Page 38 of Cold Bastard
Somewhere in the broken parts of my brain, I knew it was a trauma response. That the lack of oxygen triggered something primal, something beyond conscious control. That it wasn’t myfault my body wasn’t hardwired to my brain like everyone else. That my body fucking betrayed me but refused to allow me the simple pleasure of an orgasm without some kind of physical punishment. But knowing the truth didn’t make it better. Because Nano didn’t care about my sick, fucked-up response or my inability to control my body’s involuntary reactions or the neuroscience of asphyxiation. He just cared that I had gotten wet while he choked me.
And now he knew.
Now he had a weapon. My body. My shame. My deepest, most humiliating secret.
He could use it against me. He would use it against me. I could see it in the way he looked at me before the old fuck dragged me away, that calculating, predatory gaze that said he was already planning how to exploit my shame.
How to break me with it.
My mind raced, a frantic hamster on a wheel of fear. I had to get out. I had to escape. But how? I knew the old fuck had someone outside my door.
My hands, still trembling, felt weak. The concrete was cold and unyielding.
A desperate thought, ugly, clawed its way to the surface.Accept who you are.
The idea sickened me. To actively participate in my own degradation, to twist this agonizing vulnerability into a tool of manipulation... it felt like the ultimate surrender. But then Nano’s face, that smug, triumphant leer, flashed behind my eyes. If I didn’t find a way to regain some semblance of control, he would break me. He would shatter what little remained.
And so, against every fiber of my being, a part of me began to consider the unthinkable, the terrifying path of weaponizing my own shame. This thought, this nascent willingness to engagewith Nano’s twisted game, was a betrayal far deeper than my body’s own.
It was a betrayal of the person I desperately wanted to be.
I thought about the way Michael had used me. How he choked me every time after that first night, how he whispered in my ear that I was a slut, that I wanted it, that my body proved I was lying when I said no. How he made me believe it.You’re disgusting, the voice in my head whispered.You’re broken. There’s something wrong with you.
But even as I recoiled from the memories, a twisted part of me felt a morbid curiosity.
Was it true? Was there something inherent in me that invited this? A dark, buried desire that Michael had merely unearthed? The thought was abhorrent, a betrayal of everything I believed about myself, yet it clung to me like a shroud. I wanted to scream that it wasn’t true, that I was a victim. But the echoes of Michael’s voice, and the horrifyingly compliant reactions of my own flesh, made that plea ring hollow even to my own ears.
I wrapped my arms tighter around myself, my fingernails digging crescents into my skin.
Maybe there was. Maybe I was exactly what Michael had said I was. What Nano now knew I was. A body that responded to cruelty. A girl who came when she should have been fighting. A victim who got wet while her attacker got hard.
Disgusting. The word echoed in my skull, over and over, a mantra of self-loathing.
I pressed my forehead against my knees and tried to breathe through the shame, but it was everywhere. In my skin. In my bones. In the wet fabric of my jeans that I could still feel clinging to me, a physical reminder of my body’s betrayal. Yet, alongside the shame, a desperate, selfish thought clawed its way to the surface: if my body did betray me, perhaps it could also offer a twisted form of escape. If I could just... lean into it, let it takeover, maybe it would lead me to a place where the pain dulled and where my mind wasn’t the only thing suffering.
The idea repulsed me, a complete inversion of my fight-or-flight instinct, but the exhaustion was immense, and the thought of surrendering to the physical, even in this perverse way, was a siren song I found myself dangerously close to heeding. And underneath the shame was something worse.
Fear. Because I knew what was coming. Nano wasn’t done with me. Not even close. He got a taste of my fear tonight, felt my pulse fail under his hand, saw my body’s sick response to his violence, and he liked it. He had gotten hard from it. Which meant he would want more.
More choking. More pain. More opportunities to watch me break while my body responded in ways I couldn’t control, and there was no escape. And the terrifying truth, the one I fought with every fiber of my being, was that a part of me, a dark, shame-filled, deeply buried part, was starting to anticipate it. Not with desire, not with pleasure, but with a primal, animalistic instinct to survive. To endure. And the mere thought of that instinct, that flicker of a survival mechanism that seemed to embrace the horror rather than fight it, made me feel more broken, more disgusting, than Michael ever had.
I had to fight. But what if the fight was already lost before it began, not by Nano, but by the treacherous landscape of my own compromised will?
What if the only choice left was how I would fail?
The window was barred. The door was locked. Even if I could get out of this room, where would I go? The clubhouse was full of men just like Nano. Men who saw women as property, as things to use and break, and discard. I knew, deep down, that some of these men were capable of kindness, that some might even recoil at Nano’s cruelty if they saw it clearly. But fear, ingrained and suffocating, whispered that they would do nothing. That theywould watch, or worse, join in. That was the cruelest betrayal of all. The thought that the very people who should offer sanctuary would instead offer complicity.
I was trapped. Not just in this room, but in my own body. A traitorous, broken body that turned violence into arousal, that came when it should have fought, that gave predators like Nano and Michael exactly what they wanted. Proof that I deserved it. Proof that I wanted it. Even though every conscious part of me was screaming no, stop, please—my body said yes. A primal, desperate yes that felt like a violation of my very soul. It was a surrender I hadn’t chosen, a confession I hadn’t made, yet it was the loudest truth they heard. And that yes was all they needed.
I didn’t know how long I sat there on that cold concrete floor, my arms wrapped around my knees, my throat aching, my jeans still damp with shame. Long enough for the trembling to slow. Long enough for the tears to dry on my cheeks. Long enough to understand, with brutal clarity, exactly what my life had become. A battlefield where my own flesh was the enemy.
I was property now.
A thing the Brotherhood owned.
A thief who stole their money and would pay for it with her body, her pain, her complete and utter submission. And the worst part, the part that made me want to claw my own skin off, was that my body would betray me through all of it.
It wasn’t just that my body would respond. It was the sickening realization that a part of me, a dark, hidden part, would find some twisted sort of relief in the oblivion it offered. The thought of my body’s pre-programmed, involuntary response, a phantom of pleasure born from desire, made me feel more broken than Nano’s fists ever could. Every time someone put their hands on me. Every time someone hurt me. Every time someone looked at me with cold, predatory eyes and saw not a person but a thing to break. My body would respond, a sick echoof their cruelty, and they would use it to destroy me, confirming my worst fears about myself.
