You lie there recovering from the piercings.

You pull the robe on before the key finishes turning, worn wool over the lace and the new rings, Sera’s winter smell shutting around you, and you drop back onto the rug with the tray because that was the first order, even if a second mouth already put you on the bed. The beads are still going underneath. The collar sits over the robe’s neck and will not hide.

He comes in and looks at the rumpled coverlet first.

"I told you the floor."

"I was told the bed for the piercings," you say, quiet and full, and then you lose the rest of it because he has already flicked the ring on his own hand.

"Stand up."

You stand. The robe is too short on this figure the way it would have been on her, and the hum in your nipples and clit climbs a notch as if his ring and the beads are the same thought. He walks a circle around you and does not touch you with his fingers. He turns the ring.

The first setting is a low pulse you could have walked on. The second one makes your mouth open. The third hits the clit ring so cleanly that your knees dip and you have to catch the chair of her things, and he watches that the way he watched the window, which is to say without kindness.

"She used to flinch with her left shoulder," he says, and then the longer sentence comes while he turns the ring again. "You flinch with the whole body, which is how I know you are the cheap version, and cheap versions still stand when they are told to stand."

You try to stand. He does not give you a setting you can stand through. The beads spike together, chest and cunt, and the robe hides none of the shake, and you come on his rug with your hands in the wool and Sera’s voice breaking out of you, wet running down the inside of the old bottoms onto the floor you were supposed to be grateful for. He keeps the ring high through it and a little after, until you are folded at the waist and the collar ring taps your throat when you gasp.

He shuts it down to the low pulse, not off.

"That is supper volume," he says. "If I want you louder I will have you louder in a room with people in it. If I want you quiet I will have you quiet on a chain. Do not sit. Do not pick at the rings. Do not put some other woman’s cloth on and walk out of my house with a different face. I paid for this one."

He leaves the robe on you as if it is a courtesy he resents. The key turns. The beads keep their supper pulse, small and constant, and your thighs are wet under Sera’s winter wool while the hall takes his boots away.