by Jane Kindred
Per their agreement, Phaleg showed up at the Brimstone just after midnight. To avoid casting suspicion upon himself for his association with Belphagor, he’d come with a group of supernal officers, but Belphagor had taught him enough tricks of the game that he soon made his way to the master table.
“Any progress?” Phaleg asked as Belphagor dealt the cards.
Belphagor didn’t bother to look up. “Nothing concrete. This sort of strategy takes time and cultivation.”
“I’m not sure we have a great deal of time.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“The queen’s cousin, Grand Duchess Tsirya, is also with child and close to her time, and they say it’s making the queen anxious.”
Belphagor flicked his eyebrow briefly as he perused his hand. “Competition?”
“You might say that. The grand duchess is her sister-in-law, Lebes’s wife.”
As Belphagor cast the die, Phaleg called it correctly without missing a beat. He really was getting quite good at this. Belphagor surrendered a card. “So Queen Sefira is worried that if her cousin produces another son before she’s able to…”
“She’ll be branded as a liability to the crown.”
“Salamander. And you think this faction supporting Lebes will act as soon as the boy is born.”
Phaleg’s cast tumbled the die to Salamander, and the angel relinquished a card to the pile. “I believe they’ll see it as a sign of the grand duke’s superior genes, and they won’t want to wait around to see whether the queen will at last deliver an heir.”
Belphagor completed his latest hand with the card Phaleg had put down. “Full choir.” With a sigh, Phaleg laid his cards on the table: three Virtues and a pair of Cherubim. “So what would you suggest to speed things up? Stage some demon uprising? Get decent demons hanged just to avoid the principality having to accept the truth of his own brother’s campaign against him?”
Phaleg gathered the cards and began to shuffle methodically. “If we had other evidence of a growing rebellion—demonstrations, not uprisings; demons chanting slogans and marching about Palace Square—it’s certainly happened before. If there’s no violence and if they disperse when ordered, there would be no need for arrests.”
“Again, these things take time to cultivate. That’s why I’m spending more time at the gaming tables now. The more I play, the more allies I will have—reluctant and otherwise—willing to participate in such an endeavor.”
Bouncing the die in his hand, Phaleg pondered. “Perhaps if we had someone in the grand duke’s household to keep an ear to the wall there as well—and maybe, somehow, to reassure the queen someone is taking her fears seriously.”
“Someone to occupy the little grand duke,” suggested Belphagor.
Phaleg paused in his cast and glanced at him. “The little grand duke?”
“He’s, what, about nine years old?”
“Seven.”
“Must be getting in his mother’s hair. I know very little about childbirth, but I understand the final few months of pregnancy are rather trying. Perhaps I might know of an angelic tutor willing to take the boy in hand.” While Belphagor spoke, Phaleg tossed the die down. “Bat.”
Phaleg watched the die land on Bat. “You’re good.”
Belphagor smiled. “Of course I am.”
He beat Phaleg soundly—slightly regretting this was only in the figurative sense—and collected his facets as the angel admitted defeat and rose to make way for the next player.
“I had a word with our mutual friend this evening,” Belphagor said casually while Phaleg buttoned his coat. The angel said nothing and gave away nothing with his expression—he’d have done well to apply such self-discipline at the wingcasting table. “I believe he regrets what happened. Should he make an overture to you, an attempt at amends, I think you should consider what he has to say. I can’t recommend for or against accepting such an overture, but his genuine contrition, I’d vouch for.”
Phaleg donned his cap and nodded. “Good evening to you, Belphagor. I hope to challenge you again soon.” Another player was already stepping up to take his place, and Belphagor had to be content with that. He hoped what little he’d managed to convey of Silk’s regrets had been of some comfort to the angel. Unresolved suspicions of anti-supernal activities notwithstanding, there was a connection between the two Belphagor couldn’t help trying to foster. In a way, it felt like atonement for his own past regrets—atonement to the young demon he’d been.
Phaleg dismissed the carriage and driver as soon as they’d crossed into Elysium, preferring to walk the rest of the way. He needed to mull Belphagor’s unexpected words. He’d tried to put Silk out of his mind. He’d been busy putting the whole thing out of his mind—his desires, and the shameful pleasures he’d taken in the company of demons. He was a nobleman and a soldier and ought to apply himself to higher pursuits.
But those low pursuits…he’d never imagined how right it could feel to grovel at the feet of a demon, what ecstasy could be reached in the unrelenting blows of a crop or a cane delivered with the cruelty of one who enjoyed his torment. And being penetrated—Phaleg had to pause on the footbridge over the Fountain River and grip the rail at the fierce and sudden urges that seized him at the memory of Belphagor’s entire hand and forearm disappearing into him, twisting and thrusting inside him, filling him. It had been his introduction to anal pleasure, a secret desire that had shamed him since his early youth.
He’d played at penetrating himself with his fingers, though he’d never dared to use anything else, but virtually every orgasm he’d ever had during self pleasure had been the culmination of a wild, wicked fantasy of being kidnapped by a band of Fallen brigands, taken by each in turn as they tormented and humiliated him, defiling him thoroughly by spilling their demon seed into his mouth after they used him. In his fantasies, the demons had forced him to come, making him admit he wanted to be used and violated, and to beg for more of it. Every hot and frantic release had him whimpering and whispering please don’t stop. Please, I want more.
He’d carried that shame with him every day of his life and never told a soul about it, fearing exposure and ridicule, or worse—yet never quite ashamed enough to stop. The day Belphagor had turned the tables on him after soliciting him, Phaleg had surrendered with indescribable relief. The shame had been greater for actually carrying out what had hitherto existed only in the darkest recesses of his mind, but Belphagor had held him and cherished him afterward as if he’d done something remarkable. As if Phaleg were precious and divine—and not in spite of the shameful things he’d done, but because of them.
He hadn’t believed anyone else could ever make him feel as whole and genuine as Belphagor had. He also suspected the demon had beguiled him somewhat with his airspirit influence. Like the brigands in his dream, actually making him desire what ought to go against a decent angel’s nature. Though the pleasure of it had made him not much care whether he was beguiled. After all, if beguiling it was, he’d conjured the beguiler himself in the darkness of his room with his whispered pleas to be violated.
But then Belphagor had introduced him to Silk—given him to Silk, it felt like—and Phaleg had discovered it hadn’t been an isolated beguilement. Silk’s brand of sadism was more playful than Belphagor’s, but no less physically intense. As he had with Belphagor, he’d wanted to please Silk, and wanted to endure whatever Silk wished him to endure. And the younger demon had added verbal abuse to what he called their “play,” something Belphagor had never done. He wasn’t sure how he’d have taken it from Belphagor, in truth. Though he looked little older than any of them, Belphagor was like a father figure in some ways, certainly an authority figure.
But Silk was a peer, and he teased with a gleam in his eye, calling Phaleg a dirty angel whore and a worthless slut as Phaleg, kneeling naked on the floor before him, licked his own jism from Silk’s boots. He said the things Phaleg had imagined in his dark fantasies: “You like that dick in your mouth, don’t y
ou, you sniveling pup? Suck it harder and show me how much you want to swallow my load and prove what a pathetic little pervert you are.”
Like Belphagor, Silk controlled his right to come, which made the eventual orgasms so intense he sometimes thought he might pass out. And when he came, Silk always ran his tongue through it and took Phaleg in a sloppy kiss to make him taste it, saying, “That’s the taste of a dirty angel whore who comes when he’s defiled because he knows he deserves it.”
But Phaleg was thinking in the present tense. And there was no present with Silk. And there could be no future with Silk, no matter what contrition he claimed, if he ever did. He’d managed to make Phaleg feel like the dirty angel whore when they were no longer playing, though ironically he’d done it by acting like Phaleg’s whore. He couldn’t forgive that—being mocked for opening himself up to Silk. Belphagor had called Phaleg’s obedience a gift. Silk had treated it like a joke.
Phaleg turned up his collar against the chilly wind from the Gulf of the Firmament as he rounded the corner to his street. He couldn’t forgive him, but it didn’t stop him longing for Silk’s more consensual brutality. It didn’t stop him from lying in bed at night and remembering Silk’s lithe body slinking around him, teasing with its softness before a hard blow fell without warning. It didn’t stop him from wanting Silk’s cock up his ass, pounding him the way Vasily had the time Belphagor had ordered it, filling him, making him ache, making him come. It was the one thing Silk had never done, and Phaleg had worried it was a level of intimacy Silk simply didn’t want to share with him—that perhaps it was where Silk drew the line between patron and lover.
Silk’s parting words to him had confirmed Phaleg’s suspicion. He’d been nothing but a patron to Silk the entire time, nothing but a fool for Silk’s amusement. No. He couldn’t forgive Silk, no matter what he said, because in that single moment, Silk had revealed his true feelings for Phaleg, and they were nothing less than utter contempt.
Shestaya
It was a relief to be back home at the Brimstone. Vasily undressed in the dark and slipped under the covers on the cot, happy to find Belphagor awake and waiting for him.
The sinewy arms snaked around his waist, and Belphagor kissed his bare shoulder. “How did things go at the Horse?”
“Everyone thinks you’re a bastard, and Gaspard thinks I need emancipation.”
“Does he, now?”
“He wants to play you for me at the wingcasting table.”
Belphagor laughed. “And here I thought he liked you. Surely he knows he’d never have a chance.”
Vasily bristled. “Are you saying you’d bet me?”
Belphagor’s arms tightened around him. “Are you presuming you’d have any say in the matter if I did?”
“I’d have my word, wouldn’t I?” Vasily growled.
“Ah, the boy’s learning.” Belphagor’s breath tickled his neck. “And would you use it?” His hand stole downward over Vasily’s abs and slid beneath the head of Vasily’s thickening cock, lightly cupping it to let him know he knew exactly what effect his taunting was having on him.
Vasily breathed in sharply, defenseless against his desire. “No,” he growled reluctantly.
Belphagor closed his hand around the shaft with the two-finger-and-thumb grip that promised Vasily a swift and merciless release. “Why not?” He began to stroke, and Vasily tried in vain to stifle a soft groan. “Vasya,” he prompted. “Why not?”
Vasily turned his head toward him and buried his face in Belphagor’s side as he dug his fists into the sheet beneath him. “Because,” he moaned against the hard, unyielding muscle, “it makes me hot when you’re a bastard.”
Belphagor kissed his forehead, fingers thrumming rapidly over his flesh. “That’s my sweet boy.”
“Your sweet boy?” Vasily managed a hopeful grunt.
“Be quiet and come for me.” The second part of the command Vasily couldn’t help but obey, but the first was impossible as the heat burst out of him, and Vasily arched beneath Belphagor’s hand with a loud, helpless groan between clenched teeth. “So close,” murmured Belphagor as Vasily’s cock pulsed within his grip.
“What do you mean?” Vasily panted against him.
“I’d nearly earned the right to have you, but the fact that you can’t be quiet when I tell you to…Well, I can see I have a bit more work to do.”
Vasily pulled away from him and sat up. “Dammit, Beli—”
“Oh, my. Now that’s just sheer insubordination.” Belphagor grabbed Vasily’s queue of locks and shoved his head down into his lap. “Let’s see if this will keep you quiet,” he said as he pushed his cock into Vasily’s mouth. Vasily tried to pretend he wasn’t loving it, but it was no use.
Without quite knowing how he’d agreed to do so, Phaleg found himself at Silk’s flat the following week to meet with Belphagor’s tutor, Soluzen, whom Belphagor had persuaded to assist him in his investigation—while Silk apparently remained unaware that he himself was a subject of it.
Playing the part of Soluzen’s illegitimate son, Ruslan, the youngest of the demon boys, would accompany Soluzen to Grand Duke Lebes’s residence in Iriy as a companion for the little grand duke, and even Anzhela had a role. Posing as the daughter of one of the staff from Soluzen’s household, her services as a maid would be offered to assist Grand Duchess Tsirya during her final trimester. Phaleg’s influence with the principality had afforded him the leeway to take whatever measures he deemed fit to ensure Elysium’s security.
When they’d finished working out the details, Belphagor not so subtly left Phaleg in the room with Silk. Phaleg glared past the demon at Belphagor’s back disappearing through the door after Anzhela and the boys. Silk had placed himself directly between Phaleg and the exit route. The only way Phaleg could leave was to physically move him out of the way. His skin flushed with anger. Belphagor had manipulated him. Again.
Silk put his hands in the pockets of his stylish pants—not quite the suit pants he wore at the Stone Horse, but a similar distinctly un-celestial cut with narrow calves and pleated fronts. A white silk shirt was tucked loosely into them, sleeves rolled up to the elbows and no cravat or collar, just open at the neck in a way that made the sensuously slender demon seem almost provocatively feminine.
The dark brows narrowed over the stormy gray of Silk’s eyes. “I realize you’d rather be with Belphagor than with me, but I have something to say.”
Phaleg scrunched up his eyes in consternation. “Rather be with Belphagor? What’s that supposed to mean?”
Silk lifted his eyebrows sardonically. “Whatever you take it to mean, Major.” It was Phaleg’s turn to lift his eyebrows. Silk had certainly never addressed him by his title before. “I just wanted to apologize for my joke about the facets. I didn’t intend for you to take me seriously.” He took a hand from one of his pockets and held out a pouch that undoubtedly contained the facets Phaleg had paid for his humiliation.
Phaleg didn’t reach for it. “Your joke.”
“Yes. It was in poor taste. I should have realized you wouldn’t get it, being from your world.”
“You’re going to stand there and tell me to my face that I misunderstood you. That it wasn’t your intent to demean me out of context with the manner of intercourse in which we’d previously been engaged.”
Silk pressed his garnet lips together.
“Go to hell, Silk.” Phaleg moved forward to push past him, and Silk stepped with him, blocking his way.
“Oh, is that your attempt at a joke, Major? Or at demeaning me?”
“Silk—”
“You let me abuse you.” Silk’s eyes flashed with anger, taking Phaleg aback.
“Wasn’t that rather the point?”
“No, it wasn’t the point! If you wanted someone to abuse you, I’m sure any of your angelic comrades would be happy to do it for free. As I understand it, all you’d have to do is tell them you have a taste for cock, and they’d gladly beat the shit out of you. What I thought
you wanted was consensual submission.”
“I consented,” said Phaleg, now genuinely confused.
“Well, you shouldn’t have. Not to that.” Silk clutched at his carefully coiffed hair. “But that wasn’t your fault, it was mine. We should have set ground rules. We should have had a word to say between us that meant we’d gone too far. Because I would have said it then, Phaleg. I would have told you it—scared me.” The demon suddenly looked young and vulnerable, all his artifice and sophistication gone. Nothing could have shocked Phaleg more.
Phaleg took a step closer. “Scared you?” Without meaning to, he put a hand out and drew Silk’s fingers away from his hair, and then couldn’t bring himself to let them go, twining them together with his. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I didn’t know I could scare you.”
“Well, I scared me,” Silk clarified with a nervous laugh, but the boyish vulnerability was still evident. “And then I was petty and mean. Which isn’t sexy at all.”
It wasn’t a word angels used, but the meaning seemed clear. Phaleg was sure he’d never seen anyone quite as “sexy” in his life. There was something about this suddenly vulnerable side to Silk that made him even more alluring than he’d been before. He hadn’t intended to forgive the demon, or even to give him the time of day. Now all he could think about was touching more of his skin.
“I thought I’d displeased you,” he said—not intending to say that either. “Actually…” He’d gone this far, he supposed he might as well go on. “I thought I’d disgusted you.”
Silk looked down at their fingers twined together. “I’m the one who’s disgusting. To treat you like that. There was no excuse.”
“You’re not disgusting. Don’t say that.” Phaleg dared to bring his other hand to Silk’s cheek, and Silk’s head snapped up in surprise.
“You don’t know me at all.” Silk’s voice was a bare whisper.