Gareth reached up to explore his eye first, because it wouldn't crack open. He felt the crust of dried blood and pus over it and a whine leaked out, a small, needy sound, a pup for its mother.
And then he remembered his mother.
He lay down and his tongue explored the tender gapes in his gums where he'd had teeth, a long, strong row of them still this morning—yesterday morning? How long had he been out? What time was it?
"Where am I?" he asked the door when it opened, and felt foolish when he saw who was there.
He turned and tried to answer his own question by lifting up the blinds and seeing what was outside.
Then nature kicked in—survival urges stronger than man. His one foot kicked him up on the bed, the other swollen up the size of a melon and hurting, the pain was beyond anything he'd ever felt, but his throat was too dry and he was too weak to scream.
He tried to crawl up the bed, his raw wrist rattling against the handcuff.
Then he sunk down.
Even someone stupid as him knew there was no escaping. He gave up on trying; at least while he was here.
Him.
The giant whose footsteps were heavy as kettledrums in Gareth's searing headache, who stopped by the bed and when Gareth closed his eyes not to see him, replaced the afterimage of his face with the rustle and clink of his belt. Gareth listened to it, both eyes closed—one, he feared, permanently—and felt his breath drag in and out of his hurting ribs. A-ha. A-ha. Each breath a revelation.
He was still alive.
"What the bloody hell is your name, mate?" he asked him. It wouldn't change anything to know; he just wanted the information. Knowing made things easier. He wasn't a demon from hell, he was a man, and men could be defeated. And men had names—unlike ghouls, ghosts and monsters.
Well, some of those types of haints had names too, but—
When I finally decide to kill you, you will thank me.
Gareth looked up at him. One eye was just pus and blood, one side of his face was gone, but the other was as beautiful and handsome as it had been this morning. His eyes were blue as the sea, as the sky, the kind of blue that poets wrote elegies for.
The man had his fly open and down before Gareth could think of a response. The tug on his tight jeans pulled his hips down too, dragged his ass out and his thighs. He cursed once, sharply, loudly, and then didn't speak again.
Talking, screaming, hurt his head, and was too much effort.
A big hand under his back flipped him like a flapjack as he clawed at Ivan's hand. He had a sudden inspiration to dig his thumb into Ivan's eyes.
But he didn't. He was too scared—too scared of what Ivan would do if he failed to kill him expediently.
His tongue kept running over those empty gums, his shirt hiked up from the struggle, showing the dip of a back strong and fit and lean, small hips that fit in his captor's hands, the nape of his neck where his brown curls met his spine.
He was surprised at how hard he was shaking, at how cold he felt, his skin cool to the touch, not warm, like he was already a corpse.
The Russian covered all of that with his body, and Gareth startled, his breath turning into a wheeze. His hand reached up to grab and his nails dragged down the headboard, tearing off the lacquer. He couldn't draw much breath in—and the pain.
He could feel wounds parting, reopening. Blood began to ooze out of the cast on his leg—he'd bled through the bandages. He finally cried out.
"This isn't happening," he moaned. Did he think a dream would leave his body stabbing in pain, such rank realistic susurrations of Ivan's vodka breath and the musk of his body discernible over the rancid odor of pus?
"You're not here," he pleaded, like he could turn this into a hallucination, a bad acid trip, but all he got for his trouble was the tight globes of his ass pushed apart by a weapon finding the indent, the chink in his armor.
He found it, and stabbed Gareth.
Gareth hadn't screamed once yet, up to that point. But when Ivan's cock found its mark, he wailed. It was reactionary, more than anything; psychological, because the pain was awful, but he was already in so much pain, his body had almost maxed out what it could process as new pain.
It was the fact of it.
It was that, for the first time in his life of breezing by with no cares or worries, Gareth was going to be raped; a knowledge that there was now a before, and after.
And when it hit him, finally, as his hole opened up and he spread his legs in a vain attempt to let Ivan in and spare some of that tearing—there wouldn't be an after.
Ivan was going to kill him, like he'd killed his mother.
Gareth went from compliant to fighting like a switch had flipped inside him; it was a sudden change, born of panic. He wriggled under Ivan like a fish, flapping from side to side, his one free hand going back and trying to grab something soft to pull and succeeding only in grabbing Ivan's shirt.
His legs kicked and he screamed louder as his swollen, shattered leg scraped against Ivan's whole flesh. He turned his head to the side, the good side up, and rolled his blue eye back, that eye like Caribbean waves.
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