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RAHIL

Rahil’s sun-poisoning symptoms had faded since becoming entangled, but he was not sure what his nerves were attempting at this point. His heart pounded and his breathing was shallow, the back of his mind fighting away the thoughts of a slow, terrible death. And then there was his dick, doing things. Not a lot of the thing, thankfully, but enough to tell him it was fully prepared to offer far more if the circumstances allowed.

And Rahil thought, maybe, just for a moment, that if this man was the one who would kill him, that would be all right, actually.

“Huh,” Merc replied.

Because he was Merc. He had to be, just as tall and broad as his profile pictures but wielding that weight with a presence that was unavoidable in real life, the physicality of him a breathtaking thing that seemed to fill the room as fully as his rich, sweet scent, dragging Rahil’s gaze even as the man stepped cautiously around Rahil’s suspended body. It was harder to focus on the butcher’s knife in his hands when his dark eyes were there, staring at Rahil with a hard skepticism that tightened Merc’s thick but manicured brows and pinched the mole beside his nose. The thrum of Merc’s blood through his neck sounded like music to Rahil’s ears, a delicate song that made him salivate.

Rahil was not easily embarrassed, with his stereotypical vampire dress and his flamboyantly cheesy flirting—and he could no longer count all the people who’d seen him naked. But here, now, he was oddly conscious of the way his low-cut shirt had fallen over one shoulder during his entangling, the ruffles fluttering around his dark nipples and the smooth surface of his abs visible, his long, unbound hair draping like a veil behind him. He was conscious of something else as well.

“I know how this must look, but I swear it’s just a happy coincidence.” He tried to laugh at the end, but the knife Merc was still pointing at him turned the sound a bit too uncomfortable to be humorous.

“So, you’re not stalking me?” Merc sounded unconvinced. He stepped forward, and his blade lifted towards Rahil’s exposed chest.

Rahil wiggled on instinct, but the bindings only tightened again, the cords around his arm and one thigh growing painful. He forced himself to still, to just breathe. To not think about how close he was to death or how damn hot Merc was while threatening him. A tiny whimper still left him, something halfway between pathetic and turned on. “I really had no idea you lived here.”

He could feel the blade now, pressed against the base of his sternum with enough force that Rahil had to quiet his lungs, his whole body rigid. When Merc held his gaze, he thought he might fall into it. Fall and never get up again. “If you have come to threaten or steal from me…”

“I just needed out of the sun,” Rahil whispered, staring back like his life depended on it.

Merc grunted. He glared for another moment, then slowly withdrew the blade.

Rahil took his first full breath since the man had walked in. The comfort of it felt worse, somehow, than the depths of Merc’s attention. “Though if there was anyone worth stalking, it would be you.”

My god, had he just said that?

He had just said that.

Maybe he deserved to die, actually.

Merc turned back towards him with the same stony ferocity as before, and it felt like the deep shadow of night falling over Rahil’s sun-poisoned skin.

Rahil swallowed. “I’d be so very grateful if you didn’t kill me.”

That finally shocked a new reaction out of the man: confusion and then horror. Merc set the butcher’s knife on the bench below his assortment of equally terrifying looking tools and blades. “Why the hell would I kill you?”

Rahil raised a brow. He fought the urge to twist his arm where the cords now bit in overly tightly. “What else is this shed for, if not torturing unsuspecting vampires?”

Merc made a sound that might have been a laugh, gruff and tight and breathtaking. “I’m a craftsman. A metalsmith, primarily. A little carpentry, too, and some glass blowing when I get the chance.”

“Oh,” Rahil sassed, like he wasn’t tied up at a stranger’s mercy. “That’s a perfectly good reason to have a variety of sharp instruments all in a row.”

“Were you afraid I was going to stick one of them in you?”

“Depends on which end you plan to stick…” Rahil definitely deserved to die. If his family’s god was not preparing to smite him at that very moment, there was clearly no justice in the world.

Merc seemed to take it infinitesimally better, lifting one stoic brow at him. “You really are just like this?”

“A stupid, irrevocable flirt with no brain-to-mouth filter? Yes.” If nothing else, he would die how he lived: a terror. “And you are really just hot. Well, not just hot. I could offer many other synonyms.”

The effect of the statement on Merc was to raise his other brow. Then he lowered both. “At least that’s settled,” he said.

“Does that mean you’ll fuck me?” He knew the answer, but it was still worth a shot.

Merc sighed. “R. BabyCock—is that really your name?”

“It’s Rahil. Rahil Zaman.”

The gaze Merc leveled on him was magnificent, his voice low and both his hands holding firmly to the counter behind him as he leaned toward Rahil. “Rahil Zaman,” Merc said, “what I plan to do with you is absolutely nothing .”

That was worse than death, Rahil decided. “I’m all for bondage and denial, but a couple of these ropes are a little tight.” He wiggled his arm for emphasis despite knowing that would only worsen the problem. Or maybe he was the problem. He was always the problem.

“You did that to yourself,” Merc confirmed and turned his attention to his phone.

Rahil whimpered pathetically, because he could.

Merc lifted his brows, not looking up. “Oh, hush. I’m fixing it.”

And he was—a moment later Rahil could feel the bonds recalibrate. He settled into a stable pressure that allowed him to rotate both shoulders, his leg no longer pinched at the knee. A few extra cords slid into place, easing his weight off the areas that had begun to cramp and leaving him in a position more like a reverse-hammock than full-on shibari. Nothing else loosened. Rahil pouted. “I don’t get to come down?”

“Are you going to leave if I let you?”

“It’s sunny out,” Rahil protested.

Merc nodded and slid his phone away. “Then you’re not coming down. I have work to do and you’ll get in my way. Your foolish choices aren’t ruining my day.” He pulled a notebook from a shelf beneath his tool rack and walked deeper into the shed. “You can move now, though. They won’t tighten enough to hurt you.”

Rahil fidgeted, managing to turn his body towards the main workspace enough to see Merc again. “Most queer men would find a hot twink tied in a revealing position the opposite of a day-ruiner.” Though he knew a fair few who would have seen his fangs and decided otherwise.

“I’m not most queer men.”

“You’re not indeed,” Rahil agreed, running his gaze over Merc and wondering what it would be like to do the same with his mouth—what it would feel like to press his fangs into that glorious flesh. Fuck, the fabric of Merc’s shirt was so worn that the bright work lights revealed the outline of his strong body, toned and padded like he was made for a wiry figure to curl against his crevasses. When he donned a leather apron over his chest, the coverage only added to his intrigue.

The craft benches behind him confirmed Rahil’s not-like-other-men theory too.

With the lights on and his body no longer fighting through sun-poisoning, Rahil could make out the wide assortment of beautiful things in various stages of production displayed in an orderly fashion around the room. Merc hadn’t exaggerated when he’d called himself a carpenter, metalsmith, and glassblower—he probably could have thrown “jeweler” in and still not covered his full skill set. His creations ranged from the kinds of staffs and weapons Rahil associated with fantasy movies to little ornate figurines to… Oh god, did the poor man not know how much that statue resembled a dildo?

But no… As Rahil squinted across the room, he could make out what looked like another of them, metal and ridged, a conjoined series of ornately engraved metal beads of increasing sizes, and something very much like a human-sized collar.

“Someone’s kinkier than he looks.” Rahil grinned, purposefully rolling his lower lip between his teeth.

Merc seemed unphased. “They’re not for me.” He lifted the anal beads as he spoke, handling the toy like it was a prized trophy as he brought it to his cleared workstation. His gaze remained firmly on the piece, yet Rahil could feel the weight of his words like they were wrapping around him as securely as his bonds. “But if they were,” Merc added, “they’d be none of your business.”

Rahil tried not to grieve too much. He’d never expected this man to fuck him, much less with custom-made toys. Still, he couldn’t help himself. “I’m in your bondage contraption. That seems like my business.”

“It’s just a trap,” Merc contradicted. “And it’s my wife’s, not mine.”

His wife’s . It wasn’t the first time Rahil had hit on a married man, but he tried to reserve those for open relationships, and he hadn’t noticed anything mentioning ethical non-monogamy on Merc’s app profile. He felt his cheeks heat, the desire that had fueled his idiotic outbursts previously fading a little. “Oh, I—”

Tool paused in his grip, Merc glanced at him so harshly he shut up. “My late wife.”

“Oh,” Rahil repeated in a vastly different tone. He couldn’t read Merc’s stoic expression, but he knew from experience that losing someone you’d loved enough to marry wasn’t pleasant. He’d felt that pain himself twice over, and so many times since: when the rain came down in the summer and she wasn’t there to pull him into it, when someone misquoted a philosopher online and she didn’t rant to him about why they were wrong, or when the coral jasmine of her namesake bloomed across the street and he couldn’t tell her she was far more beautiful than any flower and laugh when she glared at him for it, her solemn scowl making him want for nothing more than to kiss her. Letting the love of your life go was as complicated as it was eternal.

“Now, if you’re done badgering me…”

“Right.” And Rahil did the thing he should have done ten flirtatious impositions ago and closed his mouth.

With the restraints imposing their stillness on him and the serenity of Merc’s slow but steady work of creation as he etched into the metal, the silence felt less restrictive than Rahil would have predicted, a gentle caress that made it easier to focus instead of harder. He let himself simply enjoy the sight of Merc, the bulging of his muscles and the fierce attention he gave to his projects. Rahil still wanted that attention for himself, but since he couldn’t have it, this, he was certain, was the second-best thing.

Merc treated his projects with an intense devotion, seeming to forget that Rahil was there in favor of his strong fingers drifting over his work and his precise measuring and choosing of tools. He’d take lengths of time to lean over his sketchbook, diagramming out a dozen ideas before he so much as touched the half-finished object. There was something impossible about the way he worked, his lines too smooth and his materials bending to his will when Rahil swore they should not have.

How Rahil would have loved to be the thing that gave way beneath those hands, if only for an hour or two.

But he’d known this wouldn’t work. He’d known, and he let himself dream of it anyway, which was his own fault—a mistake he’d made once before in his life and would never stop regretting, not until the day they placed his tombstone next to the three others that shared a name with him, leaving his ghost to forever beg for their forgiveness.

What he tried not to think too hard about was the question of why Merc didn’t have any interest in him . He’d swiped right after all, despite the fangs in Rahil’s profile—fangs Rahil hadn’t bothered retracting in years, much less for their earlier conversation. But maybe Merc hadn’t glanced through all the photos before swiping. Maybe it was Rahil’s flirting that was not to his taste. Maybe it was something else entirely.

Dwelling on it was tiring. As the sun moved, and the ornate pendulum clock on the back wall shifted from eleven to twelve to one, he felt his normal exhaustion creeping back in, the little sleep he’d managed to steal last night wearing off. The fatigue dragged at his bones, bit at his edges, lay in his mind like a fog he had to constantly shake off. Finally, he found himself yawning, as though his body were asking permission from his brain for a slumber it refused to allow.

Merc glanced up at him. His brow furrowed. “You doing all right?”

“Yeah, fine.” Rahil stretched his back, twisting his shoulders into a new position, and the cords moved with him like they knew what he wanted of them. “This would truly make fantastic bondage gear, you know. It’s a joy to hang in. Only three of my fingers have gone numb.”

“Three of your fingers are numb ,” Merc repeated, looking mortified. He stood.

“It’s hardly the first time,” Rahil grumbled. But he couldn’t dislike the way Merc moved toward him, each step so sure that it seemed he was trading one project for another.

Before the man could touch Rahil’s cords though, a deep, masculine shout came from outside. Merc froze.

Rahil could feel the sudden force of the man’s tension so strongly it took hold inside him as well, tugging back up the fear he’d felt before Merc’s arrival. There were terrible people in the city, people who were louder and more aggressive than ever since the reveal of Vitalis-Barron’s vampire experimentations. Just because Merc hadn’t been that villain didn’t mean one wouldn’t appear.

By the way Merc glowered at the sound of the approaching voice, he certainly believed that could be the case.

As the caller came nearer, his words crystalized, his tone jovial in a way that sent chills up Rahil’s skin.

“Mercer Bloncourt!” the intruder shouted, “Let’s have this holy silver, eh?”