Page 69 of Somno Slave

Nothing leaves me except slow breath.

Behind the glass, her pulse keeps stumbling every few seconds.

Peter studies me for another moment before his hand suddenly closes around my jaw. His fingers dig deep enough to force my head upward.

“I said look at me.”

I keep my eyes low, distant.

His grip tightens sharply before finally releasing altogether. He steps back once, jaw flexing, recalibrating something internally. Trying to regain the shape of the room before it slips away from him.

“You think silence is power?” he asks. “You think sitting there acting like an animal makes you untouchable?”

My breathing stays steady. The fluorescent lights hum overhead.

Peter waits again.

“One name,” he says quietly. “That’s all it takes.”

His control breaks almost beautifully. The first strike lands so hard my head snaps sideways into my shoulder. It lands cleanly against what he’s already done to my face, a bright, sharp collision that blooms outward through bone and nerve. The second follows before the first has settled. Then another. The force builds, repetitive, insistent, designed to overwhelm.

She moves. It’s subtle, almost nothing, but I feel it more clearly than the strikes themselves. Her heartbeat stumbles out of rhythm, too fast, too uneven to belong to someone who thinks they are in control of what they’re feeling.

That reaches further than anything they’re doing to me.

“Speak.” Peter’s hisses.

My shadow shifts along the floor, brushing the outline of his presence, tasting his mind without breaking it open.

It would be easy.

He’s already cracked in places he doesn’t realise.

I could pull at it, split it wider, let everything inside him spill out where she can see it, watch the structure he’s built for himself collapse in seconds.

But that wouldn’t give me what I want.

Another strike snaps my head back, and this time something deeper answers beneath the pain. It rises slowly, heavy, coiling through the body in a way that has nothing to do with what they’re doing to me. My breathing shifts with it and when I exhale, the sound isn’t what they expect.

A moan.

It carries.

It reaches.

She hears it.

I feel the way it lands in her, and the shift is immediate. Something in her body responds before she has the chance to decide what she wants to do with it.

Good.

My cock strains against the table, and I can no longer help myself. I move my chained hands slightly, the whispering of shackles almost giving my position away, but the detective moves at the same time.

His arm locks around my neck. Pressure builds instantly, precise, efficient, cutting into the airway in a way that would panic most men within seconds.

He knows what he’s doing. The placement is exact.

“Talk.” His voice sits close to my ear, breath warm against skin that still burns from the current.