Raven’s foot connected with his ribs.

Not hard — not the full-force kick of a man trying to damage, but the flat, precise kick of a man correcting a direction — and Gareth went sideways, his shoulder hitting the stone tile, his bound hands taking some of the impact.

"Breathe," Raven said.

"I WILL KILL YOU—"

"You keep saying that." Raven walked to the center of the room. Unhurried. The walk of a man in his own space. "Let’s find out if it’s true."

Gareth pulled against the rope at his wrists.

The knot did not move.

"Fight me like a MAN." The words came out through his teeth. "If you’re a man — untie me and fight me like a—"

Raven turned.

He looked at Gareth with the warm, brief consideration of someone who has been asked a question they have already answered for themselves.

He walked to the nearest wall.

The interior wall of the private bath — stone, reinforced, the kind of structural work that went into walls designed to contain both water pressure and the weight of the building above.

He placed his hand against it.

Lightly.

The tips of four fingers, resting against the surface with the casual, barely-there contact of a man touching something in passing.

He pressed.

Not hard.

’Lightly.’

The stone cracked.

Not a hairline fracture — the crack spread from the point of contact in a visible, radiating web, the sound of it arriving a half-second after the visual, the low ’CRACK’ of structural material being overruled, dust falling from the edges of the fracture.

Four finger-shaped impressions in the stone surface.

From a light touch.

Gareth looked at the wall.

The cracks.

The four parallel channels his fingers had left.

At Raven’s hand, dropping back to his side.

The sweat arrived all at once — not the exercise kind, the other kind, the kind that comes from a body that has just recalibrated its threat assessment and does not like the result.

"You would die," Raven said, simply, "the moment I used that on you."

The room was very quiet.

The only sounds were the soft, muffled sounds of the two women — the small, continuous "mmmph~" of Jennifer seeking something through her gag, the wet, quiet "mnh~" of Yuna still running seed onto the stone.

Gareth looked at his mother.

At Yuna.

Back at the wall.

At the four finger-marks.

Something happened in his chest. Not the anger — the anger was still there, would always be there, the anger was load-bearing — but something under it. A colder thing. The rational, analytical part of him that had been trained since childhood to assess situations clearly regardless of how much he did not want to assess them.

’He put his fingers through a stone wall.’

’Without effort.’

’Without any visible strain.’

The copper taste arrived in his memory. The garden. The grass. The punch he had thrown in the garden with the full force of his training behind it and the way Raven had taken it with nothing more than the specific, instructive stillness of a man receiving information.

’’You absolute bastard.’’ Raven’s voice, from the grass.

’’I’m the weakest person in this garden.’’

He had said those words and Gareth had not understood them. Had categorized them as the delirious output of someone who had just taken a serious blow to the gut. Had moved on.

He understood them now.

Raven walked to Jennifer.

He stood beside her blindfolded, gagged, open-bodied form with the easy posture of a man standing beside something he owns, and he reached down and found her nipple.

Pinched.

Then twisted.

The muffled sound that came from behind the gag was immediate and dense — the involuntary cry of a woman whose body has been conditioned to produce very specific responses to very specific stimuli — and her hips bucked upward, a fresh run of fluid pushing from her stretched entrance as the arousal her body had been maintaining for hours chose this moment to spike.

"LEAVE HER ALONE—" Gareth lunged against the rope. "THAT’S MY—"

"I know."

Raven released her nipple.

Ran the pad of his thumb along the underside of her breast — the heavy, milk-warm weight of it responding to the touch with the specific shiver of a body that had been made sensitized — and Jennifer’s back arched involuntarily, her head tilting back, the gag stretching her mouth further as she moaned behind it.

"Mom—" Gareth’s voice had broken. Not cracked — broken, the full structural failure of a voice that has been asked to carry too much weight. "Mom, I’m here — it’s Gareth—"

She couldn’t hear him.

She was three feet away and she couldn’t hear him and her body was responding to another man’s hand and the bracelet on Yuna’s wrist was still catching the light.

"That’s why," Raven said, trailing his finger slowly down Jennifer’s ribs, over the soft give of her belly, "I redirect my energy here."

The finger descended.

Found her entrance.

Three fingers, pressing at the swollen, hairy opening — not gentle, the direct and certain press of a man who knew exactly where he was going and what he would find when he got there — and pushed.

Jennifer’s spine arched.

"MMPH~!! AAAHH~—MMNH~!!"

The saliva ran from the corner of her mouth around the gag strap. The tears pressed out from under the blindfold — not new tears, the continuation of tears that had been running for hours, the specific wet that accumulates under tight fabric. Her nose was running. Her whole face was the face of a woman who had been completely claimed, who had no walls left, who was producing every response her body could produce simultaneously.

Her pussy clenched around his three fingers.

Hard.

The trained, devoted grip of walls that had spent hours being educated in what to clench around and were now doing it with faithful, humiliating accuracy.

He looked at Gareth.

"I have to say," he said, pulling his fingers back slowly and pushing them forward again, Jennifer’s hips following the motion like pulled on a string, "your mother really has a very high-quality pussy."

Gareth moved.

He did not decide to move.

His body made the decision without consulting him — the full, trained, explosive upward lunge of someone who had been doing plyometric training since he was fourteen — and the rope at his wrists and ankles became the deciding vote.

He launched anyway.

The world turned upside down.

He did not see how it happened.

One moment he was mid-lunge, both bound wrists aimed at the general area of Raven’s throat, and then there was a pressure — not a blow, not a punch, not any contact he could track — just a ’pressure’, a displacement of the air around him, the same concussive displacement that had flattened the garden grass at the baron’s banquet, and he was airborne.

Fully.

His body leaving the ground at an angle he had not chosen, rotating without his input, the stone ceiling visible for a half-second—

He hit the wall.

Not the cracked wall. The opposite one.

His back hit it and the impact drove every bit of air from his lungs simultaneously and he slid, the stone dragging against the back of his head on the way down, a warm, specific pain blooming at the point of contact.

He landed on the floor.

Face-up.

Staring at the ceiling.

Something warm was running from the back of his scalp. He catalogued this information. He catalogued the ringing in his ears and the fact that his vision had acquired soft edges and the fact that his body was not currently taking instructions.

"I will..."

He said it to the ceiling.

"I will kill you..."

The ceiling did not respond.

Through the fading edges of his vision — the tunnel narrowing from the outside in, the amber light compressing toward a point — he looked at the room.

Jennifer. Still in her position. Still making the small, muffled sounds of a woman whose world contained only sensation and darkness.

Yuna. Her hips still rolling against the rope. The bracelet still catching the light. The seed still running from her in the continuous, patient testimony of what the last several hours had been.

And Raven.

Standing in the center of the room.

Not having moved from where he’d been standing.

Looking at Gareth on the floor with the warm, unhurried expression of a man watching weather pass.

"When you wake up," Raven said, and his voice was very far away now, the distance of the tunnel arriving, "I’ll be here filling loads into my women’s pussies."

"I will..."

Gareth’s fingers found the floor.

The stone was cold.

"...kill you, bas—.."