Chapter 7: The First Command

He looked interested, his head tilted. “So you’ll be mine? You will obey my every command?” he asked, testing the boundaries of my offer. I affirmed the horrifying terms. Then his expression sharpened with cunning. “But an oath… that’s just words. Pretty words from a pretty mouth. How can I trust you? What’s to stop you, the second I remove this Lasso and return your power, from turning me into a red smear on the wall? Convince me.”

The Lasso compelled me to give him the assurance he needed, to fashion my own final chains. “Because you are binding me with something far stronger than any rope,” I said, my voice hollow. “An oath sworn by a daughter of Themyscira, an oath to save a life, is a divine contract. It is an absolute. My honor, my very soul, will be the chains. To break it would be to unmake myself. The Lasso compels this truth from me now. My word, once given, is immutable.”

Satisfied, he put the bat away. “Good,” he said. “That’s a good girl.” He called me a ‘good girl,’ the praise one gives to a compliant pet. He ordered his men to take Steve outside and call for help.

He untied me. The moment the cord fell away, the sensation was a physical explosion. A roar of thunder in my blood. Every nerve ending screamed with newfound energy as the strength to level mountains returned to limbs that were bound by my own promise. The contrast was a physical torment. Numbly, I put my armor back on. It felt like a burial shroud.

“Now, for your first command,” he said, his voice soft and monstrous as he laid out the architecture of my first task as his slave. “You are going to walk upstairs. You will go outside to the sidewalk where your precious Steve is waiting for the medics I have so graciously called. You may go to him. You may even comfort him. Hold his hand. Wipe the blood from his brow. Let him see his hero, right there with him. Let him feel that beautiful, soaring hope that he is safe and that everything will be alright.”

His words were a masterpiece of psychological misogyny, forcing me into a twisted parody of feminine care.

“But when the paramedics arrive,” he continued, “they will ask what happened. And you will tell them a simple story. You will tell them a gang attacked you both and ran away. You will describe them vaguely. You got a good look at no one. It was over so fast. A simple, believable lie to protect your new master. He will go to the hospital. He will expect you. But you will not come. You will never visit him there. You will never call. You will let him wonder why his savior abandoned him in his moment of need.”

He stepped closer, his voice dropping to a whisper. “And then, after the ambulance is gone, you will turn around, and you will walk back here. To this basement. To me. And when you return… you will kiss me deeply, as a devoted servant kisses her master.”

I lifted my gaze to his. The fire in my eyes was extinguished, replaced by a bleak, endless ocean of resignation. My oath was sworn.

“I understand,” I said, my voice a ghost.

I took a slow breath, and the next two words fell from my lips, tasting like poison and ash. The first payment on an infinite debt.

“Yes… master.”

I turned and walked toward the stairs. Each step was a beat in a funeral dirge for my own soul, taking me toward a final, stolen moment with the man I loved, and into the beginning of my damnation with my new master. Master Vex.