Each movement was precise. The rope looped and crossed and looped again with the methodical care of a man following a pattern he knew by heart. Neat. Deliberate. Somehow more unsettling for the neatness of it.
Even Tikhon had stopped in the doorway to watch.
“What fresh fuckery is this?” Konstantin said, scratching his head.
“I like it,” Ruslan said, rubbing his chin with the considered appreciation of a man reviewing a technique worth learning.
“As long as it’s painful,” I said, with a shrug.
“I bet he does this to his women,” Konstantin snickered.
Tau tied a final knot through a loop he had created before he answered.
“It works in business and my personal life,” he said.
The room went quiet.
We looked at each other. Then at Tau. Then at each other again.
Tau never discussed his personal life. We had operated under the reasonable assumption that he didn’t have one—or that whatever he had existed in a compartment so separate from this work that it might as well not exist. The idea of Tau having women. Having a personal life. Applying the same precise methodology to both.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Tau ignored us all.
He took a fistful of Tolam’s hair and dragged him to the centre of the room without ceremony—the specific efficiency of a man for whom this was simply the next step in a process. He tossed the rope over the rust-covered metal beam overhead, tested its hold with a single sharp tug, then began to hoist.
Tolam’s face told the story before the sound came—the strain arriving in his expression first, then the sharp hiss of breath as his arms were pulled upward behind him, the position finding every weakened muscle and making its presence known.
Konstantin moved without being asked and took the rope, securing it around a nearby pillar with the knot of a man who had tied things down in various contexts and found the skill transferable.
He didn’t hide the curiosity. Or the faint edge of something that might, in different company, have been called admiration.
“Are you going to take up bondage?” Ruslan asked, catching sight of Konstantin’s expression.
“I don’t need to tie my women down,” Konstantin muttered, watching as Tau crouched and bent Tolam’s legs behind him, beginning to wrap a second length of rope around them with the same methodical precision as the first.
Tolam struggled. What was left of it—the weakened version of resistance from a body that had been here too long. The strain on his face deepened with each additional loop of rope, the position becoming its own instrument without anyone having to touch him.
Tau stood and assessed his work.
“Do you want some time alone with him?” Konstantin asked.
Tau’s glance was brief and entirely disgusted.
“Start heating the coals,” Tau said, pulling a cigarette from the pack and lighting it with the unhurried ease of a man settling in for a long afternoon.
I looked at Tolam’s exposed foot soles and understood immediately what he intended.
“Yes,” I said, moving to stand beside Tau and taking a cigarette from the pack without asking.“The poor man is freezing.”
The brand didn’t matter. I drew the smoke in and let it sit for a moment, my eyes on the soles of Tolam’s feet—pale and defenceless, facing upward, entirely available.
My mind was already on the pain it would produce.
And how long it would last.
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