Page 107 of Captured By the Pakhan

"I'm — " I have to find them, which is hard, and that's the point. "I'm all right, I want more, and if you stop now I will personally⁠—"

"That will do," Ilya says, and I hear something in his voice that isn't composed at all.

It goes on a long time.

Long enough that the wax on my collarbone has gone hard and cool while there is still fresh landing on my hip, and the difference between the two — the cold plates and the live heat, on the same body, at the same time — is a thing I have no equipment for.

And then he stops.

He sets something down. He moves. I hear him settle beside me, and I am lying there entirely overloaded, breathing like I have run up a hill, waiting for the pressure of a hand — because that is what happened last time, that is what the ending is: he puts his hands on me, and I go off like something being switched.

He doesn't.

There is a noise I recognize and cannot immediately place.

And then the feather touches the inside of my wrist.

I come off the bed.

Completely — my whole back arches and I make a noise I have genuinely never made in my life, because after forty minutes of heat, a single fine line of almost-nothing isn't less. It isn't gentler. It is the same information arriving through a door that has been kicked off its hinges, and there is no part of me left that can absorb it.

"Ilya—"

"Don't move," he says, and he is enjoying himself enormously, and I can hear it.

"I can't — that isn't — you cannot⁠—"

"You asked me for this."

"I've changed my mind⁠—"

The feather stops instantly.

Everything stops. The mattress shifts and his hand comes near my face, not touching, and his voice is completely different.

"Say it properly."

And I am laughing, wrecked, half sobbing, blindfolded and tied to a bedframe covered in cooled wax.

"No — no, I haven't, I meant it as a — keep going, keep going, I'm sorry, that was an expression of speech⁠—"

"That," Ilya says, "was very poorly chosen phrasing."

"I'm aware."

"Do not do it again."

"I won't."

"Raven."

"I won't. Please keep going. Please."

And he does.

He takes it over the wax first — the cool, hardened plates, where I cannot feel it at all, so there isn't anything but the knowledge of where it is — and then over the bare skin between them, which is raw and overloaded and has had forty minutes of heat on it. The contrast between those two things about eleven inches apart remains genuinely unbearable.

I lose track of everything.