Chapter 1: Blood and Silk
The key turned with a sound like a breaking bone, the lock sliding home in the daycare’s reinforced door. Then there was only the hum of a refrigerator and their own ragged breathing. The street outside was empty, a silent witness swallowed by midnight.
Bjorn’s back hit the door and he slid down, landing hard on the laminate floor between a tiny plastic chair and a blood-smeared play mat. Sascha followed, less gracefully, his large frame folding beside him. They sat in the neon-dark, the only light a cheerful moon-and-stars nightlight plugged into a far wall, casting long, distorted shadows of spilled alphabet blocks.“Well,” Bjorn said, his voice hoarse. “That escalated.”
Sascha just stared at him. Bjorn’s dorky, handsome face was a mess—spatters of rust-brown across his cheekbone, a thicker smear through his dark, shoulder-length hair where he’d pushed it back with a trembling hand. His shirt, expensive Italian cotton, was soaked a grim crimson across the front, plastered to the unusual softness of his chest. He looked like a choirboy who’d fought his way out of a slaughterhouse.
The idiot had gotten himself snatched on the way back from a pointless meet. Some over-muscled, under-brained brute from a splinter group, thinking the new boss was an easy mark. He’d threatened Bjorn’s daughter, whispered grotesque promises about his body, and had a gun barrel tasting the sweat on Bjorn’s temple when Sascha found the warehouse.
Sascha hadn’t yelled.He never yelled. He’d just moved, a shadow with a tactical knife.It was messy, arterial. Bjorn, pragmatic even with a gun to his head, had helped wrap the body in industrial plastic, his movements clinical despite the shock trembling in his hands. They’d discarded it in the river, weights strapped to the ankles, and driven back in silence, the coppery stink of blood filling the car.
Now here they were, sitting in a room that smelled of apple juice and disinfectant and death.
“Your face is a crime scene,” Sascha said finally, his voice low and rough. He reached out, not touching, just gesturing at the general carnage. “All of you is.”
Bjorn looked down at his hands, streaked with dried red. “It’s not mine.”
“I know it’s not yours.” Sascha pushed himself up, his knees popping. He was still mostly clean, just a dark spray across his black jacket and trousers.“Come on.Upstairs. Before you faint and I have to explain a corpse in a Bunny-themed reading nook to the police.”
He offered a hand.Bjorn took it, his grip surprisingly strong despite the fine tremors running through him. Sascha pulled him up, not letting go as he guided him past the tiny sinks, the crayon drawings bleeding into the walls, the single, ironic mobile of smiling plastic angels spinning lazy circles above.
They took the private stairwell at the back, the one that led directly to the apartments above. Sascha’s keys jingled, a mundane sound. His apartment was stark, minimalist—a direct contrast to the pastel chaos below. He didn’t turn on the main light, just a lamp in the hallway, casting a soft gold pool.“Clothes. Off,” Sascha said, already shrugging out of his own jacket. “They’re trash.”
Bjorn stood frozen in the hallway, his usual confidence stripped away, leaving something raw and exposed. The binding he wore under his shirt felt suddenly like a ridiculously flimsy secret. He crossed his arms over his chest, a protective, almost girlish gesture.“Sascha, I…”
“Beruhige dich. Calm the hell down,” Sascha muttered in German, stepping closer. His warm blue eyes held no judgment, only a weary focus.“It’s just blood.And me. Turn around.”
He turned Bjorn by the shoulders, his hands firm but not rough. He found the buttons of the ruined shirt, working them open.The fabric peeled away, sticking in places. Sascha made a low sound in his throat, not of disgust, but of concentration. He undid the clasp of the binder next, his fingers practical and swift. The breath Bjorn didn’t know he was holding rushed out of him as the pressure released.Sascha didn’t pause. He just balled the garments up and tossed them toward a plastic bag by the door.“Shower. Now.”
He steered Bjorn into the bathroom, flipping on the heat lamp.Steam began to curl almost instantly. Sascha turned on the water, testing the temperature with his wrist. Then, still dressed in his own stained trousers and t-shirt, he stepped in, pulling Bjorn in after him.
The hot water hit them, instantly pinkening as it sluiced over their skin. Bjorn shuddered, his eyes squeezed shut, the water running in rivulets through his hair and down his face, carving paths through the dried blood. He was painfully, utterly naked, every unconventional curve and softness exposed under the fluorescent light.Sascha didn’t stare. He picked up a bar of plain soap and a washcloth.“Head back,” he ordered softly.Bjorn obeyed. Sascha worked the lather through his hair, his strong fingers massaging his scalp, careful around a tender spot where the gun barrel had pressed. He wiped the cloth over Bjorn’s forehead, down the line of his jaw, over his throat. The water at their feet ran crimson, then pink, then clear.He was methodical, thorough. He washed Bjorn’s arms, his back, the swell of his hips. His touch was completely impersonal, a janitorial service for a living crime scene. When he knelt to clean Bjorn’s legs, his face was level with the soft, prominent swell of Bjorn’s vulva, the pale pink folds plump and unmistakable in the steam.Sascha didn’t flinch. He just washed the skin there with the same detached efficiency as he washed his knee, as he washed his foot.
It was the most intimate thing Bjorn had ever experienced.More intimate than any of his wife’s cold, perfunctory touches. He began to cry, silently, the tears mixing with the shower spray. He hoped Sascha wouldn’t notice.Sascha noticed. He stood up, water plastering his own hair to his skull.He looked at Bjorn’s face, at the tears he couldn’t hide. His expression, for the first time all night, softened from focused neutrality to something else. Something pained.“Done,” he said, his voice barely audible over the water. He turned the shower off.The sudden silence was deafening.
He handed Bjorn a large, clean towel and took one for himself, rubbing briskly at his own short hair. “You should sleep.”
Bjorn, wrapped in the towel, hugging himself, watched as Sascha prepared to leave, to go back to his own apartment next door. The thought of being alone in the vast, cold bed, the smell of soap not quite erasing the phantom scent of blood, was suddenly untenable.
“Stay.” The word was out before he could cage it, quiet and stripped bare.“Please. Just… stay tonight.”
Sascha froze, one hand on the bathroom doorframe. He didn’t turn around for a long moment. Bjorn watched the muscles in his broad back tense under the damp t-shirt.He was going to say no.It was the sane thing.The professional thing.
Sascha let out a long, slow breath.“Okay,” he said, without turning.
Bjorn fled to his bedroom, a lush, feminine cave of velvet and silk that felt like a separate universe from the man who held court in tailored suits. He pulled a slip of peach silk from a drawer, the fabric cool and familiar against his skin.He didn’t bind himself. He just pulled the nightgown on and slid between the cool sheets.
Sascha came in a few minutes later, having removed his own damp clothes and found a pair of Bjorn’s too-small sweatpants to wear.He stood awkwardly at the side of the bed.
“Just get in, you oaf,” Bjorn murmured, his face half-buried in a pillow.
Sascha slid in beside him, keeping a careful foot of space between them. The bed was enormous, but he felt like a lodestar, a gravity well. The heat from his body reached across the gap.Bjorn, starved for touch, for any kindness not calculated as a transaction, shifted. He moved back until his spine was almost against Sascha’s side.A question.An invitation.
For a minute, nothing. Then, Sascha’s arm came over him, not pulling him close, just resting heavily across his waist.His chest settled against Bjorn’s back. He was solid, real, anchoring him to the earth after a night spent floating in a nightmare.
A whimper escaped Bjorn, a confused sound of relief and anguish. He pressed back into the warmth, into the safe, unbearable weight of the arm holding him. Something fractured in his chest, a frozen sea cracking under a sudden, unexpected sun.He didn’t understand it. He just let it happen, his breath evening out, his body going slack for the first time in years.
Sascha held him, his own heart hammering a furious, silent rhythm against Bjorn’s shoulder blades. He breathed in the scent of clean silk and the expensive shampoo from the shower, felt the delicate architecture of Bjorn’s body tucked against his own.
Sasha found a peace in this room, the silence between the two a cozy weight that lulled Bjorn to an eventual sleep in his arms. Bjorn had insisted on staying pressed against Sascha, even being so bold and audacious as to take his larger hand and press the palm to one of his breasts to hold and massage. Sascha cupped the mound gently, too scared and confused to do anything else, and listened to his boss, this man who kills in one hour and awkwardly lies his way out of interviews the next, sleep soundly in his arms.
A liar. A mafia ringleader and lawyer and head of a daycare with Sascha running beside him as an equal rather than a meek subordinate. A doting dad to a sweet little girl, and a husband to a woman who will never approve of him and so clearly has been cheating on him for weeks. A man who really tries to make amends with the world and is made a villain for it. Injustice and unfairness in a lithe form. Bjorn was more than these things, and yet the weight of his circumstances haven’t gone unnoticed.
Sascha sees him, all of him. The trauma of his childhood, the world that never gave him a break, the stress of losing everything. Suffering made human, and he lays in his arms tonight.
He knew, with a certainty that bypassed all thought, that he would kill a hundred men to keep this one complicated, fragile, violent person safe. He would sit through a hundred police interviews pretending to be his lover.He would do anything.The realization didn’t feel like a fall. It felt like finally landing, and finding the ground was exactly where he needed to be.
He pressed his lips lightly, secretly, to the back of Bjorn’s damp hair. “Sleep, meine süße Prinzessin,” he whispered, the German words a velvet murmur in the dark.My sweet princess.And Bjorn, already drifting, heard them. And for the first time, the title didn’t feel like a costume or a secret. It felt, against the warmth of the man holding him, like the truth.