Stepan Rannikov
Procrustean bed

"The stage is set, the lights dim, and you are both the audience and the spectacle. A myth retold where surrender is the only role left to play."

PROLOGUE

Then the world fractured.

A sharp, mechanical crack split the air, and the stage plunged into sudden, suffocating darkness. Rebecca froze, her heart slamming against her ribs. Yet her right hand refused to stop — her fingers kept moving beneath the lace, driven by a desperate momentum of their own. Her knees pressed tightly together, as if trying to guard that last fragile line of defense.

For a few heartbeats, everything was deathly silent. Then a massive shadow detached itself from the gloom and glided toward her glass partition. A faint, rhythmic groan broke the quiet — the tired hinges of a door swinging open.

Her eyes, still stinging from the blinding lights of the octagon, strained into the blackness. Nothing. No silhouette, no outline. Just void. Then came the touch: strong, searing male hands gripping her legs. They moved with predatory speed, sliding up the insides of her thighs, over the bunched fabric of her slacks, across the softness of her stomach. His fingers hooked into the waistband of her panties and yanked them down in one ruthless motion.

He stripped the silk to her ankles, then jerked one leg free, leaving the delicate fabric tangled around her other foot and shoe.

Deep inside her, the gears of memory began to turn, sending honeyed shivers racing across her skin.

She was back on the Atlantica, the great intercontinental liner slicing through the Atlantic swells toward America. Standing on the sun-warmed deck, watching the waves batter the hull, she had been lost in a memory she knew she would never be able to forget.

CHAPTER 1

It had happened months earlier in Warsaw.

Rebecca was walking home from her telegraphy classes, nibbling on a bar of white chocolate, when the world lost its shape — a common enough affliction for a woman prone to daydreaming. She had wandered away from the main square and stumbled into a narrow, choked alley.

Even in broad daylight, the towering, soot-stained tenements cast long, bruised shadows. To Rebecca, the street felt like a den of the underworld, a place of hidden vice. She had never actually seen a brothel — not in Vilna, and not here in the capital where she and Isaac had come chasing a better life — but she could smell it.

A sharp, primal instinct warned her of the indecency hanging in the air. Flushed with embarrassment, she hurried toward the light of the square.

Just as the alley began to open up, she nearly collided with a strange building. At first glance it looked like a miniature circus. She hadn’t seen a circus since her parents took her to Minsk as a child.

It was a low, ancient stone structure that carried the solemn weight of a cathedral or synagogue. Despite its crumbling façade, it felt immovable — a relic. A garish modern sign hung over the entrance, screaming “THEATER” in defiance of the building’s age. On the door was a small, unassuming board with a single notice:

“Daily Performance: The Bed of Procrustes. Adults Only.”

***

Zosima took a fierce, almost visceral pride in his creation. The idea had taken root when he was just eighteen — a deserter fleeing the slaughter of the Galician fronts during the Great War. He had hidden in the cellar of a lonely, aging soldier’s widow near Łódź.

Returning to Belarus was out of the question. So he stayed, bedding the widow in exchange for food and shelter. In the damp silence of that cellar, he began to dream of something bigger.

He had no trade, no real skills. But he possessed one undeniable gift: his cock. It was handsome and formidable, rising at the mere thought of a woman. During the war he had used it relentlessly — sometimes by force, more often with quiet consent. Tall, broad-boned, with a rugged, noble face and thick curling hair, he looked like a Gypsy. Perhaps his mother really had opened her legs to some wandering stranger while his father toiled for kopecks in Gomel.

In Łódź, the widow would sob “my darling, my sweet dove” into his neck while he moved between her thighs. Zosima knew, with deep animal instinct, that this was his path to greatness. His one true instrument.

When the war finally ended in the early twenties, he drifted to the fringes of Warsaw. He worked occasionally as a stevedore, but his real business was women — young girls, lonely widows, bored wives, even those barely out of girlhood. He took them all. In return, they gave him whatever they could: coins, food, or fleeting tenderness. He refused nothing.

Once he had bedded a seventy-year-old pawnbroker with such vigor that the old woman felt twenty years younger. In gratitude she gave him a hefty sum and asked only that he return from time to time so her withered hands could touch him again. Zosima would laugh like a stallion and she called him "my little teddy bear.”

It was through that old hag that he first slipped into Warsaw’s underworld — eventually finding his way to Pan Dane and the legendary Pan Kwinto. But that’s a story for another time.

***

“Daily Performance: The Bed of Procrustes. Adults Only.”

The word “theater” sang to Rebecca like a fever dream. As a girl she had often imagined herself an actress, spinning through empty rooms on her toes until the world blurred.

Driven by restless feminine curiosity, she approached the heavy doors, which stood slightly ajar. After a moment’s hesitation, she stepped inside.

The foyer was cramped and stifling. Behind a glass booth sat an old woman who looked like a worn-out rag, thick glasses perched on her nose. A single drop of moisture hung from the tip of it. She was scratching away in a bloated ledger.

“One ticket? One zloty.”

This might be her only chance, Rebecca realized. Here, in the gloom, she was invisible — a ghost. She slid the coin across. The woman handed her a key tagged with the number “4.”

“Left, down the hall,” she muttered, already returning to her ledger.

Rebecca’s heart hammered as she moved down the dim corridor. The path split. Left for rooms one through four. Right for five through eight.

She turned left.

***

By then the obsession had taken deep root in Zosima’s mind. He wanted to build a theater of the flesh — his own private pornographic playhouse. But he didn’t need actors. No, the audience itself would become the performers. And he would be right in the middle of it all, pulling every string.

To make real money, though, he needed to sink his teeth into Warsaw’s underworld. Ticket sales were just the beginning. The real profit lay in procuring women, breaking them in, and then renting them out to the city’s wealthy and powerful for private depraved parties.

By the mid-1920s, Warsaw was full of rich men — Jewish businessmen, industrialists, and underworld figures alike — who still felt safe and permanent, blind to the storm gathering over Germany.

Zosima made his move. After a few drinks and a handshake, he bought a rundown panorama theater from a man known as Pan Dane. He financed the purchase with a brutal loan from the old pawnbroker. All he needed now were reliable partners.

He found them in the slums. First came Miroslava, then her cousin Wojciech. Wojciech was a parasite who lived off his sister by pimping her out and fucking her himself. But both siblings were strikingly beautiful, and that was exactly what Zosima needed.

The concept was devilishly simple.

Inside the gutted theater, he built an octagon — a closed stage barely ten feet across. It was surrounded by eight trapezoidal booths. Three were large enough for couples, four were cramped singles, and the last served as the hidden backstage entrance.

At the center stood Zosima’s masterpiece: a massive bed, nearly seven feet long and six feet wide. One headboard was unusually tall and split into two sections on heavy hinges. The upper half could swing open like a trapdoor, carved with precise notches for a neck and wrists. Once locked, it became a velvet-lined guillotine. There was no escape.

The carpenter had done excellent work. From the outside, the bed looked elegantly Grecian. The cruel mechanism remained invisible until Zosima decided to reveal it. The thing had cost him nearly as much as the entire renovation.

The stage rotated slowly, powered by a salvaged carousel motor. Through the tinted glass, viewers could watch every bead of sweat and every flex of muscle from just six feet away.

The booths were deliberately not soundproof. Thin walls let the symphony of filth spill out — ragged female gasps, deep male grunts, and the frantic cries of couples losing control.

But the real stroke of genius was the interactivity. What looked like windows from the booths were actually disguised doors. Only Zosima could unlock them from the stage. When the moment felt right, he would roar in his gravelly bass:

“Who wants to offer up his wife for ten zlotys?”

All a man had to do was drop coins into the box and press the button. A red light would flicker inside the octagon — the signal that someone wanted to join the show.

***

Rebecca sat in the deep woven armchair, legs stretched out. The tension slowly drained from her body. For a brief moment she felt almost safe in the crimson glow of her booth.

Then she noticed a small button near the frame. She hesitated, finger hovering, before pressing it.

A soft chime rang out. The window suddenly flooded with brilliant light while the red glow in her booth died away.

She stared, transfixed.

It was an octagonal stage, enclosed by eight walls, each with its own dark mirrored window. From her side they looked completely opaque.

“I must look like that to him, she thought. Just a dark mirror. Invisible.”

The stage itself was small — barely ten feet across. From her reclined position, Rebecca realized with a jolt that her face was almost exactly level with an actor’s waist.

And there he was.

He wasn’t acting. He was sprawled across a bizarre, oversized bed that dominated the platform. The bed looked like something out of a fever dream — an ancient vessel, perhaps the ship of the Argonauts. One end curved upward like the prow, supported by legs carved into eagle talons. The tall headboard resembled the stern of a warship, pierced by three mysterious portholes.

The man was massive. Thick dark curls, a heavy black beard, and a short white Greek tunic cinched at the waist with a golden cord. One foot wore a leather sandal, the other was bare. He appeared to be sleeping.

As the stage began its slow, silent rotation, the tunic rode higher. Rebecca’s breath caught.

His cock lay heavy and thick against his thigh, half-exposed, resting like a sleeping python amid a dense thicket of coarse dark hair.

Then he shifted in his sleep, drawing one knee up. The movement freed him completely from the fabric.

A violent wave of heat crashed through her body. She told herself to look away. She couldn’t. The signal was simple:

“I want the stage.”

To lure in the hesitant first-timers, Zosima would sometimes walk to the booth himself, crack the door open, and extend his hand, pulling the viewer from the safety of darkness straight into the merciless glare of the stage lights. Usually, his targets were women caught in the middle of something shameful — skirts hiked up, fingers buried between their legs, already halfway lost to their own filthy fantasies.