The bleeding started Tuesday.

I woke up with a deep, grinding ache in the lower pelvis and a dampness that wasn't like anything I'd experienced before. Dark red against the gray cotton of my old boxer briefs. I sat on the toilet for twenty minutes running the clinical timeline: twenty-eight days since the mesh initiated ovarian function, the endometrium shedding on schedule.

I bought what I needed at a pharmacy. Between that and the compression tanks, which have been doing their job for two weeks and irritating the skin, the friction is a daily fact now.

Chapter 16

The nylon strap of the car seatbelt drags across my chest every time I brake. A week ago it was background friction, nothing. By Thursday the fabric bites into flesh that's gone tender and strange just below my collarbone, and I drive the whole way from the firm holding the strap an inch off my shirt with my left hand, steering with my right. My shoulder aches from the angle.

The wrongness starts on Wednesday, a persistent pressure sitting low behind my pubic bone. It feels like I pulled a muscle doing deadlifts on Tuesday morning, except the ache is internal. I spend the afternoon walking a client through his municipal bond yields. His name is Vance, a guy who made three million in commercial logistics last year and now wants to talk about buying a marina. I sit across from him in the glass-walled conference room, keeping my face relaxed, smiling at the right intervals.

The paddle is in the bag in the hall closet and I've been looking at the closet door since eight in the morning.

I get it out around ten. The bag has the new paddle in it. It's the replacement I ordered after I put the other one through its edge guard the night this started. I take it out and grip it. The grip wraps the same. The flare of the handle, the weight forward of my hand, all of it as it should be. I bounced a ball off the face a few times in the apartment and it goes where I aim it.

Chapter Nine: Dressing the Part

Wes is good at managing women, until his body starts becoming one. He's sleeping with two women and lying to both of them, and they respond to his shifting body in ways that confuse and excite him even as they terrify him. Jenny, the ex he wronged, is a gynecologist who knows more than what she lets on. A story about desire, consequence, and what it feels like to learn something from the inside.

---

At 5:30 the alarm doesn't go off, because I turned it off last night, but I wake up at 5:30 anyway.

I lie there in the dark with the spare blanket and the wrong quiet and the ceiling, and the body starts its inventory: breasts, the weight of them in the position I've been sleeping, the labia warm and in their soft continuous contact, the hip bones wider against the mattress. Eight seconds, maybe. Then I'm done with it and I'm just awake at 5:30 with nowhere to be.

Chapter 13 — “The Frozen Gate”

The wind had gone still.

There are weights on my chest, pulling sideways.

Something's different before I'm fully awake. The weight of the blanket, or the mattress, the way my hips sit against it, two contact points spread wider than they should be. There's a warmth at my chest that isn't how my chest feels when I sleep. I lie there tracking it with my eyes closed. The body keeps giving me things I don't want.

The alarm says 5:21. I got there first, which is normal.

The fluorescent over Exam Three has been buzzing all morning and nobody's put in the ticket yet. I notice it again while Aaron Bell tells me, for the second time, that he found it in the shower.

Chapter 14: The Inquisition Reimagined

Torn from his own world and stuffed into the body of the villainess he'd been writing, "Amelia" must navigate a world she really should know - too bad she was never great at worldbuilding.

Now stuck in a world she (maybe) created, Amy quickly finds that reality has filled in the details she failed to describe. The characters who were so flat when she wrote them now have nuance and motives. The kingdom she wrote into existence is experiencing internal strife she'd never even considered. And let's not even get into the complexities of the magic system or the infuriating demon that forced her into this situation to begin with!

Oh, and then there's the fact that she's about to be arrested and executed - but surely she can come up with a way to get out of that...

...Right?

Cover by The Sweet Winter

My Diary.

By Nikkie Silk

Dear Diary

Today was a busy day. This morning, I kissed Daddy goodbye at the front door, wearing my pink baby-doll nightie. The nightie rides up to show my matching knickers, which barely cover my little cockette in its cage. Daddy keeps the key close to his heart on a chain around his neck, which I think is supersweet of him. It is gestures like that which make me love him so much. Only he can use the key, as it should be, I hasten to add.

Chapter 3

Chapter 61: Segregation for Power

Royal Decree of Queen Yuqi

To all dragons of every class and clan: