S1 NNF Tyler EP 112

S1 NNF Tyler EP 112
The machine’s rhythm was the only clock I had. It marked the seconds of my life in steady, pulling increments. I focused on the sound, letting it fill my head, pushing out the memory of Jake’s hand, of Reddy’s smug pronouncements. Hope was a dangerous thing to have in a place like this. It was a shard of glass you kept hidden in your palm; it could be a weapon, or it could just cut you to pieces.

Footsteps echoed on the concrete floor, pulling me from my thoughts. It wasn’t the sound of the group returning. It was a single set of boots, the tread heavy and deliberate. They stopped a few feet away, just at the edge of my peripheral vision. I didn’t have to look. I knew who it was.

Aaron.

He hadn’t been with the others. While Reddy was lecturing and Jake was getting his cheap thrills, Aaron had been somewhere else. Watching. He was always watching. He was the quiet one, the one whose mental file on me was probably thicker than the rest combined. Jake and Mike were thugs. Eddie was a drone. Reddy was a megalomaniac, as was Dr. Rios. But Aaron was a professional. And that made him the most dangerous man on the farm.

He said nothing. He just stood there. The silence was a different kind of pressure than Jake’s hands had been. It was a weight on my mind, not my body. I could feel his gaze on me, methodical and patient. He wasn’t looking at my tits or my ass. He was looking at my face, my eyes, the slump of my shoulders. He was searching for the flaw in the product. He was looking for the woman pretending to be a cow. The man missed little.

Every muscle in my body screamed to tense up, to meet his stare with the defiance I felt churning in my gut. But I couldn’t. That woman was supposed to be gone. She had to be for the plan to work. I forced a slow, shallow breath. I let my head hang, my hair falling over my face, a pathetic curtain. I made my hands, still cuffed to the chair’s arms, stay limp. I channeled every ounce of my rage, every memory of every encounter we had, and I compressed it into a single point of focus: stillness. Absolute, perfect, broken stillness.

This was the job now. I wasn’t a prisoner anymore. I was a spy. My mission wasn’t escape, not yet. It was observation. My cell wasn’t a cage; it was a listening post. And these bastards weren’t my captors; they were my targets. I cataloged the sound of Aaron’s breathing, the faint scent of cheap coffee that clung to him, the way his shadow fell long and sharp across the floor in front of me. And I took it all in.

He moved, his boots drumming lightly on the floor. He walked a slow circle around the chair. I didn’t follow him with my eyes. I kept my gaze fixed on a crack in the concrete floor. He stopped behind me.

The hairs on my neck prickled. He was reading the machine’s output over my shoulder. I heard the soft tap of his finger against the display screen.

“Output’s consistent,” he said. His voice was a low baritone, devoid of any emotion. It was like a voice from a machine. “No stress indicators.”

Was he talking to himself? To Jake? To someone I couldn’t see? Or was he talking to me, testing for a reaction?

It didn’t matter. I gave him nothing. I was a farm animal. A piece of livestock. And livestock never responded to production reports.

He came back around to my side. I could see his boots now. Clean, black, functional. He leaned in, bringing his face level with mine. I instinctively wanted to pull back, to spit in his face. Instead, I let my eyes drift slowly toward him, unfocused and dull. I made them as vacant as possible. I wanted to give him the impression I now stared through him instead of at him.

His face was all sharp angles and hard planes. A bit of scruff covered his face. His eyes dissected me. He was looking for the flicker. The spark of intelligence behind the empty glaze I was projecting. For a long, stretched-out moment, we just stayed like that. Him searching, me hiding in plain sight. It was the most intense fight I’d ever been in, and I wasn’t moving a muscle.

“You’re a good actress,” he murmured, his voice so low it was almost a whisper. “I’ll give you that.”

The words hit me like a jolt of electricity.

Fuck. He knows. The thought was pure panic, a white-hot flash that threatened to burn my composure to the ground. My heart hammered against my ribs, but I refused to allow myself an outward reaction. If he sees what I’m doing. It’s over.

I held on, my breath steady. I clung to the act with the desperation of a drowning woman clinging to a piece of wreckage. I let his words wash over me, showing no sign that I’d even understood them. I blinked slowly, a long, languid blink of a creature lost in a fog. I let a thin line of drool escape the corner of my mouth. It was disgusting. It was humiliating. It was perfect.

His eyes narrowed for a fraction of a second. He was looking for the tell. The subtle tightening of my jaw, the flare of my nostrils. I gave him nothing. I was a blank slate. An empty vessel.

The machine chose that moment to cycle down. The rhythmic pulling stopped, and the suction cups released with a soft, wet hiss. The sudden absence of the sensation was almost as jarring as its presence had been. The deep, throbbing ache in my breasts remained, but at least now, they no longer ached with fullness.

Aaron rose to full height. He didn’t call for another handler. He stepped forward and began to unhook me himself. His movements were precise, economical, and utterly impersonal. His fingers were cool and dry as they brushed against my skin, detaching the flanges.

The contact was a thousand times worse than Jake’s groping. Jake had treated me like a piece of meat he wanted to fuck. Aaron was treating me like a piece of equipment he was servicing. It was a deeper level of dehumanization, a clinical erasure that chilled me to the bone.

Memories of sitting in the mess hall with him that first night, after mending fences all day, came back to haunt me. Even back then, he had noticed something. Perhaps, a crack in the disguise I wore. If I hadn’t gone snooping, maybe I would’ve passed for a male farm hand longer. But those fucking HuBulls gave me away.

“Yeah. You’re really good,” he whispered. “But I see it… I see you.”

Was it a bluff? Or did he really know?

He undid the cuffs on my wrists and ankles. The metal fell away with a series of soft clicks. He didn’t touch me again. It took him seconds to clip the leash to my collar. Once done, he stepped back.

“Back to your stall.” He gestured with his head toward the aisle.

My limbs were stiff and sore. I moved slowly, clumsily, pushing myself out of the chair. I kept my head down, my shoulders slumped. I shuffled past him, my bare feet cold on the concrete. I didn’t look at him, but I felt his eyes on my back the entire way. It was a cold, calculating gaze that felt like it was peeling back my skin, layer by layer, looking for the truth underneath.

The gate to my stall was open. I stepped inside and noticed the bench was gone. Without another word, he closed the gate. The heavy bolt slid home with a final, definitive thud. I heard his footsteps recede, steady and unhurried, until they faded completely.

I leaned against the cold steel bars, my body trembling with the aftermath of the performance. I had done it. I had faced the scariest bastard here and held the line. Reddy and his thugs saw a compliant animal. Aaron saw an actress. But he had no proof. My performance had been flawless, or so I hoped. But had it been too flawless?

A cold dread trickled down my spine. I had shown them exactly what they wanted to see: a submissive human cow. A success story. A broken woman remade into a productive asset. And Reddy, with his god-complex and his obsession with results, would not be content to leave a success story alone. He would want to replicate it. He would want to perfect it. He would want to push it further.

My perfect compliance wasn’t a shield. It was an invitation. I had just passed the audition, and in doing so, I had volunteered myself for the starring role in Dr. Reddy’s and Dr. Rios’ fucked-up experiments. Thing One and Thing Two, I could fool. Aaron was a whole other story. He got under my skin more than anyone else on the farm.

The hope I’d felt just a little while ago now felt like a fool’s dream.

I hadn’t won a reprieve. I had just graduated to a whole new level of hell.

And now, I had that fucking animal, Aaron, waiting for me to crack under the pressure.