Chapter 21 Elias
TWENTY-ONE
Elias
It takes me a long time to wake up. I claw my way toward consciousness, slowly realizing that I’m cold and uncomfortable. I’m sitting up. My head is heavy, hanging.
When I get my eyes open, I find myself staring blearily at my own naked thighs under harsh light.
The chair under me is metal. My wrists and ankles are bound to it with padded cuffs.
The floor under my bare feet is cold and hard, and I feel the edge of a drain. My thoughts are too sluggish for panic.
When I manage to lift my head, I register cold, gray emptiness—and a dark form.
My vision slowly clarifies until I see a man sitting in a chair ten feet from me, a concrete wall at his back. He’s wearing black pants, a black t-shirt, and a skull mask. He’s completely still.
My heart thuds as though under a heavy blanket. I try to think back. Events are fragmented and blurry. The sex club. The blindfold. Him, holding me.
“Wha …” I can’t finish the word, much less the sentence. My tongue is thick. My thoughts break apart.
My stalker gives me nothing. He doesn’t move at all.
My heartrate picks up, pumping blood and adrenaline through my system. I look around, but all I see is concrete walls and, over my shoulder, a steel door.
Goosebumps tighten my bare skin. My breathing shallows as I wake up more and fully register that I’m naked and bound to a chair in a cell.
I didn’t write anything like this into my fantasy.
“What’s going on?” I manage thickly.
“If you had to guess why you’re here, what would you say?” my stalker asks with the familiar rasp of the voice modulator.
“I … didn’t ask for this.”
“Didn’t you? Isn’t this exactly where this game was always going to end?”
My thoughts drag together.
This is part of my fantasy. I didn’t ask for this, didn’t write it, but, on some level, I have always wanted him to do this.
I know that he’s genuinely dangerous. I am afraid—but I want to be. That’s the point. I want to be chosen like this. To be fixated on like this.
I know he might hurt me. I know he might kill me. I still want it.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know what sickness I have. But even as I tremble in the chair, cold and frightened, I’m euphoric.
Whether he loves or hates me, he does, most definitely, see me.
And I see him too. He didn’t think I would. Unlike me, he didn’t want to be seen. But I see him, despite the mask. My monster. He’s always wearing a mask, even when he’s not. But he can’t hide from me.
“Why are you smiling?” he demands.
“Because I love you.”
He jolts. I do too, a little. I didn’t know I was going to say that. I didn’t know I felt that. But I do.
He unfolds himself from the chair. He stalks my way, his footsteps thudding a measured beat across the cold, hard floor. He crouches in front of me. His hands settle on my bare thighs. They slide upward. Inward. His thumbs stroke my balls and my hardening cock.
“You think this is love?” he asks.
“Yes, Andre. I do.”
He stills. He didn’t expect that. He doesn’t think I know him. But I do. And for the first time in my life, I know myself.
He’s stripped me bare, not just of my clothes and freedom, but of my inhibitions and insecurities and filters. I’m only myself.
His right hand leaves my thigh. He lifts his mask, pulls it away.
I stare into his searingly blue eyes. His wavy dark hair is combed back, laying bare his gorgeous face with all its chiseled planes.
All of that is familiar, but I see him for the first time, all the pieces put together, all his masks blended into truth.
He’s obsessive and controlling and cruel, and he does want me. He has from the beginning. But, unlike me, he’s angry about it.
Then he says, “I know you too—Elio.”
Ice water spills through my veins.
That name makes me into someone else. It makes him into someone else too.
“How …?” Once again, I can’t finish my thought, my question. But this time, it’s because I don’t want to.
“Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”
“I …”
“Are you spying on me? Is this to blackmail me? Were you passing information to someone last night when you went to the Bronx?”
What is he doing? Why is he twisting everything like this? It was so pure and simple a moment ago. But this—
He pinches my inner thigh, making me yelp and jump in the chair.
“Answer me,” he demands.
My chest starts heaving. My mind is blank. I don’t remember the question.
He asks, “Is this revenge for Peter Grange? I don’t remember your father, so I don’t remember if he was connected to Grange.”
Utter confusion loosens my tongue. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
His lips twist cruelly. “You’re good at this. Better than Grange was. As soon as he was in this chair, he started begging.”
I can’t make sense of any of this, so I focus on the part that has nothing to do with me. “Peter Grange killed himself.”
Andre’s hands withdraw from my thighs. He says coolly, “It wasn’t easy to spend six days making him cry instead of making him bleed.
But it was the only satisfaction I could allow myself, since I needed a suicide rather than a murder on record.
I couldn’t be investigated while I was buying his hotel—with his own money, which I had extorted from him over several years. But you must have figured that out.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t expect me to think you’re innocent just because you’re too young to have been involved … there.”
“Involved in what? Involved where?”
“The Island.”
It’s the way he says it, the simplicity and awful weight of it. It connects instantly to a memory. I don’t quite know why because it’s not a memory of a place but of my father. Rather, a collage of memories.
Paradise had been ruined, he kept saying. The Island had been raided. Shut down. He talked about it for months. On the phone. To men who came to the house. So often that it became a kind of mythical place in my mind, almost an escape. I would imagine green and blue and sunny beaches.
Whatever Andre sees in my eyes makes his eyes grow colder, the blue icier.
He says, “None of them changed. It’s not hard for men like that to find … what they want. And the people around them, they fucking know. Just like Rebecca Grange.”
I drop my gaze to my naked thighs. I shake my head. I don’t know what he means, but I can’t make myself say that again. He doesn’t believe me.
Andre circles back to his earlier line of questioning. “Who did you meet in the Bronx last night and what information did you pass to them?”
My head whips up. My vision spins, making the room wild and confusing as I shout, “I was pet sitting! I didn’t meet anybody!”
Andre doesn’t reply, and my vision settles to show him regarding me steadily. He simply doesn’t believe me.
“You can check my phone!” I shout. “My old phone. I texted with the cat’s owner. I sent him pictures of the clean litterbox.”
“False trails are easy to lay.”
“It’s the truth! I didn’t meet anybody! I haven’t seen any of my family in five years. I don’t have anything to do with them! I ran away!”
“No one leaves the mafia.”
“Exactly! That’s why I changed my name! That’s why I’ve been hiding!”
“You weren’t exactly hiding when you submitted that fantasy to ForbiddenX. Did your father know of my connection to it? Was that designed to lure me? Are you a honey trap, Elio?”
“Elias.”
“But that’s just an act, isn’t it? One made just for me. I should’ve known. You were too fucking perfect for me. Every little thing about you—perfect.”
Tears well in my eyes because he’s telling me the best things and the worst things he possibly could. It’s everything I want to hear, twisted.
Andre takes my face in his hands and sweeps his thumbs across my cheeks as the tears spills. “You don’t get to cry,” he tells me.
He blurs in front of me. “Andre …”
“Why did you choose me? Is this connected to Grange?”
“You chose me.” My voice breaks on the last word.
“You made me choose you.”
I can’t see him at all, not through the blur of tears. “I could never make you do anything.”
“But you do all the time. You’ve controlled this from the beginning. I’ve been playing your game.”
I try to shake my head, but his hands won’t let me. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to make him believe me. I don’t understand what’s happening.
“Why are you doing this?” I whisper.
“Because you don’t get to win this game.”
“It’s not a game!”
“Yes, it is.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, making more tears spill. “Red! Please, Andre—red!”
He lets go roughly. I can hear his harsh breathing over my own. Then I hear his footsteps as he walks away. A heavy door opens then bangs shut.
I bow forward, sobbing, because I’ve gotten my way. He’s left me.
I’m alone.
* * *
I stay that way for a long, long time. I know I should be thinking. I should be trying to figure out what’s going on, what Andre wants, and what I should do, but my brain isn’t working like that.
All I can feel is loss and loneliness. I want him to come back.
Finally, he does.
I rouse from my stupor when the heavy steel door scrapes open.
Andre’s footsteps thud an unhurried rhythm across the floor.
When he enters my field of view, I drink in the sight of him: big and dark and powerful.
But he doesn’t direct anything at me. He doesn’t even look at me as he walks by. He is, however, aroused.
But it’s only the stiffness of his cock that gives it away. He’s otherwise entirely cold as he sits in the chair ten feet from me. His expression is blank. I start shaking because all we’re doing is starting again.
I can’t do this again.
“I have to pee,” I tell him.
“So pee.”
My throat tightens. “Please, Andre.”
He’s unmoved.
Except … I know that he’s not. His cock is hard. He’s affected. He’s just masking it.
“Please.”
His nostrils flare slightly. He gets up from the chair. He comes to me like he did earlier, but this time, he doesn’t look at me when he crouches. He unbuckles the cuffs on my ankles then my wrists. Then he stands up.