Page 64 of Captured By the Pakhan

Because it does something I'm not prepared for. Every drop takes everything I have — the whole of me, the entire apparatus, every ounce of the thing in my head that never stops running — and puts it in one square centimetre of skin. And for the second and a half that it lasts, there is nothing else. No Danesi. No corridor. No four hundred photographs, no warrant, no nine years, no plan.

Nothing.

He tests each one on his own forearm first. I hear it every time — the pause, the small sound of it, and then the drop — and after the fifth or sixth time the sound of him testing becomes its own thing entirely, and by the end I'm reacting harder to the pause than to the wax.

Somewhere in the middle he stops.

Not because I said anything. He just stops, and the room goes quiet, and I feel him lean over me.

"Raven."

"Don't you dare."

"Answer me."

"I'm fine, I'm—" and I hear my own voice and it is not a voice I recognise, it's shredded, and I have to start again. "Green. Whatever the word is. Keep going."

"There is no word. There is you telling me, in English, in your own voice."

"Then keep going. Please keep going."

He keeps going.

And when he finally puts his hands on me — after all of it, after however long it is, when every inch of me is so overloaded that a palm is nearly unbearable — I go off like something being switched on and off again, twice, and the second one takes the whole room away.

Afterward he takes it off me himself.

That's the part I'll think about for weeks. He does not let me help and he does not rush it — he sits beside me and peels every piece of cooled wax off, slowly, with his fingers, one at a time, and puts them in a bowl. Then a cloth, warm, over all of it. Then the blindfold, which he takes off last, and the light in the room has been turned right down because he thought about that in advance.

He unties my hands and rubs my wrists between both of his, which do not need rubbing, and he does it anyway for about two minutes.

I'm completely non-verbal for a while. He doesn't fill it.

Eventually I get an arm across his chest and my face somewhere under his jaw and I lie there, wrecked, warm, emptied out entirely, with a man's hand moving slowly up and down my spine.

And because I'm not in my right mind, and because there is nothing at all left in me holding anything back, I say it.

"I love you."

Out loud. Into his throat. In a bedroom in Los Angeles at half past midnight.

Everything stops.

His hand stops on my back. His breathing stops. The entire man goes rigid underneath me and stays that way, and the silence gets longer and longer and longer —

— and I shut my eyes and let my breathing go slow and heavy and even, the way it goes when a person is asleep.

It takes about four seconds for him to buy it.

I feel him let it out. I feel the hand start moving again on my back, careful now, and I feel him settle, and after a minute he says something in Russian into my hair, very quietly, three or four words.

And I lie there with my eyes shut and my heart going like a hammer, faking sleep in the arms of a Pakhan, and he lets me.

He lets me.

Which means he knows.

Chapter 17