Page 63 of Captured By the Pakhan

"That's the most infuriating sentence anybody has ever said to me."

"Yes."

"Say the thing."

He tells me.

It takes about ninety seconds. He is completely matter-of-fact about it — what it involves, what it does, what it feels like, the fact that it will not scar and will not burn and that he has done it before and knows precisely what he is doing. He tells me the parts that are non-negotiable: that he will test every single one on his own forearm first, that nothing goes anywhere near my face or my hands, that there is a bowl of water within reach at all times and I will see him put it there.

And then he says the last part, which is the only part that isn't practical.

"You will not be able to see," he says. "That is the point of it. Everything you do is watching — you count exits in a room you have been in forty times, you read the ink on a man in a hotel, you have looked at every single person in this house and worked out what they are for. You do not stop. I have never once seen you stop." He lets my wrist go. "So I'm offering you an hour in which you are not able to."

I stand in his study.

"An hour," I say.

"Go upstairs."

I go upstairs.

I sit on the edge of the bed for eleven minutes with my hands flat on my knees, and I do not think about it at all, because there's nothing to think about, because I knew the answer while he was still talking and the eleven minutes are a formality I'm observing out of respect for the fact that he made me take them.

Then I go and find him and say yes.

He does it properly, which I should have known.

The blindfold is soft and goes on before anything else, and the first thing that happens is that the room goes from a place I have mapped to a place I have to take on trust, and my whole body has an opinion about that which takes several minutes to argue with.

He ties my hands. Above my head, to something, and there is a lot of very deliberate slack in it — enough that I'm not stretched, enough that I can move, not enough that I can reach. It's a good tie. It's a very good tie, and somewhere under everything else there's a small professional part of me noting the quality of the work.

"Water," he says, "on the nightstand to your right." Something sets down beside my head. "Do you hear where that is?"

"Yes."

"Good."

And then nothing happens for a very long time.

That's the first thing he does, and it's the cruellest — nothing. I lie in the dark listening to a man move quietly around a room, and my skin goes to a state I don't have a word for, every nerve in my body trying to work out where he is and where he's going to be, and by the time he actually touches me I'm so far ahead of myself that his hand flat on my sternum makes me arch off the mattress entirely.

"There," Ilya says, with enormous satisfaction. "That is what I wanted."

"You bastard⁠—"

"Mm."

Then the first drop.

It lands two inches below my collarbone and my entire body goes rigid — not pain, that's the thing nobody tells you, it isn't pain at all. It's heat, absolute and specific and unbelievably localised, a single point of information in a body that has been screaming for information for ten minutes, and my brain grabs it like a drowning thing.

I make a noise I have never made.

"Again?"

"Yes."

He works down. Slowly, and with the same appalling patience he used with the feather, and I lose the thread of time about four minutes in.