Vinny's hands flew up, bracing against the shower doorframe. "No! Matt, wait!"
His plea was useless. He had no strength, no leverage. Matthew shoved him, hard.
Vinny stumbled, his weak legs giving out completely. He half-fell, half-slammed into the shower stall, his shoulder and hip cracking painfully against the cold, hard tile.
The water hit him a split second later.
It was a physical assault. Needles of pure, agonizing ice strafed his skin. His breath was stolen from his lungs in a single, massive gasp that left him choking. His entire body seized, every over-strained muscle locking up at once in a violent, full-body tremor. The shock was so profound it momentarily blacked out his vision.
"Ah—! Fuck! It's freezing!" he shrieked, his voice unnaturally high. He scrambled, pushing against the wall, trying to curl into a ball in the corner, desperate to escape the relentless, icy spray. But the stall was small, and the water seemed to be everywhere.
"Matthew! Please! Turn it off! Please!" He was crying openly now, ragged, terrified sobs mixing with the frigid water plastering his hair to his skull. His teeth chattered so hard his jaw ached.
The bathroom door slid shut, plunging the small room into a dimmer, grayer light. Then, the shower door opened again.
Matthew stepped inside, fully clothed.
The water immediately plastered his dark t-shirt and jeans to his body, highlighting the hard, unforgiving lines of his muscles. He didn't shiver. He didn't even blink as the cold spray hit his face. He just stood there, an unmovable, dripping figure of pure menace, blocking the only exit.
He looked at Vinny, huddled and sobbing at his feet, with an expression of chilling, absolute contempt.
"You're pathetic," he hissed, his voice cutting through the roar of the water.
He reached down, not to help, but to grab. His fingers wrapped around Vinny's bicep, digging into the same cluster of bruises from the night before. Vinny screamed as a fresh, electric pain shot up his arm.
"Get up."
Matthew hauled him to his feet. Vinny was shaking too violently to stand, his legs buckling, but Matthew didn't let him fall. He slammed Vinny back against the tiled wall, the impact knocking the last of the air from his lungs. He pinned him there with his own body, the wet, abrasive denim of his jeans scraping against Vinny's hypersensitive, frozen skin.
"Why?" Vinny choked out, his head spinning. The cold was so deep he felt it in his bones. "Why are you doing this? What did I do?"
"You still don't know?" Matthew's face was inches away. Vinny could see the absolute lack of humanity in his eyes. He wasn't looking at a person; he was looking at something he intended to break.
"I... I don't!"
"Liar."
Matthew spun him around, slamming his front against the wall. The tile was so cold it burned. Before Vinny could even register the change, Matthew pressed his forearm hard across his shoulders, pinning him securely. The icy water beat down on his back, a relentless, punishing rhythm.
"You wanted to forget," Matthew growled, his voice a low vibration against Vinny's ear. "You wanted to pretend."
"Forget what?!" Vinny shrieked, his hands pushing uselessly against the slick wall.
He felt Matthew's free hand trail down his back, cold and rough, tracing the knobs of his spine. The touch wasn't sensual; it was clinical, proprietary. A butcher mapping out his cuts.
"This," Matthew said, his hand clamping onto Vinny's hip, digging his fingers in, "is to make sure you never forget."
Vinny heard the metallic rasp of Matthew's belt buckle. His heart stopped.
"No," he whimpered, the word swallowed by the deluge. "No, Matthew... not again. Not like this. Please, I'm already... it hurts, please..."
His pleas were nothing. They were just noise against the sound of the water.
Matthew yanked his hip back, angling him. There was no preparation, no concession. Only the frigid, stinging spray, the unyielding wall against his chest, and the brutal, agonizingly cold violation as Matthew drove into him.
Vinny screamed, a raw, broken sound that echoed off the tile and was lost in the roar of the water. There was no heat this time, no friction, no desperate passion. There was just the cold, the pain, and the relentless, punishing rhythm, as if Matthew was trying to scour him clean from the inside out.
Vinny's world contracted to three things: the unbearable, stinging cold of the water, the slick tile burning against his chest, and the excruciating, tearing pain inside him.
He was sobbing, his cries swallowed by the deafening roar of the shower. He was too weak to fight, too frozen to even try. His body was just a thing, an object being used, held up only by the iron-hard arm clamped across his shoulder and the relentless force pinning him to the wall.
Matthew's movements were brutal, piston-like, and blessedly, chillingly silent. Until they weren't.
He pushed deeper, a violent, punishing thrust that forced a new, sharp scream from Vinny. And with it, Matthew's own control snapped.
"You..." he growled, his voice a choked, unfamiliar rasp right against Vinny's ear. "You still want to escape... after everything."
The words made no sense. "What? Escape what?" Vinny choked, water streaming into his mouth. "Matthew, I don't know— "
"I BEGGED you, Vinny."
The voice cracked. It was the sound of something inside him finally splitting open, a raw wound exposed. The desperation in that sound was almost as violent as the physical assault.
Vinny's confusion, his desperate, pained denial, was the spark. It was the wrong answer.
"You don't know?" Matthew repeated, his voice dropping, thickening with a fresh, more personal wave of rage. "You don't?!"
His grip on Vinny's hip tightened, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise bone. He began to move faster, his rhythm turning frantic, chaotic, and infinitely rougher. The measured punishment was gone, replaced by a blind, desperate fury. It wasn't about control anymore; it was about breaking.
"I was on my FUCKING KNEES!"
He roared the words. It wasn't a shout; it was a primal scream, ripped from his very soul, raw with a humiliation and fury that Vinny couldn't comprehend.
The words were punctuated by a series of impossibly hard, fast thrusts. He was slamming into him, using his own body as a weapon, trying to physically hammer this unknown sin into Vinny's very being.
"I... was on... my KNEES!"
With each word, he drove deeper. Vinny's vision flared white with blinding pain. His head smashed against the tile, his body limp, a puppet held up only by the violation. He couldn't even scream anymore. There was no air, no thought, only the ice, the pain, and the sound of Matthew's raw, broken voice screaming over and over again about a moment Vinny couldn't remember, a sin he didn't know he'd committed.