a hostile takeover (francis minific)
tw: substance use, sadomasochism themes, bondage, degradation/humiliation, dubious consent/coercion dynamics
The device blinked blue. Then white. Vapor curled into my lungs and set fire to every thought that deserved extinction. I inhaled until I forgot how to blink.
Until my bones softened.
Until the noise of the world receded to something tolerable and distant, like static behind glass. Then I exhaled, as slowly and silently as a man watching a funeral he himself had planned.
The joint acquisition was already in motion. I’d pulled the threads days ago—shortselling press, quiet rumors, a calculated leak about the chief financial officer’s vacation expenses and a thirty-eight-thousand-dollar tab for “corporate wellness.”
The market, predictably, responded like an animal shown blood. Panic. Overcorrection. Liquidation.
Now they were weak. Vulnerable. And I was very calm.
I swirled the wine in my glass—not to drink it. Just to watch it move. To give my hand something to do while the CEO on the other end of the call began to realize what was happening.
What had already happened. What had always been inevitable, really.
“You’re not being rational,” he said breathlessly. I could picture him: sweating in some boardroom, tie loosened, eyes darting to the people in the room who’d already stopped believing in him. His voice strained to carry authority, but I could hear the panic blooming under it like mildew in the walls. And still, he clung.
I tilted my head, eyes rolling languidly to the ceiling. “Non,” I agreed. “Rational would have been selling three days ago. Now it is simply... flailing.”
He made a sound. It might’ve been a scoff. It might’ve been fear. Difficult to tell, didn’t matter—these were the final nails in a coffin months in the making. Emotion was irrelevant always, but especially so in business.
“You leaked false numbers.”
“I leaked audited numbers,” I corrected. “You simply didn’t expect anyone to care.”
Another pause.
In the background, I heard something crash. A rush of feet, then a voice—feminine, shrill and panicked. My guess was a PR intern throwing up. They always do, the first time.
Stocks had never interested me. I’d found out from an early age that I preferred things swollen past the point of survival—people, companies, empires. All of this was as natural to me as breathing.
“Mr. Devereux,” the CEO said again, sharp now. “This is still recoverable. If we go public together—”
The ghost of a smile flitted over my lips. “Au contraire, Mr. Bellamy. I am not interested in a shared statement.”
“Then what do you want?”
The question hung in the air like a dropped glass.
I looked out the window of my penthouse. The sky was soft with dusk. Pinked edges. Cooling stone. The city below glimmered with the quiet desperation of early evening—headlights blooming like bioluminescent insects, pedestrians flitting between crosswalks with the twitchy energy of animals sensing nightfall.
It was the hour of premature romance. The hour when couples took photos of the sky as if it wasn’t the same dying light they’d see tomorrow.
My gaze skimmed the skyline, with its angular silhouettes etched against cotton-colored air. The hills were smudged with fog, softened to watercolor. The ocean, distant but visible, caught the last light. Pretty, in the way that expensive postcards were pretty.
It was all very aesthetic. It meant nothing.
“I want your resignation,” I said, my vowels stretching like ribbon—slow, thin, intentional. “By midnight. I want your board seats vacated. I want the patents transferred. And I want you to thank me, publicly, for my generosity in not pursuing criminal charges.”
“You can’t—”
“I already have.” I stretched out my legs. “You’ll see it in the morning papers. The headline is quite good. I gave them adjectives.”
Another beat. Then:
“You’re a fucking monster.”
I smiled.
“At last,” I murmured. “You’re being accurate.”
Then I hung up. And took another hit, holding the smoke deep in my lungs until my ribs ached and my eyes blurred. The vapor spread slow, molten, through my chest, turning time into something fluid and slow. I exhaled through my nose, watching the faint curl dissipate against the glass.
Somewhere beneath the haze, I remembered that another acquisition would be arriving soon. And this one, I would be quite busy with. Not a company this time. An alpha.
Specifically—an Economics major from my International Policy class, all height and useless muscle, wrapped in his father’s money like armor. He thought this was a game. Thought the past few weeks—our debates, my offhand remarks, the way I’d taken his frat brother in hand—were a prelude to his idea of conquest.
What he didn’t know was that I’d been orchestrating his unravelling from the start.
He’d resisted, at first. Pretended not to care when I told him outright he was too vanilla to be worth my time. But the wound to his ego had festered, and now he was coming to my penthouse, thinking it was his idea.
I smiled faintly to myself, drawing another slow inhale. He didn’t know that I’d already acquired him. Or that tonight, I would strip him down to the raw material and take everything.
I would ruin him, too. -----------------------------------------------------------------
Grayson was already hard when I opened the door. Of course he was.
Button-down open, sleeves pushed to the elbows to show off average muscles. Hair gelled within an inch of its life, as if he were auditioning for the role of Man Who Fucks. The smirk he wore was casual—curated, even—but I knew that look. The kind alphas practiced in mirrors. The kind that said, I know what you want, and lucky you—I’m here to give it to you.
“You’re early,” I said, stepping aside. “How American.”
He didn’t answer right away. Just looked me over—too slowly, like he thought his gaze was something I should feel. It caught on the knot of silk tied low around my waist, lingered as though fabric could be undressed with eyes alone. My feet were bare against the marble, a glass of wine balanced in my hand, the stem turning idly between my fingers.
I let him look. His pupils dilated, just slightly.
“Nice place,” he said as he stepped inside without waiting to be invited, eyes sweeping the penthouse like he was taking mental inventory of assets we owned jointly. “Lemme guess. Your parents are both in…” He hesitated just long enough to feign calculation. “International stocks? Or—no, wait—something big in real estate. Yeah?”
“Wow. How did you know.”
It was almost impressive, the confidence required to be so incorrect. As if money this precise, this intentional, could ever be the product of parental handouts. My mother’s hands had only ever offered me weapons. My father had been a vial in a lab. Everything here, every inch of glass and marble, was mined from the bones of corporations that underestimated me. Acquired without mercy, stripped for parts, and repurposed into something useful.
Something mine.
But Grayson didn’t need to know that. He needed to keep seeing me as a version of himself—just enough to think he could compete, not enough to see how quickly I’d outpace him.
I turned from the door without answering, letting him trail behind me through the narrow sweep of entryway into the open span of the living room. The city glowed against the glass wall, lights shivering in the deepening dusk. He glanced at it once, but his focus kept dragging back to me, to the measured pace of my steps, the whisper of silk over skin.
“You live here alone?” he asked, his voice pitched in that casual way people use when they think they already know the answer.
“Alone,” I said.
He gave a low whistle and dropped into the low armchair opposite the sofa without waiting to be told where to sit, leaning back like he owned the posture—legs sprawled wide, one arm thrown over the side. His scent was sharp with aftershave but otherwise neutral per the patch sitting squarely over his gland.
I crossed to the bar, refilled my glass, and took the seat beside him. The air between us was still, deliberate. I let it stretch, watching him adjust under the weight of it.
The stem of the glass ticked softly against the marble side table, as I set it down to reach for the rig on the console beside me. Grayson’s eyes tracked the movement.
“You smoke?” he asked, sounding disbelieving.
I glanced at him once, tilting the mouthpiece toward my lips. “Frequently.”
The device gleamed in my palm, still faintly warm from the last hit. I rotated it between my fingers, the glass cold on my lower lip.
Grayson wasn’t watching the rig. He was watching me.
Perfect.
I tapped the chamber once. It blinked—a slow, lazy pulse, like a sleeping animal. Blue. Then white. Then still. Instead of taking the hit myself, I held it out to him.
"You want?" I offered, casual.
Grayson grinned, already reaching for it. “Hell yeah. Me and my frat brothers do gravity bongs all the time.”
Of course he didn’t ask what was in it. He took it like he was proving something and brought it to his lips, cocky and open-chested, tipping his head back as if he were about to crush a beer. “You ever do gravity bongs?”
I smiled. “No.”
“You’re missing out,” he said, already mid-inhale.
I watched, offering no instruction and instead watching as he ripped the hit like it was a race. He held it with a clenched jaw, throat working. I could practically see the vapor unfurling inside him like a fuse.
“This is smooth,” he said after a beat, voice slightly hoarse. “Not even that strong.”
I let him sit in that silence. Watched thin clouds trickle from the sides of his mouth. Three seconds. Five.Ten.
He blinked. “Wait.”
There it was—the flicker. A hitch in his breath, a narrowing of focus.
“…What is this, like, thirty percent?”
“Live resin,” I said mildly. “Eighty-seven.”
As if on cue, his chest seized, and the first cough tore out of him so violently his shoulders jerked forward, the device nearly slipping from his hand. I plucked it from him as another cough followed, wet and ragged, until he was doubled over, eyes watering, trying to laugh through the fit.
“Shit—fuck—this is—” he wheezed, one fist pressed against his sternum like that would hold the smoke in. I watched impassively, the corner of my mouth twitching. It was always remarkable, how quickly swagger dissolved into red-eyed sputtering when confronted with something potent.
His posture softened, head tipping back like the couch had caught him mid-fall. The smirk stayed a moment too long, then slid off, leaving him open-mouthed and slow-blinking.
“Still feeling chill?”
A pause. “…Yeah.”
It was a lie. His knees fell wider, breath dragging low in his chest. Heat rose sharp under his skin. The part of him that had come here to win was already somewhere else entirely.
“You’re really pretty,” he murmured, as if surprised to hear it out loud. “Like… in a fucked-up way.”
“Merci.”
His gaze followed the shape of the word on my tongue. “Is that French?”
I didn’t answer. Two fingers slipped beneath his collar, thumb grazing his gland. The air thickened. He shifted, thighs parting further, a hum building in the back of his throat.
Then I tugged the fabric just enough to close the distance. My mouth brushed his—not soft, not searching. A flick of tongue, the scrape of teeth on his lower lip. Not a kiss. A sample. He hadn’t even registered it yet. Too slow. But when he finally did, the reaction came all at once.
He reached for me, greedy, trying to pull me in against his body and chase my mouth like he’d earned it. My palm met his chest and shoved him back into the couch, thumb pressing down on his gland.
“Ah,” I scolded him softly. “But remember our deal?” I saw the flicker in his eyes when he remembered. The deal. The clause. It had begun in class, the day he was still licking his wounds from the third debate I’d gutted him in. He’d been sulking, still smarting from the weekend, when I’d taken his frat brother just to prove I could. Why not me? he’d blurted.
No preamble, no shame. Already exactly where I wanted him.
I hadn’t slowed my step. Why didn’t I fuck you like I fucked Felix? Why do you care when we’re incompatible? I’d muttered, attempting to slip past him into the tide of students filing from the classroom.
But he’d stepped into my path to block me, words spilling out in a furious whisper. Too fast. Too nervous. Who says we’re incompatible? Just because you want to be on top? You really think I can’t do that? If Felix can, so can I. Shit, I can do it better. Was he even good for you?
He’d made it clear he’d thought he could do better, and that was how we’d arrived at it. Not a promise. Not even an offer. Just a clause, spoken as mildly as a footnote: if you can take everything I give you without crying, I’ll let you fuck me. Now he blinked. Then laughed, cocky again. “Yeah. I get to fuck you.”
“If you can take everything,” I reminded him pointedly. “That was the condition.”
His smile widened. “Whatever you did to Felix, you can do to me.” He eyed me, squaring his shoulders. “What, you wanna do it all night or something? You know I’m on the wrestling team, right? I have stamina.” My bones felt electric as I stood up. Grayson watched me, pupils blown wide, smile softening at the edges, already mistaking my silence for tenderness.
I turned my head slightly, catching my own reflection in the window. Dusk had turned the glass to ink. Behind me: the lights, the velvet, the boy on the couch.
In front of me: a night full of screaming.
And I hadn’t even touched him yet.
“Take your shirt off,” I said abruptly. A command.
His grin twitched. Not confusion—not yet. Just surprise. “Damn, bossy. Okay.”
He peeled the shirt off and tossed it somewhere. My gaze ticked over his chest and came away bored—it was bronzed and sculpted enough to suggest some half-hearted gym effort funded by protein powder and family money.
“Now get on your knees.”
“Oh, we’re doing that?” he said, sliding down onto the floor with a short bark of laughter. “You want a little show first? Should I flex or—?”
He was still talking when I started walking a slow circle around his body, one hand resting against my jaw, the other tracing absently down the silk at my hip. I circled him like he was a prototype. Something I might return if it didn’t perform as advertised.
Perhaps it showed on my face, because Grayson’s voice trailed off. His smile faded.
I stopped behind him and leaned forward, one hand tangling in his hair, gripping just hard enough to tilt his head back.
“If you’re going to fuck me,” I murmured near his ear, “you’ll need to follow instructions. Let’s begin with obedience.” -----------------------------------------------------------------
Obedience was not a strong suit of his, as it would turn out.
The first hour was easy. I gave him little licks, the occasional slow stroke of my hand, the softest scrape of teeth along his neck—enough to keep him at the edge without ever tipping him over. I made him say please three times before I even touched him directly.
By the second hour, he’d stopped pretending it was beneath him and had started panting for it, hips jerking every time I brushed close. I kept my hands light, my mouth lighter, careful to make every touch feel like a privilege.
Then I introduced the plug.
The look he gave me was worth every second of the night so far—wide-eyed confusion tipped with indignation, like I’d just asked him to renounce his American citizenship.
“Wait. You want to… what?”
“Mm,” I hummed, spinning the plug for his inspection while pressing a thumb against his hole. “Nothing you can’t handle, right?”
“Wait. Wait wait wait. I don’t—I’m the alpha,” he stammered, incredulous. “You’re the omega. I’m supposed to fuck you. You’re being serious right now? You really want me to—to—”
I tilted my head, letting the silence stretch just long enough for him to hear how ridiculous he sounded. Then, casually:
“Felix took it.”
That landed exactly where I wanted it to. His whole posture shifted—still wary, still uncomfortable, but competitive now. “Yeah? Well, I’m not Felix,” he said, trying to inject swagger into a voice that had gone slightly tight.
“Good,” I said. “I’d like to think you can take more than he did.” What I didn’t say: Felix had lasted all of seven minutes before crying and begging me to stop.
I gave him an out—told him the word to use if he wanted it all to stop. Instead, he gritted his teeth through the stretch, his breathing jagged until it wasn’t, until the tension started leaking out of his shoulders. He relaxed, incrementally. Just enough.
And then he came.
That was against the rules. Unfortunately for him.
So naturally, I got up and left, with him tied to the bed.
“Yo. Yo, Francis—wait—you can’t just leave me here like this! Dude. No, no, where are you going? Listen, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, okay? Please don’t—no, no, no, man, this isn’t—this isn’t normal. You’re not normal. Who even does this? Francis! Come back! Come back, bro, I’m serious—this is fucked, I can’t—fuck—”
At the doorway, I didn’t even turn.
“When I return, you’ll call me Sir.” I let the pause hang, sharp as glass. “Or I won’t touch you anymore at all.”
I didn’t gag him. I wanted him to hear himself begging, wanted him to hear his voice break. -----------------------------------------------------------------
It was three hours later when I officially returned to the room I’d left Grayson in.
I stood in the doorway for a long moment, simply watching. His face was red, streaked with tear tracks that had dried and been replaced, over and over. He was grinding on the plug without meaning to, thighs trembling with each frustrated shift.
I stepped closer, letting my palm trail along his side. He startled toward me instantly, like a tether yanked taut.
“Are you fucking kidding me, man, you left for hours—”
Quick as a snake, my hand shot out, fingers wrapping just under his throat. “Business doesn’t stop for pleasure, you know,” I told him with a shake of my head, meeting his wide eyes. “I had Felix tied up for much longer.”
I climbed onto the bed, straddling his hips. The robe slipped, silk pooling at my thighs. I half-expected some crude retort, but he stayed silent, except for the sharp inhale when I maneuvered his cock past the hem to slide against the wet seam between my leg. “Remember what you’re supposed to call me?” “Sir. Oh—fuck, Sir—” His head tipped back, hips bucking helplessly despite the bonds.
I rubbed along him twice more, slow and deliberate, feeling his entire body strain toward me. Then I pulled away, letting my fingers drift down to the base of the plug. I gave it the smallest yank, just enough to make him gasp and jolt, every muscle in his legs tensing hard enough to shake the bed.
“Still think you can take everything?” I asked.
His voice came out ragged, catching in his throat. “Yeah—hah—fuck yeah, I can—”
The sound broke off into a sharp moan when I twisted the plug again, a slow roll forward that pressed exactly where I wanted it to. His toes curled, thighs shuddering under me.
“Oh my god,” he gasped. “That’s—fuck—that’s so—”
“You’re talking too much,” I scolded, reaching for the gag on the nightstand.
He barely registered what it was before I slid it between his lips and buckled it snug around the back of his head. The sound he made was muffled but desperate, and I watched his jaw flex against the leather, his eyes flicking up to mine.
“Better,” I murmured, dragging my fingers along his cheek before returning to the plug. I took my time pulling it out completely, already ready with a different one. A larger one.
I started working it in, a little deeper with each slow push, watching his body betray him. The flush up his chest, the way his hips tried to follow the motion, the choked noises spilling uselessly against the gag. The alpha who’d stormed into my penthouse thinking he’d do the taking? All gone now.
A particularly deep angle had him jerking hard against the ties, eyes going wide. He groaned—long, guttural—and then again, as though he couldn’t help himself.
“You like that?” I asked softly, giving him a moment to breathe before easing it back out just enough to make him whimper.
His nod was frantic.
I smiled, curling my free hand around the base of his cock, not to stroke him—yet—but just to hold him there, swollen and leaking, while I pressed the plug forward again. His whole body trembled.
“Good,” I said. “Because we have two more sizes to go.” -----------------------------------------------------------------
I was fucking him when my phone lit up. Kerrigan.
Of course. How poetic.
We were whispered to be rivals in certain circles, but what most would never know was that Ainsley Kerrigan and I were merely opposite sides of the same coin—his repression voluntary, mine carved in by force since ten. Two men suffocating in different prisons, though only one of us had learned how to weaponize the bars.
I didn’t slow. The strap drilled into Grayson’s body with a steady rhythm, each thrust dragging a muffled cry from behind the gag. His wrists strained against the ties, hips jerking between resistance and need. My hand pressed flat to his lower back, keeping him exactly where I wanted him, sprawled and open.
The gag came free with a sharp metallic click, and his jaw sagged open at once. Wet, desperate noises tumbled out, raw from hours of biting down against restraint. He moaned like he’d been waiting his whole life for oxygen, only for the sound to curdle into broken pleas—half-choked, half-sobbed. Perfect.
My lips curled as I pressed accept and set it to speaker. Grayson’s voice carried into the open line instantly and I heard a sharp intake of breath, as if Kerrigan was choking on Grayson choking. “Kerrigan,” I drawled, letting my voice slip lower. “You’re interrupting a session. My hands are full. As is his mouth.”
Whatever Kerrigan said, I barely listened. My attention was split between his voice and the body beneath me—one hand curling idly around Grayson’s hip, the other adjusting the strap’s angle to make him choke on another ragged moan.
“Edge training,” I informed Kerrigan smoothly, as if giving a quarterly report. “Six hours in. I have an alpha econ major tied to my bed, leaking all over my sheets, and he still hasn’t earned permission to come. Say hello, puppy.”
Grayson didn’t balk. “Sir—please—please, I’ve been good, I—fuck—please let me—”
I hummed in approval and shoved the gag back in before he could finish. “You see?” I murmured into the phone. “It is a hostile takeover, darling, I assure you. He didn’t quite consent to this.”
Kerrigan raged louder. I rewarded Grayson with a punishing snap of my hips, then stilled when his cock twitched in desperation. My palm pressed flat against the small of his back, pinning him as if nothing at all was happening.
By the time Kerrigan circled back to his usual tirade—stone-throwing from his glass house, hypocritical as ever—I was already bored. I fisted Grayson’s hair, yanking his head up just enough to hear the strangled noise he made against the gag.
“Please. I’m giving him clarity. He came in rather cocky. Now he calls me Sir with tears in his eyes and says thank you when I slap him. I’m providing education. Just not the kind that earns credit hours.”
Kerrigan’s voice shook on the line, high with righteous fury. Always so easy to bait. Sick. Twisted. A disgrace. The words poured out of him like steam escaping a kettle, shrill and inevitable. I smiled faintly, savoring the way his outrage made him so transparent.
“Oh, come now,” I drawled, one hand still steady on Grayson’s hip as he shuddered beneath me. “Don’t pretend your hands are clean. You were looking positively ravished at our last group tutoring session. All those love bites… and I bet you still haven’t so much as blown him.”
There it was. The hitch.
“That is none of your business,” he spat, teeth grinding audibly.
“Ah, but it is my business,” I countered evenly. My gaze flicked down to Grayson’s tear-streaked face, the gag muffling the sound he made when I adjusted the strap’s angle. “When your repression bleeds into my calendar. You’re not angry that I skipped tutoring, Kerrigan. You’re angry that I’m fucking someone’s brains out while you’re still pretending yours aren’t leaking down your spine every time that quarterback breathes near you.”
His silence was sharp, jagged. I could almost hear him clenching his jaw hard enough to crack enamel. “At least I don’t degrade people for sport—”
I smiled wider and adjusted my rhythm until the boy under me sobbed. Loosened the gag so his cries could leak out. Perhaps it could be therapeutic for Kerrigan, who knew.
“You degrade yourself for free, Kerrigan. Denying every instinct. Pretending control is a virtue. That puppy of yours would bend you over in a heartbeat, and you’d let him. We both know it. The only difference between us is—I enjoy myself.”
“Please, Sir, I need—I’m gonna—please, please, I can’t—”
“No,” I said—not to Kerrigan, but to the boy writhing under me. “You’ll wait. Be still. Let me finish with my colleague.”
“You’re fucking disgusting,” Kerrigan seethed on the other end.
“And you’re celibate by choice,” I shot back. “I’d ask who’s worse, but I already know the answer. I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me now, as I’m moments from climax—something your repression won't let you do without a spreadsheet and a panic attack.”
I ended the call before he could respond, tossed the phone aside, and drove into Grayson harder, finally giving him the ruin he’d been begging for all night. Not quite everything, but the closest he’d ever come. -----------------------------------------------------------------
He was quiet now. At last.
No more posturing. No more smirking. No more cocky remarks. All of that had bled out of him hours ago, leaving nothing but obedience. He was on his side, arms still behind his back, face slack against the sheets. A faint sheen of sweat cooled over his skin. His breathing was slow, uneven, like the air was heavier for him now.
He never asked about fucking me. That was gone from him entirely, dissolved like sugar in heat. He didn’t even look at me as if I owed him anything. And that, more than the begging or the tears or the ruin, told me I had stripped him clean.
I rose from the bed and crossed the room, the silk of my robe whispering over my thighs. The air was cooler out here, away from the heat radiating off his body. I poured the last of the wine into my glass, watching the dark liquid twist against the light from the city.
The skyline was the same as it had been when I’d finished dismantling his father’s company—bright, indifferent, a scatter of gold against the black.
I’d known who he was by the second debate. The attendance sheet in International Policy had confirmed the surname, and I’d remembered the file on my desk. Bellamy & Co., mid-size, overleveraged, bleeding out under the weight of my acquisition. I’d been gutting it for weeks before I ever told him he was too vanilla for my time.
A coincidence, I’d thought then. But then he kept coming back—bristling, posturing, mistaking disdain for invitation. How could I resist? To strip the father in daylight and the son at night? To carve out the dynasty root and branch?
Behind me, Grayson shifted on the bed, a small, involuntary sound catching in his throat. I watched his reflection in the glass—pliant, ruined, stripped of all that gaudy certainty.
Some bloodlines collapse in boardrooms. Some in bedrooms. Tonight, the Bellamys had the honor of both.