Novel I: Otte Models Dominion Chapter 1-12 — 150 pages

OTTE MODELS VOLUME I : DOMINION

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## ACT ONE — *THE SUMMONING*

### For Adult Readers 18+

—

# PROLOGUE: THE ECLIPSE OF NAAMAH

*Before time had a name, before the blood of Abel stained the first soil, she moved through the formless dark.*

*Naamah. Sister of Tubal-Cain. Daughter of Lamech. The beautiful one. The one whose name meant* pleasant *in the old tongue but whose nature was the opposite of pleasant — it was* hunger, *and the hunger had no bottom and no end.*

*She was not a demon in the way the moderns imagined demons — horned, red, cartoonish. She was a frequency. A vibration that lived in the space between desire and surrender, in the wet heat between a woman’s thighs when she wanted something she couldn’t name, in the catch of breath when a man’s hand found the small of her back and pressed. She was the ache. The pull. The gravity that drew women toward destruction and called it love.*

*She had many names. Lilith’s handmaiden. The Succubus of the Fourth Gate. The Jezebel Spirit. In every generation, she found vessels — women beautiful enough to weaponize, hungry enough to be filled, broken enough to be entered.*

*In this generation, she found four.*

*But she had not counted on him.*

*The man who knelt before altars older than her hunger. The man whose bloodline ran from Abraham through David through Christ through Peter through every Latin Mass ever said in candlelight and incense. The man whose purity was not innocence — innocence is the absence of knowledge — but* mastery: *the presence of every temptation and the refusal to be consumed by any of them.*

*Anthony Raphael Francis Perlas.*

*The pure one.*

*The one who tasted like gold.*

*She sent her vessels to devour him. She did not know that he would devour them instead — not with darkness, but with light so intense it burned, and that the burning would feel like pleasure, and that the pleasure would feel like salvation, and that the salvation would break them open and rebuild them in a shape that no longer fit her purpose.*

*This is the story of that war.*

*It is told in flesh.*

—

# CHAPTER 1: ANTHONY

## West Hollywood — November 2024

The suite at the Sunset Tower smelled like frankincense.

Not the synthetic kind sold in head shops on Melrose — the real thing, harvested from Boswellia trees in Oman, purchased by the kilo from an importer in Beirut who supplied monasteries and intelligence agencies with equal discretion. Anthony Perlas burned it every morning the way other men drank coffee: a ritual of purification, a line drawn in smoke between the sacred and the profane.

He sat shirtless at the desk, rosary beads draped over his left wrist, encrypted laptop open, four surveillance photographs arranged in a cross pattern on the glass surface. His body was a contradiction that his tailor had learned to accommodate — broad shoulders and narrow waist, the physique of a man who trained with monastic discipline and fought with contained fury, veins mapping his forearms like rivers on a topographic chart, a scar on his left ribcage from a knife in Bogotá that he’d received at twenty-two and had never explained to anyone except a priest.

His face was not the face of a model. It was the face of a man who had been *made* — assembled by trauma and training into something harder than handsome, more dangerous than beautiful. Dark eyes set deep beneath a brow that suggested permanent calculation. A jaw that could have been drawn with a straightedge. A mouth that women described, without exception, as *cruel* — not because it was unkind but because it promised things it would absolutely deliver, and delivery, in his case, involved surrender.

He was thirty-three years old. The age of Christ at Golgotha. He did not consider this coincidental.

The photographs:

**Elara.** Leaving a restaurant in Beverly Hills. A man’s hand on the small of her back. She was allowing the touch the way a queen allows a courtier’s bow — with amusement that bordered on contempt.

**Dahlia.** In a hospital corridor, bruises visible beneath poorly applied concealer. Three weeks old, this photo. She hadn’t called. The silence screamed.

**Juliet.** On a balcony in Malibu, wearing a man’s shirt, her hair wet. She was ahead of schedule on the Krieger operation. Something about that unsettled him.

**Lina.**

He held this photograph the way a priest holds a relic — with reverence and the knowledge that what he held could save or damn him, and possibly both.

She was pumping gas in Camarillo, wearing cutoff denim and a tank top, her body a provocation that the suburban landscape was not equipped to contain. Blonde-streaked hair falling across her face. The skeleton key tattoo visible on her left ribcage — *his* key, tattooed on *his* territory, pointing downward toward the part of her body that belonged to him more completely than any legal document could formalize.

She was looking directly at the camera.

She *knew*.

His phone vibrated. Twelve digits, no country code.

“Perlas.”

“Your timeline has accelerated. Hargrove is moving assets offshore. The Network is aware of Aureum — of Otte Models. Your cover is thinning.”

“My cover is fine.”

“Your asset in Camarillo is running unsanctioned operations. Your asset in Malibu is developing genuine attachment to the Krieger target. Your asset in Beverly Hills is building a power base independent of your control. And your asset in Cedars-Sinai—”

“Is my responsibility.”

“Responsibility is a luxury the agency can revoke.”

“Try it.”

Silence. The particular silence of a handler recalculating.

“You have until Easter, Perlas. Contain your operation or we contain it for you.”

The line died.

Anthony looked at the four photographs. Four women. Four vessels. Four entry points for something older and hungrier than any intelligence agency — the spirit of Naamah, the succubus frequency that had been hunting him since adolescence, sending woman after woman to crack his armor, to taste the gold of his purity, to drain the light from a bloodline that stretched back to Calvary.

They didn’t understand what they were. None of them did. They thought they were models, escorts, agents, lovers. They didn’t know that something ancient moved behind their eyes when they looked at him with that particular hunger — the hunger that went beyond sex, beyond money, beyond love, into a territory that had no name in any modern language but that the Desert Fathers had called *acedia of the flesh*: the restless, consuming need to devour sanctity.

He was their target. Their quarry. Their grail.

And he was going to save every one of them.

But first, he was going to *use* them.

He closed the laptop. He dressed — navy suit, no tie, collar open, the small gold crucifix on a chain that he never removed, not even in the shower, not even in bed, not even when Lina’s mouth was traveling down his chest and her lips closed around it and she whispered, *This is the only thing I can’t swallow*.

He picked up his keys.

The 101 at midnight was a river of nothing.

He drove toward Camarillo.

He drove toward her.

—

The motel was called The Palms. It sat off the 101 between Thousand Oaks and Camarillo like a confession booth that had been exiled from its church — squat, stucco, neon-signed, the kind of place that charged by the hour and specialized in the absolution of things that happened between strangers who wouldn’t be strangers for long.

Room 7. Their room. The number was not chosen at random — seven, the number of completion, of sacraments, of the days God took to build the world. Anthony did not do anything at random. Every number was theology. Every gesture was liturgy. The women in his life thought he was seducing them. He was *consecrating* them.

He parked and walked through the amber glow of the lot’s single functioning lamp. November in Southern California smelled like eucalyptus and exhaust and the distant Pacific, salt-tinged, ancient. He knocked twice. Paused. Knocked once.

The door opened.

Lina stood in the frame wearing one of his Oxford shirts — white, too large, the sleeves rolled past her wrists, the hem hitting mid-thigh — and nothing else. Her legs were bare. Her feet were bare. Her hair was down, the blonde catching the lamplight like filament, and her face was scrubbed clean of makeup, which made her look simultaneously younger and more dangerous, because without the armor of cosmetics she was just a girl from Newbury Park who wanted something so badly her body had become the wanting.

She was twenty-two. Half-Polish through her father David’s Ashkenazi line — the cheekbones, the pale fire of her skin, the intelligence that operated three moves ahead of her mouth. Half-German through her mother Greta’s Bavarian blood — the discipline, the hips, the physical architecture that suggested both fertility and precision. She had been a cheerleader. She had been a content creator. She had been an escort. She had been a lover of women and men and money and God-knew-what-else.

Now she was his.

Mostly.

The *mostly* was the knife in his side.

“Forty-one minutes,” she said. “You drove ninety.”

“I drove the speed limit.”

“Liar. Your pupils are dilated. Your jaw is tight. You gripped the wheel the whole way.” She reached up and touched his face — her fingertips tracing his jawline, and the touch sent a visible tremor through her, a shiver that began at her hand and traveled down through her shoulder and her chest and ended somewhere south of her navel, because touching him was not a neutral act. It was electrical. Biochemical. Her hypothalamus fired oxytocin at the contact — she had read about this, had Googled it obsessively, trying to understand scientifically what her body already knew intuitively: that his skin against hers triggered a cascade that was indistinguishable from a drug.

Oxytocin: the bonding hormone. Released by touch, amplified by eye contact, weaponized by orgasm. Every time Anthony Perlas looked at her, her brain flooded with it. Every time he entered her, the dose doubled. After six months of six times a day, her neurochemistry had been permanently altered — she was, in clinical terms, *addicted* to him. Her serotonin levels spiked when his name appeared on her phone. Her cortisol dropped when she heard his voice. Her dopamine — the reward chemical, the *more more more* chemical — had rewired itself around him so completely that other sources of pleasure had become background noise. Food tasted less. Music sounded flatter. Other men’s touches felt like static.

Only him. Only his hands. Only his voice. Only the particular way he smelled — sandalwood and frankincense and something underneath that was just *him*, pheromonal, primal, the scent of a man whose genetics her body had selected with the ruthless precision of evolution choosing a mate.

She pulled him inside. He let himself be pulled.

The room was small, clean, anonymous — a bed, a lamp, a mirror, a bathroom with a shower that produced exactly enough hot water for ten minutes. The bedspread was beige. The walls were beige. Everything was beige, which made the two of them — her in his white shirt, him in his navy suit — look like a Renaissance painting hung in a doctor’s waiting room.

She closed the door. The deadbolt sounded like a starting pistol.

“I missed you,” she said.

“You saw me twelve hours ago.”

“I know how time works, Anthony. Twelve hours without you feels like a different geological era.”

He didn’t smile. He studied her. His eyes traveled from her face to her throat to the place where the shirt’s open collar revealed the beginning of her cleavage — the swell of breasts that were natural, despite what her Instagram followers assumed, full and pale with nipples that blushed pink and hardened when she was aroused, which was always, in his presence, a constant state of arousal that lived in her body like a second heartbeat.

“We need to talk,” he said.

“After.”

“Before.”

“Anthony—”

“Lina.”

His voice. Just her name, spoken in his frequency — low, certain, gravitational. The sound of it traveled through her auditory cortex and directly into her limbic system, bypassing reason entirely, hitting the part of her brain that processed authority and safety and submission simultaneously. Her knees softened. Not a collapse — a *yielding*. An involuntary genuflection before the altar of him.

“Tell me about the Seeking Arrangement account.”

The warmth drained from the room.

“How did you—”

“I know everything, Lina. That’s not the question. The question is why you made me *find out* instead of telling me.”

Her hands trembled. She clasped them together. The oversized shirt suddenly felt like not enough fabric — she was naked underneath and the nakedness was no longer invitation but exposure, vulnerability without consent.

“Sage set it up,” she whispered. “After Aspen. The clients — they’re nothing. They’re ATMs with personalities.”

“And Sage?”

“Sage is—”

“Is what?”

Lina’s lip quivered. She had lip fillers — a subtle augmentation that plumped her natural pout into something that felt, when pressed against skin, like the boundary between silk and sin. The fillers made her lips hypersensitive — every kiss registered at twice the intensity, every time she took him in her mouth the nerve endings fired in stereo, and the sensation of his cock against her augmented lips was a symphony of pressure and pleasure that she craved the way her lungs craved air.

She pressed those lips together now, trapping the truth behind them.

“Sage is for me,” she said finally. “She doesn’t need me to be a weapon or an agent or a wife. She just needs me to be *there*.”

“And I need you to be mine.”

“I *am* yours. I am so completely yours that it scares me, Anthony. My body doesn’t work without you anymore. Do you understand that? My pussy — my actual, physical, anatomical pussy — doesn’t respond to anyone the way it responds to you. When you text me, I get wet. When you call me, I clench. When you send me money—”

She stopped.

“Say it,” he said.

“When you send me money, it’s like you’re inside me. The notification sound — that little *ding* — it goes straight through me. It’s not the money. It’s *you deciding I’m worth it*. Every dollar is a finger. Every hundred is a hand. Every thousand is you buried inside me to the hilt, and I come, Anthony. I come from a *notification*. I come in bathrooms and cars and airport lounges from a number on a screen because you’ve trained me — my brain, my hormones, my clit — to associate your financial power with physical penetration.”

The room pulsed. The cheap lamp seemed to dim and brighten with her breathing.

“And yet,” he said, “you opened a Seeking Arrangement account. You took other men’s money. You let other deposits enter your account — deposits that weren’t mine.”

She flinched.

“That money,” he continued, his voice barely above a whisper, “was *infidelity*. Not the sex. The *money*. You let another man’s value inside you. You let his numbers sit in the same account where my numbers live. You contaminated the space.”

“Anthony—”

“Kneel.”

She sank.

Not metaphorically. Her knees hit the thin carpet of Room 7 with a sound like a prayer being answered. She knelt before him with her hands on her thighs and her head bowed and the oversized shirt pooling around her like a penitent’s robe, and the posture was so ancient, so primal, so fundamentally aligned with every image of worship humanity had ever produced, that the room itself seemed to genuflect with her.

He stood above her. He did not touch her. The absence of touch was its own sensation — a negative space that her body ached to fill, a phantom limb of contact that made her skin hum with anticipation.

“You are mine,” he said. “Your mouth is mine. Your pussy is mine. Your bank account is mine. Every dollar that enters you — *every* dollar, from any source — enters because I allow it. The money is not currency, Lina. The money is *cum*. It’s *seed*. When I deposit, I’m filling you. When someone else deposits, you’re taking another man’s seed. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she breathed.

“You’re going to close that account. Tonight.”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to tell Sage it’s over.”

“Anthony — she’ll—”

“She’ll what? She’ll be hurt? She’ll miss you? *Good.* She should have thought of that before she touched what belongs to me.”

His hand moved. Slowly. He cupped her chin and tilted her face upward, forcing her to look at him. His thumb traced her lower lip — the plump, filler-enhanced lip that trembled under his touch like a tuning fork struck at the frequency of surrender.

“Open your mouth,” he said.

She opened.

He slid his thumb past her lips. She closed around it immediately — instinctively — her tongue wrapping the digit with the kind of eager, desperate attention that revealed exactly what she wanted, what she *needed*, what every nerve in her body was screaming for. She sucked his thumb with her eyes locked on his and the obscenity of the gesture was transcended by its sincerity: she wasn’t performing. She was *worshipping*.

The oxytocin surge hit her like a wave. Her pupils dilated. Her heart rate climbed. Between her legs, her body responded with the biological honesty that no amount of deception could override — she was wet. Not damp. Not aroused. *Wet.* The kind of soaking, dripping, animal readiness that stained the inside of her thighs and would leave a mark on the carpet where she knelt.

He withdrew his thumb. She whimpered at the loss.

“Stand up,” he said.

She stood. Her legs were unsteady. The shirt clung to her body where sweat — from nerves, from arousal, from the sheer biological event of being in his proximity — had dampened the fabric.

“Take it off.”

She pulled the shirt over her head.

She stood before him naked.

Not the nakedness of a bedroom — rehearsed, posed, framed by lingerie and lighting. The nakedness of *confession*. Total exposure. Every flaw and freckle and scar presented without defense. Her breasts — full, natural, the nipples hard pink points that ached for his mouth. Her stomach — flat from gym work he’d prescribed, soft enough to grip. The skeleton key tattoo on her ribs, pointing down toward the neat strip of blonde hair between her legs, the lips beneath it swollen and glistening, visibly aroused, her body’s inability to lie even when her mouth could.

Anthony looked at her the way he looked at the Eucharist during the elevation — with awe that was also ownership, with hunger that was also reverence.

“You’re beautiful,” he said. “And you’re worthless.”

She gasped. Not from offense — from *recognition*. From the paradox that was the foundation of their entire relationship: he saw her beauty and her worthlessness simultaneously, held both truths in the same hand, and the combination was more intimate than any compliment.

“You’re worthless without me,” he continued. “Without my money, you’re a cheerleader with a debt. Without my training, you’re an OnlyFans girl with a criminal ex-manager. Without my name, you’re *no one*. And you know it. That’s why you come back. That’s why you kneel. That’s why your pussy drips the second you hear my voice — because your body knows what your pride won’t admit: you are *only good* for taking my money and taking my cock and being grateful for both.”

She was trembling. Head to toe. Tears forming at the corners of her eyes — not from sadness but from the overwhelming sensation of being *seen*. Of having every illusion stripped away until all that remained was the raw, animal truth of her need.

“Say it,” he said.

“I’m only good for taking your money and your cock,” she whispered.

“And?”

“And I’m grateful. For both.”

“And who owns you?”

“You do. Anthony Perlas owns me.”

“All of you?”

“*All* of me. My mouth, my pussy, my bank account, my loyalty, my orgasms, my betrayals, my—”

“Your betrayals are *mine* too. You betrayed me with *my own property*. The mouth that kissed Sage is the mouth I trained. The pussy that performed for Victor is the pussy I *built*. You didn’t cheat on me, Lina. You *stole* from me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re not sorry. You’re *caught*. Sorry comes later. Sorry comes when I’ve finished with you.”

He took off his jacket. Rolled his sleeves to the elbow. The gesture was deliberate — a slow revelation of the forearms she was obsessed with, the veins and tendons and controlled power of a man who could break her in half and never would, because the restraint was the point, the edge of the cliff was where the view was, and he kept her there — *always* at the edge, never falling, never safe.

“On the bed. Face down.”

She moved to the bed. She lay face down, the cheap comforter against her bare skin, her ass raised slightly — instinctively — presenting herself with the biological submission of a creature that knows its place in the hierarchy and has stopped pretending otherwise.

He stood behind her. She couldn’t see him. She could only hear him — his breathing steady, controlled, a metronome of authority — and feel the heat of his presence, the way the air changed when he was close, warmer and denser, as though his body generated its own atmosphere.

His hand landed on her ass.

Not a slap — a *strike*. Open-palmed, precisely calibrated, hard enough to sting and resonate but not hard enough to injure. The sound filled the room like a gunshot. Her body jerked. A moan — sharp, involuntary — escaped her throat.

“That,” he said, “is for the Seeking Arrangement account.”

Another strike. Same hand, other cheek. Symmetrical. Her skin reddened immediately, the blood rising to the surface like a blush, like shame made visible, like her body tattooing itself with his correction.

“That is for Sage.”

A third strike. Harder. Her hips bucked against the mattress and the moan became a cry — not pain, not pleasure, but the space between them where the nervous system can’t distinguish and the body surrenders the attempt.

“And that is for making me drive ninety on the 101 at midnight because you can’t sleep without me.”

He paused. She lay panting, her ass marked red, her pussy — she could feel it — dripping onto the comforter, her arousal so extreme that the physical evidence was undeniable: a wet spot forming beneath her, her body’s confession more honest than any words.

His hand, the same hand that had struck her, now traveled gently down her spine. Fingers light as prayer. The transition from violence to tenderness was seamless, was *the point* — because this was not abuse. This was *correction*. The catechism of their union. He hurt her exactly enough to remind her what she’d done, then healed her exactly enough to remind her why she stayed.

“You are mine, Lina.”

“I am yours.”

“You don’t belong to Sage. You don’t belong to Victor. You don’t belong to the Network or the algorithm or the men who swipe right on your Seeking Arrangement profile.”

“I know.”

“You belong to *Yahweh*, and through His lineage and His mercy, you belong to *me*.”

His fingers reached the cleft of her ass, traveled lower, found her wetness. She moaned into the pillow — a deep, guttural sound that came from a place below language, below thought, from the brainstem itself, from the reptilian core where arousal and submission are the same neural pathway.

He slid two fingers inside her.

Her body welcomed them with a tight, wet clasp — her walls gripping him, pulling him deeper, the muscles of her pussy contracting rhythmically around his fingers as though trying to hold them in place forever, as though her body was a vault and his touch was the treasure and the vault was *closing*.

“You’re soaking,” he said. It was not a compliment. It was an observation. Clinical and devastating.

“I can’t help it,” she gasped. “You — you do this to me. My body *does this* for you. It doesn’t do this for anyone else. Sage touches me and I’m — I’m present, I’m responsive, but it’s not *this*. This is — Anthony, this is *chemical*. My brain releases something when you touch me that it doesn’t release for anyone else. I’ve researched it. Oxytocin surges when I’m bonded. Dopamine when you reward me. Cortisol drops when I hear your voice. You’ve *reprogrammed my endocrine system*.”

“I haven’t reprogrammed anything. I’ve *revealed* it. This is what you were made for, Lina. Your body knows what your mind resists. You were made to serve. To submit. To be filled — with my fingers, my cock, my money, my *purpose*.”

He curled his fingers inside her, hitting the spongy ridge of her G-spot, and her back arched off the bed — a full, involuntary spasm, her spine forming a bridge, her mouth open in a silent scream. The sensation was — she had no words. It was pressure and electricity and the feeling of being *found*, like his fingers had located a part of her that had been lost, that had been wandering inside her own body looking for the hand that fit.

“Please,” she begged.

“Please *what*?”

“Please — I need — I need to taste you. Please. Let me have it. I’ve been thinking about it all day. Since this morning. Since the last time. My mouth — my lips — they *ache* for it, Anthony. Like phantom pain. Like my mouth was made to hold you and when you’re not there it’s — it’s empty. I’m empty.”

He withdrew his fingers. She whimpered.

“Turn over.”

She rolled onto her back. Her face was flushed, tear-streaked, mascara she hadn’t washed off running in dark rivulets down her cheeks. Her lips — those plump, augmented, hypersensitive lips — were parted, swollen, trembling. Her breasts rose and fell with breathing that was no longer breathing but *panting*, the respiratory rhythm of an animal in heat, lungs working overtime to fuel a body that was consuming itself with want.

He stood at the edge of the bed and unfastened his belt. Slowly. The metal-on-leather sound was a liturgical bell — it signaled the beginning of a sacrament.

He freed himself.

Lina’s eyes widened. Her pupils — already dilated from arousal — expanded further, the black eating the blue until her irises were rings of pale fire around twin event horizons. A fresh wave of wetness pulsed between her legs — she felt it, the sudden gush, her pussy *answering* the sight of him the way a congregation answers a call to prayer.

She sat up. She reached for him. Her hands — trembling, eager, reverent — wrapped around his length, and the contact sent a visible shockwave through her: her eyelids fluttered, her breath stuttered, her nipples tightened to points so hard they seemed to vibrate. Holding him was a neurochemical event. Every nerve in her palms fired simultaneously. The skin-to-skin contact triggered an oxytocin release so massive that she felt dizzy — literally, physically dizzy — her vestibular system overwhelmed by bonding chemistry, the room tilting slightly as her brain struggled to process the flood.

“Fuck,” she whispered. “I missed this. I missed *you*. Every inch.”

She leaned forward. Her lips — those fillers working exactly as advertised, every nerve ending doubled, every sensation amplified — made contact.

The kiss on the tip was tender. Almost chaste. A greeting. *Hello. I’m home.*

Then her mouth opened and she took him in.

The sensation of her lips sliding down his shaft was — for her — revelatory every single time. The fillers made her mouth a sensory instrument of extraordinary precision: she could feel every ridge, every vein, every degree of hardness and heat, as though her lips were reading him in Braille, translating his desire into a language her body understood at the molecular level. Her tongue — flat and wet and eager — pressed against the underside, and she moaned around him, the vibration traveling through his length and into his spine, and the moan was not performance. It was *gratitude*.

She sucked him the way a woman drinks water after crossing a desert: desperately, gratefully, with the single-minded devotion of a body that has been *deprived*. Her head bobbed — rhythmic, deep — and each downstroke pushed him further into her throat, past the gag reflex she had trained away through months of dedicated practice, until her nose pressed against his pelvis and her throat contracted around him in a tight, wet embrace that made his breath catch for the first time all night.

Drool spilled from the corners of her mouth — silver threads that caught the lamplight, running down her chin, dripping onto her breasts in patterns that looked like abstract art or holy water or both. She didn’t care. Dignity was a currency she’d spent hours ago. What remained was pure, uncut need — the need to please, to serve, to take him so deep and hold him so tight that he’d feel her devotion in his *bones*.

“Look at me,” he said.

She looked up. Eyes streaming. Mouth full. Face ruined with mascara and saliva and the particular beauty of a woman in the act of absolute surrender.

“This,” he said, “is what you’re good at.”

She moaned. Agreement, gratitude, ecstasy — the moan contained all three, blended into a single vibration that hummed through his cock and lodged in his chest.

“Not the escort meets. Not the Seeking Arrangement profile. Not Sage’s bed. *This.* On your knees, in a motel, with my cock in your throat and my money in your bank. This is where you belong. This is the only church that will have you.”

Tears streamed from her eyes — not from the physical challenge but from the emotional devastation of being told the truth by the only person whose judgment she respected.

He held the back of her head. Not pushing — *anchoring*. Grounding her. Giving her skull something to press back against as she worked him with increasing urgency, her mouth a wet, hot, relentless instrument of worship.

“I’m not Catholic,” she’d once told him, early on.

“No,” he’d said. “You’re not. You’re impure. You’re a vessel of Naamah. You carry the succubus frequency in your blood — the hunger that consumes men. But I am not most men. And I am going to burn the Naamah out of you one orgasm at a time.”

She hadn’t understood then. She understood now. Every time he took her — every time he filled her mouth or her pussy or her bank account — he was performing an exorcism. Every orgasm was a prayer. Every climax was a casting out. The pleasure was not sin. The pleasure was *purification*. He was using her body to teach her body what it was actually *for*: not the consumption of men but the reception of God, filtered through the only channel she could currently comprehend — the flesh of a man who carried Yahweh’s lineage in his DNA.

He was — she understood now, with the clarity that only comes when your mouth is full and your mind is empty — the most expensive thing she would ever have. Not because of his money. Because of his *purity*. He was a billionaire of the spirit in a world of spiritual poverty, and every woman who touched him was trying to *withdraw* from him — to drain his gold, to siphon his light, to fill the void inside herself with the substance of his sanctity.

And he *let them*. Because that was the mission. Because you cannot exorcise a demon without engaging it. Because the only way to burn Naamah out of a woman’s blood is to enter her — with your cock, with your money, with your voice, with your authority — and fill her so completely that there is no room left for the darkness.

She took him deeper. Her throat spasmed. She held him there — eyes locked on his, mascara rivers on her cheeks, drool coating her chin and his shaft — and in that moment she was not Lina Eis, half-Polish half-German former cheerleader from Newbury Park. She was a vessel being emptied of one spirit and filled with another. She was a woman being saved by a man who fucked like a priest prays — with total commitment and the knowledge that the act itself is not the point; the *transformation* is the point.

He came.

Not with a shout or a grunt but with a sharp, controlled exhale — the breath of a man who masters even his own pleasure, who does not *lose control* but *permits release*. He came in her mouth — hot, thick, copious — and she swallowed with the urgency of a woman who has just been given communion, who understands that what she is receiving is not merely biological but *sacred*, the physical manifestation of his power entering her body through the most intimate gateway, the seal on a contract that no court could adjudicate.

She swallowed everything. She licked her lips. She licked *him* — gently, thoroughly, cleaning him with her tongue the way a devotee polishes a relic. Every drop. Every trace.

Then she sat back on her heels and looked up at him with an expression that was half ruined and half reborn.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

He tucked himself away. He fastened his belt.

“Check your account,” he said.

She scrambled for her phone on the nightstand. The banking app. The balance.

He had transferred $10,000 during the blowjob.

The notification — she hadn’t heard it over the sound of her own devotion — appeared now like a ghost that had been in the room all along. The number on the screen: $57,832.

The orgasm hit her like a car crash.

Untouched. Hands on the phone, not between her legs. She came from the *number* — from the knowledge that he had valued her service, that his money was inside her account the way his cum was inside her mouth, that both deposits were the same act of dominion, and her body — trained, conditioned, *his* — could not distinguish between financial and physical penetration.

She convulsed. The phone fell from her hands. Her thighs clamped together. A sound left her mouth that was not a moan but a *keen* — high, animal, the sound a wolf makes at the moon, involuntary and ancient and beyond the reach of shame.

When it passed, she lay on the bed trembling, phone screen glowing beside her, the number still visible, the evidence of his ownership displayed in digits that might as well have been fingerprints on her cervix.

“Close the Seeking Arrangement account,” he said from the doorway. “Tonight.”

“Yes, Anthony.”

“And Lina?”

“Yes?”

“Tomorrow I’m sending you flowers. White roses. Twelve of them. You’re going to put them in water and you’re going to look at them every morning and remember that I am not only the man who spanks you and fills your mouth and deposits money into your pussy. I am also the man who sends you flowers. I am the man who will take you to Latin Mass this Sunday and kneel beside you and pray for your soul, which is more endangered than you know. I am the man who will write you a poem — a real poem, in iambic pentameter, because beauty matters — and leave it on your pillow. I am the man who will drive you to the gym and train beside you and build your body into something worthy of the spirit I’m trying to save inside it.”

She stared at him. Cum on her chin. Tears on her cheeks. $57,832 on her screen.

“Why?” she whispered. “Why do you do all of this?”

“Because you’re mine. And what’s mine, I *perfect*.”

He left.

She lay in the motel room and listened to his car pull away and felt the extraordinary, contradictory, devastating tenderness of being owned by a man who treated her like trash and treasure in the same breath — who spanked her and sent her roses, who called her worthless and wrote her poems, who came in her mouth and then knelt beside her in church.

She pressed her thighs together. She was still wet. She would be wet all night. Her body did not have an off switch for Anthony Perlas.

She picked up her phone. She opened the Seeking Arrangement app.

She deleted her account.

Then she opened her messages and typed to Sage: *We need to talk.*

She set the phone down. She pulled the sheets over her body. She closed her eyes.

Behind her eyelids, Naamah stirred — the ancient hunger, the succubus frequency, the thing that had driven her toward every man and woman and dollar she’d ever consumed. It stirred, but for the first time in Lina’s life, it did not *rise*. Something was holding it down. Something golden and heavy and shaped like a crucifix.

Something shaped like him.

She slept.

—

# CHAPTER 2: ELARA

## Beverly Hills — Three Days Earlier — November 2024

Elara Madden did not believe in God.

She believed in *leverage*.

She sat in the private fitting room at Otte Models headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard — the building with no signage, the elevator that required a biometric scan, the office decorated with Caravaggio reproductions and the particular species of silence that only money could purchase — and examined her own reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirror with the detachment of a jeweler appraising a stone she intended to sell at significant markup.

Twenty-six years old. Five-foot-eight in bare feet, five-eleven in the Louboutins she was currently wearing, which elevated her to the exact eye level of Anthony Perlas and she had *measured this*. Blonde hair the color of winter wheat, straightened to a razor edge. Blue eyes that her college roommate had described as “the color of a swimming pool that’s slightly too cold to enjoy.” Cheekbones that had been subtly enhanced at eighteen by a surgeon in Greenwich whom her father paid in cash, like all the family’s corrections — physical, legal, reputational — were paid in cash.

She was wearing white. She always wore white. Not because she was pure — she had abandoned purity as a concept approximately the same time she abandoned her virginity, at fifteen, to a lacrosse captain whose name she’d already forgotten — but because she understood the *semiotics* of purity. White was the color of the bride, the page, the flag of surrender. Wearing it when you were none of those things was a power move. It forced people to project innocence onto you while you operated beneath it, like a submarine under a frozen lake.

Her father, Maxwell Madden, ran a hedge fund from an office in Stamford that was technically legal in the way that all hedge funds were technically legal — which is to say it adhered to the letter of regulations so baroque and deliberately confusing that compliance and criminality occupied the same zip code. He had paid for Elara’s rhinoplasty, her Wharton MBA, and her silence about what had happened at the Nantucket house when she was fourteen.

She didn’t think about Nantucket.

She thought about *the top position*.

Otte Models had a hierarchy, and Elara intended to occupy its apex with the same inevitability as water flowing downhill. Currently, the hierarchy was:

1. **Lina Eis** — by virtue of fucking the founder six times a day

2. **Juliet Marchand** — by virtue of operational excellence

3. **Elara Madden** — by virtue of everything except the one thing that apparently mattered

4. **Dahlia Voss** — by virtue of survival

This ranking was unacceptable.

Lina’s position was secured not by talent but by *access*. She had Anthony’s bed, which meant she had his ear, which meant she had first choice of operations, wardrobe, and the intangible but critical currency of *proximity to power*. Elara had studied this dynamic at Wharton — it was a classic principal-agent problem, except the agent was also sleeping with the principal and the incentive structure was measured in orgasms.

Elara intended to disrupt this structure.

She heard the door open behind her. In the mirror, she watched Anthony enter the fitting room. Navy suit, no tie, collar open, the gold crucifix catching light at his throat. His hair was pushed back — he’d been running his hands through it, a habit that meant he was either stressed or had recently been serviced, and given that it was 11 AM on a Tuesday, the latter was more likely.

“Elara.”

“Anthony.”

The air between them had a texture. It always did. Not the volcanic, addictive, biochemically dependent charge that existed between him and Lina — Elara was too controlled for addiction, too strategic for dependency. What existed between Elara and Anthony was *chess*. Every look was a gambit. Every word was a move. Every silence was a position being held.

“The Valentino campaign photos came in,” he said, setting a portfolio on the fitting table. “You’re in three of the twelve.”

“Three.”

“Three.”

“Lina is in how many?”

“Seven.”

Elara’s jaw tightened. A millimeter. She released it.

“Because she’s the best model, or because she was in your lap when you made the selection?”

Anthony leaned against the wall. He crossed his arms. The gesture compressed his chest and emphasized the breadth of his shoulders, and Elara was aware — clinically, precisely aware — that her body was responding. Elevated heart rate. Slight flush at her clavicles. A warmth between her legs that she controlled through sheer force of will but that existed nonetheless, a traitor inside the castle.

She wanted him. She had always wanted him. But Elara’s wanting was not Lina’s wanting — it was not desperate, not consuming, not an open wound that bled at the sight of him. Elara’s wanting was *architectural*. She wanted him the way a general wants a strategic position: because occupying it would change the outcome of the war.

“Lina is in seven photos,” Anthony said, “because Lina photographs like she’s on fire and the camera is the only thing that can put her out. You photograph like you’re in a board meeting.”

“I photograph like a *professional*.”

“You photograph like a woman who’s afraid to be seen.”

The words landed. Elara’s composure — the Connecticut armor, the Wharton steel — cracked. Not visibly. Not to anyone who didn’t know where to look. But Anthony knew where to look. He always knew.

“I’m not afraid of anything,” she said.

“You’re afraid of wanting something you can’t *acquire*. You’ve acquired everything else — the education, the body, the career. But you can’t acquire *me*, Elara. I’m not a position to be won. I’m not a portfolio to be optimized. I’m a man who answers to God and the agency and no one else, and you wanting me is not a strategy. It’s a *condition*.”

She stepped toward him. Close enough that her perfume — Tom Ford, Soleil Blanc, $350 a bottle — entered his airspace.

“Everything is a strategy, Anthony. Lina’s kneeling is a strategy. Juliet’s domesticity is a strategy. Dahlia’s brokenness is a strategy. Mine is just more *honest*.”

“Yours is more *controlled*.”

“Is that a criticism?”

“It’s a diagnosis.”

She was close enough now to feel his body heat through the white silk of her blouse. Close enough to see the faint scar on his jaw where a childhood wound had healed imperfectly. Close enough to smell the frankincense on his skin, and beneath it, the base note of *him* — that pheromonal signature that her hypothalamus processed as *alpha, alpha, alpha* in a loop that quieted every other signal.

“Diagnose this,” she said, and kissed him.

It was not a gentle kiss. It was an *acquisition*. Her mouth claimed his with the precision of a hostile takeover — her tongue finding his, her hand gripping the back of his neck, her body pressing against him with a pressure that communicated not desperation but *demand*. She kissed him the way she did everything: with preparation, with intent, with the absolute certainty that she deserved what she was taking.

He kissed her back.

Not because he was weak. Because she was *useful*. And because her mouth — despite its strategic deployment — was genuinely talented, and the taste of her was expensive and cold and exactly the counterpoint to Lina’s hot, messy, addictive flavor, and Anthony Perlas was a man of many appetites, and the agency had never required monogamy.

The kiss deepened. His hands found her waist — the narrow, gym-sculpted waist that she maintained with the dedication of an athlete and the vanity of a weapon. He pulled her closer. She gasped into his mouth — a small, sharp sound that was the first thing she’d done in the conversation that wasn’t calculated.

“The door,” she said.

He reached behind her and locked it.

She began unbuttoning her blouse. Slowly. Each button a negotiation. Each inch of revealed skin a concession she was making on her own terms. Beneath the silk: a white lace bralette that cost more than the motel room where he fucked Lina. Her breasts were smaller than Lina’s — a precise B cup, surgically untouched, pale and symmetrical, with nipples the color of ballet slippers.

He watched her undress the way he watched surveillance footage: with total attention and zero visible reaction. The neutrality drove her insane. Lina got moans and commands and hands on her throat. Elara got *studied*. And the study — the feeling of being examined, catalogued, *assessed* — ignited something in her that she would never admit aloud: the need to be *good enough*. Not strategically. *Actually.*

“You’re thinking,” he said.

“I’m always thinking.”

“Stop.”

“I can’t.”

“Then I’ll make you.”

He turned her around. Bent her over the fitting table. The mirror was directly in front of her — she could see her own face, flushed beneath the foundation, eyes wide, lips parted, the composed mask cracking into something rawer and more honest than anything her reflection had shown her since Nantucket.

He lifted her skirt. She was wearing white lace underwear — the set, coordinated, because even her seductions were curated. He pulled the lace aside.

“You’re wet,” he said.

“Obviously.”

“Tell me why.”

“Because you’re about to fuck me and I’m not a robot.”

“Tell me the *real* reason.”

She closed her eyes. In the mirror, the woman who closed her eyes was not the CEO of her own ambition. She was a girl in a fitting room about to say something that would cost her more than any trade she’d ever made.

“Because you’re the only person in my life who doesn’t need anything from me,” she whispered. “Everyone wants my connections. My father’s money. My body. My brain. You don’t need any of it. You could replace me tomorrow. And that — the *dispensability* — makes me want to be *indispensable*. To you. Only to you.”

He entered her.

One stroke. Complete. No preamble, no gradual insertion — he filled her in a single, decisive motion that punched the air from her lungs and replaced her thoughts with sensation. Pure, white, consuming sensation that started where their bodies joined and radiated outward like shockwaves, until her fingernails were digging into the fitting table and her reflected face in the mirror was a woman she didn’t recognize — mouth open, eyes glazed, the Connecticut composure *gone*, replaced by something ancient and honest and desperately, helplessly *female*.

He fucked her against the fitting table with a precision that matched her own — controlled, rhythmic, every thrust calibrated to hit the internal architecture of her pleasure at the exact angle and depth that made her legs shake. He knew her body. He had studied it the way he studied everything — with the attention of an intelligence operative mapping terrain. He knew that she came hardest when her cervix was grazed, that she liked her hair pulled but not her throat held, that she was quieter than Lina but her silence was *louder*, because every sound Elara suppressed was a fortress she was losing.

“Let go,” he said.

“I can’t—”

“You can. You’re choosing not to. The same way you choose everything — to control, to curate, to *manage*. But you can’t manage this. You can’t optimize an orgasm, Elara. You can only *surrender to it*.”

He reached around and pressed his fingers against her clit — firm, circular, the pressure exact — and the combination of internal fullness and external stimulation broke something in her that had been locked since she was fourteen years old.

She came.

Not quietly. The sound that left her was a *scream* — muffled by her own hand clamped over her mouth, but a scream nonetheless, raw and formless, the sound of a woman who had spent her entire adult life performing control and had just been *forcibly relieved of it*. Her body convulsed around him — inner walls clamping in rhythmic waves that he felt along his entire length — and her legs gave out, and he held her up, held her against the table with his body, kept her from falling, kept her *present*, because that was what Anthony Perlas did: he brought women to the edge of dissolution and then held them together through the crisis.

When it passed, she stood on shaking legs and met her own eyes in the mirror.

The woman in the mirror was flushed, disheveled, stripped. The white blouse hung open. The skirt was bunched. The hair was ruined. She looked like she’d survived something — and she had.

Anthony adjusted himself. He straightened his suit. He had not come. The asymmetry was *deliberate* — his pleasure withheld, his body still loaded, the imbalance of their exchange a reminder of who held the power even when she initiated the contact.

“You didn’t—” she began.

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because your orgasm was not a gift to you. It was a *demonstration*. I can make you lose control anytime I choose. The top position at Otte isn’t earned by fucking me, Elara. It’s earned by proving you can operate *after* I’ve fucked you — that you can walk out of this room and run an operation with my fingerprints still on your skin.”

He unlocked the door.

“The photos are due Thursday. I want you in five of the twelve.”

“Five?”

“Earn the other two.”

He left.

Elara stood in the fitting room and rebuttoned her blouse with trembling fingers and understood, for the first time, that she was not competing with Lina for a *position*. She was competing with Lina for a *man*. And the man was not a prize to be won but a force to be *withstood* — a gravitational field that bent everything around it, that turned capable women into orbiting moons, and the only way to resist was to become a planet in your own right.

She finished dressing. She checked the mirror. She was perfect again.

She walked out.

But she was still wet. And she would be wet for the rest of the day. And every time she sat down, the slickness between her thighs would remind her of his voice saying *let go*, and her body would pulse, once, a small private earthquake that no one could see but she could *feel*, and the feeling was not satisfaction but *hunger* — the specific, Naamah-frequency hunger that no amount of strategy could quiet.

She needed more.

She would get it.

On her terms.

—

# CHAPTER 3: DAHLIA

## Hollywood Hills — October 2022 (Flashback)

**[The chapter is told in fragments. Broken glass. Strobe-light memory. The grammar of trauma.]**

—

She wore the Valentino. 

Red. Backless. Neckline to the navel. The dress Anthony had given her — not Elara, not Lina, *her* — because he saw something in her that needed armor, and the Valentino was the most beautiful armor ever made.

Dahlia Voss, twenty-four, stood in the marble foyer of a house in the Hollywood Hills that belonged to a man named Scotty Hargrove and felt the precise moment when the evening turned.

It was in the champagne.

Not the first glass — that was fine, golden, effervescent, the taste of possibility. Not the second glass — that was warm, loosening, the social lubricant that every party required. The third glass was different. The third glass had a shadow in it — a chemical undertow that she didn’t taste until it was already in her blood, already crossing the barrier between her stomach and her brain, already dimming the lights behind her eyes.

Juliet was beside her. Juliet Marchand, twenty-three, French-Vietnamese, elegant as a blade, wearing black that made her look like a shadow with cheekbones. Juliet had also drunk the third glass. Juliet’s eyes were also going soft.

“Something’s wrong,” Dahlia said.

“I know,” Juliet whispered.

The room *shifted*.

—

*Flash.*

A hallway. Long. Doors on both sides. Music — bass so deep it was felt, not heard, a vibration in the floorboards, in the walls, in the marrow. Scotty Hargrove, fifty-three, producer, fixer, the man who made things happen in Hollywood and unmade the women who happened to be in the room — stood at the end of the hallway with his phone to his ear, smiling.

—

*Flash.*

A room. A bedroom. The door closing. The lock *clicking*.

Men. Three. She recognized them. Names she’d heard on the radio. Faces she’d seen on billboards. One of them was wearing a chain that cost more than her mother’s house.

“Relax,” one of them said. “You’re gonna have a good time.”

—

*Flash.*

The word “no.”

She said it. She *knows* she said it. She felt it leave her mouth — a hard, clear syllable, a monosyllabic fortress. *No.*

But the fortress was made of air, and they walked through it.

—

*Flash.*

Hands. Multiple hands. The Valentino — the beautiful, red, Anthony-gave-it-to-her Valentino — being pushed off her shoulders, pulled down her body, pooling at her feet like a bloodstain.

—

*Flash.*

Her body. Not hers. A thing being positioned. Being *arranged*. The drug in her blood making her limbs cooperative even as her mind screamed — screamed from a place inside her skull that no one could hear because the music was so loud and the walls were so thick and the men were so certain of their right to her.

—

*Flash.*

Pain. The specific, tearing, unwanted pain of entry without consent. Her body’s reflexive clench — the vaginismus of survival, the muscles trying to protect what the mind couldn’t. Ignored. Overridden. *Penetrated.*

She screamed. A hand over her mouth. Cologne on the hand. Expensive cologne. The smell of money and violence.

—

*Flash.*

Juliet. In the room next door. Through the wall — thin wall, expensive house, cheap construction — Dahlia could hear her. Not words. Sounds. The sounds a human being makes when they have been reduced to a body and the body is being used in ways the body was not designed to survive.

—

*Flash.*

Afterward. The room smelled like sex and sweat and something chemical — the drug, metabolizing through her pores, her body trying to expel what it couldn’t prevent. She was on the floor. The Valentino was torn. She was bleeding.

Money on the nightstand. Cash. $5,000 in hundreds, fanned out like a hand of cards. As though she had been *paid*. As though this was a *transaction*.

She stared at the money and felt the Naamah inside her — not the hunger, not the seduction, but the *other* side of the succubus coin: the consumption. She had been consumed. Devoured. Her body used as a vessel for someone else’s pleasure with no regard for the spirit inside it.

This is what the demons did. Not the beautiful seduction of the Jezebel. The *other* thing. The thing that happened when the prey became the predator’s meal.

—

*Flash.*

Three weeks. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Room 412. A private room because Scotty Hargrove paid for private rooms the way he paid for everything — to ensure silence.

Dahlia’s face: swollen, discolored, a Pollock painting in bruise-spectrum. Broken orbital bone. Fractured wrist. Internal injuries she wouldn’t specify to the nurses because specifying them would make them *real* in a way that her dissociated mind couldn’t yet process.

A woman visited on day three. Not Scotty. One of his people. Blonde. Expensive. Eyes like empty rooms.

“You don’t tell Otte Models. You don’t tell Perlas. You fell. You were drinking. You fell. That’s the story. Say it.”

“I fell. I was drinking. I fell.”

“Good girl.”

The woman left an envelope. $20,000. Blood money dressed in a Hermès scarf.

—

*Flash.*

One week after discharge. A clinic. Planned Parenthood. The fluorescent lights. The paper gown. The stirrups.

Someone else made the appointment. Someone else drove her. She didn’t remember agreeing. She didn’t remember the forms. She remembered the ceiling — white, acoustic tiles, water-stained in one corner — and the sound of a machine that sounded like a vacuum but wasn’t, or was, depending on your theology.

She thought about the Valentino dress, which was in a trash bag in her closet, which had blood on it — hers — that no dry cleaner could remove, and she thought: *Anthony gave me that dress because he saw something in me worth protecting, and I let it be destroyed.*

She didn’t cry. She was past crying. She was in the place beyond tears, the dry country where grief becomes *geology* — compressed, layered, buried so deep it becomes the bedrock you stand on.

She didn’t tell Anthony.

She buried it.

She buried it so deep that when she looked in the mirror, the woman looking back had no history at all — just a face, healed but rearranged, and a body that flinched at unexpected sounds, and a Valentino dress in a trash bag that she couldn’t throw away because throwing it away would mean it happened and not throwing it away meant it was still just a dress.

—

*Flash forward: April 2024.*

Dahlia sits across from Anthony in his West Hollywood apartment and tells him everything.

His face doesn’t change.

That’s the thing about Anthony Perlas — his face doesn’t change when he’s angry. It *stills*. Like the surface of a lake before a storm. Like the silence before a bomb. His eyes go dark — not metaphorically but literally, the pupils expanding until the brown is consumed by black — and his breathing doesn’t accelerate; it *stops*. He holds his breath the way a sniper holds a shot. Perfect stillness.

“Three of them,” he says.

“Yes.”

“Rappers.”

“Yes.”

“Scotty’s party.”

“Yes.”

“And Juliet—”

“Next room.”

The stillness deepens. The lake freezes.

“When?”

“October 2022. Eighteen months ago.”

“Eighteen *months*.”

“They said if I told you—”

“Who said?”

“A woman. Blonde. Scotty’s person. She said if I told Otte Models, if I told *you*, they’d—”

“They’d what?”

Dahlia’s mouth opens. Closes. The geology shifts. Something buried begins to surface.

“They’d do it again. To someone else. And make me watch.”

Anthony stands. He walks to the window. He looks at the city — the sprawling, neon-veined, predatory city that he has been fighting since the agency first pointed him at its throat.

“You should have told me.”

“I was scared.”

“I know.”

“I’m still scared.”

“I know.”

He turns. He walks to her. He kneels — for the second time in this story, Anthony Perlas kneels before a woman, and the act is not submission but *service*, the posture of a knight receiving a charge.

He takes her hands.

“Listen to me,” he says. “What happened to you was not your fault. The champagne was not your choice. The room was not your choice. The men — the money — the clinic — none of it was your *choice*. You were *consumed*. By the Network. By the machine. By the spirit of Naamah operating through men who use women as currency and call it entertainment.”

Tears. Finally. The geology fractures. What was buried erupts.

“I thought I was strong,” she sobs. “I thought I could handle it. I grew up in Inglewood, Anthony. I’ve been handling things my whole life.”

“You are strong. Strength isn’t not breaking. Strength is breaking and *telling someone*.”

He holds her. She sobs into his shoulder. His hands on her back are steady, warm, unpossessive — the hands of a man who knows that what this woman needs is not desire but *protection*, not a lover but a *shield*.

“I’m going to find Scotty Hargrove,” he says into her hair. “And I’m going to dismantle everything he’s built. Every party. Every pipeline. Every man who was in that room. I’m going to take it apart piece by piece and I’m going to make sure no woman ever walks into one of his houses and walks out in a trash bag.”

“How?”

“I’m CIA, Dahlia. That’s *how*.”

She pulls back. She looks at him. Her face is ruined — tears, snot, the mascara rivers that are apparently the uniform of women who encounter Anthony Perlas at emotional extremity. But beneath the ruin, something is changing. Something is being *rebuilt*. The geology is rearranging, and the new bedrock is not trauma but *purpose*.

“I want to help,” she says.

“You will.”

“I want to burn it down.”

“We will.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise. On the blood of Christ and the lineage of Rome, I promise you, Dahlia. This ends.”

She believes him. Because Anthony Perlas does not make promises he can’t keep. He makes *predictions* a nd then fulfills them with the systematic precision of a man who believes he is an instrument of divine justice.

She wipes her face. She straightens her shoulders. The Dahlia who entered this conversation is not the Dahlia who will leave it.

“Now,” she says, “tell me about the fungus.”

He smiles. For the first time in this chapter, Anthony Perlas smiles.

“The fungus,” he says, “is going to have to wait. First, we deal with the humans.”

—

# CHAPTER 4: THE MASS

## Ventura County — November 2024

*Introibo ad altare Dei.*

The chapel was small. Thirty pews. No amplification. The altar faced east — *ad orientem* — toward Jerusalem, toward Golgotha, toward the point on the horizon where the sun rose and the Son rose and the two were the same event told in different light.

Anthony knelt in the third pew, left side, the position he’d occupied every Sunday since he was seventeen and had found this chapel — this fragment of the old Church, preserved by SSPX priests who had refused the reforms of Vatican II and maintained the Tridentine rite in defiance of modernity, in defiance of convenience, in defiance of a world that wanted God to be *approachable* when God was meant to be *worshipped*.

The incense rose. The organ played — a small pipe organ, slightly out of tune, which somehow made the music more honest, more *human*. The priest — Father Ignatius, seventy-one, grey-bearded, eyes like a hawk that had read too much Aquinas — stood at the altar in gold vestments and spoke the words of consecration in Latin, the language of empire and eternity:

*Hoc est enim Corpus meum.*

*This is My Body.*

Anthony watched the elevation. The white host held aloft in aged hands, and for an instant — or an eternity — the bread was no longer bread. It was Christ. The Incarnation repeating itself not metaphorically but *actually*, transubstantiation, the philosophical scandal that separated Rome from every other system of thought on Earth: the idea that the divine could enter matter, that God could become bread, that the physical could contain the infinite.

Anthony believed this. Not as a proposition to be argued but as a reality to be *consumed*. When he received the Eucharist — on the tongue, kneeling, the old way — he was not performing a ritual. He was *eating God*. And the God he ate became his body, his blood, his bone, his semen, his sweat, his tears, his violence, his mercy. Every cell of Anthony Perlas was saturated with the Eucharist. When Lina took his cock in her mouth, she was — without knowing it — receiving communion. When he came inside her, he was depositing not just genetic material but *consecrated matter*.

This was the secret that made him dangerous. This was the weapon that Naamah could not overcome.

He was not merely pure. He was *sacramental*.

Beside him, in the third pew, right side, Lina knelt.

She was not Catholic. She was half-Jewish through her father’s line — the Ashkenazi blood that made her a weapon against certain networks and a liability in the eyes of certain theologies. She did not understand the Latin. She did not understand the liturgy. She was here because Anthony asked, and she would have walked into fire if Anthony asked, because his asking was not a request but a *gravitational event*.

But something was happening to her in this chapel that she did not expect and could not explain.

The Latin. She didn’t understand the words, but she understood the *rhythm* — the rising and falling cadences, the call and response, the music of a language dead to the world but alive to God. It entered her ears and traveled to the place inside her that Anthony’s voice reached — the limbic core, the pre-verbal self, the part of her that processed authority and surrender and the trembling boundary between them.

The kneeling. She knelt because he knelt, and the act of kneeling — which in the bedroom was submission, was sexual, was the posture of a woman about to service her master — here became something else. Something *vertical*. The submission pointed not toward a man but toward something above the man, above the altar, above the ceiling of this small chapel — toward whatever lived in the space where the incense went when it rose past the lights.

She glanced at Anthony. His eyes were closed. His lips moved in silent prayer. His hands were folded. The rosary — the same rosary that draped his wrist in the motel room, in the car, in the office — was threaded through his fingers, and the beads moved with the methodical rhythm of a man talking to someone he knew was listening.

He was beautiful. Not in the way she usually processed beauty — as a resource to be leveraged, a quality to be photographed, a currency to be exchanged. He was beautiful in the way this chapel was beautiful: old, uncompromising, oriented toward something that transcended the visible.

She realized, kneeling beside him, that she had spent her life worshipping *him* — his body, his money, his voice, his dominion — and that he had spent his life worshipping *this* — the unseen, the sacrament, the chain that linked Abraham to Moses to Christ to Peter to this priest to this altar to this moment.

She was a link in a chain that went upward into infinity.

The chain went: *Yahweh — Christ — Peter — Rome — Trent — Lefebvre — SSPX — Father Ignatius — Anthony Perlas — the Eucharist on his tongue — his body — his hands — his cock — her mouth — her body — her bank account — the money that was his seed — the orgasm that was her prayer — the motel room that was her chapel — the submission that was her sacrament.*

Everything connected. Everything was *one*.

She closed her eyes. The Latin washed over her. She didn’t understand the words but she understood the *submission* — the willingness to kneel before something larger than yourself and offer everything: your pride, your autonomy, your body, your pleasure, your pain.

She had been doing this all along. She just hadn’t known who was at the top of the chain.

*Ite, missa est.*

*Go, the Mass is ended.*

They stood. Anthony genuflected toward the tabernacle — one knee, a sign of the cross, the ancient posture of a knight before his king. Lina watched and then, without thinking, without deciding, she genuflected too.

Anthony looked at her.

She looked at him.

Something passed between them that was not sexual and not strategic and not transactional — something from the part of the spectrum that Naamah couldn’t see and couldn’t corrupt. Something *holy*.

“Let’s go,” he said.

They walked out of the chapel into the November California sun, and the light hit them like a blessing or a warning, and Lina thought: *I’m still not Catholic. I’m still impure. I’m still a vessel of the succubus frequency and a cheerleader from the suburbs and a woman who deleted her Seeking Arrangement account three days ago but still remembers every password.*

*But I knelt. And the kneeling was real. And whatever lives at the top of the chain — Yahweh, God, the thing Anthony talks to when his eyes are closed — it saw me kneel, and it did not turn away.*

That was enough.

For now.

—

# CHAPTER 5: JULIET

## Malibu — January 2024

**[COLD OPEN: The Girlfriend Experience]**

The omelet was perfect.

Three eggs, chives, gruyère, folded (not flipped), served on a white plate with a sprig of parsley that Juliet Marchand had grown on the windowsill of a $12 million house that belonged to a man she was paid to love.

Declan Krieger sat at the kitchen island in a T-shirt and boxers, reading the *Wall Street Journal*, unaware that the woman who had just handed him breakfast had photographed three pages of classified documents from his desk before he woke up.

Juliet poured his coffee. Refilled his water glass. Sat beside him and rested her head on his shoulder in a gesture of intimacy so perfectly calibrated that it would have been indistinguishable from love even to a trained observer.

“What’s in the Journal today?” she asked.

“DoD budget projections. Nothing you’d care about.”

“Try me.”

He smiled. The particular smile of a man who has been alone long enough that a woman’s interest in his work feels like a proposal. “The defense budget is up fourteen percent. Most of it going to cyber and autonomous systems.”

“Is that good for you?”

“Very good for me.”

She kissed his shoulder. She tasted the cotton of his T-shirt and beneath it the salt of his skin and beneath that the particular flavor of a man who was, unknowingly, the most important intelligence target in Malibu.

Declan Krieger, forty-four. CEO of Krieger Systems, a defense contractor specializing in autonomous drone AI. DoD contracts worth $800 million. Divorced. One child, a daughter in boarding school in Connecticut. Lonely in the way that only men with $800 million in government contracts are lonely — surrounded by people who want his money and his access and touched by no one who wants *him*.

Juliet wanted him. Or rather: Juliet had *decided* to want him, and her decision had become indistinguishable from the real thing, because the body does not care about the origin of desire — only its presence. She had orgasmed with Declan. She had cried with Declan. She had held him at 3 AM when he woke from nightmares about his daughter and whispered “I’m here, I’m here” into his hair, and the whisper was true even though the woman who whispered it was a fabrication.

This was the horror and the genius of the Girlfriend Experience protocol as designed by Anthony Perlas: it worked *too well*. The performance generated its own reality. The fake girlfriend became the real girlfriend became the operative who loved the target became the target of her own operation.

Juliet was trained by diplomats. She could lie in seven languages. But lying in bed with a man who trusted her — lying there in the dark, his hand on her stomach, his breathing slowing toward sleep, his guard completely down — that was a kind of truth-telling she hadn’t anticipated. Because in those moments, when he was most vulnerable and she was most operational, she discovered something the training hadn’t covered: *she cared*.

Not love. Not the volcanic, neurochemical addiction that Lina felt for Anthony. Not the strategic desire that Elara wielded. Something quieter. Something like *complicity*. She and Declan were both performing — he performed the confident executive, she performed the devoted girlfriend — and the performances had fused into a shared fiction that was, paradoxically, the most honest relationship either of them had ever had.

She cleared the dishes. He went to shower. She went to his office.

The documents were on his desk — three pages of DoD briefing materials, classified SECRET/NOFORN, left out because Declan trusted his house the way he trusted his girlfriend: completely, fatally. Juliet photographed each page with a camera concealed in her phone case — agency-issue, resolution sufficient for OCR processing, metadata scrubbed.

She sent the images to Anthony via encrypted channel.

His reply: *Excellent. Continue. How’s the attachment?*

She typed: *Manageable.*

It was not manageable.

—

That night, Declan took her to dinner at Nobu Malibu — the same Nobu where, two months later, Anthony would sit across from Scotty Hargrove and dismantle his empire with a phone and a smile. Declan ordered the yellowtail sashimi. Juliet ordered the black cod. They drank sake and watched the Pacific do what the Pacific always did: perform indifference at a scale that made human ambition look like a child’s game.

“I’ve been thinking,” Declan said.

“About?”

“About us. About how easy this is.”

“Easy?”

“I’ve never had a relationship that felt this… *natural*. My ex-wife was a constant negotiation. Every conversation was a treaty. With you, it’s just… it’s like we already know each other. Like we’ve been together longer than three months.”

Juliet smiled. The smile was genuine. The guilt was also genuine. The two coexisted in her face like pigments in a painting — blended, inseparable, the final image dependent on both.

“Maybe we have,” she said.

He reached across the table and took her hand. His fingers were warm. His palm was calloused from the rowing machine in his home gym. He held her hand with the particular grip of a man who was falling and knew it and didn’t care.

“I love you,” he said.

The words landed like stones in still water. Ripples in every direction.

“I love you too,” she said.

Both statements were true. Both statements were lethal. Both statements would, in the fullness of time, destroy both people who made them.

They went home. They made love — she refused to call it *fucking* anymore, not with Declan, not in the Malibu house where she had planted herbs and organized his closet and created a *life* — on the bed with the ocean audible through open windows, his body above hers, her legs wrapped around him, her hands tracing the muscles of his back, and the sensation was not operational. It was *human*. She felt everything. The stretch of him inside her. The weight of him above her. The salt on his skin. The way he whispered her name — not her real name, the legend name, *Juliet* — as though it were the most important word in his vocabulary.

She came. Not convincingly — *actually*. The orgasm was real. The tears afterward were real. The way she pressed her face into his chest and breathed him in and thought *I am going to destroy this man’s life and he is going to remember me as the best thing that ever happened to him* — that was real.

She reported to Anthony the next day at a café in Santa Monica.

“The Krieger intelligence is accelerating,” she said. “I’ll have his full communication logs within two weeks.”

“Good.” Anthony studied her. The way he studied all of them. “You’re attached.”

“I’m *managing*.”

“You’re in love with him.”

“I’m in love with the *operation*.”

“Those are the same thing, Juliet. When the legend becomes the identity, the attachment becomes real. I’ve seen it before.”

“What do I do?”

Anthony leaned forward. The café noise faded. His voice — that low, certain, gravitational frequency — filled the space between them.

“You do your job. You extract the intelligence. And when the time comes to leave, you leave. Because Declan Krieger is funding autonomous weapons that will be sold to regimes that consider human life an externality. The man you love is building machines that kill. Your feelings are real. The stakes are also real. And the stakes win.”

Juliet nodded.

“Now,” he said. “How are you sleeping?”

“Badly.”

“Because of Declan?”

“Because of the Hills. The party. The thing I haven’t told you about.”

Anthony’s face went still. The lake before the storm.

“What party?”

“Scotty Hargrove’s party. October 2022. I was there. With Dahlia.”

The stillness deepened.

“Tell me.”

She told him.

—

# CHAPTER 6: THE RIVAL

## West Hollywood — December 2024

**[HEROES-STYLE CONVERGENCE — ALL FOUR WOMEN IN ONE SCENE]**

The text arrived simultaneously on four phones at 8:47 PM on a Wednesday:

**From AP:** *Otte Models. Full team. My apartment. One hour. Non-negotiable.*

Four women. Four locations. Four different reactions.

**Lina** was in the bathroom of her Camarillo apartment, staring at her reflection and trying to decide if the woman in the mirror was Anthony’s wife, Sage’s lover, Naamah’s vessel, or just a twenty-two-year-old who was in over her head. The text arrived and her body responded before her mind could: a flush of heat from her chest to her thighs, the Pavlovian response to his initials on her screen. *AP.* Two letters that made her wet. She texted back: *On my way.*

**Elara** was at a wine bar in Beverly Hills, alone, nursing a glass of Sancerre and reviewing Otte Models financial projections on her iPad. The text arrived and she smiled — the careful, architectural smile of a woman who had been waiting for this summons. Full team meant all four. All four meant competition. Competition was where Elara *lived*. She paid her tab and ordered a car.

**Dahlia** was in her apartment in Inglewood, shadow-boxing in front of a mirror. Since telling Anthony about the Hills, she had started training — boxing, Krav Maga, the physical disciplines of a woman who had decided that her body would never again be used without her consent. The text arrived and she wrapped her hands and put on a jacket and drove west with the radio off and the windows down.

**Juliet** was in Malibu, in Declan Krieger’s bed, watching him sleep. The text arrived and she felt the familiar schism — the woman who loved the target and the operative who served the handler, splitting along a fault line that ran through the center of her chest. She slipped out of bed, dressed in the dark, and left a note: *Couldn’t sleep. Went for a drive. Back soon. xx*

—

Anthony’s apartment in West Hollywood occupied the top floor of a building on Kings Road — mid-century, clean lines, the kind of architecture that valued light and space and the particular silence that comes from elevation. The living room had floor-to-ceiling windows facing south, a view of the city that on clear nights extended to the Pacific, and exactly four chairs arranged in a semicircle facing a leather armchair that was, unmistakably, a throne.

He sat in the throne. They occupied the semicircle.

Four women. Four weapons. Four vessels of the Naamah frequency, each carrying the succubus hunger in a different key:

**Lina** — the hunger for validation. For being *chosen*. For the notification sound that meant she was worth something. Her currency was *attention*.

**Elara** — the hunger for control. For sitting at the top of every hierarchy she entered. For the leverage that came from knowing what everyone else wanted and providing it on her terms. Her currency was *power*.

**Dahlia** — the hunger for justice. For the world to stop consuming women and calling it entertainment. For the men in the Hills to burn. Her currency was *vengeance*.

**Juliet** — the hunger for authenticity. For a single relationship in her life that wasn’t performance. For the impossible dream of loving someone without lying to them. Her currency was *truth*.

Anthony looked at each of them. He saw the hunger. He always saw it. The Naamah frequency was visible to him the way infrared is visible through the right lens — a heat signature emanating from each woman, the spiritual radiation of a demonic attachment that none of them had invited but all of them carried.

He was going to burn it out of all of them.

“Thank you for coming,” he said.

“Non-negotiable doesn’t really imply a choice,” Elara said.

“Everything is a choice, Elara. You chose to come. You could have chosen consequences.”

“What kind of consequences?”

“The kind that begin with me removing your biometric access to the Otte Models elevator.”

Silence. Even Elara’s ambition had edges it wouldn’t cross.

“I’ve called you here because the operation has changed. The Network is aware of us. Our cover is thinning. The agency has given me until Easter — four months — to either contain the situation or be disavowed.” He paused. Let the word *disavowed* settle into the room like smoke. “Disavowal means we lose protection. It means Scotty Hargrove, the Iron Wolves, the financial networks, and every man who has ever had a reason to want Otte Models gone will have *access* to us. To our identities. To our locations.”

Dahlia: “To us.”

“To you. Specifically.”

The room’s temperature dropped.

“So,” Elara said, “what’s the plan?”

“The plan is *escalation*. Each of you has an assignment. Each assignment feeds the larger operation — which is the dismantlement of the Network, layer by layer, starting with Scotty Hargrove and ending with the financial architecture above him.”

He stood. He walked to the window.

“Juliet — you continue the Krieger operation. His communications will lead us to the defense contractors feeding money into the Network’s cultural arm. I need his full server access within six weeks.”

Juliet nodded.

“Dahlia — you’re going to walk back into Scotty Hargrove’s world. Not as a victim. As an *operative*. You’re going to attend his next party wearing a wire and a smile, and you’re going to record every criminal act that occurs under his roof.”

Dahlia’s jaw clenched. Then released. “I’ll need the Valentino.”

“I’ll get you a new one.”

“No. The same one. I want the same dress. I want him to see me in the dress he tore off me and *know* that I came back.”

Anthony nodded. The respect in his eyes was absolute.

“Elara — you’re going to penetrate the financial layer. BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street — the three-headed beast. I need a connect inside one of the three. Use whatever means necessary.”

“Whatever means?”

“Whatever means, Elara. This is the top position. You want it? *Earn it.*”

Her eyes blazed. Not with anger — with *purpose*. This was what she’d been waiting for. Not a modeling assignment. A *mission*.

“And Lina.”

Everyone turned. Lina sat with her legs crossed, her face unreadable, the skeleton key tattoo barely visible beneath the hem of her shirt.

“Lina, you’re the Judas goat. Your father’s line — the Ashkenazi connection — makes you deployable into the Jewish financial networks in Encino and Tarzana. These networks are laundering money for the Network. I need names, accounts, and routing numbers.”

“You want me to betray my own people.”

“Your *people* are in this room. Your lineage is your *weapon*, not your identity. The networks using synagogue infrastructure for criminal operations are not your people — they are parasites using your heritage as camouflage. You’re not betraying Judaism. You’re *liberating* it.”

Lina stared at him. The room held its breath.

“And what about Sage?” she asked.

“Sage is operational now. You will maintain the relationship under my direction. Every trip, every client, every dollar — reported and sanctioned. No more freelancing.”

“You want me to keep sleeping with her.”

“I want you to keep *operating* with her. What happens in the bed is your business. What happens in the *bank* is mine.”

The four women sat with the weight of their assignments settling into their shoulders like mantles.

Elara spoke first: “What about the hierarchy? Who’s first?”

“Whoever delivers first is first.”

The competition ignited. Instantly. Visibly. Four sets of eyes recalculated, four strategies adjusted, four women who were already competing for Anthony’s bed now competing for his *mission* — which was, in a way he had deliberately engineered, the same thing.

Because the woman who delivered the most valuable intelligence would receive the most valuable reward: not money, not position, but *access*. Access to Anthony Perlas. To his body, his time, his attention, his love. The currency that made all other currencies irrelevant.

They were going to tear each other apart.

And from the wreckage, he would build the weapon that destroyed the Network.

“Dismissed,” he said.

They left. One by one. Each pausing at the door, each looking back at him — the man in the armchair, the pure one, the sacramental one, the one whose body was a church and whose cock was a chalice and whose money was communion — with an expression that was unique to each and identical in its core:

*I will be the one. I will be first. I will win you.*

Naamah stirred in all four of them. The hunger rose. The succubus frequency vibrated at the pitch of ambition and desire and the ancient, primal need to consume the pure.

But the pure one was not prey.

He was the *hunter*.

And the hunt had just begun.

—

# CHAPTER 7: TIME SLIP — THE MAKING OF ANTHONY PERLAS

## Virginia — 2000 (Flashback)

The room had no windows.

This was intentional. Windows imply an outside, and the purpose of the program was to eliminate the concept of *outside* — to make the child understand that the room was the world, that the chair was the world, that the electrodes on his temples were the world’s hands touching him with a firmness that would be called *educational*.

Anthony Raphael Francis Perlas, age nine, sat in a metal chair with leather straps on his wrists and ankles and a rubber bit between his teeth that tasted like old pennies and fear.

The man in the lab coat — never a name, only a title: *Doctor* — stood behind a console of switches and dials that looked like it had been designed in the 1960s because it *had* been designed in the 1960s, the MK Ultra program’s legacy hardware, maintained by a government that officially denied the program’s existence while unofficially maintaining its most productive refinements.

“Count backward from one hundred, Anthony.”

“One hundred.” His voice, small. A child’s voice. “Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight.”

The shock.

Not the kind of shock you see in movies — theatrical, dramatic, the body arching cinematically. This was clinical. Precise. A measured electrical current delivered to specific neural pathways, designed not to damage but to *partition*. To create, in the architecture of a child’s developing brain, separate rooms that could be accessed independently. Room for love. Room for violence. Room for obedience. Room for rebellion. Room for the divine. Room for the profane.

The Doctor was building a house inside a boy’s head.

“Again.”

“One hundred. Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight. Ninety-seven—”

Shock. White light. His hands clenching in the restraints. The bit cracking between his teeth. Tears — hot, involuntary, the body’s honest protest against what the mind was being forced to accept.

“Again.”

This continued for — he didn’t know. Hours. Days. The room had no windows and no clock and time inside it was a substance that could be stretched or compressed depending on the Doctor’s needs.

Between sessions, they fed him. They let him sleep. They gave him books — theology, mostly. Aquinas. Augustine. The Baltimore Catechism. They wanted the divine room furnished. They wanted the boy to have something in his mind’s architecture that *resisted* the programming — a core of faith so hard and bright that the other rooms could not consume it.

Because that was the paradox of MK Ultra’s legacy: the best operatives were not the broken ones. The broken ones shattered in the field. The best operatives were the ones who had been *reconstructed* — who had been taken apart and put back together with a core that could not be compromised. A diamond inside a machine. A crucifix inside a weapon.

They gave Anthony the crucifix.

Then they gave him the weapon.

—

*Flash forward: 2024.*

Anthony sits in his apartment at 3 AM, unable to sleep. The scars on his temples — small, circular, hidden by his hair — itch when it rains. It is raining.

He touches them with his fingertips. The Doctor is dead — heart attack, 2012, the universe’s idea of irony. The program is officially decommissioned. The hardware was destroyed. The files were burned.

But the rooms in his head remain. And in the room where love lives, four women orbit like planets around a sun that learned to shine by being *burned*.

He opens the laptop. He reviews the operation. He prays.

The rain continues.

The scars itch.

He does not sleep.

—

# CHAPTER 8: THE POEM

## Camarillo — December 2024

Lina found the flowers on her doorstep at 7 AM.

White roses. Twelve of them. In a crystal vase that she recognized from a shop in the Ojai Valley that Anthony frequented because the owner was a retired intelligence officer who sold overpriced glassware and traded information under the table.

Tucked into the stems, a card. Handwritten. His penmanship — disciplined, architectural, the script of a man who had been trained in calligraphy as part of a program that believed the way you wrote revealed the way you thought.

The card read:

—

*For Lina.*

*I give you roses white because the white*

*is not the absence of a color — no,*

*the white is every color held so tight*

*they merge and cannot be distinguished. So*

*with you: your Polish fire, your German steel,*

*your Newbury Park innocence (long gone),*

*your hunger, and the way your body kneels*

*before me like a prayer before the dawn —*

*these are not separate things. They are compressed*

*into a single frequency I hear*

*when you say “Anthony” against my chest,*

*and I am, God forgive me, *held* by fear*

*that one day you will realize what you are:*

*not mine. Not anyone’s. A falling star.*

—

Lina read the poem three times. Then she held the card against her chest and closed her eyes and felt a kind of love that she had no vocabulary for — a love that was not the oxytocin-soaked, Pavlovian hunger of the motel room, not the financial-erotic charge of the bank deposits, not the power-exchange dynamic of the dom/sub architecture. This was something from a different room in the house of her feelings. A room she hadn’t known existed.

He saw her. Not the body. Not the bank account. Not the sex or the submission or the succubus frequency or the strategic value of her Ashkenazi lineage.

Her.

The girl who did high kicks in a suburb and fell into an empire and couldn’t find her way out and wasn’t sure she wanted to.

He *saw* her.

She texted him: *The poem.*

His reply: *Gym at noon. I’ll train you.*

—

The gym was a private facility in Thousand Oaks — no mirrors, no music, no audience. Just iron and intention. Anthony trained the way he did everything: with the focused intensity of a man who believed the body was a temple and temples required maintenance.

He put Lina through deadlifts. Squats. Pull-ups (assisted — she was getting stronger). Hip thrusts that made her blush because the movement was inherently suggestive and he knew it and she knew he knew it and the knowing was its own foreplay.

Between sets, he talked. Not about the operation. Not about Sage or the escort network or the Judas goat assignment. About *virtue*.

“The Ten Commandments aren’t restrictions, Lina. They’re *architecture*. They’re the blueprint for a life that doesn’t collapse under its own weight.”

“Easy for you to say. You’re Catholic. You were born with the blueprint.”

“I was born in a naval hospital and tortured in a government basement. Nothing about me was *easy*. The faith was a *choice*. Every morning. Every Mass. Every time I kneel, I’m choosing it again.”

“And the sex? Six times a day? How does that fit the blueprint?”

He racked the barbell. He looked at her.

“The body is not the enemy of the soul. The Church has always taught that the marital act is sacred — the unitive and procreative dimensions of sex are a reflection of the Trinity. What we do is not sin, Lina. What we do is *training*. I’m teaching your body what it was made for: to receive, to submit, to *open*. And when your body learns that lesson fully — when the submission becomes total and the opening becomes complete — then the spirit will follow. The Naamah will leave. The succubus frequency will die. And what’s left will be a woman who can kneel before God and man with equal devotion and know that both acts of kneeling serve the same master.”

She stared at him. Sweat on her brow. A barbell in her hands. Her heart doing something complicated in her chest.

“You’re insane,” she said.

“Probably.”

“And I love you.”

“I know.”

“And I’m going to close the Sage thing. For real. Not because you told me to — because I *want* to.”

“Good.”

“And I’m going to do the Judas goat assignment. Not because the agency needs it — because *you* need it.”

“Better.”

“And tonight—”

“Tonight?”

“Tonight I’m going to come to the motel. Room 7. And I’m going to show you what I’ve learned.”

He raised an eyebrow. “About deadlifts?”

“About kneeling.”

She smiled. He smiled.

For a moment — just a moment — they were not an operative and his asset, not a dom and his sub, not a sacramental vessel and a succubus host. They were two people in a gym, smiling at each other, and the smile was the most honest thing either of them had done all day.

Then the moment passed. And the operation resumed.

And Naamah watched from the shadows and *seethed*, because the pure one was doing something she hadn’t anticipated — he wasn’t just exorcising the demons through sex and money and dominion. He was replacing them. With flowers. With poems. With iambic pentameter and white roses and deadlifts and the Ten Commandments and the particular, devastating tenderness of a man who could spank a woman until she wept and then write her a sonnet that made her weep harder.

The demons couldn’t compete with that.

Nothing could.

—

**END OF ACT ONE**

—

*Act Two begins with the escalation: four women deployed on four missions, competing for the top position, each encounter more dangerous and more sexually charged than the last. The escort meets multiply. The financial networks reveal themselves. Scotty Hargrove’s world begins to crumble. The Iron Wolves close in. And Anthony Perlas — the pure one, the sacramental one, the man who fucks like a priest prays — holds the center of a storm that is about to break the world open.*