A shadowed figure in the corner...

The green curtain settles and the room goes smaller without the coats. The day by now turning into the night, with oil smoke hanging under the beams. Your wrists ache where the ribbons have been holding them, and the wool under your hip is wet enough that it has stopped being warm. Hemm’s voice is a blur out front, counting sealed bolts, and you keep your eyes on the ceiling because looking down means looking at what is still running out of you.

Your eyes drift down from the ceiling and notice there is a corner by the bolt-shelf that you have not looked at properly.

It is only a darker patch at first, the kind a lamp leaves when a body is between it and the wall, and you tell yourself it is the dummy’s shadow until the dummy’s shadow is already on the floor by the bed. This one does not move when the flame does. It sits at the height of a man, and it has been sitting there since the heavy one finished, maybe longer, and your stomach goes tight around that thought while the ribbons hold you as they cool.

He steps out of it.

He is an adult, ordinary in a dark coat and a waistcoat that has been buttoned wrong in the hurry, and his cock is already in his hand, thick and flushed, the foreskin back. He's eyes are squarely on you and your body, and then he looks at your face.

“Hallin, I’m one of his men” he says, before continuing . "Hallin has been watching this room the whole hour. Not here but from afar". He looks to the window and gives it a nod as if acknowledging his master.

Your mouth opens and nothing useful comes out. The enchanted strands wake before you can call Hemm. A ribbon lifts off your wrist and another off your ankle, and they do not tighten this time. They slide you. The bed drops away. Your knees hit the boards in the middle of the floor, the lingerie still on, bra cups full and the panties soaked through, and the cords settle you there as if the room has decided where a model belongs when the buyers are gone. Your hands come down in front of you. The last ribbon leaves your mouth free.

He walks around you once. His boots stop where you can see them, and the cock in his fist is close enough that the heat off it reaches your cheek.

“He wanted to see how acceptable you are to be used,” he says. “Now he wants the face.”

He takes a small bottle from the waistcoat, cheap glass, the same wrong color as the one at the abbey, and he breaks the wax with his thumb. He drinks it in one pull. The empty bottle hits the boards. For a second nothing happens except his breath going short, and then the air beside him tears.

A second man steps out of him, same coat, same wrong button, same cock already hard, and then a third, and a fourth, until the circle around your knees is him six times over. They do not speak to each other. They look at your mouth and at the blonde hair stuck to your cheek and at the bra, and the first one — the one who drank — puts his free hand in your hair and tips your face up.

“Open.”

You do, as if the mans words has power you didn't expect, and he does not put himself in. He strokes, close, and the first stripe hits your lower lip and your tongue and keeps coming, hot and thick, until your chin is running. A clone on the left finishes across your cheek before that one is done. Another takes the other side and paints the bridge of your nose. They work in a rough turns, not a queue so much a roll of chance, and every time one spends the next is already there, cock head at your eyebrow or your open mouth or the hollow under your eye.

You try to turn. A hand in the blonde hair keeps you facing them. Spend lands in your lashes and you blink it worse. It strings from your lip to a clone’s fist and breaks. Someone laughs, short, the same laugh in two mouths. They want a canvas, and the face is what they take, paint stroke after paint stroke, until your skin is tight with it and your hair is clumped at the temples and you can taste it when you breathe.

The original does not finish with them. He waits until the clones have used what the bottle gave them, and then he steps in close and adds the last of it across your mouth and your chin, slower, watching it sit. When he is done the duplicates thin at the edges and fold back into him, coats and all, until it is one man again with his cock softening in his hand and your face a white mess that will not drip clean.

“Hallin has been watching close,” he says, voice scraped, and he finds the longer sentence because you are still kneeling and he wants it heard.

“He has decided he has a use for you now.
Not the tailor’s use. His."

You will walk to him like this so the street can see what the potion bought, and if you wipe it off before the door I will put you back on the boards.”

A last thin copy peels off him for the errand. It brings a hooded cape from the shadow-corner, dark wool, and it settles the thing over your shoulders and over the bra and the panties so the lingerie is covered and the body is a shape under cloth. The hood comes up. It only hangs a bit over your forehead. The face still exposed. Cum is stuck to your cheeks and your mouth and the ends of the blonde hair, and the clone tugs the clasp once and fades.

The original buttons his coat. He looks at the curtain, then at you, then at the mess he left.

“On your feet,” he says. “Hallin does not like to be kept.”

The ribbons have gone slack on the floor. Hemm is still selling out front. The cape rests uneasy on your shoulders, and the hood does barely anything for what is on your face.