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“One more thing,” Brooke told them as Claire entered the room again. “Claire will apply electrodes to your scrotum. If you go more than twenty seconds without writing, and you are not getting a drink of water, emptying your bladder into the supplied bottles, or talking to a monitor about a legitimate need, you will be shocked until you become productive again.”

* * * *

Elijah felt awful that Ezra was being punished when his brother hadn’t done anything wrong. Ezra had told him not tochangeto cat, but it didn’t matter. The vampires had figured out the brothers would follow instructions better if both were punished, even when only one did something wrong, and it seemed they’d given the secret to their new owners.

His balls hurt, his asshole burned, but the rice hurt so fucking bad the pain radiated throughout his legs and into his back. He didn’t know how he was going to hold it together long enough to write this damnedparagrapha thousand times.

He considered whether it could be true, that his trainer was his partner, trying to help him to succeed, but it made him screw the sentence up and he wadded the paper up and tossed it. He’d crossed a word out and kept going earlier, but the whole page had been trashed. He may as well trash it himself rather than finish out the rest of it.

* * * *

When Ezra finally finished his thousand paragraphs, Elijah had been finished a while. He couldn’t be too angry at his twin forchanging. They both knew these new people would have tobe tested. At first, he’d been mad at Dev for not telling them achangemight kill them, but he’d come to understand that Dev didn’t intend to give them rules for the hell of it. Any rules given were important and to be treated as life-threatening if broken. Dev had been clear that all of them wouldn’t have a chance in resulting in death if not followed, but many would.

Another whiteboard was brought in and propped on the floor in front of them, and as the child vampire had said, it was shorter.

Trattenere informazioni rende la veritá un segreto ed é equivalente a mentire. L’intento di ingannare é punito in questa casa.

Once they’d both completed fifty sheets of ten, they were given the English version.

Withholding information makes a secret of the truth, and is equal to lying. The intent to deceive is punished in this house.

When that was finally finished, another whiteboard was placed in front of them.

I am my own person: a sentient being who is not interchangeable with another. Pretending to be someone else is disrespectful to me, my brother, and anyone we attempt to deceive.

“I told you there would be further consequences for lying before the bracelets went back on,” Dev told them. “One hundred lines. Ten per page, as before.”

They’d already been at it over eleven hours. Dev wished this final round wasn’t necessary, but the boys needed to understand Dev wouldn’t tolerate dishonesty.

* * * *

Ezra was in tears when Claire finally removed the butt plug and humbler and then lifted him from the rice. Mikael did the same to Elijah, and both were carried through hallways and into a suite they hadn’t been in before. Ezra was placed on one of Dev’s legs, and Elijah the other, so both were snuggled in his lap, nestled into the protection and comfort of his arms. The two vampires carefully removed the pieces of rice embedded into their skin, and Dev talked to them and held them and comforted them as Ezra and his brother broke down into full blown sobs in the larger man’s arms. Tears ran down their faces, snot came out their noses. Ezra couldn’t remember the last time he’d bawled in someone’s arms.

“Punishment’s over,” Dev said. “You won’t be able tochangeuntil tomorrow. Mikael and Claire are going feed from you in a few minutes. I’ll get in bed between the two of you, and I’ll hold both of you while they feed.”

Ezra was used to feeding vampires. He’d been doing it nearly as long as he could remember.

“I don’t remember the first time I fed a vampire,” he told Dev, and he wasn’t sure why he was volunteering the information, but it felt important. “It’s like I always have.”

“It isn’t likely they would’ve fed from you until you were eight,” Claire told him. “Possibly six, if you were precocious.”

“So young?” Dev asked.

“A child’s mind is almost always clouded,” Mikael said. “Most of us prefer adults because it’s safer, harder to kill an adult. There are those who prefer to feed from children, even if it means they must bite two or three in order to get enough blood, so they don’t drain the child. With shifters who arechanginga lot, they could’ve taken more.” He sighed. “Some prefer feeding from children because they prefer fucking children, but others do so because you can taste the innocence in a child who has not experienced sexual pleasures.”

* * * *

Dev knew the boys had fed a few of the topmost vampires three years after arrival, when they were biologically six years old. They hadn’t been available for the rest of the Concilio vampires to feed from until they were biologically ten, four years later. Those notes weren’t as detailed as the ones made later, so Dev didn’t know the details of what had happened during those early feedings, but he could guess.

And he had no intention of sharing that information with them. Odds were, the vampires had wiped their memories shortly after each feeding, so unless Dev saw a reason they needed to dig into those nightmares, that history was best left in the past.

They’d gone into the Concilio’s stables at fifteen, available to anyone with enough money to rent or lease them. Brooke had therapists who could help the boys deal with that should they show signs of needing to do so, but Dev hadn’t seen those signs yet. Not all former slaves were traumatized by sex slave training, and it looked like the twins might fall into that group.

These were young men. Biologically, they were twenty-five. Emotionally? He wasn’t certain. He couldn’t treat them like children, but he was going to have to figure out how to catch their emotional age up. He’d done it a number of ways with dozens and dozens of former slaves, and the same thing was never going to work for different people, and that might mean these two would need to learn in different ways.

Decades earlier, he’d assigned someone to care for an abused kitten to help her learn empathy and other emotions. Originally, he’d worried that these two might hurt a kitten, based on the way they’d reacted to Genie on their first day, but it might be a consideration.

Chapter Fourteen