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The pain on his face is intense. Whatever the fuck is going on with the robot, he’s not making this up. Dude went a few hundred years without sex. I can’t imagine.

“Why?” I ask. “Some religious thing?”

Still looking down, he shakes his head.

“Come on…” I nudge his shin lightly with my foot. “You can’t drop a bomb like that and then not deliver the story.”

He lifts his head, but turns to the side, unwilling to look at me. And damned if I don’t feel sorry for the guy. Still, his story better be good if he wants to live, and certainly if he ever wants to get anywhere near Ember again.

“My Makers,” he says quietly and then stops.

“Makers?” I say. “As in more than one?”

He nods. “Yes. My Makers were mates. One male, one female.” He shakes his head. “To be honest, I’m not one hundred percent certain whether they both made me, or just one of them, but they told me that they did it together.”

“I’ve never heard of that.”

Zuben starts pulling on the hairs near his junk, tugging them out by the root. I want to stop him, but don’t.

“They enjoyed pain,” he says. “Feeling it, but especially dispensing it. To my knowledge, they never did anything sexual that didn’t involve intense pain.”

I wince. “And they hurt you?”

“That, my pirate friend—” he turns toward me “—is the understatement of the millennia.”

“Shit. I’m sorry. That sucks.” And I’m shocked to learn that the robot and I might actually have something in common.

“I was a young man when they captured me.” Zuben looks past me, like he’s seeing something in the distance. “I was so young that, while I knew how to give my own body pleasure, I had not yet been with a woman and certainly not with a man.”

My belly roils as I recognize how this part of his story parallels my own.

“My training began long before they turned me,” he continues, his face blank. “They would bind me into uncomfortable positions and then fuck me. Sometimes using his cock, sometimes using large phalluses fashioned from marble or rough stone.” He shudders.

“And when I’d bled too much, or started to pass out, they would feed me their blood, and that, of course, made me crave more sex, which they would then refuse to offer without first inflicting more pain.”

“That’s fucked up.” I shake my head. “I thoughtI’dbeen through a lot of shit.”

The look in his eyes is haunting. “And I have onlybegunto describe the things that they did to me.”

I wince.

He turns away. “I will spare you the details. But that pattern went on for a very long time. Perhaps years. I am honestly not certain. And then eventually they forced me to fuck them too. Both of them. They would fill me with their blood until I was rock hard and desperate, and then use my cock for their pleasure.

“I was no match for their vampiric strength, and if I resisted, one of them would control my body, pushing on my hips, using my phallus to fuck each other. I couldn’t stop if I wanted to—which soon, I admit, I didn’t want to—and also…” He looks down.

“Also what?” I ask softly.

“While they fucked me, or had me fuck them, they would mete out pain. Whips, barbs, contraptions around my balls and throat, spikes beneath my feet.”

“While you were still human?”

He nods.

“But your skin… You’re fucking flawless.”

He raises his gaze and the pain there stabs me. “Each time they hurt me, they’d force fed me their blood. They’d rub my wounds with vampire blood so I’d heal from any torture they inflicted.”

I suck in a deep breath. That’s the opposite of my captors. Mine liked seeing the scarred evidence of the pain they inflicted.