Chapter 1: A safe word

Loading host consciousness

"Zero percent, two percent, one hundred. Host consciousness loaded."

"Host name: Cian Fitzgerald."

"Loading book."

"Book title: The Reined In Romance."

"Genre: Contemporary, Pure Love, Protagonist Suffering, Coercion, , , , Beep, beep, beep"

A harsh electronic screech cut through the air.

The system stalled. "Inappropriate vocabulary detected. It has been censored automatically."

The mechanical voice delivered this in a flat tone and went quiet. Cian pressed his fingers to his pounding temples and hauled himself upright. Foam slid off his shoulders and water sloshed over the rim of the tub, leaving a glistening trail across the floor.

He was in a bathtub.

More precisely, he was in the enormous marble tub of a penthouse suite in a five star hotel on the Liffey, in the heart of Dublin.

The bubbles smelled of rose and sea salt, the air of cedar from a flameless diffuser, and the floor was polished Connemara marble. Through the floor to ceiling window he could see the whole city spread out below, the lights of the quays and the Docklands glowing gold against the dark.

Cian figured the room cost well over a thousand euro a night.

The body he’d landed in belonged to a trust fund heir who burned through money like turf in a stove.

He glanced at the system interface and tapped the pale blue panel hovering in front of him, crowded with dense text.

"So this is the book I’ve been dropped into?"

"Correct, Host. This is your starter assignment."

Cian had been a junior clerk at the Bureau of Transmigration until the day his heart stopped without warning. As his consciousness slipped away, a voice introduced itself as the "Archetype Roleplay System 015 for Protagonist Suffering Novels" and offered a deal. Complete its roleplay tasks and he could live again. Cian didn’t want to die, and he didn’t pause to wonder about the string of censored words after the genre. He pressed "Accept" and became 005’s host.

There was a dizzying spin, and then he woke up in the hotel bath.

005: "Plot loading complete. Would the Host like to review it?"

Cian pulled on a bathrobe. "Yes."

Points of silver blue light shimmered and rearranged themselves. A rectangular reading screen hung in the air, full of text.

He skimmed it quickly.

It was an early era romance between two men, The Reined In Romance. The author had unusual tastes, and the pages were packed with scenes that couldn’t be shown, which the system had censored in the name of decency.

The protagonist was Eoin Brennan, a boy from a poor family whose parents had died young, leaving him with only his Nana. Eoin was brilliant. He won a place at Trinity College Dublin, secured a PhD position early, and picked his supervisor. With a smoother road, he’d have been a rising star.

Everything changed the year he was due to graduate.

His Nana had a chronic illness that needed constant medication. To pay for it, Eoin had worked since first year, tutoring, shelving books in the library, pulling pints and pouring tea in a café. Even sleeping six hours a night and spending every other waking hour studying or working, it was a drop in the ocean against the cost of her treatment.

However hard he tried, she didn’t improve. She got worse, until she was nearly past saving.

When he’d run out of options, Student Services offered him a "golden opportunity."

Declan Fitzgerald, one of the country’s biggest business magnates, had come asking for a top student of excellent character to act as study companion to his wayward son.

Declan was a giant in biopharmaceuticals, and his company partnered with international labs. One of its experimental drugs was recruiting volunteers and could be supplied to patients for free, and it might help Eoin’s grandmother.

The volunteer places were limited, though, and nobody could simply sign up. After a long hesitation, Eoin accepted the job.

Plenty of people warned him off. They said Declan’s son was a nightmare and a notorious bully, and who knew how he’d be treated? But Eoin had no other choice.

Cian, Declan’s son, was the most infamous spoiled heir in the city. He was hopeless at his studies, at art, and at anything practical, but brilliant at partying, clubbing, and racing cars. He was wild and flippant, and all of Dublin’s well to do rolled their eyes at the sound of his name.

Declan was swamped with business and spent three hundred days a year abroad, with almost no time to get close to his son or keep him in line. So he’d decided to hire a good student as a companion, hoping to rein him in.

The companion he found was Eoin.

Eoin knew Cian’s reputation and knew the young man would be no picnic. But with his money troubles, he signed the contract with Declan anyway.

Of course, if a mere companion could reform a spoiled heir, he wouldn’t have been a spoiled heir to begin with.

Cian sneered at the "study buddy" and "tutor" his father had hired. On the day his father flew out of the country, he cornered Eoin at the college gates and tossed over a second document.

The "Sponsorship Agreement."

It was full of degrading terms, and Cian even stated outright that he had certain particular demands which Party B would be required to meet.

Eoin held the contract in hands that shook. Cian lounged against his car, looking down on him. "You’ve got three days to decide."

Eoin said nothing.

Cian didn’t think much of the silence. He knew Eoin was backed into a corner.

The deadline for volunteer applications was three days away.

No one could know what Eoin went through in that time, how many nights he sat in his empty flat wringing out a threadbare shirt. But on the last of the three days, he brought the signed agreement to Cian.

Cian checked the time. "So it’s already day three?"

System: "Yes. The protagonist is expected to knock on your door in about an hour."

Cian: "Then I’d better learn the script."

With an hour to go, time was tight. Cian had no acting experience at all, not even a part in a secondary school play. Luckily he’d never been a model student either, always messing about and winding people up, which overlapped well with the original character. As long as he got the lines right, he was unlikely to slip out of character.

He tapped to turn the page and read on.

The moment the page flipped, his hand froze.

"*, *"

Cian paused. "What’s this?"

Censored?

He skipped those lines and kept reading, only to find more big stretches of blacked out text.

"Cian ***, *********, ***."

"Eoin *********, **."

"Cian ***** Eoin *******, *******, Eoin **, Cian *****."

Cian: "?"

He rapped on the floating screen. "System, did you get water in you? Are these two doing a stage act or what?"

The bathroom was thick with steam. If moisture had got into the system through a port somewhere, a display fault would make sense.

The system paused. "I’m the Bureau’s latest technology. I do not get water in me."

Cian pointed. "Then what is this?"

The system beeped twice, sounding rather guilty. "On inspection, it is content requiring censorship."

Cian: "Reason?"

The system muttered, "It offends public decency."

What sort of book had so much indecent material in a couple of lines? He had a bad feeling.

He scrolled to the later Chapters. Most of the book was blocked out, with only scraps of plot between the gaps. He pieced together what came next by guesswork.

As the villain archetype, he was supposed to put Eoin through certain forbidden acts, so extreme they couldn’t be shown, torturing him in body and mind until he was close to breaking.

Later in the book, Eoin developed a severe mental illness and had to take fistfuls of pills each day just to get by. Even then, Cian had no intention of letting him go. Eoin’s cold indifference only fed Cian’s urge to dominate him, and the cruelty escalated until it nearly ended in disaster more than once.

After about half a year, Declan came home. Unable to stand his son’s constant racing and carousing with his useless friends, he packed Cian off abroad to study. Only then did Eoin get a chance to breathe.

Three years later, Declan died suddenly of an illness, and Cian’s uncle, Fergal Fitzgerald, took over the company. Eoin, who had been biding his time all those years, graduated and joined the firm, rising fast to become Fergal’s trusted right hand and a power player in Dublin.

With Declan dead, Cian’s allowance was cut off and he slunk back to Ireland in disgrace. Eoin intercepted him at the airport and took him to a hotel. There, before the same floor to ceiling window that held so much shame, Eoin broke Cian’s fingers one by one.

The once golden heir was reduced to a wreck, screaming and begging. Eoin stood over him, unmoved, then forged medical records claiming Cian was mentally ill and had him committed to a psychiatric hospital, shut in a tiny room for years, cut off from the world.

The original Cian couldn’t bear the humiliation. He fought back hard at first, then tried to reach his old friends, but Eoin’s grip was iron and he had no chance. In the end his mind gave way, and after twenty years of delirium he died in that hospital.

The novel wasn’t finished at that point, but Cian’s role was over, and the system didn’t show the rest.

After digging through the rubble of censored text to reconstruct all that, his worldview was shaken. He pointed at himself. "So I’m supposed to play a dim rich kid, keep being dim, get my fingers broken, and then rot in a psychiatric hospital for twenty years?"

If so, coming back to life might not be worth it.

"No, no, no," System 006 said quickly. "When your fingers are broken, I’ll block your pain perception. You only have to put on a show of agony. As for the hospital, you need only return and perform when Eoin visits. The rest of the time you can live normally."

Cian nodded. "That’s more like it."

So he’d live as a top tier heir for the first half of the plot, then travel abroad and see the sights, play a bit part in the second half, and bow out. That didn’t sound too bad.

The only problem was that he had no idea how to get through the first half.

He flipped back through the book again and again, but he couldn’t make out a single line of dialogue through the blur of censored text.

He pointed at the screen. "This?"

With no lines, how was he supposed to act?

The system cleared its throat. "Displaying the novel’s original content is against the rules, but I can give you some hints."

"Cian’s character is very shallow. He’s just an Archetype in a story built around suffering, written as a domineering, spoiled, dim witted rich kid. Act in that manner, and you don’t have to match the book’s behaviour exactly."

"As for the censored parts."

The system hesitated, the cursor blinking as if in doubt, and finally typed two letters on the screen.

"That’s it."

Cian looked closely and raised an eyebrow.

He’d never done it and wasn’t well versed in this genre, but he’d heard of it. He recognised those two letters.

His brow twitched as he made a last ditch attempt. "Those two letters can’t possibly mean what I think they mean, can they?"

The system crushed his hopes. "They mean exactly that."

So the kink was that kind of kink.

According to the book, the original host not only had the kink but was highly skilled, capable of all manner of twisted games and bloody, depraved acts, so much so that the censored blocks in the book were thicker than the walls of Dublin Castle.

Cian was hardly a saint. He’d skipped lectures, got into scraps, and ridden motorbikes. But next to the original’s antics he was out of his depth entirely.

"No chance," he said, closing the book. "Find someone else."

He knew he wasn’t nearly as twisted as the original and couldn’t pull off that behaviour.

The system panicked, its cursor flashing. "If the original host goes offline, you won’t survive either."

The system’s condition was that he could return to life in the real world only after acting out the novel. If he didn’t complete the main task, he couldn’t keep living once the novel ended.

Cian shrugged. "Then I can’t do it."

On reflection, getting to live another decade or so as a rich kid was already a bonus, but being asked to play such a depraved character, using his status to torment the protagonist and acting out the restricted scenes of the first half, made him feel sick.

When he put on his coat, buckled his belt, and picked up his bag to leave, the system cried out, "Wait, wait, Host, you don’t have to get everything exactly right."

Cian turned back.

"Since most of the book is censored, which objectively limits the difficulty, you only need to hit the key plot points, with at least sixty percent accuracy."

Cian: "Key plot points?"

"Yes," said the system. "Take the hotel scene with Eoin. You only need to play the original host in a way that leaves the protagonist feeling humiliated and ashamed. You needn’t follow every beat, and how you achieve those emotions is up to you."

Cian sat back down.

Sixty percent. He could live with that.

His knowledge of the field was superficial. Frowning, he skimmed the novel, trying to analyse the original content, but before he could make sense of it, the doorbell rang.

The system displayed: "Eoin Brennan is at the door."

The hour was up.

Cian nodded. He crossed his legs on the sofa, settled in, and said lazily, "Come in."

After a pause, the door opened and shut. A young man stepped in, met Cian’s eyes briefly, then looked away. He took two steps under Cian’s appraising stare and stopped.

Honestly, he was rather good looking.

This future big name of Dublin was still young, tall and lean. He wore an old white shirt with a collar worn thin and faded from countless washes, and a pair of tired trousers. His legs inside them were long and straight, with a clean line at the ankle, just right for holding and toying with.

Cian raised an eyebrow. "Brennan, the Teaching Assistant?"

Eoin was a teaching assistant at Trinity, as stated on the CV he’d submitted to Declan.

That had been the first time Cian and Eoin met, with Declan present. He’d put a hand on Cian’s shoulder and said, "Here, meet Mr. Brennan, the Teaching Assistant."

Cian had always been wild, never even using a respectful tone with his own father, let alone with Eoin. He looked the new companion up and down without shame, from his neatly combed hair to the slim ankles peeking out of the old trousers, until Declan frowned deeply and snapped, "Why are you staring?"

In front of others, the original Cian had to save face for his father, so he raised an eyebrow and said, "Mr. Brennan, the Teaching Assistant." But being forced by his father to address someone so formally stung the spoiled heir’s pride. When he later sent Eoin the "Sponsorship Agreement," he still called him "Mr. Brennan, the Teaching Assistant," every syllable dripping with sarcasm.

Eoin said nothing.

Cian gestured. "Where’s the agreement?"

Eoin hesitated, then handed over the document.

Cian flipped through and found Eoin’s signature at the end, the strokes bold and firm, with a commanding presence. Behind the agreement was a thick stack of papers. He looked and saw a medical report, which, beyond the usual tests, had a prominent tick beside the sexual health screening.

The original Cian had forced that on him.

Cian thought, How humiliating.

It wasn’t enough to take what he wanted by force. The other person also had to prove his body was clean and healthy to qualify as the heir’s plaything. No wonder Eoin snapped afterwards and had the original Cian committed.

After checking everything, he set the contract aside and looked up at Eoin, silent for a long moment.

He was working out how to proceed.

The script gave no details, so he’d have to improvise. As Cian wondered how to begin, Eoin suddenly raised a hand, pulled off his jacket, and draped it over his arm.

With the jacket gone, only a shirt remained, neither new nor old, buttoned to the second button and wrapped snugly around his neck.

Eoin didn’t look up. He only set a hand on the buttons, pretending to undo them.

His fingers were long, with thin calluses on the pads, and they were trembling uncontrollably. One perfectly ordinary button resisted, and after several tries he still couldn’t get it undone.

His movements were quick, as though he were peeling himself out of his clothes rather than taking them off. His face was calm and composed, his expression as unshakeable as ever, but Cian’s gaze landed on his fingertips, which were clearly shaking.

It seemed that if he could get his clothes off fast enough, he could hide his unease and embarrassment.

Cian sat up on the sofa. "You"

Hey, let’s talk first. Don’t just start stripping!

Eoin looked up. His shirt was already half off, revealing his waist and stomach, the line narrowing inward to hint at his hips. The only thing covering his upper body was the jacket hanging from his arm. Seeing Cian’s reaction, he gave a self mocking smile and asked, "Not enough for you?"

Cian: "What?"

Eoin laughed softly. "The tools. Shall I fetch them for you?"

Cian was speechless.

Eoin let out a short scoff and walked straight to the wardrobe. He dropped to one knee, drew out a leather case, and asked, "Which one are you planning to use?"

In the silence, Eoin took the hint. He stood, carried the case to the coffee table in front of Cian, and said with a sneer, "Going for the whole set?"

The old fashioned leather case had flimsy clasps and popped open at a touch. As Eoin set it down, the contents spilled across the table in plain view.

Cian glanced down casually and struggled to keep a straight face.

He had never seen so many kinds of whips.

Leather, fibre, multi stranded, loose, oddly shaped, barbed. It looked like a prop from a 1920s Dublin gangster film. Just looking at them, Cian could imagine how much they’d hurt on a person.

These were for people???

Cian stayed silent, and so did Eoin. They hung there in a tense, heavy quiet. Eoin’s fingers curled tighter, nails biting into his palms.

"Look, Mr. Brennan, here’s the deal," Cian said, glancing at him and choosing his words with care. "I’m a serious enthusiast. Before we go any further, there’s one more thing."

Eoin looked up at him.

Cian rummaged through what little he knew about "special interests" and chose his words carefully:

"First, we need to agree on a safe word."