Charlie
“I don’t wanna,” I quiver, shaking my head.
He steps closer, all cold authority. “I know, but walking out with us calmly is the safest way to do this.”
Safest.
That word claws at my ribs.
“You’re coming with me,” Nikolaus murmurs softly against my temple.
“I don’t—” I start to protest, but Constantine cuts me off.
“If you come with us quietly,” he hisses, voice laced with threat, “no one gets upset. No one gets suspicious. No one interferes.”
Those are not words people usually use in the little room.
“And I really don’t want to have to hurt you,” Constantine adds, softer than a lullaby but sharper than a blade.
“H-hurt me?” My breath catches in my throat.
Nikolaus grasps my chin in his hand, pushing it up so I’m looking at him. My vision swims as I take in the intense look in his dark eyes.
“No one’s going to get hurt if you’re a good boy, Charlie. We don’t want to have to do that.”
Constantine nods in agreement.
My brain can’t decide what’s happening.
“I just—” I choke on the words. “I just came to color…”
Nikolaus presses a chaste kiss into my hair. “I know,” he murmurs. “And I’m so glad you did, baby. Now, do you need to take anything with us? Is this little friend yours?” He gestures toward the stuffie I’ve been holding.
“No, it’s not mine,” I answer quietly, staring down at the fuzzy thing, wishing it were so I wouldn’t have to be alone right now.
Nikolaus notices the longing in my gaze and tells me, “I don’t have any friends for you at our hotel, but I promise that soon enough you’ll have all the friends you could ever want. Okay, baby?”
My heart sinks. “H-hotel? I thought…”
“Yeah, baby,” he soothes. “We don’t fly out until early tomorrow morning, but then we’ll get you home.”
“Fly out?” I feel sick. “Like… on a plane?”
He nods and stands up, still holding me in his arms. I gasp as the room tilts and shifts around us, and clutch at his chest.
He doesn’t seem to be talking to me when he mutters, “Fuck, he’s absolutely perfect. Look how well he fits in my arms.”
Constantine smirks and says, “Just don’t start carrying him everywhere. Actually… scratch that. I think I need to see Giuseppe or Franco’s face when you show up to a meeting with him clinging to you like that.”
Nikolaus snorts, rolling his eyes. “They’d be secretly jealous, and you know it.” He then looks down at me, smiling. “Let’s get you in the car, sweetheart.”
Constantine opens the door ahead of us. The hallway outside is quieter than before, and I start thinking about yelling for help, or maybe signaling to Lana somehow that I’m in trouble when we walk past her.
But we don’t walk back through the rest of the club. I’m carried in the other direction, further down the hall to where there’s an emergency exit door.
The door opens with a click that churns my stomach.
Cold night air hits my face as we step out into a dark parking lot.
The small lot is empty except for one black sedan waiting with its engine already running. A man in a dark coat stands beside it like he’s been expecting us.
The moment he sees us, he opens the back door.
My heart stops.
I can’t get in that car. I can’t. If I do, I’ll disappear, and no one will look for me and—and—
“No,” I gasp, panic flooding through me so fast my fingers go numb. “No, no, no—”
“Charlie—” Nikolaus warns.
“I don’t wanna go!” I cry, twisting hard in his arms, pushing at his chest properly this time. “Please don’t make me go!”
He lowers me just enough that my feet brush the pavement, and that’s when I bolt.
I don’t think about it.
I just run.
Or try to…
My legs feel weak and shaky from crying and panicking and being carried, but I still make it three steps before a hand catches the hood of my hoodie and yanks me back.
“No, you don’t,” Constantine hisses.
I fight against his hold, but Nikolaus is already there again. His arm wraps around my waist from the other side, lifting me clean off my feet before I can even try again.
“No, no, no, no—please!” I wail, kicking weakly into the air. “I wanna go home! Please!”
“I am taking you home,” Nikolaus growls, his hand clamping over my mouth. “Come on, baby, don’t make this any harder than it needs to be.”
I whimper into his palm, frantically looking around for anyone who can help. But there’s no one. No one except these strange men and their driver.
“Easy,” he murmurs near my ear. “You’re alright. I promise this is for the best, Charlie. You’ll see.”
The driver steps back politely as we get close, like this is just a normal occurrence for him. I don’t even want to think about why that may be.
“Get him inside already,” Constantine orders.
Nikolaus doesn’t hesitate. He lowers himself into the back seat, pulling me in with him before I can wriggle away again. I try to scramble out the other side, but Constantine is already there, blocking the door as he slides in beside us.
“No,” I gasp, trying again anyway. “No, no, no—”
Nikolaus pulls me firmly back against his chest, one arm wrapped securely around my middle while his other hand cups the back of my head, pressing my face gently into his shoulder.
“It’s alright,” he repeats. “You’re okay. Nothing bad is going to happen.”
I whimper in distress when I feel the car start to move.
Now I’m not almost leaving with them.
I am leaving with them.
The door beside me is locked. I heard it click. I felt the car pull away. The building is already disappearing behind us through the tinted window.
“I wanna go back,” I whisper, my voice thin and shaky. “Please.”
Nikolaus doesn’t let go of me, just pulls me even closer, making a pleased hum.
Like I did something right.
Like being tucked against him is where I’m supposed to be.
The sound should scare me more than it does, because I am in a car with men I don’t know, being taken somewhere I didn’t agree to go, and my brain keeps trying to make the pieces line up into something that makes sense.
But they don’t.
Nothing makes sense.
Not the car, which is so quiet inside it feels sealed off from the whole world.
Not the seats, soft black leather beneath my palm, smooth and warm and stitched in perfect little lines along the edges.
Not the faint glow of hidden lights tracing the floor and doors.
Not the little black sliding window between the driver and us, closed tight like the front of the car is a different place entirely, and we are back here in our own small, secret room.
Not Nikolaus’s arm around me.
Not his hand stroking over my back like I’m something precious instead of something stolen.
I stare at the little window until my eyes start to blur.
It reminds me of movies.
Bad ones.
The kind where someone gets into the wrong car and never comes back out.
My breath catches, then catches again, and then it won’t stop catching.
I try to breathe normally, because I know what this is. I know the beginning of it—the fluttery, awful squeeze in my chest, the funny floating feeling in my fingers, the way the world starts sharpening and blurring at the same time.
A panic attack.
No, no, no.
Not here.
Not with them.
Not when there’s nowhere to go.
“I—” I try to say something, but the air breaks in my throat. “I can’t—”
Nikolaus’s hand stills at once.
“Charlie.” His voice lowers in a way that cuts through the rushing in my ears, but not enough to fix it.
My lungs are too small, and my chest is too tight. The car is too closed in, the doors locked, the night gone, the club gone, Lana gone, my coloring page gone, my half-orange mama cat abandoned on the floor.
“I can’t breathe,” I gasp, and it comes out broken, almost squeaky, not like my voice at all.
“You can,” Nikolaus says, so calm it makes me want to cry harder. “You are breathing, sweetheart. You just need to slow it down.”
I shake my head because he’s wrong.
He has to be wrong.
If I were breathing, it wouldn’t feel like this.
If I were breathing, my hands wouldn’t be tingling, and my face wouldn’t be hot and cold at the same time. If I were breathing, I wouldn’t feel like I was going to float right out of my body and leave myself behind in this expensive black car with these scary guys.
Constantine says something from beside us, but I can’t make it out.
It’s only a sound.
A low, muffled sound.
Nikolaus turns me so I’m no longer looking at the window, my face pressed up against his chest instead. I make a weak, frightened noise and push once against him, but my arm has no strength in it, and he doesn’t even seem to notice except to gather me closer.
“Easy,” he murmurs. “Enough of that now, baby boy.”
I don’t know what that means.
I don’t know how to be enough of anything right now.
His hand comes to my face, thumb brushing under my wet cheek, then down to my mouth. He pauses there, just a second, the pad of his thumb resting against my lower lip.
“Open for me, baby.”
I stare at him through watery eyes. My brain tries to understand the words, but they get drowned out by too many other things.
Open?
Why?
“I—”
“Open,” he repeats, softer this time, though there’s something in it that doesn’t sound like asking. His thumb presses gently against my lips, and because I’m too scared and too little and too scrambled to decide anything else, my mouth parts.
He slides his thumb inside, and the shock of it makes me go still.
It isn’t like a pacifier.
It’s warmer, firmer, and real.
His skin tastes faintly clean, but also distinctly like skin, and my first thought is that I should not do this, that I should bite him or pull away or spit it out because this is wrong and strange and too much.
But then he presses the pad of his thumb lightly against my tongue, and his other hand cups the back of my head, not forcing, only holding.
“There,” he murmurs. “That’s it. Suck.”
My whole face burns.
I don’t want to.
I do it anyway.
At first, it’s barely anything, just a reflex, just my mouth closing around the shape of him because he put it there, and my body doesn’t know what else to do. Then he strokes my hair, slow and steady, and the rhythm of it gives me something to follow.
Suck.
Breathe.
Suck.
Breathe.