Stay
By the end of the first week the shackles came off his wrists.
Not completely. The cock ring remained as did the remote, and Mikhail and Gregor made sure he understood both of those things would remain until Viktor decided otherwise. But the wrist shackles came off during the day and went back on at night, and the difference between being chained to a ceiling and being able to move through a room turned out to be the difference between a man who was barely surviving and a man who was something slightly more than that.
He told himself not to be grateful for it. He was grateful for it anyway. He caught himself being grateful and hated himself for it and then got up and ate the food Mikhail had left and was grateful for that too, and somewhere around the end of the second week he ran out of the energy to keep hating himself for every small relief and just started taking them as they came.
This was, he understood later, how the next phase of his captivity began.
The days developed a shape. Mikhail and Gregor arrived in the mornings with food and whatever the day’s work was going to be. The work was real, Viktor’s property didn’t run itself and the men with the out-of-state plates weren’t there for landscaping. Dominic pulled weeds and cleaned gutters and moved things and fixed things with the shackles on his ankles and an iron ring on his cock and Mikhail or Gregor watching from wherever they’d decided to watch that day. The ankle shackles were long enough that he could work. Not long enough that he could run. The calibration had been thought through.
Viktor took him back to the garage for the first time on a Thursday morning in the third week of September.
He didn’t ask. He said “come” in the way that wasn’t a question, and Dominic came, and they walked from the main house through the side entrance and across the gravel to the separate structure and Viktor entered the code and the door opened and the climate-controlled air came out and Dominic walked in.
The Shelby was right where he’d left it.
He stood in the garage doorway and looked at the twelve cars under the lighting that treated them like what they were and felt something happen in his chest that he didn’t have a name for. Not happiness. Not relief. Something more basic, the sensation of being in the right place, which he hadn’t felt since the parking lot of Rusty’s Bar on Labor Day weekend.
He walked to the Shelby. He stopped just short of touching it. Same instinct as the first time.
“The brake work on the 'Cuda is where we left off,” Viktor said from behind him. “I haven’t let anyone touch it.”
Dominic went to the 'Cuda. He crouched and looked at what he’d been doing in August and found it exactly as he’d left it, half-finished, the brake system open and waiting. He felt the pull of unfinished work. The specific itch of a job left in the middle.
He stood up. “I’ll need a brake line kit.”
“I ordered it in August. It’s on the shelf,” Viktor replied.
Dominic looked at him.
“I knew you’d want to finish it,” Viktor said. Simply.
Dominic nearly smiled in response but withheld it. He didn’t want to give Viktor the satisfaction.
He started working. Viktor sat on the stool near the workbench, where he had always sat, and the garage settled into the rhythm it had always had, tools and oil and the low conversation of two people who had found a shared language. Dominic worked and Viktor asked questions and the questions were good and Dominic gave real answers.
He’s my kidnapper, Dominic thought.
He’s right about the brake line routing.
He’s my kidnapper.
He knows why the previous restoration skimped on the rear calipers.
He. Is. My. Kidnapper.
He went back to the calipers.
At some point in the afternoon Viktor said, out of nowhere, “You know what I find difficult about the car community? Most of the men in it are very straight. The kind of straight that announces itself.” He said it with the dry precision of someone who had been observing this for years. “It’s a lonely world if you’re... what I am.”
Dominic looked up from the caliper.
Viktor was looking at the Shelby with an expression less controlled than his usual ones, the one that looked like something was allowed to show. “I’ve been to every major car show in the country,” he said. “There’s only a small handful of men I could have a conversation with who understood these cars the way I do and was also...” He paused. “Someone I could actually talk to. About all of it.”
Dominic looked at him for a moment. For the first time, he had to seriously consider whether he was “straight”. He’d ignored how he felt after laboring away in nothing but his very short blue jean shorts. He dismissed the feeling of seeing himself in the mirror in the tiny Speedo. He disregarded the countless jerk-offs in the shower after returning from a sweaty day’s work at Viktor’s as just the need for relief. What caught him most off-guard, however, was the empathy he felt for Viktor. No one to share this part of his life with. And now, he was sharing it with Dominic.
He thought: He’s my kidnapper.
He thought: I know exactly what he means.
He went back to the calipers and said nothing and felt the door that the conversation had opened and did not walk through it and could not entirely close it either.
* * *
The gym was on the lower level of the main house; behind a door Dominic had noticed in the first weeks without opening. Viktor told him to meet him there on a Monday the fourth week of September and told him they would be working out together in the mornings. Every morning.
He produced workout clothes. Too short compression shorts that fit Dominic the way the cutoffs had fit him, without apology, leaving nothing particularly ambiguous. Tank tops cut wide enough at the sides that the shirt was largely theoretical. Dominic looked at them and looked at Viktor.
“Workout clothes,” Viktor said pleasantly.
“These are not workout clothes,” Dominic said.
“They’re exactly workout clothes. Put them on.”
He put them on.
The workouts were real, Viktor trained with the focus of someone for whom it had always been discipline rather than vanity, and he pushed Dominic at a level that Dominic responded to because Dominic had always responded to being pushed at the right level. They moved through the gym, physically well-matched in different ways, Viktor’s dense efficiency against Dominic’s raw strength. In an hour they were both drenched and the tank top had been discarded and the compression shorts were doing what compression shorts do when the man inside them has been built the way Dominic was built.
Viktor watched him. He didn’t disguise it. He had never disguised it and Dominic had stopped expecting him to.
What Dominic hadn’t expected was that he’d started to notice Viktor back.
Not the way Viktor noticed him, not with Viktor’s undisguised directness. More like the peripheral awareness he’d had all summer in the garage, the tracking without wanting to be caught tracking. Viktor at forty-three, moving through the gym with a competence and confidence Dominic found himself admiring. The lean density of him. The gray at his temples dark with sweat. The pale eyes finding Dominic across the room with equal respect, and just a trace of longing that Dominic tried not to recognize for what it was, but failed.
Dominic looked away. Went back to the weights. Told himself he was assessing Viktor as a threat, not a person.
He wasn’t entirely sure that was true anymore.
“I’ve never had a workout partner,” Viktor said, racking the bar after a set. He said it the way he’d said the thing about the car community, without looking for a response, just stating something true. “I’ve always trained alone. I didn’t know how much better it could be.” He looked at Dominic slowly, top to bottom, and back up. “Way better.”
Dominic picked up the bar. He said nothing. He did the set and set the bar down and thought: he’s telling me things. Small things. True things. Things he hasn’t told anyone.
He thought: this is how you get someone. You tell them things.
He thought: I can see exactly what he’s doing.
He thought: it doesn’t matter that I can see it.
They pushed through another forty minutes after that. Viktor didn’t let up, he trained the way he did everything, with complete attention to the task and no interest in stopping before the task was done, and by the end Dominic’s legs were done and his shoulders were done and there was a satisfying exhaustion in him that he hadn’t felt since before Labor Day. The kind of tired that meant something had been accomplished.
He was standing with his hands on his knees catching his breath when Viktor said: “Let’s head to the spa.” He nodded toward a door at the back of the gym that Dominic had assumed was a closet. “You need it after that.”
It wasn’t a suggestion. Viktor was already moving toward the door.
Dominic straightened and followed.
The room on the other side stopped him in the doorway.
It was not a closet. It was larger than his entire trailer had been, stone floors, low lighting, warm humid air indicating the space had been running before they arrived. A multi-person shower along the far wall, glassed in, enormous, with showerheads mounted at every level, overhead, at shoulder height, at hip height, water coming from all directions at once, the kind of shower that existed in hotel brochures and not in any real-life Dominic had access to. A hot tub in the corner, already running, steam rising off the surface. A sauna beyond it, its light glowing amber through the glass.
He noticed, mounted on the tile beside the shower, the same attachment he’d seen in his own shower downstairs. The douche fitting. He recognized it now. He looked at it for one moment and looked away.
“Shower first,” Viktor said. “Then the tub.”
He was already pulling his shirt over his head.
Dominic stood in the doorway of the spa and watched Viktor undress as if showering with your kidnap victim was an everyday event and understood he was about to see something he wasn’t prepared for.
Viktor’s shirt came off first. The torso was lean and dense the way his handshake was, nothing performed about it, just the body of a man who had been maintaining himself for decades because he had reasons to. Dark hair across his chest, more than Dominic had expected the same at his stomach. Then the gym shorts. Then nothing.
Dominic looked. He couldn’t not look. Viktor didn’t make it easier by turning away or moving quickly, he folded the shorts and set them on the bench with the same economy he brought to everything and then walked toward the shower without looking back, wordlessly daring Dominic not to follow him.
Dominic undressed. He told himself it was just a shower. He stepped into the shower.
The water came from everywhere at once. It was the kind of water pressure that had no equivalent in a single-wide in Harlan Creek, Tennessee, and the temperature was exactly right and it hit his worked-over muscles from six directions simultaneously and he heard himself make a sound before he could stop it.
Viktor glanced at him. Something moved in the pale eyes that wasn’t quite a smile. “First time in a shower like this,” Dominic said. It wasn’t a question. Just a statement, to explain the sound.
“I know,” Viktor said.
They showered side by side under the water coming from all directions and Dominic was aware of Viktor’s body with the same peripheral hyperawareness he’d developed over months, except that there was nothing peripheral about it now. He looked straight ahead at the tile and was aware of everything in his field of vision and slightly outside it. Viktor was aware of him the same way. Neither of them made it a conversation.
They lathered. Dominic kept his eyes on his own hands moving over his own body and was aware that Viktor was doing the same and that they were both, in the way of two men in a shower who are each pretending to be less aware of the other than they are, paying very close attention to nothing in particular.
His body made its own decision. He had known it was going to and had been hoping it wouldn’t and it did anyway, filling slowly against his will with the humiliating insistence that his body had been demonstrating since June. He kept his face toward the tile. Viktor said nothing. Viktor was possibly doing his own inventory and reaching his own conclusions. Dominic did not investigate.
If there had ever been a time for Viktor to physically claim Dominic, this was it. But Viktor turned off his section of the water, and simply said, “hot tub.” He stepped out and walked off with his dripping back to Dominic.
With Viktor’s back turned, Dominic quickly turned the water valve to Cold and doused himself to deflate the evidence of his arousal. When the situation had resolved itself sufficiently he stepped out and dropped into the tub. As he stepped in, he paused for a moment, inexplicably allowing his semi-inflated cock to float on the surface in full view.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he thought to himself as he submerged completely.
Viktor, if he noticed, did not let on. But Viktor noticed everything.
The heat hit him like a wall. A good wall, the sensation of very hot water receiving a body that had been worked hard for an hour and a half, every muscle releasing at once, the kind of physical relief that went below comfort into something more fundamental. More primal. More feral. He heard himself make the sound again. He didn’t try to stop it this time.
“You’ve never been in a hot tub,” Viktor said. Not a question.
“No.”
“What do you think?”
Dominic looked at the ceiling and felt the water touch parts of his body that had never been touched before. “I think I’ve been missing something.”
Viktor looked at him from across the tub with the expression that had been in the gym earlier, the trace of longing that Dominic tried not to recognize for what it was and failed. Viktor said nothing. Dominic didn’t realize it, but he was returning the gaze.
They sat in the water. The jets moved it around them in slow currents. At some point, without either of them moving toward it, Dominic’s leg drifted through the water and made contact with Viktor’s beneath the surface. The contact lasted two or three seconds before the current shifted and moved them apart. Neither of them acknowledged it. Two minutes later it happened again.
Dominic looked at the ceiling.
His cock, which had resolved itself in the shower, was once again overruling his brain. The water and the heat and Viktor six feet away and the occasional drift of contact beneath the surface were producing a result he could feel building and couldn’t do anything about. He was going to have to get out of the tub eventually. He was aware of this problem.
“Tell me about the Charger,” Viktor said.
Dominic looked at him.
“The car coming from Memphis. What’s the first thing you do when it arrives?”
It was such a deliberate subject change that Dominic almost laughed. He understood exactly what Viktor was doing and was profoundly grateful for it. He started talking about the Charger, the inspection sequence, what he expected to find, what a Hemi Orange car from that year typically needed, how you authenticated the drivetrain on a numbers-matching claim. Viktor asked questions. Real questions, the kind that required real answers, and Dominic gave them and the conversation went where their conversations always went and the paralyzing sexual tension of the hot tub receded to something manageable.
They talked about the Charger for twenty minutes. By the end of it Dominic’s situation had resolved itself again and he was something approaching relaxed, which in a hot tub after a hard workout, even in this particular hot tub with this particular man, was what his body had decided to be.
Viktor stood up.
The water cascaded off him, almost in slow, sensual motion, and Dominic looked at the far wall of the spa.
“Shower to rinse,” Viktor said. “Then we’re done.”
They rinsed side by side again, cooler water this time, briefer. They dried off and dressed in the clothes they had worn before they changed into workout clothes. Getting back into their everyday clothes had a strange effect on Dominic. On one hand, he was grateful he made it through the shower/hot tub/shower sequence without demonstrating evidence of his arousal. But on the other hand, he was walking away from one of the most potentially erotic moments of his life.
In the doorway of the spa Viktor stopped. He looked at Dominic with the pale eyes.
“Good session,” he said.
“Yeah,” Dominic said.
There was a moment. Not long. The kind of moment that exists between people who have been in a confined space without their clothes and are now standing at the threshold of the ordinary world.
It wasn’t lost on Dominic what Viktor chose to do and not to do. He chose to diffuse what was a potentially highly erotic moment. Two men, obviously aroused. Workout, shower, hot tub, shower. He could’ve taken Dominic and Dominic wouldn’t have been able to stop him.
But he chose not to. He created the opportunity, showed Dominic what was there for the taking.
Was he simply a gentleman? Or was he cagey?
“No chores until this afternoon,” Viktor said. “You have the morning.”
Dominic nodded. Viktor walked toward the main house. Dominic walked toward his room. He had one mission.
* * *
He lasted about four minutes.
He sat on the edge of his bed and thought about the hot tub and the shower and Viktor’s body and his body’s response to both and lasted four minutes before he gave up and lay back and let his hand do what his hand was going to do.
His mind whirred with thoughts that were simultaneously breathtaking and disturbing. Him in his summertime work apparel, the too short jean shorts. The white Speedo and subsequent inspection by Viktor’s associates. The skimpy workout gear. The shower. The hot tub. And finally, the whips and leather furniture pieces he shared quarters with, which were becoming objects of fantasy rather than terror.
It didn’t take long. He spit in his hand and pumped furiously. That wasn’t enough. He didn’t know why, or even how he knew to do it, but instinctively, he spit on his finger and slowly slid it up his hole. He laid there. He stopped pumping. He contemplated the full feeling in his rectum. Then he experimented. He wiggled the tip of his finger. It felt unexpectedly good. Although he didn’t know what he was looking for, he used his finger to search his inner cavity. Left, right, down, up. UP! He hit something that sent chills up and down his body. He didn’t want it to be over, for the feeling to be gone. He rubbed the place more. More chills. He pictured Viktor, nude. In the shower. Emerging from the hot tub. Dipping water. He lifted his neck to inspect the fuck bench and wondered what it would feel like. To be restrained. Used. He stared at the St. Andrews Cross and fantasized about being bound to it. Looking at the whips, he imagined Viktor taking one off the wall and slowly flogging him as he groaned, begging for more. In his fantasy he begged Viktor to strike him harder, believing that whatever punishment he was subjected to was deserved.
He hated these feelings.
He loved these feelings.
He lost control. He pressed his finger into that place he found in his rectum that responded with such intensity he almost yelled out. He pumped his massively hard cock so hard, that after two strokes it erupted, covering his hair, face, and torso, until there was nothing left but the slow slide of it down his shaft.
He was a kidnapping victim who had just fantasized about his captor and cum so hard he’d covered his own face. Somewhere across town, or across the state, he still didn’t know, Dom Jr. was waking up without his father. He held both of those facts at the same time and couldn’t make them fit together and took the pleasure anyway, which was the part he’d have to live with. He laid there, took his hand and scooped up a fingerful of cum and fed it to himself, imagining it was Viktor’s hand feeding him, consecrating the act he’d just committed. And to his surprise, he craved more. He scooped every drop from his face, torso, even hair, and licked his fingers dry. This was for real. What he’d do with the feeling, he didn’t know, but this was for real.
He lay on the bed in his room afterward and stared at the ceiling and felt the hollow clarity that followed and asked himself: what is happening to me.
He didn’t have an answer. He was running out of ways to pretend he didn’t know.
*****
By the end of October the arguments Dominic had been having with himself were losing steam.
He still made them. He still heard Danny’s voice occasionally, the word at Rusty’s that had landed like a detonated bomb, and he still felt the shame of the white Speedo, Viktor’s hands, the shower, and his own body’s response to all of them. He still thought, he kidnapped me. Every day.
But the gaps between the arguments were getting longer. And what was in the gaps was something he hadn’t expected: a life that had a shape. Work he was good at and cared about. A man who knew exactly what that work was worth and praised him for it, even conveyed a level of respect he’d never before experienced. Meals that were real. Workouts that pushed him right. Conversations about cars that went where car conversations could go when both people actually knew what they were talking about.
He thought about Brianna. He thought about the single-wide and the arguments that had nowhere to go and the grinding quality of a life that had no future. He hadn’t chosen to leave it. He would never have chosen to leave it. But he was out of it, and the longer he was out of it, the more complicated it became to call it the life he’d been taken from rather than the life he’d been in when something else found him.
He didn’t say this to anyone. He barely said it to himself. But it was there.
He had also, over eight weeks, built a picture of Viktor Volkov more complete than any picture he had of anyone he’d known before. He knew Viktor’s tells, the slight tension at the jaw when something hadn’t gone the way he’d planned, how his mind worked when he was deciding something, the way the pale eyes changed when something pleased him versus when something merely didn’t displease him. He had learned to be hyper-attentive to his moods because his safety depended on reading him correctly.
What he hadn’t planned for was what eight weeks of that kind of attention produced. He understood Viktor. Not agreed with him, not the kidnapping, not the room, not any of it. But he understood the logic of a man who had seen something he wanted and had the resources and the ruthlessness to take it. He understood, in the private place where he was honest with himself, that being wanted that completely by anyone was something he had never experienced in twenty-four years, and that the experiencing of it, even in these circumstances, had done something to him he couldn’t undo.
He thought about Dom Jr. every day. The thought of him was the one thing that stayed painful and entirely unmanaged. Seven years old. Gap-toothed. Tearing across the common area at Pineview on his bike with Jake Pruitt beside him. Whatever Viktor’s assurance about Dom Jr. actually meant, Dominic tried to make it enough.
*****
Viktor noticed the hair before Dominic did.
It had happened gradually, the way he stopped noticing most things about his appearance around week three, when there had been no mirror worth looking into and no reason to care what he looked like doing yard work in shackles. But by late October it had grown well past his collar in the back, curling at his neck in a way it never had in Harlan Creek, where he'd gotten it buzzed short every six weeks at the barbershop next to the hardware store because short was cheap.
"Come here," Viktor said one morning, catching his jaw and turning his head slightly. His fingers moved up into Dominic's hair, and ruffled it almost idly, the way you'd touch something you already considered yours. He said nothing for a moment. Then: "You need a haircut."
"I know." Dominic hadn't thought about it in weeks.
"Not the kind you're picturing." Viktor's thumb moved briefly along his hairline, assessing. "I have someone."
The someone arrived two days later. A man in his fifties named Étienne who said almost nothing, set up a folding chair in the middle of Viktor’s kitchen, and worked for the better part of an hour with scissors and a straight razor and products Dominic didn't recognize the names or fragrances of.
Étienne finally turned the chair toward the mirror he set up, Dominic didn't say anything for a long moment.
It wasn't short. It wasn't the buzzed, functional cut he'd worn his whole life. It was longer on top, textured, swept back from his face in a way that did something to his jaw he hadn't known his jaw was capable of, and it made him look, unmistakably, like a different category of man than the one who'd fixed water heaters at Pineview Mobile Estates. He turned his head slightly, the way Viktor had turned it, and watched a stranger do the same thing in the glass.
"Handsome!" Étienne proclaimed, or something in that same amused Continental register, gathering his tools. "Prince Viktor should approve."
Dominic didn't correct the name.
The clothes appeared on a Friday afternoon, laid out on the bed in his room while he was in the gym.
Not workout clothes this time. Real clothes. Dark trousers with a clean break at the hem, the kind of cut that came from someone who understood proportions. A shirt in deep charcoal, cotton so fine it felt different in his hands than anything he’d owned. A jacket. Leather shoes, not dress shoes exactly but not casual either, the kind that existed in a category Dominic didn’t have a name for because he’d never needed one.
He stood in the doorway and looked at them.
Viktor appeared behind him. Addressing the new clothes, he said, “We’re going out tonight,” he said.
Dominic looked at him. “Out.”
“Dinner. Be ready to go by 6.”
He changed in the bathroom, alone, and pulled on the trousers and they fit the way the compression shorts fit and the cutoffs had fit and everything Viktor had ever put him in had fit. The shirt fell across his shoulders without bunching. The jacket sat on him the way jackets sit on men whose shoulders were built for jackets.
He looked in the mirror.
He didn’t recognize himself immediately. Not in the way he hadn’t recognized himself in the Speedo, that had been something else, something that had confused and alarmed him. This was different. With the new haircut, the man in the mirror was a man he hadn’t met before, and the man looked like someone whose life had gone a different direction than Dominic Caruso’s life had gone. Someone who had been given the opportunity to become what he was.
He stood there longer than he needed to.
Viktor was waiting in the hall. He looked at Dominic when he came out and something moved in the pale eyes, not the controlled appreciation Dominic had seen all summer, but something less managed than that. Something that looked, for just a moment, like the answer to a question Viktor had been asking for a long time.
“You look good,” Viktor said. That was all. But the way he said it meant considerably more than that.
The restaurant was forty minutes from Franklin, far enough that no one would recognize Dominic, which Dominic understood was the point. It was the kind of place that had no sign visible from the street and a menu with no prices and lighting that came from somewhere that couldn’t be identified. The kind of place in which Viktor felt as comfortable as he did in the garage with the vintage cars.
The host greeted Viktor by name. His eyes moved to Dominic with the professional discretion of someone who understood that the man beside Viktor Volkov tonight was someone Viktor was proud to be seen with and acknowledged Dominic accordingly.
They were given what appeared to be the best table in the room, centered, visible, the kind of table that said the person sitting at it wanted to be seen rather than tucked away. Dominic understood that he was being shown off. The haircut, clothes, the restaurant, the table, all of it had been arranged with one purpose, and the purpose was him. No one had ever done that before. No one had ever looked at Dominic Caruso and thought: I want the room to know I’m with him. He sat with that for a moment and felt something move through him that he didn’t have a word for, something that had been missing for so long he hadn’t known it was missing.
Viktor ordered for both of them, asking Dominic first what he wanted and incorporating it into the order without making it a performance. The wine came. The food came. And the conversation moved the way it had moved over the dinner Viktor had cooked in his kitchen, except that they were in public now, in a restaurant, at a table with candles, and something in the air that transported them to the next level.
“Can I ask you something,” Dominic said, around the middle of the meal.
Viktor looked at him.
“Why here? Why tonight?”
Viktor was quiet for a moment. He looked at his wine glass and then at Dominic with the expression that was the real one. “Because I wanted to,” he said. “Because I have spent a great deal of my life eating dinner alone and I didn’t want to do that tonight.”
Dominic looked at him across the table. A man who controlled everything in his world and ran it with cold efficiency, but who had eaten dinner alone, consistently, for a very long time.
“I know what you gave up,” Viktor said. His voice was quiet. “I know the life you had. I know it wasn’t what you wanted, but it was yours and I took you out of it and I don’t expect you to be grateful for that.” He paused. “But I want you to know that what I see when I look at you, not the body, not the work, though both of those matter, is someone who was meant for more than that life was going to give him. And I intend to give him more.”
Dominic sat with that. He thought about the single-wide. The site fees. The water heater. Brianna’s objections to everything and Tammy’s Impala in the window. The grinding smallness of a life built around what was available rather than what was possible.
He thought about the garage and the cars and the effortless conversations that had gone places no conversation had ever gone for him before. The gym. The dinners. The mirror tonight and the man looking back at him in clothes and a face that fit like a different life. And Viktor in the hallway saying “You look good” in a way that meant: I see you. I have always seen you. You are exactly what I knew you were.
Nobody had ever seen him like that before. Not Brianna. Not Randy. Nobody.
He understood now why he was here. Not the kidnapping, he understood that too, and it was still wrong, and he hadn’t forgotten it. But underneath it, the reason underneath the reason. Viktor hadn’t taken him because he could. He’d taken him because losing him had been unthinkable.
Dominic sat with that. It was the most terrifying thing he’d felt yet. It was also, and he couldn’t talk himself out of this, the most desired he’d ever felt.
“You can’t just decide someone’s life for them,” Dominic said. He said it without heat. Just true.
“No,” Viktor agreed. “You’re right.” He picked up his wine. “I decided mine. I’ve been living with that for a long time. I’m asking you to live with it too, and I know what I’m asking.” He looked at Dominic steadily. “But I’m also asking you to look at what’s on the other side of it.”
Dominic looked at the table. He thought about what was on the other side of it. He had been living on the other side of it for two months and the answer was complicated and true and not something he could say out loud in a restaurant forty minutes from Franklin.
He picked up his wine.
“The Charger’s going to need a full interior restoration,” he said. “Seats are shot. Dash is cracked. Whoever owned it before didn’t treat it like what it is.”
Viktor’s expression shifted. The real one again, the one that showed what was allowed to show. “I know,” he said. “I’m counting on you for that.”
They finished dinner. They talked about the Charger and a '66 Mustang fastback Viktor had been watching at auction and what a genuine Shelby numbers-matching restoration was worth versus a tribute build, and the conversation was the conversation they had always had in the garage, except that it was happening in candlelight in a restaurant where no one knew them and Viktor was looking at him across the table like a man who had finally arrived somewhere after a very long drive.
* * *
They drove home mostly in silence. Not uncomfortable silence, they had said enough to each for one evening and were enjoying the quiet.
As they pulled through the gate, Viktor took Dominic’s hand, squeezed it gently and said, “I really enjoyed tonight. Thank you for joining me.”
Dominic should’ve been shocked when he grasped his hand, but strangely he wasn’t. It felt right, so his answer came easily, “I enjoyed it too.” At the house Viktor entered the code and the gate opened and he parked and they walked inside. In the main hall, where they’d naturally part ways, he stopped. Dominic stopped beside him.
Viktor looked at him. The pale eyes in the low light of the hall. The house quiet around them. A long moment passed before he spoke, as if he were choosing his next words as carefully as he'd chosen everything else that night.
"Stay," Viktor said. Not a command. Not quite a question. Just the word, offered, and what it meant was clear.
Dominic stood in the hall in the clothes that fit him like a different life and looked at Viktor Volkov, who had taken everything he’d known from him and given him things he hadn’t known he needed, and felt the past two months pressing against the back at this moment.
He couldn’t deny what the summer had been. He couldn’t deny what the two months since his abduction had done to him. He couldn’t deny what his body had been telling him since the white Speedo in August, since Viktor’s hands on him as he hung in shackles those first days here, since every morning in the gym since.
He was twenty-four years old and he had spent his whole life being someone he mostly wasn’t and standing in the hall of this house in these clothes with this man looking at him like that he understood, in the unambiguous way he understood when an engine was finally running the way it was supposed to run, that this was the thing he had been not-looking-at for a very long time.
“Okay,” he said.
Viktor held his gaze for a moment. Then he turned and walked toward the stairs and Dominic followed.
As he followed, everything from the previous months flashed through his mind. How wrong this was. How right this felt.
But in this moment, only two things mattered. The first was that no one in his life had ever made Dominic feel as valued, as respected, as seen as Viktor had these past several months. Their easy connection over vintage cars now stretched to nearly all aspects of their lives. There was rarely an uncomfortable silence between the two. Half a day without the other had started to feel like something was missing.
The second thing that mattered was more difficult to acknowledge, but he couldn’t fight it any longer. The unbridled masculinity he felt wearing the white Speedo, the erotic humiliation of being inspected by those men while trying to control his arousal, the shackles, the toys in the dungeon (as yet unused), the sweaty workouts, the steamy showers, the scalding hot tub where the churning water hid his excitement. Any one of them made his heart pound. All of them together propelled him to unapologetically follow Viktor to his bedroom.
Viktor opened the door; Dominic had never been inside nor seen it. It was just what he’d expect though. Clean, spare, modern. No excess, just a massive king bed, beckoning them.
Viktor stood in front of Dominic, placed his hands on his cheeks and pulled him into a gentle kiss. Dominic didn’t resist; in fact he nearly melted into Viktor’s arms. He surrendered completely and totally. No more pushing back, no more doubting, no more concealing his desire. He stopped fighting because he had no other choice. He fell into Viktor’s embrace. Willingly.
“My boy…” Viktor whispered as they embraced. “My beautiful, beautiful boy…”
Without thinking, Dominic found himself replying the first thing that came to his mind, “Daddy….”
That unleashed a torrid exchange of near rabid kisses, a virtual wrestling match leading to Viktor ripping Dominic’s new clothes off his body. He couldn’t be patient. Dominic was his and he was going to take him. He’s been patient too long. Buttons flew off the newly purchase shirt, the pants were nearly ripped in two.
Dominic had lost control himself, lunging at Viktor to do the same. Within seconds they were both nude, fully erect, and wrestling for control.
Viktor pulled away to say something, to regain control. “Do you know how long I’ve waited for this moment?” he asked.
“No, tell me”, Dominic wanted to hear him say it. He couldn’t get enough of Viktor’s hunger for him.
“Since the moment Randy introduced you to me. Just one look at you…” he couldn’t finish. But he started again, “and I’ve loved you more and more every day…”
Dominic heard the words, “I’ve loved you more and more every day”, and dropped into Viktor’s waiting arms and silently wept. Wept that he felt the same about Viktor. Wept for what he was about to experience. Wept for the price he was being forced to pay.
Gaining control, he looked into Viktor’s eyes and, with a half-smile said, “I’ve never done this before…with a man. You have to teach me.”
Viktor rubbed their steel-hard cocks together and said, “Oh, you’ll know what to do, you’re a natural”, cupping his erect cock and giving it a loving stroke.
With that invitation, Viktor led Dominic to his bed and laid him on his back. “On your back. Daddy will show you.”
Dominic obeyed. Nude, laying flat on his back, his cock proudly pointing north, Viktor knelt by his side, picked up his hand and gently started to kiss it. Each finger a kiss, and then in his mouth, worshiping each digit. Dominic made a noise that was somewhere between a groan and a whimper. After finishing one hand, he reached across his body and did the same with the other hand. “You taste so good, my boy..” he smiled.
“Thank you, Sir,” Dom smiled back.
Still off to his side, Viktor began a trail of kisses, down one leg, up the other, paying close attention to Dom’s inner thighs making him instinctively arch his back wordlessly begging for more. But Viktor steadfastly avoided Dom’s most cherished parts.
Then he worked Dom’s torso, alternating between kisses, licks, and sharp little bites of his nipples. “Oh…my…fucking…god…” Dominic gasped, never experiencing anything remotely like this. When Viktor bit one, he’d pinch the other with his fingertips. Then he’d reverse. Back and forth until Dominic begged him to both stop and keep going.
Viktor could keep going all night, but Dominic wanted more. He needed more. He demanded more.
Viktor gently turned him over on his stomach saying, “It’s time.”
Dominic had a general idea what he meant and had no desire to refuse him. Despite kidnapping him, Viktor had earned his trust by waiting this long to take Dominic and never taking him forcefully. He laid on his stomach instinctively knowing to spread his legs, the most natural way for him to offer himself to his captor. Viktor climbed between them, pushed them even further apart and whispered, “Good boy…”
Dominic groaned with appreciation.
Viktor began again, kissing up and down his legs, but this time paying special attention to his inner thighs, and each time reaching a centimeter closer to Dominic’s taint, balls and the trench between his glutes. Every time he did, Dominic would lift his hips and groan, wordlessly begging to be taken.
When he’d gotten as close as he could without actually rimming him, he stopped and whispered, “My boy likes it, doesn’t he. He wants his Daddy to take him. Use him.”
Dominic’s muffled an inaudible response into the pillow. “Say it boy. Tell me,” Viktor ordered. “Yes, Daddy”, Dominic choked out, still barely audible.
“SAY IT” Viktor repeated, this time harshly.
“Yes, Daddy….Use me….fucking use me,” Dominic finally yelled back, fearing what he’d unleashed. And then he added in a quiet whisper, “Please Daddy, use me…”
Without hesitation, Viktor climbed further between his legs, spread his glutes as wide as he could with his hands, and, starting at his taint, took a long swipe over his pink virginal hole and up his trench. “OH….MY….FUCKING….GOD…” Dominic shrieked, never having imagined pleasure like this.
Viktor ravaged Dominic's hole with his tongue, relishing the way it made him squirm. He slowed down and, changing pace, laid face down on Dominic’s back with his hard cock nestled between his glutes. He embraced him from behind, pulled him close, began to very slowly slide his cock up and down him, sliding over, but not in, his hole. Dominic didn’t know a feeling like this could exist. He knew what was next and wanted it more than anything he’d ever wanted. He arched his back indicating for Viktor to take him, and cried, “Please Daddy, fuck your boy…fuck your little boy…”
Viktor didn’t hesitate, “You my little boy?” he asked.
“Fuck yes!” he barked back.
Viktor pulled off him and reached for the lube on the side table.
Legs spread, ass pushed in the air, Dominic panted waiting for the inevitable. He waited breathlessly for something that was unthinkable a few months ago. He heard the mechanics of the lube being extracted from the bottle and Viktor applying it to himself. He felt Viktor get back into place. It couldn’t come fast enough.
He felt Viktor’s lubed fingers slowly circle and massage his hole. “Oooohhhh…” he groaned. Then one finger slowly penetrated him. Although he knew it was coming, he seized up at as the finger slid into his hole. The feeling was foreign, even scary. Viktor assured him, “Relax….that’s it….there you go…” as Dominic followed orders and let the finger simply reside in his rectum. Viktor just let it sit, motionless, and after a few minutes, it felt almost natural for it to be there.
Viktor carefully slid it in and out, getting Dominic used to the feeling, then slowly added a second finger. “Ohhhh….” Dominic gasped as his hole was stretched. But he also felt something different, something better, as the fingers located a place inside him that felt electrifying. “Oh…my…god…” he yelped when Viktor found it.
Dominic was now completely relaxed into the bed, letting Viktor use him however he saw fit. Viktor had proven repeatedly he could be trusted. Dominic had turned himself, body and soul, over to his perpetrator.
The fingers slid out slowly, and Viktor once again climbed on top of him, with the tip of his cock nestled at his entry. “Ohhh…” Dominic groaned, knowing what was about to happen. “You ready my boy?” Viktor asked with genuine concern. “Yes, Daddy”, Dominic sighed, bravely trying to relax.
Dominic could feel the heavily lubed cock head slowly breach his hole. He felt a burning, stretching sensation by something thicker and harder than the fingers. It was frightening, but he wanted it. He craved it. He arched his back to take more.
It slid in further, stretching his hole in a way he wouldn’t have thought possible. Viktor went in with such caution it was as if he could read Dominic’s mind. Just when the burn from the stretch became intolerable, Viktor would pause, and just when Dominic wanted more, he’d resume. Dominic was nearly delirious from the experience. The stretch, the pause, the stretch, the pause, the stretch, the pause, until finally he felt a fullness he didn’t have a word to describe.
Viktor climbed up more and slid his arms under Dominic’s shoulders and embraced him from behind. With him in a passionate headlock he slowly withdrew tormenting Dominic. Dominic arched his back, greedy for more. Viktor pushed back in with more force than before. It continued. Slow, tortuous withdrawals followed by forceful thrusts back into him. Slowly out, pounding re-entry. Slow, fast, slow, fast, until Dominic whimpered not knowing how much more he could take.
Accurately sensing the need for a break, Viktor pulled out, left several small kisses across the back of Dominic’s neck, and then gently turned him over on his stomach. He spread his legs, climbed between them, pulled his ankles over his shoulders and placed his cock back at Dominic’s entry. He peered into Dominic’s eyes, wordlessly conveying his deep affection, and pushed in. Dominic groaned with an intensity that surprised even him, but the sensation from being entered from the front was beyond comprehension. Once again, he arched his back, begging for more. But this time something different happened. From this position, Victor’s cock found that spot inside him that the fingers had found and set Dominic on fire. The electricity raged throughout his body. He screamed with pleasure. “Fuck, Daddy…Fuck”, he screamed, thrusting his hips for more.
“That’s right boy, your Daddy is fucking you”, and then pounded it into him, scraping his prostate like never before. “FUCK” Dominic screamed.
They both were close; the intensity was getting the best of them. Viktor didn’t want it to be over so, still fully penetrated, he paused and lowered himself onto Dominic so they were now nose-to-nose. He gave him a small, affectionate kiss and whispered, “You’re so beautiful.”
Dominic didn’t have words for what he was experiencing. Nothing in his life before came remotely close to this experience. He teared up. He wanted to respond but couldn’t find the words. All he could say was…“Daddy…” and pushed his hips to find a way to take Viktor even deeper.
“Oh, my boy, my boy,” Viktor responded, pulled out and then thrust back into him with near violent force. He couldn’t contain his lust any longer. “ARGGHHHH” Dominic yelled but that didn’t stop Viktor.
“Take it boy”, he growled as he pounded him again. “Take my cock, I know you want it”.
“I want it so bad, Daddy”, he screamed back. “Fuck your boy, Fuck him”
Once again, Dominic was in a place he never imagined existed. Passion, pain, torment, lust. He felt like an animal, being devoured by a more ferocious one. He had lost the match and surrendered to his superior. And he loved the feeling of surrender.
“Grab your cock, boy, cum with me.” Viktor ordered.
It hadn’t occurred to Dominic to jerk himself off, how could it. Everything he was experiencing was new. He wrapped his fingers around his own cock and Viktor wrapped his own fingers around Dominic’s.
“Shoot for me boy. Cum together.” Viktor croaked as he pounded his boy. Now both covered in sweat, it happened. Dominic felt Viktor’s body stiffen and immediately halt its motion. He then felt a volcanic-like eruption inside him and matched Viktor’s orgasm with his own. “YES!!” Viktor yelled as he came feeling Dominic’s blasts shoot between their sweat soaked torsos.
Viktor continued to shoot inside him, finally slowing down to a few final spasms while Dominic did the same. Now nose-to-nose, Victor dropped his full weight on Dominic and pulled him back into a passionate kiss.
They stayed exactly where they were, both of them slick with sweat, breathing slowing, the room coming back around them in pieces. Neither moved. Neither spoke. They had nothing left in reserve.
Eventually the volume of cooling cum between them made the decision for them. Viktor rolled to his side, pulling Dominic with him, and neither of them made it a conversation.
Viktor gently pulled Dominic out of bed and into the shower in his en suite bathroom. Unlike previous showers, this time they could look at each other, revel in each other’s masculinity, even showcase their manhood.
Viktor started by soaping up a giant luffa sponge he had in the shower and tenderly bathed Dominic. He did the back of his legs, up his thighs, his shoulders and back, held up his arms, his underarms, and torso. Then he said, “Do me”, which Dominic leaped at the opportunity. He followed the identical order that Viktor had, ending with his torso.
Once finished, they were both fully erect again.
They dried off, and Viktor pulled Dominic by the hand back into the bedroom.
Standing at the foot of the bed, he said quietly, “Kneel”.
Dominic felt honored to do so. He had a good idea what he was being asked, make that ordered, to do, and wanted badly to show his appreciation.
He knelt in front of Viktor, eye level with his long, veiny cock.
“It’s yours”, Viktor said. “Take your time.”
Dominic leaned into it, took it gently in his hand and placed it in his mouth. Once again, something that would have been unthinkable a few months ago was now a pinnacle of his short life. Viktor’s hard cock rested naturally on Dominic’s tongue. So naturally, Dominic somehow knew how to pleasure Viktor. He virtually inhaled him, taking him all the way back to his throat with barely a gag. And somehow he knew to swirl his tongue across the bottom, making Viktor groan.
“Oh my fucking god…” Viktor cried. “Where did you learn that?” he asked, only half in jest.
“Am I good, Daddy?”, Dominic asked, looking up into his eyes.
Viktor grabbed his hair and pushed him even deeper, “So…fucking….good…my beautiful boy…”
Dominic kept it up. Licking his balls, tonguing his piss slit, sucking his cock until Viktor couldn’t wait any longer. “I’m cumming, boy. You’re going to swallow every drop”.
Dominic loved the challenge and wanted nothing more than to please Viktor, so he braced himself by holding the back of Viktor’s thighs and consumed every drop that Viktor fed him.
“Fuuuucccckkkk….” Viktor howled as he came.
He shot and shot and shot, and when he finally was depleted, he turned Dominic’s head up to look him in the eye. “You did it, my boy.”
Dominic peered up into his eyes and simply smiled.
“I hope you like the taste of me,” he said. “There’s a lot more where that came from”, he smiled.
“I hope so...” Dominic whispered.
Dominic was still hard, but Viktor had already made up his mind that he would control Dominic’s orgasms, and best to start off right. “I know you want to cum again,” he said, “but you’ll have plenty more opportunities for that. I want to leave you wanting more.”
Dominic wasn’t sure he understood, but he had placed trust in his captor and didn’t want to question him now.
Viktor pulled him back into his bed saying simply, “Stay with me tonight”
Pressing into him, his hard cock pressed against Viktor’s side, Dominic responded sheepishly, “Yes, Daddy.”
* * *
They lay in the dark.
Viktor on his back, one arm around Dominic, the other at his side. Dominic had moved as close into him as possible, the way you move toward warmth in the dark, and his head was pressed against Viktor’s chest and Viktor’s arm had come around him and they had been like that for a while without speaking. They held each other like if they released, the other would disappear.
Dominic could hear his heartbeat. Steady, unhurried. The same as everything else about him.
He lay there cherishing the feeling that had settled over him and tried to find the right word for it and found one he hadn’t expected: safe. He felt safe. Not free, the ankle shackles were on the nightstand and the ring was still on his body and none of what was true about his situation had changed. But something underneath all of that was present that hadn’t been present before, the deep animal sense of being in the right place next to the right person, and he was too tired and too honest with himself to argue with it tonight.
The arm around him tightened slightly. Not dramatically. Just enough to register.
He closed his eyes.
He thought about Dom Jr. He let himself think about it the way he’d been letting himself think about it a little more each day. Randy would have him. Randy’s orbit, Randy’s son Jake down the hall or across the yard. Dom Jr. and Jake had been inseparable since they could walk. Whatever Viktor’s assurance actually meant, Dom Jr. was not alone.
He held onto that.
He slept better than he had since the parking lot of Rusty’s Bar.
There were things Viktor hadn’t told him yet. He didn’t know that. They were coming.
-To be continued-
Author’s Note: This chapter took longer to get right than almost any other, and I hope you can feel why, there's a lot happening under the surface, and I wanted the "yes" to feel earned, not just inevitable. This is the turn the whole story's been leaning toward. What comes next builds directly on it, so stay close. As always, I'd love to hear what you're feeling: [email protected].
To get in touch with the author, send them an email.
