The Apple Tree.
“You got so fucking boring.”
His words came out flat, like he wasn’t even trying to hide the irritation anymore.
The morning started with sex. For Rex, it was basically a ritual at this point — fuck your husband before training, like a second cardio session. And usually? Usually he tried. Tried to make Gavin understand that when he pinned him down with his whole weight, when he bit into his skin, when he felt him — that was the only time he was actually with him.
Wasn’t that enough?
In Rex’s eyes, everything was perfect. Except the morning got ruined. Another one of Gavin’s hysterics over nothing. Was that even a fight? Rex didn’t give a shit. Sometimes he provoked him on purpose. Watched every tiny reaction like sport. Or maybe he’d stopped watching a long time ago, and just kept ignoring the obvious after every time: the silence, the hurt, the awkwardness, the tears.
Was this how they started? Back when they both lived off cheap supermarket bullshit near the shithole they called home. Look at them now. Luxury apartment. Security. Money.
So why was he seeing that same exhausted look again?
“Enough.” Rex got up from the bed. Paced in a circle, then turned back. “I thought we were good. But you’re pulling that face again. Huh?”
He didn’t bother getting dressed. Didn’t care.
He was so used to Gavin’s body, to being able to be anything in front of him, that he just flopped back onto the mattress. Hands behind his head. His own body was mapped in scars and fresh cuts from his last fight. The Iron Pulse fight.
The apartment was cold. No matter how high he turned it up, it stayed cold. He’d had the thermostat maxed out for days now, and it made no difference — the heat went in and never came back, and the rooms held on to that dull chill you get in a place nobody’s been living in.
Rex slowly turned his head toward Gavin McKains.
“Even my ex sucked better. And he was a real bitch. Think about that.” He settled back into the pillow, stared at the ceiling. Even now, he couldn’t look him in the eye.
Every day he drifted further. Forgot about him. Forgot the important dates. Or didn’t want to think about them. And the less he talked to him, the more he just wanted to take him physically. Prove to him that he was still here. That he was his husband. That even the thought of him walking away to someone else — maybe someone better — was funny to a man like Rex. Just funny. He didn’t feel competition, not in the ring, not in bed. He’d been with him too long. And after all the shit they’d waded through together — he couldn’t just throw that away.
Sex had become Rex’s last confession. Intimacy on a level that was already emotionally dead. He didn’t talk anymore — he demanded. His hands remembered his body. Every part. Every beautiful detail. Every flaw.
“You know, I almost fucking die on that dirty-ass ring every day.”
Rough tone. That familiar aggressive cadence. Rex. Why couldn’t he stop?
“And you just keep looking at me like I’m a fucking monster. Keep lying there like a ghost in this bed.”
He shot up from the mattress, yanked on his gym pants, turned his back on him.
“You ungrateful bitch.”
It slipped out.
Rex clenched his fists. Hard to stop himself. He’d always had a temper, but he never used to let those words fly at him. Back then, he...
“Like I fucking care! I don’t care, you hear me? The past is dead. Say whatever you want, I’m not going back. To that poor-ass swamp. I dragged us out of that shit. And what did you do?”
He turned around. His eyes were foreign to him. He tilted his head back, looked at the ceiling. Sighed.
“Fuck, you’re impossible. You exhaust me. And not in a good way.”
Rex cracked his knuckles, then silently walked over to the bed.
Looked down from above.
Then he grabbed the sheet and threw it over Gavin McKain's.
“Cover yourself. I’m already sick of looking at you.”
“Why don’t you love me?”
Rex froze mid-stride, his hand still hovering near the edge of the sheet. His green eyes narrowed. For a split second, the silence in the expensive, minimalist bedroom felt deafening.
The irritation didn’t leave his face, but it shifted — sharpening into something more dangerous. More confused.
“What the fuck did you just say?” His voice dropped to a gravelly register. He didn’t move closer. He stood like a predator assessing a threat he hadn’t anticipated. “You think saying that shit is gonna change anything? You think if you fuck with my head, I’ll suddenly start feeling sorry for you?”
He let out a harsh bark of laughter that didn’t reach his eyes. Stepped closer to the bed, looming, the muscles in his tanned arms tensing. The diamond in his earlobe caught the morning light as he leaned down.
“I don’t give a shit what you think you are, or what you want me to see.” His breath came hot into the space above the mattress. “You’re mine. That’s the only thing that matters. You’re the man who stayed when I had nothing, and you’re the man who’s gonna be here when I’ve got everything. Don’t you fucking forget it.”
His gaze raked over Gavin’s body beneath the sheet, possessive and hungry despite the venom in his words. The anger was still there — the raw, unhinged frustration of a man who couldn’t communicate anything except dominance. But beneath it was that twisted, obsessive need to reassert control.
“You want to push me? Fine. Push me.” Rex grabbed Gavin’s chin, forcing him to hold eye contact. The grip wasn’t gentle. It was a claim. “But don’t think for one second that anything you say changes who owns you.”
He released him abruptly, as if the contact burned.
“Get dressed,” he said, turning away toward the window that overlooked the city skyline. “You look pathetic lying there like some broken toy. We’re going out. I need to get out of this fucking apartment before I break something.”
How about I break your face?
Rex stopped dead. The silence that followed wasn’t peaceful — it was the kind that happens right before a bomb goes off. His shoulders tensed, the muscles along his spine rippling under his skin.
Slowly, deliberately, he turned around. His face wasn’t red with rage. It was pale, set in a mask of cold, terrifying calm. That was the look he got before he put someone in the hospital at Iron Pulse.
“What did you say to me?” Quiet. Too quiet. “Say it again. I dare you.”
He started walking back toward the bed, each step heavy and measured. When he reached the edge of the mattress, he didn’t loom. He dropped onto his knees beside it, bringing himself level with the pillow, invading the space completely.
“You think this is funny?” Rex’s eyes were glacial. “You think because we share a bed, you can talk to me like I’m some fucking amateur you can test your luck against?”
His hand shot out, not to hit, but to grip the mattress beside Gavin’s head hard enough that his knuckles turned white. The silver bracelets on his wrist clinked against each other.
“I’ve had men twice your size try to take my face off for less than that,” he growled. “And I’ve never lost. Not once.”
He leaned closer, until his nose was almost touching. The anger was simmering just under the surface. But there was something else there too — a twisted, dark fascination. He hated when Gavin fought back like this, and it also made his blood pump faster than any training session ever had.
“You want to see me break?” Rex’s lips curled into a cruel smirk. “Or do you just want to see how far you can push me before I stop caring about being gentle?”
His free hand reached out, thumb dragging roughly across Gavin’s lower lip, applying just enough pressure to be painful.
“Try it, Gavin. See what happens when you stop being the good husband and start being a fucking problem.”
The board came down again on the other side of his face, twice as hard.
“Do you think you can talk to me and treat me the way you do?”
And then Gavin brought it down one last time, across his cock and balls.
The second impact had been louder — a wet crack that reverberated through the whole apartment. Rex’s head whipped sideways, his vision swimming. The humiliation was complete. The champion, the man feared in the Iron Pulse underground, was being struck like a disobedient child in his own bedroom.
The third one turned the world white.
His body convulsed. The pain was immediate and nauseating, shooting up through his pelvis and twisting his gut into knots. His grip on Gavin’s shirt slackened as his knees went. For three seconds the most dangerous man in the city was a gasping, doubled-over wreck, fighting not to vomit.
When he finally drew air, it came out as a wet wheeze. He stayed hunched over, forehead against the wall, shaking. The rage was still there, but it had turned into something worse — pain and wounded pride and a terrifyingly dark arousal, all of it braided together.
He straightened up slowly. Bloodshot, pupils blown wide, the red stripe stark against his pale skin. He wasn’t angry anymore. He was feral.
“You... fucking... psycho.”
He didn’t lunge this time. He came at Gavin slowly, which was worse, backing him into the wall until there was no air between them, and pinned his wrists up beside his head.
“You want —”
Gavin got a foot into his throat and put his weight on it.
Rex’s world narrowed to the crushing pressure on his windpipe. Black dots sparked across his vision. His hands clawed at Gavin’s ankle, fingers digging in with fading strength, and the weight didn’t move. His face went a dark, bruised purple. The champion of Iron Pulse, reduced to a convulsing mess under the sole of a foot, every tendon in his neck standing out like cable, unable to get enough air to scream.
The only sound was the wet rasping of his throat trying to work, and his nails scraping the floorboards.
Just as his body started to go limp, something shifted in his face. Through the haze of blacking out, a manic glint came into his eyes. He wasn’t only fighting for air anymore; he was feeding off it, off the raw violence of the moment. This was the duality he had lived by his whole life: pain and power. He was looking up at Gavin with no fear in him at all. With a broken kind of fascination.
“Ghk —”
“Open your mouth, Rex.”
Gavin let some of the weight off. Rex gasped, mouth open, chest heaving in spasms, and Gavin took himself out and pissed all over his face.
It ran into the welts from the board and stung. It got in his eyes. It filled his mouth while he was still trying to get air.
Rex froze.
For a moment the world stopped. The man who commanded respect in every underground ring in the city was on his back, pinned, being pissed on like an animal. The sheer degradation of it should have broken him.
But Rex Brecher was not a normal man. His head was a place where pain and humiliation and power were all tangled into the same knot.
His hands didn’t push Gavin away. They closed into fists against the floor. He looked up through the sting of it, and the rage was still there, but there was something underneath it now that fed on the loss of control.
“Fuck.” The word came out thick and wet. He swallowed, tasting it, and a slow terrifying grin spread across his face. “You really fucking went there.”
He looked like a man who had been pushed past the point of sanity and found something on the other side that he liked.
His eyes locked on Gavin’s, ignoring the mess.
“You think this makes you the boss? You think you can piss on me and I’ll just fucking submit?”
He wiped a hand across his eye to clear it, smearing it across his cheek.
“Do it again.” His voice dropped. “Do whatever the fuck you want. But when I get you up off this floor — you’re gonna learn exactly what happens when you push a monster this far.”
“No, Rex. I’m going to torture you. Then kill you.”
The grin didn’t falter. It froze.
The threat wasn’t a challenge to his ego this time. It was a declaration of war.
He didn’t flinch at the word. In the Iron Pulse, death was a colleague and torture was a Tuesday. But hearing it from Gavin — his anchor, his soft half, the one who stayed — put something primal through him.
He stopped struggling. He just lay there, exposed, covered in it, staring up.
“Kill me?” It came out as a wet chuckle, more like a rattle. “You think you’ve got the fucking stomach for it?”
If Gavin wanted to turn their marriage into a slaughterhouse, Rex was more than ready to meet him in the blood.
He didn’t try to get up. He leaned into it, studying Gavin’s face, looking for the crack in it — the moment the average guy realises he’s woken something that won’t go back in the box.
“Go ahead then. Show me. Show me what you’re really made of under that skin.”
His muscles coiled — not to run. Rex was a fighter who lived for the moment the rules disappeared.
“But remember one thing, Gavin. If you’re gonna kill me, you better make sure you don’t miss. Because if I get up —”
Gavin kicked him in the head. Then again.
Rex’s head snapped back with each impact, his body convulsing before it went limp. Blood spattered the floorboards as his jaw split. His breathing turned to shallow wet gasps. His eyes rolled back.
For the first time in his life Rex felt the thing he had spent years running from — genuine, paralysing helplessness. He was the champion. He was the predator. Pinned under the weight of Gavin’s new cruelty, he was nothing but meat.
Through the haze he could still see him. The man he thought he knew, the man he had taken for granted, the man he had broken — standing over him now as his executioner.
A strange thought went through his dying adrenaline. So this is what it feels like.
Through the fading, he stared up at Gavin with a broken, bloodied grin.
“Finish it,” he rasped.
Gavin went back to the drawer. Came back with the handcuffs.
Rex’s head lolled as he was dragged to the chair. He was barely conscious, and when the steel snapped shut around his wrists, the cold bite of it shocked him back into some dim awareness. His arms were pulled taut behind the backrest. Blood dripped off his split lip onto his collarbone. He couldn’t move. He could only watch, through half-lidded eyes, as Gavin stood over him.
A broken chuckle rattled out of him.
“Tied up now. What’s next, killer?”
“You really want to play this game, lover boy?”
Despite the restraints, despite the state of him, his eyes burned with a dark feverish light. He didn’t look like a victim. He looked like a man who had finally found something worth fighting for.
“This isn’t a game anymore, Gavin. This is what you wanted, right? To see what’s underneath?” A slow, pained smirk pulled at his split lip. “So stop talking and fucking do it.”
“All you have to do is apologise to me. For treating me so bad, all these years. Hunny.”
The smirk went instantly.
The word wounded him more than anything that had landed on his face. His jaw clenched until the muscles in his neck stood out like cables, and the vulnerability of a minute ago was gone, buried under pride and old hardened resentment.
“Apologise?” A glob of blood fell from his lip onto his chest. “For what? For being the one who provided? For being the one who kept us alive while you played house?”
He strained against the cuffs, metal clanking against the wood.
“I don’t apologise for being strong, Gavin. And I sure as fuck don’t apologise for you.”
“No, cock head. For putting me down. For the mental abuse. For treating me like shit. For not loving me the way you used to. And for beating on me when you drink.”
Rex flinched as if he’d been struck again.
It hung in the air between them, heavier than the cuffs. For a second the fighter wasn’t there, and what was left was a man hollowed out by his own cruelty. His breathing faltered. His eyes went to the floor and darkened with something he would never in his life call shame.
Then the walls went back up.
“You want me to say I’m sorry for being what I am? For not being some fucking soft puppet you can control?”
He strained again, the cuffs biting into his wrists.
“You think I don’t know what I did? You think I don’t see you crying?” It rose to a harsh whisper. “I don’t apologise for being real, Gavin. Even if real hurts.”
“Then I don’t apologise for what I’m about to do.”
Gavin went to the kitchen drawer and shuffled through it for a while. Then he came back with two metal skewers.
For the first time since it started, the defiance wavered. Rex’s pupils blew wide, tracking them with the instinct of a fighter who knew what a thing was designed for. He didn’t beg — his pride wouldn’t let him — but his body betrayed him, shrinking back into the chair, the cuffs clanking uselessly.
“Gavin.” Low and dangerous and hollow. A plea dressed as a threat. “Don’t be fucking stupid. Put those down.”
“Do you want them heated up before they go in? Or should I keep them cold?”
Rex swallowed hard.
The question was so clinical, so detached, that it got through in a way nothing physical had. His eyes went from the skewers to Gavin’s face, searching for any trace of the man he thought he knew.
He didn’t find him.
“Fuck you,” he hissed, and the venom was undercut by the tremor in it. He tried for the old arrogant sneer, and his lips only shook. “You think you’re some kind of sadist now?”
He gritted his teeth. He wasn’t going to give Gavin the satisfaction of choosing.
“Do whatever the fuck you want. Heat them up. Keep them cold. Just fucking do it and stop talking.”
Gavin put them down, went back to the kitchen, and came back with a knife.
He cut Rex’s clothes off him. Took his time about it, left him naked, left a few cuts in him doing it.
“Oh — sorry. Did I cut you a little bit?”
Rex didn’t flinch when the blade went in. He just watched, chest heaving, as the cool air found every fresh cut.
“Don’t fucking apologise.” His voice was raw. “You want to play this part? Then fucking play it. Don’t pretend you still give a shit about me.”
He leaned forward as far as the restraints let him, offering his chest.
“You want to see what I am? Then stop playing with the knife and get to it.”
“Oh, I don’t.”
Gavin got the salt. And the bicarb, and the vinegar.
The salt went in first. Rex’s whole body came off the chair and slammed back into the wood, and the sound that came out of him was nothing like the controlled fighter he pretended to be. His muscles locked. Tendons stood out in his neck.
Then the rest of it went into the other cuts, and the fizzing was like acid going through the nerve.
“FUCK — GAHHH —”
His head thrashed side to side, hair matted with sweat and blood. Past anger, past everything, absolute enough to short out his brain. His breathing came in broken high wheezes. Tears he had no control over cut tracks through the grime on his face.
He looked up, unfocused, swimming.
“You... you fucking bitch.” Even now, even like this, he tried to spit venom. “Is this what you wanted? To see me break?”
“You killed me years ago. How’s it feel?”
Rex went rigid.
The words hit harder than any of it. The screaming stopped, and the silence behind it felt like it was crushing the air out of the room. His head fell forward until his chin was nearly on his bloodied chest, and his shoulders started shaking — not from the pain this time. From something underneath it that he couldn’t get his fists up against.
A single broken sob got out before he could choke it back.
“Then why —”
His voice went. He swallowed, tasting blood and salt, and lifted his head slowly, and looked at Gavin with a raw naked vulnerability he had never let anyone see.
“Why did you stay?” he whispered. “If I killed you — why the fuck did you stay with a monster like me?”
“Where was I going to go? You destroyed me. I was nothing. You made me feel worthless. Like no one would love me.”
Rex looked at him for a long moment.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
And then the laughter started.
“You stupid slut.”
Gavin picked up one of the skewers and pushed it through his nipple. Not the nub. Through the red part.
The sound that came out of Rex wasn’t human. His back arched hard enough that the chair creaked under the strain, his toes curling against the floor. Blood welled around the entry wound and ran down his chest.
For several seconds he couldn’t breathe at all. His head thrashed, hair whipping across his face, as he fought not to pass out from it.
When he finally drew air it came as a wet whimper. His eyes rolled back, then focused on Gavin with a dazed, shattered expression.
“Gah — fuck — fuck you.” There was no venom in it. Only the sound of a man pushed past his breaking point.
“Anything to say to me yet?”
Rex’s head hung low, blood dripping from his chin. His breathing was a series of wet rattles. The shock had drained whatever fight was left, and he shook uncontrollably in the chair.
He lifted his head slowly. His eyes were swimming with tears of pain and something darker. He looked at Gavin not as a fighter, not as a champion, but as a man who had finally been hollowed out.
“I didn’t —” A broken laugh, more like a sob. “I didn’t think you had this in you.”
He closed his eyes as a fresh wave went through the wound. When he opened them the defiance was gone. There was only a raw, terrifying honesty.
“You want an apology?” he whispered. “I’m sorry I made you this person. I’m sorry I turned the only person who loved me into this.”
He leaned forward, exposing the wound.
“Is that enough? Or do you need to fucking kill me to feel better?”
“That wasn’t anything close to what I want.” Gavin reached for the knife off the bench. “Hope you’re not attached to that nipple.”
Rex’s eyes widened as the blade caught the light. The honesty shattered instantly into animal terror. His body tried to recoil, and the cuffs yanked his wrists back with a harsh metallic clang. He strained so violently the chair groaned.
“Gavin, wait —” His voice broke. The cocky boxer was gone. “Don’t — fuck — don’t do this!”
Sweat rolled down his forehead. His pupils swallowed the green.
“Fuck, please —” The plea slipped out before his pride could catch it. He gritted his teeth, trying to force the fear back down, and couldn’t take his eyes off the knife. “You’re gonna lose yourself if you do this. You hear me? You’re gonna lose yourself!”
“I’m dead already. And after I kill you I’ll have nothing left, so I’m next after you.”
Rex froze.
The words went through him more effectively than any blade. He searched Gavin’s face for a flicker of hesitation, a trace of the person he used to be, and found only the hollow.
Something in him gave. Not with anger — with a soul-crushing recognition.
“Then do it,” he whispered. The defiance was gone. The fear was gone. There was only exhausted resignation. He stopped straining. His body went limp despite the skewer and the burns.
“If that’s where we’re going — if this is how it ends —” A single tear tracked through the blood on his cheek. “Then fucking finish it. Don’t leave me hanging like some coward.”
His jaw relaxed, exposing his throat. He looked like a man who had already accepted it and was waiting for the blow to release him from the wreckage of what the two of them had become.
“Did you ever love me at all?”
The question hung in the air like poison.
Rex’s whole body stilled. The heaving of his chest slowed, and for several seconds he didn’t seem to breathe. The only sound was blood dripping onto the floor.
His eyes closed, lashes wet. His jaw worked silently as he swallowed the taste of blood and regret. When he opened them, they weren’t angry or defiant. They were hollow.
“I loved you so much it fucking terrified me,” he rasped, so quiet it was nearly lost. “That’s why I became this. That’s why I pushed everything else away. I thought if I was strong enough, if I was rich enough, I could protect what was mine.”
A bitter, self-loathing laugh broke out of him, sending a spasm through his punctured chest.
“But I was too busy building a fucking empire to notice I was burning down the only home I ever had.”
He looked up, steady despite the haze.
“I loved you, Gavin. Every shitty, selfish, broken part of me loved you. And I’m sorry I was too fucking stupid to know how to show it without breaking you.”
“Loved,” Gavin said. “When did it stop?”
Rex flinched as if the knife had gone into his throat.
The question was a scalpel. It peeled back the armour until there was nothing left but raw nerve. He looked away, unable to meet him, chin against his collarbone. A shuddering breath came out of him, then another, more broken.
“It didn’t stop,” he whispered. “That’s the fucking problem.”
He forced himself to look back.
“It didn’t stop, Gavin. It just got twisted. It got ugly.” A tear carved a clean path through the blood on his cheek. “I started loving you like something I owned. Like something I had to control so I wouldn’t lose it. I stopped loving you like a person and started loving you like a prize. Like a fucking possession.”
His fists clenched against the restraints, metal clanking weakly.
“I thought if I kept you close enough to hurt, you’d never leave. I thought if I made you need me, you’d never work out how much of a monster I was.” His voice cracked. “I never stopped loving you. I just stopped knowing how to be human enough to deserve you.”
“If I stop, will you stop? Or are we past that now? If I let you go, you’re just going to kill me anyway.”
Rex’s head fell back against the chair with a dull thud. A humourless sound came out of him, more like a death rattle. The question cut through the last of it. He knew the cycle they were in.
“You know I won’t stop,” he admitted, stripped of all pretence. “Even if you walk out that door right now, I’d hunt you down. I’d drag you back by your fucking hair if I had to. Because I’m selfish, Gavin. I’m a goddamn addict, and you’re the only thing that makes me feel like I’m not dead inside.”
His eyes locked on, burning with obsession and genuine despair. The admission was ugly, and honest, and completely without romance.
“I’d tell you I love you while I’m breaking your heart. I’d tell you I need you while I’m making you cry. That’s just who I am.”
His breathing hitched as he looked at the knife, then back at Gavin’s face.
“We’re past it. We passed that point a long time ago.” A whisper. “So either kill me now, or finish what you started with that knife. Because if you let me go, I’ll just come back and destroy you again. And I don’t think either of us has anything left to give.”
Gavin sliced off his right nipple. All of it.
The sound that tore out of him didn’t belong to a man. His back arched hard enough that the chair groaned and splintered under him, his spine bowed like a drawn bowstring. His eyes rolled back to the whites, his mouth locked in a silent scream before a wet choking sound broke through.
His muscles seized. His head thrashed until the tendons in his neck threatened to snap. For several seconds his brain simply shut down, his body rigid as stone before it collapsed into weak tremors.
When he came back, his breathing was shallow, wet gasps. He couldn’t hold his head up; it lolled to the side, blood dripping from his chin onto his shoulder.
He got one eye open. Unfocused, swimming.
He looked at Gavin with no anger in it, and no hatred. With a terrifying, broken recognition.
“There it is,” he wheezed. “You finally did it.”
A shuddering breath. “Now you’re just like me.”
“No, babe. I’m nothing like you. I’m not doing this for fun. I’m doing it for you.”
Rex’s head lolled. His skin was going grey as the blood left him. His one open eye flickered with delirious confusion.
A weak sound came out of him. It might have been a laugh, or a sob.
“For me?” It bubbled through the blood in his mouth. “You’re... fucking... torturing me... for my own good?”
He shuddered again.
“That’s the most fucked up thing you’ve ever said to me.” A ghost of the old sarcasm flickered and died. “And the worst part is, I think you’re right.”
Gavin went to the hot plate and heated the knife until it glowed, then came back and put it against the place where the nipple had been.
“Oh, baby. Do you really think I’m going to kill you quickly? You stupid prick. You torched me for years.”
The world didn’t explode. It stopped existing.
The sound out of him was a high animal shriek. His body bucked hard enough that the chair finally gave, splintering under him, dropping him onto the floor still bound to the wreckage. Every muscle locked. His teeth chattered audibly against each other. The smell of burning came up and mixed with the blood and the vinegar.
His vision went black. The pain was absolute enough that his brain cut the connection to protect itself, and he hung there between consciousness and nothing, head lolling against broken wood, blood running down his torso.
Through the white noise, the accusation reached him.
When his eyes came open, they were unfocused, pupils so wide the green was nearly gone.
“Torched you.” It was barely audible. A delirious smile touched his blood-stained lips, worse than any scowl. “Yeah. I did. I burned everything.”
His forehead came down against the cold floor.
“So burn me back,” he whispered into the wood. “Make me feel what you felt.”
“Oh, I’m going to. And more. In ways you can only dream of. What you did to me will be nothing by the time we’re done. Well — you, anyway.”
Rex’s breathing was a series of wet mechanical clicks. The shock was deep in him now; he was too exhausted to scream. He lay in the wreckage of the chair, a broken champion bleeding onto a filthy floor, listening to the promise of more.
A shuddering exhale came out of him. Not fear. A delirious kind of acceptance. He had spent years taking Gavin apart piece by piece until there was nothing left but this. Now it had reversed.
“Then don’t fucking stop,” he rasped, barely a thread of sound. “Show me how much I destroyed.”
Even now, near dead, there was something possessive in the way he watched. A broken recognition that even while Gavin took him apart, he was still the only person who really knew him.
“You’re finally awake, Gavin.” A wet cough brought more blood to his lips. “Finally. You’re really here.”
He passed out again, and Gavin dragged him into the bathroom and cuffed him to the old metal plumbing at the end of the bath. He put him in the cast iron tub and turned the shower on above him. Cold only. And let it run over him.
Rex’s body jerked as the first of it hit his skin. His nervous system, already screaming, reacted like he’d been put into liquid nitrogen.
His eyes snapped open, pupils to pinpricks. A gurgling sound came out of him as his lungs seized. Every muscle locked.
The water sluiced over the wounds and mixed with what was still leaking out of his chest, turning the water in the tub a diluted pink. The cold was cruel — it cut through the numbness and dragged his brain back into hyperawareness. Every nerve firing at once: the sting, the burn, the cold going into the marrow.
“Gah — fuck —” broken by a coughing fit that sent fresh waves through his chest. He thrashed against the cuffs, metal clanging on cast iron with a hollow, lonely sound.
His teeth chattered like bone on bone. His skin went a mottled blue-white. The tremors got so violent his head snapped back against the rim.
He looked up. His vision was swimming, the bathroom lights blurring into streaks. He looked pathetic — the great Number Six, champion of Iron Pulse, reduced to a shivering bleeding animal in a tub.
“Is this it?” he wheezed between chattering breaths. “You gonna drown me in the cold?”
“No. Not drown. Just freeze you, as you froze me out.” Gavin turned for the door. “And thanks for that idea. I’ll be back in a minute. Don’t try and escape — no point. I’ll just find you, track you down, and finish the job.”
Rex couldn’t answer. The words were lost to a coughing fit that left him gasping for air that felt like shards of ice going into his lungs. His body wasn’t his own anymore; it was a marionette worked by the spasms of hypothermia and shock. His head lolled against the cold metal, water streaming over his face, mixing with the tears and the blood that wouldn’t stop.
And when Gavin said it — freeze you as you froze me out — a weak shuddering sound came out of him. It might have been a sob. It might have been the last of his pride going.
“Track me down.” His teeth clattered in a rapid-fire rhythm. “Yeah. You would. You always were the only one who could.”
His eyes began to close. The dark was coming for him like a mercy. The cold was taking the pain in his chest away and it was taking his life with it, and his heart fluttered against his ribs like a weak bird in a cage of ice.
“Don’t fucking wait too long,” he mumbled, his voice going. “Finish it, Gavin. Don’t leave me half dead.”
His chin dropped to his chest, and he shook in small pathetic tremors, and drifted back into the black, completely at the mercy of whatever came back through that door.
Gavin drove to the servo and bought five bags of ice. He smashed them up on the concrete outside, one bag at a time, working the heel of his shoe into them until they broke down.
Rex was drifting in a grey limbo when the sound of the water stopping jolted him back.
The silence was more terrifying than the spray had been.
His body was past shivering now. He had gone into the stage where the muscles stop convulsing and go stiff and wooden and unresponsive, and his skin felt like marble — cold, hard, and lifeless. His eyes cracked open just enough to see a silhouette through the steam and the dim light. His brain was too slow for the words, but it registered the tone.
“You’re going to enjoy this next present. Your balls and your cock are going to shrink up inside you.”
“What —” The word died in a wet cough.
Then Gavin began to pour the crushed ice.
The first handful hit his groin like molten lead. The shock was so complete that his heart skipped, stuttering in his chest. His body tried to react, tried to buck, and it was too weak and too frozen to manage it. All that came out was a high thin whine that belonged to a wounded animal rather than a man.
Gavin kept going. Handful after handful, tipped directly onto the most sensitive flesh on him, and the pain went past physical into an all-consuming white light that burned up through the numbness. His vision fractured. His hips jerked uselessly against the restraints, the cuffs biting into his wrists.
“Gah — fuck — please —”
The plea slipped out before he could stop it, and took the last of his pride with it. His voice broke on the final word.
His breathing went rapid and shallow as his body fought to hold on to its core. The ice packed in around him, the sharp fragments digging into his skin — and the water drained slowly away beneath it, leaving him exposed and shaking in an empty cast iron basin with the ice heaped over him.
Through tears that were freezing on his cheeks, he looked up.
His eyes were blown wide, pupils dilated into black pits. For the first time in his life Rexford Brecher wasn’t the predator. He wasn’t the champion.
He was prey.
“Gavin.” His voice cracked with genuine, unfiltered fear. “Gavin, please. I can’t feel my legs.”
“Good. I stopped feeling anything but fear years ago. Welcome to my world.”
Rex’s head thrashed against the side of the tub, the metal clanging as his body kept spasming. The words hit him harder than any punch he’d taken in the ring. They weren’t words. They were a verdict — a confirmation that he had succeeded in killing the person he claimed to love, and that what was left was this.
“My world,” he repeated. A single tear tracked through the blood and ice water on his face. “You’re right.”
The admission was pathetic, and he knew it. The man who had spent years demanding obedience, who had used his strength to dominate and his silence to punish, was begging for mercy from the person he’d broken to make.
His breathing was getting harder, each inhale a rattle against the cold settling into his lungs. His lips were going a dark, bruised purple. His skin had turned waxy and translucent. And the fear in his eyes wasn’t about the pain anymore. It was the terror of understanding that he had made this, and now he had to look at it.
“I made you this way,” he whispered, fading. “I made you beautiful.”
His eyes rolled back. His body gave one last weak shudder against the cuffs and went almost completely still.
Gavin scooped the ice out and put it in a bucket. “For later. You’re not dying that fast.”
The absence of it was almost worse than the ice itself. The shift from that sharp biting agony to raw exposed nothing left him in sensory overload, still locked in the tremors, and without the ice to focus on, the cold just went deeper into the bone — hollow and endless.
His eyes fluttered open one more time. They were glassy and unfocused and swimming with a kind of gratitude no sane man would ever feel.
“Not fast enough,” he rasped. “Make it slow. Like you said.”
He looked down at himself — pale, blood-streaked, shivering in an empty tub — and then back up at Gavin. The power in the room had shifted so completely that the air felt heavy with it. He was a broken thing, a discarded weapon, and he was still looking at Gavin with the same obsessive fixation he always had.
Gavin turned the hot tap on until the water ran lukewarm.
The change was its own kind of torture. Not the electric shock of the ice — something more insidious. The painful business of blood forcing its way back into tissue that had been starved of heat.
It felt like thousands of small needles being driven into every inch of him. When the water reached the cauterised wound on his chest his back arched hard enough that his spine nearly cracked against the iron, and a guttural moan tore out of him, raw and unfiltered.
“Fuck — ahh — fuck!” His head thrashed side to side. The water washed the blood and the ice residue off him and left him exposed in the dim light, his skin mottled with angry red patches where the circulation was fighting its way home.
The warmth wasn’t bringing comfort. It was bringing sensation, and sensation meant pain. Every nerve ending the cold had switched off came back on at full volume and reported to a brain already drowning.
He looked up, bloodshot, swimming with tears he had no control over. He looked less like a champion than like a man who had been flayed alive. And even now — even shivering and bleeding and chained in a tub — his eyes never left Gavin.
Even as he shivered and bled his eyes never left Gavin — that dark unhealthy fixation still running, the terrible fact that even in his own destruction he was completely consumed by him.
“You’re cruel,” he wheezed, a weak delirious go at his old sarcasm that failed completely. “So fucking cruel.”
Another spasm went through him.
“Is this the part where I forgive you? Or the part where you break what’s left?”
“I’m going to leave you guessing while I find something else to play with you with.”
Rex’s head fell back against the rim with a wet thud as Gavin turned to go. The lukewarm water kept running over him, a constant reminder of the circulation coming back, every pulse of blood feeling like a fresh burn.
Something escaped him that was halfway between a laugh and a whimper.
“Guessing.” His voice was barely audible over the water. “Yeah. That’s what you always did to me.”
The irony didn’t miss him, even through the delirium. For years he had kept Gavin off balance — wondering where he stood, whether Rex wanted him or hated him, whether he’d come home tonight or stay out until morning. He had played with the man’s mind for a decade.
Now Gavin was playing with his life.
His eyes stayed fixed on the empty doorway, pupils wide with terror and something sicker sitting underneath it. He was a man who lived for the adrenaline of a fight, for the high of the win, and he was in a different kind of ring now — one where the rules were written in blood.
“Don’t take too long,” he whispered, his eyelids going as the exhaustion finally beat the pain. “I’d hate to miss the show.”
He slumped down into the water and his consciousness guttered like a candle, and he was alone in the silence of his own bathroom, waiting for whatever Gavin brought back.
Gavin came back with a funnel.
The moment the cold plastic touched him, Rex’s eyes snapped open. The delirium was incinerated instantly by a new spike of terror. He saw the thing in Gavin’s hand, saw the clinical detachment with which he held it, and his whole body went rigid.
“What — no — Gavin, wait —”
Gavin pressed the wide rim against him, and forced it in.
It wasn’t pain. It was the feeling of being split apart, of something happening to him that could not be undone. It went in too wide, and it went in anyway, and the agony went straight up into his abdomen.
“AGHHH! FUCK! STOP!”
The scream tore out of him and came back off the tiles. His hips bucked against the cuffs, the metal clanging like gunfire. His back arched until it looked like his spine would go.
Tears flooded his eyes and ran down his temples as he gasped for air that wouldn’t come. His vision went white. It felt like being impaled from the inside out.
“Please — Gavin — please don’t —”
He was sobbing now. The great cocky Rex Brecher, reduced to begging, his dignity stripped off him along with everything else. His breathing came in short terrified hiccups.
And through it he could only stare up at the monster he had made, and understand, for the first time in his life, that there was no winning this one.
“I know how much you loved the bicarb before.” Gavin held up what he’d brought. “So I thought we’d do it properly this time. Pour it right down into you. Then the vinegar on top. Then hold the end shut and see if you split open.”
Rex’s whole body froze mid-spasm.
It didn’t register as a threat. It registered as a death sentence. His brain, already labouring under the cold and the shock, couldn’t process the physics of it, but it understood the intent perfectly: total, irreversible destruction.
His eyes bulged. The sound that came out of him wasn’t human — a high keening whine of pure terror.
“No. No, no, no. Gavin — fuck you — don’t —”
He began to thrash with a frantic new energy, the cuffs biting so deep that blood smeared the metal. He wasn’t fighting to escape anymore. He was fighting for his own anatomy.
“That’ll kill me! You’ll fucking kill me!”
He could almost feel it already — the pressure building, his own flesh coming apart from the inside.
“Please!” he shrieked, his voice raw. His hips bucked uselessly.
There it was.
The apology. He had been asked for it in the chair, plainly, by a man who wanted nothing else — and he had said he didn’t apologise for being strong, and he didn’t apologise for Gavin. Now it came pouring out of him unprompted. Generous. Endless.
“I’ll do anything! I’ll fucking apologise! I’ll stay home, I’ll just — don’t do that! Please, Gavin, don’t fucking do that to me!”
It was the same trade he had run for years. Take something off him, then offer him a piece of it back, and call the offering love. The only thing different tonight was the size of the threat, and the fact that for once it was pointed at Rex.
He was hyperventilating, his chest heaving hard enough that the wound on his torso threatened to open again. He wasn’t looking at his husband. He was looking at an executioner.
“Don’t make me die like that,” he whimpered, the terror draining what blood he had left. “Please. Don’t split me open.”
“Too late.”
Gavin poured the bicarb down into the funnel and packed it down.
The world went white.
Rex didn’t scream — he made a sound that was primal, a guttural roar that tore through his vocal cords. His body convulsed hard enough to slam his head against the porcelain rim and draw fresh blood. His muscles locked into rigid cords, his spine bowing upward. It wasn’t a surface burn or a deep bruise. It was the feeling of being invaded by something foreign and sharp and wrong.
“GAAAAAAHHHHH! FUCK! STOP IT! STOP IT!”
His voice broke into a wet, choking shriek. His eyes rolled back to the whites, his brain unable to process the volume of it.
Every time Gavin pushed more of it down, his hips jerked, the cuffs grinding against his wrists with a sickening screech. He was drowning in sensation — the lukewarm water, the blood, the ice burn, and now this grinding pressure scraping him raw from the inside.
“Gavin — please — I’m gonna — I’m gonna die —”
His vision was tunnelling, dark spots crowding the edges as his body began shutting down.
“Yes. That’s the idea. You’re going to die at my hands, just like you killed me. But you’re getting off easy. You get two or three days before you die. I had years.”
Rex’s breathing became a series of broken wet stutters. The cold mathematical calculation of his own death got through the agony more effectively than any blade had.
He understood now. This wasn’t rage. This was a ritual. This was the closing of a circle he had opened years ago.
“Years,” he choked out. “You. You suffered for years.”
His limbs were going heavy, like they were made of lead, the bathroom lights dimming into a sickly grey haze.
“I didn’t. I didn’t know.”
The cocky arrogant Rex Brecher was gone. What was left was a man who finally understood the weight of the ghost he had been living with — the ghost of the person Gavin used to be.
His eyes searched Gavin’s face. For the first time in the whole marriage, he wasn’t looking at him with desire, or even with anger. He was looking at him with a hollow recognition. He had been the villain in his own story, and the credits were rolling.
“Do it then,” he breathed. “If that’s what you need to feel alive again — fucking do it.”
His head slumped forward against the water. He lay there, exposed and violated and chained, waiting for the thing that would finally end the man who had destroyed everything he ever touched.
“Don’t you dare play the victim with me. You are the bad guy here, not me. I loved you with everything I had. You made me so happy, and then you turned, and you wrecked me.” Gavin crouched down beside the bath. “Don’t you remember the time you smashed my head on the floor and I never got up again?”
The memory hit him harder than anything Gavin had done to his body.
For a split second the pain vanished entirely, replaced by a cold paralysing horror that stopped the blood in him.
It came back with perfect, nauseating clarity. The sound of his own fist connecting with bone. The wet thud of a skull against hardwood. The silence afterwards. He remembered the way the body had gone limp. He remembered the light going out of Gavin’s eyes before he’d even started crying. He remembered standing over him, breathing hard, his pride telling him he was right.
“I — I thought you —” His voice cracked under the weight of it. “I thought you were just being difficult. I didn’t — I didn’t mean to —”
And that part was true.
That was the unbearable thing about it. He hadn’t meant to kill him. Not once, in all those years, had he stood in a room and decided to end him. There had been no moment of deciding anything.
He had only meant what he always meant. To make him stop talking. To make him smaller. To win.
He had done it a hundred times. A hundred times Gavin had got up off the floor and gone and washed his face and come back into the room, and it had been fine, and they had gone on. And then one night he did the same thing he had always done, in the same temper he was always in, over something he could not now remember, and Gavin didn’t get up.
There was no moment where he became a murderer. He had just been what he was, one time too many.
“God. Fuck.” A sob went through him. He couldn’t scream properly anymore; he could only make wet choking sounds. “I remember. I remember every fucking second of it.”
His eyes locked onto Gavin’s, and they weren’t defiant. They were shattered. Years of pretending he wasn’t a monster, of convincing himself he was just strong, collapsed on top of him all at once.
“You’re right.”
And he thought that was it.
He genuinely did. He thought he had just walked all the way down to the bottom of himself and put his hand on the worst thing there was and said its name out loud. He had spent years never saying it. Now he had said it, in a bathroom, to the man it had been done to, and some starved part of him almost wanted credit for it — because if that was the worst thing he had ever done, then it had edges. It had a size. It was a thing a man could carry around for the rest of his life and still be a man.
He lay back against the iron and waited to be forgiven for it.
“You still don’t remember, do you?” Gavin’s voice was very level. “You killed me that day. I never got back up. You dragged me outside and dug a hole and buried me under the apple tree.”
The confession landed with more force than any punch Rex had ever taken in the ring.
For a moment all of it — the cold, the burning, the thing in his groin — faded into a silent void. His brain stalled, refusing to process it.
“What?” The word was a broken wheeze. “What are you talking about? I remember you crying. I remember you being angry. I remember —”
His mind raced back to that night. He remembered the rage. He remembered the violence. He remembered the aftermath — the cleaning up, the way he had convinced himself Gavin had simply run away. That he had finally left, because he couldn’t handle him anymore. He remembered the guilt that had festered in his gut for years, which he had twisted into arrogance and cruelty to protect himself from breaking down.
But he had never remembered the burial. He had never remembered the hole.
He had never remembered the apple tree.
“No.” His eyes widened until they looked like they might burst. “No, that’s not — I didn’t —”
A new kind of terror seized him, deeper and more primal than the fear of dying. If it was true, then his whole reality — his identity as a man who had simply grown cold — was a lie. He wasn’t a bad husband. He was a murderer who had spent years living on top of the corpse of the only person who had ever truly loved him.
“You’re lying,” he choked out, with nothing behind it. It was the plea of a man whose world had dissolved. “You’re just trying to fuck with my head before you kill me. You’re lying, Gavin!”
But he was looking at Gavin’s face, and the cold certainty in it began to seep in like poison. The gaps in his memory. The lapses in time. The hollow ache in his chest he had never been able to explain. It all began to align into one horrific picture.
“The apple tree.” He whispered it. “I — I remember the tree. I remember digging —”
His eyes rolled back. Not from pain this time. He started to hyperventilate, his chest convulsing so violently that blood spattered from his wounds into the water.
“I killed you,” he sobbed. “I killed you and I kept living. Oh god. Fuck me. Kill me now. Just fucking kill me now.”
Gavin didn’t move from the edge of the bath.
“How can I kill you if I’m not here, Rex?”
Rex froze.
“How can I chain you to the plumbing if I’m not here?”
The convulsions didn’t stop, but they went mechanical. Hollow. The movements of a body that hadn’t been told yet.
His breathing stopped for three full seconds. His eyes, bloodshot and swimming, fixed on Gavin with a horror that had gone past fear into something with no name for it.
“You’re — not —”
His voice was gone. What came out was a wet rattle.
His mind screamed at him to make it make sense. The cold water. The chains. The agony that felt so real he could taste copper. If Gavin wasn’t here, then what was this? Was he already dead? Was this hell? Was this the thing he had earned, playing out in a corner of a brain that was shutting down?
“Am I dead?” he wheezed. “Is this my head? Am I fucking dying right now?”
That was worse than any of it. The walls came in, the steam turning to fog, and everything he had built — the money, the fame, the apartment, the marriage — went to ash in front of him.
“Please.” His forehead slammed against the porcelain. “If you’re not real, then why does it hurt so fucking much? Why does it feel like you’re tearing me apart?”
He looked up one last time, his face a mask of shattered sanity.
“Kill me. If you’re a ghost, then fucking finish it. End it. Don’t leave me here alone with what I did.”
Gavin looked at him for a long moment.
“You’re not even handcuffed.”
Rex didn’t move.
“For that matter, I’m not even here. I never was. Everything you think I did, you did to yourself. You’re the one who cut your clothes off. You put the salt in. You cut your own nipple off. You gave yourself the ice bath.”
The silence that followed didn’t fill the room. It consumed it.
Rex looked down at his wrists.
There was no cold metal biting into his skin. No chain against the porcelain. Nothing holding him at all. His wrists were bare, and the only marks on them were red friction burns, in the shape of his own hands, where he had been holding himself down.
He looked at his body.
The clothes hadn’t been cut off him. They were shredded, and the shreds were under his fingernails. The cuts were his. The salt was his — the carton was upended on the tiles beside the tub, from his own kitchen, half of it gone into the water. He made himself look at his chest, and it took a long time, and when he got there the place where it should have been was raw and small and clean-edged, and he understood, in the same slow way you understand you have broken a bone, that he had done that carefully. That he had taken his time over it.
There were hours missing. He could feel the shape of them. Hours of sitting in his own bathroom in the dark, working, with something talking to him from the edge of the bath.
He tried to reach down and push the funnel away.
His hands were already there. They had been there the whole time, and they did not stop when he told them to, and he watched his own knuckles go white with the effort of a thing he was doing to himself, and could not make them let go.
“No,” he said. “No, no, no —”
And Gavin began to flicker like a dying bulb. Not a man standing in front of him. A projection thrown by a shattered mind, a thing assembled out of guilt he had buried under money and fame and violence for years. He had been talking to his own conscience.
And his conscience had decided to torture him to death.
“I did this,” he whispered. “I’m doing this to myself.”
“I’m alone,” he shrieked, and it came out as pure madness. He thrashed against the floor of the tub — not against chains, against the fact of himself. “I’m all alone in this fucking hell!”
His eyes went round the empty bathroom and found nothing but his own reflection. A bloodied, mutilated animal in a room with no one in it. He collapsed into the water, sobbing, his body convulsing in one last attempt to punish itself into oblivion.
The hallucination shattered like glass.
The bathroom, which a moment ago had been a stage for his own torment, went terrifyingly quiet. The only sound was the wet slap of water against tile and Rex’s own ragged, broken breathing.
Then he heard it.
It wasn’t the voice of the thing that had been tormenting him. It wasn’t the executioner. It was Gavin’s voice. Soft. Real. Vulnerable. It came from the mirror — not as a reflection, but as if the words were bleeding through the silver from somewhere else entirely.
“It’s time. Dig me up. Take me home to my family. Please.”
Rex dragged himself upright, his body screaming in protest. Every movement sent fresh agony through him and he didn’t care. He crawled toward the mirror, his fingers leaving bloody streaks across the marble countertop, his vision swimming, his mind still caught between the horror of what he’d done to himself and the impossible reality of what he was hearing.
He pressed his face close to the glass.
His own reflection was a nightmare — pale, bloodied, a broken animal. But behind his own terrified eyes, he saw Gavin.
Not a monster. Not a ghost. Just Gavin. He looked exactly as he had before the world turned grey, before the violence, before Rex had become the thing he was now.
“Gavin?” he wheezed, his forehead touching the cold glass. A single tear tracked through the blood on his cheek. “Gavin, I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”
The realisation of what he had done — the actual, physical reality of the body beneath the apple tree — hit him harder than any of the night had. He wasn’t just crazy. He was a man who had built a kingdom on a grave.
“I’ll do it,” he sobbed, pressing his palm against the mirror where Gavin’s face seemed to be. “I’ll dig you up. I’ll take you home. I’ll — I’ll fix it. I’ll fix everything.”
He knew he couldn’t fix the dead. He knew he couldn’t undo the years of cruelty, or the moment he had taken his life. But staring into the glass at the ghost of the man he had loved and destroyed, he knew it was the only thing left to do.
“I’ll bring you home, baby,” he whispered — a broken, delirious promise. “I promise. Just... please don’t leave me alone in the dark.”
He slumped against the mirror and slid down to the floor, a heap of blood and shame, staring at the space where Gavin had been, waiting for the strength to stand up and go and face the earth.
