The memory did not knock.
It simply arrived, the way a blade slips between ribs before the pain registers.
Noire was there again.
Not in the body. Not exactly. She floated just behind the eyes, the way she had been trained to do. The room was dark except for the single red spotlight that painted everything the color of dried blood. *Chosen Ones* played on a loop from hidden speakers, the beat slowed down, syrupy, almost tender. The same track they had recorded together. The same one the world still streamed by the millions.
A taste of rubber and metal filled her mouth. The ball gag sat perfectly behind her teeth, straps tight enough to keep the jaw from trembling but not tight enough to bruise. They had calibrated it for hours. Perfection was the point.
Latex clung to her skin like a second, living membrane. It creaked softly every time she breathed. Cold air licked the places the suit left bare—inner thighs, the small of her back, the underside of her breasts. She felt the plug first as pressure, then as fullness, then as something that simply *was*, the way breathing simply was. No choice. Only obedience.
A voice—male, calm, almost kind—spoke close to her ear.
"Love it."
The words slid inside her head and stayed there, repeating in the same rhythm as the slowed-down chorus.
*Love it.*
She did. That was the worst part. The conditioning had done its work so cleanly that the shame and the pleasure braided together until she could no longer tell which was which. Every thrust of the spiked toy sent sparks through nerves that had long ago stopped belonging to her. Pain bloomed, bright and familiar, then folded into heat, then into something that felt dangerously close to gratitude.
*Love it.*
Her hips moved on their own—small, precise rolls the way they had taught her. The man in the leather hood made a low sound of approval. She hated how much that sound mattered. How it anchored her.
Somewhere far behind the red light, another voice—tiny, almost childish—whispered: *Make it stop.*
Noire answered without speaking.
*We don't stop. We love it.*
The music swelled. The chorus again. Alice's voice, sweet and crystalline, singing about being chosen.
Noire's eyes stayed open because they had never been allowed to close.
She floated there, perfectly still on the outside, perfectly shattered on the inside, while the body did exactly what it had been built to do.
And she loved it.
Because that was what she had been taught.
The memory snapped off as suddenly as it had arrived.
Mia was back in the Sanctuary, standing barefoot in the animal enclosure, a small knife still clenched in her right hand. The young faon watched her with wide, dark eyes.
The blade trembled.
She did not remember picking it up.