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“…Recorded as Document No. 1819-013455981, on March 1, 1819, of Official Records in the Office of the Recorder of London, Parish of Poplar, the corporal estate commonly known as Jane Marybell Thompkins, more particularly described as:

PARCEL 1:

Property rights as defined in the Accumulations Act 1800 § 11003.5 (B) consisting of an undivided interest in and to that certain above-named single woman TOGETHER WITH —”

At the staccato sound of a knock at the door, Dominic looked up from the page of intensely lawyerly handwriting and blinked his eyes clear. They were slightly sticky with concentration, and he needed to re-focus before anybody asked him anything not to do with the acquisition of particular usage rights by Mr. Frederick Walton of Stepney Green to the body and its assigns of Miss Jane Thompkins, Poplar. This was a particularly permissive deed, the solicitor having made several choices in the drafting Dominic was surprised were allowed by the registrar in Miss Thompkins’ home parish, and which had caused Dominic himself a fair amount of consternation as he attempted to create a conformed copy to place on file at Westminster.

“Yes?” he called, marking his place in the document with a finger.

A clerk leaned around his door, shiny collar at his throat catching the candlelight and making Dominic swallow reflexively against his own lack of restriction. Christ, even low-level administrative peons could count themselves more lucky than Dominic Frey. It took only a moment for Dominic to recall the man’s name, for all that he was but a drone in the vast hive of records-keeping slowly gathering wax in Somerset House.

“Good evening, Mullins,” he greeted. “Something I can do for you?” With his free hand, he gestured to the chair.

The clerk stayed where he was, his face uncomfortably stiff.

“It’s the Pell Office, sir,” Mullins said. Dominic felt his headache getting worse. “There’s been a flood.”

“I don’t suppose you’re about to tell me it was the natural result of a faulty roof?”

One could but hope.

“No, sir,” Mullins replied, confirming what Dominic had both expected and feared.

This was the problem with the shambolic nature of British record keeping: with no centralized repository for public record documents, deeds, marriage certificates, birth and death records, even lodged wills all jostled for place with church rosters, receipts of the exchequer, criminal histories, and the everyday detritus of the inattentive rector. Vital documents were shoved into drawers across England. The necessary papers defining a person’s life had their edges chewed by mice. Even the rats’ nest of undefined short references and inelegant phrasing that was Miss Thompkins’ Deed of Corporal Rights deserved better than that, but nobody listened to Dominic’s calls for reform. As a result, the oubliettes into which Britain’s paperwork went were vulnerable to vandalism.

Dominic wiped his pen and gave up on the Thompkins deed for the time being.

“Do we yet know the extent of the damage?”

Mullins shuffled his feet.

“The flooding was confined only to the corporal deed files,” Mullins stated. “The vandals were quite targeted in their attack.”

Dominic felt his face twitch, but schooled it quickly. Those files would have largely consisted of Dominic’s own work, his near-obsessive efforts to create duplicates of corporal deeds and see them housed in a single location. It was too common for deeds of ownership to be challenged, rescinded, annulled. Dominic’s opinion was that should a person be able to find the record when needed, to save time and taxpayer money.

Alone, he couldn’t handle every important bit of paper that passed through England and Wales. He’d been presenting a— well, slavish attention to doing it for every corporal deed, so at least the most essential body rights to the citizenry of Britain could be tracked, maintained, and referenced upon appeal. It was a touch masochistic, taking on an immense job nobody wanted and nobody asked him to do, but Dominic had been known to harbor one or two masochistic impulses. There was also the seething envy he had for every name that crossed his desk, the torture of knowing about every person who was wanted enough that someone would sign a deed of hand claiming rights to their physical body. That, also, hurt a bit. But, what hurt the most was that all of it was proving entirely pointless, as some vandal (or vandals, he couldn’t rule out the possibility that this was an organized effort and not the crazed machinations of one singularly motivated individual) had been going around, systematically destroying his work.

Dominic dismissed Mullins with his weary thanks, and glared into the scrawl of Jane Thompkins’ assignment of rights.

The most frustrating thing about the ordeal was, he didn’t even know why someone was out to destroy all of the corporal deeds in London. At first he’d thought it was someone trying to get out of their own rights agreement by erasing its existence, and that all the others housed with it were just collateral damage. But, this was the third targeted attack in two months, which seemed too methodical for a disgruntled grantor or grantee.

Indeed, he’d come to the conclusion that it had something to do with the pamphlets circulating amongst the libertines and decadents of the city, decrying the practice of deed ownership on the whole as a dehumanizing privation of liberty antithetical to a just society. Actually that was the kindest thing the screeds had to say about Dominic’s life’s work; a recent tip from Julius said that there was an even more excoriating one that said corporal deeds worked in direct contravention of the Slave Trade Act of 1807. Dominic hadn’t seen that particular piece, but he had Julius on the lookout for a copy, should one turn up amongst the fashionable dilettantes of his acquaintance.

Richard’s man Cyprian would likely turn one up faster, but Dominic didn’t feel comfortable asking that of his old friend. The entire topic of deed ownership was strictly noli me tangere between the two of them, which did somewhat limit their available areas of discussion because, well, this was Dominic’s job. He wished he could talk about it with Richard. Well, more specifically, he wished Richard could understand what the concept meant to Dominic, but that… it was like trying to explain a treadle loom to a turbot: entirely outside of what he knew or cared to know.

The loops and descenders of the Thompkins deed taunted him with the way they wove around their subject like binding ropes. Some ordinary chap in Stepney Green held the key to this woman’s collar, and presumably her heart by extension, and she’d promised him exclusive use of— he flipped through the document— yes, all of her orifices, without any specific carve-out provisions or circumstantial riders. He’d already noted that this was a highly permissive document, and wondered if perhaps that was on purpose, rather than neglect on the part of the solicitor. Had Miss Thompkins intended to give Mr. Walton free license to her entire body, wherever, whenever, entirely at his choosing?

Dominic again looked up from the page, found himself staring at the back of his office door. There was a knot in the wood grain, surrounded by concentric circles of growth, the knot hemmed in, bound and enclosed by protective layers that enfolded and incorporated the imperfection to make it a stronger part of the whole.

He sighed. His candle guttered.

Perhaps it was time to go home.

—————

There was post awaiting him when he returned to his rooms, but his eyes were tired, the candles seeming low and dim. He didn’t want to look at the collier’s charges for the month, or even an invitation from one of his friends to a social gathering. Ever since Ash had taken to wearing his collar— a beautifully crafted thing decorated with subtle interlocking strands like the weft and warp of fine linen— it had become difficult for Dominic to be at his ease amongst even his closest companions. Somebody like Francis might understand, at least better than Richard did, but Francis didn’t want Dominic. Dominic had, of course, seen the deed signed by Francis Webster and Lord Gabriel Ashleigh, and it was not anything like the Thompkins document, with its lax definitions and open-ended drafting. Ash and Francis had signed as mutual grantee/grantors, pledging rights to each other, with the explicit exclusion of anyone else. It was… fine. Ultimately, Dominic didn’t want Francis, either. He could probably enjoy a tumble with him, but it wasn’t worth straining another friendship, the way he’d already done with Richard.

It was because of Richard, really, that the distinctive seal binding a letter at the back of his stack caught his eye. Three interlocking rings stood out in bas relief against vermillion wax, and Dominic was immediately awake, his fatigue forgotten. He recognized that seal. By the standards of the gentlemen with whom Dominic associated, it was a very simple design. Simple, and instantly identifiable to those in the know.

He’d finally gotten a reply.

Richard would hate it if he knew Dominic had stooped to correspond with the bearer of that seal. Richard had steadfastly refused to hear the reason Dominic could be compelled to do so. If Richard had understood what Dominic wanted from a corporal deed, the confused knot of desires at the core of his being, he wouldn’t have put pen to paper in the first place.

Richard viewed a corporal deed as something similar to a marriage certificate. He couldn’t understand every way in which it wasn’t. He’d approached the concept with a sort of bland acceptance at first, a shrug and a wave, not appreciating that it was more than a simple promise of constancy. It wasn't about that at all. The trouble was, Dominic didn’t think Richard even understood marriage, considering the examples he had with which to compare. How could the Marquess, with an arranged marriage that against all odds became a love match, accurately model what most marriages were in truth? How could Richard look at that, and understand deed ownership? Dominic tried to explain that legally, it wasn’t a question of love or companionship. It wasn’t even a matter of fidelity. Fundamentally, both marriages and deeds came down to property, and Dominic was in a position to understand that, intimately. Richard wasn’t, and didn’t, and was at first flummoxed and later appalled when Dominic tried to explain the importance of those property rights, that fidelity didn’t come into it.

“That doesn’t sound like love to me,” Richard had said, broken-hearted. Dominic couldn’t make him see it any other way.

So, he sought out a service, the one whose letter he held in trembling fingers. It did not offer love, or fidelity, or companionship at all— not Richard’s image of it, anyway.

Abandoning the remainder of the post on the tray, he rushed upstairs to his study, dismissing his staff with a quick word to Belinda, the tweenie, on his way. The fire was laid, last night’s book still on the chair, a favorite wine in the decanter anticipating his return home. He ignored all of these and cracked the seal with a thumbnail, not even troubling to fetch a letter opener. It took him three readings of the short missive before he could even absorb its contents.

Finally. Finally, the Annulet Society had accepted him. He had an invitation to the club. Christ, he could go tomorrow night, never mind the thirty pounds of destroyed documents he needed to re-make following the water damage at the Pell Office. That was a project for the day’s labor. The night, though. The night.

He fell into his chair as if bowled over by the force of his excitement, and jumped slightly when the corners of the book he’d entirely forgotten poked his backside. It was a slim volume, basically a chapbook, containing the tale of a sinister nobleman seducing a young gentleman by defying social conventions, and then destroying his quarry as he preyed on the innocent. Dominic had his own feelings about all of that. He wondered whether the dramatic tale would ever have been written, had Dr. Polidori been able to satisfy his latent desires with an Annulet Society of his own, rather than languishing at the inattention of a Lord who could not or would not answer his needs.

—————

The small table in the anteroom, lit by a red taper candle and bearing a neat legal document on its surface, looked exactly as Dominic had imagined. Enveloped otherwise in darkness, the white of the page fairly glowed in the light of that single flame, beckoning him forward as if to sign the devil’s own book. His blood surging, he took the quill from where it rested, barely glancing at the terms of the lease before he signed his name where indicated, blew on the ink a moment, folded the sheet three times, and dropped the paper into a brass slot in the wall. He’d known to expect these things.

The square of fine cotton lawn in brilliant Sardinian blue was a surprise. It was presented to Dominic by the same bowing attendant who took his greatcoat and hat, and absent of any other instruction, Dominic presumed it was for the same purpose as any piece of fine lawn in that size and shape: a neck cloth. He’d never seen a neck cloth in that color outside satirical cartoons, but untied his own white one and dutifully replaced it with the more vibrant cloth before a second attendant gestured with white-gloved hands to a curtained doorway, and led Dominic through.

Inside it was warm, enough so that Dominic slightly resented the neckerchief. There was a blazing fire in addition to candles in glass sconces all around, giving the room an intimate glow. He crossed to a polished bar where a man in a domino mask poured him a rather startling orange wine, and sat, observing the room through the mirror behind the barkeep.

Men and women milled about, gathered into clusters, and broke off again in pairs and groups to climb the stairs at either side of the room. Not everybody wore a blue neck cloth (or ribbon, in the case of the women), but every time any group of people began ascending the staircases, at least one of their number was marked out by that celestial, shining hue. Dominic wondered if he ought to have tied a more elaborate knot.

Before he had time to consider returning to the anteroom to re-do his tie, a large hand fell on his shoulder. Dominic’s heart rate picked up.

“Are you here for a lady, or a gentleman?” the man attached to the hand asked. Clipped tones, but not acerbic. Hair a sandy blond, eyes, coffee brown. He smelled like lavender and boot black, and indeed his casual hessians were rather lovely— not quite to Richard’s standards, but apparently, nothing was. Dominic licked his lips, considered the best way to answer.

“I’m not here for anybody, yet,” he said, trying to pitch his voice softer, round out the edges of his dry delivery like well-thumbed paper. “I’ve not been here before, you see.”

The man’s smile broadened, showing his eye teeth.

Aha.

This was exactly what Dominic was after.

“Perhaps I’ll show you around,” the man said, and Dominic nodded, and allowed himself to be pulled from his bar stool.

—————

The man’s name was August, and when he led Dominic by the elbow to an upstairs room, it appeared he had friends.

“Evening gents,” August said to the three men seated around a card table. “I’ve discovered a new member at the bar. Say hello to Nick.”

Dominic had chosen a pseudonym for the night, and didn’t regret the choice as the other men stood and moved to crowd around him. His chest felt tight as one of them, a broader fellow than August with dark hair and thick brows, stretched out a hand to slide up the breast of his jacket and tweak at the blue neck cloth.

“Don’t you look nice in black and blue,” he commented, and then slapped Dominic hard across the face.

Dominic gasped at the impact, the sting, the burn that bloomed in its wake. August steadied him, held him upright for an echoing slap on the other cheek.

“Say ‘thank you’ to Eugene, Nick,” August said, close to Dominic’s ear, but Dominic’s head was buzzing, and he didn’t respond quickly enough. The next blow was to his gut, and sent him doubling over, coughing. August let him fall to the floor.

“Gerhard, why don’t you help me get him over the table,” August suggested, and Dominic was lifted, muscled the three short steps to the table where a game of reversis still lay spread across the surface. A hand between his shoulder blades forced him down so he was face to face with the quinola, the mustache and impassive eyes staring past the heart on the pasteboard as if meeting Dominic’s murky gaze.

“Do you have something?” That was the one called Eugene again, as Dominic’s ankles were kicked apart. The question didn’t seem to be directed at Dominic, though, so he ignored it, feeling sweat spring on his skin as his ankles were bound to the legs of the table, his wrists pinned to either far corner.

“Grab hold unless you want another smack,” said an unfamiliar voice. That would have to be either Gerhard, or the fourth man the others hadn’t named yet.

Did Dominic want another smack? Part of him did, but what if the men grew sick of his antagonism and ended this encounter before it had even begun?

The jack of hearts observed with continued apathy as Dominic’s fingers wrapped around the corners of the table, to a chorus of sarcastic praise.

“I thought you said he was new,” Eugene said, a hand clenching painfully in Dominic’s hair. “Seems to me he knows what he’s on about, knows what’s expected of him.”

“Except he still hasn’t said ‘thank you’,” August replied, one hard hand gripping the meat of Dominic’s ass with a strength that would bruise.

Dominic sucked in a breath.

“Thank you,” he said in a rush. “Thank you, sirs.”

“Ah, that’s nice,” came the voice of the fourth man, lightly Italian in its accent. “This is what you joined for, isn’t it? You want to surrender the use of your body to someone else, let them choose what your holes are good for.”

His thumb forced its way into Dominic’s panting mouth, pressed down hard on his tongue so Dominic could only nod.

“I always thought that’s what the club’s icon was about,” said Eugene, moving to Dominic’s left and out of his line of sight. “Three rings; three holes. A mouth, a cunt, and an arsehole.”

“Nick here hasn’t got a cunt,” said the unnamed man. “At least, I don’t think so. Shall we check?”

“Vincenzo makes a good point,” August noted. “Let’s.”

The tight grip on Dominic’s cock through his breeches wrung a high noise out of him. It hurt, and he didn’t like it, but wasn’t that the point?

“Hm, only two holes then,” said Gerhard.

“Only two, but they’re ours for the evening,” August said, and then Dominic’s breeches were unfastened and wrenched down to the tops of his boots along with his drawers. “He’s agreed to it, with that pretty blue ribbon of his. He’ll take absolutely anything.”

Two fingers and spit were the first things Dominic took, and it burned. It felt like being rammed through with a fire poker, and Dominic cried out, but Vincenzo was holding his wrists down and he couldn’t squirm away. Distantly, Dominic registered a bottle of oil on the mantelpiece, set out for this exact purpose, but Dominic supposed he wasn’t getting any of that. What he got was another fat gob of spit, right on his hole, and then the blunt head of Eugene’s cock, pushing in.

Dominic’s mouth fell open in shock, tears blurring his vision. Of course, that only made it easier for Vincenzo to shove his cock to the back of his tongue, and begin battering his throat with it in thrust after brutal thrust.

Dominic shook. He couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, could hardly think at all. Eugene’s nails scored his sides and worked for purchase as he forced himself in deeper, as his cock branded Dominic’s core with a searing ache. Vincenzo held him by the hair, fucked against his mouth so Dominic knew his lips would swell and bruise.

“Take that nicely, don’t you. Maybe you don’t need a third hole,” Gerhard said, at Dominic’s side. “We’ll make do with the ones you’ve got, but you’re going to make it up to us, eh? Going to work extra hard so we don’t miss the cunt you haven’t got?”

Even if Dominic had a response to that, there was no way he could give it. Eugene swore, his thrusts faltering. Dominic lifted his hips as much as he could with his ankles tied, and August laughed.

“Look at him lifting his tail like a cat,” he said, stroking Dominic down his clothed flank. “It rather seems he likes your cock, Eugene. Go ahead and come inside him; I like an easier glide when I fuck a fresh hole.”

Dominic wasn’t hard. His cock swung limp between his legs, untouched except for that one crushing squeeze before. He felt it leak, though, a long clear strand spilling from his tip to stain the inside of his breeches and possibly the carpet, the unstoppable reaction to having his prostate jabbed repeatedly, and the thought that none of this, not one thing about it, was under his control. That was what he’d wanted. His face stung where he’d been slapped. He was awash in the sensations, adrift at sea without sail or oar. He had no choice whatsoever but to go wherever these four winds may take him.

Eugene grunted, and came explosively in a series of sharp bursts, forcing his spend deep. Dominic made a noise around Vincenzo’s cock, writhing at the wet ache within him. Richard rarely did that, didn’t seem to like to, or else, thought he shouldn’t like to. Dominic thought about being a receptacle for this stranger’s come, and moaned again.

That seemed to be enough for Vincenzo, who pulled out abruptly and spent in hot gouts across Dominic’s face, his nose, cheeks, lips, and hair. Dominic blinked. He’d managed to avoid getting it in his eyes, and was grateful enough for that to lick the splatters from his lips.

“Am I going to have to remind you every time?” August asked, and Dominic shook his head.

“Thank you,” he said, voice a rake over coals.

“For what?” August prompted. “Be specific, so he knows what you liked.”

Dominic swallowed, felt the raw sting at the back of his throat.

“Thank you for… fucking my throat,” he said, thrilling at the words. “And for spending on my face.”

This was humiliating. It was exquisite. It was terrifying. He’d never had anything like it. He still wasn’t hard, but maybe it was better that way. Maybe it was better if he only had to focus on the pleasure he could give to these men, without the distraction of his own. He could stroke off later to the memories of this… perhaps these men might even like to watch.

“Very nicely said,” August praised, with another stroke down Dominic’s back. “Eugene, you great pillocking lummox, pull out already so I can take my turn.”

Eugene did, and none too gently, wrenching a whine from Dominic’s bruised throat. He hadn’t a moment to recover, before August took Eugene’s place, driving in to the hilt without pause or mercy. This was no place for mercy. Dominic didn’t think he wanted mercy. He’d had mercy enough for a lifetime, and gentleness, and tenderness, and whatever kind of love it was that left him feeling so cold.

This, this excruciating heat, the relentless friction of a cock inside him, using him… he felt the resonance of their earlier words. He felt that this was his purpose, that he was good only for the tight grip of his body milking out their spend.

There were fingers in his mouth again, bitter with old tobacco, but his tongue chased them, felt their blunt edges and hard nails. Once, he’d sucked Richard’s fingers with all the intensity of his feelings, had flung his head down on them until the nails scraped the back of his throat and made him gag. Richard snatched his hand away immediately, apologized for being so careless, but in the day and night after, Dominic found himself repeatedly pressing a hand to the soft underside of his own jaw, cupping his palm against the pain like guarding a candle.

August was longer than Eugene, and he used it. Deep, goring thrusts that pressed the air from Dominic’s lungs lanced through him, made him pant and gasp around the fingers, made him drool messily as much as his cock continued to leak stickily on the floor. He wanted to spread his legs wider, to show he was open and willing for it, but his ankles were bound and his breeches were tangled at his knees and his fingers were numb on the corners of the table, and he couldn’t move at all, one way or the other. He didn’t want to. He could try to protest, try to form words around the fingers pressing down on his tongue, seeking out the recesses of his mouth, stabbing occasionally at the pit of his throat and making him retch fruitlessly, but it would be only noise.

A thumb and forefinger grabbed his tongue, a nail digging into the lingual artery with a starburst of pain that made him twitch like a shocked frog.

“Like Augie’s cock, do you? More than Gene’s?” Gerhard asked, pulling Dominic’s tongue from his mouth like he was inspecting a horse for purchase. “You’re making me feel bad, Nicky. Don’t know if you’ll make such sweet sounds for my prick, and I’d hate to feel unwanted.”

Dominic looked up at him, met his eyes for the first time. They were a pale, icy blue, almost grey, and glaring down at him with a complete indifference at odds with his words. This man Gerhard didn’t care if Dominic wanted him. He didn’t want Dominic. That wasn’t at all what this was about, except that, damn it all, it was, or it was supposed to be, and suddenly, real tears welled up from somewhere deep in Dominic, and spilled down his cheeks to splash silent and unheeded on the high-pile rug.

“Oh fuck, whatever you’re doing, Gerhard, he just tightened up beautifully,” August groaned, hands pulling at Dominic’s hips like he could grab hold of each iliac crest and tug them as a set of handles.

“I made him cry,” Gerhard said, and August barked out a breathless laugh.

“Well, it’s marvelous,” he said. “God, he’s quivering like a jelly inside with those sobs. Feels incredible.”

Dominic didn’t know what to do. His feelings were a riot of pain and color, mashed within the mortar of his body by August’s endlessly driving pestle. He felt pasted, like these men would leave him nothing but a smear on the card table, a mess for someone else to clean up. Hadn’t this been what Dominic wanted in coming here? Richard hadn’t understood the meaning of a corporal deed, nor why Dominic wanted him to. But maybe, Dominic hadn’t understood either, with all of his obsession and envy, how the pretty blue necktie was no substitute for a real, proper collar.

So, he cried. He cried as Gerhard continued to finger his mouth, and cried when August stiffened and came, and then Gerhard took hold of his dripping chin, and forced his head up and he wailed.

“Ah, no, that won’t do,” Gerhard tutted. “Didn’t Augie teach you your manners?”

Dominic was supposed to say ‘thank you’, was supposed to tell August he’d liked feeling him spend inside, or the slow, shivery leak of two loads now dripping down his bollocks to spatter inside his drawers. He couldn’t make his mouth work. He felt bruised from the eyes down, his mouth numb with use, and evidently, that wasn’t acceptable.

He heard the click of a knife.

Panic flashed through him, but there were hands on his wrists, Eugene and Vincenzo having recovered enough from their post-orgasmic lazing about to return to the scene and pin him again. Gerhard grabbed his tongue again, pulled it taut, and pressed the flat of the blade against its wet, wriggling surface.

“There ought to be consequences when you don’t use your words,” Gerhard said, and Dominic looked at the others, wild-eyed. Nobody moved to help. “If you can’t mind your manners, perhaps you don’t need words at all.”

It was the back of the blade, now, knife edge facing up, poised to slice into his soft palate, fuck into his throat like Vincenzo’s cock, and Gerhard’s fingers. Dominic was paralyzed with fear. His knees felt weak. The taste of the metal on his tongue was a gritty tang, and he knew that if he moved even an inch, he could do real damage.

Back and forth the knife slid, clicking horribly against the backs of his front teeth. The blade scraped at the enamel and Dominic wanted to squirm, wanted to pull away from the dreadful sensation, but of course he couldn’t. All he could do was turn watery, pleading eyes on Gerhard, knowing the man cared not one bit.

“Up,” Gerhard said, and Eugene and Vincenzo pulled Dominic into a standing position. A playing card was stuck to his lower belly where his shirt had ridden up, and Vincenzo plucked it free.

“Eugene, you sneak, you had four aces,” he said, holding out the ace of spades. “Why did you not declare Espagnolette?”

“I was working my way ‘round to it,” came the reply, as though they weren’t holding Dominic, bound and naked from the waist down, while Gerhard circled the table.

“Is this really the time?” August asked, from an armchair by the fire. He sat with his breeches still undone, watching the proceedings with a glass of the orange wine from downstairs. It may have been Dominic’s glass, in fact. All of these things entered Dominic’s mind with no emotion attached to them. He was… somewhere else. And then, Gerhard stood behind him, hooked his chin over Dominic’s shoulder, and brought his arms around Dominic’s body.

Dominic squeezed his eyes shut, trying to stem the flow of tears. He didn’t want to think about any of this, because he knew very well he wasn’t crying from fear or pain. He was simply disappointed in himself, for not being able to enjoy these acts he’d thought he would. He’d gone through efforts to get into the Annulet Club without it getting out who he was. And, he had been enjoying himself, somewhat, until he made the mistake of expecting too much. That was his folly, and not the fault of these men. This chap Gerhard should be allowed to do as he pleased with Dominic’s body, without becoming beholden to Dominic’s foolish notions.

That was always Dominic’s problem: wanting things for which it was stupid to ask, from people who shouldn’t give them.

The line of cold steel against his cock brought him back down into his body from wherever he’d retreated in his thoughts.

“You know, Nicky, I’ve noticed you’ve not been hard this whole time.” Gerhard’s mouth was right up against Dominic’s ear, his breath warm against Dominic’s skin. He smelled of brandy and pipe smoke, like a gentleman of leisure, not like a man who’d press a knife to another man’s cock and criticize him for not getting hard. “Is it that you can’t? This just for decoration, is it?”

The back of the knife was beneath his flaccid shaft, the blade just touching his balls. There wasn’t enough pressure behind it to cut him. Not yet.

Dominic shook his head, not knowing how else to reply. He didn’t know why he wasn’t hard— he should have been. He should have liked all of this, but of course, he’d had to go and ruin it.

“Maybe you don’t even need your prick, and should have a third hole, after all,” Gerhard said, and turned the knife. Dominic held very, very still. He could feel the wicked edge of the blade at the base of his cock, felt sweat stinging on his skin. Would this man actually do it? They hadn’t discussed anything, and the blue tie said he was free to use, as they chose. Christ, he could die here, mutilated and left to bleed.

Another hand, Vincenzo’s Dominic thought, pinched his cock head and lifted his soft, wet cock away from the blade.

“Ought to be able to see what you’re doing, Gery,” he said, with mild disapproval, like he was reminding his friend to cut his pencil away from himself and not toward.

“Ta, Vin,” Gerhard said, and the knife nicked Dominic, right there, at the base of his shaft where he’d feel it in the crease of his skin. Dominic hissed, but couldn’t mobilize any other protest, and Gerhard laughed. Then he drew the blade away, and Dominic sagged in the other men’s hold, and Gerhard laughed louder.

The next cut was low on his belly, just inside the dip of his hip. Dominic whined and twitched, and felt blood trickle down only to be lost in his pubic hair. It was ticklish and itchy on his skin, the sting of the cut a small distraction as Vincenzo began to stroke his cock, slick with oil and forcing him to stir.

Christ, maybe he could make this work. Maybe he hadn’t ruined it, and he could be what these men wanted, be wanted by them, in turn.

Vincenzo’s grip was tight, pulling his foreskin up over the head and stretching the cut at his base with each rough pass. It hurt, and Dominic’s legs wanted to buckle, but he was held steady, his body not his own in this moment but slung between the stronger wills of men who could want him.

Across the table, in his chair, August sipped his drink and began stroking himself in time with Vincenzo’s hand. Dominic felt his eyes on him, bathed in the heat of that attention, felt his cock finally harden to fullness. August had picked him out at the bar. He’d looked at him and approached him and brought him upstairs, choosing him for this treatment. Maybe that was enough. Dominic held his gaze, even as the knife bit into his skin again, a blazing line of liquid fire along the curve of one rib. Eugene held Dominic’s clothing out of the way, exposing more skin for Gerhard’s knife.

“You didn’t get hard from a prick or two in your arse, or having your throat fucked for you, but now you’re hard enough to drive rail spikes. Why is that, Nicky?”

The layers of Dominic’s clothing were bunched as far up as they could go, and the point of Gerhard’s knife sat under his left nipple, drew a vivid line down from there, made Dominic throw his head back on a shout.

“You like my knife more than these chaps’ cocks?”

Dominic moaned, feeling the blood running on his skin.

“That so? Shall I fuck you with the knife, then, instead of my prick?”

Dominic shook his head, wondering if it even mattered what he said or did. A thumb hooked into his hole, pulled roughly at the rim, forced more of the spend to leak out of him as Dominic shuddered. He was raw and sensitive, having been fucked twice and none-too-gently. They wouldn’t, with the knife, would they?

“Seems like a waste,” Eugene said, and it was that which told Dominic it was Eugene’s thumb. He hadn’t consciously realized his wrist was free, that he’d wrapped his arm around Gerhard’s, clutched into his jacket with tense, bloodless fingers.

“They mightn’t let us back in the club,” August added, fist having slowed on his prick. Vincenzo’s fist squeezed Dominic right over the cut, and Dominic’s toes curled in his boots.

“You’re probably right,” Gerhard agreed, and then the knife went onto the table with a small clink. Dominic could see his blood, clinging to the metal.

Some shuffling behind him, and Eugene and Vincenzo stepped away, leaving Dominic’s upper body free, his cock hard and twitching.

“Face down again, Nicky, unless you want me to get cross.”

Dominic bent, laid himself over the mess of cards again. He could feel every cut, probably staining his shirt irreparably with blood. There was no way he could explain that to the laundress. He moved to take hold of the upper corners once more, but Gerhard stopped him with a slap to one wrist.

“Not now you’ve finally got your prick up,” he said. “You’re going to show us how much you like everything we’ve done to you. Hand on your stand, now Nicky.”

Dominic shoved an arm under his body. It wasn’t a good angle, the table largely in the way, but he could at least get a fist around his cock and give himself a few furtive strokes.

There was a scrape, a sound he recognized as the knife being dragged from the table, and then the quiet shff shff noise as Gerhard wiped the blood from the blade on Dominic’s shirt.

“You’ve had a good time, haven’t you, Nick?”

Nobody was touching Dominic, but he could hear them, close. Vincenzo stood before him again, jerking his prick at what looked like a painful speed. He was going to spend on Dominic’s face a second time. Dominic worked himself faster. If he signed a corporal deed with this man Vincenzo, he imagined there’d be language written right into the contract about when and where Dominic might expect to kneel for this sort of treatment, and whether he should anticipate walking around with the man’s come shining on his lips and cheeks.

“And since you’re having such a nice time,” Gerhard said, “I think we ought to commemorate.”

At the top curve of Dominic’s arse, another flash of pain. Gerhard cut a line in, perhaps an inch in length, and said, “One for Eugene,” then another cut, “one for Vincenzo,” a third beside the first two, “and one for August.”

His palm went over the cuts, smearing the blood and making Dominic writhe with the sting of salt. These cuts felt deeper than the others, and the blood was slick under Gerhard’s hand, and then the hand pulled away and Dominic had long enough to feel the cold air on his split skin before Gerhard brought his hand down in a brutal smack, right over the cuts, and Dominic screamed.

“You stopped stroking,” Gerhard said, spanking him again. “I told you to touch yourself, and show us you like it. I’m going to keep spanking you unless you do what you’re told.”

Dominic nodded against the table, feeling cards shift under his cheek, and forced his fist to move.

“Look at your handprints, Gery,” Eugene said. “Handprints in blood, like a murder scene.”

Gerhard clicked his tongue.

“Yes… I should do something about that.”

With a few quick jerks of the knife against thin linen, Gerhard cut Dominic’s drawers off of him. He must have used them to wipe his hands, because he didn’t use them to wipe Dominic’s skin.

“Here,” Eugene said, and stuffed the ruined fabric under Dominic’s hips. “No sense ruining the cards when he goes off.”

“Very sensible,” said August, closer now. Dominic opened his eyes and saw that August stood shoulder to shoulder with Vincenzo, and each of them had his hand on the other’s cock, each working the other and aimed at Dominic’s mouth. He opened his lips, panting, waiting, hand speeding on his own cock. It was when Vincenzo turned his head, pressed his mouth to August’s with a sly smile, that August grunted, and spent across the bridge of Dominic’s nose, his lips, his waiting tongue. That did it for Vincenzo, too, who followed a moment later with a moan into August’s mouth. His come hit Dominic’s brow, a smaller load than the first, but Vincenzo stepped forward, breaking the kiss to wipe the head of his still-hard cock through his own mess, and then pressed his tip into Dominic’s open, ready mouth.

Dominic sucked, licking the spend from Vincenzo’s skin, and heard August’s soft chuckle, followed by the sound of kissing again. The cock in his mouth softened, fell from his lips, and Dominic looked up, watched August and Vincenzo kiss noisily. His cock ached.

August broke away, cast his eyes down on Dominic, and gathered a smear of come from Dominic’s cheek. Dominic relaxed his mouth, anticipated the press of cooling spend across his tongue, but it didn’t come. Instead, August fed it between Vincenzo’s kiss-swollen lips, and Vincenzo’s lashes fluttered on a quiet whine, and Dominic gasped and came, knees shaking, into the shredded fabric of his own drawers. Neither August nor Vincenzo even looked at him as Dominic emptied himself. Vincenzo simply sucked August’s fingers, staring into those rich coffee eyes with an expression that made Dominic’s heart clench.

“Oh, very nice,” Gerhard said, behind him. “Gene, did he manage to keep it in his pants?”

Eugene bent to inspect. His hand, wrapped in linen, wiped Dominic’s tip with a perfunctory swipe, before pulling the ruined garment free. A few more cards fell to the floor.

“Looks like,” Eugene confirmed.

“Excellent. Put those to use, will you?” Gerhard instructed, and very suddenly, Dominic had a mouthful of tattered linen, musky with wear and bitter with his own spend. Eugene knotted the fabric at the back of Dominic’s head, and gave his hair a little pat.

“There you are,” he said, and then Dominic very suddenly appreciated the need for a gag, as Gerhard forced his way into Dominic’s hole, his thumb digging into the cuts as he held Dominic’s hips and made his way in. He was shorter than either August or Eugene, but a great deal thicker. The head, at its broadest, felt like it might have the same diameter as Dominic’s pocket watch, and the shaft wasn’t much thinner. It had a noticeable taper toward the base, so Dominic could feel every inch as it speared him. He bit down on the gag, tears running through the dry come on his face, and wailed.

“You two always pair off before the end of things,” Eugene complained to August and Vincenzo, curled together on the armchair with Vincenzo straddling August’s lap, and August’s hand lost somewhere under Vincenzo’s shirt. “Makes me wonder why we even bother coming here.”

“I went and found him, didn’t I?” August shot back, with a nod at Dominic. “You can’t deny I’m the prettiest of us. You think he’d have come upstairs if it was just you and Gery?”

“He’d have come up for me,” Gerhard said, a little breathless, as he began gaining speed. Dominic blinked rapidly. He was glowing with pain, his mind sizzling, the words exchanged around him and about him having somehow nothing to do with him. He was locked in his body, slung between points of agony: his cuts, pressed into the table and rasping against his shirt; the fresher ones on his backside held open by Gerhard’s cruel thumbnail; the furious burn in his hole as he was fucked without lubricant by a punishingly thick cock. His vision swam, but that might have been the tears.

“Look, his prick’s drooling again,” Gerhard went on. “I must be hitting his sweet spot.”

“That’s like hitting a sixpence with a framing mallet,” Eugene said, coming around to Dominic’s front. “You can hardly miss.”

Eugene’s breeches were open before Dominic’s eyes, but he was gagged, so he couldn’t be expected to suck another cock. He blinked up at Eugene with wet eyes, and wondered if he was about to take a fourth load on his face. A detached sort of acceptance rolled over him, even as Eugene pulled his cock from his drawers and brought it up to Dominic’s lips, stretched around the gag. It didn’t even register to him that Eugene wasn’t hard, until warmth and an acrid taste began soaking into the twisted cloth.

“Don’t tell me,” said Gerhard, but it sounded like there was a laugh in his panting voice.

“You’ll make a mess,” said Vincenzo.

“Don’t get it on the rug, for god’s sake,” added August, as the piss soaked the linen, trapping it against Dominic’s tongue.

Eugene stopped before it puddled, tucking himself away again, and Dominic didn’t fight. His hands were free; he could remove the gag. He didn’t. He lay in his shame and a confused sort of longing, covered in blood, and tears, and piss, and sweat, and come.

Gerhard grabbed one of Dominic’s wrists, pinned it to the small of his back as his thrusts began to falter. It hurt, wrenched Dominic’s shoulder and elbow in a way he wasn’t used to, but Dominic had nothing left in him. He simply allowed the savage fucking to continue, and wondered in a sort of disjointed fashion if he even knew what he wanted.

Gerhard finished with a groan, body stilling against Dominic’s ass before pulling out slowly, and dragging the spend of three men out with him. The pain of the cuts had diffused to a dull throb, and the come on Dominic’s face had dried to an itchy pinch. He could barely taste the piss anymore, his mouth dry, and aching at the corners, and he barely flinched at all when Gerhard added the fourth tally mark alongside the others.

Gerhard paused, then, seemingly admiring his work. Dominic’s hole felt puffy and abraded, his every joint screamed with pain, and his head pounded with the ache of too much crying, so he didn’t move.

“Shame to leave it at just four,” Gerhard said, airily. “A tally always seems incomplete without the five-bar.”

“If you’re counting orgasms, it’s seven,” Vincenzo offered.

“I’m not,” Gerhard said. “Ought we head back downstairs, see if we can’t find a fifth chap to complete the set?”

Murmured sounds of ambivalence followed, and the other men began setting themselves to rights. Though, not before Eugene made sure to tie Dominic’s wrists to the upper legs of the table.

“Wouldn’t want you going anywhere before we’ve found your fifth cove,” he said, and patted Dominic on the cheek.

Footsteps. The door opening and closing. Chatter in the hallway that peaked and then receded.

Silence.

Dominic closed his eyes. They felt sore and gritty, and he thought, perhaps he could just sleep until the men came back. If they came back.

He’d no idea what amount of time had passed, when the door opened again. Dominic listened for the men he’d entertained throughout the evening, but heard nothing. The door closed again. When it reopened, there were two voices, talking to a third party who did not speak.

“This is highly irregular,” one said, in low, sonorous tones. “He’s wearing the blue cloth, after all.”

“We’re not objecting, but if those other gentlemen raise a fuss, be it on your head,” the second voice said, his timbre higher and lighter.

The silent third person must have nodded or made some gesture, because the first two came farther into the room, and began loosing Dominic’s bonds. The gag came away, and the higher-voiced man made a noise of maybe shock, or dismay, or perhaps disgust, before dropping the sodden cloth into a wastebasket by the chair. Dominic rather thought the ruined garment could be very easily consigned to the fire, but did not voice that opinion.

When he was free, Dominic stood, his legs shaky as a fawn’s. His knees and back cracked, but he drew his breeches up, feeling odd with no drawers on underneath. The cuts on his backside had scabbed over, and he moved carefully to avoid cracking the dry clots and bleeding into the wool. His shirt would be a lost cause, of course, but those bloodstains would be covered by his jacket and greatcoat, letting him at least return home with some decency.

Under the watchful eye of a redheaded attendant wearing the black half mask of a Brighella, Dominic went to the pitcher and basin to cleanse his face as best he could. He was glad there was no mirror— he hardly wanted to know what he looked like just then.

“Your earlier company has left for the evening, sir,” the first man said. His mask was the one-third mask of Il Dottore.

“But please feel free to return downstairs for refreshments,” said the second one, wearing the mustachioed mask of Beltrame.

Dominic blinked, then nodded. He didn’t trust his voice, but his throat was bruised and his mouth tasted of piss. Besides, he’d never finished his glass of orange wine.

Cautiously, he passed the third attendant, who bowed but remained as silent as ever, and made his way back to the bar, on legs he could barely feel.

Nobody else approached him that night.

—————

Days passed. Dominic returned to work. He completed his efforts on the Thompkins deed, and tried not to think anything in particular about it. He began replacing the files that had been lost in the attack at the Pell Office. It was a good job he had an excellent memory.

In the evenings, he read. Not The Vampyre, nor anything stimulating at all, just some old claptrap about a pirate gallivanting about and ravishing native girls. It was all very trite and derivative, but Dominic didn’t want to challenge himself. He didn’t much want to think about ravishment, either, but the book didn’t go into any sort of lurid detail, so he was saved from engaging his brain on the subject.

He probably could have gone on like that indefinitely, were it not for the demands of good manners, and keeping up his face in society. There wasn’t much of a point in doing so, except that it stopped Richard from making a pronouncement on his state of wellbeing thereby making everything worse, so, Dominic went. They met at White’s. He sat, he drank, he did not play cards. The knave of hearts was a hateful creature to him, and while he could not avoid his knave friends or their fickle hearts, he could at least avoid piquet.

Ash’s collar shone in the firelight as he sat on the rug at Francis’s knee, constant as a trained heeler. Dominic couldn’t look at him, and so sat away from the hearth, which brought him close to perhaps the only man he could stomach in his state, in the person of Julius Norreys. Julius, after all, could be counted upon to be more miserable than anyone else at any given time, and Dominic appreciated that consistency, and the company that misery provided.

“Ah, Saint Jerome emerges from his study to brave the florid wild,” came the cut-glass voice from Julius’s corner. “How go your efforts at translating the vulgar vulgate?”

“I toil, and beat my breast,” Dominic replied, trying for humor. It fell flat when he remembered that the Saint’s iconic self-castigation was in an attempt to quell his sexual desires. Perhaps he ought to try it himself… when the cut under his nipple healed.

“I did hear something about another act of vandalism levied against your records,” Julius said. “Here.”

From his flamme de ponche jacket he withdrew a slightly creased sheaf of papers, which, when Dominic took hold of it, turned out to be a pamphlet. In fact it was the pamphlet, “Cuts of Meat”, the one that likened the very concept of deed ownership to a form of slavery. Dominic sat up straight, felt the slightly raised texture of the printing on the pages.

“I wouldn’t read that here,” Julius warned, with a glance toward the chairs surrounding the fire. Richard and Francis were involved in some conversation about sheep and wool in Lancashire, into which Ash interjected the occasional bon mot, and Dominic wanted nothing whatever to do with that. In fact, he very much wanted to leave, except that he’d only just arrived, and hurrying home to read a socialist publication wouldn’t earn him any compliments. He tucked it into his own more somber jacket, and settled in for a night of clock-watching.

Instead, he found Julius’s eyes on him, an odd expression on his face. Dominic turned with questioning brows, and met the clear blue gaze. It wasn’t the same cold blue that man Gerhard wielded, but he felt a frisson of anxiety nonetheless.

“I say, Dominic,” he began, checking that Richard was too engaged with his discussion on the productivity of the Cirencester lands to overhear, “forgive me for asking a question you likely answered to someone else, long ago, but…”

Dominic’s stomach turned, not sure how he should explain the tension between himself and Richard to a third party.

“What is it that fascinates you so about corporal deeds?” was the unexpected question he received, instead. “Surely birth records, or else death certificates, are a more pressing body of documents that ought to be copied and centralized. Is it merely that there are fewer documents of that sort to be getting on with? Working your way up to a complete overhaul of the government?”

He didn’t ask it as though he knew Dominic harbored a burl of undefinable desires all growing around the concept of a particular legal document. He asked it as if Dominic were a colorectal surgeon, and Julius couldn’t understand why anyone would choose that particular specialization.

Dominic was too tired to lie.

“I don’t suppose you know what it’s like to want to feel wanted,” he said, and Julius frowned. It was a bit of a surprise, as Dominic thought he’d never seen Julius want anyone, in all the time they’d known one another. Yes, Julius had tumbled with a few of their number before, but he never seemed to be interested in anything lasting, so the idea that Julius would consider the collar, either for himself or some unknown intended, was a curiosity. Was even untouchable Julius luckier than Dominic?

Rather than brood over that, Dominic went on. “A corporal deed is, to me, the ultimate expression of that, moreso than a marriage bond— or, I should say different, anyway. Marriage alludes to consummation through vague promises ‘to have and to hold’, but a corporal deed is forthright in its purpose, and, ideally, lays everything out in clearest language.” He looked into the depths of his port, swirled it in his glass. “It is a promise between the signatories, wherein one chooses to surrender, and the other is bound by that trust. It’s visceral, but it can also be beautiful.”

Julius nodded slowly, eyes slightly narrowed as he thought that over. Dominic worried somewhat that he’d revealed too much, but what was the point in hiding it? He would take Julius’s barbs about his absurd, naive notions, and perhaps that would help him abandon them at last.

“So, you reject the assertions in these pamphlets, not on the grounds that the law is as it may be and it is for us Britons to abide, but because you view the collar as representative of a sort of freedom, one governing the right… to consign one’s rights. Do I have that right? That is, do I have it correct?”

Dominic nodded emphatically.

“Quite so,” he said, a bubble of elation fizzing in him for the first time since he’d gotten the letter from the Annulet Society. Could this really be the first time someone understood even a part of what Dominic held so dear? He had the mad urge to embrace Julius, but knew the man wouldn’t bear it.

“Mm,” Julius replied, eyes still far away in thought. Then, he astonished Dominic by saying, “My brother planned to take the collar, for his fiancée Lucia. Our parents didn’t know.” He wasn’t looking at Dominic, took a long sip of his topaz-colored oloroso sherry. “After he died, I discovered the piece among his things. Very simple, but elegant. I couldn’t imagine wearing it, and when my parents urged me to do the honest thing and offer Lucia my suit in place of Marcus, I could think only of that smooth metal collar, packed in a velvet-lined box and tucked beneath my brother’s bed. Whatever that collar meant between them was something I couldn’t replace. His ring was just a little band of gold, but the collar felt different. I never understood why, but perhaps I ought to have asked you. Indeed, I ought to have asked you years ago, but it seemed such an obvious thing to ask a fellow with your job description, I didn’t like to appear as a dullard.”

“I truly don’t think you could,” Dominic said. “You’d have to make a startling effort.”

He wasn’t in the habit of complimenting Julius, even obliquely, but Julius wasn’t in the habit of discussing his late twin, nor admitting to something so… vulnerable.

“I can’t speak to what your brother felt about the collar. He may have had entirely different ideas about it,” Dominic said, feeling like an intruder in Julius’s family tragedy. “However, if he got as far as commissioning a collar, I expect they’d have at least drafted a deed, even if it wasn’t signed. Would you like me to look for it?” He paused. “It may contain more information than you really want to know.”

Julius jerked, his sherry tossing like a little amber sea in its copita.

“I—” Julius said, uncommonly flummoxed. “I don’t know. As you say, it may contain some rather graphic details about my brother, things family members ought not know, but… it feels as though I’m being offered a magic lantern glimpse at his life. I’m damned if I know what I should say.”

“I can tell you I haven’t seen one yet,” Dominic said. “I would have told you, had the name Norreys come up, in any instance. But, shall we say, if I do come across a deed bearing your brother’s name, I’ll read it, and give you a summary, and you can decide whether you’d like to see the record for yourself.”

“Would that be permitted?” Julius asked, his voice lacking its usual crystal sharpness.

“‘For purposes of requests for certified copies of any public record, authorized persons include the registrant, or additionally the parent, legal guardian, spouse, child, sibling, or attorney of a named party in such record,’” Dominic quoted by rote.

Julius nodded, and lapsed into a thoughtful silence.

—————

It was surprising how much Dominic’s mood was improved by the conversation. Usually, a night spent under Julius’s surgical wit left him flayed and weary, but on this occasion, Dominic felt he’d been the one to peel back the skin and look underneath. And, perhaps more importantly, he’d been reminded what it was he longed for. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten, simply lost sight of it, like blood beneath a scar.

He walked straight-backed to his rooms, thanked Belinda for her day’s efforts, and allowed the last of the staff to head home. Ever since the night at the Annulet Club, he’d not been wearing his more fashionable tight-fitted clothing, for fear one of his cuts might reopen and bleed. It also meant that he didn’t need the help of a valet to undress, and, with a collection of rather obviously intentional marks on his skin, the privacy was necessary.

Belinda was the last to leave, and reminded Dominic about the evening post sitting unopened on the tray in the front hall. Dominic didn’t think much about that, until he noticed another envelope bearing the three-ringed seal. Originally he’d thought the iconography was something to do with collars, or perhaps wedding bands, or some other holistic and portentous thing. As he cracked the wax, alone at his desk, he remembered the other interpretation: mouth, cunt, and arsehole. It gave him a minute shiver, and he flicked the letter open, halfway expecting a dismissal notice following a complaint from one of those four men. After their sudden departure that night, Dominic had been inwardly waiting for the axe to fall.

“Dear Sir,” Dominic read, and was glad the letter had taken care not to name him. Indeed the envelope must have been hand-delivered, as it didn’t bear his name on its face. “The Annulet Society wishes to express its regret that your recent visit was unsatisfactory.”

Dominic blinked. He hadn’t said anything of the kind. In fact, he hadn’t said much at all, even when the masked attendants stood watching him as he dressed and washed. He could have told them— what? That he’d been used as freely as he’d offered, by joining the society in the first place, and signing the temporary lease, and evidently by donning the blue lawn tie? That seemed inappropriate, even ungrateful. It wasn’t the club’s fault if Dominic couldn’t handle something for which he’d tacitly asked. That was Dominic’s own deficiency, and he’d felt fairly wretched about it until his conversation with Julius that evening. Following that, he’d resolved to view the entire experience as merely a failed experiment on his part. It was only an attempt at gaining some part of what he wanted from a corporal deed— and now he knew what didn’t satisfy. He couldn’t hold the Annulet Society to account for that.

“The comfort of our members is of paramount importance to us, and we hope that your experience has not dissuaded you from returning.”

Well, it rather had, but Dominic could understand a club’s desire to preserve its reputation, as well as its membership with the dues associated thereto.

“We therefore would like to extend an invitation to you, and furnish you with the opportunity to attend an exclusive evening of entertainment, facilitated by one of our senior members. He has been hand-selected to assist, and we trust that his expertise will be a credit to our services.”

Dominic’s brows lifted. He doubted every new member of the Annulet Society could expect this kind of personal attention, and suspected one of the men he’d met there had done something forbidden, something of which Dominic was not aware, that the club now wished to paper over by offering this special dispensation. It was a little funny, really, that they should be going to such efforts to keep him sweet, when he’d spent so many days worrying that one of the men from that night would submit a complaint about his performance. Several times, he’d failed to say ‘thank you’ when prompted, for example, and they’d commented repeatedly on his lack of apparent arousal. Either of those might have been a faux pas, Dominic had realized, in the aftermath. And yet, here he had a letter in hand, inviting him to partake in private amusements, apparently at the club’s expense.

The letter closed with an address to which Dominic was directed to reply, should he wish to take them up on their offer. He stared at the neat, precise handwriting, the letters and numbers of a post office box that was different from the one to which he’d sent his original application, and considered whether he ought to burn the letter and pretend never to have seen it.

He didn’t need to be bought off or placated, and surely didn’t want more of the same.

Shifting back in his desk chair, he felt the faint sting of the tallies on his backside, and leaned into the pain with a sort of morbid pleasure. It was a good reminder. With guilty resignation, his fingers went to the scabbed line under his nipple, pressed into it until the dull ache sharpened to a sharp burn, felt his cock twitch in his drawers in response. It wasn’t the pain, nor the rough treatment, nor really any of the acts performed that night which had caused him to feel so bereft. Speaking to Julius had brought that back into focus, reframed his thoughts in a way he felt silly for having needed.

Going back to the Annulet Society wouldn’t get him any closer to what he wanted.

His nails dug into the cut, through his shirt, and he hissed.

Then again, they’d gone to the trouble of arranging something specifically for him. And, this time, he could go in with adjusted expectations, having the little experience from the first visit to inform him.

He reviewed the letter, eyes stroking luxuriantly over the word ‘expertise’.

Dominic liked the sound of that word. It was vitally suggestive, and also, reminded him that he had some expertise of his own.

His first time at the club, he’d gone in unprepared. He didn’t have to do that again.

Slowly, he drew his hand away from the damaged skin of his chest, and withdrew two sheets of paper from a desk drawer. On the first, he jotted a quick reply, addressed to that post office box, and ready for the morning’s collection. On the second though, he began to draft a piece that would take a little longer than that brief missive.

——————

In the morning, his candle was burned to a stub, he’d slept only a scant few hours, but he woke fresh and dewy as a spring daisy, ready to face his day with a new motivation.

That is, until his valet mentioned the pamphlet he’d removed from the inner pocket of Dominic’s jacket. Enfield offered no comment on the contents, merely indicated that he’d placed it on the dressing table, where he usually put Dominic’s watch and cufflinks. Dominic still hadn’t read it. He thanked Enfield as the man bowed out, and, unable to resist, plucked up the pamphlet and turned to the first page of text.

“Hark, the spring-bright sound of singing,
Birds are winging, on they go,
Like to set the ev’ning ringing,
Ring’d as are the beasts below.

Gentle are the bud and berry,
And the merry, gentle folk,
Why, then, do the beasts still tarry,
Ring’d as ever by their yoke?

Yea, the beasts may throw their fetters,
Run the fields awild again,
Lest the beasts cast off their betters
And take the ring as though a chain.”

Dominic stared at his wall, at the minute patterns in the paper-hanging made to look like silk damask. He imagined the block printing of the flora and foliage was not entirely dissimilar from the process that produced this… whatever it was, in his hand.

He hadn’t expected poetry, at any rate, and there were certain bits of it that didn’t quite flow. “On they go” was a bit forced, he thought, and it was clear with the fetters/betters rhyme that the writer was attempting to say something about class, but, corporal deeds functioned at all levels of society, or very nearly. Why, Ash was the son of a duke, and wore his collar with pride. So, who were the ‘beasts’ and the ‘birds’, exactly? Perhaps they were the lower and upper classes, respectively, or else, people who’d signed deeds against those who had not.

The poem was signed “G.E.”, which was not the pseudonym Dominic had come to recognize from other pamphlets. With a wry pang, he realized he was somewhat relieved to find that the awkward composition hadn’t been penned by Jack Cade. He’d have thought the man, whoever he may be, was losing his touch, and Dominic preferred a worthy opponent.

He tucked the pamphlet into his coat as he stepped out onto the street. Likely the rest wouldn’t be ham-fisted poetry, and he felt it was relevant to his work to know what was being said of it.

Mullins was at his office door as Dominic arrived, bearing another stack of warped, wrinkle-edged paper that crackled in his hands. The clerk had been very useful in separating all of the damaged deeds, leaf by leaf, and setting them out to dry as flat as he was able, like a scullery starching the linens. This was the result: a crunching pile that sounded like kindling, and looked like shite.

Dominic appraised the offering. He’d spent days re-copying the worst of them, ferreting them away within his own office where he thought they might, at last, be safe. He was running out of shelf space.

“Any of those salvageable?” he asked, making a close inspection of the top sheet. Mullins handed it over, and for the first time, Dominic noted that the man wore no ring on his left hand. It hadn’t stood out to him before, because it wasn’t exactly an uncommon practice: having a corporal deed but no marriage certificate. Dominic had rather always assumed the same would be true for himself, were he ever lucky enough to sate his desires. It did make him wonder, though, what the shape of Mullins’s relationship was. Dominic knew very little about the man. He was a good clerk, precise and tactful and efficient, though not especially ambitious.

“Your own deed wasn’t stored at the Pell Office, was it, Mullins?”

“No sir, we have it at the parish registry.” Mullins hung his coat and hat on Dominic’s rack, settled in for another day of undoing the effect of a few minutes’ work with a bucket and a lockpick. “Tilly’s father is rather well-to-do, a Hackney banker, and insisted on having it done there. I suppose he’s hoping Tilly and I don’t work out, and that he’ll have the deed close to hand when she wants it voided.”

“And if you two do ‘work out’,” Dominic offered, glad he had something of a reputation for being approachable and fair, “will you marry her?”

Mullins laughed.

“Heavens, no, sir!” He was rolling up his sleeves and securing them with bands, so they wouldn’t get dragged through the ink as they copied out the unusable deeds, remaking them line by line, scrivening long into the evening. “She’s already married, after all.”

Dominic raised a brow. That was a bit more uncommon.

“Her husband has an old war wound,” Mullins explained. “Waterloo. He’s a very decent fellow, but unfortunately, can’t father children. So, he made my acquaintance one day at the post office of all places, and he bought me a drink at the pub next door and said I looked rather a lot like him when he was younger, and then asked if I’d like to come round and meet the wife. I didn’t really know what to expect, but he’s got a knighthood and everything so I thought it’d be impolite to refuse. Well, as it happens, he and Tilly were on the lookout for a chap of about my looks, and when I did meet her, we got on famously, and I don’t much mind him, either, so we’ve just been rolling along together ever since. The twins are about to be two, both girls, and we’re trying for a boy.” He looked up from cutting and sharpening his pen. “Of course, Sir Andrew wants to have an heir. We haven’t discussed whether this’ll come off,” he pointed with the feather end of his quill at his collar, “once he has a son. Should I turn out like Henry VIII, blessed only with girls, I suppose they’ll have to find another fellow to take my place. But we really are good friends, so I’m not too fussed about it. Tilly says all of the children will call me ‘uncle’, which is nice.”

Dominic didn’t have any opinion about whether Mullins ought to be so chuffed that his own biological children should call him ‘uncle’, and another man ‘father’. There was a deep voice in the back of his mind which seemed ready to mount disapproval, but he’d been working to quash the impulse to listen to it, along with all of his complicated feelings about the man to whom that voice belonged.

“It sounds like it’s all working out rather nicely,” he said, instead.

“Yes. It’s only that Tilly’s father would’ve preferred me to be something more impressive than a clerk. I think he’s already got Sir Andrew if he’s wanting impressive, so asking for more is asking too much.”

“You may yet rise above your current station,” Dominic put in. “You’ve been invaluable to this project of reconstitution. I could put in a good word?”

Mullins turned large eyes on him.

“Would you? I mean,” he looked down at his ink-stained fingers, “I wouldn’t want to ask for special benefits, just to please Mr. Stamford.”

If that Mr. Stamford was Samuel Stamford of Stamford, Hill & Co., Mullins’s ‘Tilly’ was well-heeled indeed. Of course Samuel Stamford would want a grandson, to inherit his interest in the banking firm, and of course if his son-in-law couldn’t provide then an alternate solution would have been necessary. However, Dominic couldn’t imagine being in his clerk’s shoes, taking the collar in order to father someone else’s children. He’d thought at first, when Mullins started wearing the thing around the office, that the man must be quite lucky— moreso than Dominic, anyway. In some ways, he supposed it was true. Through that collar, Mullins had friends in high society, a pair of girls to call him ‘uncle’, and an intimate relationship he seemed to genuinely enjoy. But, it was nothing like what Dominic wanted from a corporal deed, and he felt as though his clerk had inadvertently given him another kernel of understanding.

“Of course,” Dominic said, punctuating it with a tap of his pen against the lip of his inkwell, “I’m not the sort to hand out petty favors, nor compliments where they’re not warranted. You’ve been a great help.”

Mullins thanked him, and the two lapsed into silence but for the scratching of pens on paper.

—————

As the bells of St. Paul’s rang noon, Dominic took himself for a light nuncheon at Rules. Seated under a massive rack of antlers, he ordered a plate of breads and cheeses, and, once left to his own devices, slipped the pamphlet from where he’d hidden it in his jacket since arriving for the day at Somerset House. He halfway wished he had a book into which he could tuck the scurrilous thing, lest anyone see him reading it, not just for what it was, but for who he was.

Still, he flipped the small booklet open again, this time to the second page. After the poem was a woodblock illustration he certainly didn’t want anyone seeing over his shoulder. It was rather graphic, for all its bold-lined simplicity.

A man, bound and hanging upside down, the collar about his neck heavy with padlocks, swung from a hook like a side of beef. His skin was marked as if for butchery. There were chains around his hips, censoring anything important, and his face was a rictus of pain. In the background, a caricature of John Bull grinned over a bulging moneybag.

Dominic understood the intention. He didn’t need the type below the image, reading “Who gets a cut?” He knew that his office, in fact, he himself, was being accused of profiteering off of the sexual subjugation of common Britons.

But.

The dark hair of the hanged man, the somewhat Celtic features, the slim, soft build… he could easily be Dominic, himself. And to see a man very similar to his own looks rendered like that had Dominic’s blood rushing, his nipples tightening enough to pull at the cut still healing on his chest.

This was not appropriate for a mid-day repast, and he turned quickly to the next page, which was, thankfully, a more ordinary block of text, lampooning the government, its civil servants, and the domineering society which laid claim to the carnal acts of its citizenry. That, he could stomach, and even enjoy as his bread plate arrived and he could let the passion of the words, the humorous turns of phrase, accompany his jam and cheese.

It was obviously the work of Jack Cade, and it was scathing, and deeply insulting, but also, well written. He didn’t need to feel personally validated by everything he read; Dominic had read plenty of books with which he didn’t agree. He’d read Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice to the end, despite having extreme doubts about the feasibility of its philosophy, and feeling somewhat appalled by what the author considered ‘rational’.

Actually, he saw some traces of Godwin in Cade, and supposed the pamphleteer must have read the same treatises Dominic had. The arguments Cade made against deed ownership seemed to build upon Godwin’s lambasting of the institution of marriage, but where Godwin wrote as a former clergyman who was celibate until the age of 40, Jack Cade seemed no such creature. There was a distinct sensuality to Cade’s prose that Dominic doubted could come from anyone but a man with significant experience.

Never in any Cade pamphlet were corporal deeds called ‘obscene’ or ‘immoral’, at least, not on the basis of their content. Proprietary ownership may be called immoral. The flagrant disregard for social equality between grantor and grantee could be called obscene. But, Jack Cade never described the actual fact of the deeds, the language within them and their function to unusual arrangements like Mullins had with Sir Andrew and his ‘Tilly’, as being disgusting, only because they discussed sex.

“The joining of bodies, the confriction of pleasure, the touching and tasting of flesh, all of these must spring from a well of mutual freedom and understanding, a meeting of minds that begins upright before it comes to its horizontal end. No freedom can there be, when the state keeps one party in bondage; no understanding can arise while one party stands and the other is forced to his knees, not by his lover, but by his government.”

Dominic rather liked being forced to his knees, and wasn’t particular about who was doing the forcing. Well, maybe that wasn’t entirely true. But, he didn’t mind kneeling for crown and country, in any case. He smiled a little into his Madeira, imagining what it would be like if he ever met Jack Cade, and had the opportunity to explain to him the value of kneeling, whether it be for a night, or a knighting.

He returned to work feeling cheered, and between himself and Mullins, the damage at the Pell Office was quickly being undone. Soon, it would be as though it had never happened, and all would be set right once more. It felt like striking a blow against Jack Cade and his ilk, or at least, a competent riposte. Shame the man would never know it.

—————

The evening post arrived a little after eight of the clock, as Dominic sat in his study with Caleb Williams open on his lap, since he’d been thinking of Godwin that afternoon. It was a thick, squat volume, a little unwieldy to hold comfortably at some four hundred and fifty pages, but he supposed Godwin wouldn’t want a man like Dominic to be comfortable.

The polite knock of a servant roused him from thoughts of judicial malfeasance and the agony of the cell, and Belinda presented his letters on their tray before asking if there would be anything else for the night. Dominic thanked her, said she could let the others go home as well, and leafed through the post, anticipating one envelope in particular. Though he’d only sent his reply that morning, he had a feeling the answering confirmation would be prompt, and indeed it was.

Once again, the envelope bore no postage, and Dominic idly wondered just how many runners the Annulet Society employed to be hand-delivering letters like this. He sliced under the three-ringed seal with his paper knife, and smoothed the folds out of the good-quality paper. Certainly, he could not fault the club for the standard of their service.

“Dear Sir,” As before, there was no specific address. “We are pleased to receive your affirmative reply, and will await your attendance at the below-appointed date and time. It is our dearest wish to provide you with a pleasant evening’s amusements, and thank you sincerely for your continued patronage.”

Three days. The date at the bottom of the letter gave him three days, in which to prepare, and brace, and stew. It gave him three days to think on the word expertise and to try very hard not to get his hopes up about it. That had been one of his chief mistakes, upon his first visit to the club. It was his own fault, for expecting too much. This time would be different. In three days.

—————

On the day before his appointment at the Annulet Society, he went to White’s again. He hadn’t arranged to meet anyone there, thought perhaps he might have food and drink and do something about his rioting nerves and the anticipation of the following evening, but as he was led into the back dining hall by a servant in the club’s ornate livery— reminiscent of the end of the last century and indeed, Richard’s man, Cyprian— he saw instantly that Richard himself was there. Dominic would of course recognize him anywhere, but with the height and breadth, the figure dining on roasted lamb could be no one else.

Their eyes met across the table, and with that acknowledgement, the liveried servant thought it appropriate to seat Dominic at Richard’s side, on the assumption that they were old friends. Dominic allowed himself to be served pease porridge and cuts of lamb shoulder before he said anything at all.

“Have you just come from Somerset House?”

It was a good half hour walk between there and White’s, explaining why Dominic arrived partway through a first course of supper. He hoped he didn’t look too windblown.

“Yes, I’m afraid I’ve been putting my nose to the grindstone of late. You heard about the vandalism at the Pell Office?”

If Julius had, then Dominic supposed someone will have told Richard.

“I did. Petty nonsense,” Richard declared. “These hoodlums haven’t the sense to know they’re only spending taxpayer money by forcing records to be remade. Sorry it’s made work difficult for you.”

Dominic made a vaguely affirmative noise, and sliced his lamb. Richard’s commentary was of the usual run, the same impersonal remarks as a person who’d read about the Pell Office flood in a newspaper, rather than knowing it happened to a friend.

“I’m making an attempt to change things,” Dominic said, suddenly enough that Richard looked a bit alarmed. “About the way British records are kept,” Dominic added, and Richard relaxed. Only then did Dominic realize Richard thought he’d meant something else. Well, maybe Dominic would change that— the following night would tell.

He shouldn’t get his hopes up.

“I’ve seen plans for an expansion of Somerset House. Sir Smirke is still decorating the North Wing of course but there have been ongoing building works on the site for three hundred years, so we should hardly be surprised if the latest iteration is still unfinished.” Dominic’s eyes went to Richard’s again, found them cautious. “In any case,” he pressed on, “within a few years’ time, there should be more space, in which to build a general repository for all vital records in England and Wales.”

“What, all of them?” Richard asked, taken aback.

“Yes. The current state of things is dreadful, and the incident at the Pell Office very well proves it. Britons deserve better care taken over the documentary evidence of their lives.” He paused, not wishing to sound heated in front of Richard ever again, if he could help it, no matter the subject. Adopting a more relaxed pose in his seat Dominic said, “Personally I’d be satisfied simply centralizing the corporal deeds.”

Richard snorted.

“No you wouldn’t.”

Dominic’s shoulders slumped. He didn’t know if that was a commentary on Dominic’s overactive work ethic, or on his inability to be satisfied.

“No, I wouldn’t,” he agreed, in either case.

They made their way through the second course, and then a sharp and bright lemon blancmange which served to stimulate their appetites for brandy in the card room. Unsurprisingly, Francis was there, though he hadn’t dined in, and Sir Absolem Lockwood, a member despite being a Whig, made a fourth at whist.

“Will you two partner?” Francis asked of Richard and Dominic as he shuffled. “Know all of your own tricks and tells, I expect.”

Richard cast an eye at Dominic, but it was with a smile that he said, “It would only be gentlemanly to give you a sporting chance, Webster, so I’ll take Lockwood to my side, so you shall have to learn Dominic’s game.”

Francis was very good, regardless of his partner, and neither Richard nor Lockwood took it badly when they lost. They’d not been playing deep, and Dominic fully intended to “lose” Richard’s note of hand, even as he tucked it into his jacket. Doing so put his fingers against the riffled edges of “Cuts of Meat”, and he let his hand linger on it only a moment, before busying himself instead with the decanter. He’d taken to carrying the pamphlet with him, though he hardly knew why. Perhaps he simply didn’t want any member of his household stumbling upon it and being confronted with that shocking woodcut on the second page. Perhaps he liked to have that illustration to hand, to contemplate, ruminate, and speculate about what certain members of society thought of men like himself.

Richard had called the vandalism “petty nonsense”, not realizing how much he had in common with the perpetrators. What would Richard think of Jack Cade, and his assertion that to assume ownership of corporal rights was to reduce the conveyor to the level of a beast? The better question was, what would Richard think of himself, if he knew he’d likely align with the position of a radical pamphleteer?

He put it out of his mind as he followed his friends down the front steps and out onto St. James’s Street. Richard was but a few minutes’ walk from home in Albemarle Street, but Lockwood was in the other direction toward Pall Mall, while Francis and Dominic were at either side of Berkeley Square like a pair of bookends.

With more or less the same direction, Dominic and Francis walked together, sneezing as the breeze kicked up and the plane trees of the square shed their tiny hairs.

“Hell’s teeth,” Francis swore, tugging the kerchief from his pocket and wiping his eyes. “Thirty years those trees have been there, and they’re worse every spring.”

Dominic couldn’t mount a response, because a mouthful of the irritating fibers had stuck to the back of his throat, and he was coughing like a consumptive.

“Gabriel says there’s some terribly clever reason they were planted, but I can’t see how anything could be worth these tortures, March through May,” Francis said, still mopping his face.

Dominic wondered what the hell Ash knew about trees of all things, but perhaps that was the sort of information one learned when one’s father was a duke and one’s existence was predicated on the notion of ‘an heir and a spare’. He cut his burning eyes at Francis, and finally managed to get a breath in.

“His collar looks nice,” Dominic said, croaking. “I hadn’t said, before. It’s very tasteful.”

Francis, red-faced, turned slowly, still coughing intermittently. They’d come to the northeast corner of the square. Very shortly, Francis would go right, and Dominic would go left, and each would go up to his own solitary situation— unless of course Ash was waiting up for Francis. He’d not been at White’s, so Dominic had to wonder.

“Thank you,” Francis said, at last. “I didn’t design it, entirely, but I did offer some suggestions to the jeweler.”

“It shows,” Dominic replied.

Francis stopped walking, stared at Dominic for a long moment.

“I feel I should apologize,” he said, and Dominic would have gasped if he wasn’t sure that would send him into paroxysms again. Instead he merely blinked very rapidly, feeling the sting of terrible trichomes as he did. “I know that you… wished Richard would do the same. I saw the way you looked at Gabriel’s collar, and by association at me, and I still flaunted it in front of you, which was unkind.”

Dominic hardly knew how to respond to that.

“No,” he said, feeling his way to an answer. “I can hardly begrudge my friends their happiness. That would be unkind. And it would be illogical, and spiteful, besides. Should I sneer at and resent the married couples of my acquaintance? It isn’t their fault that I’ve not yet found myself happy.”

“Perhaps not,” Francis allowed, “but that doesn’t stop other people. Richard is jealous of his brother’s happy marriage. Julius is jealous of his brother’s grave. And you are jealous of Gabriel, for his signature on a paper, and a metal circlet on his neck. And I knew it, and I think I may have rubbed your nose in it somewhat, and for that, I am sorry.”

Dumbfounded, Dominic put aside the incisive and damning observations about their friends to ask, “For heaven’s sake, why?”

Francis folded his arms behind his back, like a boy at school asked to recite some difficult bit of Latin.

“Because I was jealous of you,” he said, astoundingly. “I don’t quite know why you and Richard fell apart, but it seemed to me you had something you wanted, which he wouldn’t give to you. Still, you asked for it, and for a long time I was too much a coward to ask for what I< wanted, and I thought you and Richard had attained and then put aside more than I could ever hope to gain. It was… small.”

Dominic took the spring and the trees as an excuse to rub at his eyes.

“Well. Thank you, I suppose.” He felt known in some way that hurt. “And for what it’s worth, I am truly happy for you and Ash.”

He was working on the roiling envy that burned beneath that happiness. If Francis Webster could admit to a weakness of character, then Dominic could begin the process of bleeding the venom out of his own soul.

The two shook hands as they parted, and each went his own way. Dominic refused to think about the laughing youth clad only in golden hair and a silver collar who might at this moment await Francis upon his return. He thought instead about the dark-haired illustration, naked but for his chains, suspended from the ceiling and writhing in the air. He imagined the cold drag of paint on his own skin, were someone to mark him like that, to section off and delineate the best parts of his body, label them for best use. He patted the pamphlet in his pocket again, where it budged up against the mostly-healed cut on his chest, and his heart behind it.

He didn’t have to be jealous of Ash anymore, nor wonder with the masochistic pleasure of a picked scab about everything enumerated in the deed between him and Francis, and why, if they’d signed as mutual grantees, Ash was the only one with a collar. Dominic could freely admit that their arrangement was an excellent answer to the problem of marriage— that there was no equality between the sexes, and marriage, still considered a covenant with God in some respects, was not allowable between men. He’d always appreciated how the deed, more secular in its function, conveyed property rights without the intercession of the church, and saw that it was an ingenious solution that Ash and Francis, as mutual grantees, conveyed their respective rights to one another. Honestly Dominic was shocked he hadn’t seen more deeds drafted that way, but refused to wonder if Richard would have accepted something like that, all those years ago. It would be pointless to ask. He didn’t have to know. He didn’t have to think about it, really, because he had something else to think about.

He really shouldn’t get his hopes up.

One more day.

—————

Adelaide Wetherly Bonk was the improbable name on his latest waterlogged deed. She was married to Lord Wadham Stephen Gildford Bonk, Earl of Rosewyne, whose permanent address was not far from Dominic’s, in Grosvenor Square. Dominic was fairly sure he’d seen the Earl at White’s, and that nobody called him Bonk, there. Rosewyne, too, was too florid a name for the man Dominic remembered: a dry, uncheerful fellow with a disorderly puff of hair and a long face that made him look not unlike a shoehorn, especially when wearing a hat.

The deed he’d signed with his wife, however, could have knocked Dominic’s boots off, no horn required. It was some extremely ripe stuff, even by Dominic’s standards which, as the few remaining scabs on his arse reminded him, was a pretty high bar.

“FOR NO CONSIDERATION,” Dominic read, following the handwriting and ignoring Mullins bent to his work across from him, “Lord Wadham Stephen Gildford Bonk, 3rd Earl of Rosewyne (hereafter, “GRANTOR”, “ROSEWYNE”), hereby grants and assigns to Mrs. Adelaide Wetherly Bonk, née Fairfax (hereafter, “GRANTEE”, “ADELAIDE”), the following described corporal property in the form of his person, commonly known as Lord Wadham or Rosewyne, being that same person as is named in the marriage certificate dated June the 26th in the year 1812. Such property is assigned as a whole covenant, with individual rights to said property more particularly described as:

All of GRANTOR’S right, title, and interest in and to GRANTOR’S reproductive organ, and its function and produce, TOGETHER WITH the rights therewith to any thought or deed affecting the action of said organ, including without limitation any physical touch upon or within the body of ROSEWYNE, be it by hand or by mouth or by any other part, and/or any creation of the mind which may so affect said organ as to infringe upon the aforementioned rights of ADELAIDE. GRANTOR agrees, for the benefit of GRANTEE, that this deed is made and accepted upon the covenants, conditions and restrictions, easements, liens, and other matters as set forth and defined in Article IV §§ 3(a-h) of this instrument. GRANTOR further agrees that these rights are to be held in perpetuity, at the pleasure of GRANTEE, and may be exercised at any time. Such rights are to be for the exclusive use of ADELAIDE, or her assigns, as agreed in that Schedule A, attached to this instrument and incorporated herein by reference thereto with the same effect as though fully set forth herein.”

No wonder the man went around looking like he was holding his breath. He’d signed away the right to even think about anything that might get his cock hard, without the express direction of his wife. The strangling nature of the Earl’s neckcloth made sense… especially if it covered what Dominic presumed must be a rather thick and heavy collar. Hell, Dominic wouldn’t be surprised if Lady Adelaide had placed a similar ring about Lord Wadham’s bollocks.

Dominic glanced up, surreptitiously. Mullins, like Ash, wore his collar above the white starched linen of his shirt points, his neckerchief knotted under its metal curve with the ends tugged up to create a pair of bow-like loops above the metal, the tails pinned under it and tucked into his waistcoat. It was a fashionable sort of knot for collared men who wished to draw attention to the fact. Rosewyne was either unfashionable, or didn’t wish to invite conversation about his collar, lest that call to mind any memories which may cause him to break the covenants of his corporal deed. From what Dominic knew of the man, either option was about as likely as the other.

Taking a moment to clean his pen, Dominic imagined what it would be like to be party to a deed like Rosewyne’s, to have even the right to his own private thoughts assigned to someone else. It was shocking and enticing in turn, and he could, potentially, see the appeal… though, he was aware that the Rosewyne deed was built on the structure of an existing marriage— something Dominic didn’t have. If he had someone who wanted and loved him enough to marry him, perhaps he would repay that love by bestowing every private right he owned, body, mind and spirit, to that person.

Failing in that, he could envision a temporary arrangement, with and for the right individual. Supposedly, he’d be meeting an expert in such matters, that very night. Could he be the sort of person to whom Dominic would feel comfortable giving over everything? At least, for a while?

He blinked such thoughts away. Mullins was looking at him, his pen hovering over his own copying.

“Nothing,” Dominic said, answering the unasked question. “I was straining my eyes, I think.”

“I know the feeling, sir,” Mullins agreed. “This one looks like it was written by spiders in ice skates.”

With that evocative estimation, the two returned to work, while the clock marched its steadfast way toward the evening.

—————

The attendants didn’t bother with the blue neck cloth that time, but when a masked man directed him to the little writing desk with its single candle, Dominic shook his head.

“I brought my own,” he said, bringing the folded document forth. It rasped against “Cuts of Meat” in his pocket. “I’d like my partner for the evening to review it, but of course, if a representative from the club ought to review as well, I’ll understand. Could you inform the relevant parties?”

The masked man nodded, and ducked through the curtained doorway. Dominic had only to kick his heels for a few moments before he was beckoned by a gloved hand.

The redheaded attendant stood before him, silent as ever. He led Dominic through the room with the bar, which was, surprisingly, empty, and then up the right-hand staircase, where Dominic’s previous experience had been up the left. He didn’t know if there was any difference between the two, but was inwardly glad he wouldn’t be returning to the same room.

Instead, the attendant opened a door on the hall, and gestured Dominic into a room tastefully appointed in a palette of willow green and straw yellow, where the other room had been a bolder arrangement in red and gold. The card table was also missing, though there was a sturdy-looking library table with caryatid figures at the corner of each pedestal panel, and a few dark green chairs around a lively fire, and a chaise longue in mezereon, and a man, standing by a side table where a decanter sat alongside a pair of tulip-stemmed glasses.

The man could not be less like that fellow August if he tried. Where August was tall and athletic and blonde, hair falling in artful swoops over one brow, clothed in all the trappings of a gentleman from the starched points of his fine linen collar to the soles of his hessian boots, this man was a solid, sturdy presence, with close-cropped hair and scars on his knuckles. Those scars gave Dominic an almost seasick thrill, shining opalescent in the firelight. This must be the ‘expert’.

Neither Dominic nor the Expert said anything as the redheaded attendant indicated the table, and the document in Dominic’s hand. Dominic nodded, crossed to the heavy piece of furniture, and smoothed his handwritten instrument on its surface. The attendant left, and was replaced by a woman, wearing the same Il Dottore mask Dominic had seen on a man the last time he visited.

“Let us see what you’ve brought,” she said, and came to the opposite side of the desk from Dominic to pluck up the short document and hold it close to the fire for the light. For a while, she was quiet, reading over the words. Then, she laid the pages down again and hunted around in one of the desk drawers for ink and a quill. “This needs to be cut,” she commented after testing the point. “I’ll go and bring back a fresh one.”

“No need,” said the Expert, his voice a rasping burr. From his pocket he drew a folding knife, and Dominic’s heart sped. He supposed this man would see the shiny pink new skin of his healing cuts, would know immediately what the tally marks on his arse meant.

Maybe he’d add that fifth cross bar the other men had gone in search of.

For the moment, the Expert merely reached for the quill, and very efficiently cut and sharpened it, as a man accustomed to frequent writing and correspondence. Dominic watched his large hands as they maneuvered the knife, watched the liquid flash of the blade as firelight poured over it, and swallowed. The Expert didn’t look at him, merely passed the quill back to the female Dottore and closed his knife with a click.

“Well, this is somewhat more lenient than our usual paperwork,” said the Dottore. “Read it carefully, sir,” she instructed the Expert, the honorific coming with special emphasis as though it wasn’t usually warranted.

The Expert grunted, and lifted the sheet, and Dominic could not help but watch his face as he read. His heavy brows lowered, his frowning mouth pursed. He passed a hand over his head, down his neck, over a travel-worn neck cloth to tuck his free hand into the pocket of a slightly battered waistcoat.

“You sure about this?” he asked, with a demonstrative flap of the paper. Dominic didn’t know to whom the question was addressed, as the female Dottore answered.

“I think our basic liabilities are covered, so long as we keep that document safe.”

Dominic had written it to the best of his ability, and knew it to have rather elegant drafting. It was clear, concise, and left no room for misinterpretation.

“This essentially tells me to do my worst to him, and nevermind if he cries or screams or says ‘no’. I don’t want to start getting accusations from other members,” the Expert groused. He laid the document on the table again.

“The house is yours for the night. Nobody will hear you. Or, more appropriately, nobody will hear him.”

Just like the last time, there was a conversation about Dominic occurring right in front of him, without involving him in the slightest. At least this time he still had his drawers on.

“Fair enough,” said the Expert. At long, long last, he turned to Dominic. “So. This doesn’t look like a temporary lease. Come up with this by yourself, did you? This ‘Easement Agreement’?”

Dominic nodded, and then, at the twitch of the Expert’s lips, spoke aloud.

“Yes… sir.”

That got a reaction. The Expert’s pupils grew fat, and the set of his shoulders changed.

“I drew it up myself,” Dominic continued, “based upon my own desires and wishes. If the terms aren’t acceptable to you, please of course say so.”

The Expert flicked his eyes between Dominic and the deed. In the firelight, it was hard to tell what color those eyes were, the flames repeatedly turning them gold.

“Your own desires and wishes,” he echoed, slightly hollow. “I notice there’s no end date predefined.”

“No,” Dominic agreed. “I wagered that, should tonight’s efforts prove mutually entertaining, we may not wish to have a specific end date, and might instead continue to abide by the terms of the agreement, on a going-forward basis.”

“And if it’s not mutually entertaining? What happens if you come away from this hating my guts, and yet I still have your hand on a document that promises me use of,” he checked the wording again, “most, if not all of your body? I could use this against you, force you to perform acts against your will.”

Dominic must have made a face, because the man added, “Actually against your will. Not in keeping with your so-called ‘desires and wishes’.”

It would be a fair question, if the Expert had not been brought here, ‘hand selected’, they’d said, for this purpose. Dominic was not the sort of man who shrugged, but he shifted his stance anyway, which was much the same.

“They tell me you’re a senior member,” he said. “I expect that’s as much an affidavit to your character as I’m likely to get. Besides, a man fixing to take advantage would probably wait until after I’d signed to bring it up.”

The Expert’s considering grunt didn’t reveal much. It was the sort of noise Dominic had heard at the card table, when a man was asked a question about his hand.

“Alright then,” he said, rubbing his jaw. His eyes skated over Dominic and then away. “I can’t see that I lose anything, being the grantee.” With his scarred fingers, he plucked up the quill, then signed his name in an illegible scrawl like that of a physician or solicitor. Dominic had thought the man must spend a great deal of time writing. By his hand, he could be a clerk or a secretary, but by his hands, he absolutely could not.

“Now you, sir,” the Dottore said to Dominic.

He’d thought about this: how to maintain his anonymity—being a servant of the crown made it somewhat difficult— while also seeking a means to the pleasures he craved. From his pocket, he drew a small metal stamp. Then, plucking up one of the candles (beeswax, not tallow, he’d noticed upon his first visit), he dripped a spill of wax on his signature line, and pressed his seal into the congealing puddle.

The Dottore and the Expert looked at it, at the bas relief impression of his personal intaglio. It did not bear his name, but to any gentleman, it was as intrinsic to Dominic Frey as would be his own blood. The Dottore, presumably, knew who he was, but hadn’t said it aloud, and the Expert didn’t look like a gentleman.

“Right, then,” the Dottore declared, straightening. “The night is yours.”

She took the agreement with her as she left, likely to be stored alongside all the temporary leases the club collected each night. Distantly, Dominic thought about what their organizational system must be like, and how they catalogued their records, but his thoughts were arrested as a hand fell on his shoulder.

“Hear that?” The Expert’s voice had dropped a register, and it raised gooseflesh to prickle across Dominic’s skin. “The night is mine. And so are you.”

Dominic shivered, but searched the Expert’s face, denying the urge to drop his gaze in submission. He wanted to see what lay there, as the man claimed him for his own, whether he was being seen, or merely looked at.

The Expert’s pupils had almost entirely swallowed his irises, save a silver ring at the edge that made Dominic’s breath catch. His mouth was slightly parted as he observed Dominic in return, taking in his face, his hair, his graying temples and the neckcloth tied high on his throat.

“You are a pretty piece of flesh, aren’t you,” he said. Dominic blinked, wondered if that was intended to be Shakespeare. He didn’t think himself a Mercutio. “And all these fine clothes. Why this jacket alone—” The Expert’s hand slid down Dominic’s chest, over his heart, and they both felt the crinkle of paper between. “Oh, what’s this? Another agreement? More of your desires and wishes?”

Dominic’s hand flew up, but the Expert caught his wrist. He hadn’t thought about anyone else seeing the pamphlet. What would this man think, seeing Dominic carrying that around? With what they’d just signed?

The Expert reached in to Dominic’s jacket with his free hand, the other so tight on Dominic’s wrist he was sure it would bruise. Casually, he drew out the pamphlet, as though he had every right to search Dominic’s clothing, as though anything that was Dominic’s was his. That hadn’t been part of the agreement, but Dominic’s breath came faster, thinking on it.

Those black-pitted eyes widened in recognition as they flashed over the cover of “Cuts of Meat”.

“Well, well,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me why you’ve got this in your pocket? Looks well-loved. Are you all for dismantling the deed institution? Annoyed that all these collared men can’t line up to fuck you?”

Dominic’s face felt hot. He thought he might sweat. He wanted to start undressing, but hadn’t been told to, and felt that would be the done thing. How should he answer this man? He could lie, but there were also a few different truths he could offer. Some were respectable: that he needed to know what people thought and said about his job, that he ought to have rebuttals ready for that sort of talk should it come up socially… but some reasons were more humiliating in their honesty.

“There’s an illustration,” he said. “I like to look at it.”

The Expert flipped the pamphlet open, directly to the page with the woodblock print. He must have read it too, to know exactly which image Dominic meant.

“Hmm, I see,” the Expert rumbled, thumb swiping over the bound man’s face, rendered starkly in black against white. He looked up, met Dominic’s gaze. “Strip.”

Dominic’s hands went to his neck cloth, and the Expert leaned against the mantelpiece to watch.

“You’d like being hung up like that, bled for butchery? I could, you know. Your ‘easement’ gives me the right. It didn’t say I couldn’t hurt you. And I could. Could stick you like a pig and listen to how that made you squeal.”

The buttons of Dominic’s waistcoat felt very small and fiddly, his fingers scumbling over them as he struggled free of his layers. Pocket watch, coin purse, all of his gentlemanly clothing, everything of worth, he laid out on the library table for the perusal of this man. He hoped he’d offered him something more valuable than that. Would this Expert think so? Dominic wanted the man to ‘make him squeal’. Christ, why did those threats affect him so intensely? It was just that, well, the man looked capable of it. The scars on his hands— those men before hadn’t been built that way. Their manners were rough, in some cases, but their hands were unblemished. Dominic looked at interlocking lines of white and pink, the thickened caps of bone and tendon, and had the wild desire to drop to his knees, lick into the ridges and valleys between each knuckle, to taste the texture of pale scars on his tongue.

Bare to the waist, he glanced up, hands hovering over the placket of his breeches.

“To the skin,” the Expert said.

He’d poured himself a glass of whatever was in the decanter— more of that orange wine, Dominic supposed. Dominic watched him sip, swirl, and consider. Then, he undid his own breeches and drawers, and toed out of his boots. His valet might cluck at the scuffs to the heel, but he didn’t think the Expert was about to help him. Dominic didn’t want him to. He liked watching the man drink casually, feeling the eyes on him as his skin was revealed. God, he’d never— every time he’d undressed before Richard, there’d been a different sort of look between them. Perhaps he could call it sweetness, or comfort, or ease, or even some kind of presupposition, and Dominic to this day could not name why that look had in the end left him so melancholy, while the heated gaze of this stranger had his knees going liquid, his fingers trembling, his heart a steaming gallop in his chest.

When at last he’d leaned his bare arse on the table to remove his silk stockings, the Expert finally strode over, still holding his glass, and stood, appraising Dominic as though looking at a Summer Exhibition piece at the Royal Academy.

“Stand straight, and give us a turn. I should see what I’m being offered, shouldn’t I?”

Dominic felt ridiculous, executing a slow turn while naked and visibly aroused, and his cheeks darkened further. He wasn’t properly hard, not yet, but his cock had thickened, and Dominic expected the Expert would know it. Then, as he turned his back on those assessing eyes, a hand gripped him hard by the arse cheek, thumb digging in, and held him still. He quivered.

“Look at these marks,” the Expert said. “Seems you know something about being a cut of meat, don’t you? Someone carved you like a sirloin before I could even get my hands on you.”

The click of his tongue made Dominic flinch, his body lurching like a kicked horse before he stilled himself, and then the other hand went to the base of his throat, the edge just pressing into his windpipe as short nails bit into his arse. Christ, those hands were strong. Dominic could feel the calluses on them, hard and rough, and the whisper of breath as the Expert leaned close, smelling of wine.

“Is that how it is, my fine thing? Who told you not to fight?”

Dominic had no answer. He shook his head, feeling the pressure of the hand at his throat.

“I’ve been in a scrap or two,” the Expert went on. “So go ahead and fight. It’ll do you no good.”

For a moment, Dominic couldn’t react. Then, the expert shook him, using the hold of both hands, and the grip around his throat grew tighter, and he shook his head again.

“No,” he croaked. The hand on his arse didn’t move, but the one on his throat moved higher, thumb and forefinger pinching inwards and upwards under his jaw, so he felt them when he swallowed. “No,” he said again, around the grip, though he threw his body forward, making the pressure harder, worse.

There was a laugh, against his ear.

“That’s it, go ahead and try,” the Expert rumbled. “You’re mine to play with, my toy, until I decide it’s over. No end-date, remember? Don’t cry to me if you regret it.”

Dominic found himself wrenched around, forced face-up onto the table with the edge digging into the small of his back. It hurt wonderfully, and Dominic blinked dazedly at the ceiling. How could he ‘regret’ this? Had he hit his head against the table as he went backwards? He couldn’t tell. He could feel cool glass near his ear, and supposed that must be the Expert’s wine, set aside in favor of a grip on Dominic’s throat. Still, it hadn’t spilled when the Expert threw him to the table. Good aim, Dominic thought.

“Someone really did work you over with his knife, didn’t he…” came the words from somewhere above. “Did you like it?”

Did he? In turns, yes and no, but Dominic couldn’t grasp at the fraying edges of that thought well enough to weave them back together. Instead he only moaned, as the Expert pinned his wrists with only one hand, leaving the other free to trace the tender lines, puckered with new-healing skin.

“I’ll bet you were gorgeous for him,” the Expert forced out in an aggressive whisper. Dominic’s breath caught. Oh god, had he been? Was he gorgeous, now?

Before he could get any farther along with that question, the Expert said, “Did you cry out? Did you scream? Tell me, because everything they did to you, I intend to do better. If they made you scream, I’ll make you scream louder. If they made you cry, I’ll make you cry harder. And if they made you come, well.” He pinched Dominic’s nipple, the one above the cut, hard and merciless, pulling it up as if he’d hang Dominic from it. “We’ll see about that. You’re sporting a nice stand, there, already.”

Dominic almost wanted to look and check. He hadn’t been hard for most of the previous encounter, but this time, his cock strained, untouched.

“No,” he said, anyway, instigating. “Not yet. You haven’t earned it.”

The Expert stood back at that, a grin creeping across his face.

“Haven’t earned it?”

Dominic could hear the teeth in his smile, and wanted them buried in his flesh. The awkwardness between them had begun to melt like fat in a pan, and Dominic hoped he could play this right.

“I have to earn the right to play with my own toys?”

From the tabletop, he swiped Dominic’s neckcloth, tied his wrists with an efficient knot. Yes, god, yes. This was why he’d said ‘no’.

“I don’t think so, pretty thing. You gave yourself to me, and I’m going to make whatever use of you I please.”

Dominic’s cock twitched, flinging a fat drop of moisture up his belly. The Expert saw, snorted, then gathered it up on his thumb. Dominic opened his mouth, expectant, but instead, the Expert brought it to his own mouth, and licked his thumb clean. It was like, Jesus, it was like when August and Vincenzo had— but their attention had been only on each other. The Expert looked down at only him, and licked his lips, a hot, hasty look searing over Dominic’s skin.

“How— very charming,” he said, haltingly. His hand tightened where it had rested on Dominic’s thigh, before releasing. Quietly, he muttered, “What am I going to do with you?”

His eyes seemed focused in that moment in the vicinity of Dominic’s navel, perhaps staring at the shiny skin where that heavy drop of precome had been. His lips worked, but formed no words, and then with a sudden wrench he grabbed Dominic by the bindings at his wrists, dragged him off the table.

Dominic kicked, and struggled, but the Expert was a good deal stronger than him, and seemed to have experience muscling people across a room. Perhaps he worked for the club, throwing people out if they got too drunk, or did— whatever it was those four men did to get them turned off of Dominic in such a hurry. He didn’t know where they were going, hoped he wasn’t about to be dragged naked down the stairs and turned out into the street for having misjudged this whole affair. Those last words from the Expert held some distant note in them, an unhappiness with which Dominic was all too familiar, and he wanted to stop and apologize, say he was sorry for saying ‘no’, sorry for making assumptions, sorry for wanting things no sane or moral man should.

Dominic stumbled, lost his footing, and was dragged, knees burning on the rug, until they came to a wall with a row of coat hooks and hat pegs. The Expert tested the strength of one jutting metal stake, made a face, but hooked Dominic’s bindings over it anyway, and did not look at him.

“Now you stay there a moment,” the Expert said, eyes on the spike and not on Dominic, “and don’t go pulling that peg out of the wall. I don’t hold with destructive pets.”

Dominic stood miserable in his confusion, arms upstretched, prick still pointing valiantly upward from just the burn in his shoulders and the memory of scarred hands on his throat. The height of the peg put him in an oddly crouched position, bearing his weight with the underdeveloped muscles of his core, and he shifted, foot to foot, reviewing everything that had been said between the door closing on the Dottore and now. The Expert had encouraged him to fight, had as much as said that he’d be put in his place if he tried. Why, then had the man abruptly stopped meeting his eyes?

His legs began trembling almost immediately, and he twisted to see what the Expert was doing, but couldn’t. He could hear a drawer opening, something heavy landing on a wooden surface, then some lighter clicks and rattles, and then a brief, strange silence.

Finally, the Expert’s footsteps approached again, slightly quicker than they’d receded, and Dominic hoped that meant the man was in a hurry to get back to him, rather than anxious to have this over with. It had started after the Expert had tasted his fluids, seen the mark they made on his skin. Was that the reason? Something about that had disgusted him, and now the encounter was a chore? For god’s sake, Dominic hadn’t asked him to do that, would have been happy as anything to be fed his own mess and to be tugged around by a thumb hooked behind his teeth afterward. He didn’t understand.

“Do you know why it’s called the Annulet Society?” the Expert asked, close, but still outside Dominic’s line of sight. Christ.

“I’ve heard some hypotheses,” Dominic said, after a pause. He had to get himself under control.

A dry laugh sounded, somewhere to Dominic’s left.

“That tripe about the three holes, eh? Everyone who says that thinks he’s the first to think of it. No.” Three steps closer, around a corner, and Dominic could see what had made that heavy clunk against the chest of drawers. “This is where the name came from, originally.”

In the Expert’s hands was a collar. Dominic swallowed, finding his body doing all sorts of things at once— his heart skipped, his cock throbbed, his mouth flooded embarrassingly. Lord, here was this man who maybe wanted nothing to do with him, and Dominic was so uncivilized as to slaver like a beast just looking at a bit of metal. Could the Expert tell he was drooling, actually drooling, at the mere sight of the thing?

It was thick, a heavy circle of solid metal, with rings all around, and, at the front, two large metal cuffs affixed at an acute angle, their own rings dangling and jangling. Dominic could see how this, a piece not unlike the pillory at the Old Bailey, could have morphed into the club’s three-ring motif. He ought to have saved those wax seals, to look at and remember.

“Look at you, pretty thing. Where’s your ‘no’, now?”

Dominic tore his eyes away from the collar to look the Expert in the face, then down his neck, his broad torso, to white-knuckled hands. From the set of his lips, the tension in his shoulders, the clutch of his fingers, it was clear he really was holding something back. Dominic fought the panic, and the ties at his wrists, struggled off the peg and rolled to his feet.

“You won’t put that on me,” he said, voice sounding odd to his own ear. “You don’t even want to.”

A hand suddenly pinned him by the throat to the wall. The Expert moved fast, throttling him with the span of his palm, and the collar pressed hard and cold into his chest. Dominic wondered what the hell had gone wrong in his own life that he thought he could very easily come from this, and nothing else, if the Expert only looked him in the eyes again. His face was too close for that, as he spoke.

“What gave you that impression, sweet thing?”

The words were a growl, but ground out close to Dominic’s skin, lips brushing the shell of his ear and making him writhe in the hold. He thought, from the quick intake and sigh of breath, that the Expert might be smelling his hair, and wanted to know, needed to know what this man thought of him, if he’d only brought out the collar to satisfy whatever agreement he’d made with the club for Dominic’s amusement, or if, if he really—

“You’ve read ‘Cuts of Meat’,” Dominic said, fighting past the constriction of his throat. “You don’t believe in collars, do you?”

The Expert drew back. Dominic hadn’t meant to say that. Firstly, it wasn’t appropriate for this setup, such as it was. If the Expert was fed up with him and his nonsense and was cleaving to the common structures to see Dominic through a perfunctory orgasm and send him home, then this didn’t fit. He was supposed to struggle weakly until the stronger man ‘forced’ him, and the Expert was supposed to play the role of a thoughtless brute, with nothing more to him but heavy hands and rough speech. This was ruining it, but Dominic needed to know, else he’d come away from this feeling the same way he had after every sexual encounter he’d had since… well, probably since he was eighteen years old and felt Richard rolling his weight off of him, cautious of any hurt he might cause, and had in that moment of loss started to cry.

They stared at one another, the Expert’s hands no longer pushing, but merely resting on his slightly chilly skin.

“Alright,” the Expert agreed. “Say I don’t. I still signed your agreement, didn’t I?”

There was something in that, something in his voice that made Dominic tilt his head, stretching the skin of his throat where he was sure there’d be finger marks come morning. He wanted to feel that tender pang, needed it as an anchor, a reminder that this man had gripped him by the windpipe and told him to go ahead and fight.

“You did. And, you’re a member of this club. Strange truths for a man who reads Jack Cade.”

The Expert’s eyebrows flicked up and down as his face went through a series of emotions before flattening out, going still and hard.

“A temporary lease isn’t the same as a corporal deed, and you know it,” he insisted. “I suspect that’s why you had to draw up your own ‘easement’, a thing that’s a deed in all but name.” The grit in his voice was real, now, not play-acted. He was angry, but maybe… not at Dominic. “You crave a collar, don’t you,” he went on, at a rush. “I could see it when I brought this thing over. You panted like a mounted bitch, eyes so big and shiny you’d wag your tail if I put one up you.”

He jabbed the heavy collar into Dominic’s sternum again, made him grunt.

“Yes, all of that is true,” Dominic said. Bits and pieces of understanding clicked together like the rings on those cuffs. “But you still signed. So,” he leaned close, feeling the metal edge of the collar press hard into his skin, working up a bruise beneath it, “there’s something you crave, too. Something I can give you, maybe, if you’ll take it.” His lips brushed the Expert’s stubble, felt its friction as he said, “You know very well I want you to. That’s what this whole exercise is for. But more than anything, I want to know what you want.”

The Expert made a short, unstudied noise, and so, Dominic kissed him. The collar bit into his skin between them, trapped between their bodies, and Dominic looped his bound hands over the Expert’s head and to the back of his neck. Rough fingers grabbed at him, greedy, frantic, never settling. Dominic felt his heart could burst. Then the Expert bit his lip, a savage bite that drew blood, and licked into the little wound, and Dominic’s knees went out from under him.

He was held up by the bonds at his wrists and his arms over the Expert’s shoulders, and the Expert’s hands gripping his hips like he might crack him open. Fingers dug in, scratched at the tally marks on his arse.

“There is something I want, pretty thing,” the Expert said, speaking the words into Dominic’s mouth, their lips brushing together so Dominic could taste his breath, the blood on their teeth. “Here’s this gentleman with all his fine notions of personal and private property and the order of things, the hierarchy of the world and his place in it, and he comes in here and tells me to own him.” His thumbs pressed into the hollows of Dominic’s hips, followed them down. The collar fell from between them, thudded to the rug, and then both hands were on him, pulling like he could be folded up inside the man’s ribcage to live next to his heart. Then, one hand pushed between Dominic’s legs to grip and massage his balls, thumb rolling left and right, and Dominic let out a quavering moan, a pitiful, ecstatic sound. There was a threat of nails there, and Dominic remembered the knife from his previous visit, and that there was another knife in the Expert’s pocket, and the threats of being stuck like a pig. The small scab at the base of his cock had healed, but now he latched onto the thought of a new one, caught that idea in his teeth and clenched his jaw on it.

“Now, I’ve read a fair bit about ownership rights,” the Expert continued conversationally, his grip tightening, pulling, wrenching another loud, awful whine from Dominic’s throat. Ownership, and a hand on his bollocks— the implication was clear. “…And it seems to me they’re usually written to serve those who already have everything, and not for those without.” A harsher squeeze then, and Dominic’s head went back, tears gathering. He didn’t move otherwise, just took the sharp, driving pain as it increased and increased, until the Expert let go.

Dominic sucked in a gasp as the immediacy of the pain leached out and left a warm, aching throb behind it. He blinked at the Expert, mouth open and wet, eyes bleary with unshed tears.

“That gentleman,” the Expert said, at last meeting Dominic’s unfocused gaze, “he’s giving himself to me as a gift, a pretty package all tied up with a nice white bow, and the damned thing is, I want him.” Dominic’s mouth hung open. “He looks at me with his big dark eyes, all long lashes and sweet lips like a girl, and he tells me to take what I want, and for all my fine notions of common property for the common good, I’ve never seen anybody who’d look so good in a collar and chain. I believe so strongly in common property, I belong to a free use club. And yet…”

“It goes against your principles,” Dominic whispered, shocked, delighted, and aroused. His cock rubbed uncomfortably against the Expert’s workmanlike clothing, stubbing against wool and worsted.

“Damned if it doesn’t,” the Expert replied. “How am I going to face my reflection in the morning?”

He nosed in under Dominic’s jawline, bit him again, over his pulse point, a long scrape of teeth against already bruising skin. Dominic laughed.

“Oh good god,” he said, elation welling like blood in a cut. He lifted his bound wrists away from the man’s shoulders, fell back against the wall with an audible thump, put his hands together as if in prayer, and backhanded the Expert across his stubbled cheek. He’d tried to imagine he was swinging a racquet. It wasn’t a good hit. He didn’t have adequate leverage with his wrists tied together. The Expert didn’t see it coming, though, and the shock of it did more than the impact. One large hand came up, touched the skin. It wasn’t even reddened.

Flint struck in the Expert’s eyes, sparked, and caught. Dominic darted to the left, took off at a run to put distance between them, and paused behind the large library desk.

If the two of them were about to chase each other around and around a bit of furniture like a pair of schoolchildren about a mulberry tree, it could at least be a sturdy piece. He’d been pushed down on it once already, and wouldn’t mind a repeat performance.

“You’ll regret that,” the Expert promised. “I don’t mind telling you, you’ll regret that.”

He started toward Dominic, unhurried, scooping up the abandoned collar on the way.

“Oh, you silly little cock-robin,” he said, stepping nearer, “you’ll get your arrow, yet. Mark me. You can’t fly away with your wings tied down, now can you?”

Dominic grinned, feeling wild.

“‘A Robin Redbreast in a cage, Puts all Heaven in a rage,’” he quoted, and the Expert dropped the collar loudly on the table.

“That’s Blake,” he said, startled.

It was, but that should hardly be as surprising as watching a gentleman run about naked like an Ancient Greek at Marathon.

“I’ve read the same pamphlets as you,” Dominic reminded him, nodding to “Cuts of Meat” still lying face-up on the desk’s cluttered surface, that oft-considered illustration open to the air. “Is it any surprise I’ve read the same poetry?”

“In a word, yes.”

Dominic tutted, cheated to the side when the expert cracked his neck and took two quick steps around the corner of the desk.

“I expect gentlemen like you to be well-bred, not well-read,” the Expert said with a wry twist to his lips. “Though I suppose gathering quotations is a fair half of what boys like you do at Eton, isn’t it? The rest, I hear, is drinking.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Dominic sniffed. “I was at Harrow.”

“Oh, aye?” The Expert raised his eyebrows derisively. “You get fagged by your house captain? Caned before the assembly? Did you love it, you thorough-going degenerate slut?”

Straightening his shoulders as much as he was able, Dominic said, “Do you really want to hear about my public castigations?”

There hadn’t been many— Dominic had not been a trouble-making youth, and the early explorations he and Richard undertook were thankfully not discovered at school. Still, he remembered watching the punishments, seeing a boy his own age flogged for some disobedience, and feeling a bewildered sort of hunger he could not express or explain. Only once, he acted out, a delirious urge driving him to stay out past the last bell, but before he could be brought before the master or even chided by a prefect, Richard was there, citing Dominic’s excellent record and sweeping the ‘meaningless folly’ away. Nothing ever came of it.

It didn’t matter, really. The prefect was a spotty-faced boy just two years Dominic’s senior, with mean little eyes, and hair and lashes so pale his ruddy skin shone through it on his scalp and made him look like a plucked hen. Dominic wasn’t attracted to him, didn’t particularly want to bare his arse to that squinting gaze, even if only to take the cane. And, he’d had Richard, then.

He’d felt oddly bereft.

He wouldn’t tell the Expert that. It wouldn’t make for an enticing story. He’d have to make something up, put himself in the place of a boy more madcap than himself, should the Expert want to hear a thrilling tale of public whipping.

“I want to hear about the cove who put those tally-marks on your arse,” the Expert said instead, saving him the trouble.

Dominic looked across the desk at the man, and lowered his lashes. If his hands were free, he’d stroke a palm over the healing cuts— the tallies had been the worst of them, the deepest, and those men had been savage in handling him, thumbnails gouging, palms spanking, each one of them rough and uncaring. It was a wonder the cuts hadn’t become infected, even as Dominic treated them nightly and in secret with honey and vinegar, but they might yet scar, and Dominic wasn’t yet sure if he wanted them to. Perhaps the Expert’s opinion could help him decide.

“Well, there were four men, as you might gather from the count,” he began, hopping to the right as the Expert feinted left. “Two of them seemed to be involved with one another, though not collared, and took pleasure from having another man beneath or between them. The other two were rougher characters— merchants who made good, perhaps— and it was one of those who drew his knife and decorated my skin.”

The Expert’s eyes were dark, fixated on the cut under Dominic’s nipple. It was enough to make Dominic say, “One of them gave me that line about the three holes, and the one with the knife threatened to cut me a cunt, so I’d fit that ideal. Gave me a good little slice at the base of my prick, actually.”

“Christ,” the Expert said, awed. Dominic looked for the first time at the man’s groin and saw the line of an attractive stand pressing at the rough material. He licked his lips.

“Yes,” he said. “They punched me, and slapped me, and bade me say ‘thank you’ for it. Some came on my face, or down my throat, but I think I took three men’s spend up my channel before the night was through.” He could see the Expert’s eyes darting, calculating his next move, how he’d end the chase and get his hands on Dominic.

“And did you come?” A deep, gravelly thrum.

“They told me to stroke myself off, and they cut my drawers off of me, made me spend in those ruined tatters, then shoved that mess of fabric and come into my mouth.” The Expert’s hands were on the desk. Dominic met his eyes, held his gaze, and said, “I’d barely time enough to taste myself before one of them pressed his cock to the gag, and let it soak up his piss.”

With an athletic leap, the Expert was on the table, and Dominic tripped backward, fell to the carpet against the chaise. He couldn’t get his feet under him in time, hands bound, no leverage, so when the Expert came down from the desk on the other side, dragged the collar across its surface with an audible scrape, Dominic was helpless to fight him.

“Pissed in your mouth, eh?” the Expert commented, and kicked at Dominic’s heels, forced his legs apart. “I’ll bet you didn’t spill a drop, fine manners and gentle breeding n’ that.” His fingers worked quickly with the latching mechanism of the collar, and Dominic drew his knees up as if to kick back, but then there was the rough sole of a straight-lasted shoe pressed firmly to the underside of his cock. “Don’t try it, pet,” the Expert said, toe trapping Dominic’s cock against his belly, “I shouldn’t like to be you, if you do.”

Dominic blinked up at him, breathing heavy. The pain was encompassing, and delicious, and when the Expert leaned his weight in, Dominic flung his hands up over his head to grip at pale green velvet cushions, squirming and moaning. He smeared his face against his bicep, feeling wetness from his eyes and mouth both, and let his legs thud limply to the rug, useless.

“Like that?” the expert ground his sole against Dominic’s tender flesh.

Yes!

“No!” Dominic’s voice was muffled by his own skin. “No! God, how dare you?”

“How dare I?”

Now it was the outsole of the shoe, the toe, digging in at the base of Dominic’s cock, right where that little nick had been.

“I’m only putting my shoe to you. Other men have pissed on you and you liked it, you base, debauched creature. Is that what I have to do? Bathe you in my waste and make you stink like a Seven Dials alley?”

The sole was gritty with wear, dirty with god knew what slop from the street, and the Expert scraped his soft bollocks with it, and Dominic had to suddenly cry out, “Stop, wait! No more, I’ll spend!”

The pressure left, immediately, and Dominic sagged on the floor, his head resting on the seat of the chaise, throat clicking dry as he tugged feebly at his wits.

“Oh god,” he said, hazy. “Thank you.”

A pause.

“For stopping?”

Dominic laughed, and it sounded high and giddy even to his own ear.

“No. Not for that.”

“Well, then.”

Cold metal touched Dominic’s throat, and his heart stuttered. The collar clicked shut, and he felt its weight, heavy and insistent, and had to hold his breath a moment.

Sometimes, he’d walk down Sackville Street and look into the windows of the jewelers’ shops there, see the collars displayed on mannequin heads and on velvet cushions amongst the bracelets and brooches and baubles. Some were slim and pretty. Some were ornate and gaudy. He’d pretend to adjust his cravat in his glassy reflection, and sometimes, if he lined it up just right, a fine collar would sparkle through his ghostly image in the window, and he could halfway see what he’d look like, wearing it.

He’d never actually gone in to try one on.

He didn’t want to answer the questions that would come, about the deed he didn’t have, the grantee who didn’t exist. He didn’t want to know what it felt like to have that firm, comforting weight at the base of his neck, only to have to unlock it, return it, and forget it.

This, he wouldn’t forget. The metal was thick as his little finger, covered him from just above his Adam’s apple to his suprasternal notch, weighed about five pounds, and felt lovely as a wedding ring. Dominic took slow, steady breaths, his eyes closed in rapturous concentration. The Expert took him by his bound wrists and worked the knot free, and Dominic might have struggled, then. He ought to have struggled— the Expert didn’t want this easy, and was being quite amenable to Dominic’s perversity. He didn’t struggle.

His head was full of thistledown as first one wrist, then the other, were locked into the cuffs, jammed up under his jaw in a supplicant pose that forced Dominic to curl his fingers into impotent fists beneath his chin.

The Expert tested the locks with a yank, and Dominic gasped, jerked from his mind’s wanderings by force.

“Get up, pet,” the Expert commanded. He stood back, refusing to help.

Dominic couldn’t use his hands to steady himself, nor to lever up, nor anything at all. He was certain he looked horribly ungainly, attempting to get his feet under himself. His back scraped against the underside of the chaise, and he wobbled, and fell onto its cushions at a sprawl, then jackknifed himself up from there, to the sound of the Expert’s laughter.

“Some gentleman you are, wheeling about like a drunk,” the Expert said. “Now, stand up straight like I’m sure they made you do at Harrow, and tell me how that collar feels. Nice and clear, with good elocution, else I won’t believe you’ve had such a fancy-dancy education.”

Oh god. He stood as straight as he could with his elbows folded up in front of him, but found his tongue numb in his mouth. How did the collar feel? It was too big a question, the answers a jumble in his mind like a box of jigsaw pieces turned out on the floor.

“It,” he began, tentative, picking up the pieces one by one to fit together an answer that would serve. “It’s heavy. And the cuffs, and the weight of my arms, makes it heavier. I can feel it digging into the curve of my neck, resting against my collar bones. I shouldn’t wonder if I have a circlet of bruises tomorrow.”

“Mm, a collar to take home with you,” the Expert said. He’d leaned against the library desk, and was palming his cock through his clothing with slow, casual motions, and Dominic wanted very badly to suck it. “Keep talking, pet. I’m sure you have more to say about it. Craved a collar for years, I bet. Is it everything you hoped?”

Dominic nodded.

“Yes sir.” Then, “Thank you.” He wished the room had a mirror. “Of course, I couldn’t wear a collar like this out and about in the world. I wouldn’t be able to do my job. But, can you imagine, if this was truly my collar, and you kept me in it, and I followed you through your day’s labors, walking down the high street pilloried like this… I can’t unlock it myself of course. I’d be helpless for you. You could do anything at all to me, anywhere you felt like it, and there’s not a thing I could do about it.”

The Expert gave himself a firm squeeze, and Dominic’s knees shook.

“That’s true even without the collar,” the Expert said. “No end date. Comprehensive rights to your entire body. I own you, sweet thing.” He kicked Dominic’s legs out from under him, and Dominic went down hard on the rug, left knee and elbow taking the brunt of the impact. His yelp of pain was genuine, but morphed as the Expert turned him belly-up on the floor by jabbing him in the side with the point of his shoe. “Is it better than the blue necktie from the last time you were here?”

“Yes sir.”

“Tell me why.”

The Expert unfastened his trousers, and Dominic swallowed, wetting his lips.

“It feels…”

God, how was he to think when the Expert had his cock out and it was thick and sturdy as the rest of him? He had to close his eyes before the words would come. He’d described his feelings on the subject to Julius in terms of the language, like an aesthetic appreciation for elegant drafting. That wasn’t untrue, but it didn’t answer the Expert’s question. It didn’t speak to the sensation of the collar encircling and enclosing him, the weight of it impossible to ignore, the ache in his upper arms from the cuffs and the impression of being entirely at the mercy of another person.

“I feel secure,” he said, finally.

With his eyes closed, he could concentrate on the feelings in his body, separate from the buzz in his mind. The rug was soft against his back. His hair spilled backward from his forehead, away from his eyes. The insertion points of his deltoids had a pleasant soreness. He could feel the heat of the fire on his feet and shins, but his chest was cold, his nipples tight under the folds of his elbows. Would the collar grow hot against his skin if he changed positions, sat closer to the hearth? The backs of his fingers brushed the underside of his jaw, feeling the faint abrasion of new stubble, the tacky stutter of old sweat. All of this, he felt, was acceptable. He could accept it for himself, naked and vulnerable before a man whose name he didn’t even know, and could imagine that same man accepting all of it, as well. He could feel the arousal still humming in his veins, his stand having flagged somewhat from lack of attention, but he wasn’t soft. He remembered the Expert’s shoe digging into him, and it only made him harder, a twinge of pain as bruised skin filled with blood making him writhe ineffectually on the floor.

“Secure, because you’re bound in a way you can’t escape? Like a load tied to a cart horse is secure?”

Dominic considered that, rolling his head from side to side, smelling dust and lemon and furniture wax.

“Yes, but also,” he said, not opening his eyes, “secure in the notion of being wanted. Desired, I mean.” So long as he didn’t open his eyes, he wouldn’t find any evidence to the contrary.

“Oh, sweet thing,” came the voice from above him, rich and resonant. “You didn’t feel desired by whatever fuckster cut lines into your skin?”

Dominic gave a little shake of his head. “I was like… a pitch for cricket, to them. It could be any bit of sufficiently flat grass, so long as a man might drive his wicket into it.”

“And it gets ground down in the process,” the Expert muttered.

Dominic’s eyes snapped open.

“I liked the grinding!” he insisted, trying to make the Expert understand. The man looked skeptical, and Dominic tried to shift into a sitting position, worming on the ground until he could get himself partially upright. “It was just… impersonal.”

“Right…” the Expert said. His brows were furrowed over dark eyes. “But this is different.”

“Yes!” Dominic hissed, eyes bright. “You said you wanted me,” he went on, hoping to god it was true. “You signed the agreement. You put the collar on me. For God’s sake, your prick is hard as iron in your hand. What am I doing wrong, that makes you not wish to use it on me? What did I say, or not say? Good Christ, man, look at you!” His hands tried to gesture, but couldn’t, locked tight to his throat, and it made him sway on his knees. “From the moment I saw the scars on your hands I wanted to taste you, feel the strength of your fingers. I want you to hang me up like that illustration in ‘Cuts of Meat’, and pummel me like a sandbag at Jackson’s. I want you to tie me to the wall and give me every caning you think I should have gotten at Harrow. I want you to do everything those men did, last time, but better, stick me like a pig and make me squeal. Please, sir, I want you to want to do those things. And if you don’t, I pray you’ll tell me, and I shall leave, and perhaps remove my person to a hermitage, where I may beat my chest with stones until this venal flesh is purged of such desires, because—!”

He lost his balance and fell to the side, then lay on the floor like a forgotten toy, and thought he might cry. The Expert was there, suddenly, kneeling beside him, fingers pushing into Dominic’s hair to pull him over until Dominic’s pinched lips touched the Expert’s hard cock. Strong hands pushed him down, and Dominic opened his mouth, took the thick length, and let go.

The tears flowed from him, and he sobbed as much as choked around musky flesh, but he gave his best effort. Everything he’d learned in some twenty years of sucking pricks, he gave to this man, tongue pressing, circling, seeking, slipping under the head and prodding at the tight foreskin. The head alone was thick, and filled his mouth, and he moaned around it even as he continued to cry.

“God, you love that, don’t you,” the Expert grit out, breathy, awestruck. His hand moved from Dominic’s hair to the back of the collar, curling into a fist that tightened the grip around Dominic’s throat. Using the collar like a handle, he forced Dominic up and down, down further, until the hard nudge of his cock was at the back of Dominic’s throat, and he could swallow it down. He couldn’t breathe, but it didn’t matter. He swallowed and swallowed until he felt heat clouding his mind, until he saw black spots dancing in his eyes, until the pinch and struggle of his lungs had his whole chest fluttering like a trapped bird.

A Robin Redbreast in a cage, Puts all Heaven in a rage, he thought, and then, pressure, pain against new-forming bruises, muffled speech coming from somewhere beyond the darkening cloud bank that had filled his vision and set thunder roaring in his ears. He ignored all of that, sucked and swallowed and closed his eyes. He didn’t need to see, for this, he only needed to move his tongue, his lips, to taste salt-bitter fluid at the back of his throat, to feel the stretch and ache of his jaw as it was held open by a thick cock. He felt pacified, tears drying as he sucked, grateful at last to have this, to be given the gift of a prick down his throat, by a man who wanted it there. His mouth was so wet, his head pounding, chest tight and trembling. His throat was tight too, and then it was worse. Tightness beyond bearing, a thick band of pain cutting into him, and then he was heaved bodily up, off the Expert’s glistening prick, and he took a racking breath in, coughed, breathed again.

Slowly, his vision cleared. He sucked his lower lip between his teeth, felt the earlier bite had swollen and gone tender, and smiled dazedly up into the Expert’s red face. The man was panting like he’d run the Royal Ascot and won.

“Jesus,” the Expert hissed. A thumb swiped at Dominic’s lips and chin, and he realized how wet it was, how the Expert’s cock still shone in the firelight with thick saliva. Dominic opened his mouth, and the thumb pressed in, fed him his own cold spit, and the two of them groaned together.

“Please, sir,” Dominic said, slurring around the digit.

“You want to strangle yourself on my prick? Force yourself down on it ‘til you black out? I almost didn’t notice, you know. I was enjoying myself a bit too much.” His thumb jabbed into the soft well beneath Dominic’s tongue, tugged his mandible down, held his mouth open. “Think I should’ve waited ‘til you lost consciousness, and fucked your insensate body? Maybe you’d come to before I finished, but maybe not.” He shook Dominic’s head from side to side, rattling his brain. Dominic felt like a terrier with a rat, in reverse. He didn’t want to shake his head to that. “I could have my way with you any number of times, maybe fill your arse up enough to rival those tally marks, eh? Would that satisfy you?”

“Ngkh,” Dominic said, eyelids fluttering. His cock leaked onto the rug.

“Was that supposed to be a ‘no’?” The Expert asked, a laugh to his voice. Dominic didn’t know if it had been, in truth. “You make it hard to believe your ‘no’s, pretty pet. Here I was, feeling sick over how beautiful you look in a collar, hating how much I wanted to bolt those cuffs to the floor just to have you on all fours and ready for me, and yet, you look about ready to spend at the thought of me using you like a come rag.”

Dominic moaned. He couldn’t nod, with the Expert’s grip on his jaw, but he wanted that. He wanted all of it. His knees slid on the rug, and he knew they’d be raw and abraded by the time he left, but he needed to show the Expert he was willing, ready— that he’d surrendered.

The Expert saw, or must have done, because he drew his thumb from Dominic’s mouth, wrenched him around by a fist on the collar again.

“Spreading your legs for me, now?” he asked, both hands on Dominic’s arse, opening him to the air. “The way you act, I wonder how tight your hole could be. I know you took four men up you recently, and here you’re opening your legs like a common doxy, so—”

His thumb, wet with Dominic’s spit, pressed in, tugged the rim, made Dominic whine.

“Talk to me, pet. Will you still say ‘no’ if I tell you what I want to do to you? How I want to fuck you into the floor, not stopping even if you spend, even if you cry, even if you beg?” The thumb pushed in and out, pulling, rough. “I’ve never wanted this before, never wanted to punish a man with my prick, but you’re so ripe for it.”

Dominic nodded, his cheek against the rug.

“Show me,” he said, then keened a high, thin note as the Expert’s other hand came up, began tugging and squeezing his bollocks. The bruising from being stepped on sharpened the edge of the pleasure, made him want to be kicked.

“Show you? Show you how you deserve a thrashing?”

Dominic’s back arched, his hips lifting, and the Expert replaced his thumb with two thick fingers, spearing Dominic open.

“Show me what you don’t think you should want.”

The Expert made a guttural noise and shoved away from him, stomped back over to the console whence he’d drawn the collar. He came back with impatient speed, poured oil over Dominic’s hole until it dripped from his balls and made him twitch, ticklish.

“‘What I don’t think I should want’, he says,” the Expert huffed, jabbing three fingers in at once and making Dominic bite down on a scream. “Do you have even half an idea what I could do to you, what you gave me license for, what you’re asking?”

“No,” Dominic ground out. “Show me!”

Grumbling and rustling, the sound of a hand in a trouser pocket, and then the fingers withdrew from Dominic only to be replaced by something heavy, metallic, and spheroid. It pushed in, and Dominic sniffled and whimpered as it stretched him, huffed out all of his breath as his muscles closed around it. It sat inside him, a weight that pressed insistently against what felt like every nerve ending he had, but that wasn’t the last of it. A flexible band of wire connected the ball to another piece, and the Expert passed the wire down Dominic’s perineum, and locked the circular end piece around the base of his prick, behind his balls, and it was then Dominic realized the wire part had little conical nodules on it like dull spikes and each one pressed into the sensitive stretch of skin between his hole and his cock, but when he squirmed against that stimulation it caused the ring to pull against his dripping stand, the weight to move within him like a billiard ball hitting its pocket.

“Oh, oh good Christ,” he whispered, rubbing his face into the rug like an animal, trying to string two thoughts together, failing, and getting out nothing more than another, “God. God!”

“Right,” the Expert said. “Regretting it yet?”

“No, no…!” Dominic hardly knew what he was saying. Every motion, every breath had the ball shifting, budging up against his prostate and make him jolt, which tugged the ring, which pulled the wire taut, which nudged those little metal points into his skin, hard and merciless.

“Well, just you wait,” the Expert replied, and then there was more shuffling as the Expert stood, and drew something lightweight from the library desk.

“I told myself I wouldn’t ever use this,” he said, and then there was a high pitched whistling, and the thin, sharp sting of a rattan cane landing against Dominic’s arse.

“I thought I was better than this, above it,” the Expert went on, aiming another strike just under the first. “But something about you puts me past all logic and sense.” A third hit, crossing the first two diagonally.

“Is it because of that easement of yours? Is it that I’m trying to make you see what a bad idea it is to give yourself over to any cove who’ll have you?”

Two stripes in rapid succession, and Dominic yelped. He couldn’t separate the sensations anymore. His flesh burned with pain, but each strike came with the reciprocal motion of the ball and the ring, the ruthless jabs from the conical spikes. There was the pressure, too, of the collar against his throat, his hands fisted under his chin and providing little room except for the collar to be forced back against his skin. He felt it with every rasping gasp as the whipping went on and on, as he held as still as he could, as he imagined he would have back at school, had he been allowed to take the cane as he should have.

“No,” the Expert said, answering his own question as Dominic was in no fit state to do so. “It’s not so noble or righteous as all that. The truth of it is, pet, that your arse takes color like a beauty, that your skin looks made for the knife and the whip, that those velvet eyes and that silky throat make me want to keep you for my own, and it pisses me right off.”

The next three strikes were harder than any before them, and when Dominic felt the cold, itchy sensation of wet trickles on his skin, he realized he’d begun to bleed.

“Suppose I can just take that out on you, and you’ll love it, won’t you?”

Dominic sobbed out a desperate sound. If he could get a hand under himself, if he could just touch his prick once, he was sure he’d spend. Of course, he couldn’t, and he didn’t want to lower himself to the rug and rut against it, because that might look like he was trying to get away from the cane, when in fact every harsh, biting slap of the wood against his flesh drove that punishing ball in deep, made his body sing. If the Expert would only lift his shoe to him again, he’d thrust against the leather maybe twice before he came, that would be all it would take.

“I asked you a question, pet. Didn’t you tell me those other men made you say ‘thank you’ for their treatment? Did you forget yourself?”

The rattan cane ran up and down his crease, poked at his raw, sensitive hole.

Dominic chewed his lip, swallowed once before saying, “Yes, sir, I love it. Please, more. I’m so close. I’ll spend if you so much as touch me, if you kick me, I’ll come. Sir, sir, please. God, please.”

“You’re going to make me tear down everything I believe in, you know that? You and your pretty mouth.”

The cane moved down. The rounded tip slid between Dominic’s high, tight balls. The pressure of it left, and Dominic sucked in a breath, and then the hit licked against his bollocks, and he screamed as he came, body rolling, feeling the ball, the ring, the collar, the hot red stripes on his arse, the bruises forming all over. He’d carry this with him, rings on his wrists and throat, welts on his skin, and the thought drove him higher, his spend striping the rug, his own belly, the locked-up angles of his elbows. Unable to take it anymore, he rolled onto his back, legs splayed, and met the Expert’s burning gaze as another spurt shot up Dominic’s body to hit his chin.

There were dark spots dancing in Dominic’s vision again, and red flashes, and white stars. He blinked, and tried to clear them, light-headed as the Expert jabbed him under his softening cock with the end of the cane, startled another drooling gout of come from his wilting prick.

“Th-thank you, Sir,” Dominic stuttered, his tongue heavy, his body a long, delicious ache.

“Don’t go thinking you’re done yet, pretty thing,” the Expert said. “What do you think we should do about me?”

Dominic looked down at the Expert’s hard cock still jutting from his open trousers. He licked his lips, and drew up his knees as much as he was able. If he could, he’d hold them up. The motion jostled the ball inside him, and his lashes fluttered. He was well past oversensitivity, but his soft cock still twitched.

“Oh, I see. You’ve got a bit of a problem, there, haven’t you?” The Expert’s shoe nudged Dominic’s thigh, then taped a few times against the studded wire, making Dominic moan pitifully. “You want me to give you a solid riding, but you can’t do anything to help that along. Hell, you can’t even do anything about the plug in your arse, blocking my way.”

Dominic had never heard of any such aid called anything so vulgar as a ‘plug’, and shivered a bit at the thought. He should remember that, should he have need to include it in a deed.

“So, tell me this, pretty thing,” the Expert went on, his tone casual as anything, even as the sole of his shoe kept pushing those blunt little spikes into Dominic’s skin. “Would you rather have it on your belly, over the desk; on your back, on the chaise; or on your feet, against the wall?”

Unable to choose, Dominic shook his head, and the Expert snorted.

“You and your ‘no’,” he said, sounding, of all things, fond. “Suppose I have to choose for you. Up.”

He hoisted Dominic by a grip around one cuff, hauled him to his feet, and didn’t that do interesting things with the apparatus between his thighs. Dominic’s prick made a serious effort at rising again, the flow of blood as painful as before. It was very quickly worse as the Expert muscled him across the rug and up against the wall beside the fire, pressed cheek to knees up against green and yellow damask. He hoped the splatters of come dotting his face and belly didn’t stain the hanging.

“God, feel how hot your skin is, from that caning,” the Expert said, palming and then squeezing Dominic’s are, making him writhe. “I wonder if you’ll be this hot around my prick when I get it in you.”

Dominic tried to nod, but it was an aborted effort, pinned as he was. Callused fingers felt between his legs, undid the clasp on the ring, and Dominic gasped, not having realized how it would feel to be freed.

“If you like that so much, pet, I should get you in nipple clamps sometime.” The ring fell away, and the spikes left his skin, and then the Expert was pulling on the ball with sharp little tugs that had Dominic’s eyes rounding, even as he stared at nothing. “This collar puts your arms in the way, but perhaps another night I’ll tie you to a bed and put clips to all your most sensitive parts. They’ve got some really nasty ones around here somewhere, with jagged little teeth. What do you think of that, pretty poppet?”

Dominic nodded awkwardly again, clinging to the idea of ‘another time, another night’ with both hands. The Expert had one broad palm curving around Dominic’s hip as the other hand made pull after pull at the wire, setting the ball knocking against Dominic from the inside.

“Alright now, you know what to do,” the Expert said, and Dominic flushed down to his sternum, keeping his face to the wall as he consciously relaxed his body and let the Expert pull the ball free. He didn’t have long to feel empty and strange though, because three fingers returned, then four, and the Expert purred into his ear, “Ah, see how ready you are for me?”

In and out, the fingers pushed, almost a whole hand, and Dominic’s knees trembled. His prick was thickened, noddy with weight, and he wanted to beg, but his tongue was stuck fast, mouth dry from panting.

“Nothing to say? That’s too bad. I’d started getting used to your ‘no’s. Can’t you give me a few more, just to whet my appetite?”

Dominic shook his head, nose brushing the wall hanging.

“Out loud, pet, let me hear you.”

Another shake. Dominic didn’t trust his voice, after everything.

“Oh, now that won’t do,” the Expert intoned. He reached for the decanter, tipped it against Dominic’s lips. “Maybe you just need to wet your whistle. Open up now, that’s it, drink.”

It was easy to simply part his lips, let the tannic wine flow over his tongue, down his bruised throat, warming his belly. As before, he didn’t breathe, only swallowed and swallowed and swallowed. This time though, the Expert stopped him before he began to struggle, before his chest grew tight. The crystal pulled away, a drop of amber liquid clinging to his lip, and the Expert leaned in to lick it, and they were kissing again, the Expert’s tongue against his, sucking the taste of wine from his mouth until nothing remained. Dominic moaned into it, craning his neck, shocked at how well he liked it. He hadn’t kissed a man that way since Richard. Or, maybe ever.

“Found your voice again, sweet thing?” the Expert asked, lips moving against Dominic’s, waiting for the answer to be spoken back.

“Yes si-ir,” Dominic gasped, as the fingers moved within him again.

“Ah-ah, you know that’s not what I want to hear. What am I supposed to do with your ‘yes’? I tell you, I’m going to fuck you blind. What do you have to say to that?”

Dominic felt incandescent, like a glowing spasm of light without form or weight. He floated cloudlike above his own body, taking in the insistent press of the man caging him to the wall, the slightly tacky sensation of salt slick skin sticking to shimmering silk. Knees, hips, elbows, cheek, all ground hard into the surface, the smell of wine and tobacco smoke and ink filling his senses.

“No,” he said, giving a little wriggle, testing how far he could get— not very, as he’d thought, expected and hoped. “No, you can’t! Don’t… don’t put your thick, hard cock in me, it’s too big! You’ll break me!”

“Oh, pet,” the Expert said darkly, stroking over Dominic’s prostate with two ruthless fingers, “that’s precisely what I intend to do.”

The fingers dragged their way out and Dominic’s mouth fell open on a long, anguished sound, and then, finally, there was the long, endless press as the Expert forced his way in. He was slick with oil, and Dominic more stretched than he’d been in years, but it still felt impossible, still felt like he’d tear in half as the Expert thrust in to the hilt. He didn’t stop, only held Dominic open and bullied forward, until his hips were skin to skin with Dominic’s bruised and smarting arse.

“Good… god in heaven,” Dominic forced out, feeling full beyond belief.

“You like having a hard prick up you, don’t you, sweetness? Not a gentleman at all, just a right and proper Maryann.”

The Expert started a slow grind that built and built, one hand on Dominic’s hip, the other holding his head against the wall by his hair.

“No!” Dominic cried. “It hurts, it hurts! Too big!”

“I know, precious,” came the words, kissed against his ear. “But there’s nothing you can do about it. This hole belongs to me, and I’m going to fuck it and fill it as I like.”

“No, please! Oh god, don’t!”

Dominic’s hard prick rubbed wetly against the damask, dripping thickly, making the fabric slick against the head. The metal wrist cuffs knocked rhythmically against the wall, hard enough to make the wine glass and decanter rattle on the sideboard. Each thrust made tiny golden sparks fizzle behind his eyelids, made his toes curl in the thick weave of the carpet, made his bruised balls draw up higher and tighter.

“No, please, don’t!” he said again. “Please, god, don’t—” He couldn’t stand it anymore. “Don’t! Sir, please, don't stop, oh Christ, don’t stop, I—fuck! I’m going to, going to come, I’ll come again! Oh god, Sir, I’m so close, please!”

“That’s it, my darling, my beauty, tighten up your hole and come for me, go ahead and spend all over the wall and see if I don’t make you lick it clean, you pretty, pretty thing!”

Dominic’s ears rang as he spent, howling, body jolting against the Expert’s unyielding hold, head thrown back over the Expert’s shoulder, feeling the orgasm pulled out of him as if by force, as if this man had reached one thick, scarred hand behind his navel, grabbed hold of something pure, and yanked. And the fucking didn’t stop as Dominic was coming, only got harder, faster, driving Dominic’s painfully sensitive cock through his own mess dripping down the patterned silk. Dominic sobbed, eyes sore, body screaming, mind floating, and then shouted through the tears as the Expert bit down on his shoulder, clamping his jaw hard, a muffled growl rolling through him and into Dominic’s skin as the Expert spent inside him.

“Oh,” Dominic said. “Ooh.”

It went on and on, and Dominic’s lashes fluttered, each stab of the Expert’s cock as he milked himself with Dominic’s hole pushing another little spurt from Dominic’s softening prick.

“Nn, mmh, oh!” he tried, getting no farther than that, feeling the hot spread of the Expert’s spend inside him, feeling like he wanted to keep it inside somehow, wanted to stay full and painted and owned to his deepest parts, claimed at his core.

“Ahh,” the Expert said against his neck. “Fucking Christ, you—!”

One last slam, and he slumped against Dominic’s back, stifling him with his weight. Dominic wished he could live inside this moment forever, penned in, pinned, protected.

It took the Expert a long time to pull out, and when he did, it was only to push his leaking spend back into Dominic’s puffy hole with a thumb, making Dominic whine.

“No, you keep that in, pet, or I’ll get the plug again, and send you home wearing it.”

Dominic cast wide eyes over his shoulder. Oh god, would he? To have those spikes jolting into him with every bounce of the hack—

The Expert’s laugh was startled, and loud.

“Satan’s frosty tits, is there nothing I could do to you that wouldn’t have you looking at me like that? For all your ‘no’ you absolutely are the most solicitous bit of stuff I’ve ever had.” He patted Dominic’s bruising arse, then gave it a pinch. “The nicest thing I’ve ever owned, come to that.”

Without the Expert’s support, Dominic slid down the wall, collapsed into a heap on the floor. It put him eye-level with the splatters of his own spend marring the damask, and Dominic remembered what the Expert had said. His eyes fluttered closed and he put his tongue to work, licking up his mess, tongue dragging against rough embroidery and scooping his own bitter taste into his mouth to be swallowed away.

“Oh, Jesus,” the Expert said, a voice from above. “If I didn’t just spend…”

His hand carded through Dominic’s hair, the scratching at his scalp like a reward for a dog, and Dominic smiled against the wall. There was a silent pause, then footsteps, and when the Expert returned to him, he had the other wine glass, full from the decanter, held up to Dominic’s lips.

“Here, just have a little bit to drink, and then I’ll get that collar off you.”

Dominic nodded, allowed himself to be watered and washed like an invalid. His mind drifted as the Expert moved around him, unlocking the cuffs and the collar, moving his wrists for him, massaging blood back into his hands and arms. The wrist bones were bruised, and he wished again for a mirror, wanting to see the marks on his neck, his arse, and anywhere else he might have reminders in the morning. It wasn’t until the Expert had an arm around Dominic’s ribs, hoisting him gently to his feet like a wounded soldier, that Dominic mobilized enough thought to form words.

“You don’t have to,” he said, and the Expert shook his head.

“You’re mine,” he reminded Dominic. “I’ll do what I please.”

In short order, Dominic found himself laid out on the chaise longue, a bolster under his head and a blanket tucked up to his chin. The Expert washed him with a cloth and pitcher, head to foot, then sat on the other end of the seat, the wicked little knife in his hand. Dominic’s pulse stuttered, but the Expert only reached for a bowl beside the chaise, selected an apple, and began peeling and cutting it with efficient skill. Dominic watched, dispassionate, as the Expert dropped each crisp white slice into the empty wine glass, and set it between them, near Dominic’s knees.

Explaining nothing, the Expert moved again, lifting Dominic’s legs over his lap and taking hold of Dominic’s feet. He wasn’t doing anything to them, precisely, but he had his hands around them, and occasionally he’d pet over them to the ankle and back.

Dominic felt he ought to ask a question, but hadn’t the first idea what it should be. The Expert broke the silence first, though.

“I don’t suppose there’s any point in asking if you’re alright,” he said. “Would you give me an honest answer if I did?”

Blinking down the length of the chaise, Dominic opened his mouth to reply, then caught sight of the Expert’s expression.

“I’m… yes. More than alright, truly. That was,” he didn’t have a word. “Deeply fulfilling,” is what he landed on, though it hardly measured up to how he felt. “Extremely pleasurable,” he tried again, but that wasn’t enough either. “It felt… right.”

That was all he could say, and he tried to convey the rest with his eyes, not looking away, even as the Expert stared into him, a small frown creasing his rugged face.

“Glad you thought so,” the Expert sighed, breaking the gaze. “I feel like I did something dreadful.”

Dominic’s lips pinched.

“Because you thought you shouldn’t want any of that?” he hazarded. The Expert shucked one shoulder up, which was as much as a ‘yes’.

“Do you think I go through life, sure in the knowledge I should want all the filthy things I want?” He wished he had something in his hands. A pen, a cup of tea, literally anything to hold between them in this moment as he laid out the truth. Well, the man had said he wanted honesty. “I nearly lost my oldest and dearest friend over it, you know. I joined this club hoping to somehow alleviate the wanting, but to be perfectly candid, when I got that letter from the club inviting me to meet you, I thought it was going to be a notice that I’d been thrown out, for something I did the last time I was here. I thought I’d done it all wrong. I thought I’d once again asked for things I couldn’t have, things nobody would ever want to give me.” His fingers flexed in the blanket, taking fistfuls and then letting them go, only to gather up another hunk of wool and release again. “You’ve no idea what a relief it was to find you wanted the same things I do. Please… please don’t take it all back. You don’t— I can annul the easement, if it really upsets you, but please don’t say you didn’t want—”

He couldn’t finish that sentence, bit his lips to stop the words. His teeth found the Expert’s bite from earlier, worried into it, teased out blood.

“I did. I did want it. All of it,” the Expert said, “all of you. But Christ’s sake, what does that mean?”

Dominic tilted his head.

“I presume it means either you were wrong about what deed ownership is, or that you were wrong about how you feel about it. Or both.”

The Expert looked like that was an obvious answer, and also like he was annoyed that simple, obvious answers could in fact be right.

“I’m not asking you to change your entire worldview,” Dominic said, a little defensive, and making several assumptions at once. If he thought about it a bit more clearly, he could reason that maybe he was asking that. Richard had expected him to feel differently about corporal deeds, and it had been just about the worst thing anyone had ever asked of him. “Perhaps you could talk to me about it?”

“You’re about the worst person with whom to talk about it,” the Expert groused, but there was a smile haunting his features. His hands squeezed Dominic’s feet, and Dominic was glad he wasn’t ticklish there. “I don’t know. I need to think about it, I suppose.”

“Godwin married in the end, you know.”

That earned him a bewildered look.

“Yes,” the Expert said, “I know. I… knew Mary Wollstonecraft.”

Dominic’s brows went up.

“Did you indeed! Well, that explains a lot.”

The Expert sat up straighter on his square of green velvet. “They only married because the world wouldn’t accept an illegitimate child, not because Godwin had a change of heart about the institution of marriage. The institution was at the heart of the problem, after all.” Now the man was gathering steam. “He simply knew he wouldn’t be able to tear it all down in a mere nine months.”

“He could have taken the collar,” Dominic said, slyly. “He wouldn’t have had to marry then, and her child by him would have been seen as legitimate to her as grantee.”

“And then he’d be her property. It cuts both ways,” the Expert shot back. He pushed against the soles of Dominic’s feet, like some sort of punctuation. “It’s always about property, whether it’s marriage or deed ownership or child-bearing or whathaveyou. Someone always benefits at another’s expense.”

“But the collar equalizes, don’t you see?” He no longer wore the heavy collar, but he could feel its echo in bruises and memories. “Look at you and me. Which of us has more power?”

“It doesn’t equalize, if the person wearing the collar is the socially disadvantaged one to start with. It doesn’t protect a person forced into it by a tyrannical partner, or, indeed, a tyrannical government. Just because being dominated by a dictatorial presence gets you hot doesn’t mean it serves for everyone, and anyway, do you really think it’s just that if you and I wanted to form a lasting commitment, the collar would be our only option, because even if we wanted to, you and I couldn’t marry?” He paused, made a face, and said, “But we’re straying from the point.”

That sounded waspish, almost like they weren’t straying at all. Strangely, the Expert plucked up an apple slice, held it out to Dominic. Dominic sat up just enough to take it in his teeth, and relaxed back down again.

“The point is,” Dominic pressed after chewing and swallowing the tart little slice, “that Godwin married, once and again, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughters gained an extended family, who introduced into their midst those various poets who thought it wise to holiday in Geneva in the year without a summer. And now we have more books in the world than we did. Is that because William Godwin broke his principles and married?” He hesitated, with a conciliatory moue. “In fairness I did think to myself the other day that if Lord Byron had collared Dr. Polidori, we wouldn’t have The Vampyre.”

“Byron wouldn’t hold with anything so committal as a collar,” the Expert scoffed. He offered Dominic another bit of apple.

“And are you like Byron?” Dominic asked, wheedling. Again, he ate the fruit from the Expert’s fingers. Dominic had met the poet, once, at the Alfred Club, and knew from experience it was a silly question to ask.

“Don’t insult me.”

“Very well, then,” Dominic said, grinning with juice in his teeth, and tapping the Expert’s other hand with his foot. “You can see that a collar has permanence; ergo, you believe it is a tangible commitment, not to be taken lightly. An institution you don’t respect should hold no weight, yet you recognize the importance of the collar.” Before the Expert could object, he added, “I understand your position— you feel that a collar and deed relegate the grantor to the realm of property, and deny the freedom and personhood of that selfsame creature. But, would not total freedom mean the right to choose to submit, should one wish, to give wholeheartedly to another person the completeness of oneself? And if not, then who shall be the arbiter of prevention?”

The Expert squinted at him.

“I think that may be specious reasoning,” he argued, and Dominic’s smile broadened.

Truthfully, he was having a marvelous time, and found himself prodding the argument like a cat with a ball of yarn, causing it to spool out all over the room until the mantelpiece clock chimed one. The Expert fed him every slice of the apple, one by one, and they’d talked their way through Thomas Paine and Jean-Paul Marat, and from there to Camille Desmoulins and the merits or defects of changing one’s political stance, to other victims of Madame la Guillotine, including André Chénier, which brought them to the Romantic poets and back to Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and that was nearly full-circle. Dominic glanced at the clock for the first time all evening.

“I hadn’t realized the time,” he said, a little embarrassed to have been sitting nude under a blanket for so long.

“Your butler will be yawning,” the Expert sniped, and Dominic straightened his shoulders.

“I don’t keep a live-in staff, I’ll have you know. They are free to take themselves home at any time in my absence.”

“Ooh, la.”

Dominic snorted. The clock ticked on, and neither of them made any moves to leave. Finally, Dominic came around to the question he’d bitten back all night.

“Do you think, all things considered, and having thoroughly discussed the philosophy and poetry of the thing… that you will wish to tear up that easement?”

The look he got from the Expert was in its turn wary, then sharp, then, as it flickered down to Dominic’s throat and back up again, hungry. Still, he was quiet for a long time before he said, “Perhaps… not just yet.”

Dominic beamed.

“Then,” he tried, shuffling over on the chaise so he was almost within reaching distance, “might we meet again? Soonish?”

That was showing his hand a bit, but the man had, of course, seen everything else already.

The Expert passed a hand over his face and looked heavenward for only a moment before he said, “Right. Sure. How’s next week for you? Same time?”

Dominic kissed him, which was to say ‘yes’.

—————

Five days later, Dominic was practically humming. His friends had of course noticed the bruises on his wrists, but thankfully, his fashionably high cravat kept them from seeing the ones on his throat, which were a lurid mottle of purples and greens like a field of violets through a dirty pane. And, if they noticed that he’d been sitting a bit gingerly for a few days, nobody said anything.

Even Julius, against whose barbs Dominic had come to White’s braced and girded, said nothing of Dominic’s careful gait and instead, brandished a crisp sheaf of paper like a little flag as Dominic approached his table.

“Your man Cade has written again,” he said, and Dominic looked round, apprehensive.

“Should you really be waving that around?” he asked. He could see the Earl of Rosewyne across the floor, standing stiffly by a hearth with a largely untouched glass of port.

“Oh I shouldn’t worry. This one’s different from the last. Have a look,” Julius said, and pushed the pamphlet across the little table like he was moving a chess piece.

With hesitant fingers, Dominic opened the latest treatise.

“ON THE RIGHTS OF ALL PEOPLE to seek FREEDOM in ALL its FORMS” read the title page. There was no frontispiece, no racy illustration, and no slightly hackneyed poetry, either, and Dominic let his eyes rove down the first page of type first with morbid interest, and then again a second time, with mounting confusion.

It absolutely was the work of Jack Cade, or else somebody had gotten very good at mimicking his style. No, indeed, Dominic checked— the pages bore the slightly nicked capital E, evidence of a damaged glyph amongst a specific printer’s drawers of movable type. Dominic recognized it like a signature, the evidence that a work was produced from one particular printing press, and it was literally there in black and white, both in PEOPLE and in FREEDOM. It was on the title page of “Cuts of Meat”, after all, printed in all caps, and hadn’t Dominic looked at that often enough…

It was the work of Jack Cade, but as Julius had said, it was different.

“CITIZENS: Is it for want of feeling, or want of freedom, that we seek security in one another?” read the first line. Dominic looked up from the page, took in Julius’s arched brows, the only marked expression on a pallid, marble-hewn face. Returning to the text, Dominic read it over a third time, poring over the pages of the essay with enough focus to warrant the beginnings of a headache.

There was nothing about corporal deeds in it, at least, not directly. Only a few oblique references to ‘institutions of power’ and ‘limbs of the law’ touched upon the subject before wincing away. Instead, the whole corpus seemed to be a consideration as to whether there can ever be equity between any two (or more) people, and whether love or pleasure itself was a commodity to be traded.

“Rather less self-possessed than his usual,” Julius noted blandly. “It’s as if somebody got the wind up him… or perhaps not the wind, precisely.”

Dominic gave a quiet snort. “You think Jack Cade is in love? Perhaps I should check the back for a marriage announcement,” he joked, flipping to the final page of the pamphlet with a dramatic flourish, for humorous effect.

What he saw there shot the smile right off his face.

On the last page was a small illustration, or a stamp more like, composed of a few simple curves and lines. It depicted a collar, but not of the normal sort. This one was thick, and heavy, weighing probably five pounds, and had two sturdy metal wrist cuffs welded at the front.

Dominic licked his lips. He shouldn’t be so sure, but he knew with an intuitive jolt what that simple print meant. In two days, he had an appointment— an assignation— with Jack Cade.

Surreptitiously, he crossed his legs, hoped the room was dark enough that Julius wouldn’t notice his spreading blush.

He’d certainly read enough of Mr. Cade’s work, and yet the man had only seen a single page of Dominic’s own efforts. He thought about every bit of sacrifice, control and surrender he’d ever seen in his years of reading corporal deeds, about how the bruises on his wrists pressed into the edge of his desk as he sat in his office and copied them out, and decided he ought to bring the Expert something new to read.