Master of the Game

by Jane Kindred

  Belphagor was still dressed for an evening out. With one exception—the erection bursting through his open fly. “So we’ve established that you withheld information from me,” he enumerated with a stroke of his cock. “And that my efforts to sell you this evening to give the impression I was an ass may have backfired into my actually being an ass. But I’m not sure whether to punish you for my being an ass or for your pointing it out.” He stroked again.

  “Well, you’re still an ass,” Vasily said. “If that helps.”

  Belphagor smiled. “It does indeed.” He straddled the cot, legs wide, and pressed close to Vasily, teasing the warm mouth with his cock. “You want this, don’t you?” Instead of answering, Vasily grasped for it with his lips, but Belphagor held himself just out of reach. “But I think to atone for being an ass, I ought to forgo that pleasure. And to atone for keeping your mouth closed when it should have been opened, you may need a demonstration to truly appreciate what that means.”

  “Beli,” Vasily moaned, straining toward him. “Don’t.”

  Belphagor raised his pierced eyebrow. The boy must be particularly riled to be speaking so out of turn. “You’re making all kinds of transgressions with that mouth this evening.” He slipped his belt from its loops and wound the ends around his palms. “Open up.”

  The fire-tinged hazel eyes regarded him warily. “Why?”

  “Why? Precisely because you keep asking questions and making objections. Your words are ‘da, ser’ or ‘nyet, ser’. Open.” The barked command had the desired effect, and Vasily opened almost involuntarily, jerking back when Belphagor shoved the leather between his teeth. But Vasily had nowhere to go, back against the wall, and he stared in helpless indignation as Belphagor threaded the belt behind his head and pulled it tight, forcing his jaws apart.

  “There,” said Belphagor. “Now neither of us gets to use your pretty mouth the way we’d like.” From his sleeve, he produced the bottle of almond oil. “Luckily, you have another perfectly serviceable hole.” He released the stopper as he spoke and tipped the bottle, letting the oil run down over Vasily’s straining erection where the glistening liquid pooled for a moment in the crease of his scrotum, making the firespirit moan. Belphagor set the bottle aside. “Silk ought to have had his patrons drink body shots from here,” he remarked, and then hooked his arms around Vasily’s thighs and jerked him forward from the wall into a slumped position, exposing the blushing tint of firespirit asshole. The oil dribbled down into it. “Or here.” Belphagor ran his middle finger through the slick lubricant, the heat of Vasily’s skin already sending the warm, sweet almond scent into the air, and penetrated the tight sphincter with a slow twist.

  Vasily made a sort of gurgling gasp around his gag, saliva glittering in the candlelight at the corners of his mouth, while Belphagor slowly fucked him with his finger.

  “I think it’s fair to say that I was by far the worse behaved this evening, and that you were sorely used. Thus, it is only fair that I be sorely used.” Belphagor buried his finger to the knuckle. “And since you stand in for me in all matters of discipline—” He prodded a second finger in beside the first, and Vasily quivered around him, squeezing him with heat. “I know I need hold nothing back in my atonement.” He picked up the lube again and poured it generously into his cupped hand beneath the two fingers firmly ensconced in Vasily’s ass, running his thumb through the oil and up over his two remaining fingers, narrowing them to a point and prodding them through the ring of muscle, stretching it wide.

  Vasily groaned, choking on the excess spit in his throat as he tilted back his head and let Belphagor open him, twisting and working his slick fist until it had all been swallowed up inside the groaning demon.

  “Do you love me, beautiful boy?” Belphagor whispered the words without quite intending to, overcome by the sensation of his captured hand and by Vasily’s sweating, panting vulnerability as he twisted his fingers deep inside the demon. A guttural sound escaped around the leather gag in an approximation of “Da, ser.” He crawled between Vasily’s wide-open legs, letting their cocks brush and bob together, and leaned close to his ear. “Do you want me to fuck you to the brink of insanity?” Another groaning affirmative.

  Belphagor grabbed both their cocks, just barely able to stretch his fingers to the opposite edge of Vasily’s, and stroked with one hand while he pumped and corkscrewed Vasily’s ass with the other. Insensate, joyful sound was bursting out of Vasily behind his gag, soon followed by a burst of sticky firespirit heat making a mess of Belphagor’s handful. He stroked it down over the sensitive flesh of his own erection despite the temperature as it pulsed out of Vasily’s, and the slick warmth of it made him need to be inside Vasily immediately. He worked his hand out slowly, making Vasily come just a bit more with delightful shivers, and then he plunged into the gap his hand had left, his cock sticky with firespirit semen, and fucked Vasily for all he was worth.

  Vasily was moaning with slight discomfort now, but eagerly taking him as he always did. It made Belphagor feel wild and thrilled knowing what a pounding Vasily could take—would take—just to make him happy. Vasily was like a drug.

  He marveled fleetingly, right before he shot with immense satisfaction, that Silk would have passed this up. He couldn’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t want to fuck Vasily any chance they could. He was matchless in so many ways—his enjoyment, his abandon, his sexual honesty.

  As Belphagor collapsed contentedly on top of him, licking the sweat from the warm nipples, he remembered there had been a time when he hadn’t exactly relished fucking a demon’s ass. It was the same reason he rarely went in for being fucked himself to this day, so many years gone by. Early experiences had taught him it was a means of dominance and control—of inflicting pain to put a lesser man in his place—of feminizing the one being fucked as a kind of supreme degradation—the worst thing some men could fathom being feminine.

  He’d gotten over that perversion of this most intimate act long ago and had almost forgotten it had been that way for him once. But Silk was young, and Silk’s start in life had been at least as inauspicious as Belphagor’s. Belphagor laid his head against Vasily’s heaving chest. He’d goaded the boy in front of everyone. Damn.

  “Gegy.”

  Belphagor looked up at the unintelligible sound from Vasily and remembered he’d gagged him rather fiercely. “Sorry, love.” He undid the belt and kissed the bruised lips, enjoying Vasily’s slight wince as he pulled out and rose on his knees to release Vasily’s wrists. “You’ve been an exceptionally good boy this evening.”

  Vasily rubbed his wrists and swiped at the saliva that had run into his sideburns while his mouth had been forced open. “Don’t get carried away, Beli. Wouldn’t want to accidentally call me your boy.”

  Belphagor laughed at the effected pout. “I was going to say you might even have earned that right.” He took one of Vasily’s hands and kissed the chafed wrist. “What I can’t decide…” He paused and kissed the arm higher up at the crook of the elbow. “Is whether your petulance works against you or clinches the deal.”

  The firespirit eyes were glowing at him with a sort of hopeful defiance. Belphagor ran his hand down Vasily’s forearm before letting him go and rising to undress.

  “I think,” he mused as he loosened his collar, “that you have.” He slipped out of his jacket and unbuttoned his shirt, letting the pronouncement sink in, letting Vasily revel in it for a moment before he snatched it away. “But I haven’t.”

  The elated expression dissolved into a frown. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Belphagor sat on the edge of the cot to unlace his boots. “It means more punishment for you, naturally. I have a rather thick skull. It’s going to take some doing to hammer my own lesson home.” He kicked off the boots and the pants and rolled Vasily over on top of him despite the firespirit’s indignation. “But I promise to hammer you mercilessly until I get it.”

  Belphagor’s reputation had taken another hit, but Vasily had c
ome out of the previous evening’s adventure with exactly what Belphagor had hoped to secure: the indignation—on Vasily’s behalf—of both fellow workers and patrons of the Stone Horse. He left Vasily to his own devices, lunching with rent boys to gain their ear, while Belphagor took Silk aside on the pretext of discussing business.

  Silk ushered him to his private parlor and closed the sliding doors onto the outer room, turning about with a look of professional interest and nothing more. “What can I do for you, Belphagor?” It was as polite and cool a reception as Silk had ever given him.

  “I came to apologize.”

  This took Silk aback, his hands dropping from the door handles behind him.

  “I put you on the spot last night, and it wasn’t fair. I didn’t really care for the spectacle you were making of Vasily, but I did say you could do as you pleased with him, and it was up to him to use his safe word if he wasn’t comfortable—although I ought to have established that between the three of us as well. So for my awkward handling of the situation and my inappropriate reaction, I apologize.”

  Silk’s hands slipped into the pockets of his tailored suit. “Thank you.” The velvety gray eyes observed him for a moment. “Can I ask you something?” Belphagor inclined his head. “About Phaleg. I… Did he tell you what I did?”

  Belphagor took a seat on the divan and set his legs apart with his hands on his knees—a habit from the world of Man meant to display the tattoos on his fingers and the backs of his hands in an implied threat, though they had little meaning in Heaven. “Major Phaleg is an angel of the utmost discretion. He told me only that things hadn’t worked out between the two of you. But it seems fairly clear to me that you hurt him in some way, and I believe I warned you that you’d answer to me if any harm came to him as a result of your association.”

  “I drew blood.” Silk wrapped his arms around himself as he blurted the words. “On his prick. He never told me to stop, just let me beat on him until I drew blood. And it made me angry.”

  “Injuring Phaleg made you angry at him.”

  “Because he was just going to lie there and take it like I was some kind of monster—like I wanted that!”

  “And did you?”

  The gray eyes flashed with fury and Silk stepped forward in challenge, but stopped, his expression conflicted. “I…did.” Silk’s face went pale. “I wanted to keep going. Heaven help me,” he murmured, reminiscent of Phaleg. “Why would I want that?”

  Belphagor considered, drawing on memories he hadn’t touched in decades. They were memories he wasn’t proud of. “Revenge?”

  “Revenge?” Silk looked ill.

  “Against someone other than Phaleg. Someone Phaleg reminds you of, perhaps, or whom your encounters with Phaleg remind you of. When I was a young demon in the world of Man, I had some experiences I don’t like to think about. I’ve never told Vasily, nor will I tell him, so you’ll keep this between us.” His tone allowed for no disagreement.

  “But when I had the opportunity to treat others with the same brutality, I didn’t think twice. I lashed out, trying to punish the ones who had made me downcast, trying to take my revenge on men who were no longer there. Where I was—the Russian gulag, they called it, the Zona—violence and brutality were the only languages anyone understood. It took me a long time to unlearn that language. And longer than that—much longer—to learn that my desire to cause a demon pain in the act of mutual pleasure didn’t make me what I’d been taught to be in the Zona. And it didn’t make me the boy who’d suffered without consent at the hands of others taking their own misplaced revenge.”

  Silk sank onto the cushions of the chair perpendicular to the divan while Belphagor spoke. His head hung forward, the carefully oiled hair falling over his face. “I didn’t want to do that to Phaleg. I didn’t want him to make me that demon. That’s why I sent him away.”

  “So he doesn’t know what he’s done to anger you.”

  Silk shook his head, defeated. “I mocked him and treated him scornfully. If you wish to thrash me for it, you’re well within your rights.”

  “Silk.” He reached out and laid a hand on the young demon’s knee. “I have no desire to punish you for making a mistake. You’re certainly doing that quite well on your own. I think Phaleg is confused, though, and he ought to hear from you that he did nothing wrong.”

  “If I tell him he did nothing wrong, I’ll have to tell him I did.”

  “Shouldn’t you?”

  Silk looked up, his eyes bitter. “He’ll hate me. Probably hates me already.”

  “I doubt that. But even if he does, he deserves to know he wasn’t to blame. Give him the opportunity to forgive you. And in the future, you might try negotiating in advance and using a safe word when you find an angel or a demon who takes such total pleasure in sexual torment. They are rare individuals, to be treasured.”

  “You seem to know a great deal about sexual torment.”

  Belphagor grinned from one side of his mouth. “I’ve made a lifetime of studying it, my dear boy. Practice makes perfect.”

  While Belphagor headed back to the Brimstone for the evening, Vasily stayed on at the Horse to cultivate his role as misused slave. He had to admit, the attention Belphagor’s stunt had brought him wasn’t altogether unpleasant. That Silk had unwittingly aided Belphagor in what amounted to enabling Vasily to spy on Silk himself made him slightly uncomfortable, but Silk seemed oblivious, merely pleased to have Vasily’s company.

  The other demon kept his distance at first after Belphagor’s departure—during which Belphagor behaved as though the Stone Horse had begun to bore him and flippantly declared that Vasily could do as he liked—but Vasily maintained an air of business as usual that quickly put Silk at ease. Silk made no attempt to apologize for how things had ended the night before, which suited Vasily, who gathered it hadn’t had anything to do with him anyway. Whatever he and Belphagor had talked about while they’d disappeared together, Belphagor would likely tell him later.

  Though Vasily hadn’t noticed any particular talk of revolution or sedition before, now he was listening for it, there were definite overtones in certain interactions between a few of the angelic patrons and their hires. If he hadn’t spent the afternoon with the working boys, he might not have noticed the sort of coded banter going on. From some of the angels, however, it seemed nothing more than a means of ingratiating themselves to the objects of their interest, sympathetic talk about demon rights designed to lubricate further intercourse in much the same way as the usual liberal application of libations and spirits seemed to do.

  The more subtle indicators, however, were in the conversations between certain angels and patrons of the demon merchant class who strove to appear as their equals. A great deal of praise for the principality’s brother, the Grand Duke Lebes, seemed to be bandied about. Belphagor had told him Phaleg suspected a movement to depose Helison in favor of his brother. The irony was that Helison was being depicted as an oppressor of demonkind, next to whom Lebes was presented in a far more liberal light, when according to Phaleg, Helison’s talk of signing the Liberation Decree had turned angelic public opinion against him. It was enough to drive a demon to drink.

  Vasily’s merchant patron from the evening before arrived just in time to save him from listening to any more bullshit. Gaspard wanted his usual, and displayed his usual gratitude, and afterward it was clear he was becoming increasingly at ease in Vasily’s company. Vasily was happy enough to spend time in casual conversation with him for a few extra facets, and the merchant seemed to genuinely need the companionship.

  “Have you given any thought to emancipating yourself from that petty demon thug of yours?” Gaspard asked while they reclined among the cushions in the parlor. Clearly, his orgasm and his drink had combined to put him in an exceptionally relaxed state.

  “I don’t need ‘emancipating’.” Vasily downed the ale Gaspard had brought him from the bar.

  “We all need emancipating. Some more than others.” Gaspar
d tilted the whiskey glass in his hand, staring at the line of gold liquid remaining at the bottom.

  “You suppose the principality will ever sign that decree? Liberate the Fallen?”

  Gaspard threw back the last of his drink. “Not bloody likely. To be honest, I think it would do more harm than good if he did.”

  Vasily propped his head on his hand. “How so?”

  “Plenty of demons depend on the system. Families have positions they count on with upstanding angelic households. They know their children will be taken care of, with a place in the house they serve, instead of having to sell them into…” He paused and glanced up at Vasily, his cheeks reddening. “Not that there’s anything wrong with your profession, of course.”

  Vasily shrugged. “No, but there is something wrong with families having to sell their children into it. It’s a profession one should be free to choose. I thought that was what the Liberation Decree was supposed to do. Give the Fallen the freedom to choose their own lot in life.”

  Gaspard laughed harshly. “That’s not how it would unfold. I guarantee it. We’d all be free to go straight to hell as far as the majority of the Host is concerned. They’d damned well make us pay for our ‘freedom’.”

  “Yet you were the one saying I ought to be free. Seems a double standard if you don’t think demonkind as a whole should be free.”

  The pink in Gaspard’s cheeks now seemed to hold a touch of bashfulness. “I was rather hoping to lure you into my own service.”

  Vasily gave him an amiable smile. “I’m already at your service. Anytime you like—anytime I’m here.”

  “That’s the rub, isn’t it? Your Prince of Tricks gets to decide when that is. Perhaps I should play a round of cards with him and challenge him to put you up as the prize.” The merchant winked as he said it, but Vasily got the distinctly uncomfortable impression he wasn’t altogether joking.