The first thing to return was neither light nor pain.
It was sound.
Dull and heavy, it came from somewhere far away, as though through a great depth of water. Someone was calling him. Voices overlapped, broke apart, lost their words — until only the rhythm remained, insistent and angry.
Then came the light.
White, flat, striking him directly in the eyes. A rectangular lamp swayed above his head, and every jolt echoed through his body — they were taking him somewhere. A stranger's hand covered his face and pressed something over his mouth and nose. Air surged into his lungs — cold, rubbery, alien.
— Can you hear me? Don't close your eyes. Stay with me.
A face leaned over him. Blurred. Dressed in blue.
Simon tried to answer.
His throat refused to obey.
His body lay somewhere far away and did not belong to him — numb, heavy, stuffed with night.
— His blood pressure is dropping, — a second voice said sharply, very close by.
Cold entered the crook of his elbow. Somewhere beside his ear, a monitor beeped rapidly — uneven, stumbling — and Simon did not immediately understand that it was his own heart beating. Losing its way. Choking. Falling behind itself.
— Epinephrine. Keep the defibrillator ready. — The voice was hard, without panic, and that only made it more frightening. — We can't let his heart stop.
The light expanded.
The lamp swelled and blurred, flooding everything with white. Faces, voices, the ceiling of the ambulance, and his own name — all drowned in that whiteness as someone repeated it again and again beside his ear.
The sound grew thin.
Retreated behind glass.
The last thing Simon heard was the monitor's broken rhythm.
Then that vanished too.
The darkness was not the end.
It was only a pause.
Simon surfaced from it slowly, reluctantly, layer by layer. First the beeping returned — steady, calm, nothing like the strained sound from before. Then the ceiling. White, clean, motionless. Not the lamp inside the ambulance. Not the dark beams of the house in the country.
A hospital ceiling.
He was lying in a bed. The crook of his elbow ached — a thin tube ran upward to an IV bag. A plastic clip gripped his finger. The skin over his cheekbones felt raw where a mask had pressed against it all night. His mouth was dry and bitter.
For several seconds, Simon simply stared upward.
He was alive.
The body that had obediently faded only yesterday was breathing on its own now. Beating. Driving blood in circles. It was dragging him back into the world he had left so carefully, so meticulously, having accounted for everything except one thing.
Except being brought back.
The chair beside him creaked.
— Hey, — a quiet voice said. — Well, hello.
Simon turned his head.
Ashley sat in the chair right beside the bed. Her short blue hair was flattened on one side and stuck out in every direction. Dark shadows lay beneath her eyes. Her black jacket was wrinkled in the unmistakable way clothes wrinkle when someone has spent the night in a hospital chair — and Simon understood everything from that jacket before he could even ask.
She had stayed there until morning.
— What… — His voice came out as a strange, brittle rasp. He had to start again. — What happened?
— They brought you back. The ambulance got there in time. — Ashley swallowed. — A little longer and they wouldn't have.
— How long have I been here?
— One night. It's morning now.
Simon closed his eyes.
The last thing he remembered flared beneath his eyelids at once. The orange glow of the fireplace. Jacob straining against the chains. His own hand calmly finishing what he had decided to do. And then — the swaying lamp, unfamiliar hands, and voices that had never been part of his plan.
His eyes flew open.
— Shit. — His breath hitched. — It wasn't a dream.
— Simon…
— Jacob. — He jerked upward, pulling the IV line taut. — I chained him up. I drugged him. Ash, they're going to put me in prison. They are, aren't they?
The monitor began beeping faster, hurriedly exposing everything he was trying to contain.
Ashley placed a hand against his chest, gentle but firm, and made him lie back down.
— Easy. Stay down. — She moved from the chair to the edge of the bed. — No one is putting you in prison.
— What?
— Jacob gave a statement.
Simon went still.
— He told the cops the two of you had been playing, — Ashley continued in the level tone of someone reading words written by somebody else. — The chains were consensual. And you took the pills yourself. You wanted to relax and overdid it.
The words reached him one by one.
Playing.
Consent.
Yourself.
The police had entered the house and found a man chained to a chair, his wrists scraped raw. One truthful sentence from that man would have been enough to destroy Simon completely — and the truth was on his side.
Instead, he had lied.
For three years, their story had existed only in darkness — in locker rooms, storage closets, beneath staircases, anywhere without witnesses and with nothing that could be proved. Now it had its first official version. Written into a report. Filed as evidence.
And that version was a lie Jacob had invented to protect him.
— I don't understand, — Simon said quietly. — Why did he protect me?
Ashley was silent for a long time.
— I don't know why he did it, — she finally said. — But officially, it turns out I stuck my nose into something that wasn't my business. Again. — One corner of her mouth twitched upward, but the smile never formed. — I called the cops and an ambulance to someone else's private party. With chains and other adult entertainment. At the station, they looked at me like I was some girl who peeked through a stranger's window and didn't understand what she saw.
She gave a short, humorless laugh.
— Just like with the director. Remember? I thought I was saving someone. According to the paperwork, I only ruined everything.
Simon looked at her.
She said it lightly, like a joke, but her hands betrayed her: her fingers twisted the strap around her wrist, stopped, and started again. She had driven through the forest after him in the middle of the night. Stood in the rain outside a stranger's window. Followed the red lights of the ambulance all the way back to the city. Waited in the corridor while, behind a closed door, people decided whether he would come back or not.
And now she sat on the edge of his bed, calling herself the girl who had ruined everything.
— Ash.
— Mm?
— I'm sorry.
She looked up.
— Back there, in the rain, — Simon said. Every word had to be forced through his raw throat, but he did not stop. — The things I said to you… I drove you away. And you're the only one who…
His voice broke.
Ashley shook her head, cutting him off.
— I'm not stupid, Simon. — The armor she wore in place of skin cracked before his eyes for the first time. — I figured it out a long time ago. And I've been afraid for a long time that it would end in disaster.
She lowered her gaze to his hand — pale, bruised at the crook of the elbow, with the tube running upward from it.
— I'm sorry I was right.
The room fell silent.
Only the monitor continued counting his heartbeats — steady, calm, indifferent to what those beats had cost.
Simon wanted to say something else. That she had not ruined everything. That without her, Jacob would still be sitting in chains inside the cold house, and Simon himself… He did not manage to assemble the words.
The door creaked.
Simon looked up — and froze.
Jacob stood in the doorway.
He was not wearing the red-and-white jacket with the proud letter "U." There was no team at his back, no corridor parting before him, no familiar lazy smirk. Only a plain dark T-shirt — and white bandages around both wrists, where the metal had rubbed the skin raw.
He did not come in.
He simply stood there and looked at Simon — long and unblinking, as though verifying what the doctors had already told him but what he could not believe until he saw it for himself.
Simon turned his gaze toward the window.
His fingers closed around the edge of the blanket on their own. His breathing became short and rapid. He ordered himself to calm down — and failed: the monitor answered with a hurried burst of beeping, broadcasting his condition to the entire room.
Jacob's slow exhale became audible.
Ashley looked from one of them to the other.
She understood.
She rose from the bed without hurry, every movement making it clear she was leaving by choice, not because she had been pushed out. She touched Simon's shoulder with her palm.
— I'm going to get some coffee, — she said quietly.
At the door, as she drew level with Jacob, Ashley stopped. For a second, they stood face-to-face — a slight girl with blue hair and a man more than a head taller than her. Jacob held her gaze in silence.
Then she looked back at Simon.
— I'm close. If anything happens, I'm right outside.
It did not sound like politeness.
It sounded like a warning.
The door closed softly.
They were alone.
For several seconds, Jacob did not move.
Then he crossed the room — slowly, almost cautiously, without his usual proprietary swagger, as though in a single night he had forgotten how to take up space. He sat down on the edge of the bed beside Simon's thigh. The mattress sank beneath his weight, and Simon shifted slightly toward him — by the few inches he would never have agreed to move on his own.
Simon kept staring stubbornly at the wall.
He breathed quickly. A muscle twitched in his cheek.
He waited.
It would begin now. Jacob would explain what Simon was supposed to say when they came with questions. He would repeat the official story word for word, force him to memorize it, and warn him what would happen if he slipped up. He would take Simon's silence from him as he always had — because that was why people came to witnesses.
Jacob said nothing.
For a long time.
A gurney rattled down the corridor. Several floors below, a car passed outside the window. The monitor beeped steadily, indifferently.
Then Jacob raised his hand.
Simon tensed inwardly, prepared for everything he had been taught to expect — a fist in his hair, fingers around his throat, a humiliating flick against his forehead.
The touch was different.
Strong fingers — the same ones that had spent years hitting him, breaking him, pinning him against walls — settled against his cheek with care, as though he were made of something that could easily crumble. A warm palm. The rough edge of a bandage beside his temple.
Jacob gently turned Simon's face toward him.
Simon had no strength left to resist. He allowed himself to be turned — and their eyes met.
Truly, for the first time.
Not through the crosshairs of mockery. Not through fear that forced Simon to look at the floor. Not in darkness where neither of them could see the other clearly anyway. Just two people in a bright hospital room looking at each other, neither knowing what to do with it.
Up close, it was clear that Jacob had not slept either. Reddened eyes. Gray shadows over his cheekbones. At the collar of his shirt, the edge of a fresh abrasion ran toward his collarbone. A mark left by the chain.
— Now you're mine alone, — Jacob said quietly.
There was not a trace of his old mockery in his voice.
No game. No audience. No witnesses worth performing for. All that remained was the hoarse, night-worn certainty of a man who had decided everything for himself — and had no intention of asking permission.
Simon did not have time to answer.
Jacob leaned closer.
The kiss was slow and gentle — nothing like the cruelty that had stood between them all this time. Simon turned to stone. Everything inside him, trained by pain, screamed that it was a trap, that a blow would come next, that this had happened before — warmth in exchange for humiliation, affection used as a running start before a fall.
The blow never came.
There were only another man's lips — careful, almost questioning. The warmth of his breath. A palm holding Simon's cheek as though he might disappear.
Simon's eyelids lowered on their own.
His breath caught. The fingers that had been clutching the blanket slowly relaxed. Somewhere nearby, the monitor raced, honestly and shamelessly beating out everything he would never say aloud.
The whole world narrowed to that warmth.
To the very warmth he had waited for so desperately, so shamefully, all these years — and which he had believed he did not deserve. For one second of it, he had asked for directions beneath the sign. For its shadow, he had endured everything else.
It had come.
Too late, in the wrong way, by the wrong path — but it had come.
They parted.
Their foreheads almost touched. A single tear rolled down Simon's cheek — and not from pain. Jacob did not pull away. He looked into Simon's wet eyes from only a few inches away, and there was something new in his gaze — something dark, possessive, hungry. Something he had hidden for years behind cruelty and other people's hands. Something that no longer fit inside him.
— My baby, — he breathed, barely moving his lips, directly against Simon's mouth.
Simon did not answer.
There was nothing left to answer with: the monitor had already said everything for him.
Outside the door, only a few steps away, Ashley stood holding a cup of cooling coffee. Beyond the window, an ordinary day was beginning. Somewhere at the police station lay a report containing a beautiful, carefully arranged lie in place of their story.
And here, in the silence of the hospital room, beneath the monitor's calm, even rhythm, the thing that had been breaking against both of them for three years finally fused together between them.
Crooked.
Wrong.
Forever.
The screen fades to black.
Continued in the next episode.