The Same Night
“Don’t be afraid.”
The voice was low and assured, carrying its Eastern European edge into the stone room like something that belonged there. Dominic, nude but for a sheer white loincloth, hung in the chains and felt Viktor’s hands on him and cologne surrounding him and understood that he was more afraid than he had ever been in his life.
Viktor Volkov was not a man you crossed. Dominic had understood this from the first afternoon on the private road in Franklin, the gate, the camera, the men with the out-of-state plates, his comment about discretion that made it clear to Dom that he didn’t want to know what happened when discretion was violated.
Viktor had arranged this room. Had arranged the Suburban and the chloroform and the two men and the shackles and the ring on his cock and the electrical device in a jacket pocket. Had arranged all of it while Dominic was rebuilding carburetors in the garage and telling himself the tension in the air was just Tennessee heat.
He was terrified.
Then Viktor removed his hands from Dominic and stood directly in front of him.
He placed his hands on his shoulders. Not gripping. Not hurting. Just there, the way a hand rests on someone when it wants to communicate something.
Dominic’s whole nervous system registered it as something other than threat. He hated that it did. He couldn’t make it stop.
“You’ve been here for almost two days,” Viktor said. “You’re cold. You’re frightened. That’s understandable.” His voice was even, the same voice that had told him the carburetor had been rebuilt incorrectly, the same voice that had said “I know” when Dominic told him he could fix it. “I want to talk to you. Can we do that?”
Dominic couldn’t identify the tone in Viktor’s voice. Was it sinister? Sympathetic? Calculated? Or something else entirely.
“Two days,” Dominic said. His voice came out rough. He hadn’t spoken in a long time.
“Almost. You slept through most of Saturday.”
Saturday. So it was Sunday. Labor Day weekend, and he was hanging from a ceiling in Viktor Volkov’s dungeon and it was Sunday.
“Have Mikhail and Gregor treated you adequately?” Viktor asked. “Food, water. Have your needs been met?”
Mikhail and Gregor. Names for the two men. Dominic filed them away, knowing instinctively he might need them later.
“They shoved a hose up my ass,” Dominic said.
A pause. “That was necessary. I apologize for the manner of it.”
“You apologize.”
“For the manner. Yes.”
Dominic pulled at the chains. The shackles held. The spreader bar held. He was exactly where he’d been for two days and Viktor’s hand was still warm on his back and he was shaking and he couldn’t tell if it was cold or fear or something else.
“Where am I?” he said. “Why am I here? What do you want from me?”
“I’ll answer all of that,” Viktor said. “I want to answer it properly. Not while you’re hanging from a ceiling.” He let that sit for a moment. “I’d like to take you down. If you’ll agree to something first.”
“Agree to what.”
“Mikhail and Gregor are watching through the monitors.” Viktor moved to his side, and Dominic could see him for the first time, the same man he’d known all summer, the gray at the temples, the pale eyes, dressed now in dark clothes that made him look less like a wealthy car collector and more like what he apparently was. He gestured toward two small cameras mounted high on the wall that Dominic hadn’t noticed in the dim light. “If you make any move toward me or toward the door, they will be in here in seconds.” He paused. “The device down there,” motioning to Dom’s groin, “was set to a two. If they come in, it goes to eight.”
Dominic stared at him.
“A ten is survivable,” Viktor said, “but just barely. I don’t want that for you. I want us to have a conversation.” He held Dominic’s gaze. “Do we have an agreement?”
He had no choice and they both knew it. “Fine,” Dominic said.
Viktor reached up and released the shackle at Dominic’s right wrist from the ceiling chain. Then the left. Dominic’s arms came down and the relief in his shoulders was immediate and physical and he couldn’t help the sound he made. Viktor crouched and unhooked the spreader bar from the ankle shackles, leaving the bar on the floor, leaving the shackles on his wrists and ankles but letting him stand with his feet together and his arms at his sides.
He stood on the stone floor and breathed. Two days of hanging and his legs were unsteady and his wrists ached in the iron and the loincloth hung from his waist and Viktor stood in front of him watching with the pale eyes and said, “Come sit down.”
He walked to the couch in the corner of the room. Viktor walked beside him and Dominic could have run, he thought about it, the door was behind him, he could turn and go, and then he thought about the cameras and Mikhail and Gregor and the device at a nine and he sat down on the couch.
Viktor sat beside him.
And something happened that Dominic had not planned for and could not have predicted and could not, once it started, make stop.
He started crying.
Not the kind of crying that announces itself. The other kind, the kind that comes up from somewhere below the chest without asking, that bypasses everything rational and arrives as heaving sobs. He was sitting on a couch in a dungeon in iron shackles in a white loincloth and he was twenty-four years old and he had been hanging from a ceiling for two days and he hadn’t seen Dom Jr. since Friday night and he didn’t know what was happening to him or why and his body had been making decisions without him for two days and now it made this one.
He curled up in a ball, sobbing.
He felt Viktor’s hand on his back, between the shoulder blades, a slow circle. He felt Viktor’s arm come around his shoulders. He felt himself being pulled in against Viktor’s side and he was too exhausted and too broken to resist it and he didn’t resist it. He sat against the man who had put him here and cried into the front of his shirt.
Viktor said nothing. He held him and let it happen and his hand kept moving on Dominic’s back, steady and slow, until the crying ran out.
It took a while.
When it was done Dominic sat up, steadied himself, and blankly stared at the stone floor. He was aware, in a corner of his mind that was still running an inventory, that he was sitting nearly naked against the man who had kidnapped him, that he had just cried into that man’s shirt, that the arm around him was Viktor’s arm and the hand on his back was Viktor’s hand and that none of this was safe, but this was all he had.
He kept staring at the floor.
* * *
“My son,” Dominic said. His voice came out flat. “Dom Jr. He’s seven. I need to know he’s okay.”
Viktor was quiet for a moment. “He’s fine,” he said. “He’s being looked after. I can’t tell you the details right now, but he is safe and cared for. That I can promise you.”
Dominic looked at him. “How do I know that’s true.”
“You don’t,” Viktor said. “But I’m asking you to believe me.”
He didn’t know if Viktor was lying. He didn’t know anything about what Viktor was or wasn’t. What he knew was that the alternative, Dom Jr. not okay, Dom Jr. not cared for, Dom Jr. waking up Saturday morning and still waking up Monday morning and finding his father gone, was something he couldn’t live with. So he took what Viktor had said and compartmentalized it. He had no choice, for now, but to believe him.
“Brianna,” he said.
“Also being managed,” Viktor said. “There are people handling the situation. Nobody is in danger.”
He sat with that. It wasn’t enough. It was something.
“Why,” Dominic said. The whole question was in it. Why any of this. Why the shackles and the dungeon and the two days on the ceiling. Why the Suburban in the parking lot of Rusty’s. Why him.
Viktor was quiet for a moment in the way that meant he was choosing what to say and how to say it.
“You declined my offer,” he said finally.
Dominic stared at him. “The job.”
“Yes.”
“You had me kidnapped because I turned down a job offer.”
“I had you brought here,” Viktor said, as if the word kidnapped were a technical inaccuracy, “because I am not accustomed to being told no. And because what you and I had begun in that garage over the summer was something I was not prepared to walk away from.” He looked at Dominic with the pale eyes, which were the same in this room as they had been in the garage in the July heat, entirely direct and entirely unashamed. “Your work on those cars is exceptional. There is no one I have found who understands them the way you do. I wanted to continue that.”
“So you kidnapped me.”
“I brought you here,” Viktor said again, mildly. “Yes.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he continued: “What we had in that garage was not just about the cars. You know that. I think you knew it all summer and chose not to look at it, which I understand.” He paused. “What I want from you is not only your work. I want what was building between us. The partnership. The time together.” He stopped, choosing the word carefully. “The closeness. I want that to continue. I want it to become what it was always going to become if you’d accepted the job and allowed it to develop.”
He said it without embarrassment and without aggression. The way you say something you’ve thought about for a long time and have decided is simply true.
“I’m not a man who walks away from something I want,” he said. “You already knew that. Now you know it completely.”
Dominic stared at him.
He had heard it. He had understood every word. He just couldn’t make his brain do anything useful with it.
The closeness.
He knew what that meant. He wasn’t naive and he wasn’t stupid and he had spent an entire summer not looking at exactly what that meant and Viktor had just said it out loud in a stone room in the dark and there was nowhere left to not look.
“You’re telling me,” Dominic said slowly, “that you had me kidnapped because you…” he stopped. He couldn’t finish it.
“Yes, because of you,” Viktor said. Simply. The way he said everything that was true.
Dominic sat with that. The word in the air between them. He thought about Danny at Rusty’s. He thought about the word Danny had used—faggot—the one that landed as a joke because, as far as any of them knew, it didn't apply to anyone any of them had ever known. He thought about himself laughing along.
He thought about the pool. The Speedo.
“I’m not…” he started.
“I know what you’re going to say,” Viktor said. He didn’t say it unkindly. “You’ve been saying it to yourself all summer. It hasn’t worked.”
Dominic looked at the floor. His jaw was set. He had no answer for that and he wasn’t going to lie in this room to this man who had watched him for an entire summer and apparently seen things he was only learning himself.
“This isn’t…” He stopped again. “You can’t just…”
“I know,” Viktor said. “I know what I’ve done.” His eyes didn’t move from Dominic’s. “You don’t have a choice about being here. You do have a choice about what it becomes. I’d think carefully about which version you want.”
Dominic sat in the shackles in the loincloth in the stone room and said nothing and felt the weight of what was happening to him and underneath the weight, in the place he’d been pushing things all summer, something he still didn’t have a name for and was not going to name tonight.
“I need to think,” he said finally.
“Yes,” Viktor said. “You do.”
“I don’t have a choice about staying,” he repeated, trying to digest the implications.
“Not right now. No.”
There it was. No performance of it, no apology for it. Just the truth of it, stated plainly, by a man who was deciding the tone of this conversation.
Dominic looked at him. He was the same man who had stood in the garage doorway with a glass of water and a pair of cutoff shorts and said you’ll be more comfortable in these. He was the same man who had put his hand on the engine bay and enthusiastically talked for two hours about the history of American muscle after having found someone who shared his passion. He was also the man who had arranged the Suburban and the chloroform and this room and the ring on Dominic’s cock and two days on a ceiling.
He couldn’t make those two things fit together into one person and yet here that one person was, sitting beside him on a couch with his hand resting on Dominic’s knee.
* * *
The hand moved.
Up from his knee to his thigh, slow, the way Viktor did everything. Dominic felt it and went still. The hand moved to his stomach, flat against it. Then up his chest, palm spreading across the muscle there, fingers finding the hair and resting in it.
Dominic sat very still. He was tracking the hand. He was tracking his own response to the hand, which was doing exactly what he didn’t want it to do.
“You don’t have to be afraid of this either,” Viktor said. Low. Close.
“Stop,” Dominic said.
The hand didn’t stop. It moved around to his back, tracing the line of his spine in a way that produced something Dominic had not given it permission to produce. He sat with his jaw set and his hands in his lap trying to cover himself and told himself this was not happening and it kept happening.
Viktor’s hand moved around to his chest again, found his nipple and pressed there, lightly, and Dominic felt it go through him.
“Stop,” he begged, not entirely convincingly.
The hand moved lower. It moved under the edge of the loincloth and found him there, rigid.
Then the booth at Rusty’s arrived without warning: Danny’s face. “They say he’s a raging faggot” the word that got the whole table laughing, and him laughing with them, and the drive home with the radio off and Danny’s voice still going in his head.
He was on a couch in a dungeon with a man's hand wrapped around his straining cock, hardening treacherously against what his mind had refused to for twenty-four years. He knew who Viktor Volkov was, his friends had told him as much at a table at Rusty’s, and he had laughed along with them, and now he was sitting here letting him…
He stood up.
He didn’t think about the cameras. He didn’t think about eight or nine. He stood up off the couch and turned toward the door and his legs were moving before anything else had caught up.
The door opened before he reached it.
Mikhail came through first, Gregor right behind him. Dominic had maybe two steps on them and it wasn’t enough. He heard the click of the remote before he felt it and then he felt it. Not a two this time; everything in his body contracting at once, his legs going out from under him, the stone floor coming up hard. He heard himself make a sound he didn’t recognize and then he was on his knees on the stone with his hands braced in front of him and everything shaking.
It stopped.
He stayed on his knees and breathed and waited for his vision to clear.
Mikhail and Gregor worked efficiently, the way they did everything. They had him on his feet and his wrists reclipped to the ceiling chains in under a minute, the spreader bar back between his ankles, the shackles reattached. They stepped back and said nothing and looked at Viktor.
Viktor said something in Russian. One word. They left.
The door closed.
Viktor stood in front of Dominic, who was hanging again, shaking still, staring at the floor.
“That was a four,” Viktor said. His voice was still even. “I want you to remember what a four felt like.”
Dominic said nothing.
“This doesn’t have to continue,” Viktor said. He stepped closer. His voice dropped. “You keep telling yourself this is something it’s not. That you’re someone you’re not. You’ve been telling yourself that all summer and you know it isn’t working.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The pool,” Viktor said.
Dominic’s jaw tightened.
“You wouldn’t come out of the deep end,” Viktor said. “My associates noticed. They mentioned it.” He let that sit. “You know why you stayed in the deep end.”
“The work wasn’t finished.”
“Dominic.”
The way he said the name. The same way he’d said it the first day in the drive, placing it somewhere. Like it meant something to him.
The silence went on long enough that it became its own answer.
“Because I…” Dominic stopped.
“Say it.”
He looked at the wall. He looked at the chains above his wrists. He thought about saying nothing and understood that saying nothing was also an answer and said, through his teeth, very quietly: “Because I was hard.”
Viktor nodded. No performance of satisfaction. Just the acknowledgment of a thing that had been said.
“We all knew,” he said. “My associates, all of them. And not one of them thought less of you for it.” He paused. “Neither did I.”
Dominic stared at the wall.
“You’ve been fighting this all summer,” Viktor said. “The shorts, the pool, the conversations in the garage. All of it. You’ve been fighting what you feel and it hasn’t worked and it’s exhausting you and I don’t want you to be exhausted.” His voice was steady. Not cruel, not soft. Honest. “You tried to fight it just now, on the couch. What I want is for you to stop fighting it.”
“You kidnapped me,” Dominic said. The word felt important to keep saying. To keep it true.
“I brought you to a place where you can’t leave until you’re ready,” Viktor said. “I know that’s the same as kidnapping from where you’re standing. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But it won’t always feel the same.”
He stepped forward. His hands came to Dominic’s waist, both of them, resting there on either side. Not gripping. Just there. The same touch as the hand on his back had been, warm, present, communicating something without forcing it.
“You are exceptional,” Viktor said. “The work you do. The way you understand those cars. The way you move through a space.” His hands moved up Dominic’s sides, slowly, and Dominic felt his own breathing change and hated that it changed. “I have been watching you all summer and I have never once stopped thinking about how extraordinary you are.”
His hands moved to Dominic’s chest. Found his nipples, both of them, pressed there with his thumbs, and Dominic’s whole body responded and he made a sound he didn’t intend to make and Viktor watched him make it with the pale eyes.
“Stop,” Dominic whispered, with considerably less conviction in it than before.
Viktor’s hands moved down. Slowly. Over his stomach, finding the edge of the loincloth, sliding beneath it, reaching down and once again finding Dominic hard. There was no version of this Dominic could explain away.
He hated it. He hated that his body had done this without him. He hated that the hands on him felt like something he’d been waiting for without knowing he was waiting. He hated that the summer had left him so open to this that a man’s hands on him in a dungeon in iron shackles could produce anything other than pure revulsion.
He hated it and he was hard and Viktor’s hands were on him and he was hanging in chains in a stone room and he didn’t recognize himself.
“Think about what this could be,” Viktor said. His voice was low, close, his mouth near Dominic’s ear in the same place it had been when he’d said don’t be afraid. “Think about the garage. The work we did. The conversations we had. Everything we built over the summer. Now think about what it could be if you stopped fighting it.”
His hands stilled. He stepped back.
“I’m going to leave you for the night,” he said. “Mikhail and Gregor will be your caretakers. You’re going to stay where you are and think.” He looked at Dominic with the pale eyes. “Think about the pool. Think about the garage. Think about what you actually want, not what you’ve been telling yourself you want. There’s a difference and you know it.”
He turned to go.
Then he stopped.
He turned back and looked at Dominic hanging there in the low light, the shackles, the loincloth, the body that had been built by work and didn’t know what it was. He looked at him for a long moment with the expression Dominic had seen all summer on the stool near the workbench and at the edge of the pool terrace and in the drive on the first afternoon. The expression that registered more than the situation required.
Then he stepped forward, one step, and reached out and slipped his hand into the back of the loincloth and gently pressed his middle finger into Dom’s hole, exactly where it had been earlier. He held it there. His eyes didn’t move from Dominic’s.
“This,” he said. Quietly. Entirely without apology. “Is mine. Whatever you decide. However long it takes. This is mine.”
Dominic went rigid with recognition. He had no explanation for what had occurred in the shower the day of the Speedo incident. He had soaped up a finger and inserted it into himself. It was pure animal instinct. And now, Viktor was demanding the same.
Viktor held the gaze for a moment longer.
Then he let go. He walked to the door and knocked twice and it opened from the outside and he walked through it and the door closed and the light went back to its lowest setting and Dominic was alone.
He hung in the chains and breathed.
His body was still responding to Viktor’s hands. He couldn’t make it stop. He hung in the dim light in the stone room with the things on the walls and the loincloth hanging from his waist and Viktor’s words still in the room with him.
He kept telling himself: this is the man who kidnapped you. He’s a monster.
He kept hearing: don’t be afraid.
He kept feeling the hand on his back, the slow circle, the arm around his shoulders while he cried.
He kept feeling Viktor’s hands on his chest, his nipples, his groin, his finger claiming his most private part. His body’s response to all of it.
He kept thinking about the pool. The deep end. What he’d been hiding and who had known anyway.
He kept thinking: he’s a monster.
He kept thinking: but he didn’t hurt me when he could have.
He hated that he was thinking that.
He hung in the chains and thought about it anyway.
-To be continued-
Author's Note: This one was tough to sit with, even writing it. Chapter 3 was fear and confusion. This is where it starts getting complicated, where the lines blur in ways I think a lot of readers will find uncomfortable, and honestly, that's intentional. If you've made it this far, thank you, genuinely. I'd love to know what you're feeling right now, good or conflicted or both. Reach out anytime: [email protected].
To get in touch with the author, send them an email.
