The First Hours
He didn’t know how long he’d been there.
Time was the first thing that went. Without light, without sound beyond the fan, without any external reference to anchor him, the minutes and hours became indistinguishable. He had been awake for what felt like a long time since the two men left. Or a short time. He had no way to tell. His mind kept reaching for something to count against and finding nothing.
He worked the shackles again. Not because he expected a different result but because his body needed to do something, needed to confirm that the situation was what it was rather than something his chloroform-soaked brain had simply made up. The iron at his wrists was cold and solid and gave nothing. The chains above him were taut. The collar at his neck allowed him to turn his head and nothing more. The shackles at his ankles were attached to the base of the platform with the permanence of something that had been installed by someone who knew what they were doing.
The ring around his cock was still there. He’d learned not to pull against it.
In the dark and the silence, his mind did what minds do when there is nothing else available: it ran. It ran through the parking lot at Rusty’s and the cut battery cable and the Suburban and the rag over his face. It ran through who might have done this and arrived, each time, at nothing that made sense. He had no enemies. He had nothing worth taking. He was a twenty-four-year-old handyman from a trailer park in Harlan Creek, Tennessee, and whoever had put him in shackles in a stone room in the dark had made a mistake or had a reason he couldn’t account for.
Both possibilities terrified him in different ways.
He thought about Dom Jr. He thought about the iPad and the gap-toothed face turning up for the kiss and turning back. He thought about Dom Jr. waking up Saturday morning and finding him gone and not understanding why. That thought was the worst one and he put it away because he needed to think clearly and he couldn’t think clearly while he was thinking about that.
He lay in the dark and breathed and waited and tried not to think about anything at all, which was not something he was built for.
He had no idea if it was still Friday night or if it was Saturday or if the Labor Day weekend had passed entirely and Tuesday had come and gone without him. Time had become a room with no doors.
* * *
The door opened without warning.
Light came in first, dim, the lowest possible setting, barely enough to register after the complete dark, but after complete dark it felt like a flashlight in the face. He squeezed his eyes shut and then forced them open because not seeing was worse than the light.
Two figures. The same two from before, or he assumed so, he couldn’t make out faces, only shapes, and the shapes moved through the room knowing exactly where everything was. Low voices passed between them in a language he didn’t know. Russian, he thought, or something like it.
He heard a word repeated between them. Short, two syllables, said with the ease of something said often. “Pakhan.” One said it and the other responded and they moved around the room and he heard it again. He didn’t know what it meant. But it was clearly a name or a title, and the tone that surrounded it was the tone you use for someone above you. Someone who mattered.
Someone they were preparing him for.
That understanding landed like a thud in the center of his chest.
One of the men approached the platform. He leaned over Dominic and the dim light caught just enough of his face to register: mid-forties, broad, expressionless. He put his hands on Dominic’s chest and pressed, not gently, the way you press on something to test its structure. He ran his palms down Dominic’s stomach and along his arms and Dominic felt the assessment in it, not sexual, nothing that could be called sexual, more like a mechanic checking over a vehicle before delivery. The second man watched from the foot of the platform and offered a low comment. A short exchange followed, and then something in both their tones that sounded like approval.
He didn’t know what they were saying. He knew what they were doing. They were looking him over. They were deciding he was acceptable.
“Get your fucking hands off me,” Dominic said. His voice came out steadier than he felt. “Get your fucking hands off me, NOW.”
Neither of them responded to this. The first man continued his assessment, moving his hands along Dominic’s thighs, pressing into the muscle, working down to his calves. Dominic pulled against the chains and felt the shackles at his wrists bite and heard the chain go taut and then the ring at the base of his balls pulled and he heard himself make a sound that was not dignified and stopped moving.
The man at the foot of the platform made a sound that might have been a laugh.
“Let me go,” Dominic said. Quieter this time. Not because he’d given up but because he was learning the reality of his situation. Every movement that involved his hips ended the same way. He was going to have to be still and he was going to have to think and he was going to have to find a way through this that did not involve the pain the rings produced when he pulled against them.
The man who had been checking him over straightened and said something to his partner. The partner nodded. Then they began unchaining him from the platform.
Not removing the shackles. He understood the difference immediately, the iron stayed on his wrists and ankles and the ring stayed on his cock, but the chains that held him to the platform were detached one by one, starting with the collar at his neck, then the chains from his wrists, then his ankles. When the ankle chains came free he tried to swing his legs off the platform and stand up and the first man put a hand flat on his chest and pushed him back down with a force that made clear this was not a discussion.
He said one word in Russian. His tone did not invite a response.
The second man unhooked the chain from the cock ring and Dominic felt the weight of it go and felt, absurdly, relief, which immediately made him angry at himself for feeling relieved about anything in this situation.
Then the first man gripped his arm and pulled him upright. Dominic got his feet under him. He was standing for the first time since the parking lot and his legs were not entirely steady under him, the chloroform still working its way out of his system or simply the effect of being horizontal and immobile for however long it had been. He stood. He pulled against the grip on his arm.
The man held him without effort.
Dominic pulled harder, turned his body into it, trying to break the grip with his weight and momentum. The man stepped into him and used his own momentum against him and Dominic found himself facing the wall with the man’s forearm across his shoulders, not hurting him, just containing him, holding him there until the struggling stopped.
The second man laughed. Said something in Russian. The first one responded and Dominic had the humiliating sense of being the subject of a joke.
He stopped struggling. He stood against the wall with the man’s forearm across his shoulders and breathed and made himself think.
His situation was this: shackled at the wrists, shackled at his ankles, iron collar around his neck, iron ring around his most vulnerable body part, and two men who were larger than him and entirely unbothered by his resistance. Struggling had produced nothing except pain and laughter. He needed to wait. He needed to watch and learn and find the opening that would present itself when they were less careful or when circumstances changed.
He made himself go still. The forearm across his shoulders eased back.
*****
They turned up the lights one fraction.
Not much. Barely enough to register. But his eyes had adjusted to the dark over however many hours it had been, and the increment of light was enough to begin giving him the room.
Stone walls. Stone floor. Stone ceiling. He had been right about the acoustics. The room was large, larger than he’d imagined in the dark, maybe forty feet by thirty, the ceiling twelve feet up. The platform he’d been chained to was in the center. There were other things in the room that he couldn’t make out fully yet, shapes at the edges of what the light reached.
The men walked him toward the far corner. There was a shower there, open, no curtain, no partition, the kind of shower that existed because something needed to be washed and privacy was not part of the consideration. A drain in the floor. A showerhead mounted in the stone. A hose coiled on a hook beside it with an attachment he didn’t recognize.
They walked him into the shower without asking. One of them turned on the water. It came out cold and only eventually warmed up and Dominic pulled back against it and the man holding his arm walked him forward into it anyway.
They were wearing some kind of treated clothing or outerwear that shed the water. They worked with efficiency, one of them holding his arm while the other produced a brush and soap and began scrubbing him down like they’d scrub down a thoroughbred race horse. Not roughly, exactly, but without any consideration for what it felt like to be the person being scrubbed. They talked to each other while they did it. He caught the word “Pakhan” again, said in the context of something that sounded like a checklist being worked through.
They were cleaning him, which left him with a heavy sense of dread, lodged in his stomach. They were cleaning him the way you clean something before you present it. He was being prepared. For what, he didn’t know, and the possibilities his mind produced were not reassuring.
Death was one of them. He didn’t let himself think about that directly but it was there, in the background of everything, the very real fear of a man who has no information and fills the gap with the worst available option. Human trafficking was another. Torture for reasons he couldn’t imagine. He was in a stone room with iron shackles and two men who were washing him like an object and his brain had very little else to work with.
He thought about Dom Jr. He put it away again. He couldn’t afford it.
When the scrubbing was done, one of the men reached for the hose on the wall. He uncoiled it and attached the piece at the end, a nozzle of some kind, narrow, the purpose of which Dominic didn’t understand until the man turned him around and he felt the nozzle press against his hole.
He went rigid. “What the fuck…get that away from me.” He tried to step forward and the other man held him in place. “Don’t. Don’t you dare —”
The nozzle went in. Not gently. The water followed.
He yelled. The sound bounced off the stone walls and came back at him and neither man reacted to it. He felt the water filling him and the pressure building and the outrage of being violated in a way he had no frame of reference for, in a room with two men who were talking to each other in Russian while they did it.
Then one of them said, in English, clearly, two words: “Hold it.”
He didn’t understand at first. He understood the words but not the instruction in the context. The man pointed to the toilet in the corner of the room. The same open arrangement — no partition, no door, a toilet in the corner of a stone room. The man pointed again.
Dominic understood.
He crossed to the toilet on shaking legs and did what needed to be done. It took two tries before his body cooperated fully. The men watched without reaction. One of them said something in Russian that sounded like a technical observation.
He didn’t know what this was. He knew it had a purpose and the purpose was preparation and he still didn’t know what he was being prepared for and the not knowing was, in its own way, worse than knowing would have been.
They rinsed him again. Then they dried him with a towel, brisk, efficient, the way you dry something rather than the way you dry someone.
*****
One of the men produced a sandwich from the bag they’d brought and set it on the small table in the corner along with a bottle of water. He pointed at it and said one word in English: “Eat.”
Dominic didn’t want to eat. Everything in him said don’t eat anything they give you, which he understood was not a rational position given that he was chained and naked and had no leverage over anything, but the refusal felt like the one thing he could control so he stood there and didn’t move toward the table.
The man who had handed him the sandwich looked at him for a moment. Then he said something to his partner in Russian and his partner said something back and neither of them moved toward the table either and nobody said anything for a moment and then Dominic’s stomach made a sound that was both inconvenient and accurate.
He ate the sandwich. He drank the water. He told himself it meant nothing and ate anyway because he needed to be functional and he couldn’t be functional on nothing, and whatever was coming, he needed to be as functional as possible when it arrived.
The men watched him eat with the same expressions they’d had throughout: not unkind, exactly, but not kind either. Professional. He was a task being completed.
The second man reached into the bag again and pulled out something white and small. He shook it out. It was a garment of some kind, white fabric, minimal, something that in other circumstances might have been a small towel or a cloth, but was clearly meant to be worn. He held it out to Dominic and said, in English, “Wear.”
Dominic looked at it. It was a strip of white fabric, loose, meant to wrap around the waist and hang down in front and back, tied at the sides. It covered almost nothing. The hanging fabric in front and back provided the suggestion of modesty without the reality of it, open at the sides, access to everything it nominally covered available to anyone who chose to take it. It was, he understood, not clothing. It was what you wore when you were intended to be looked at. Or more.
He thought about refusing. He looked at the two men and thought about what refusing would produce and put the garment on. It was so loose it tented as it draped over his thickening cock and balls. He looked down embarrassed and the white Speedo flooded back.
The man who had handed it to him stepped back and looked at him and said something to his partner. His partner responded. The tone was the same tone they’d used after the physical assessment on the platform. Approval. They were looked at him in that white cloth and one of the men reached down and cupped his massive bulge which was easily accessed under the loincloth. He looked at his colleague and uttered something that sounded filthy.
Helpless and on display. Dominic stood shackled in a white loincloth and felt the pool at Viktor's terrace rise up in his memory, the same disgust and exposure. And underneath it, the same heat, which he pushed as far away as he could manage.
*****
They turned the lights up one more fraction and the room began to reveal itself even more.
It was large, he’d been right about the dimensions in the dark, forty feet or more in each direction, the stone ceiling high enough that the light didn’t fully reach it. It was clearly designed to be lived in or at least occupied for a specific duration of time. One corner held a kitchen area: a counter, a small refrigerator, a hotplate, a row of cabinets. Another corner held a table and two chairs. The open shower and toilet he already knew about. A narrow bed against one wall, neatly made.
These were the ordinary things.
The walls held the other things.
Iron rings set into the stone at intervals, some near the floor, some at shoulder height, some at the ceiling. Chains of various lengths hanging from them. A bench that he understood, after a moment, was not a bench, it was padded at the center and had attachment points at each end at floor level and had an unmistakable purpose once you recognized it. On the far wall, a frame mounted to the stone, X-shaped, six feet tall, with cuffs at each point of the X, a St. Andrew’s Cross, he didn’t know the name for it but he could tell what it was for. A sling suspended from the ceiling in one corner by four chains, positioned at waist height, the leather seat worn with use. Floggers and crops hanging from hooks beside the cross, arranged by length. A cabinet with a glass front whose contents he could see from here and did not want to see.
He looked at all of it and felt the terror of a man who has just understood what kind of room he is in.
This was not a room you were taken to for a conversation. This was not a room you left quickly. This was a room that had been built and furnished with intention, by someone who knew exactly what they intended to do in it, and he was in it wearing a white cloth that covered nothing, in iron shackles, and the two men behind him were talking about the Pakhan in tones that said whatever was coming hadn’t come yet.
He was going to be tortured. That was the conclusion his mind reached and settled on, because the alternative, the thing the room’s other equipment suggested, was something he couldn’t make himself think directly. He was going to be hurt in this room by someone his captors deferred to and he needed to find a way out before that happened and there was no way out and he knew there was no way out and the knowledge of that sat in him like something swallowed wrong.
He tested the shackles again. Just to do something.
*****
They walked him to a point near the far wall, but accessible from behind.
Iron rings in the ceiling, two of them, set three feet apart, with chains hanging down. The men attached the shackles at his wrists to the chains, pulling his arms up and out until he was stretched toward the ceiling, his feet still on the floor but barely, most of his weight on his wrists. The iron bit. He pulled against it and it held.
“Stop,” he said. “Stop. Whatever you’re doing, stop.”
They didn’t stop. One of them crouched at his feet and produced a metal bar, a spreader bar, eighteen inches long, with attachment points at each end. He clipped the shackle at Dominic’s right ankle to one end and then pushed his feet apart and clipped the left ankle to the other end. Dominic felt his feet forced eighteen inches apart and locked there, the bar rigid between them, no way to bring his legs together.
He was hanging from the ceiling with his arms and legs spread, the white cloth hanging loose from his waist, the iron shackles at all four points. He pulled at his wrists and his wrists went nowhere. He tried to bring his feet together and the bar held them apart. He was arranged in the shape of an X and could not change that.
The two men stepped back. They said something to each other. The approval was in their voices again.
One of them reached into the bag they’d brought and produced a small black device, seemingly a remote control. He held it up so Dominic could see it clearly. He said, in English, slowly: “Escape?” He pointed at the ring still around Dominic’s cock. Then he pressed the button.
The charge hit without warning. Every muscle in his body contracted simultaneously, his vision went white at the edges, his jaw clenched and he heard a sound come out of him that he’d never heard before. It lasted two seconds. It felt considerably longer.
When it stopped, he was gasping. His whole body was shaking.
The man held up the remote again. He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t need to.
He put the remote on the table. He and his partner picked up the bag, said something brief to each other, and walked toward the door. At the door, one of them turned the light back down to its lowest setting. The other one looked at Dominic one more time, hanging there in the dim light in his white cloth and his shackles and the spreader bar. He stood in front of Dominic and grasped his massive cock and balls. He squeezed the bulge hard and said something that seemed to translate, in their language, to: “Yes. Pakhan will be pleased.”
Then they left. The door closed. The dark came back.
*****
He hung there and breathed.
His wrists ached. His shoulders ached. The bar between his ankles was cold against his skin. The charge had left something behind in his body, a low residual trembling in his muscles that he couldn’t make stop.
He did not try to escape.
He thought about it. He moved his wrists experimentally in the chains, assessed the spreader bar, thought through every possible configuration of movement that might produce something useful, and concluded that there was nothing. The chains were attached to iron rings set in stone. The bar was solid steel. The shackles had been fitted by people who knew how shackles worked. The weight of the cock ring was a constant reminder of the pain it was capable of producing.
He thought about Dom Jr. He let himself think about it this time because there was nothing else to do and keeping it away required energy he didn’t have. Dom Jr. would wake up Saturday morning and Dominic wouldn’t be there. Brianna would be angry before she was worried, which was simply how Brianna operated, but eventually she would be worried, or Tammy would push her toward worried, and eventually someone would call Randy. Randy would not know anything. Randy would say he hadn’t seen him.
And then what. He didn’t know. He’d never thought about what happened after you disappeared from a parking lot in Harlan Creek, Tennessee, because the thought had never had any reason to occur to him.
He closed his eyes. He opened them. The dark was the same either way.
He was cold. Not dangerously cold but persistently cold, the stone room holding its temperature regardless of the season outside, and the white cloth covered nothing useful and the fan moved air over him that raised gooseflesh on his arms. He couldn’t do anything about the cold. He added it to the list of things he couldn’t do anything about, which was a long list.
Hours passed. Or what he assumed were hours. He counted his own breaths for a while, trying to build some sense of time, and lost count somewhere in the hundreds and gave up. The fan moved air. The chains held. The bar kept his feet apart. He hung there in the stone room and tried to keep his mind on something other than the walls and what hung on them.
He thought about the ‘67 Shelby. The carburetor work. He walked himself through the entire restoration, step by step, every decision, every adjustment, the way the timing had been off and how he’d identified it and what he’d done to correct it. He did it slowly and carefully and in as much detail as he could manage. It took a long time. When he was done he started on the Camaro’s ignition timing.
He didn’t think about the cross on the wall, or the bench, or the sling, or the cabinet with the glass front.
He didn’t think about what the word Pakhan meant, or what the two men had been saying in Russian when they looked him over, or what they were preparing him for.
He didn’t think about the white cloth or the shackles or the way the two men had stepped back and assessed him when they were done and said something that sounded like approval.
He thought about the Camaro.
He was still thinking about it when he heard the door behind him open.
*****
It opened slowly. A crack, then wider. Not the same sound as the two men, they had been more efficient, doors opening fully, lights going on, purpose in every movement. This was different. This was one person, moving without hurry, making no particular effort to be quiet but making no unnecessary sound either.
Dominic heard footsteps. A single set. Slow, measured, coming toward him across the stone floor.
They stopped behind him.
The person said nothing. Dominic heard breathing, calm, even, the breathing of someone who was not afraid or hurried or uncertain about being in this room at this hour with this person hanging from the ceiling in front of them.
Dominic hung in his chains and did not speak and did not move and waited.
He felt a hand at the back of his neck, turned backwards so the fingertips dragged lightly down his back. They stopped when they reached his waist and then turned around to gently caress his buttocks outside the white loincloth.
The man said nothing. Dominic held his breath.
The man continued. He reached under the cloth to gently hold Dominic’s bare ass, touching him like something that might break. He explored Dominic’s ass like a blind man reading braille, taking particular interest in what he found at the center of it, and pressed his middle finger against the hole.
Dominic was horrified, partly because this was happening, and partly because he was becoming uncontrollably erect. He’d never felt this level of arousal.
“Mmmmmm….” was all the man said.
Still behind Dominic, he reached around his waist. One hand lifted the loincloth and the other hand easily found Dominic’s hardening shaft. “MMmmmmm…” the voice repeated, and fondled Dominic’s cock and balls together.
He pulled in closer behind him so Dominic’s back was pressed against the man’s clothed front. He continued to fondle him, picking up speed.
Dominic realized he had been holding his breath throughout the ordeal. He gasped and then inhaled deeply.
It hit him.
Cedar and resin and something underneath it, dark and particular, the kind of fragrance that came from somewhere that wasn’t a drugstore.
He knew that smell.
He had been smelling it since June. He had noticed it the first afternoon in the drive and every afternoon since. In the garage it competed with oil and metal and lost and he caught it anyway. He had stopped being able to separate the smell from the feeling it produced, the tension in the air, the pale eyes that registered more than the situation required, the quality of attention that had no name in his experience.
He knew exactly what that smell was.
He knew exactly who was standing behind him.
Viktor Volkov had arranged the Suburban and the men and the shackles and the white cloth and the room with the things on the walls and all of it, the summer, the garage, the shorts, the pool, had been moving toward this.
Viktor was close behind him now. Dominic could feel the heat of Viktor’s body against his back, not quite touching, close enough that he could feel it. Viktor was fondling him. And he was fully erect.
And then a voice, low, unhurried, carrying its slight Eastern European edge through the stone room, spoke directly into his ear.
“Don’t be afraid.”
Dominic hung in the chains and said nothing and felt the fear and underneath the fear, in a place he would not look at, something else entirely that he had no name for and no intention of naming.
He knew that whatever was coming next was about to happen.
-To be continued-
Author's Note: Thank you for the incredible response so far; I read every comment and it genuinely means a lot. This chapter took Dominic somewhere darker than Chapter 2, and I know it's not an easy read. But it's necessary, everything that happens from here builds on what he's just been through. Chapter 4 is coming soon, and I promise it's worth staying for. As always, reach out anytime: [email protected].
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