Chapter 13
He spoke of it without caution. There was no warning in his voice, no inflection that suggested I should be afraid. If anything, he sounded calm, almost bored, as if naming something self-evident.
“You keep acting like you don’t have a choice.”
Zwierek was leaning back in the chair, one leg hooked over the other, fingers tapping idly against the wooden armrest like he had all the time in the world. “You let her decide what happens to you,” he continued, glancing at me like he was studying something unfinished.
“And then you walk around like it’s inevitable.” His mouth curved, not a smile, no, it was almost predatory.
“That’s not inevitability. That’s laziness.” My jaw tightened. Not visibly, but he saw it anyway. He always did.
“That look,” he said, tilting his head.
“You think you’re different from me because you don’t act on it.” His eyes locked with mine.
“You’re not.” I didn’t react. But something in my chest tightened. He leaned forward then, elbows resting on his knees, voice dropping by a degree.
“Control isn’t what you think it is.” His fingers stilled.
“It’s not about stopping things.”
“It’s about deciding how they happen.”
That was the first time he said it like that. The first time something in the conversation turned. He was always vague when he talked about those things, about his ideas and his solutions, but somehow I was never confused about what he meant or what he was trying to tell me.
He always understood me too, which honestly should’ve been impossible considering I didn’t speak and didn’t know sign language, but none of that seemed to matter with him.
And somehow I always understood him right back.
I couldn’t stop thinking that maybe we were made from the same kind of thing in some strange way.
Like there was something in him that matched something buried deep inside me.
After that, it arrived in splinters.
Half-said things, passing remarks, things he mentioned as though they held no consequences.
Rope, knots, the way tension distributes across the body if you do it correctly.
How certain positions restrict movement without causing immediate damage.
How you can hold someone in place. He never framed it as cruelty; he framed it as precision. Control. Ownership.
“You don’t even understand your own body,” he said once, watching me too closely.
“You react to things without knowing why.” A tilt of his head.
“You should fix that.” I didn’t understand what he meant at first, not fully. But I understood enough to feel it settle somewhere deeper than thought.
“You let things happen to you,” he continued, almost conversational.
“But you could make them happen instead.” His eyes flickered over me briefly. “Big difference.”
That’s the thing, little Ghost. He never told me what to do; he just made it sound like I was already behind. Like I was missing something obvious. And I hate missing things. He talked about it like it was a blueprint.
“If someone takes control of your body,” he said one afternoon, voice quieter than usual.
“It’s because you gave it up first.”
“You don’t even realize when you do it.” I held his gaze, and he smiled then, actually smiled. Like he’d been waiting for that.
“Good,” he said.
“Now you’re listening.”
That night, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
The room was dark, same as always. Same walls, same ceiling, same bed, nothing had changed. And yet, my body didn’t feel the same inside it.
I lay there staring at nothing, replaying everything he had said. The implications. The spaces between them. The idea settled slowly and deeply in my stomach.
What would it feel like?
Not to react, not to freeze, not to let something happen, but to understand it.
Not to be the prey, but to be the hunter.
To anticipate it, to hold it still. The feeling settled lower, blood rushing to my cock, making it throb.
My hand moved before I thought about it, and I closed my eyes as I felt my balls tighten.
What he had said about the body, about knowing it, about not being surprised by it.
I wanted to understand that. Scenarios started to unfold in my mind, darker ones.
Where I was in control, where every move, every breath bent to my will.
Where I was the one holding their gaze, watching fear flicker and grow in their eyes.
My heart was pounding, threatening to burst out of my chest. My muscles tensed as my head fell back against the pillow, my hand tightening its grip around my cock, feeling precum drip down over my fingers.
Up until this point, every sexual experience I’d had involved Krystyna, and I’d never really felt any need or desire to explore that part of myself alone.
The images flared through my mind as I lost all control over my body, my hand moving faster, feeling the veins in my cock throb against my fingers until I finally tipped over the edge, feeling the cum spread as it slipped over my hand.
I exhaled slowly and didn’t move for a while after. Just lay there, feeling the residue of it sink back into my body. Sleep came fast after that, not invited but descending all the same.
Weeks passed, and something between me and Zwierek darkened.
“You learn faster than I thought,” Zwierek said one afternoon, flipping through a book like he wasn’t even reading it. We were sitting on the floor again.
“You just needed the right direction.” He tossed the book toward me. It slid across the floor, stopping just short of my hand.
“Start with that.”
I picked it up. It wasn’t what I expected, not exactly. Diagrams. Its form was disciplined, all clean lines and exactness. Anatomy.
“Doesn’t matter what you’re dealing with,” he said casually.
“Everything breaks the same way if you understand it properly.” I looked up at him. He was watching me.
“You can’t rely on instinct forever,” he continued.
“Instinct is messy.”
“Knowledge is cleaner.”
We went to the library after that, browsing through the shelves until we found what Zwierek was looking for.
Books about hunting and tracking. How to approach something without being seen, how to predict direction.
Where to strike for a speed kill, where to strike if you wanted it to last. It was all written about animals, but we read it differently.
The language was neutral and educational.
But the meaning sat just beneath it. Zwierek didn’t explain everything; he didn’t need to.
“You see it, right?” he asked once, not even looking at me. I didn’t answer. He laughed, soft and low.
“Yeah,” he said.
“You see it.”
After that, he stopped being patient.
“Stop looking at it like that,” he snapped one day, with more bite than usual. “You’re still hesitating.” My grip tightened around the page.
“Hesitation gets you hurt,” he continued.
“Or worse, it makes you useless.” His eyes locked onto mine, cold and focused.
“You want to stay like this?” he asked.
“Just… letting things happen to you?” My chest tightened as he leaned closer. “You already know what needs to change,” he said, almost as a whisper.
“You’re just too comfortable pretending you don’t.”
That stayed with me because he was right.
That’s the worst kind of person, little Ghost. The kind who doesn’t convince you, just points at something you already know.
The house felt different after that. Smaller, almost claustrophobic. Like everything inside it was waiting for something to happen. And for the first time, I wasn’t just waiting with it. I was starting to understand what it would take to make something happen instead.