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Chapter Text

If there was one thing Harry would always be glad he had learned, it was when and how to keep his mouth shut. He knew Dominic had forgotten his presence entirely and until he was more settled Harry was perfectly content to keep it so. He did edge around the divan, careful to keep in the blind spot of the man’s blinkers, and brush his hand against his lover’s, offering reassurance. He had seen Julius go very white and wave Raven to a halt, and then the quietly competent way the older man had taken over, ensuring the damage was minimal and that Dominic had been soothed and settled. He was a little in awe of Dominic in the ordinary way of things, and being invited to a debauching that included one of the infamous Murder had not helped him feel less so. He had had to sternly remind himself that he wanted to be here, not just for Julius, but also, more privately, as a chance to impress Silas. The motivation behind that desire was one he refused to examine more closely as of yet; suffice to say that he was here to ensure no one forgot about Julius’ well-being in the heady rush of how eminently fuckable Dominic Frey looked tonight. 

The appearance of Sir Dominic clad head to foot in leather and shod in such high heels a Frenchman might have struggled, with borrowed tail swishing demurely about his slim legs – Harry had clutched involuntarily at Julius’ hand, hidden by their generous costumes, and made a mental note to call Ash out for not giving him sufficient prior warning. 

Julius was still wearing his gloves and a rather neurotic expression, but at Harry’s touch he turned into him, taking his mouth in a hard kiss that Harry steadied himself against. He pulled away after a moment, reaching to touch Julius’ cheek, gently. “All right, beautiful?”

“I am perfectly well.” Julius said, snappish, and then more gently, “Thank you, Harry. Pray do not miss your shot on my account.”

“You forget, I have already had mine.”

Julius raised a brow and cupped Harry, briefly, in one of those gloved hands. “And yet your sky does not want.”

Harry laughed. “And you? If you can yet quote Shakespeare you must not be in so desperate straits.”

He looked over at where Dominic was panting and struggling in Raven’s lap, greased curls damp with sweat and perhaps even some tears. Wyndham was a couple paces away, pulling idly at himself, and Harry looked back at Julius. “Would you mind terribly if I offered assistance until Frey is again at liberty?”

“Of course.” Julius leant in and kissed him again, brief, and took up his crop.

 “I should resume my charge as well.” 

Harry watched him go with great appreciation for both the arse and the crop and then turned his attention to his own duties.

“We have met only in passing, I think,” he said cheerfully to Sir Richard, “But I would be delighted to service you until Dominic can be used again. I’m extremely fond of a prick in my mouth, and yours is lovely.”

“You are too good.” Wyndham looked amused at his somewhat blunt offer, but after only the briefest of hesitations, he gathered his shirttails and lifted them away from where his piece was standing at attention. 

Harry eyed it with a connoisseur’s appreciativeness. It was on the smaller side, but well formed, and with a crop of dark hair surrounding it that was kempt and likewise pleasing to the eye. Large weapons were all very well in one’s arse, but Harry much preferred a mouthful he could sink his teeth into — metaphorically speaking, of course — and Wyndham had just such a one.

Without any loss of time, he sank to his knees, gathering spittle under his tongue and drooling it out on the offering before he closed his mouth around it.

He loved this, the unashamed warmth and silk of a cockstand against his tongue and sliding against his cheek before it ever arrived in the passage of his throat. The way every prick tasted just slightly different but with the same underlying heat and scent of a man in the throes of pleasure. 

He would never begrudge Julius his defining fastidiousness, nor his right to dislike as many of the more earthly elements of copulation as he pleased, but it was undeniably delightful to indulge himself once in a while with the kind of debauchery that made Julius’ lip curl with badly disguised horror at the mere thought.

Really, Harry didn’t know why they hadn’t done something like this sooner. It was the sort of backhandedly kind thing Silas would do; solving a problem before Harry had even known it to exist. 

A scenario where Julius could remain as fully clothed and aloof as he liked while Harry was likewise free to slobber and behave as sordidly as he pleased, as his lover watched him behave like a wanton — oh, yes; it was as fine a proposition as he’d ever heard. He wondered if perhaps he and Ash both begged, Webster might be brought to consider the suggestion. Or even, for he had heard Julius speak in, for him, unusually regretful tones regarding his failed assignation with Richard, Cyprian might even—

“Easy, easy,” Wyndham said above him, laughing a little and pulling Harry off his prick where Harry had nearly choked himself with sudden fervency. “I am not so young that I could make a second attempt, and my instructions were clear.”

Harry allowed himself to be shifted, a little mournfully, as Wyndham’s piece was indeed a delight, but it was the image of Cyprian, as perfectly cool and composed as ever despite Harry’s over-large cousin buggering his hole, directing Harry and Julius’ lovemaking, and oh, yes, it would be very clear who was the one in charge of operations, and it was the image of Cyprian’s face as he had watched Julius nearly kill a man with only an expression of polite interest that had Harry once again at a complete stand, if he could be forgiven the expression.

Wyndham offered him a hand up, kindly not commenting on how much Harry looked as though he had just been dealt a leveler, and drew him to where Dominic was panting openmouthed against Raven’s shoulder. There was seed seeping slowly free from Dominic’s hole, and the rim was beginning to look like a well-used quim– and no wonder, after it had taken such a pounding from Raven’s prick. Harry saw with some measure of envy that even quiescent it put every other man present to shame. The man in question saw him looking and a corner of his mouth quirked up before he leant close again to Dominic’s ear to whisper something. 

Frey nodded, beginning to shift off, and Harry moved instinctively to steady him. A pair of hands, gloved, met his own over Dom’s thighs, and he smiled helplessly at Julius. “Hello,” he whispered, unable to keep himself from stealing a kiss with his lover so close.

“Hello,” Julius murmured back, and then more loudly, “If you be so kind, Harry, to procure me a couple of the curtain ties, I believe I have hit upon a solution for keeping our thoroughbred in place for use.”

Bemused, Harry obeyed and watched as Julius bent Dominic’s arms and slid the silken cords about both columns, binding wrist to shoulder and wrist to shoulder and rendering Frey even more helpless without his arms for balance. He completed this hobbling by unsnapping the dangling reins and performing the same exercise on his legs, tightening ankle to thigh with a reversed tension of leather straps which he then hooked to itself again. The result was an absurd mimicry of a four-legged creature without any of the natural grace of one, and a look at his face told Harry that Dominic was all too conscious of the ridiculousness of his situation. His mouth began to open, a half-formed protest visible in his mulish expression, but to Harry’s surprise and his prick’s intense interest, Julius slapped him across the face before he could get out even a syllable. 

“You need not think,” he said, very coldly, “that because we have been decent enough to remove the cruellest of curtails that we would brook any disrespect from a gelding. You are simply the teaser we allow out of the stable to tell what mares are in estrus until they can be covered by a worthy stud.” He leant down, enough to hiss into Frey’s scarlet face, “Know your place, Tory.”

Dominic reacted as though he had been struck with something far harsher than Julius’ gloved hand, going very white and then red again before a look of mulish determination took over, and he bowed his head with the kind of submission no one in their right mind would call meek. 

Julius beckoned to Harry and Wyndham both. “I would recommend taking him both together. You may find it tight enough under those conditions to pleasure you adequately.” He did not look at Raven as he said this. Harry did, and saw the man was reclining at his ease with his arms stretched out along the back of the sopha, still showing very much to advantage even with his prick soft against his thigh.

“Before you begin, if you would move him a mere six inches this way — I thank you, that will do very well. I find putting my feet up does wonders for reducing strain on my knees.”

Harry watched with amazement as Dominic, with none of the concealed fury and reluctant compliance he had shown to Julius, instantly shuffled near enough to Raven that the man could prop his still booted feet neatly in the small of his back and even arched up into their weight like a cat might stretch into the touch of a hand.

This arch coincidentally doing much to present Dominic’s arse to them, Harry could only be divinely thankful as he moved where Julius indicated, gently moving the proudly swaying tail out of the way as he positioned himself. 

Suddenly recalled to his duties as a gentleman, he moved aside a little, gesturing the other to proceed him.

“Too good,” Wyndham murmured, but acquiesced, fitting his prick neatly into Dom’s arse and then pausing, all his muscles suddenly clenching tightly as he fought back the intense need to spill. “If you do not join me in the next two minutes I do not hold out much hope to be able to fill him completely.”

Thus abjured, Harry quickly brought his own weapon to bear, and by dint of careful manoeuvring of limbs and even more careful parting of certain ways, he found himself roving in an exquisite going of that most tender of skin against and into a heat that pressed him before, behind, between, above, and below.

He was drowning, in other words, and almost without thought looked for Julius as a man in a gale looks for any anchor rope or outstretched hand. 

Julius met his gaze, looking for the first time that evening discomposed in the bewilderedly overwhelmed way he often got when he found himself against all odds and prior experiences enjoying pleasures of the flesh. 

Harry pressed himself in to the hilt, feeling Wyndham’s prick twitch against his (frighteningly alien feeling if it were not so excitingly erotic) and leant forward, crushing Dom quite unmercifully between them as he sought Julius’ mouth in a deep kiss. 

Julius had not expected at any point to become personally involved in the scene before them. Dominic Frey was very far from his preferred type of partner and despite Harry’s reassuringly solid and eager presence, both his inclinations and responsibilities did not incline him to anything more than distant arousal. 

But what Harry and Wyndham at Frey’s back channel could not precisely see was how Dominic’s face, what little could be seen through the mask, was such an exquisite example of a kind of transported peace and determination that Julius felt the yearning of earlier return fourfold. He couldn’t marshal his thoughts enough to recognise if his uncharacteristic arousal was due to some hitherto scorned attraction to Dominic or because, despite his birth, rank, privilege, and unparallelled fashion sense, he was somehow placing himself in Dominic’s rolé. 

Without, of course, the uncouth clobber of the tack currently encompassing him — no; not even the most elegant of harnesses could ever induce Julius to behave so beastially. But the deliberate handing over the reins, if he could be pardoned such an apropos bit of wordplay, to a person one trusted completely, for them to be paying such heady close attention as John Raven had just been to Frey, and to receive the weight of their regard and approbation - that would be something indeed. 

He looked up from his absent contemplation of Frey’s mouth, and saw Harry looking at him, for him, and with no regard for how it crushed Frey’s mouth uncomfortably into his own crotch, leaned forward to meet him in the kind of kiss they had perfected this last twelvemonth.

Tender, with a distinct lack of that overly wet quality which seemed to distinguish the salutes their fellows exchanged (in full view of others of the club, and of an outrageous length), and with a neat bite just where Harry’s full lower lip began to curl inward to meet the soft pink of his insides. 

With a defeated groan, he wrenched himself free of his trousers and pulled back far enough to get a hand wrapped around his length. He stopped short of actually putting it into Dominic’s mouth, but he looked his fill at that tear-stained, desperate face, tongue lolling out near unconsciously as though pleading for yet another cock to fill it; the well loved half-grunts and moans Harry let out when he was near his peak in his ears; and his treacherous eyes straying every now and again to where Raven was watching all the proceedings with that damnable air of competent quietude. 

He would go to his grave swearing he came at the same instant as Harry and that the quiet, “Well done; such a good boy,” Raven murmured to Frey had no bearings upon the proceedings whatsoever. 

If Silas at that moment had walked in and told Dominic he intended to parade him about on his cock in front of the House of Lords and Mad King George himself Dominic would only have babbled his thankful agreement and asked only which way he was to face.

He could no longer feel his extremities, though he trusted one of the men present would have said something if they had come off entirely. He seemed to exist in some altered plane between perfectly clear eyed serenity and foxed out of his mind on the strongest of brandies despite his deliberate avoidance of anything stronger than lemonade.

The combination of the continual use of his rear hole and the whispered encouragements and curt admonishments at his front hole left him at once tautly anxious to please and cognizant that he was performing well and making many people happy, and of far more import - that Silas would be pleased with him, and would tell him so in short order if Dominic continued in his careful obedience. There was someone present who was not Silas, but who spoke with the same easy authority that Silas held and was large and warm and even when he was stretching Dom’s poor channel beyond what it could bear, did not neglect to tell Dom what an excellent slut and truly exquisite example of whoredom he was. Already bowed to the humiliation of performing as a— a common beast, for Julius Norreys of all men, Dom had only been able to be grateful for the kind words, even wrapped as they were in a framework of humiliation and demands. Demands for him to further debase himself by begging for Raven’s cock, that magnificent beast that had battered so comprehensively down at Dom’s rear entrance that even the two pricks currently knocking at it could not replicate the hollowed out feeling it had given him. 

When one and then the other of them slipped out again, spent, he scarcely noticed the prick in front of his mouth releasing into it, the very tip held to his lips as though the owner feared any increased contact might contaminate him, feeling only a rising surge of wild alarm that he had failed to meet whatever standard his handlers required, that he would be repudiated and cast out into the cold and a bad report given to his owner; that like the horse he was dressed as he would be turned over to the knackers and refused entry to the warmth of a lit place to rest and a gentle hand assuring him he had done well. 

There was a susurration of movement above him, the quick low tones of men who saw an impending danger and were moving to avert it, and then a familiar form was bending over him, and a beloved voice saying gruffly, “Easy, easy, Tory, I’ve got you, you did as fair as any man could ask for; rest easy, hush.”

He sank thankfully down into the waiting soft darkness, bolstered by strong arms around him and relinquished any claim on consciousness.

Dom woke to a hand petting heavily in his hair and a beloved, rough voice over him reading aloud, “'O what freedom from care is more joyful

than when the mind lays down its burden,

and weary, back home from foreign toil,

we rest in the bed we longed for?’ ”

...This one moment's worth all the labour, Dominic finished in his head, and rolled over to prop his head up on one broad thigh, feeling an incalculable warmth and unearthly delight fill him as he gazed up at where Silas was frowning in concentration over the small type and refusing, as ever, to use a glass. 

Silas noticed at once his wakeful state and put the book carefully to one side with a marker to his place (no dogs-earing or split spines for him!)  and laid a heavy hand on Dom’s forehead.

“Morning, pretty.”

Dom began to reply and then cut himself off with a yawn, indulging in a luxurious stretch and then immediately wincing as more than a few aches and pains made themselves known with pointed accountancy. 

“Oh, aye,” Silas said, amusement and satisfaction warring in his tones, “Rode hard and put away wet, you were. I must remember to send an extra thank-you to John for the pains he took with you.”

This, as doubtless it was meant to, brought the entirety of Dom’s bridling and breeding the previous evening back into sharp relief, and he raised himself up abruptly, feeling tell-tale dampness beneath him and an odd looseness that had last been present twenty years before, after experiencing the not-unwelcome consequences of a wager with Richard. “Oh, god.”

“And Wyndham, of course,” Silas went on, inexorable, as the remembered taste of leather and cock-spunk flooded Dom’s mouth. 

“Oh god.”

“And really I got to say—  never thought Harry’d have it in him to give it to you like that, but Norreys wasn’t a bit of a surprise. Needs a tight hand on the reins himself, that one, so’s it stands to reason he can play at it just as well.”

“Jesu fuck.”

Silas flicked Dom’s ear where it was just visible, doubtless bright red, beyond where his hands were barricading his face. “‘Defile not thy Maker’s creations by thy blasphemous tongue!’”

“Wrong religion entirely,” Dom said, as dryly as he could manage, and then raised himself up a little more in order to look about himself. “This is not— Silas— pray do not tell me we are still at the Talgarths!”

“Well, I won’t, then.” Silas crossed on leg over the other, seemingly as much at his ease here in a stranger’s spare room as he was in his own cramped quarters over the bookshop. “But I will say you were in no state to be drove five miles back in a rattling carriage, no matter how good a whip Wyndham is, and when that young puppy stumbled on us about to take you out the doors he did very right to offer the use of a room until you’d recovered.”

His face, Dominic was certain, must be hot enough to light the whole of London a-blaze. “What young puppy?”

“Fawnly, or Nohope, or some such.”

The image of a godlike profile, curls liberally dressed with grape leaves and with a diaphanous robe slipping from one pale shoulder, surfaced in Dominic’s mind, and he let out a very low moan.

“There’s no call to be going on like that,” Silas said, his voice shifting register into the cool contempt of their games, “I did say I’d have you on your knees in front of all the nobs. Made my best attempt last night, didn’t I.”

“Silas,” Dom said, voice breaking in the middle of the word. “Stop.”

“Got a rare report from John, and even Norreys had to admit you put up a good showing considering you’ve never been bridled afore. And Richard—  Sir Richard, what is—  thanked me for the opportunity. Like that, Tory? Being naught but an opportunity for your betters to take advantage of.”

“Please.” Dom rolled over, already stiffening cockstand finding purchase in the sheets of the featherbed they were shamelessly sullying. He realised only now that his borrowed equestrian trappings were laid neatly across the bureau and he was in a more than usual state of dishabille—  leaving him all too open to Silas’ casual possession of his prick.

“Begging for relief already? I guess it’s true what they say about gentry and weaknesses.”

“Damn you—” Dom tried to pull away, but Silas merely shifted his grip to encompass both of Dom’s cherry stones and squeezed. The coarse calluses against such thin and delicate skin would have been punishment enough—  coupled with a motion as though Silas meant to extract milk from him it left him gasping with tears in his eyes and a far more genuine, “Stop! Please, Silas! You’ll rip me apart!”

“Oh, I don’t think so.” Silas rolled the tender package in his hand, bouncing and weighing it almost thoughtfully while Dom nerved every limb so he didn’t kick his lover in the teeth. “We both know you love it; put in your place by a bit of rough and loaned out to your flash cull mates like the whore you should’ve been. And these bastards,” he gave them a smack with the back of one hand, like you’d backhand an impertinent schoolboy, “Made you far too uppity for a couple of ‘em. Norreys offered to band you for me, and reckon I ought to take him up on it; see how much you’d beg and that pretty cocklet’d leak if it was the last time you’d ever rut like a man.”

Dom’s entire body stretched into one line of agonisingly horrified arousal. To speak of castrating him like a stray dog! It was beyond anything any man of honour would stand—  indeed, nary a man from the Archbishop to the lowest nightsoil collector would leave such a suggestion unavenged— but Dom’s prick, that Judas of Judases, was beading up and well-nigh weeping at the threat and he knew Silas could feel his stones jumping in his grasp. And worst of all, his mouth had fallen open in an involuntary moan that even he could not have said was wholly distressed.

“Well well well.” 

Even with his eyes shut as tightly as he could get them and an arm flung over them for good measure, Dom could sense the cruel delight as Silas flexed his grip. Another hand stroked thoughtfully down Dom’s prick.

“Ain’t that something? Pretty Tory whore wants to turn eunuch, eh? Nay, that’s too grand a purpose. Just an ass, maybe. Sommat that can mount and rut as much as it wants; it’ll never take. Oh, Tory.”

It was the affection in that tone that proved too much at the last. Dom’s other arm joined the first in covering his eyes, but nothing could stifle the sob that burst from him, and both Silas’ hands dropped at once from his nethers, only to return warm and encompassing at his waist. 

“Mason.” Dom gasped, “Mason, Mason, Silas, Mason!”

“Easy, easy, I’ve got you, love, you’re all right, darling. Ah, Dom. My poor Dom.”

Dom could feel kisses pressed to the backs of his hands, to the edge of his hair where come still crusted and tears slowly wetted it further, and Silas’ hands stayed where they were, thumbs moving in comfortingly regular patterns by where they rested, as Dom wept nearly as hard as he had since he had broken things off with Richard for the last time.

What must have been at least a half an hour later he became aware that he was fully cradled on Silas’ lap, head pillowed on one of those broad and scarred shoulders. His throat ached more from tears than from the bollocking it had gotten last night and he had stiffened even further all curled up as he was. He felt in body as rough as ever he had after a night of being worked over by exactly the sort of men Richard had feared he was subjecting himself to. But the turmoil in his chest had calmed. He no longer felt even that nettle-scratch of resentment towards Harry he had only weeks before realised he harboured. He felt washed out, cleansed, and purified by both the testing of last evening and the immediacy of Silas’ care and attention this morning. 

Underneath his cheek, the muscles and fat shifted and bunched as Silas freed one of his arms from where it had been trapped between Dom’s knees and reached for a pitcher of water stood by the bed. He held it carefully for Dom to drink his fill, and when Dom lifted his head from it, gasping and feeling as though he had been immersed like some guilt-ridden Anabaptist, he said, “Tell us how you’re feeling, love.”

It was a gentle order, but an order nonetheless, and Dom obeyed. “Sore, and I suspect I’ll remain so the next few days, but I’ve taken no harm, and indeed I believe it has done me a great deal of good.”

“Oh aye?” Silas threaded a hand into Dom’s hair despite how absolutely disgusting it must be. “Being used like a mare in heat and threatened with castration what gives you peace of mind?”

“Knowing I’ve got a lover who cares enough to set up such a scene and has such affection for me that they set up such an involved scene and knew precisely what to say to tip me over the edge to catharsis is what gives me peace of mind.” Dom replied steadily, for once refusing to be turned into other channels.

Silas shifted beneath him, but Dom pursued, determined in his course of open affection, and finished, “And who understands when my needs shift, and is the most stubborn of men and kindest of lovers and. Most beloved of my heart.”

“Dom,” Silas said, as hoarse as if he’d been the one to spend hours on his knees the night before. “Ah, Tory— you’re too fine by half for this old man.”

Dominic pulled himself up, turning so he was straddling Silas’ lap and could look him full in the face. “If you insist on calling yourself old and myself too good for you I’ll have no choice but to submit a pamphlet to The Publican advising them that Jack Cade has admitted the superiority of the upper classes.”

“You fucking harpy,” Silas growled, fitting his hands to Dom’s buttocks and with one powerful heave throwing him down among the bed clothes, landing hopeful prick first. “I’ll show you superiority.”

And laughing, Dominic welcomed him.

O