Chapter 10 #2
Vale’s hand slid from his mouth to his throat. Not choking—something worse. Fingers pressing deliberately on either side of his throat with a careful pressure that knew exactly where to touch, how hard, massaging the sides of his throat in a rhythm that forced his swallow reflex to engage.
The touch felt different than the violence. Careful. Knowing. Almost gentle.
Kieran’s body relaxed slightly under that pressure, betrayed him in some fundamental way by recognizing the touch as something other than a threat even while his mind screamed for resistance.
He swallowed.
Vale’s hand stayed on his throat a moment longer than necessary, feeling the movement. When he pulled back, he smiled.
“Good boy.”
He released Kieran, stepped back, and returned to perfect calm as if the violence had never happened.
Kieran sat frozen in the chair, throat still tingling where Vale’s fingers had pressed, hating his body for the way it had responded to that touch. For the way some stupid animal part of his brain had registered those careful fingers as care instead of control.
Kieran took his medication the next day without fighting. Twice daily, morning and evening, pills from Vale’s hand to his mouth to his throat with barely a protest.
He hated himself for it.
He got out of bed when Vale appeared in the doorway and didn’t wait for the command, he just pushed back covers and stood on shaking legs because it was easier than being dragged.
He hated himself for that too.
He walked to the basement on his own feet when Vale said “It’s time.” He didn’t fight at the top of the stairs or grab the doorframe. He just descended into darkness with the resignation of someone who’d learned that fighting only made the violence more intimate.
The anger was still there. Kieran held onto it like a lifeline, repeating “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you” on an endless loop in his mind during his “lesson”, during every bland meal, during every moment Vale’s hands touched him.
But the anger was harder to access now, slipping through his fingers like water every time he tried to grip it tight.
The hood blocked out the world and Vale’s fingers wrapped around his cock, already half hard, and his body betrayed him again. He wanted to reach into his nervous system and rip out whatever broken wiring made him react to Vale’s touch with anything except revulsion.
“You don’t want to fight this.” Vale’s voice came through the darkness, soft and certain. “Fighting only makes it harder. You want to accept what your body already knows.”
Kieran sobbed behind the hood. Not from pain—Vale hadn’t needed to hurt him today. He sobbed from the confusion of his body speaking a language his mind couldn’t translate.
I don’t want this. I don’t. I don’t.
But it felt less true each time.
By the sixth day—or was it the seventh?—Kieran found himself anticipating the sessions.
Not wanting it, exactly, but his body responded to the routine, to the predictability.
Knowing that in the basement, he didn’t have to make decisions.
Vale decided everything—where to touch, how long to wait, when to remove the hood.
It was easier than trying to maintain autonomy he’d already lost.
That realization should have terrified him.
Instead, it just made him tired.
The session lasted longer than usual. Hours of Vale’s hands and voice and that suffocating darkness making Kieran’s body do things his mind still tried to deny.
When Vale finally removed the hood, Kieran was sobbing. Not the angry, resistant tears of the first few days. Something deeper. More broken.
Vale wiped his face with careful fingers, murmuring soft reassurances that felt like mockery except they didn’t sound like mockery. They sounded genuine.
“J-just k-kill me.” The words scraped out of Kieran’s throat raw and desperate. “Please. I c-can’t— I c-can’t d-do this anymore. Just k-kill me.”
Vale’s hands cupped his face, his thumbs brushing away the tears. The touch was gentle—such sharp contrast to yesterday’s violence, to this morning’s firm grip steering him through breakfast, to the calculated precision of the session they’d just finished.
“You don’t want to die, sweetheart.” Vale’s voice was so soft it hurt. “You want the confusion to stop. I can help with that.”
“I d-don’t want your h-help—”
“Yes, you do. You just don’t know how to accept it yet.”
Vale helped him stand, an arm around his waist when Kieran’s legs wouldn’t hold his weight. He guided him upstairs with that same careful support that felt like care if Kieran didn’t think too hard about context.
He tucked Kieran into bed. He brought him water. He sat there. Patient. Gentle. Always gentle except for when he wasn’t.
Kieran wanted to tell him to leave, but couldn’t find the energy. He couldn’t find the anger anymore either. Just exhaustion and confusion and the horrible, shameful comfort of Vale’s hand stroking through his hair.
He fell asleep with Vale’s fingers still carding through his hair, too tired to hate himself for not wanting them to stop.
When he woke hours later, Vale was gone.
But the phantom sensation of that gentle touch remained, and Kieran hated that he missed it.
Two o’clock came with its usual inevitability.
Kieran had been waiting for it, dreading it, that knot of tension pulling tighter in his chest with every hour that passed. He’d played along all morning—breakfast, pills, pretending he was becoming what Vale wanted.
But not this. Not today.
When Vale appeared in the living room doorway, Kieran was already on his feet.
“It’s time to go downstairs.”
“No.” The word came out steady. Certain. He wouldn’t do it. He couldn’t do it. “I’m n-not doing it today.”
Vale’s expression shifted—not quite surprise, more like recognition. Like he’d been expecting this, waiting for Kieran to reach his breaking point so he could watch him shatter.
“Sweetheart—”
“I said no.” Kieran’s hands clenched at his sides, body coiled with desperate energy. “I’ll f-fight you on the stairs if I have to. I d-don’t care if I break my n-neck. I’m not going d-down there today.”
For a long moment, Vale just studied him, reading something in his posture, his defiance, the way his whole body was shaking.
Then he nodded slowly. “Alright.”
Kieran blinked. “What?”
“I said alright.” Vale’s voice stayed calm. “We can do a different lesson today. One that doesn’t require the basement.”
The relief was so sudden and overwhelming that Kieran nearly collapsed. “You—r-really?”
“But you need to understand something first.” Vale took a step closer, and the relief curdled into something else. “Once you make this choice, you can’t back out of it. No matter how much you want to. Do you understand?”
Kieran’s mouth went dry. “What... what k-kind of lesson?”
“A necessary one.” Vale’s eyes held his with uncomfortable intensity. “One that will teach you why the basement is a mercy you didn’t appreciate.”
The way he said it made ice crawl down Kieran’s spine. But the alternative was the basement. The hood. Vale’s hands in the dark for hours until Kieran’s body betrayed him in ways he couldn’t predict or control.
Anything had to be better than that.
Right?
“I...” Kieran swallowed hard. “F-fine. Whatever it is. Just n-not the basement.”
Something satisfied flickered across Vale’s face. “Good. Then we’ll do this lesson in the living room. Now.”
Kieran’s feet didn’t want to move. Every instinct screaming that he’d made a terrible mistake, that he should have just taken the basement, that whatever was about to happen would be worse.
But he’d already chosen. Already agreed.
Once you make this choice, you can’t back out of it.
Vale steered him to the living room instead and gestured to the couch.
“Sit.”
Kieran sat, his body obeying before his mind caught up.
Vale disappeared down the hall, returned a moment later carrying Kieran’s guitar—the one thing from the old life he still had—and laid it carefully in Kieran’s lap. Then he placed a small jar on the coffee table filled with a clear, yellowish liquid.
“Do you know what capsaicin is?” Vale asked, sitting on the coffee table across from him.
Kieran’s stomach dropped. “The th-thing in peppers—”
“Concentrated capsaicin suspended in carrier oil. Medical grade.” Vale unscrewed the lid. “It’s designed for topical pain management through desensitization. But before the desensitization comes the burn.”
“What are you—”
“You wanted a different lesson.” Vale’s voice stayed calm, almost gentle. “Fine. Let’s explore what it means to maintain artistry when your instrument is agony. Real musicians play through injuries all the time.”
He reached for Kieran’s left hand.
Kieran jerked back. “No—I ch-changed my mind, I’ll go to the b-basement—”
“Too late.” Vale caught his wrist. “You made your choice. Now you’re going to learn what that choice means.”
He held Kieran’s hand steady, dipped a cotton swab into the jar, and began painting Kieran’s fingertips, each one coated thoroughly on the pads and just under the nails where calluses had built up from years of playing.
The burn started almost immediately. It began as a low, creeping heat that built and built until it felt like his fingertips were being held to a flame.
“V-Vale—” Kieran’s voice cracked, eyes already watering. “Please—”
“Other hand.”
“Please, it hurts—”
“That’s the point.” Vale released his left hand and snatched the right one. By the time Vale finished, Kieran’s fingers felt like they were burning from the inside out. The pain kept escalating—not sharp like a blade, but deep, penetrating, and impossible to escape that seemed to pulse in waves.
Vale recapped the jar. “You’re going to play ‘Recuerdos de la Alhambra.’ I assume you know it? You’ll play it from beginning to end with no mistakes.”
Kieran stared at him through his tears. “‘Recuerdos’ is n-nine minutes—”