The Flesh Cartel #3: Choices

stop hating it. But you will know your place. I will teach you that much.”
Mathias blinked. Blinked again. Nikolai knew that look—that desperate confusion, that terror, that unwillingness to believe what the senses were perceiving, that fierce hope it was all a dream, that it would end soon, that they were mistaken. He reached out once more, cradled Mathias’s head in both hands, and pressed a kiss to his forehead. Mathias was too confused to recoil from him. “I’m sorry,” he whispered into Mathias’s ear. “But business is business, you understand. Your life will never be happy, but your time here needn’t be so harsh. I do hope you’ll let me help you as much as I’m allowed.”
Mathias said nothing, but then, Nikolai hadn’t expected him to. He rocked back on his heels. Stood. Deliberately turned his back to Mathias, just to see what he’d do. “Now come,” he said when nothing happened. “We’ve much work to do. Best to get started.”
He took four steps down the hall and paused again, disappointed but not at all surprised that Mathias hadn’t risen to follow him. He stopped, turned back, let his disappointment show on his face. “Passive resistance is a choice I’ll never stop you from making,” he said. Mathias blinked up at him, so very weary, so clearly waiting for the other shoe to drop. “But as I said before, choices have consequences. It will always be in your hands to decide—within reason—if the consequences are more or less distasteful to you than the order you’ve been given. But know that I will not start easy; it’s a disservice to you, you see, to keep you from understanding just how bleak the consequences can be. So I’ll ask you one more time: will you come under your own power?”
Mathias met his gaze, let his head loll against the door, and closed his eyes.
Nikolai sighed and went to fetch the guards. Well, this was to be expected, he supposed. But he’d not tolerate a wild animal in his personal living space, and he’d not tolerate disobedience either. And neither, he was certain, would his client, despite the man’s desire for a little token pushback.
The guards were quick—and disgustingly eager—to collect his new charge. When they picked Mathias up and began to drag him bodily across the foyer, his eyes locked on the steel plug.
Nikolai smiled mirthlessly. “No, we won’t be using that again, at least not for a while. You’re of no value to anyone with a ruined body. I have something more logical . . . and simultaneously much, much worse in mind.”
The fear in Mathias’s eyes eased, but the man would learn to distrust his own sense of relief soon enough.
For now, Nikolai let him keep his illusions, and they left the front hall and the wicked plug behind. The ground-level portion of the house was its public face, not that Nikolai entertained many guests: only the occasional client or fellow trainer. But keeping up the appearance of normality was necessary just in case. He hated the necessity of walking untrained animals through these halls, filthy and likely to piss on the rug as they were, but oh how he looked forward to the day when he could bring them back up again as proper pets.
Never Mathias, he reminded himself. Mathias would go to the basement now, and would return to the ground floor only on his way out again. Never to be trusted, or loved, or brought pampered to his bed upstairs. The upstairs—Nikolai’s private rooms, his sanctuary—was locked to everyone but him and a trusted few.
Poor bastard.
The basement. His workspace. Accessible by all manner of hidden doors and stairwells— today’s choice a secret panel set into the wall of a small storeroom—most of them known only to him, whatever dead man had been the architect of this place, and the man he’d inherited it from. Windowless. Soundproof.
As they descended the narrow, twisting stair, he wondered if these secret ways and rooms had always been used for the purpose he put them to now, or if it had a different pedigree. Illegal gambling? Smuggling? They were so far from everything here, he couldn’t imagine a drug trade or import/export or the pale, disgusting shadow of his own work with unsuspecting women trafficked in from the Third World and sent to work for cheap pimps. Why had he never asked his mentor when he’d had the chance?
Other things on my mind then, I suppose. They’d had so little time together, all things considered.
And really, did the place’s past