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Shane reaches for the centre console out of reflex. The screen reads 9:47 PM. He stares at it long enough that the road ahead blurs. He last checked it when he drove through Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, two hours ago, two and a half if you include the gas station with the flickering forecourt light and the attendant who hadn't looked up from his phone. The signal bars had been four solid white columns then. Now he doesn’t know how long it will be before he can get in contact with anyone.
He'd put the phone face down on the passenger seat and driven.
The road has been narrowing for forty minutes. No more centre markings. The asphalt is old and cracked at its edges, where decades of root growth have fractured it from underneath, and the Laurentians press in from both sides in a way that has nothing to do with the neat, manicured forests of the lower elevations.
These are the older trees, spruce and black fir growing so straight and dense they form solid walls on either side of the road, their trunks running sixty, seventy feet before the branches start. Above them, the sky is still faintly luminous at the horizon line, that pale grey-gold that holds on past sunset like it's reluctant to admit it's over, but the light doesn't reach down to road level. Down here it's already dark. The mountains rise in layers beyond the treeline, the near ones forest-black and the far ones misted into blue, their ridgelines running serrated against the last of the light.
It's beautiful.
He rolls the window down.
The air comes in warm and carrying everything at once, pine resin and the faint sweetness from some flowering shrub he can't name, and underneath it all the cool mineral smell of the rock itself, the mountain sweating so cold even in July. A bird calls somewhere in the wall of trees, two notes, the second lower than the first, and then nothing. The wind moves through the upper branches in a continuous rush, not the white noise of highway driving but something more real, you know, alive. Shane exhales through his nose. He loosens his grip on the steering wheel by one degree.
This is why you're doing this, he tells himself. This is the whole point.
The problem is, the point isn’t really working.
He'd built this whole theory that the noise of the city, the schedules, the press obligations, and his teammates' relentless, grinding vicinity, was what was wrong with him. That if he could get far enough out, into actual quiet, his brain would settle like dirt in undisturbed water. But the dirt doesn't settle when you remove the current. It just keeps circling, slower now, no external turbulence to blame it on.
There is a squeezing feeling behind his eyes. It's been there for three weeks, since a night out in a bar no one would recognise him in, sitting next to a man who smelled like cigarettes and ordered Shane two drinks, and he had felt the base of his throat close up like a fist clenching. He'd left. He'd stood outside in the rain on Rue Saint-Denis with his hands pressed flat against a brick wall and breathed through his mouth until the nausea passed. Then he'd called his travel agent and booked ten days at a silent wellness retreat in the Laurentians, because he was a man who solved problems by removing himself from the conditions that created them, and he has been calling this taking care of himself ever since.
He presses his body back against the seat, feeling for the resistance of the lumbar support against his spine. His thumbs trace the leather of the steering wheel. He focuses on the two-note bird call and tries to count the seconds between repetitions.
He is gay. He has been gay for his entire conscious life, and for most of that life he has managed it through a combination of ignorance and a schedule brutal enough to leave no time for introspection. The lie has several justifications, plausible reasons for not dating, teammates who've stopped asking, a public image so relentlessly defined by hockey that his private self barely registers as a question. It has been functional for years; it was functional enough.
But lately it's less of a lie and more of a thing living inside him. He can feel it pressing against his lungs when he's not busy enough, when it's too quiet, when a gruff cashier laughs or a bartender leans too close. It presses and presses, and his body responds before his brain can intervene, and then the shame hits like a fucking delayed injury, the kind you don't feel until the adrenaline wears off. He is rotting from the inside. That's the only way he can describe, you are rotting, as though the suppression has fermented the desire into something poisonous, something leaking. He can feel it in his blood sometimes, the fever of a person living in fundamental opposition to themselves.
He blinks hard, tries to clear his eyes, and focuses on the road.
The sky ahead of him has deepened from pale gold to a full, saturated rust, the clouds lit from underneath in bands of orange and copper where they catch the last of the sun. The mountains have gone completely black against it, silhouettes so jagged and massive they look painted rather than real. Shane watches the colours shift for a long moment, the orange bleeds upward into rose, the rose into a deep red before it softens into violet. It is extraordinary, yet feels nothing looking at it except a guilty sense that he should feel something.
He glances at the navigation screen. Four hours remaining.
Shit.
He should have stayed in Sainte-Agathe. He is going to arrive in the middle of the night, drag his bags up to whatever cabin they've assigned him, and lie awake on an unfamiliar mattress while his brain continues its spinning. At least he'll have another four hours to think about dying. He huffs out a short breath through his nose— his own joke, landing flat, as his own jokes tend to.
He reaches for the radio dial.
His hand hovers.
No. Whatever frequency covers this stretch of highway, whatever is broadcasting at quarter to ten on a Tuesday night in the middle of nowhere. Bad country ballads about trucks and lost women, he imagines, or worse, talk radio, some man's voice filling the car up with confident and wrong opinions. He pulls his hand back. He'd rather hear his own skull hammering away at itself.
The car shudders.
It travels from the engine and up into the steering column, and Shane feels it in his palms and his feet simultaneously. He has time to think what, before the engine chokes twice in rapid succession and cuts out entirely.
The car rolls silently on the slope of the road, bleeding momentum, the steering wheel gone stiff under Shane's hands. He pumps the brake, guides the dead weight onto the gravel shoulder. The tyres crunch and slow and stop.
He presses the ignition button.
A single click.
He presses it again, the ignition makes the same dead sound. He sits with his hands still on the wheel. Through the windscreen, the trees stand completely still on both sides of the road, and beyond them, the mountains are visible only as a darker dark against the sky. There is no other light anywhere. No headlights coming from either direction. No lit windows, no reflective road signs, nothing.
Shane gets out of the car.
He shoves the door open harder than he means to, swings his legs out, and slams it. The metal edge catches the meat of his right thumb. He doesn't even feel it for second and then it burns viciously. He swears, stuffs the thumb in his mouth, and crouches at the hood release with his uninjured hand, fingers searching the grille in the dark until he finds the latch, and the hood pops with a heavy click and a face-full of steam.
He waits for it to clear. Then he reaches in.
The engine block is scalding. The burn catches the heel of his palm before he even makes full contact. He drops the hood with a crash of metal on metal, clutches his burnt hand against his ribs, and stands in the road.
"Fuck."
The word dissolves into the trees.
He leans forward, presses both forearms against the warm metal of the bonnet, and lowers his head between his shoulders. His burnt hand hurts. His split thumb hurts. The steam is already thinning, dissipating into the warm night air. He breathes. In through the nose, he inhales pine resin and his own sweat, out through the mouth.
When he finally lifts his eyes, the scale of it arrests him completely.
Mountain above mountain above mountain. In every direction, the ridgelines rise, and between them the valleys are filled with darkness so dense it looks solid. The road runs straight in both directions and empties into more of the same: trees, dark, nothing. He becomes abruptly, acutely aware of his own breathing, his own heartbeat, the small sounds of the cooling engine ticking beside him, and they feel too loud.
A chill runs up the back of his neck. The air is warm, he is sweating, he is cold.
He pulls his phone out, shit, no signal, of course. The screen glows uselessly in the dark. He switches the torch on, sweeps the beam across the gravel shoulder and into the tree line, and the light dies ten feet in, swallowed by the density of the firs.
He turns, slowly, pointing the beam at the other side of the road.
And there.
Through a break in the trees, not much of one, a gap where the forest gives way to an overgrown meadow, there is a house. Wooden, old, the pale white paint of it greyed with age and dampness, a little porch running across the front, a sloped roof heavy with moss along the ridge. It sits low in the grass as though the ground has been slowly accepting it for a long time. And beside it, pressed close against the foot of the mountain like it grew there, a chapel. Stone at the base, whitewashed plank siding above it, a small square bell tower on the roof with no bell visible inside. Narrow windows, plain and dark.
God hasn’t abandoned him yet, ha.
Shane lowers the torch.
He stands at the roadside with his burnt hand and his split thumb and his dead car, and he looks at the house.
Then the ground-floor window fills with light. Yellow, warm, the unmistakable shade of lamplight rather than overhead fluorescents.
Shane stands there for another four seconds. The mountain sits behind the chapel, massive and close, and the sky above it has gone fully black, and the light in the window holds steady. It is terrifying.
He pockets his phone. He locks the car, the chirp of it swallowed immediately by the trees. And he crosses the road toward the gap in the treeline, the house ahead of him resolving slowly from dark shape to detail.
The porch steps are warped. Shane tests the first one with his weight before committing to it, as though the strength of a stranger's staircase is his problem to assess. The wood holds. He climbs the three steps to the porch and stops.
Up close, the house is older than it looked from the road. The paint on the boards is a grey that was probably white twenty years ago, lifting in thin curls at the window frames, and the porch roof sags a little at its centre, bowed by decades of winter. But the foundations are good, stone, not concrete, the real kind, and the door is heavy and well-hung, no gap at the sill. Could be a cool renovation project. Someone has been keeping this place standing through an act off sustained personal will. You could see it in the porch boards, rough but recently swept, and in the firewood stacked along the left side wall.
Shane moves to the nearest window. The blinds inside are drawn flush to the glass, the fabric so dense that almost nothing gets through, just the glow of lamplight, and a single dark movement crossing it.
He steps back.
He drags one hand through his hair because he wants to make a good impression, at least, and the split skin on his thumb catches at his hairline. He draws a sharp breath through his teeth. His thumb is still bleeding sluggishly, tacky in the creases of his knuckle. He presses it against the seam of his jeans and looks at the door.
I wouldn't answer it. That's the first thought, unprompted and certain. If someone knocked on his cottage door in Ontario at this hour, his properly modern glass-and-timber lakehouse with the security system and the motion lights, he would stand still in the hallway and not move until they left. And that was with neighbours within screaming distance. Out here, there's nothing for miles in every direction. He'd have assumed bears before strangers.
He knocks anyway. His knuckle against the wood make a sound too small, absorbed too quickly by the mass of the door.
Shane waits.
He looks at the door. He looks at the cottage in his peripheral vision, and he realises, standing this close, that it's genuinely old. Not old, the way the Muskoka retreats are old, that cultivated rusticity, all salvaged oak and architectural intention. Old in the way that means someone built this by hand with the materials available and kept it standing by any means necessary. The joints in the boards are tight and uneven, two different measurements, wood from different cuts. The window frames are hand-planed. He finds himself looking at a corner joint near the porch roof and thinking, unprompted, that's a mortise and tenon, someone knew what they were doing, and then his brain follows that with: you're standing on some stranger's porch at ten o'clock at night bleeding on their steps and you're thinking about carpentry, you're losing your mind, you are absolutely going to die out here.
He should be thinking about the high likelihood that a murderer is waiting behind the door. It will swing open, and he’ll attack him, and Shane will decompose quietly alongside his car, and the trees will grow over the road in three years, and that will be the end of Shane Hollander: cause of death, a broken-down Land Rover and his own unwillingness to call his parents.
Well. At least it would spare him the rest of the rotting.
He raises his fist and knocks again, harder.
The door opens.
Shane takes an involuntary step back and steadies himself with one hand on the railing as the door swings wide and fills with a man.
He has to duck to clear the frame. He straightens on the other side, and his shoulders take up the width of the doorway so completely that Shane can't see anything of the house beyond him. Six-one, at least. Maybe six-two. A few inches taller than him.
He is wearing a jacket he has clearly just pulled on, the collar is slightly flipped, one lapel resting lower than the other. Beneath it an open shirt, the buttons undone to the fourth, hanging loose over a white tank top that's been tucked into dark trousers. His chest hair shows at the neckline of the tank, a V of it. Suspenders— actual suspenders, the real leather-and-metal kind, not decorative, are attached to the waistband and hold them up. The trousers are heavy wool despite the summer heat. Everything he's wearing looks like it belongs to a different decade.
Shane's eyes move upward.
They catch his jaw first. The line of it is so sharp, carved up at the hinge with a precision that makes Shane aware, unpleasantly, of the softness of his own face. His mouth is set in a slight downward pull at the corners, not a frown exactly, a neutral resting. His eyes are pale blue, almost grey in the low light, and his brows are drawn together in a dense furrow that casts actual shadows over them, two deep vertical lines between his nose and the bridge. His hair—what the hell—is pulled back from his face in thick golden waves, swept back so cleanly it must be gel, except it's too loose and alive for gel. Maybe it’s sweat, of course it’s sweat, look at the tan on him. God, with a body like that, of course, his strands would be happy to fall in whatever direction he sent them to.
He feels heat crawl up along his neck and jaw, the blush that always flashes too obviously on his pale skin, marking the bridge of his nose and the tops of his cheekbones where the freckles are densest.
"I—" His voice comes out level, at least. He clears his throat, starts over. "Sorry. Hello."
His eyes drop of their own accord to the man's chest, then to the gap between the suspenders and shirt where the cotton of the tank pulls flat across his chest, then back up to his face again in a circuit. He licks his lips.
"This is your house."
The man's eyes haven't moved from Shane's face.
"Yes." The S stretches out oddly. He can’t be Canadian with that face and that accent. Eastern European, Shane thinks, but he can't place it more precisely than that.
Shane nods. He turns slightly and gestures back toward the road to the dark outline of the Land Rover visible at the shoulder, hazards off now, looking very abandoned. "My car broke down. I can't get any signal." He pauses. "The last town I passed was—"
Recognition moves through the man's expression, "Ah. Yes." He taps one finger against the door frame where his hand rests. "It is far away." He pauses. "I would drive you, but the mechanic." He lifts one shoulder, lets it drop. "He is not available now."
"Is it closed?"
The man's mouth lifts in a compression of faint amusement. "No. Is open twenty-four hours." He pauses again. "He likes to drink."
Shane exhales through his nose. His eyes move across the man's face despite himself.
"I can drive you up in the morning," the man says. "First thing."
"Yeah?" Shane's mouth manages the most meek smile imaginable. "That'd be— yeah, thank you, that would really help."
He turns. He has taken two steps back toward the porch stairs, already calculating: his car is locked, he can sleep across the back seat, it's July, it won't be cold—
"Ah."
Shane stops, pivots on one heel.
The man has tilted his head. "What? You want to sleep in your car?" He pulls his chin toward the dark interior of the house, a small gesture. "No. Come in. Is no trouble."
"I shouldn't—"
"I have a couch." He has already turned from the door, already moving somewhere inside the house, his voice carrying back down the hallway. "You can eat, rest. We go first thing."
His footsteps recede. The hallway beyond the open door is warm and golden-lit, and Shane can smell, from here, woodsmoke and something roasted, something with herbs.
He stands on the porch.
He looks at the door, and then he looks at the road behind him, at the absolute black between the tree trunks, at the mountains invisible behind their own darkness. The cricket sounds have started up in the meadow grass, a wall of them.
The warm air moves against the back of his neck.
A fucking horror movie, his brain offers. This is the setup. You are the idiot.
Or, says a different part of his brain, a part he has been attempting to starve into silence for approximately a decade, you're about to sleep next to the most beautiful man you have ever met. This is a set up to a porno, baby.
Shane tells both parts of his brain, with feeling, to go to hell.
He steps inside.
The door swings closed behind him, and the latch catches with a solid, definitive click. The hallway is narrow, barely enough to stand in without your shoulders brushing both walls, and lit by a single oil lantern hung from a hook beside the door. The flame inside is still, barely trembling. Shane stands in its small circle of warmth and unlaces his sneakers, bending to set them against the wall.
He straightens. In his socked feet, the floorboards give slightly under his weight.
The hallway opens at its end into the main room, and Shane steps through.
He stops.
His brain runs a fast inventory: large, but not the large he's used to, not the cathedral ceilings of his Ontario lakehouse or the open-plan expanse of his Montreal apartment, just a room that is generously proportioned by the standards of a nineteenth-century farmhouse, with plaster walls gone the colour of old paper and a low ceiling crossed by bare wooden beams. An oil lamp on the dresser in the far corner, two on the windowsill, three or four candles burned down on saucers scattered across the surfaces. The combined light is golden and uneven, pooling in the low places and leaving the ceiling mostly dark, and it makes the whole room feel smaller than it is.
In the centre: a dining table. Square, dark wood, old enough that the legs are slightly warped at the ankle. A white tablecloth over it, not crisp, washed many times, the cotton gone soft at the folds. Four mismatched chairs. In the middle of the table: a single bowl, a spoon, a piece of bread on a board. One setting.
Shane counts it. One.
To the left: a kitchen that runs the full length of the wall, and it is not what the rest of the house prepared him for. It is serious— a cast iron range with two deep burners going low, and above it a metal rail hung dense with pots, the good heavy kind with riveted handles. Shelves floor to ceiling packed with tins and glass jars, herbs in tied bundles, things Shane can't identify drying from hooks, and the knives, a full magnetic strip the length of Shane's forearm, eight or nine blades ranked largest to smallest, every one of them visibly maintained. It is weirdly well stocked compared to the rest of the house.
On the range, a pot is simmering. The smell of it has been in the air since the porch but it's insistent now, beef fat and root vegetables and dill so heavily perfumed it coats the inside of his nose, and underneath all of it, that other smell, the one he caught from the doorstep, faint and medicinal, something astringent. He can't place it. It doesn't come from the kitchen.
He turns his head to follow it.
At the far left of the room, through a low arched doorway, there is a bedroom. Shane can see most of it from where he stands: narrow bed, iron frame, cream blanket pulled drum-tight across it. A low wooden stool. On the wall above the headboard, a wooden cross. Plain, unvarnished, the proportions slightly uneven, like it was made by hand.
In front of the bed, a chest. Old pine, the lid propped open. The man is crouched in front of it with his back to the room, his hands moving through the contents.
Shane looks at the chest. He can see the edges of its contents from here: folded fabric, dark glass bottles with hand-written labels, what looks like a length of cord or rope. He tips his head, trying to read the labels, catches himself doing it, and straightens.
The man straightens with a grunt of satisfaction. In his hands: a folded blanket in dark wool, a pillow, both of which he carries around the table and drops with a solid thump onto the armchair-and-sofa arrangement against the back wall. The sofa is the one Shane is going to sleep on, he assumes— deep-cushioned and aged, the upholstery a faded floral that might have been rose-coloured once. It looks, Shane thinks, like it weighs three hundred pounds.
"Blanket and pillow," He says, patting the pile. He turns toward the stove, reaching for the pot with one hand and lifting the lid with the other, steam rising in a white column. "For you. Is not the best, not nearly as comfortable as you have in—" He tips the ladle, stirs, and doesn't finish.
Shane realises he's waiting for an answer to something. He looks at the man's back, the wide set of his shoulders, the way the jacket rides up when he reaches. "Montreal," Shane says after a beat.
"Ah." He takes two ceramic bowls from the shelf above the range and ladles into both of them, the broth running dark and rich. "Montreal." He says it slowly. "And what is Mr. Montreal doing so far away from home?"
Shane sits down on one of the table chairs— he chooses the nearest one, perching on its edge with his elbows on his knees. "Mr. Montreal?"
"I don't know your name." He sets the two bowls on the table. He picks up a knife from the cutting board and takes three clean strokes through a loaf of dark bread. "Does Mr. Montreal eat meat?"
"It's Shane." The smile is happening at the corner of his mouth without his permission; he presses his lips flat. "Shane eats meat."
He doesn't eat meat. He’s on a nutritional plan, the performance-driven elimination of red meat and saturated fat, curated exactly for him; that his dietician adjusts every preseason, none of which Shane is going to explain to a man who has no television. Whatever is in that bowl, he's eating it.
The man pulls out the chair across from him with one foot, hooks the back of it with his heel, and drops onto it. He settles with his knees wide, elbows resting on the table, and picks up his spoon.
"Sorry, what's your name?" Shane asks. He watches him lift the spoon and bring it to his mouth, the long line of his forearm visible where the jacket sleeve has ridden up, the tendons moving as his wrist turns.
"I am Ilya." He says it as though reading it off a plaque. Sets the spoon down, tears a piece of bread.
"It's nice to meet you, Ilya."
"Is nice to meet you too, Shane." He gestures toward Shane's bowl with the bread, a small flick of his wrist.
Shane wraps his hand around the spoon. It's heavier than expected, actual wood or something like it, the handle worn smooth. He lifts a small amount of broth to his lips and sips.
Oh.
He takes a proper spoonful, beef, potato, something dark and soft that might be turnip, and wraps his lips around it, and his eyes close for a full second before he can stop them. It is deeply, unreasonably good. The kind of food that is embarrassing to eat in front of a stranger because of the noises it provokes. He restrains himself to a small exhale through his nose and takes another spoonful.
They eat in silence. Ilya eats without much manners, without performing anything; he just eats steadily, his attention moving occasionally to the window and back to his bowl, and the silence between them is the unusual kind, the kind that doesn't require filling. Shane has eaten thousands of meals in locker rooms, in hotel dining rooms, on chartered flights, every one of them threaded with the constant ambient performance of male camaraderie, and this is entirely different. He can hear himself swallowing.
Ilya sets his spoon down. He tilts his head back slowly, exposing the full column of his throat, and exhales through his nose. His head comes back level. He looks at Shane with those pale eyes, the colour of ice under very thin cloud cover, and the furrow between his brows is back, but softer now.
"So," he says. "You are from Canada."
Shane lowers his spoon. Something in the phrasing is slightly wrong, not the grammar but the emphasis, the implication, as though from Canada is the beginning of a longer observation that Ilya is deciding whether to make. Shane has heard this observation before. "Uh— yeah. Ottawa, originally."
Ilya makes a face. Not a large one, a slight lift of both brows, the mouth compressing once in what might be irony. He wipes his palm across his thigh. The movement is slow, and Shane's eyes go to his lap, to the broad spread of his hand against the dark wool of his trousers, and are back on Ilya's face in the same half-second, and Ilya watches all of it with the same unblinking he’s given everything.
"I have never seen a Canadian look like this," Ilya says.
"Like what?"
Ilya turns the word over in his mouth for a moment before he delivers it. "Pretty. Like—" He hums, low and thoughtful, and gestures vaguely toward his own face. "Olen." A pause. "The freckles. You look like a deer."
The blush reaches Shane's face before he has time to process the sentence. He can feel the burn across the bridge of his nose, spreading into the freckled terrain of his cheekbones, which is the absolute worst place for a blush to manifest on a person who is trying to maintain his composure. He laughs, once, this gross, slightly strangled sound, and looks at his soup.
"I'm— half Japanese," he says, when he has himself together enough to produce a sentence. "My mom's side. That's where I get the—" He gestures toward his own face.
"Your looks," Ilya says.
"Yeah. My looks."
"So you speak Japanese."
"No." He shakes his head. "No Japanese. French, though."
"Mm." Ilya tears another piece of bread and tosses it into the remaining broth of his bowl. He glances at Shane's bowl, raises his chin toward it. Shane lifts his eyes, spoon still near his mouth. "You like it?"
"It's— yeah, it's great. Genuinely great, thank you."
"Zharkoe." Ilya says the word in its natural register. "Russian dish. Beef, potato, some vegetables. Made the broth from pig bones and dill." He pauses. "Is usually very good."
"It's really good."
"So." Ilya tilts back, one arm draping over the back of his chair, ankle crossing over his knee. The posture opens his whole torso. "Shane from Ottawa, living in Montreal." His eyes move over Shane. "What do you do?"
"I'm— I play hockey." He watches Ilya's face. "For the Metros."
"You are the captain."
Shane opens his mouth. Closes it. "How did you—"
"It is obvious," Ilya says, around the last of his bread. "I think. That whatever you do, you are the best at it." He tips his chin toward Shane's shoulders, his chest. "You are built for it."
Shane lets out a short breath of something not quite a laugh. "I mean, you'd have to see me actually play before you decide that."
Ilya doesn't answer. He drops the bread into his soup and watches it absorb and says nothing, and the quiet stretches exactly long enough for Shane to understand that Ilya has already decided, and that Shane's opinion of the decision is not required.
"You like it?" Ilya asks.
Shane blinks. "Hockey?"
"I can see it is hard on you." Ilya tips his head slightly. "It is in how you sit. Your shoulders, when you came in, they were—" He lifts both of his own, demonstrating. His jacket rises with the movement. Shane realises with a small shock that his own shoulders have been up near his ears since he sat down, and he drops them, feeling the tension release. "There." Ilya nods. "I understand that."
"You do?"
"I played when I was young." He sets the spoon down in the empty bowl with a clean clink. "Back in Russia." He exhales slowly, something leaving with it. "Yes, I am not native to Canada." The pause is dry, self-aware. "Despite my perfect accent." He draws his tongue slowly along his lower lip and rests the edge of his teeth against it. His eyes hooded the smallest fraction.
Shane puts his spoon down and leans forward onto his elbows. He doesn't make a decision to do this. His body does it ahead of him, pulled forward by something he stopped arguing with about ten minutes into the soup. "I like your accent," he says. "It's different."
"Different, mm." Ilya considers this. "Here, maybe, different. Not back home." He picks up a glass of water Shane hadn't noticed being poured and takes a sip, setting it back without looking away. "Back home, I was like everyone else." He pauses. "Almost like."
Almost like.
Shane hears it. He hears the weight in the qualification, the deliberate comma of almost, and his chest twists. Two people sitting in a house in the middle of nowhere, both of them just a little outside the template of what they were supposed to be. Maybe that's it. Maybe that's why the whole evening has had this ease that Shane can't account for, why he sat down at a stranger's table in the middle of nowhere and ate their food and has been answering questions with his actual answers, why he keeps leaning forward when he should be leaning back.
Is this cruising? he thinks. Am I being cruised? Is this— in an oil-lamp-lit farmhouse in the Laurentians at ten-thirty at night, are we about to, you know?
"If you like the accent," Ilya says, and there's something behind his eyes now, deeply amused, as though he's been watching Shane's thought process play out across his face and has found it endearing— "you should visit Russia. Is beautiful in summer. Best in winter."
"I don't think I'd be very welcome," Shane says. "Over there."
He hears himself say it. His eyes travel across the room to the cross on the wall opposite, plain wood against white plaster, hanging at exactly Shane's eye level, and the full sentence completes itself in the back of his skull: I would not be welcome, and you know exactly why, and you have a cross on your wall, and I’m a fucking idiot, Jesus Christ, ha isn’t that ironic—
"Wh—" He straightens. "What I meant was—"
"That you are gay."
Ilya says it the same way he said zharkoe, with the same complete absence of drama. As though he is identifying an ingredient. The blood drains out of Shane's face and then floods back in all at once. His molars press together hard enough that he can feel the enamel.
Ilya follows his gaze to the cross. "I cannot judge," he says.
Shane's eyes snap back to his face.
Cannot. Not would not. The specific verb of impossibility, not the choice.
"Is okay," Ilya says again. He has not shifted position, still angled back with an arm over the chair. "It is not my place. How would I judge?" He spreads his hands. "We are all the same. All flawed, all made wrong in some part. To judge one man's flaw above another's—" He shakes his head slightly. "Who is worthy? Only God can tell us this."
Shane stares at him. "Everybody judges," he says. The words come out before he can catch them. "That's not— I mean, everyone has opinions. Everyone decides what's acceptable. That's just— that's what people do."
"Yes," Ilya says. "People do." He doesn't say I am not people, but the sentence contains it.
Shane swallows. He picks up his spoon and puts it down again. "I just—" He shrugs, one shoulder. "I feel especially different, I think. Like, specifically and particularly different, in a way that isn't easy."
Ilya watches him. The silence that follows isn't empty; it is a kind of attention that Shane has rarely been given, the undivided kind, the kind where you can see the other person actually listening to what you've said rather than queueing their response. He keeps going.
The retreat comes out, the ten days, the silence, the vague idea that if he stripped out enough external noise, he'd be able to find some quieter version of himself underneath who wasn't perpetually sick with the effort of being Shane Hollander in public. The hockey comes out too, all the performance, the way captaincy is a twenty-four-hour character he wears rather than a role he steps into, and how the character and the actual person inside it have grown so far apart that he's not sure he could tell you which one is real anymore. He is talking to a stranger in an oil-lamp lit room in the middle of nowhere, and it comes out of him in sentences he's never said to anyone, not his therapist, not Hayden—Hayden doesn't know, nobody knows—and Ilya sits there and listens.
"You have never been to confession," Ilya says, when Shane pauses.
"No. I— no. When I was growing up, we weren't really—" Shane shakes his head. "I would just feel. Judged. Walking into a church."
Ilya's mouth curves. It's the first time tonight that his expression has moved all the way into something that could be called a smile, a real one, reaching his eyes, and in the warm lamplight, it is genuinely disarming, the whole plain of his face rearranging itself around it. He tips forward, elbows onto the table, mirroring Shane's position. They are both leaning in now, both of their faces in the gold radius of the nearest oil lamp, and Shane is aware of how close that puts them.
"Confession is not judgment," Ilya says. "Confession is—" He pauses, choosing the word. "Letting go. You put the thing inside you outside of yourself, and then it cannot hurt you." He tilts his head. "A man who is carrying something very heavy sets it down. He doesn't have to throw it away. He just—" He opens his hands. "Sets it down."
"I'm not exactly a holy person," Shane says. "I'm not sure what walking into a church does for me at this point."
"The church is not for holy people." Ilya's smile stays. "Holy people don't need it."
Shane laughs, a real one this time, short and surprised out of him, and Ilya's eyes crease at the corners in answer, and for a moment they are just two people at a table laughing in the lamplight, and Shane thinks, with an almost painful clarity: I am in trouble.
"There are many stories," Ilya says, settling back slightly, "in the Bible. Of men who were very far from holy. Very far from what they were supposed to be." He pauses. "And what God did with them anyway."
Shane rests his chin in his hand. "Like what?"
Ilya reaches forward and turns the oil lamp on the table up a single degree, the flame brightening to a clean, steady gold.
"Have you heard of Jonah?"
"Jonah?" Shane squints, shuffling his chair forward a few inches without thinking. "Like— the whale guy?"
The corner of Ilya's mouth moves. "Yes. The whale guy." He tips his head. "So you have heard of him."
"Yeah, a little— I mean." Shane lays his palm flat on the table, pulling at the memory. "God asked him to go somewhere and preach, right? And he was— he didn't want to, he was scared, so he ran away on a boat." He furrows his brows. "And then the whale."
Ilya nods once. He folds his arms across his chest. The smile he's wearing now is different from the one of five minutes ago, and his eyes have gone to a place Shane can't read.
"And God got so angry at his disobedience," Shane continues, "that he made a great whale eat him—"
Ilya raises one hand from the crook of his elbow.
Shane closes his mouth. He doesn't know why he does it so immediately. The hand wasn't commanding, but the silence after it is absolute, and Shane stays inside it, and Ilya lets a full breath pass before he speaks.
"I do not think God did this because he was angry," Ilya says.
He unfolds his arms and rests both forearms on the table. The lamp between them is burning steadily and gold, and in its light, the shadows beneath his brows are deep enough that his eyes are a pale glint, watching Shane with a focus that makes Shane feel the back of his own neck.
“No?”
"Is more like, his will is inevitable yes." Ilya says. "The whale was—" He pauses, with a patience that doesn't feel like searching for words but like selecting between options. "—transport. It swallowed Jonah and carried him to where he was supposed to go. All the way to Nineveh." He watches Shane's face. "Where God had always intended him to go."
"So—" Shane's voice comes out quieter than he expected. He clears his throat. "It didn't matter that he ran."
"It mattered. But the will—" Ilya opens one hand, palm upward, a gesture that contains the entire weight of the word. "—finds a way. Jonah tried to be somewhere else. And he ended up where he was supposed to be regardless." He pauses. "Just from the inside of a whale instead of a boat."
Shane looks at him. "Right," he says, though it comes out less certain than he intended. "And then he's spat out on the shore."
"Yes." Ilya tilts his head. "Do you want to know what happens after?"
Shane nods. He really does, and he isn't sure exactly when that became true. Sometime in the last few sentences, Ilya's voice had slowed, the way a current gets slower as a river deepens, and Shane had followed it down without noticing the descent.
"Yes," he says.
He takes a slow breath in through his nose. “Jonah arrives on the shore of Nineveh dry. Whole. The whale had not touched him. He stands in the sand outside the great city and looks at its gates, and he understands–” Ilya pauses, “That God did not send him there only to stand in the big square and speak.”
"Before he goes in, Jonah makes a dagger. He finds the metals. He works them in fire, folding them, folding again, until the blade is the finest in all the lands." His eyes stay level. "He inscribes it. He tests it on his own thumb."
Shane watches his face.
"Then he goes in." Ilya spreads his hands on the table. "There are thirty-nine sinners in Nineveh. God had counted them. Jonah knew who they were the moment he looked at them, he didn't need to be told. He could see it. Feel it." His mouth pulls slightly at the corner. "You understand? He could see it."
Shane's hand tightens under his chin.
"So Jonah finds the first one." Ilya taps a finger on the table once, "He binds him. With rope, good rope, the same rope from the ship. He knew rope, Jonah." He pauses. "And then he uses the dagger." He doesn't elaborate on what he uses it for; he moves forward. "The second sinner, the same. A different man, a different thing the dagger takes from him, but the same rope, the same blade, yes. One by one, he went across the whole city. Thirty-nine men. By the time he was finished—" Ilya exhales through his nose, "—every household in Nineveh had learnt."
Shane's lips slightly parted.
"And the city repented." Ilya tips his head. "The king came down from his throne and sat in ash and took off his robe. Every person in Nineveh fasted. The whole city, on its knees. And God looked at this and decided to extend His mercy. He would not destroy Nineveh after all."
"And Jonah—"
"Jonah," Ilya says, "was furious. He left the city. He went east and built himself a small shelter all alone and he sat in it and he waited to see what would happen to him and the city. He said to God: I knew this. You will strike me down before you strike them. And this is why I ran. This is why I took the boat. Because I knew that no matter what I did— no matter what I was made to do— you would forgive them in the end, and I would be left outside in the heat with blood on my hands, and the city you had me bleed for would be—" He opens his palms. "Forgiven."
Shane hasn't moved.
"So God grows a plant over Jonah's shelter. Gives him shade. And Jonah is grateful, one day, he is grateful, the shade is good, he rests." Ilya's lowers his voice so only Shane can hear. "And the next morning, the plant is dead. A worm ate it at the roots in the night, at God's instruction. It is gone. And the sun comes down on Jonah with everything it has, and the desert wind, and Jonah sits there exposed and he says—" Ilya looks directly at Shane— "I want to die. I am better off dead."
The candles on the windowsill have burned down. Shane doesn't remember them burning. Shane blinks up at him. His eyes are heavy-lidded, his mouth slightly open, the lamplight full on his face. "And what happens to Jonah," he says.
Ilya looks at him across the table. His expression is still and soft in the way that has nothing to do with gentleness, and the trace of a smile at his mouth is the kind that doesn't reach any other feature. "Mm." He tips his head. "You want to know."
"Yes." Shane swallows. He can feel his own pulse. "Yes."
Ilya looks at him for one full second, his pale eyes moving over Shane's face. Then he sits back. He pats both hands against his thighs with a satisfied sound and stands, reaching for the dish towel hanging from the oven handle. He bends to the oven door, wraps the cloth around the handle, and pulls it open.
The smell that comes out fills the room entirely. Sweet, warm, caramelised apple and butter-browned pastry. Shane's eyes close for a moment on pure reflex.
Ilya sets the tin on the stovetop and takes a knife to it. He plates two slices and disappears through the arch into the bedroom. There is a brief rustling, something taken from a shelf.
Shane watches the pie.
His eyes trace the lattice of it, the golden-brown weave, the apple visible in the gaps, the smell of it sitting in the back of his throat. He tips his head, content, eyes half-closed, listening to Ilya moving in the other room. There's something in this house, the warmth, the low light, the story, that has made him feel more settled than he has felt in months, more settled than he expects to feel at the retreat after ten days of silence, and he knows this is strange. And he should probably be watching what Ilya is doing to the food.
Ilya comes back. He sits down and slides a plate across the table.
Shane looks at it. "Apple pie," he says.
"Mhm." Ilya picks up his own fork. He holds Shane's gaze across the table. His expression has returned to the readable warmth of the dinner, easy, open, two people at a table late at night with nothing pressing, and there is nothing in his face that Shane can catch or hold or name as wrong.
"I'll tell you the rest," Ilya says, "after dessert."
The first thing that comes back is cold.
Not the manageable chill of a summer night, this is stone cold, the cold of something that hasn't been warm in decades, pressing up through his knees and shins. Shane's brain assembles the sensation before it assembles anything else: cold, and hard, and his weight distributed wrong, kneeling, he's kneeling on something—
He tries to move his hands.
They don't go anywhere.
His eyes open.
The church is small, and in the dark it seems even smaller, six pews in two rows of three, the wood so old it has gone almost black, the narrow windows on both sides showing nothing but night through the glass, no stars, just the reflection of candlelight thrown back at him as flickering smears. The ceiling is a low timber beam, and the stone floor runs from the door behind him to the altar at the far end in a expanse of cold grey slate.
There are candles everywhere. On the altar, a long narrow table of dark wood with a white cloth going grey at its edges, they stand in clusters of three and five. On each windowsill, one more. They are the only light, and the light they cast is merciless toward the shadows it leaves: the corners of the room are absolute black, the ceiling swallowed entirely.
On the altar: a heavy red book, a rosary draped across its cover, dark beads, a small silver crucifix on the chain. A bottle of oil in dark glass, the label handwritten in a language Shane can't read from here. And in the centre, lay flat across the white cloth, a dagger. Iron and bronze, the blade narrow and long, the hilt fashioned into the figure of Christ on a cross, the proportions of it perfectly balanced between weapon and sacrament. Even from ten feet away and with his brain still cotton thick, from whatever was in that pie, Shane can see it is very old and has been very carefully kept.
He jerks his wrists. The rope holds. His hands are bound together above him, wrists crossed and wrapped tight, the rope running up and over something in the ceiling he can't see from this angle, a beam, a hook maybe. His ankles are tied behind him and back to his wrists in a single continuous length, pulling his heels in toward his hands and keeping him bent on his knees, the position half-collapsed, his weight on the stone with no leverage to stand. He's naked. He notices this second, the full cold of the stone against his bare knees and shins, the air of the church against his chest and back, and his brain runs a fast, panicked inventory and confirms it: nothing, no clothes, not even socks, the full expanse of his pale freckled skin entirely exposed to the candlelight and the cold.
He pulls at the rope again, harder. His shoulders strain, his wrists grind together in the knot, and nothing moves at all.
Oh God. Oh no. Oh, absolutely not—
He tries to scream, and the sound comes out wrong, a wet, truncated noise behind the gag. There is something in his mouth. Silk, a cloth of some kind, is folded once and knotted tight at the back of his head, and his jaw is held slightly open by it, and he can push air around it, but he cannot form words, cannot make the scream that is building in his chest into anything that would carry past these walls.
He twists. He wrenches sideways, the rope at his wrists cutting into the skin, and rocks his weight to try and tip himself, and finds that the angle of his binding makes it impossible; he is held too close to kneeling, too close to the floor, his centre of gravity wrong for any direction except straight down. His toes press cold against the stone.
He knew it. He knew it, some part of him, the part that registered the medicinal smell under the woodsmoke, that part had known. He had walked in anyway. Had decided to come out to a traditional eastern orthodox Russian and then fucking eaten the food and listened to the story and accepted the dessert with his eyes already closing and his brain going soft at its edges, and he had been—
He hears whistling, barely a melody, more a continuous breath shaped into pitch. Shane jerks his head around and gets a glimpse of the aisle behind him before his bound wrists arrest the rotation, and he has to hold the position with his neck craning.
Ilya has taken off the jacket and the shirt. The tank top is all that's left from the waist up, white cotton, and in the candlelight and without the bulk of his outer layers, it is immediately, shockingly clear how large he is. Shane knew this at the door, but the jacket had softened it, had made it comprehensible. Without it: the width of his chest was large across the tank top, the size of his arms was even bigger where they hung loose at his sides, the way each muscle in his forearms moved visibly as his fingers flexed. He is enormous. Shane could maybe beat him in a fight, maybe and that’s with both hands and both legs.
In his right hand, hanging from his fist with its tails trailing the stone floor: a flogger. A rope flogger, the handle a thick knot of braided jute, the tails eight or ten lengths of the same rough rope falling to knee height, each one knotted at its end with a tight, hard bulb. He is dragging the tails behind him as he walks, drawing the knotted ends across the stone.
He rounds the pew at the end of the aisle and steps into the open space before the altar. He stops, facing the front of the church, and looks at the altar for a moment with his back to Shane. His shoulders expand on a long, slow breath. Then he turns around.
His face is blank. He looks at Shane on the floor at the foot of the altar like he has expected him for weeks, and there is, in his eyes, the faintest trace of something that Shane's brain, against every instinct of self-preservation, wants to call pity.
He steps forward. He widens his hands, both of them open, the flogger hanging from his right.
Shane screams. Or tries to, the gag turns it into a thick grunt, and he wrenches his wrists upward and drives forward against the rope and gets nowhere, the stone biting into his kneecaps, his bare heels jerking at the binding. He throws his weight sideways and back, and the rope holds, and he ends up exactly where he started, breathing hard through his nose, snot already tracking down to his upper lip, his freckled chest heaving.
Ilya watches all of it. When Shane's struggling has used itself up for a moment, he tilts his head.
"Shane Hollander," he says.
Shane's chest seizes. His mouth opens around the gag. How—
"I will tell you the rest of the Book of Jonah." He steps forward again, his loafers finding the seams between the flagstones. "God does not let Jonah die." He looks down at Shane with those pale eyes. "No." The whispers. "God does not let him die." He lets his head fall back on his neck, looking up at the black ceiling, and his throat moves as he swallows. "Jonah falls to his knees." He rolls the words out slowly, the same cadence he used at the dinner table. "He repents. He begs his Lord's forgiveness for refusing his will. And God forgives him." He brings his head back down. "Despite all of it. God forgives him."
Shane shakes his head hard. He pulls at the ropes until he can feel the burn of the jute starting at his wrist bones. "—mmph—" The gag muffles everything. He tries again, tries to form Ilya's name, if that even is his name, tries to form please, and gets neither.
"So Jonah builds his house," Ilya continues, "on that spot, with the hands God gave him. His own hands. And he vows—" He pauses,"—that any sinner who crosses him." He drags his tongue across his bottom lip. "Any sinner."
He stops in front of Shane. He looks down, the candlelight carving the shadows below his brows so deep his eyes are almost hidden. He crouches slowly, knees dropping, until he is at eye level, and his forearms rest on his knees. His face, this close, is completely unreadable.
"Shane." He says it gently. "Do you know about redemption?"
Shane shakes his head wildly, rocks backward, the rope pulls taut, and he screams into the gag again—
"In Deuteronomy." Ilya stands back up. He begins to move in a slow circle around Shane's kneeling figure, the flogger tails hissing across the stone behind him. "Chapter twenty-five, verse three. God commands—" His voice booms through the church. "'He may beat him, but no more than forty stripes lest he exceed this and beat him with many more stripes than these, and your brother be degraded in your sight.'" He pauses, completing the circle, arriving back in front of Shane. "Forty," he says, "is too many. Forty is, like, doing too much; it degrades the man." He tilts his head. "Thirty-nine is best."
He looks at the flogger in his hand. He looks at Shane.
"Thirty-nine men in Nineveh," he says, "thirty-nine lashes." He pauses. "You understand? Yes?" His eyes come back to Shane's face. "This is what I told you, at dinner. The thing inside you—" He lifts the flogger once and lets it drop. "It comes out."
He moves behind Shane.
The sound of the first strike arrives half a second before Shane's body processes it, the hiss of the rope tails coming down and the sharp, dense crack of the knotted ends landing across the full width of his upper back in a line, and then the sensation arrives in a wave, and Shane lurches forward against the wrist rope and yells into the gag, a full, ragged, horrified sound, his whole back contracting toward the impact.
It is not like he expected. He does not know what he expected. What he gets is a bloom of heat across his shoulders that starts sharp and spreads and spreads, the initial sting giving way to a throbbing pulse that hits every nerve in his back simultaneously, and he is still processing the first one when the second lands.
He screams. He screams with everything he has, the sound flattened and muffled against the silk, and wrenches sideways so hard his shoulder almost dislocates, and his kneecaps grind against the stone. The third lands before he has finished screaming for the second, and his whole body jackknifes, spine rounding, heels trying to reach his hands, every muscle pulling inward toward a centre that is rapidly, horribly awake.
"You like to run yes?" Ilya says, from behind him. The flogger hisses. The fourth lands lower than the third, catching the middle of Shane's back, and Shane chokes on a sob and his eyes stream openly. "Run and run and run. Like a hamster on wheel. Run from what you are. From what God made you." The fifth. Shane loses a sound somewhere between a grunt and a scream, his wrists grinding together in the rope, his fingers clenched white. "And you ended up, greshnik, exactly where God wanted you, regardless."
By the eighth, Shane is crying in full, heaving, wet, snotty, with his chin dropped and his mouth pulling wide around the gag. He wrenches against the rope on reflex with every landing, his whole upper body moving, and gets nowhere, and wraps the rope in his fists and hauls until the beam above him creaks.
The ninth lands directly across the back of his shoulder blades.
The tenth finds the small of his back, and Shane collapses forward over his own knees as far as the binding allows, his head dropping, his forehead nearly touching the stone, his throat working around the gag with the effort of the sob he cannot fully expel.
Ilya walks around to his left side and crouches.
Shane's eyes, wet and red-rimmed, find his face.
"Look at you," Ilya says. He is studying Shane, tilting his head in confusion. "You look at me like this, even here." He clicks his tongue once, soft. "Like a dog watching the person who feeds it." He stands. "Disgusting."
He brings the flogger down across Shane's thigh.
The shock, the new location, the unguarded skin of his outer thigh, drives a noise out of Shane that he has never heard come out of himself, a high, startled thing. The eleventh, same thigh. The twelfth across the other one. Shane is shaking now, a tremor that he can't stop, his teeth finding the fabric of the gag and pressing hard into it, his whole jaw clenching around it as if he can bite his way through the next one.
"You know what you are, come out of there." Ilya says, above him, moving again. He circles Shane with the flogger, taunting. "You have always known. You just prefer the lie." The thirteenth lands across his upper chest, high, where the skin is thinnest over his chest. "Shlyukha," Ilya says, conversationally. "A whore for a lie, even." The fourteenth, same place, the knotted ends catching the edge of his right pec. "What a waste."
By the fifteenth, something is changing.
His brain is still fully occupied with being terrified, with the hot, constant bloom of heat mapping itself across the full surface of his skin, with the wet mess of his face and the ache in his wrists. But his body…
The pain is still pain, the full, dense, present pain of fifteen painful whips, but it has begun to carry something underneath it, a low undertow that runs from each landing point inward and downward and pools between his burning thighs.
The sixteenth lands across the soft inner surface of his upper thigh, deliberately close, and Shane whimpers, and his cock—his cock, which has been pulled in and soft against his thighs for the last fifteen minutes of sheer terror—twitches.
No, he thinks, with complete clarity.
Seventeen hits the same place. The flogger tails hiss, and the knotted ends find the inner thigh, and Shane's cock twitches again, and this time it does not pull back.
"Oh." Ilya has noticed, his footsteps stop. "Oh," he says again, "Look at this." He crouches to Shane's right, his forearm resting on his own knee, and he looks at the slowly thickening length of Shane's blushed cock where it hangs between his thighs, and his expression resolves into contempt. "Look at what you are." He tilts his head. "I told you. I told you at dinner. Ty eto znayesh. You always knew."
Shane shakes his head hard. He makes a noise behind the gag that is meant to be no, that is meant to be this is not what this is, this is the adrenaline, the nervous system doesn't distinguish—
The eighteenth lands directly across his lap. The knotted tails catch the soft skin of his inner thighs and the underside of his cock simultaneously, and his hips lurch forward on pure reflex, and he groans into the gag.
"Whore," Ilya says, above him, without particular heat. As if it is just fact. He stands, moves behind Shane, and brings the nineteenth down across his back again, and the twentieth, and the twenty-first in quick succession, the pace picking up, and Shane's whole body is one continuous burning surface by now, and his cock is hard, properly hard, flushed dark and pulled against his stomach, leaking against him, and he can feel every heartbeat in it.
"You enjoy it," Ilya says, somewhere behind and above him. He does not stop. The twenty-second lands across the tops of his shoulders. "The lying.." Twenty-third hits his lower back. Shane's hips rock forward, and he cannot make himself stop doing it. "Even now, even here, you are enjoying it." Twenty-fourth, across the back of his thighs. "You want to shake your head at me." He says it without anger, without mockery. "Don't shake your head at me, Shane. I can see your cock."
Shane presses his forehead against his own bound arms and shudders. His face is a complete disaster of snot, tears, the accumulated mess of the last twenty minutes, and he doesn't care, he is past caring, his body has entirely taken over, and his brain is just trying to keep up. The shame is so sharp it is almost indistinguishable from the heat of the lashes. He is hard. He is hard in a church, bound on a stone floor, crying into a silk gag, with a huge Russian man he met three hours ago delivering the twenty-fifth strike across the backs of his thighs, and his cock jumps at the impact and taps his stomach, and a thread of precome runs down from the tip.
"Don’t cry over me," Ilya says. "Cry for your soul. Cry for all those years spent hiding what you are." The twenty-sixth. Shane keens, his hips rocking on nothing. "This is not wrong, what I do. This is what God asks of me." The twenty-seventh. "Every year you spent in that lie, every year rotting your spirit—" The twenty-eighth. "—built up." The twenty-ninth, hard, directly across the backs of both thighs, and Shane collapses forward again with a choked moan.
Ilya goes around in front of him again.
He looks down at Shane's cock. Shane watches his face from under his brows through his tear-blurred view and the fringe of his own wet lashes. Ilya's expression is measuring. Then he lifts his right foot and presses the sole of his loafer, slow and deliberate, against the underside of Shane's cock.
The leather is unyielding, and he grinds it down, and Shane's hips buck upward into it on pure reflex, seeking more.
"So you are truly nothing more than this," Ilya says. He applies more pressure, rotating the sole once. Shane's breath comes out in a broken, stuttering rush. "A fucking whore." He presses harder. "A faggot, yes? You are." He tilts his head. "Don't shake your head. You know that you are. Even now?" He looks at Shane's face, at his cock pressed under his shoe, at the precome that is running freely now, thin and clear, tracking down the side of the shaft and beading against the leather. "Even now, you are lying to yourself. Even now." He removes his foot. Shane's cock bobs free, and he makes a wretched noise of loss. "Even in the house of God. Even tied on your knees. You are lying. Blyat, this is not enough."
He steps back.
He throws the flogger against the stone beside him, and stands for a moment with both arms loose. Shane is panting. His whole body is alive, every inch of his back and thighs and chest an overlapping grid of impact points, and he can no longer feel the cold of the church floor. He can barely feel the stone under his knees. He is floating three inches above his own body and simultaneously more present in it than he has ever been in his life.
He loses consciousness. For a moment, two, and then he is back, gasping, his head snapping up, and Ilya is standing at the altar with his back to Shane.
He comes back with the dagger in his hand.
Shane's eyes go wide. He shakes his head, and the motion sends a new wave of tears down his face, and he finds Ilya's eyes and holds them and makes every sound the gag will let him—no, no, please, no—
"Greshnik." Ilya says it gently, holding up his free hand. The dagger is in his right hand, held flat, the crucifix-hilt resting in his palm. "Is okay, tears is okay." The corner of his mouth moves. "You will enjoy this part, I think."
He crouches in front of Shane.
He sets the flat of the blade against Shane's chest, cold iron against the skin, and he goes rigid. Ilya moves the blade, slowly, the flat edge dragging, and Shane watches it go, follows it with his eyes, cannot look away. "It will hurt a bit. But you have hurt yourself more than this." His eyes come up to Shane's face. He holds the gaze.
He makes the cut.
A single clean line from the right pec to the left, horizontal, pressing in enough to open the skin in a line of white that immediately flushes red, the blood rising in a seam, and Shane screams, the full sound slamming into the gag and coming out as a wail.
It hurts. It hurts more than anything the flogger did, nothing diffuse about it, just the one sharp line of it laid across his chest.
Ilya makes the second cut, downward, bisecting the first. A vertical line from the base of the horizontal cut toward his navel, shorter, forming a cross. Shane's vision goes white at its edges, and he drops forward against his own arms and shakes, his cock still hard and furious against his stomach, his chest stinging in two directions simultaneously.
Blood runs down his chest in twin tracks, thin and dark in the candlelight.
Ilya raises the dagger.
He brings the flat of the blade to his own tongue and draws it slowly; his eyes stay on Shane's face the entire time.
And Shane feels something.
From inside, deep inside, deeper than any dildo Shane has reached and every nerve ending below his navel fires simultaneously in a way that makes absolutely no sense because nothing is touching him there, nothing is near him there, there is nothing between his thighs but cold church air—
And yet.
The pressure is unmistakable. An insistent pushing that causes his hole to stretch, trying to accommodate something large pushing into him slowly from behind, and Shane's hips snap forward on pure reflex, trying to escape it or get away from it.
It doesn't stop.
It pushes. It seats itself in him, and something is inside him, filling him for the first time in his life, and he has thought about this, in the dark, in hotel rooms, with a hand over his mouth— he has thought about what this would feel like, and it is nothing like what he imagined because it is everywhere, in every direction simultaneously, filling up the whole hollow of his pelvis, pressing against the front wall in a way that sends a shock up his spine and makes his vision blur.
He groans.
And then it moves.
It withdraws, and Shane's whole body chases it backward, his hips rolling back, following the sensation, and it pulls almost all the way out, and then it drives forward again.
"Oh—" It comes out around the gag. "Oh God—oh—"
It thrusts in hard, it fills him all the way to the top of the stroke, so deep he feels it in his gut, behind his navel, pressing up into his chest cavity in a way that should be impossible and feels exactly right, and his cock, still flushed and wet, jumps between his thighs and smears precome against his stomach.
Thrusting, in and out, in and out. A rhythm building at a punishing pace, and Shane's hips are moving with it now, forward on the inward stroke, rocking with it, his whole ass given over to meeting something that isn't there, grinding against the air, and his moans are these embarrassingly high, punched out, continuous sounds.
The angle changes.
On the next drive, it catches his prostate, grinds against it, and the sensation runs up through Shane's body, from his pelvis to his chest to the back of his skull, and his knees lift off the stone, and his spine arches, and he screams into the gag.
With every stroke, it finds that point. Every stroke.
His cock is leaking in a continuous thread. He can feel the pulse of it on every inward drive, the way the thickness inside him squeezes outward, forces precome from him in slow, persistent pulses, the head of him tapping his stomach, leaving a wet smear each time his hips roll. His thighs are shaking. His whole body is shaking, and he cannot hold his own weight anymore, the rope above him is doing it, his wrists taking his full bodyweight as his legs give, and the rope digs in, and the pain of it mixes with the thrusting inside of him, and he cannot distinguish them.
"Da." Ilya brings the flogger down.
"There." The thirtieth strike lands across his shoulders, and whatever is fucking him drives to its deepest point, as though the two sensations are synchronized, as though Ilya is fucking him, and Shane's whole body convulses, his cock jerking hard, a long pulse of precome arcing off the tip and spattering the stone.
"Give it to me. Everything you've been carrying."
He is moaning. He is openly, continuously moaning around the gag, each sound shaped around the thrust, and he rolls his pelvis to open himself further.
The thirty-first hits him, he is fucked even deeper, and Shane feels it move all the way up through him, the tip of it pressing somewhere soft behind his ribs.
The thirty-second. It thrusts in even harder.
"Good boy." Ilya’s accent thickens. "Take it. Take what I give you."
He is being fucked through himself. Through the stone floor and through the church and into the cold mountain earth underneath it, all the way down, and he wants to go further, wants to be pinned here, wants to be held exactly here, split and full and overlit with sensation, wants Ilya's flogger and this thing inside him, all of it, and the wanting is so total it has replaced the shame entirely—
The thirty-fifth, thirty-sixth, and thirty-seventh, thirty-eight.
Shane whines for more.
And then something else rises. From the base of his stomach. Nausea. A deep, rolling nausea, it rises fast, and Shane's throat fills, and he lifts his head and looks at Ilya with his eyes wide and dark and desperate, and his whole face says I'm going to be sick—
Ilya reads it.
He steps forward. He lurches back and hits the final one, the thirty-ninth, and Shane's body arches up against it, and he drops the whip and crouches directly in front of Shane to pull the gag from his mouth with one sharp tug.
Shane's jaw drops open, and he gasps, a full, raw, drowning pull of air, then his stomach heaves, and he chokes.
Ilya's hands go to his belt. He unfastens it with two practiced movements, and his trousers fall open, causing to his suspenders to drop off each shoulder, and he pulls himself free of his boxers. He is huge, hard, the full length of him enormous, and he cups the back of Shane's skull in one large hand.
"You want to vomit." His voice is wrecked. "Yes?"
"Yes—" Shane chokes, "yes, yes—please—"
"Khoroshiy."
He guides Shane's mouth onto him.
Shane's lips part and Ilya pushes in and keeps going, his cock feeding past Shane's teeth and down his tongue and then further, all the way, until Shane's nose is pressed flat against the coarse blond hair of his groin and Ilya's stomach is against his face and there is no air, there is nothing.
And the phantom that has been fucking him goes deeper.
His eyes roll back.
His body seizes, his hips drive forward against nothing, and his cock begins to pulse, and the orgasm hits him hard, spurt after spurt of cum arcing from him in long jerking pulses, landing on the stone, on his own thighs, on Ilya's trouser leg. Shane is shuddering through it and cannot stop, the pleasure so large it has absorbed the pain, the cold, the fear, the shame, everything—
And at the same moment, Ilya pulls back.
The cock withdraws and Shane's mouth opens fully and his throat convulses and he vomits; black, dark, almost viscous, nothing digestible in it, nothing from the stew or the pie, just this ancient dark substance that comes up and up and up from somewhere deeper than his stomach, splashing the stone floor in a spreading pool that his cum has already met, the two things mingling, and Shane heaves again and more comes, and his vision is going at the edges, the candlelight narrowing to a tunnel.
His body is weightless.
The candles burn down around them.
Shane does not know if he will get up.
He does not know if he will find his clothes, find his car, find the road. He does not know what he has expelled or what has taken its place. He knows the stone is very cold and Ilya's hands are very warm and the cross on his chest is still bleeding, slowly, and the candlelight is doing something to the plain glass windows that makes them look, from this angle, like gold.
He has never felt this. Not after jerking off, not after he won the cup, not after anything, an undeniable lightness, everything in his body released simultaneously, as though he had put down something he was carrying so long he had forgotten the weight of it.
He is falling.
"Woah woah woah, Shane." The hands catch him. One under his chin, large and warm, tipping his face upward. One at his throat, the palm of it spread across his neck just below his jaw. His head lolls back and Ilya holds it up.
Ilya exhales. "Khoroshiy," he says softly. "Khoroshiy. Good job." His thumb sweeps across Shane's cheekbone, wiping through the black residue at the corner of his mouth. "Good job, you did a good job." He says the English version of it, as it matters more, like he wants Shane to understand it in his own language. He crouches lower, his knees on the stone, and his other hand moves to Shane's shoulder.
Shane's eyes are open. Barely. The lids are heavy, and his focus is imprecise but he can see Ilya's face from here, close, the bright blue eyes looking at him.
Ilya leans forward.
He kisses him, Ilya's mouth against his is warm and tastes of blood, and he does not pull back immediately; he stays there, his hands still on Shane's face and throat, holding him. His mouth moves, and Shane's cracked lips part, and he lets him in.
The candles burn down around them.
Shane does not know if he will get up.