Burn this City by Aleksandr Voinov

21

Pure exhaustion pulled Jack under like a heavy, warm wave of nothing. He didn’t, as a rule, remember his dreams. When he did, they were anxiety laden and all about having to be somewhere, but nobody had told him where, and the geography around him kept shifting until nothing made sense anymore. If it had been that dream again, that would have made sense, since that had bizarrely become his reality. But no.

Instead, his subconsciousness served up a gallery of hazy erotic scenes, and all the particulars evaporated when Jack awoke with a start, convinced he heard water sloshing around him. Being awake and aware meant being in pain again—his lungs felt as if they’d been scoured with barbed wire, and his chest and throat ached as though he’d been punched multiple times.

Rausa sat by the side of the bed and looked like he’d been there for a while, which gave Jack goosebumps. He tried to move his hands, but the ties were too short to do anything useful with them, so he rubbed his face. It was dark outside, the house calm and gloomy. The only illumination from the lamp on the far nightstand, and some golden light pouring in from the living room.

When he stayed here, Jack did his best to sleep in the middle of the bed, but the previous owners had liked their space—or maybe their orgies—and it was simply impossible to fill out a king size all by himself, especially since the bed he used most in town was a normal double. If felt like there was too much space that he had never claimed and didn’t know how to. Not a problem he’d continue to have, though.

“If I let you make a phone call, who would you call? Beth?”

Jack tensed—had she called? Rausa shouldn’t have been able to answer it without a password, but maybe he’d figured out a way into his phone. Maybe he’d somehow accessed the voicemail. Shit, maybe he’d called her? How much did he know?

“She’s a friend. And she isn’t part of any of this. She’s just a friend.” Shit, he was babbling. But seeing Rausa’s face so close, and almost feeling the heat from his body, maybe babbling was natural. He should just have mercy on his vocal cords and shut up.

“A friend or pet?”

“What?”

“Answer my question. What does a guy like you have to do with a woman like that?”

“You talked to her?”

“I did.” Rausa cracked a half-smile. “And I’m curious.”

Oh God.“I helped her out. She attached herself to me, God knows why. I don’t mind her. We’ve become friends, but she knows nothing. She thinks I’m a consultant.”

“Shit.” Rausa chuckled. “You’re pretty good, but clearly addled.”

“Did you threaten her?”

Rausa stood. “After we played submarine, you scoffed at the idea that it was actually the nicer option. But it was, because the alternative would have been to send a couple of men to pick up sweet little Beth at home and bring her to a nice, quiet place with good soundproofing. Then transmit the video for us to watch together live. Four or five mean guys can break a woman like that down in a couple hours at most.”

With her history, one guy could break her down in half an hour or less.Jack’s stomach clenched so hard he felt ready to throw up at the suggestion, and his face grew numb. “You don’t have any fucking idea what she’s been through.”

“Life’s a bitch, Jack. We both know that better than most.”

Yeah, maybe. They surely weren’t good Samaritans. Neither of them would have gotten where without stepping on people to make money. Both of them needed to be respected, and that could easily involve teaching somebody to be respectful who hadn’t been so inclined at the start. But people like Beth weren’t a threat to anybody. The best Jack could have done was help her back on her feet and then cut off all contact. And yet not even twenty-four hours before, he’d been willing to pull her into all this darkness. Where she would have met sharks like Rausa. And all to save his own neck.

Jack gathered himself, breathed deeply a few times to test his lungs. It hurt, and there was a tickle in his bronchi, but the worst of the coughing seemed past. “But you’re right. I’d rather you do this shit to me than to her.”

“What? You want to spend a couple hours getting gang-raped?” Rausa said it jokingly, but there was calculation in his eyes.

Jack swallowed. “You know exactly what I mean.”

“I do. But you should remember that, yes, I’m playing nice right now, but not for a lack of imagination or resources.” Rausa reached for his belt, freed the multi-tool from its holster and unfolded it.

“Why play nice? I’m a dead man, surely. And we both know I’m not going to haunt your conscience. Especially with all the dying that’s going to happen on both sides when your war starts. The dying you’re apparently itching for.” Shit, he was getting angry, and he was way too exposed to backlash. “Listen, you can still turn around. You can still stop this.”

“And you’ll sit across from me at the negotiation table and remember how I almost killed you a few times?” Rausa placed one side of the multi-tool precisely against the zip cuff that held the restraints around Jack’s wrists. “And pretend nothing happened?”

“If that’s what it takes.” Jack tried to meet the other man’s gaze, but couldn’t quite. He had no idea how he’d live in the same city as Sal Rausa after everything that had happened. If he survived this in spite of the odds, the first thing he’d do was call Beth and tell her to leave Port Francis and the state, to change her name and her appearance and never try to call or contact him ever again.

The second thing he’d do was activate Plan B and prepare his own retirement. It would involve some play-acting for Andrea’s benefit and the rest of the organization, and a couple days in a hospital to recover from a “heart attack” or similar—he was pretty sure he could talk to a friendly doctor about how to appear unfit for work. That way, Andrea wouldn’t think he’d sold him to the Feds or worse. Except of course, Plan B looked shaky at best now.

“Maybe I’ve come to respect you, Jack Barsanti. You’re old-fashioned as fuck, but you’re smart and strong.”

Jack blinked, shocked that Rausa would say such a thing. Then again, he could be magnanimous because he held all the cards. Easy to talk up an enemy you could easily dispose of. It meant nothing. Still. Maybe he could use it somehow. “Leave Beth alone. Please. Even after I’m gone. Leave her in peace.”

“Dying man’s wish?” Rausa snapped the plastic in two places and picked up the cuff when it fell. He stuffed it into his thigh pocket, but kept the multi-tool in one hand.

“I guess. When you kill me, obviously I won’t care anymore, but—fuck, please. She’s never harmed anyone.” Appealing to Sal Rausa’s softer side felt like begging a tiger, but maybe that “respect” he claimed to feel gave Jack a foothold.

Rausa’s eyes darkened. He holstered the multi-tool and pressed the metallic button down with a soft click, then sat down on the bed and placed a large strong hand flat on Jack’s chest, fingers splayed. “You can take this the wrong way, Jack, but you’re really fucking hot when you beg.”

For a few heart-pounding moments, Jack was completely speechless. Nobody had ever dared touch him like that. Well, not true. There had been an incident when a man in a bar in Las Vegas had groped him—luckily he’d been alone, so all he’d done was turn around and push the guy away. There had been other unsubtle moves from a number of men over the years, but Jack treated them with the same indifference as he’d always responded to women. Though with women at least he didn’t have to worry about witnesses thinking he’d somehow invited the attention. If any of his men had doubts about Jack’s masculinity, it’d never been whispered loud enough to hear.

This now, this … he didn’t have a frame of reference for this. The same man who’d threatened the one innocent on the planet that Jack cared about, the same man who laconically called drowning “playing submarine” and promised to kill Jack after all of this was over, just touched him like this, demonstratively, provocatively. More than that, he’d halfway untied Jack before he did it. The same who casually told him he fucked his capo but also shook with rage when he’d talked about his dead wife. As cunning as Rausa was, his emotions were … raw. Pure. Powerful.

All his life, Jack had learned over and over again that emotions were a weakness. The old consigliere had offered only one piece of advice: don’t ever blink. And in prison, if he’d shown fear or weakness, or just how much those walls had been closing in on him, everybody in there would have seen it, smelled it on him. And the same back when he’d been a capo. Had he lain awake at night and tied himself in knots about making one of his big plays, the gambles and schemes that had recommended him as consigliere in the first place? He sure as hell had. Other made men could fuck and snort and drink that tension away, but Jack had always known the moment his senses blurred, and his control slipped, that darker truth about him could come out, so he never let it happen.

“You’re really fucking hot when you beg.”

Ears ringing, he rolled fully onto his back, hands lifted so they didn’t touch Rausa’s. It was hard to breathe underneath that touch. His body responded to the contact, the heat, the promise of pleasure, even though Jack tried to hold onto the fact that “the promise of pleasure” was really only an absence of fresh pain right now. If he did invite more of this, exploited what seemed like attraction from Sal Rausa, could he gain any control of the situation? He knew from his job that a lot of men got themselves into trouble for sex.

Sal Rausa was attractive, and Jack’s own body was interested; there was no need to fake anything. But would he be able to ignore the fact that Rausa was his torturer, maybe his executioner, and get past the fear of him? Could he loosen his self-control enough to allow himself to use sex as leverage? Exactly how he was meant to do that when he’d never used sex for anything? How to seduce a man when all of this was new territory? His experience so far was comprised of resisting any attempts at seduction, so not much help there.

What if Sal Rausa turned the tables on him and humiliated Jack further? If Jack tried this, he was committed, and there was no way to back out. Rausa would then have the power to hurt him in totally new ways. It didn’t matter. If Rausa wanted to fuck him, he would, whether Jack was willing or not. But Jack couldn’t resist the hope to gain just a scrap of leverage.

“You want to hear me beg again?”

“Yeah.” Rausa gave him a lop-sided grin, a dangerous glimmer in his eyes.

“Please leave Beth alone. She’s not—”

“Enough. Stop talking about her. It’s messing with my boner, Jesus.” Rausa chuckled. “Sorry, but she’s not my type. You don’t fuck small birds that have fallen from their nest. You just don’t.”

One thing they could agree on, Jack assumed. “She’s had it pretty rough.”

“I said, stop talking about her.” Rausa’s voice was low and held no edge, but the authority was still there. Interesting to witness Rausa wield a much quieter power than brute force. “We both know you don’t want to fuck her. Or any other woman.”

Jack swallowed and said nothing. He couldn’t imagine how Rausa knew that. Maybe because a red-blooded male responded differently? He should shove Rausa away in anger, insult him and his lineage, but he found himself quite mesmerized by that single point of contact.

Rausa winked at him. “And always thinking. You’re never not thinking.”

“Not thinking is dangerous,” Jack said quietly.

“In the big picture, you couldn’t be in more danger than this.” Rausa slowly moved his hand to the side, to cover Jack’s left pec, brushing over his nipple. The sensation was a sharp dart through his body, soothed by the slowly moving heat.

Jack should use his elbow to push the hand away. This touch was more than a simple squeeze of his ass, or a wink, or a number scribbled on a paper napkin. Strangely, now Jack wished he’d been more reckless in the past, so at least he would die knowing what it felt like. But even more than that, he hadn’t realized how much he’d longed for touch—a friendly one, or a deliberate one, rather than an accidental or threatening one. The intensity of this caress was unbearable—Rausa this close, watching him, maybe truly seeing him.

“You’re never not thinking.”

How ironic, maybe, that of all people in the world, Rausa would be the one to recognize him.

“Does Andrea know about you?”

Jack tried to keep his face neutral, because the whole trajectory of the conversation was disturbing, yet he couldn’t think of a way to change it. “Know what?”

Rausa squeezed his nipple between two fingers and Jack jerked involuntarily. “I can’t quite figure out what you are, Jack Barsanti, but you’re not straight. And not quite vanilla either.”

“Are you fucking saying I enjoyed drowning?”

Rausa regarded him with amusement and a strange heat in his eyes. “Anger. Always good. You heard what I said.”

The truth was, Rausa was possibly right. Jack found himself unable to tear himself out of this situation, and, heaven help him, he liked the touch too much. The mix of pleasure and that lingering fear of death had twisted his brain and slowed him down.

“Where do you think this is going?” Jack asked.

“Unlike you, I’m following my gut.” Rausa slowly moved his hand across to Jack’s right pec, and the deliberateness made Jack nearly squirm. He was glad there were two layers of cloth between Rausa’s fingers and his skin—without those, he’d be losing his mind.

“You must have a plan?”

“Big picture stuff right now.” Rausa grinned at him. “Though, honestly, I wish I had more time with you. I’ll be annoyed to have to smash up a half-solved puzzle box.”

Annoyed. That was one way of phrasing it. He’d be annoyed when he killed Jack. He had to focus on that. Death. Not Rausa’s touch. Rausa was mocking and manipulating him, using that one weakness against him, and what a weakness it was. The old consigliere had been right—emotion and losing his nerve were the two things that could unmake him, in more senses than one. But dragging himself back from the precipice took everything Jack had and he wasn’t even sure why he should. Falling could be so easy.

If he could let himself do it, maybe he could reverse this situation, get under Sal Rausa’s skin, though that seemed like a terrifying place to be. But with death so close, there was no point denying himself one selfish pleasure—feeling what it was like with a man, feeling all of it, hunger, need, hell, even desire. Everything else was decided, everything he’d sacrificed that part of himself for was gone now, stripped away.

Rausa re-centered his hand on Jack’s sternum, and then slid it further down, to where the hard cage of bones ended and only muscle protected him. From here, angled upward, a knife would stab him right in the heart. Judging by the gleam in Rausa’s eyes, he knew that too.

“I can’t tell whether you’re turned on or scared or both, but your heart’s racing like hell.”

Jack swallowed but didn’t dare to look away or close his eyes. “I got no answer.”

“It wasn’t a question.” Rausa chuckled and that slight vibration went right into Jack’s chest. His hand traveled lower, and Jack’s muscles tensed. He had to stop this, needed to stop it, but Rausa knew, damn him.

Rausa moved to straddle Jack’s knees without removing his hand. He was momentarily unbalanced, and Jack might have been able to kick him away since his legs were free, but he couldn’t move. Didn’t want to. His tied wrists were almost tucked under his chin, an awkward compromise between avoiding touching Sal’s hand and making himself more vulnerable by placing them above his head.

“Do you … do you this to everyone after tying them up?”

Rausa laughed. “My God, so coy. If I thought you did that on purpose …” He put the other hand on Jack’s hip. “I’d say you were doing it to turn me on.”

“Coy? Fuck you. You tortured me.”

“Yep, I did. And this is different.” Rausa’s hand moved to his groin, but his touch became lighter, using just a couple of fingers to trace the outline of Jack’s cock. Jack squirmed, torn between outraged and not nearly enough. He’d briefly entertained doing this as leverage, but the truth was that Rausa had the upper hand in this game too. He could do whatever he wanted, fuck him, rape him, ask his two friends to join, hell, call a few more friends while he was at it, and Jack had nothing.

“This isn’t a fear erection, Jack. I’m not going to flatter myself and think this is specifically for me, but right now I’m the only guy who can do something about it.”

“What are you … what’s your game? Humiliate me before you put a bullet in my head?”

Rausa’s features darkened. “Is that all you’re feeling? Humiliated?”

Exhilarated, scared, turned on, embarrassed. To start. “You’re going to kill me. I’ve accepted that. So it’s really fucking hard to get into this, if that’s what you want. You’re just torturing me again.” Jack realized he was nearly panting.