7. Kyle

CHAPTER 7

Kyle

K yle had stripped the bedsheets from all of the rooms on the ground floor by the time a damp-haired Casey showed up at lunchtime looking sulky and resentful. The man didn't seem inclined to assist, merely watching Kyle from the doorway as he tossed the linen into a pile on the floor and wiped down the plastic sheeting on the mattresses underneath with an efficiency born of years of practice.

"If making the beds back up is more your thing," Kyle said absently without turning to look at him, "feel free to grab fresh sheets from the storage room."

Casey made a non-committal grunt.

"Then are you able to get the other side of this mattress?" asked Kyle. "It's shifted slightly and needs slotting back into the frame-"

"We only have another two minutes of fucking detention to endure," Casey pointed out, "and then we can go have lunch. Someone else can handle it."

That made Kyle straighten up and stare at him. "So what, you're going to just stand there? And make other people waste their time in changing the beds later when we could have already done it?"

"It's not our job."

Kyle shook his head and shoved the mattress back into place by himself. "Do what you want," he told him. "I'm changing the beds."

But it seemed Casey's childish defiance only extended as far as not lifting a finger to help, for rather than fucking off, he trailed after Kyle and continued to bitch about their punishment. A shame, for Kyle would have rather enjoyed watching Master Epsilon tear strips off the other man for his petulant disobedience, and unless anyone was still monitoring the cameras over lunch or Kyle dobbed Casey in – both possibilities as equally unlikely – his presence here would probably be enough for everyone to assume he'd been doing as instructed.

With only thirty seconds remaining according to Casey, whom he had no doubt was keeping accurate time, Kyle stopped at the fifth and final door on the first-floor corridor. He frowned when he found it closed.

Closed meant a client.

The House's staff were all trained to leave the rooms' doors open after finishing a session so that the cleaning and maintenance staff knew to turn the room over for its next guest. But the clients should have all left at least twenty minutes ago, giving the staff time to shower before their lunch break, and Rick at the front desk hadn't said anything about an extended session when Kyle had passed through the foyer earlier.

He considered skipping the room and coming back to it, but something felt off. This was the room usually assigned to Ben, a bratty submissive with a fondness for consensual non-consent, and as Kyle had been the one to introduce him to the House, he felt responsible for him. Although to be fair, he felt that way about all of House Epsilon's staff, not least because he had, as the Master had accused him of earlier, filled their workplace with all the lost and desperate people he'd found on Xerxes' streets.

Whatever. Ben was one of their best, and Epsilon knew it. The man could press every single one of a client's buttons without stepping over the line, and his repeat business was so good, he hadn't taken on any new clients in months. Having helped out with some of his initial training, Kyle was familiar with the primal urge Ben could invoke in someone to knock the cheeky grin off his face, and with only an hour at a time to enjoy that pleasure, it was no wonder his clients were eager to return.

Had one of them decided they couldn't wait until their next appointment? Were they still in there, teaching poor Ben a lesson he wouldn't forget?

Or was Kyle about to interrupt something entirely consensual?

He hesitated only a second before pressing the buzzer set in the wall by the door to room eight. As the rooms were necessarily soundproofed, no one inside would hear a knock.

But neither did they respond to the buzzer, so after sharing an anxious look with Casey, Kyle pushed down on the handle and let himself inside. All of the client rooms in House Epsilon were similarly decorated, with ambient mood-setting lighting set into the walls and ceiling, a generously sized bed in the centre, and various equipment and furniture arranged around it for those who wanted their exploits to be a little more adventurous.

He couldn't see anyone else in the room but Ben was curled up on the bed, his knees tucked to his chest and his arms wrapped around them. He had his back to the door, and as he was wearing only boxer shorts, Kyle could see the red lines that crossed his shoulders. Faint, but numerous.

"Ben, honey?"

The man startled, whipping a tear-stained face over his shoulder before nestling it back into his knees when he realised who his intruders were.

"I'm fine."

Kyle's heart broke at the sobbed-out words and the sheer amount of pain behind them.

Casey, at Kyle's shoulder, shrugged. All traces of concern had drained from his face. "You heard the subbie, Kyle. He's fine ."

Biting back on what he really wanted to say to the other man, he gave Casey a thin smile. "I'd like to make sure of that. Please take these to the laundry on your way to lunch."

Casey eyed the armful of soiled sheets Kyle was holding out to him, his mouth curving in disgust. By the stars, did that arrogant, contemptuous act really work for his clients? As a coworker, he was insufferable.

"I'll owe you one," Kyle coaxed.

"You bet you will."

Casey took the sheets and disappeared from the room.

Kyle spoke softly to Ben as he moved closer and sat down on the bed beside him, telling him what he was going to do before he did it so that he didn't spook him again. Ben didn't respond, but he didn't resist either, even when Kyle began to stroke his fingers through his floppy ash-brown hair.

"Can you tell me what happened?"

Ben's skinny body convulsed with near-silent sobs.

"Did your last client do something to you?" Kyle asked, his tone gentle. He didn't want to retraumatise the man but they had to know if someone needed to be blacklisted before they hurt anyone else. And it wasn't like they could call the police considering prostitution was technically illegal on Xerxes – although the cops used the services of the Houses as much as anyone – but Kyle suspected Epsilon might go postal on the guy in some vigilante-like justice if he'd hurt one of his staff. He loved how protective his boss could be.

Uh. Liked. Definitely liked, not loved. That was just…

Ben still hadn't said anything. "Was it this?" said Kyle, lightly tracing a finger over one of the whip marks on his back to gauge Ben's discomfort with them. The man shook his head.

"No," he muttered into his knees. "I asked for that. I needed…I needed not to think for a while." He gave a short bark of laughter. "The client didn't realise I wasn't crying for him. "

"Would you like to tell me what you are crying for? Perhaps I can help."

Ben peered up at him, initially seeming as though he was going to answer, and then something unreadable flashed across his face.

"Fuck you, Sir."

Kyle didn't mix playtime with real life. He wasn't the kind of Dom who punished anyone for what they did outside of a dedicated scene, but he understood that some people needed the stability that BDSM brought them on more than just an occasional basis. Ben himself was in a 24/7 TPE relationship with his Owner-husband.

It explained what the boy wanted now. Why he hadn't just refused Kyle's offer. Why his tone had been so unnecessarily argumentative and defiant.

So Kyle narrowed his eyes and pressed down harder on the reddened skin across Ben's shoulders, making him hiss. When his head came up to swear at him again, Kyle grabbed his chin, and dug his fingers painfully into the other man's jaw.

"What was that?" Kyle asked, his voice curt.

"Are you deaf? I said fuck you ."

It took four attempts, but after he'd had his hair pulled and his face slapped, Ben finally lowered his gaze in submission. "Sorry, Sir. Didn't mean it, Sir."

"Hmm," Kyle said, making it clear he didn't believe him. He gave him a hard shake. "Then answer me before I make those pretty marks on your back bleed."

Ben deflated under his hands, fully surrendering. "It's Alecia."

Kyle cocked his head. "Your sister?"

"Yeah. She was due back from a Dive yesterday. She never…she never came home."

Kyle wanted to offer his sympathies, to scoop the smaller man up in his arms and hug him until all his tears had been shed, but that wasn't how grief worked. And it wasn't something Ben would thank him for.

So he just nodded and said, "you know Diving is an incredibly dangerous job. They're skydiving down to the surface of the fucking Earth, with all the radiation and weather and dangerous altitude such a thing entails."

It was also well-paid, for those same reasons. Not something Kyle would ever consider – he'd had far too many nightmares about falling off the side of Xerxes, as impossible as that would be with the walls that wrapped around each level to close off the city from the unseen sky – but for those desperate to feed their families and delusional enough to believe in luck or a higher power, getting a spot on a Diving team to help hoist precious materials and resources back up the city was considered an honour.

"Alecia isn't dead, asshole," Ben snapped, continuing to act out.

"You'll mind that tone, boy," Kyle responded sharply. He hoped Ben didn't realise how half-hearted the admonishment was. The last thing he wanted to do when someone was upset was yell at them, for fuck's sake, but it seemed to settle the man.

"Yes, Sir." Ben took a breath and spoke to his knees again. "They told us she was dead. Obliterated in the fall when she misjudged the parachute deployment height. Produced a death certificate and everything, like that matters when the Uppers can say whatever they want without us being able to do shit about it."

His shoulders sagged. "But a friend of hers – a Diver on her team – he found me afterwards and said it wasn't right that we should think she'd gone out that way. That Alecia was super smart and would never..." Ben hiccoughed out a sob.

"He said they took her , Sir. They took my little sister right in front of the other Divers the moment she stepped foot back on Xerxes and threatened the rest of them to keep quiet. The Uppers did it on their return so they got three days of work from her without...without having to pay a fucking micro-credit. Cold. Fucking. Bastards."

Oh, Ben , thought Kyle, daring to stroke the man's shoulder because he couldn't find it in himself to be physically cruel when Ben was already in so much emotional distress.

"Ma hoped it was just a...thing," Ben told him through his tears. "That whatever the perverts wanted with Alecia, she'd be back the next morning. Hurt, humiliated, maybe, but alive. But she's..." He flopped a hand weakly towards the blank runepad lying on the bed next to him. "She's still not come back. And now I don't know if she'll ever..."

"That's right," said Kyle firmly, folding his arms around Ben's middle and dragging him off the edge of the bed to force him to stand. Ben did so with clear reluctance, tears still dribbling down his cheeks. "You don't know if she will, which means you don't know that she won't . Alecia needs you to be strong for her, Ben. She needs you to fight as fiercely as she will undoubtedly be doing to get back to you all." Kyle offered a grin. "As fiercely as you fought me that time we scened on the third floor and ended up on the first."

Ben, despite himself, let out a little noise of amused agreement. Kyle had never met anyone who threw himself into role play quite as thoroughly as him: by the time he'd pinned the little shit down half the House away from where they'd started, Ben had invented an entire victim persona to convince the interested onlookers that he really was being raped by a serial molester who wanted both his virginity and his organs as gruesome keepsakes.

Fortunately, said onlookers – the other House staff, because their game had stretched out into the lunch break – had been far too invested in watching the brat getting railed on the stairs to bother interfering. The little cheer that had gone up as the scene finished had embarrassed Kyle, it being one of the first times he'd engaged in mass exhibitionism, but Ben had just gotten to unsteady feet, wiped away his tears, and given a deep, flourishing bow to their audience.

Swiping up the discarded runepad from the bed, Kyle settled an uncompromising hand on the nape of Ben's neck and guided him upstairs to Epsilon's office. The door was open, revealing the Master himself seated at his desk. He glanced up as Kyle grazed his knuckles on the door frame in a light knock, with the glow of the rune-powered monitors bathing his handsome face in a harsh blue light.

The office was immaculate, particularly when compared to the worn-down remainder of the House. It wasn't because Epsilon indulged himself while letting his staff work in squalor: having been here since nearly House Epsilon's inception, Kyle knew the furniture in here was as old as the rest of it. It was just that the Master was good at taking care of what was his.

The other man tapped something on the runepad beneath his right hand and the light of the monitors abruptly vanished, hiding whatever had been displayed on the screens. Kyle didn't take it personally. If the man was secretive enough not to share his given name, he doubted the House's confidential information was treated any less seriously.

"Kyle," greeted Epsilon, rising from his chair. He glanced at Ben, forming the man's name on his lips, but seemed to notice how Kyle's hand still lay possessively around the back of his neck, for he aborted the word. He adjusted the cufflinks on his sleeves, his expression dropping into sternness. "I see you've brought me a sub. What does he need?"

This wasn't quite a scene, but it wasn't not , either, because Kyle didn't treat other men as subservient outside of one. Nor did Epsilon deliberately talk about his staff instead of to them, as if Ben wasn't a living, breathing person standing right there. Not unless they were playing with a Dom who they'd agreed would speak on his behalf.

"Ben has received some bad news about his sister," Kyle explained. "He should take the rest of the night off."

Kyle loosened his grip and gave Ben a hard shove between the shoulders, sending him stumbling further into the room. "Kneel in the corner," he ordered, and Ben obediently moved to where the ridged mat on the floor would ensure his knees would begin to hurt within seconds. "We're going to play the numbers game. Four."

Master Epsilon shot a concerned look at Ben's kneeling form and then hurried over to Kyle, bringing his head close to his ear so they wouldn't be overheard.

"And just what am I supposed to do with him?" he hissed urgently. "What if he starts crying?"

Kyle, as tempted as he was to laugh, held back for the sake of both men. Epsilon was a competent boss when it came to the figures and the business, the training and the discipline, but he was terrible at what he called the people stuff. The expectation that he'd be needed to comfort an emotionally distraught employee clearly had him nearing full-blown terror.

"Call his husband, ask him to come and pick him up," Kyle instructed in a low murmur. "And if Ben begins to cry, comfort him as you would any submissive experiencing sub drop."

Putting it into the context of D/s role dynamics that Epsilon was far more familiar with than basic social skills seemed to ease his panic.

" Our sub," Kyle added loudly, making it clear to both men that he was extending Ben's temporary ownership to their Master, "deserves to be properly punished by his Owner for turning up to work tonight when he should have stayed with his family in their shared grief. Eleven. He doubly deserves punishment for giving up on his sister when he knows nothing about her fate other than that she disappeared. A hundred and one."

"Forty-four," Ben replied from where he faced the wall, pain already hitching his breath. That mat was no joke: it was designed to feel like tiny grains of rice or gravel beneath your knees, and as a result of Ben's failure to get himself dressed after his last client had left, he'd be feeling it particularly acutely on his bare skin.

Master Epsilon swallowed and nodded. "Very well. I will ensure his Owner is informed on his arrival. Seventeen."

"One thousand and...um, eleven. No wait, one thousand, one hundred and eleven," the boy hastily corrected, but Epsilon clicked his tongue in disapproval.

"You can be sure he will be informed of that, too." A ghost of a smile played on their boss' lips.

Ben groaned and his shoulders began to tremble.

Good. While he was concentrating on the pain and remembering prior numbers in the sequence to multiply by, he wasn't spiralling over Alecia.

"I'll rearrange Ben's appointments and take care of the staff until you're done here, Master," Kyle said. Him looking after the House when Epsilon was busy was a familiar arrangement to them, and had been for over three years now.

"Ben?" Kyle asked, drifting towards the door.

The boy shifted on his knees. "Yes, Sir?"

"Forty-thousand and seventy-eight."

Ben's cursing was drowned out by Epsilon's low, anticipatory chuckle.