Chapter Text
Ethan choked and wheezed on the hazy smoke quickly filling the locked listening room. He shouted, screamed, and pounded on the new bulletproof glass that sat in the reinforced door.
The slight blonde agent hiccuped and cried as the black metal muzzle pressed against the base of her skull. A cold leather-gloved hand curled up against her waist, underneath the fabric. Moving higher and higher, drifting up her stomach, only stopping when Ethan’s panicked beats started to weaken.
With cold eyes, sharp cold eyes, he steps back and pulls the trigger. He doesn’t turn from Ethan as he gasped and strained against the sleep of the smoke.
On the floor, the dead gaze of the young blonde woman was met by another who gasped and choked. Blunt manicured nails failed to scrape at the thick leather belt that strangled their throat. Their pale skin shined with sweat as they thrashed, long white hair sprawled across the floor soaking up the life of the dead agent.
Their blotchy glazed white eyes started to droop shut as Ethan’s hand slid down the glass. Their vision started to black when finally the same gloved hands removed the belt from their neck with practiced hands that lingered. A multicolored oil painting of bruises layered at their throat where the belt once was.
Pale lips gasped, gulping down the musty metal-tinged air that lingered but tasted just as sweet to their starved lungs.
They whimpered as the man’s hand rooted itself in their long hair. Another slowly stroked their face before simply resting, the no longer cool leather resting with the palm against their cheek and thumb parting lips to rest against clenched teeth.
Abruptly the man stood, dragging the pale body along with them. Their weak limbs struggled to keep chunks from being ripped from their scalp before they were thrown back to the ground.
Their skull cracked against the cold ground, the sharp noise echoing in the silent shop. The man blew air from his nose, “Vinter, get her up and bring her back,” he motioned to someone out of their rapidly narrowing field of view as they started to lose consciousness.
“I want her ready when I get back.”
…
Vinter slammed them against the wall, the harsh doorframe biting somewhere against their shoulder. Lane had given him free rein over them as a reward for Vinter’s due diligence.
They were still sore from the record store and their wrists were bleeding from when they got back. Lane liked having them tied up. The back of their head pressed against the wall as his hand cradled their chin in his palm, grinding the bone of their skull into the taupe painted drywall.
His fingers dug into the soft flesh of their face as he murmured, “Now, you’re going to be a good girl aren’t you,” running his other hand up their side pulling up the hem of their shirt to finger shaped bruises and a bleeding bite mark.
They let out a strangled cry as his nails dug deeper into their face, “That’s what I thought.”
He got closer, leaning over them with his mouth right next to their ear. They shuddered and stilled as his breath brushed over their pale skin. The hand that once grasped their face had joined the other as it slowly crept up their body. They didn’t dare to make a sound.
Staring forward, past Vinter, past the gray cement wall, they imagined a sky. A sky so blue that the violets shrieked with envy every dawn and cried with every sunset. There were no clouds, just an endless expanse of sky. The wind brushed against their face, the clouds beneath skirting past soft and gentle.
They wished they could sit on a bench, out in a park to people walk past. Free to sit under the sun until their skin reddened and the sky went dark and they would sit under the stars. And when it starts to rain, they would go home to their apartment and look out on the now closed flower shop across the way.
The flower shop run by a little old woman that waved to them when they left in the mornings when they went to work as a barista at the small cafe down the way.
They were pulled back to reality when they felt their feet moving under them as they were down the hall. The rough hands pressing against the abused flesh that had torn and started to bruise from the belt that choked and strangled. Their body moved on its own as their mind tried to wander despite every move jostling scabs and welts, they could hear themselves whimper.
Lacquered wood fell under their bare feet as they were walked, stumbled, through the halls under rough hands. The blue, oh so blue, sky was so close but whisked away with each breath on their neck. The grass under their fingers fading and the scent of the rain-laden air tarnished with copper from the blood dripping from their nose.
Then they were stopped, their shuffle-step-drag of one foot in front of the other was halted in front of the pristine metal doors of the elevator. The muted surface reflecting back a pale haze of their form and out of the corner of their eye a hand reached out under their nose, smearing red across the face of their ghosting twin in the door. They wondered what they must look like, almost daring the move closer to grant some definition to their reflection.
As quickly as the hand on their face entered their view it was gone, and then the rest of the room with it as a familiar feeling of cloth wrapped around their head restricting their sight. It made it all the easier to sink into the night sky and see the twinkling stars as their body was moved forward into the elevator.
They knew it wouldn’t be long until they were put into a car and moved somewhere else, they knew it wouldn’t be long until more bruising bites entered their collection. They knew Vinter wouldn’t wait long enough for the car to start driving. He was never one to wait, and they could almost be thankful for it because Lane liked to make it last.
The leather of the car seats was like ice against their flesh and the rough hands were like fire.
They wished they could stay cold.