Beckett and are sitting in the hospital waiting room. It’s been two days since the helicopter brought Bianca here, two days of Europe’s best doctors running every test they could find, the top scientists scratching their heads over the half-eaten apple.

We’ve heard a thousand things, and so have her parents, here from Voravia. They think it was something in the apple. It wasn’t the apple. She breathed in a poison, she had a minor heart attack, she had a stroke, there’s a brain tumor so small they can’t see it, she has some kind of glandular imbalance.

In short, no one has any fucking clue what’s happened to Bianca or why she’s been unconscious for nearly three days. All they have is theories and hypotheses, and most of the time, they won’t let us in to see her.

It’s around two in the afternoon when the main nurse sticks her head in. Her parents look up at the same time we do, and the nurse comes, sits primly on a chair in front of us.

“They think they’ve found the poison,” she says with no introduction.

Beckett and I both sit up straighter. Her mother clutches her father’s arm, both of them still silent.

“It’s very rare, and frankly, it’s very strange, which is why no one thought to test for it sooner,” she says. “There are simply thousands and thousands of poisons, and so testing always takes time, meaning that—”

“What was it?” her mother says, her face white.

“Right. Yes, of course,” the nurse goes on, looking down. “A neurotoxin from the Amazonian Bread Beetle. Normally, it kills someone by causing their lungs to slowly stop working so they simply can’t breathe.”

I crack a knuckle, holding my own breath.

“But,” the nurse goes on. “In exactly the right dose, it can dramatically slow breathing and heartrate, giving the victim a near-dead appearance that can last for hours, days, weeks, or...”

She shrugs.

“No one is really sure, because it’s incredibly hard to get, so there simply isn’t much information.”

“Will she wake up?” her father rumbles, his wife still squeezing his arm.

The nurse smiles.

“Luckily, the antidote is simple, and we’ve already given it to her. She should be awake within the hour. She’s already stirring.”

* * *

We wait outside Bianca’s door, anxious. Her parents are inside, her mother crying, and I can just barely hear Bianca’s voice over the noise.

Finally, her father comes to the door, calls us in. Bianca’s propped up on pillows, tubes sticking out from both her arms, but she smiles at us despite the huge circles under both eyes.

“Good morning, beautiful,” Beckett says, taking one hand.

I take the other and simply kiss the back.

“Hi,” Bianca whispers.

Behind us, her parents step quietly from the room.

* * *

After that, everything happens quickly. Bianca still has to undergo a thousand more tests, scans, MRIs, the whole deal, but it’s all downhill. There’s no lasting brain damage, and it’s decided that the safest place for her is my family’s stronghold.

I have workers rip out anything that connects to the internet, then configure all the power to be run from a generator. I don’t want anything in her wing to be connected to the grid. I’m not taking chances again, because it’s our fault that this happened to her.

We should have never taken her into Inversberg. We should never have let our guard down like that, should never have been so careless.

Bianca’s moved in absolutely secrecy, at three o’clock in the morning. She’s fine, though still a little weak, the effects of the poison finally draining from her system.

She’s got her own suite in the castle, her own everything, and Beckett and I can stay right next door. I haven’t talked to her parents at all, but I get the distinct sense that they know something is going on, but they haven’t said anything, and neither have I.

For days, the two of us wait on her hand and foot, even when she tells us not to. We insist on bringing her anything she needs ourselves, plumping her pillows, getting her more tea, rearranging her footrest. But she gets stronger day by day, and before long, that wicked look is back in her eyes.

The look that says, I remember the hot tub.

I force myself to ignore it. She needs to really be better, be fully recovered before we can do that again, no matter how badly I ache for her.

So I settle for jerking off twice a day in the shower, imagining fucking Bianca deep, her pussy clenching around me as Beckett slides his cock down her throat.

I imagine the way she moans, the way her body moves like she’s hungry for me.

I imagine pushing my cock into the tight bud of her back hole, how she’d gasp and pant for breath. I think of the way she’d scream when she came that way.

And of course, of course, I think of Beckett joining me. I think of us taking her together, the way she begged us to. I think of Bianca flooded with so much pleasure that she can’t talk, can barely move.

And then I come into the shower drain, and I do it again a few hours later, because all the jerking off in the world isn’t a substitute for her.