The Full Arc
Genuine Acceptance
Daren.
Weeks 2 through 4.
His body had settled the question on the sixth day, on a couch, under a hand, and had not consulted him about it. The rest of him took longer. The analytical voice went from resistance to observation somewhere in there, and observation was already one step inside the dam. Resistance says no. Observation says let me watch what is happening.
The response is identical to Max's. Down to the second, down to the drop in the shoulders. I am what he treats me as.
The fighting stopped. Not with a dramatic moment. Not a single surrender, not a flag dropping, not a white towel thrown. The fighting stopped as sound stops in a room where everyone has grown tired of shouting: gradually, and then all at once, and then you realize the silence has been there for a while and nobody noticed.
Daren stopped cataloguing Viktor's manipulations. Stopped plotting exit routes. Stopped running the CAPS manual as a diagnostic on his own psyche.
Instead, the analytical voice did something far more unsettling: it began to appreciate.
He woke in the morning. On the bed, next to Viktor, the collar warm against his throat, warm because Viktor kept the apartment heated. And his first thought was not I am a slave. His first thought was: The performance is over.
Before the collar, I was always performing. Measuring every man. Calculating every interaction. Was I dominant enough? Did my body read correctly? Was the "proud top" convincing today, or did someone see through it? Did Leo see through it, did Max see through it, did the bartender at the dive bar see through it when I slapped his shoulder and ordered another whiskey and performed the easy confidence of a man who has never been smaller than the room he's in?
The performance was exhausting. Ten years. Every day. Every interaction. Every fuck, every punishment, every study session. All of it performed for an audience of one: myself. Convincing myself. And the audience was never satisfied because the audience knew the performer was lying.
Now I kneel. And Viktor's hand is on my neck. And the performance is over. My life is predictable. Structured by the external world. I don't decide; I simply belong.
It is fulfilling. The word terrifies me.
The workshop slave's words. From months ago, from another man's mouth, surfacing now as if they had been waiting. "I am calm, reserved, and self-assured. My life is predictable, structured entirely by the external world. I don't decide; I simply belong. It is fulfilling."
The slave's philosophy predicting Daren's fate before either of them knew it. The prophecy, landed.
But the part of him that calculated would not stop running.
It had stopped running against the situation. It was now running inside it. And the numbers it produced were dark.
Viktor is broke, eighteen, in debt. My savings are his savings and they are spent. The apartment runs out.
And I am a sellable asset. Male, athletic, late twenties, former-owner premium on top. The men who pay for a body like mine do not pay it for kindness. They pay for a body they can use hard, and they use it for five years, and the oldest slave at the workshop was thirty-five, and after that...
He knew the answer. He'd been in the trade for five years. And if he was honest, and the collar was making him honest in ways the freedom never had, he'd sold men into situations he had never followed up on. Never asked what happened to the thirty-year-old he'd assessed for a mining company. Never checked on the twenty-five-year-old he'd recommended to a leather bar in the south. Never counted the dogs he'd sold to the wolves.
There are no old slaves. I know this. Everybody knows this. Nobody says it.
For five years he had kept that silence from the outside, a free man who never asked the question. He kept it now from the inside, and the inside was warmer and more terrible than the outside, and the silence sounded different with a collar on.
And he was still happier.
That was the thing. The numbers on his future ran dark, and the present was still better than the ten years he'd spent pretending. Viktor's hand on his neck, the bed warm, the performance dead, the silence comfortable instead of tense.
The final surrender was this: the brain choosing not to act on its own analysis. Not because the analysis was wrong. Because it was right, and the present was still better.
Is Viktor being warm because he cares? Or because calm slaves sell for more?
The same question as "The Question" in the dark. Do you call me by my name because you care, or because the manual says it deepens the bond? Same unanswerable equation. Same answer: "Don't think about it."
He could see all the layers, label them, find the exact overlap where "I care about you" and "you're worth more calm" produce identical behavior. It didn't matter. The warmth was the warmth regardless of its source, and the brain that could see through the mechanism could not stop the body from responding to it.
The Sale
Viktor.
I'd known since the beginning. Since the ice cream on the bus, since the filing, since I walked out of the Property Registration Office and did the math on Daren's savings against Daren's debts against my own debts against the apartment lease.
I was a broke kid with education debt from the CAPS courses. Daren's savings were spent, mostly on me, during the mentorship, covering my living expenses with the generous wave of a man who didn't realize he was funding his own acquisition. And Daren had debts too. Everyone has debts in this city, debts are the water we swim in, the thing that keeps the whole machine turning. The apartment lease was running out.
I didn't need capital for an empire. I needed to clear the ledger so I didn't end up on the wrong side of a collar myself. I had three sellable assets: Daren, Max, and Leo. The sale was survival, not ambition.
I contacted a dealer. Scheduled the sale. Prepared all three for transfer with the same casual, warm efficiency I brought to everything. Clean clothes, showers, a good meal before. Like you'd prepare anything you cared about for someone else.
I ruffled Daren's hair. "You'll be fine, bro. You're a good product."
His eyes. I won't describe his eyes. I can't. I don't have the words, and if I did, I wouldn't use them, because some things you file behind the sternum and never take out because taking them out would require admitting what they are.
The Valuation
Daren.
He knew the room before he could say why.
Fluorescent tubes overhead, one of them ticking on a dying ballast. Grey tile graded toward a drain in the center. A steel table, a clipboard, a tablet in a rubber case. Bleach laid over something the bleach never reached. He had walked into a hundred rooms like this with a badge in his pocket and a stylus in his hand, and he had never once seen the drain, because the drain was not built with men like him in mind.
He saw it now. He was barefoot, the tile was cold, and the floor tilted everything a half-degree toward the center, and his body understood the grade before his mind finished the thought.
The dealer did not look up when they came in. Heavyset, fifties, reading glasses pushed down his nose, a man doing inventory at the end of a long day. Viktor stood by the door with his hands in his pockets. He was not running this. There was nothing here to run. The dealer ran it, the way he ran it every day, and Viktor watched with the mild interest of a customer waiting on a receipt.
"Strip them," the dealer said, to his assistant, not to Viktor.
Max and Leo went first, and that was where it started to come apart.
They undressed without being told twice. They stood on the cold tile with their hands at their sides and their eyes gone soft and middle-distanced, and when the gloved hands came at them they gave up everything, the jaw, the throat, the muscle, the reflex, unhurried, two bodies that had learned long ago the inspection goes faster when you stop owning the thing being inspected. Max raised his arm before it was asked for. Leo turned his hip into the hand.
Daren had trained these two. Years of it, cold and exact, and he had told himself the product of all that discipline was their obedience. But this calm was not his. The animal economy of a body that has stopped fighting the room, the ease of it, none of that was his. He had made them flinch. Viktor had made them rest. Both lessons sat in the same two bodies now, taking the dealer's hands without a tremor, while their old master stood three feet away and could not unlock his own jaw.
Beside him a girl waited her turn. Early twenties, naked, weight on one hip, arms loose, the posture of someone in line at a pharmacy. When the assistant reached her she lifted her chin before he asked and opened her mouth and held it. He counted her teeth. She let her jaw close. She did not look at anyone. She had stood here twice before, maybe three times, and the room held no information for her anymore. While the hands worked over her, she yawned.
That was the knife. Not the hands. Her yawn. Max's lifted arm. Leo's turned hip. Three bodies in this room had already arrived where Daren was only now beginning to fall, and not one of them found it worth noticing.
Then it was his turn, and the assistant started at his head and worked down.
He knew every step before it landed. That was the worst of it. Gloved fingers hooked his cheek and dragged the lip back, counting, and he heard the module in his own voice, the one he had written: dental, full arch, note wear and absence. The hands pressed the glands under his ears, dug into the shoulders, rolled the muscle, testing the meat of him as he had tested the meat of other men a hundred times while a clipboard waited. A thumb ran up the arch of his foot and his leg kicked, the reflex firing clean. A number went onto the tablet.
His mind reached for the manual and the manual answered, smooth, clinical, exactly as he had taught it. Subject presents elevated rate, shallow respiration, motor tension in the jaw and hands. He was a line in his own report. He was the male.
The hands came up the inside of his thigh and cupped him, weighed him, rolled him between gloved fingers like a man checking fruit he has no intention of eating himself, and his cock filled. It filled against the cold and the buzzing light and the stranger who did not know his name, no warmth in it, no Viktor, nothing to surrender to, only the body doing what the body had been trained to do under handling. The shame went through him like cold water and did nothing to soften him. The cold made it worse. The indifference made it worse. The gloved hand gave him one more unhurried roll, feeling for the give of the thing, and he stood fully hard in front of a man pricing him and could not will it down, and the part of him still taking notes logged it before he could stop it, clean, in his own clipboard voice: responds under handling, no owner present.
"Good response." The dealer made a note. "Handles well."
Another man had come in off the floor. A buyer, browsing, heavy coat, the flat appraising eyes Daren had carried into a thousand rooms himself. He tipped his chin at Daren. "That one trained?"
"That one trains itself." The dealer set the pen down. "Former scout. Licensed, five years. It wrote the drill the rest of them get broken by. You don't condition this one. It conditions itself, holds itself to the standard, marks itself down when it slips. Cheapest body on the floor to keep."
That landed in him like a nail. For weeks the audit had run in him, the brain that would not stop grading him, and he had taken it for his own private torture, a wound nobody could see. The dealer had just said it out loud to a stranger and called it a discount. His worst week was a line on a sales sheet, and he had not known until now there was anything left in him to wound.
The dealer laid two fingers on the back of his neck. "Watch."
The hand was nothing. A stranger's hand, dry, indifferent. But it found the one spot, where the spine meets the skull, the spot Viktor had used every night, and Daren's body answered before he could get in front of it. Shoulders down. Breath long. The surrender fired clean, the way it fired for anyone now, because it had never been about Viktor. Viktor had only installed it. It answered to whoever's hand was on the spot.
"Present," the dealer said.
And his body, which had given the neck away without being asked, did not know this one. He had called for the pose a thousand times. Hands laced behind the head, feet to the shoulders, hips forward, chin down, eyes on the floor. He had docked men for a lazy spine, a wandering eye. He had never once stood in it himself, and the shape lived in reps he had never done. His chin came up when it should have stayed down. His eyes went to the buyer instead of the floor.
"You know the drill, boy." The dealer's voice went flat. "You wrote it." His hand started up to fix the chin.
He never had to. The grader in Daren had already caught the fault, faster than the hand. Lazy chin. Wandering eye. Dock it. He heard the grade in his own clipped register, held to his own standard, and his body moved to it. Chin down. Eyes to the drain. He fixed himself, clean, the correction he had wanted out of a hundred slaves and never once got, because the eye that had spent a career finding the fault could not stop now that the fault was him.
The dealer's hand settled back at his side. He looked at the buyer. "See? Tells itself. You'll never lift a finger."
And that was the thing Daren had spent ten years teaching and one second understanding. He had stood at the front of a class and called a slave a thinking animal, and told the room the thinking was the leash, the thing that lets an animal grade itself and punish itself and hold itself in line so the owner never has to. A slave responds to structure the way water responds to gravity. He had built that into other men. It had been in him the whole time. His own brain, running its endless audit, was not the last thing that belonged to him. It was the product. It was the feature. It was what made him cheap to keep, and his cock was still hard while he understood it.
"What's the number?" the buyer said.
The dealer named one. Low. The number you give for fresh former-free, a discount on a body that still half-remembers being a man. And Daren, holding the pose, eyes on the drain, priced himself, because he could not stop pricing anything. Twenty-eight, peak condition, no dental damage, minimal joint wear, former-owner premium on top. Forty thousand drahm of merchandise, easy. Viktor was letting him go for twelve, because twelve in hand today beat forty in a month Viktor did not have. Dumped cheap and fast to clear a ledger. And the scout who had run the market models could not even argue the markdown. Fresh former-free was a flight risk, a discipline risk. He would have stamped the same discount on a body exactly like his.
He had told himself a story the whole way down. Through the collar, the floor, the bed, the claiming, he had kept one wall standing: that this was between him and Viktor, a private thing, a war he was losing to a man who at least knew his name. That underneath all of it he was still a man among men. He had needed that wall.
The drain in the floor took it. There was no war here, no privacy, no name. A heavyset man pricing stock before close, a buyer pulling the same response off three different bodies and getting it three times, a tablet, a number. Gender did not matter. Five years licensed did not matter. The clipboard did not care that he had once held the clipboard. Meat was meat, and he had said exactly that, in exactly those words, to a classroom full of kids who were dying to hear it.
With Viktor it had felt like relief, a surrender he could almost call a choice, because the hand catching him was warm and it knew who he was. This was not that. This was processing. In the apartment the collar had felt like an answer to a question he had carried for ten years. Here, under the lights, the collar was a price tag.
The game is over. No apartment, no warmth, no fiction that this was still between them. I let myself fall because something soft was always there to catch me. Nobody is catching me here. This is the real thing now. The lifetime. The field, the bulk lot, whatever a man with twelve thousand drahm to spend wants from a body he can use hard. He had run those probabilities a thousand times on a thousand other bodies and they had been numbers. On his own body they were a future, and there was no warmth anywhere in it.
The dealer pushed his glasses up and looked, for the first time, at the three of them together. Then at Viktor. "Clean lot," he said. "I can move them."
Daren.
The scout in him, one last time.
He's selling me with the same calm he used on that man at the processing center. The warmth was never the bond. It was always the weapon. I studied the mechanism my entire life. I studied it in him. And I was right about everything.
And being right saved me nothing.
The Final Mirror
Viktor.
The dive bar. Same bartender. Same collar. Same neon, but it was evening now, and the evening neon was different from the afternoon neon. Less honest, more forgiving.
I had cash in my pocket. No slaves. No apartment. No truck. I'd sold that separately, to a dealer who didn't ask where it came from and didn't care. I had enough to clear the debts. Mine, Daren's, the CAPS fees, the lease. Just barely enough. Not empire money. Survival money.
I ordered a beer. Same stool. Same lean.
"How's your night?" I asked the bartender. Same tone. Same warmth. Same grin.
The bartender served the beer. He was a slave, one who had been read by a hundred men, who had curled against my chest in the rented room and made me coffee without charging, who had watched me evolve across four bartender mirrors from a kid with hope to a man with cash.
He did not make eye contact.
He poured. He set it down. He moved to the next customer. No lean. No joke. No warmth reflected back. The bartender who had once looked at me with desperate, starved gratitude now looked at the counter, at the taps, at anything that wasn't me.
He knew. They always knew. He had the instinct free men don't have. The instinct that lives in the collar, in the skin, in the body that has learned to read warmth like prey reads wind. It told him everything.
I tipped well. I finished my beer. I left the empty glass on the counter and walked out into the neon.
The Mask Drop
The math worked.
Daren's debts were real. Years of them, layered like sediment: the apartment mortgage, almost paid off but still dragging like a chain on a leg that's been running too long. The truck payments. A credit line he'd been rolling since his second year of scouting. The tab at the dive bar that turned out to be bigger than either of us knew. My own stack: CAPS course fees, licensing payments, six months of living expenses Daren had fronted me and that the law now classified as a debt to myself, which was the kind of circularity that made accountants drink.
He'd been drowning. That was the thing I didn't see then and saw clearly now. Drowning like an alcoholic, slowly, in public, asking for help with everything except the words "help me." Every generous gesture, every "I'll cover it, kid," every magnanimous wave of the hand. None of it was strength. That was a man signaling from inside a flooding room, knocking on the glass, hoping someone would notice the water level before he had to admit he couldn't swim. He was too proud to step out of his own shadow and say: I need attention. I need someone to see me. I need someone to take the weight. Too weak to ask. And the weak, in this city, in this world, in the particular arithmetic of men, the weak always end up at the bottom. Where slaves belong.
I sold Daren. I sold Max and Leo. I sold the apartment lease. Subletting rights, city market, there's always a buyer.
The numbers cleared. Not just cleared. They turned. I sat in a café with a calculator and a napkin and I added up the columns and when the total came out positive, I ordered a second coffee because I'd never been able to afford a second coffee in this city.
I moved.
Not far. Twenty minutes on foot, but a world. A quiet block with trees and coffee shops and the kind of bars where men drank wine instead of beer and argued about architecture instead of debt. The apartment was small. One bedroom, a kitchen that doubled as an office, a window that looked out onto a courtyard with a lemon tree someone had planted in a pot that was too small for it but the tree didn't care, it grew anyway, its branches pressing against the railing of the balcony above.
Cozy. Calm. The word I never knew I needed. The walls were thick. No bass leaking through, no strangers' lives seeping under the door. The neighborhood had nice guys and smiling slaves. Slaves who served coffee in boutique shops and got patted on the head by owners who read books about ethical property management and thought they were different from the men in the dive bar. They weren't. But they were quieter about it, and the slaves smiled because smiling slaves work in coffee shops and non-smiling slaves work in fields, and every slave in the world knows the math on that one.
I bought a truck. Used. Old. The engine knocked above sixty and the vinyl seats smelled like someone else's sweat, but it was mine. Not a bus, not Daren's leather-interiored tank with the armrest he used to rest his dominant hand on while explaining the market to me.
My truck. My key. My ignition.
I started scouting.
Solo. Independent. No mentor, no agency, no boss. Just me, the truck, the badge, and a cheap black notebook, names and addresses and the shorthand I was building for what men's eyes did when they talked about money.
The working capital was enough. Operating money. Enough to work the suburbs where the families lived, the ones with sons one missed payment from the collar. Fathers who shook my hand at the door and didn't understand what I was until the paperwork came out. Sons who looked at me the way I'd looked at the kid on the market platform, my age, my build, my jaw, and recognized the mirror.
I scouted them. Young and old. I found them in their kitchens and their offices and their living rooms, the places where free men go to feel safe before the knock comes. I processed the paperwork. I fitted the collars. I drove them to the auction houses in the back of my truck, and some of them cried and some of them were silent and some of them, the brave ones, the ones who'd known it was coming, sat up straight and looked out the window and said nothing, and those were the ones I remembered.
If I liked one, I didn't sell right away.
I know how that sounds. But here's the thing, and I'm only going to be honest about this once, so pay attention: a lot of good men passed through my hands. Working men. Men with thick, calloused palms and broad backs and the kind of dense, hairy bodies that came from years of labor, not from gyms. Men whose souls were clenched like the beast's jaw had been clenched on the market platform. Tight, guarded, sealed shut by years of carrying burdens they were never designed to carry alone.
They needed what the beast had needed. What the workshop slaves had needed. What Max and Leo had needed. What Daren, underneath everything, had needed.
Confession. Acceptance. The hands of someone who bothered.
I gave them that. I kept them for a week, sometimes two. I learned each body like I'd learned Leo's collar and Max's spine and the beast's chest hair. Slow, curious, patient. I used their bodies because I wanted to and because they needed to be used by someone who saw them, and the using was both selfish and generous and I never figured out where one ended and the other began because I don't think there's a line.
A calm, grateful animal always sells for more than a terrified one. This was not altruism, and it was not only that either. The same gesture, the same hand, the same weight, learned from the workshop and the bar and the shower and every slave who leaned into my touch because it was the only touch in his life that said you are useful, not merely used.
I raised their resale value by making them whole. And they thanked me for it, and I slept fine.
Daren taught me this.
Not the methodology. I had that before him. Not the CAPS manual. I barely passed the exam and forgot most of it within a year. What Daren taught me was the shape of the lock.
Here was a strong man. Built. Smart. Successful. A licensed scout with a five-year track record who looked at the world and saw victims and assets and never once considered that he might be either. So certain he was the predator that he handed me his slaves and his apartment and his psychology and his jaw and said practice on me, kid, I'm too big to fall.
Too careless. Too naive. Too convinced that understanding the mechanism was the same as being immune to it.
Daren didn't teach me how to scout. He taught me what men look like when they don't know they're already open. The strongest ones are the ones whose cages are already built. They've built them themselves, brick by brick, out of pride and performance and the exhausting daily theater of being in charge. All I had to do was walk in and show them the cage had a door, and the door opened inward, and on the other side was a room where someone else carried the weight.
I was never cruel with them. Not with Daren, not with the men who came after. Most slaves are owned by men who use the "animal" framing to vent, not to train, and the difference between those two things is the difference between a man who kicks a dog and a man who teaches it to sit.
I taught them to sit. And they loved me for it. And the love was real. And I sold them anyway.
He told me he was proud of me. Daren. Said it with a collar on, kneeling on the floor of the apartment that used to be his. The last morning before the dealer came.
And here's what nobody tells you about betrayal. You think it'll feel like a win. You think the scoreboard will say your name. But it doesn't feel like that. It feels like opening a door you always knew was there and finding out the room behind it is exactly the same size as the room you're already in.
I ruffled his hair anyway. And it worked. And I spent the next five years telling myself it was funny.
The truck's engine knocked as he turned onto the new street. The lemon tree was visible from the corner, a spot of green against the concrete. He parked. He sat a moment with the engine cooling and the key warm in his palm.
The stone behind his sternum. The one that had been collecting data since the first night, the bartender's gratitude, the workshop slave's trembling hands, Leo's pulse, Daren's surrender, the beast's offered throat. The stone was still there. Heavier now. Named.
He didn't say the name out loud.
He was eighteen years old. He had a truck, a badge, and a notebook with names in it. He knew what he was. And he was just getting started.
I'm writing this now.
The apartment is quiet. The lemon tree outside the window has outgrown its pot. The branches press against the railing above, leaves brushing the glass when the wind picks up. I can hear the espresso machine in the coffee shop downstairs, the murmur of pleasant people living their pleasant lives.
In the other room, a man is preparing his hole.
He's thirty-three. Construction. Muscled like construction men are. Thick neck, slabbed forearms, the particular density built by years of carrying real weight. He was sentenced six days ago. Debt cascade. The usual. Mortgage, medical, the wife's surgery that didn't work, the second mortgage to cover the first, the spiral. I scouted him myself. Knocked on his door on a Tuesday afternoon. He opened it in a t-shirt and work boots and looked at my badge and his face did the thing all their faces do: the two seconds where the brain refuses what the eyes already know.
He's in my bathroom now. Cleaning himself. Thorough, practiced. I showed him how the first night, and he took to it like these working men take to every new protocol: seriously, carefully, with the grim efficiency of a man resolved that if a thing must be done, it will be done well. He'll come out and kneel by the bed and I'll ask him about his day, and he'll confess. The debts, the ruined marriage, the moment he knew it was over, the shame that tastes like metal in the back of his throat. And the confessing will open him like it opens all of them, and then I'll mount him. And his enthusiasm will be real.
He doesn't enjoy being fucked, not yet, maybe not ever. What he enjoys is having rules. A cage. A predictable life. Someone who tells him what to do and means it and checks if he did it right. The surrender is the relief. The cock is just the seal on the contract.
I'll fuck him tonight. And he'll thank me. And the thanking will be real.
And then, on Friday, a guy will come over.
Free. Thirty-three. Owns the wine shop on the corner. The one with the chalk menu and the natural bottles and the dog that sleeps on the doormat. Muscled. Hairy. Built to my taste, broad chest, thick forearms, a body earned stocking his own shelves, not built in a gym. He has a gap in his front teeth and a laugh that fills a room and he fucks like free men fuck: loud, messy, biting, laughing, fighting for the top and not caring who wins.
He's complete without me. I'm complete without him. And that's why we fit. Two finished men who chose each other not from need but from want, which is the rarest currency in a city built on dependency.
He doesn't confess. He doesn't kneel. He doesn't need rules or cages or someone to carry the weight. He just comes over on Fridays with a bottle of something from his own shelf and we cook something bad and we fuck on the couch and sometimes on the floor and once on the kitchen counter, which was a mistake because the espresso machine fell and didn't break but could have.
He sees me. Not the scout, not the mechanism, not the man who makes construction workers cry and thank him for it. Just me. A guy. Who he likes. No expectations. No confessions. No filing things behind the sternum. He smiles at me and the smile is genuine and it asks for nothing and offers nothing except itself, and I like it. I like him. I like that he doesn't wait for me to carry anything, doesn't need me to be strong or cold or warm or strategic. He just likes me. And I like him back.
And maybe that's a boyfriend and maybe it's just Fridays and maybe one day we'll use a freshly enslaved construction worker together, or a young colt I've been breaking in, or whatever we agree on for mutual fun. Him on top, me watching, the three of us sweating in my small apartment with the lemon tree pressing against the window. And maybe that will be the closest thing to a life I'll ever build.
He cares about me. I care about him. Nobody's keeping score.
The stone behind the sternum is still there. It always will be. But on Fridays, it's lighter.
If this story hit right, leave a rating. It helps others find it.
If this one worked for you:
The Expert (Master & Slave, Cerebral, Conditioning). For years he ran intake at the market: stripped, priced, and collared other men. Now the debt has him, and he walks in knowing every step.
Roman's Collateral (Cerebral, Blackmail, Dad & Son). A young scout buys a collared boy, then finds out what the boy's father sold to put him there.
If you enjoyed this story, consider supporting the author on Patreon.
To get in touch with the author, send them an email.
