Episode 1 #4
Rei cleared the small table on the edge of the workroom at the end of the meal.
The dishes in the kitchen took a few moments to wash up and put away.
His hands moved on their own, passing water over surfaces, wiping them dry with the towel.
His thoughts were wrapped up in a past that lived in his bones with a melancholy that had become a pain he loved to touch: days of little sleep and long hours in the training studios as a trainee in his company in Seoul, back when he was tween and teen, preparing to debut as one of Bak Gyeong’s K-pop idols.
He’d made the cut, taking four younger boys under his wing as their leader, preparing to debut together: Jun, Geun, Jaewoong, and Yoihei.
They were going to be known by the name PentaNow.
But he’d never debuted. Late one night he’d been summoned to one of the studios.
There had been two men in rumpled suits waiting.
Bak had told him that he was to go with them.
Rei had known then. He didn’t have words. He hadn’t understood, but he’d had the deep instinct that if he walked through the doors with those two strange men, his life as he knew it would be over it. He’d backed away toward the door, but he’d never had a chance. Behind him had been a third man.
That had been the end of his freedom, or at least the hope for freedom when he came of age and finished his contract with Bak, the one his erstwhile guardian had signed when Rei was eleven.
They’d grabbed him, gagged him, and secured his arms behind his back.
He still remembered looking up at Bak from the floor, the pudgy drunk of a man who had ruled his days, demanding things of him and the other boys that he could not do himself.
No one was coming for Rei. The only ones who would miss him were other children, singers and dancers without voices of their own.
He’d been trafficked to Russia. There had been two dark months of training—a nightmare at the hands of a woman who hated her work and by extension him—and then he’d been driven to an estate in the mountains and dropped in an opulent foyer.
He’d met his first owner. An old man, retired, absent-minded, madly in love with the male form. He seemed to think Rei was an employee. And Rei had known better than to counter that notion. Or deny him . . . anything.
It could have been worse. It could have been like the much harsher treatment he’d been trained for in those first two dark months.
His life had been that of a treasured pet, bed warmer, and ornament.
He’d been expected to be beautiful every moment of every day, naked or adorned in revealing clothes.
Some days were long, lying on a couch, holding a pose, his mind drifting.
Others he was almost left alone. He’d learned to speak Russian, his owner teaching him like a dog being taught tricks.
On his own, he’d built on the English and Chinese he’d been trained in while preparing to be an idol.
Chinese was easier. His owner enjoyed Chinese films and indulged Rei with dictionaries and study books.
He’d read Journey to the West about the Monkey King over the course of a year and entertained his owner with the Monkey’s exploits in broken Russian, the old man laughing at his attempts.
He was property. And who knew what happened to pets who outlived their owners?
Rei closed his eyes against the memories, against imagining Jun’s face in the same rooms. He knew the terror he’d felt that day when Bak had sold him. To know Jun had felt the same . . .
To know that Sevastyan had gone to oversee the crime . . . He wiped the last of the water from the counter. Something was changing. His past was folding back and meeting him again.
He dried his hands and went through to the bathroom, stripping off. Sevastyan was present. That meant certain routines, rituals they’d established over the course of years. Rituals to protect themselves. Rituals to remind themselves. Rituals to feel alive. Rites to keep his training instinctive.
Rei turned on the shower and stepped into the spray. He cleaned himself, inside and out, taking time to be certain he was sanitized and shaved from the shoulders down. He brushed his teeth and flossed and walked naked into the room where they slept.
Sevastyan was already there, sitting on the edge of the four-poster bed, a book written in German in his hands. He laid it aside as Rei passed through the doorway.
Rei’s heartbeat quickened. It always did, the first time he was with Sevastyan after being parted for a period.
He stopped just inside the room, eyes lowered, watching for Sevastyan’s signal from the edge of his vision.
Sevastyan motioned him close and signaled for Rei to kneel between his feet.
Rei approached and folded himself down to his knees, spreading his thighs and folding his arms behind his back, cradling his elbows in the palms of his opposite hands.
He kept his eyes down, gazing at a disassociated point just below Sevastyan’s cock where its shape was outlined through the creases of his slacks.
Sevastyan gave him time. He always did. Time for Sevastyan to study Rei’s bare form and time for Rei to feel the sensation of being seen. Rei breathed in and out, surrendering to the moment, to his master. He was Sevastyan’s. This body was his to see, to touch, to use.
To care for.
His muscles relaxed, one by one. His eyes fluttered shut.
He flinched when Sevastyan’s fingers threaded through his hair.
Sevastyan tightened his grip. Rei let go of his breath, releasing his tension at once.
Two weeks alone had been too long. The fear had crept back in during the long nights and days wrapped in his work clothes without any voice but his own to speak his name.
Sevastyan carded his fingers through Rei’s hair, searching his scalp.
He tilted Rei’s countenance upward, traced the lines of his face, turned his head this way and that, touching each scar and ridge of bone.
Rei let Sevastyan do what he would, his mind subsiding into quiet.
A tap on his elbow brought him to his feet.
Sevastyan went over Rei’s torso, front and back in the same way.
Clinical and thorough, measuring, testing, searching for injury or tenderness.
He found the paper cut on the side of Rei’s hand and the bruise he’d gotten while getting groceries out of the drop box.
Sevastyan guided Rei back and tapped the bed.
Rei crawled up onto the mattress and lay flat on his back, spreading his legs and folding his hands behind his back.
Sevastyan circled the bed, opening Rei’s mouth, checking his teeth and his throat, then running his hands down Rei’s legs, picking up his feet, bending his knees and spreading his thighs, handling Rei’s genitals with the same impassive inspection as any other part of him.
He finished, tapping Rei’s legs.
Rei rolled over. Sevastyan went to his kit, a case that could have held a rifle or instrument, and returned with rope.
Rei watched Sevastyan’s hands. Strong boned.
Knuckles protruding from the backs of his palms. The skin slid back and forth revealing wide blue veins tracing channels beneath the skin.
Beautiful hands. Hands that had killed. Hands that had hurt him. Hands that had been burned saving his life. Hands that had soothed him. Yearning and need rose up in Rei’s throat.
Sevastyan’s touch whispered over Rei’s scars on his ribs. “So strong, my thrall.”
“Yours,” Rei whispered.
There was no greater truth. There was nowhere else he could exist other than at Sevastyan’s feet. Those beautiful hands held his life and death, and from him he would accept either. Had drunk both from his palms.
“Beautiful,” Sevastyan whispered. He touched his lips to the upper slope of Rei’s hip.
Rei blinked tears. “Master.”
Sevastyan gathered up Rei’s right wrist. He wrapped a doubled length of rope around him twice and secured a knot that would not slip, then anchored it to the bed post. He paced around the foot of the bed, moving toward Rei’s left wrist. Rei watched him.
Sevastyan took Rei’s left wrist in his hand, and Rei’s breath rose in his chest.
“Through fire, through hell itself,” Sevastyan whispered.
Rei’s breath stuttered. He blinked back the tears again, his fingers uncurling. Sevastyan wrapped the second rope around Rei’s wrist.
Through fire, through hell itself.
Not mere words, not between them. Hell was where they had met.
Rei
Five years previous, somewhere in The People’s Republic of China
The flames were on the bed. They had climbed the walls and enveloped the curtain.
Rei knelt amidst the sheets, blood streaming from his fingers, his right wrist manacled to the burning headboard.
He jerked, willing the bones in his hands to break, to let him slip free.
The heat licked at his cheek. Sparks caught on the pillow beneath his knees.
He slapped them out, a pointless struggle.
This was where it was going to end. The sleeve of the white collared shirt draped over his arms and shoulders caught fire.
The window above the bed, behind the flaming curtain cracked.
He jerked, looking up. The glass shattered.
Rei flattened himself beneath the explosion.
Cool air rushed into the space above his head.
He gasped a breath and then screamed as the flames roared, burning high on fresh oxygen.
He pulled off the bed, stretching his arm out to slide as much of his body away from the flames as he could.
This was the end. All his dreams. His struggles. His losses. His damnation. He dropped his head against his bound arm, his knees almost touching the floor, his body draped over the side of the bed. The heat wrapped around him.
A shadow passed over, a large body covered him, and hands grasped his bound limb.
“Brace yourself.”