conclusion.

The porridge came off her forehead in a slow, viscous sheet and landed directly on her chest.

Across her bra. Over the soft upper swells of her breasts. Down the valley between them. The thick, warm mass of it spreading across her collarbone and pooling in the cups of her bra and running down the side of her neck in a slow, undignified river.

She looked down.

At herself.

At the porridge.

At the absolute ruin of the dignity she had been maintaining through everything.

"No—" Her voice broke. "No no no—"

"What have you done,"

Viktor said.

His voice contained exactly zero percent remorse.

He was looking at the mess. At the porridge on her chest. At the specific, comprehensive, wet disaster of it spread across her breasts and collarbone and the pooling lap of her bra cups.

He grabbed her breast.

The full-palm grab — his fingers sinking into the soft, porridge-covered flesh through the bra fabric, the wet warmth of the porridge pressing between his fingers, her breast compressing in his grip.

She made a sound that was not ’stop’ and was not ’more’ and was the specific, short-circuited sound of all of her wiring arguing at once.

His mouth came down.

He sucked her breast.

The whole upper swell of it — the area above the bra cup, where the porridge had run and pooled — his lips sealing against her skin and ’drawing’, the warmth of his mouth and the warmth of the porridge and the warmth of her skin all arriving simultaneously on her nerve endings in a combination her body had absolutely no framework for.

She screamed.

Not in pain.

The full, uncalculated, chest-deep release of it — the sound of a woman who has been holding everything with both hands for five hours and all year and all three years before that, and something has finally, comprehensively, given way.

"It hurts—"

He lifted his mouth.

"Does it," he said.

He was gentle. The suction had been firm but careful — his lips, not his teeth, the specific considered pressure of someone who knows the difference between ’intense’ and ’damaging’ and stays on the right side of it.

"Let me make it better," he said.

His hand went down.

Her panty.

His fingers found the loose fabric — the untied side — and moved it aside. Not removing it. Just displacing, the string falling off her hip entirely, the front panel folding sideways, and the thick, dark hair of her exposed fully now, the specific, honest, uncurated reality of a woman who had not anticipated being here today.

His hand moved through the hair.

Found her.

The heat. The wet — ’substantial’ wet, the kind that has been building since before she understood what was building — the specific, immediate, devastating welcome of a body that had been deciding for itself regardless of what her brain was doing.

One finger.

He pushed it in.

No warning. No approach. The full, direct, unhesitating entry of one finger into the tight, clenching, ’responsive’ grip of a woman who hadn’t been touched here in however long it had been and was receiving the information with the specific, overwhelming, whole-body response of something long-closed finally being opened.

Her hips.

They came up off the bed on their own — the involuntary arch, her back lifting, her tied wrists pulling against the leather, her head thrown back against the pillow with the force of the response her body had sent before her brain had even finished processing the arrival.

"AAAHH~—"