Lucy squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her teeth as he used his free hand to spread the cheeks of her buttocks.
“Becalm yourself, Lucy,” Inigo said as he positioned the slender little phallus. “The less tense you are, the less this will trouble you.”
She took a deep breath and appeared to visibly relax, but no sooner did he penetrate her with the little device than she yelped and twisted around to swat him away.
Groaning in exasperation, Inigo told Elic, “Just use your liggia spiall on her.”
Fixing his friend with a look, Elic said evenly, quietly, “You know I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
With a meaningful glance around the perimeter of the round chamber, Elic whispered something I couldn’t hear.
Inigo winced. “Sorry, brother. Wasn’t thinking.”
Liggia spiall? I looked toward Vitturi, but he was frowning in evident bewilderment.
“Why don’t we just, uh…” Inigo nodded toward the hat stand festooned with straps and chains.
“Not yet.” Turning to Lucy, sitting on the bed with her arms wrapped around her upraised knees, Elic said, “I thought you wanted to cooperate.”
“I… I do, I swear it, but…”
“Did it hurt?” Elic asked her.
“This?” Inigo held the tiny phallus up.
“Nay, it didn’t hurt, but it felt so…” She shuddered. “When I felt it go in, I just panicked.”
“’Tis this or London,” Inigo said, brandishing the phallus.
With a sigh of capitulation, she lay back down, promising to lie still this time, but when Inigo attempted again to insert the dildo into her, she leapt up kicking and flailing.
Her fist slammed into his nose.
He howled.
“Lucy!” Elic gripped her arms and pushed her back down onto her stomach. “For pity’s sake.”
“Oh, God, I’m sorry!” she said. “I’m sorry, Inigo. I just… I can’t help it. It feels so, so…”
“Sh, don’t fret so,” Elic murmured. Folding her arms behind her, he clamped a hand around both of her wrists, pressing them to the small of her back. He caught Inigo’s eye and cocked his head toward the hat stand.
Inigo went to it, dabbing a handkerchief under his badly swollen nose, which was trickling blood. “Now you come round,” he said nasally, “after she broke my bloody nose.”
“’Twill get better.” Elic’s disregard for his friend’s injury— the nose did, indeed, look broken—struck me as curious, given the compassion he displayed with others.
Plucking two short leather straps off the stand, Inigo hooked them to a pair of small rings on the bottom corners of the training bed, just two of many that I now noticed at intervals among the nail heads.
“What are you doing?” Lucy asked.
“Making this easier for you.” Inigo pulled her left foot toward him and buckled the strap around her ankle, then circled the bed to tether the other ankle as well.
“You don’t need to do this,” Lucy said, craning her neck to look over her shoulder at her widespread, tightly bound legs. “I won’t move, I promise.”
“That’s what you said before you smashed my nose.” Inigo fetched two more straps, one short and one long. He handed the short one to Elic, who wrapped it around Lucy’s crossed wrists, trussing her hands behind her. The other, Inigo buckled across her waist, securing her firmly to the bench.
“You curs!” She struggled against her restraints, her upper body straining off the bed, those lush breasts swaying. Her lower body could wriggle a bit, but that was all.
“’Tis for your own good,” Inigo said. “You don’t want to be shipped back to London, do you?”
“N-nay, but—”
“Well, then.” He parted her bottom cheeks and plunged the little phallus in all the way to the knob.
She thrashed, swearing like a sailor. Elic held her still, murmuring soothing things into her ear until she settled down, red-faced and glowering.
“How does it feel?” he asked her.
She squirmed a bit, her expression sullen. “I loathe you, both of you.”
Inigo smiled and gave the dildo a little jiggle. She sucked in a breath, but didn’t budge as he slid it almost completely out of her, then in again, and again, and again. He moved it in a circular motion for some time, then asked Elic to take over while he oiled the next one, which was about as thick as his thumb, with little bumps all over it.
As soon as he pulled the first one out of her, he replaced it with the second, pressing it into her slowly. He paused when she cried out, her body jerking. If she hadn’t been strapped down, she probably would have bolted off the bench.
“Does it hurt?” Elic asked.
“Nay, but… Gadzooks, it feels so big, too big.”
“’Tis just the right size,” he assured her, stroking her hair as Inigo pushed the studded phallus deeper, deeper. “Think about how wonderful it feels entering you, filling you.”
“And look at it from the man’s perspective,” Inigo said. “Imagine how it feels to be buried in such a snug little aperture. ’Tis a gloriously tight fit around a full cockstand.”
Standing across the bed from Inigo, Elic slid his hand between Lucy’s legs and under her mons, cupping it as Inigo manipulated the phallus this way and that.
“’Tis best if you’re as aroused as possible before your benefactor takes you this way,” Elic said, “and of course, you want to remain so while he’s inside you. You can touch your clit very softly, like this, or ask him to do it.”
She gasped; it turned into a moan. He’s stroking her pearl, I thought. I didn’t know how I felt about the word “clit.”
I started when Vitturi leaned over to whisper in my ear, “Like Lucy, you will need to learn to connect the sensation of being penetrated this way with erotic pleasure. That way, when one of your benefactors takes you in this manner, you’ll still find it sexually arousing even when you aren’t being directly stimulated.”
Given his matter-of-fact tone, he might have been discussing politics instead of sodomy. I wondered if he had ever had a woman the Greek way, and concluded that he must have. I envisioned him rearing over a prone female, pushing himself into her as he caressed her breasts and her sex, thrusting, sweating, groaning…My own sex pulsed with desire as I imagined how it would feel to be breached in such a manner—by a man who was, as Lucy had said of Domenico Vitturi, a gentleman but also a bit of a savage, a man who was not afraid to “let the beast out of its cage.”
“If you can time your climax so that you come first,” Inigo told Lucy, “he’ll feel every spasm with astonishing intensity.”
The third phallus was about as big around as a broom handle, with a raised spiral down its length. Inigo pushed it into her, twisting and turning it, as Elic caressed her sex, murmuring “Accept it… Let it in. Let it possess you.”
She lay still as it penetrated her from the tip to the bulblike handle, her breath quickening, her color high.
“Is there any pain?” Elic asked, still caressing her sex.
“Nay,” she breathed. “None at all.”
With his free hand, Elic started unbuckling the strap around her wrists. “I don’t think you need these anymore.”
“I may,” she said. “Perhaps you’d best leave them.”
The two men shared a smile as Elic rebuckled the restraint. Inigo scooped a hand under her breast, kneading it gently as he maneuvered the phallus. Lucy’s hips rose a bit every time he thrust it into her, lowered as he tugged it out.
She whimpered when he withdrew it completely, but smiled, lifting her bottom when she felt the tip of the final and largest one nudging her open.
“You can push it in harder,” she said breathlessly as he worked it in inch by inch. “I don’t mind.”
“You see? The third one prepared you for the fourth, and the fourth will prepare you for this,” Inigo said, stroking himself between his legs.
So fixated had I bee
n on Lucy and what was happening to her that I hadn’t noticed Inigo’s condition until then—bizarre, considering how obvious it was beneath the shirt hanging down over his breeches. Elic’s doublet had a long, pointed skirt that concealed his groin, but I assumed he was as aroused as his friend.
Without even meaning to, I looked at Don Domenico, at his lap. His doublet was skirted with square tabs that parted, revealing a sizable bulge.
Lucy’s strident moaning drew my gaze back to the Training Room, where Inigo was still frigging her—another coarse word I now knew the meaning of—with the big dildo. Her thrusting had taken on a strained, frantic quality as she rubbed her sex against Elic’s hand.
“Nay!” she cried when he took his hand away. “I’m about to spend.”
“I know,” he said as he unbuttoned his doublet. “’Tisn’t time yet.”
Much as I tried to concentrate on what was happening inside the Training Room, my mind kept returning to Vitturi, sitting right next to me, as aroused as I. I couldn’t help but recall that first night, when we were walking away from the bathhouse and I turned to see Sibylla kneeling before him, relieving him of his lust.
Methinks ’twas watching Hannah that excited him so, Lucy had said.
I swallowed hard, licked my lips. Do it. Say it. “Don Domenico, I…” I glanced at him, then down at my nervously clenched hands. “If you wish it, I would be…more than willing to…”
I had run out of words.
He was staring at me.
Lifting my great mass of skirts, I knelt on the floor and rested a hand upon his knee. “You’ve asked very little of me, and—”
“You offer this as compensation, then, for my patronage.”
I shook my head, gazing up at him in the dark, at his anguished beauty. “I offer it because… I would like to. I want to.”
Reaching slowly toward him, I pried loose a button of his breeches with trembling fingers. He seized my hand and pressed it against the rigid column. His eyes closed. A muscle flexed in his jaw.
Abruptly he flung my hand away and stood, looking down at me as I knelt at his feet. “Did Elle not tell you I’ve no stomach for pity?”
So he had been listening to my conversation with Elle in the library the night before—or to enough of it to have heard me tell her that I felt sorry for him.
Bracing a hand on the couch to rise, I said, “Don Domen—”
“Stay here and learn something.” He turned and strode stiffly away.
I sank onto the floor, my head in my hands. You fool, Hannah, you absurd little ass.
“Nay, don’t unbind me, I pray you,” Lucy said.
I looked up to see Inigo unbuckling the strap across her waist. A tiny speck of blood under one nostril was the only remaining evidence of his broken nose. The swelling had completely subsided; it wasn’t even red.
It must not have really been broken, I thought. It had certainly looked that way, though.
“I’m just taking off this one,” Inigo said as he hung the strap back on the hat stand. “The rest can remain as they are.”
As Inigo held the dildo in place, Elic, shirtless now, helped Lucy to rise to her knees, still widespread because of her tethered ankles. The way her wrists were bound behind her forced her back to arch, thrusting out her breasts. Elic suckled her nipples as he opened his breeches, and then he lay on his back between her thighs. Guiding her with one hand and his cockstand with the other, he lowered her onto the tumescent organ.
“Oh, God, I’m so close,” she moaned as she began to writhe atop him.
“Not yet,” he said, holding her still as Inigo leapt up onto the training bed.
Elic spread his legs to make room for Inigo behind Lucy. Crouching on his haunches, Inigo whipped off his shirt and popped open the buttons of his breeches. He retrieved the little white bottle from his pocket and dripped oil down the length of his cock, using his fist to coat it in three swift strokes.
Slowly he withdrew the lacquered dildo, which, despite its size, didn’t approach the length and girth of the phallus rising between Inigo’s legs. He parted her buttocks and touched the broad head of his cock to the tiny opening.
“Do you want it fast or slow?” he asked her.
“Fast.”
Planting one foot on the bed to brace himself, he got a good grip on her and rammed himself in.
From her seemingly tortured groan, I was worried for a moment that he’d hurt her, but it was a groan of ecstasy, as I soon realized. Elic stroked her between her legs as she writhed like a wild thing, rasping “Deeper, both of you. Oh, God, deeper. Fuck me! Fuck me harder. Oh…oh…”
She came with an explosive scream, but she didn’t even slow down, just kept thrashing and thrusting and moaning and begging them to fuck her harder, deeper.
Elic arched his hips and shuddered, his face darkening, a vein rising on his forehead. Inigo paused for a moment, stilling Lucy with one hand banded around her waist and the other gripping a breast. When Elic’s climax ended and he started thrusting again, so did Inigo and Lucy. Elic came again, not long afterward; this time, I saw thick white fluid oozing out from where he was joined to Lucy.
Inigo’s thrusts grew more frenzied. He shifted his position, lowering the bent leg. As he did so, his unbuttoned breeches slipped down. He yanked them up, but in the split second before he did, I saw something that made my jaw drop.
I can still see it, when I close my eyes and revisit that afternoon in my mind. The breeches fall, revealing something that doesn’t belong there, a fleshy, whiplike something growing out of the base of his spine. A tail, I think as I sit on the floor in that dark, carpeted passage, staring. He’s already covered himself back up again, but I know what I saw.
I think.
“What’s wrong?” Elic asked, wondering why Inigo had gone still. Lucy, oblivious, was still thrusting away.
“You don’t suppose someone’s watching right now, do you?” Inigo looked around fretfully, pushing a hand through his wild mop of hair, in which I saw, or imagined, a pair of small, bony stumps. The tips of his ears, which I hadn’t seen before, were ever so slightly pointed.
I stood up, staring and shaking my head. Nay. I’m imagining things. If so, however, it would be the first time in my life that my mind had ever conjured up something that wasn’t there.
“Is anyone there?” Inigo asked loudly, glancing one by one at the veiled gaps between the mirrored panels.
I bit my lip, weighing the pros and cons of responding.
“What says that bloodhound’s nose of yours, brother?” Inigo inquired.
Elic drew in a breath slowly. “There might be a female. I smell orange flowers, lavender, frankincense…”
“That’s just Lucy.”
Elic scowled in concentration. “Possibly, but—”
“É!” Inigo happened to be looking in my direction when he yelled this.
I lifted my skirts and ran.
“Qui va là,” he called out, but I was already sprinting down the stairs.
OUR DAYS LATER, while Elle and I were strolling arm in arm across the west lawn toward the castle for dinner, I stopped walking, forcing her to stop, as well.
She looked at me expectantly, her face shadowed from the noon sun by the broad brim of her straw hat.
“I didn’t come here to learn to be a courtesan,” I said.
After a moment, she pointed to a swing bench beneath a vine-covered arbor in the rose garden adjacent to the castle’s west wall. “Let us go sit in the shade, shall we?”
We sat on the swing, our skirts mounding into a crackling, colorful heap. My black mourning attire had been supplanted by the luxurious new wardrobe Signora Tozzi and her staff were busily sewing day and night. Two days ago, we novices were told that every morning we would be given a newly finished dress to wear that day, so that Signor Vitturi could pass judgment upon it, while the dress from the day before would be taken away for alterations.
That day’s gown, which I found both exquis
ite and scandalous, had been designed to make the most of my slender frame and dainty breasts. It was fashioned of deep blue satin embroidered in gold, its heavily boned bodice featuring a wide gap in front that was laced together with gold cords. As it was intended to be worn with neither shift nor stomacher, the open bodice bared a wide expanse of my chest and stomach; any wider, and it would have exposed my nipples. The voluminous leg-o’-mutton sleeves, which were trussed to the bodice with ribbon rosettes, had been generously slashed, with undersleeves of fine white sarcenet puffing through the slits. The skirt was undivided, in the Venetian style, its deep hem lightly tacked so that it could be rehemmed longer and worn with chopines.
Signora Tozzi, who declared it to be the most beautiful and seductive dress she had ever created, called it “il vestito dallo zaffiro”—the sapphire gown. So enamored of it had Elle been when she saw it that morning that she’d asked the gifted dressmaker to create an exact replica for herself. Signora Tozzi had objected that Elle was too generously endowed on top for a bodice with such a wide opening, whereupon Elle had offered a thousand ducats for the gown, silencing Madame’s objections.
Elle untied her bonnet and tossed it onto a nearby bench. “What you tell me will never pass my lips, Hannah. Not once in my life have I revealed a secret that I’ve been asked to keep. And I assure you,” she added with an enigmatic little smile, “I am far older than I look.”
Elle was my only confidante at Grotte Cachée, and a woman of singular insight. If there was anyone who might have some notion as to how to run the elusive Duke of Buckingham to ground, it would be she. Not to mention that she was the only person there whom I could truly trust.
And not to mention that I was, at that point, pathetically desperate. My uncle’s fate was in my hands, and I was failing him utterly.
I told her everything. Toward the conclusion of my account, I began weeping in frustration at Buckingham’s continued inaccessibility, for so obsessed was he with his hunting that I’d scarcely laid eyes on him since we’d been there. I’d seen plenty of dead boars being lugged across the courtyard, and I’d eaten so much pork that I’d grown quite sick of it, but the duke had continued to keep himself well isolated from most of his fellow visitors to Grotte Cachée.
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