Punishment Room: 9. Bending, Mending, and Claiming

The applause from my initiation still rang in my ears days later, phantom echoes I carried back into the noise of ordinary life. At work, my colleagues saw only distraction: a woman who lost her train of thought mid-sentence, who lingered too long staring out the window. They did not know that every flicker of memory—leather restraints, masked eyes, Corin’s voice claiming me—still pulsed in my veins like a second heartbeat.

But the Echelon didn’t allow initiates to bask in triumph for long. The note came two nights later, slipped beneath my apartment door.

What is broken can be remade. Come prepared.

The words chilled me. I had thought I was already remade. What else did they demand?

***

The welts on my back faded into pale reminders over the next few days, but their echo lingered in my body like a secret chord. Each brush of clothing against my skin rekindled memory—not of pain, but of surrender, of the way Corin had broken me and pieced me together ag