Chapter 14: Vodka & Vengeance
The water’s embrace had become a lullaby, a warm, heavy lie. Ethan floated in the aftermath, his skin humming, the pain a distant, manageable thrum. He was almost asleep when hands gripped his biceps, hauling him upwards.
“Naptime’s over, counselor,” Damien’s voice cut through the steam.
He was pulled, stumbling and dripping, onto the cold marble floor. A black silk blindfold was tied tight over his eyes before he could process the shift. The world vanished, replaced by intimate, amplifying darkness. Every sound, every touch, became colossal.
He heard the crunch first. A sharp, crystalline sound beneath Damien’s feet. Then the cold hit him—a shocking, aggressive cold that seared his feet and ankles. It wasn’t just wet marble. It was a field of it. Crushed ice, spread thick across the floor. He gasped, his raw skin screaming at the sudden, vicious contrast.
Damien guided him forward, each step a miniature agony. The ice bit into his soles, numbed his burns, sent jolts of protest up his legs. He was walked a few paces and then released. He stood, shivering violently, blind and balanced on a frozen bed.
“Stay,” Damien commanded, a simple, quiet word that brooked no movement.
Ethan heard the liquid pour, the clink of a glass. Smelled the crisp, clean scent of vodka. Not the cheap kind. The expensive, sub-zero stuff Damien kept in the freezer.
A new presence approached. The scent of jasmine cut through the alcohol. Seraphina. He felt her warmth near his chest, then the delicate, terrifying pressure of a knee on either side of his ribs. She straddled him, her weight settling, pushing him down. The ice crunched beneath his back, a cold fire against his salt-scoured skin. He cried out, a short, sharp sound.
“Shhh,” she soothed, her voice a mocking lilt. One of her hands pressed flat on his sternum, pinning him. The other…
He heard the distinct, metallic click of a stiletto heel being released. Then he felt it. The cool, hard tip of it, resting on the back of his hand where it lay splayed on the ice. She shifted her weight, and the point dug in, just shy of breaking the skin, right over the swollen knuckles of his index finger.
“You have such nice hands, Ethan,” she mused. Her voice was conversational, as if discussing the weather. “Precise. Useful. I’ve watched you use them. Signing documents. Making points in a meeting.” The heel pressed incrementally harder. A bolt of pure, skeletal fear shot up his arm. “It’s the little bones, I think. They make such a satisfying sound.”
He held his breath. Every muscle in his body was wire-tight, fighting the instinct to snatch his hand away. To move was to fail. To fail was worse.
“Look at him,” Damien said, his footsteps quiet on the ice as he circled them. “Absolute stillness. Even now. That’s what you’ve trained for, isn’t it? To hold form under pressure.”
The vodka came without warning.
It wasn’t a splash. It was a pour. A steady, glugging stream from the bottle’s neck directly onto his chest. The liquid was so cold it felt like a brand. It hit the raw, abraded patches left by the salt and honey and ignited them into a blazing, white-hot agony. It was a pain with a flavor, clean and sharp and vicious.
Ethan arched, a silent scream locked in his throat, the only sound a ragged intake of breath through clenched teeth. Seraphina’s heel never wavered, a constant, poised threat on his hand.
Damien poured slowly, meticulously, painting his torso with frost and fire. The vodka ran in rivulets down his sides, pooling in the hollows of his hips, mingling with the melting ice beneath him. The smell was overwhelming, surgical, drowning out the perfume and the sweat.
Seraphina laughed. It was a light, breathy sound, genuinely amused. “He’s so pretty like this. All marbled. Red and white and shaking.”
Damien finished the bottle, tipping the last few drops onto Ethan’s throat. “A libation,” he said, his voice thick with a dark satisfaction. He dropped the empty bottle onto the ice nearby. It landed with a dull thud.
The pain from the vodka was subsiding, leaving a deep, penetrating chill in its wake. Ethan’s teeth chattered. The cold from below and the cold from above were merging, turning his body into a single, trembling node of sensation.
Seraphina leaned down. Her lips brushed his ear, her voice a secret. “Do you want me to move my foot, Ethan?”
He couldn’t speak. He managed a jerky, minute nod.
“Use your words.”
“Yes,” he choked out. “Please.”
“Please, what?”
“Please… move your foot.”
She didn’t. Instead, she shifted the pressure from his hand, trailing the stiletto point slowly up his arm, over the swell of his bicep, a teasing, cold scratch that raised gooseflesh. It came to rest in the hollow of his throat. A different kind of threat.
Damien crouched beside him. Ethan felt his presence, a heat source in the frozen air. A finger, wet with vodka, traced his lower lip. “Open.”
Ethan obeyed. Damien’s finger pushed past his lips, the taste of alcohol and salt stark on his tongue. It was a claiming, absurd and intimate.
“Good,” Damien murmured. He withdrew his finger. “Now get up. The ice is melting. You’re making a puddle.”
Seraphina lifted her weight off him, the stiletto clicking back into place as she stood. Ethan pushed himself up on trembling arms. The blindfold was soaked, clinging. He knelt on the ice, disoriented, the room spinning in his private darkness.
Hands—Damien’s—gripped him again and pulled him to his feet. He was led, stumbling on numb, burning feet, away from the ice field. He felt plush carpet, blessedly dry and soft, under his soles. He heard the rustle of Seraphina putting her robe back on.
“Leave the blindfold,” she said. “For a little while longer. I want you to live inside it. To wonder what’s next.”
Damien guided him to stand in the center of the room. “Stay,” he said again.
Then, their footsteps receded. A door sighed open and shut.
Silence.
Ethan stood alone in the dark, water and vodka dripping from his body onto the expensive rug. The air from the ventilation system whispered over his wet skin, raising fresh shivers. Every inch of him was a map of their attention—throbbing, aching, alive. The fear of the hovering stiletto was still a live wire in his nervous system. The burn of the vodka was a fresh memory in his flesh.
He was utterly, completely theirs. And the blindfold meant the game was nowhere near over. He listened, straining for a clue in the silence, knowing it was just another form of waiting they’d designed for him.