Shackles
Author: Alexis Hall
Date: 2014-10-30T08:00:00+00:00
Description: Dear Mr. Dickens, Since you was so kind as to publish my story in your magazine, lots of folks have been sending me lots of letters asking me about stuff what happened what I don't know about. Seems like they want to know how a priest what got himself chucked out the church, and the Arch Rogue of Gaslight, being only the prissiest motherswinker whatever held a knife to your throat, wound up in what I reckon ye might call love, or as near as passes for it. Things is, I never did get the whirligigs to ask Ruben himself, but I done some asking round, and I think I got the shape of it. 'Cos it's R

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Shackles (A Prosperity Story)

Copyright © 2015 by Alexis Hall

Cover art: Simoné, http://www.dreamarian.com

Editor: Sarah Frantz

Layout: L.C. Chase, http://lcchase.com/design.htm

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ISBN: 978-1-62649-226-4

First edition

January, 2015

Also available in paperback as part of Liberty & Other Stories:

ISBN: 978-1-62649-230-1

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Dear Mr. Dickens,

Since you was so kind as to publish my story in your magazine, lots of folks have been sending me lots of letters asking me about stuff what happened what I don’t know about. Seems like they want to know how a priest what got himself chucked out the church, and the Arch Rogue of Gaslight, being only the prissiest motherswinker whatever held a knife to your throat, wound up in what I reckon ye might call love, or as near as passes for it.

Things is, I never did get the whirligigs to ask Ruben himself, but I done some asking round, and I think I got the shape of it.

’Cos it’s Ruben’s story, I tried to write it all proper and inkhornish like he’d like it, and Byron Kae has checked all the spellings for me, so you don’t have to ask that nice Mr. Collins this time.

I ain’t so sure about the commas.

Piccadilly

To L, and all the wild horses

About Shackles

Chapter the First

Chapter the Second

Chapter the Third

Chapter the Fourth

Chapter the Fifth

Dear Reader

Also by Alexis Hall

About the Author

Enjoy this Book?

There were many stories about the crime prince of Gaslight.

So many that Ruben Crowe, climbing the thousand stairs to the top of the Spire, half fancied he had been sent to meet a monster. But waiting in the iron-grey cell, his face turned into a stream of dusty moonlight, there was simply a man.

Who twisted as the door grated open, chains clanking at his wrists and ankles.

“It has been many years since I have seen the sky.” His voice was smoky sweet and as refined as any gentleman’s. “Tell me, do you think it beautiful?”

Three days ago, Ruben had received a personal visit from the Bishop of Gaslight. This was somewhat surprising, for the last time they had met, the bishop had revoked Ruben’s licence. He had also professed himself disappointed.

In truth, it had not been unexpected. Ruben Crowe, it was generally agreed, was a poor fit for the Church. When, after leaving Cambridge with first-class honours, he had announced his intention of taking orders, his father—the late Lord Iron—had declared that Ruben would be home by Candlemas. He, too, had professed himself disappointed.

Ruben received the bishop in the Citrine Drawing Room and served him Darjeeling first flush tea in translucent bone china. The sunlight that slipped through the arched windows paled in the savagely glittering splendour. As did the bishop.

He reached for one of the fancies, a cunning spiral of air and sugar, flavoured with saffron and lavender and, at last, essayed a conventional enquiry into Ruben’s health and happiness. Dr. Jaedrian Forrest was a lean, gilded lion of a man and not usually uncertain of his words.

Ruben gave assurances that he was quite well. He had just returned from the Stews. Dust had soiled the edges of his cuffs and clung to his hair. His fingers left rough, dark stains upon his teacup.

“I understand,” remarked the bishop, “you have been visiting the malcontents in the Lower City.”

“I wasn’t preaching.”

“No, of course not. That was not my intended implication.”

There was a long silence.

Dr. Forrest leaned forwards in his chair and steepled his fingers. His episcopal rings flashed darker and deeper than the gemstones that encrusted the room.

The motion was so startlingly familiar that Ruben’s heart shied like a roe deer. It was too easy to remember and easier still to forget. He could half imagine they were friends as they had used to be. The worldly bishop and the ardent young curate, ensconced together with tea, crumpets, and the debates of the day. And other pleasures, perhaps less easily reconciled with doctrine. Ruben knew too well the twist and arch of that silken, sinew-roped body. The chill pressure of those rings, warming like flesh beneath the weight of his palms.

“Do you still believe,” asked the bishop, “that all souls can be saved?”

Ruben did not hesitate. “Yes.”

“No matter how iniquitous or unrepentant?”

“Especially those.”

“Hmm.”

Ruben had little patience for what he had always termed “state room theology.” Church politics, in other words. So he watched the light skitter sharply across the surface of his tea, gold over gold, like Jaedrian’s eyes. And he felt, almost as if from nowhere, the soft stirring of loss, a restless and familiar longing for impossible things.

He remembered his father’s funeral. The silver apathy of the rain and the moment he realised that now he could never earn Lord Iron’s approval. Like most of his youthful ambitions, it had always been something he believed he could do tomorrow.

“Ruben, have you heard of the crime prince of Gaslight?”

He glanced up in some bemusement. He was not the sort of man to concern himself with fables. “I’ve heard the stories, but they’re just stories.”

“They’re not stories. They caught the man.”

“They caught a man.”

The bishop’s tawny eyes held Ruben’s steadily. “The reality hardly matters any more. It’s what he represents.” There was a pause. “He burns in less than a week.”

Under the laws of England, a condemned criminal would die by fire in order that they might repent in the last moments of their life and thereby save their soul eternal torment. However, if the condemned made a full confession and showed penitence, he would merely be hanged. The state called this mercy. Ruben was not so certain. “You must send someone to him,” he said.

Dr. Forrest stared at his own interlaced fingers. “I did.”

“And? Wouldn’t he repent?”

“He killed the man.”

An eerie chime sounded through the room as Ruben’s fingers slipped on his teacup.

“You see my quandary,” murmured the bishop.

Ruben wouldn’t precisely have called it a quandary, but he nodded.

“I cannot in good conscience send a criminal to the stake who has not received every opportunity to confess. But, equally, I cannot send another man into danger.”

Ruben’s lips quirked wryly. “But you seem to be sending me?”

Dr. Forrest had the grace to blush. “I’m asking you.”

“You may recall,” said Ruben mildly, “that you revoked my licence. Even if I was willing, I would be unable.”

“I could provide a dispensation.”

“Could you now?”

The bishop pinched the bridge of his nose wearily. “Ruben, I—”

“Of course I’ll do it.”

“I feared you might,” sighed Jaedrian, looking suddenly both older and younger than his years.

“You knew I would.”

“Yes.” Another pause, and then with a touch of pleading: “But you will be careful, won’t you?”

Ruben did not answer, but across the gleaming table, their hands met and roughly, tightly entangled, as if they were still lovers.

Ruben had come to the Spire prepared with many warnings. He had read all the newspaper articles and several penny dreadfuls, and he believed he harboured no illusions about the man who stood before him. He knew him for a criminal, a recidivist, a thief, and a murderer. In short: an unrepentant villain of unimaginable depravity.

He had not, however, expected the man to have the face of a feral angel. Nor that he might want to discuss aesthetics.

“What?”

“The sky,” repeated the most dangerous man in Gaslight, somewhat impatiently. “Do you think it beautiful?” Since he could not gesture with his hands, he jerked his chin in the direction of the window set high into the granite wall.

Beyond its bars, Ruben could just about see a handspan of the waiting world—a piece of dark, speckled by a few irresolute stars.

“Well,” he said, at last. “Yes.”

“Curious.” The man frowned. “I wondered if I should.”

“Should what?”

“Find it beautiful.”

The man’s ice-shard eyes did not waver from Ruben’s, and Ruben knew better than to look away. “Don’t you?”

“I have never had occasion to ask myself. Until now.”

“And what do you answer?”

“I believe—” his mouth turned up at the corners, tugged slightly lopsided by the silver scar that crossed his upper lip “—the stars are merely distant light and the sky a roof like any other.”

Ruben couldn’t quite help himself. He shivered. In the gloom, the man’s pale suit and pale hair gleamed softly, as though he was already the ghost of himself. But he was utterly calm. It seemed almost impossible to believe that he was waiting to die. Only the manacles betrayed him, hanging heavy from his fragile wrists, like some terrible insult.

“Forgive me,” added the prisoner, in his soft, too-careful voice, “but I have been remiss with introductions. I am Milord.”

Ruben swallowed something that might have been the most ill-advised laugh of his life. The man’s attention dropped swiftly to his mouth and then away again. The faintest of lines creased the smooth white skin of his brow. But Ruben pressed on regardless: “That’s not your name.”

“It’s what I am called.”

“I think,” said Ruben coaxingly, “I’d rather know your name.”

“Then you had better accustom yourself to disappointment, Lord Iron.”

Ruben tried to conceal his surprise and failed. Dissembling had never been among his talents. “H-how do you know who I am?”

“I have long made it my business to know things.” Milord’s gaze swept over him, assessing and impersonal, but with a weight behind it, somehow, like chill hands upon his skin. “They sent you to me like a lamb to the slaughter, Ruben Crowe.”

Well, Ruben thought, I’ve just been personally insulted by the crime prince of Gaslight. How many people can make that boast? And this time, his amusement slipped out before he could stifle it, and he felt again the knife-edge of Milord’s gaze upon his lips. “You think me a lamb do you?” Ruben asked, smiling faintly.

“You all are.” The man turned, or he would have done had his bonds allowed it. Instead he stumbled, chains clashing, and it was as though a spell had been broken. Milord stood before him, neither prince nor monster. He was a prisoner, and that was all.

Milord steadied himself, but it was too late, and they both knew it. For a moment after, his face was open, maskless. Furious. His eyes wild and glittering, like the eyes of a wolf. Colour seeped across his cheekbones, a dull stain like old blood on marble. He drew in a harsh breath, but before he could speak, a violent tremor ran through him, and he began to cough.

Ruben was startled, but he did not dare look away, in case it was some sort of—admittedly highly imaginative and obscure—trap. Although, as the attack persisted, it seemed far more likely that the man was just ill. Terribly ill.

That cough was a familiar sound down in the Stews. It was a sign of the complaint that was known simply as dustlung, and as far as Ruben knew there was no cure. Some claimed gin alleviated the symptoms, but Ruben, who had dabbled in the sciences as he had dabbled in most things, thought it a questionable treatment. It probably just made you die more quietly.

He stood there, utterly helpless and fighting down pity, as Milord choked and coughed and struggled to breathe. He could not have been aware of much beyond pain, but there was another rattling of metal as he pulled clumsily away from Ruben. Seeking privacy in a cell less than two meters across.

Ruben’s burgeoning pity warmed and deepened into something like genuine sympathy. It was simply beyond him to behold suffering—however, some might claim, deserved—with indifference. And he had just witnessed an almost unbearably human act: strength amidst all that weakness, the futile fight for pride in a moment of humiliation.

At last the fit abated, and Milord crumpled into a crouch on the floor, knotted in his chains like some desperate animal. Black fluid clung to his lips, and he pressed his mouth into the crook of his elbow, smothering the last of his coughs. When he lifted his head again, his skin was dead white in the moonlight, the sweat standing out sharp as diamonds. And when he spoke, his voice was shreds and tatters: “C-can you believe they were so uncouth as to arrest me without a pocket handkerchief?” He dragged a trembling hand to his lips, the links that held him stirring like snakes.

“For God’s sake, you need a doctor.” Unthinking, heedless, helplessly moved, Ruben crossed the space between them and dropped to one knee on the rough, cold flagstones.

Milord flinched back as though anticipating pain, an instinct that—in the strangeness of that moment—struck unexpectedly against Ruben’s heart.

He drew a handkerchief from his coat pocket and offered it.

The other man stared at it blankly. Then very slowly reached out a hand. Icy fingers slid lightly against Ruben’s, raising, almost one by one, like the ripple of wind through a cornfield, all the hairs on Ruben’s forearm. He caught his breath.

Which was when Milord lunged.

There would have been no warning at all except for the drag of the chains. His hand closed over the hilt of Ruben’s sword and yanked it free.

In some vague, timeless otherworld, insulated from the concerns of his body and its imminent danger, Ruben felt foolish. He was accounted an intelligent fellow. He had been warned. And he had thought he had understood those warnings. But it had taken Milord less than five minutes to prise him open like an oyster shell. It should not have felt like a betrayal, but it still, somehow, did, as though Milord had twisted into weakness everything Ruben held deepest, believed truest.

Internal hesitation did not, however, dull Ruben’s reactions. He possessed, in spite of everything, a certain facility for taking care of himself, something a year in the Stews had only improved. He caught Milord by the wrist—skin, metal, and bones as thin as a bird—and twisted. He would have preferred not to hurt him, but Milord—devil take him—would not yield. The sword was too unwieldy a weapon to be used effectively in the narrow space between their struggling bodies, but still Ruben felt the edge of the blade scrape a shallow cut beneath his ribs.

He forced Milord’s hand to the floor, and his fingers at last twitched open. The sword hit the floor with a dull clatter. Milord’s other hand came up, weakly, then his knee with a most uncouth intent. It was not a time for Ruben to concern himself with dignity; he got his leg across Milord’s, pressed him flat to the floor, and pinned him there with the weight of his body.

His captive writhed and hissed like a feral cat, but Ruben simply held him down until Milord exhausted himself and—finally—lay quiescent. His head was turned away, his ash-blond curls plastered to his brow with sweat. It was not a thought Ruben wished to entertain at such a juncture, but there it was regardless: Milord was beautiful. Like a pre-Raphaelite angel, his lips—even with the scar that marred them—as pale and soft as rose petals.

“If you carried a knife instead of that gentlemen’s toy, I would have killed you.” The texture of Milord’s voice had changed again, roughened somehow.

“And what good would that have done you?”

“Perhaps I enjoy it.”

“Is that why you do it? Because you enjoy it?” It seemed somehow too simple, too base an answer.

“I do what is necessary.” He met Ruben’s gaze. So close, the silver-blue purity of his eyes was almost unbearable. As was their coldness. Ruben searched, with something that might have been desperation, for remorse, for feeling, for some shadow of humanity. And found nothing.

There was a long silence.

Milord stirred restlessly, his body pressing sharply into Ruben’s. His throat rippled as he swallowed. “Release me.”

It was not quite command, not quite plea, but there was a strange softness to it. And, at last, in his eyes—something, something that might almost have been fear. Another trick? It had to be. “I’m not sure I trust you.”

“Of course you should not trust me.” That sounded more like Milord. Sharp and impatient. “But—” again that anxious, twisting motion “—you must release me.”

He had a point. Ruben could hardly keep sitting on him. But, in a strange way, it felt safest. Like holding a tiger by the tail. He shifted slightly, strengthening his hold on the man, and Milord . . . Milord gasped.

His eyes closed, and the sudden stillness in him was like the moment before glass shatters. But there was no resistance there. None at all.

That was when Ruben knew: he could make the crime prince of Gaslight beg, and it required nothing but this rough collision of their bodies and souls, two magnets spinning between the twin impossibilities of attraction and repulsion.

And he wanted to do it. He wanted to hear words of desperation shaped in that voice of silk and shadows. He wanted to punish Milord, not for any of the atrocities he had committed, but for making Ruben too aware of his own follies and failures. It was the most sordid and contemptible of impulses, tangled up in something that was almost worse, something that was somehow sensuous and cared nothing for morality, retribution, or wounded pride. It simply, achingly wanted. This man. Like this. Powerless. For Ruben.

He jerked away from Milord as if he held fire between his hands, stooping clumsily to retrieve his sword, in full retreat from the other man, and from himself.

He banged his elbow against the cell door to summon a gaoler.

After a moment, Milord sat up, curling his legs primly beneath him, like a maiden aunt at a picnic, his manacled hands folded as best as he could manage across an utterly undeniable erection.

They did not look at each other. They did not speak.

Ruben paced the length of the Mirrored Gallery. Lost amidst silver echoes of himself, he sometimes thought he saw the reflection of his father.

He would have to tell Jaedrian he could not do it.

The man—Milord—was irredeemable.

And so, in a different way, was Ruben.

The mirrors passed the bloodstain on his white shirt back and forth between them like a rust-red kiss.

Ruben was not, and had never been, troubled by his inclinations, nor by the mode of their expression—the sweet-dark things that made his heart quicken and his cock rise. On the other hand, he had never felt them so thoroughly and comprehensibly exploited. Milord had worn his weaknesses like trinkets. They had glistened like fallen stars on his long, pale fingers.

He paced and he paced, and he tried not to remember wolf’s eyes and a catamite’s mouth, and the too-sharp, too-thin, too-surrendered body under his. He broke several of the probably irreplaceable mirrors. But neither his thoughts nor his blood would settle.

Later, he tended the cuts on his hands and the gash in his side. The pain was hot and soft as tongues, and stirred him. When he was respectable again—a man who did not think too much on chains and those they held—he left the town house in the Golden Quarter for the Gilded Crescent and a discreet, inordinately expensive establishment where a honey-haired courtesan promised, and would likely have delivered, all the pleasures, dark and light, that Ruben might have desired. But there was no hidden harshness in the man’s voice. No frailty in his wrists. And the eyes that held Ruben’s from beneath a sweep of pale lashes were the wrong blue, and too gentle.

Ruben pressed coins into pampered hands, murmured his apologies, and left.

Back at Lord Iron’s mansion, he tried to read, then to rest, but for the first time in his life, the nature of his thoughts and the desires of his body shamed him.

The next day, he resolved to speak to the bishop.

But he didn’t do that either.

He descended instead to the Stews, the twisting paths that had grown familiar to him. The darkness deepened, thickened, until it swallowed the night and congealed into an impenetrable smog of tar and shadow: an artificial sky, as unforgiving as a coffin lid, intermittently smeared oily orange from the gas lamps. Dust coated the backs of his hands and the back of his throat. His mouth filled up with the taste of filth and metal. But he had grown accustomed to it.

Somewhere in the depths, down some wretched alley, three ragged ruffians came at him with fists and flashing blades. Having grown accustomed to this also, he disarmed them swiftly, and saw them off. Milord might have sneered at Ruben’s sword, but down here the weapons were knives and knuckles, desperation and brute cunning, and Ruben’s sabre had far better reach.

He did not walk the Stews entirely without purpose, though he hesitated to own it, even to himself. Crime was as much a part of the undercity as the smog, and just as all-pervading and ephemeral. But the newspapers had mentioned a place, an alehouse known sometimes as the Chicken, for its sign had long since rotted away beyond any hope of recognition.

Ruben found it at last, a mean little building at the far end of a mean little street, sagging between an opium den and a bawdy house. There appeared to be a corpse on the doorstep, but Ruben was relieved to discover the man was merely unconscious. He possessed nothing worth stealing, so he was probably not in any immediate danger. Ruben moved him carefully into what little shelter the slop alley could provide and left him there, his head propped on his elbow so he would not choke on his own vomit during the night.

This too was something Ruben had learned: kindness had no place here. So he tried instead to make usefulness its own virtue. It was not what he might have imagined. On those dreamy afternoons at Cambridge in Jaedrin’s arms, goodness had seemed as certain as skin, a grand and golden thing. And now it was little more than a succession of acts, too random and too individualised to acquire any great meaning. Too petty to effect or motivate change.

His faith in God had not wavered. His faith in people, though, that had become its own problem. For Ruben, the two were inextricable, the Creator and His creation. One saw the watchmaker in the watch, though more than mere reflection. A kind of prefiguration, he had called it once to Jaedrian, in a moment of intense bodily unity. And later, more dangerously, in the pulpit. “If you want to see God,” he had told his congregation, “look at each other. If you want to feel God’s love, love each other. If you want a glimpse of Heaven, see the world. If you want to understand what—for lack of a better word—we have called Hell, simply close your eyes, and turn away.”

Later, Jaedrian had tried to protest. “It’s not biblical,” was what he’d said.

“Damn the Bible,” Ruben had cried. “It’s just words. Truth isn’t words.”

That had been in 1859, about six months before the publication of two books that would change Ruben’s life forever.

He pushed open the door to the Chicken and stepped over the threshold. He hadn’t known quite what to expect from a reputed den of iniquity, but inside it seemed merely unpleasant. Dank, smoky, and redolent with the aromas of sweat and stale beer.

Conversation did not dwindle as he entered. Nobody dropped a glass. A few bullyboys glanced his way, sizing him up, but for the most part life went on.

He moved carefully through the crowds, a hand resting lightly on his sword hilt. As he approached the bar, the man behind it reached under the counter for a bottle, uncorked it with his teeth, and splashed about a finger width of liquid into the bottom of a very dirty glass. Then he pointed to the chalkboard fixed to the wall behind him. All it said was “1d” in a barely legible scrawl.

Ruben handed over a penny and the barman—or the bluffer, as he would have been called in the local dialect—slid the glass across the bar straight into Ruben’s slightly unwilling hand.

He had little taste for gin, and even less for cheap gin possibly adulterated with rat poison. All the same, he lifted it to his lips and took a sip. It was about as bad as he had imagined.

When his stomach had stopped roiling, and he had blinked the water from his eyes, he leaned across the bar. “I’m looking—”

The barman jerked his thumb over his shoulder to the door at the far end of the room.

And that seemed to be all the answer Ruben was going to get.

He nodded his thanks, picked up the glass, and went through to the back room. Now people were watching him, and Ruben felt a prickle of anxiety run down his forearms and across the nape of his neck. Being able to take care of himself meant knowing when to be afraid.

A sensible man would probably have turned, walked away, and never looked back. But Ruben had always been ruled by his passions.

The room into which he stepped seemed to be little more than a converted cupboard, though Ruben suspected at least one of the walls was false, and he could also see a faint mismatch at the centre of the flagstones, suggesting the presence of a trapdoor. In a spill of dirty yellow candlelight, four sat at play around a battered table, and the only one to glance up from their cards as Ruben came in was a tall, loose-limbed woman at its head.

She had swung her chair onto its back legs and was lolling in it like a lion taking its ease, one booted foot resting on the tabletop, her skirts rucked carelessly under her knee to reveal not only her entire ankle but a good deal of stocking too. She was handsome in a bold, vulgar way: square jawed and wide lipped. Her hands and forearms were covered by a writhing tangle of brightly coloured ink disappearing under the shabby green velvet of her gown.

“Well, well, well—if ain’t Lord Iron hisself.” Her voice carried a veneer of Gaslight, but her vowels were southern. “You’d better be stopping right there, my duck. Not anuver step til you put down that toasting iron.”

Ruben’s hand had flown so swiftly to his sword, he had barely been aware of it.

“I think it would be unwise to do that,” he said mildly. “But I assure you, I mean you no harm.”

She blinked, the cards slipping between her fingers to land beside her knee. “Oh, you assure me, d’you? Well then.” Her gaze flicked to one of the other players. “’Parently we’re assured. D’you feel assured, luvvie?”

This man, too, put his cards down. “Well, I dunno, Nell. Don’t reckon we’re in the business o’ being assured just cos some swell says we are.”

Ruben took a step backwards, only to discover someone had closed the door behind him.

Nell yanked her skirts still higher, pulled a pistol from her garter, and levelled it at Ruben. “You ain’t calling no shots here. Now, drop the sticker and come sit down wif us.” She smirked. “Or d’you need some assurances.”

Sighing, Ruben pulled his sword free and dropped it onto the floor. “Would they be worth anything?”

“I ain’t no bravo, Ruben Crowe. I don’t crash a cull wifout cause. You going t’give me cause?”

“I hadn’t planned on it.”

“I heard tell you was a clean fella.”

They jostled along to make a space for Ruben at the table, and he had no choice but to sit with them. Nell had her elbow braced next to her leg, the pistol still pointed, unwaveringly, at his heart.

Oh God, he thought, too ruefully for it to be much of a prayer, I’m going to die.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Nell, they call me. Little Nell.” It did not strike Ruben as a likely descriptor. And perhaps it was a common thought for she shrugged and went on. “The name was given to me when I was just a kinchin. ’Tis sommat folks ne’er reckon on, ain’t it?”

“I’m sorry, what isn’t?”

Her eyes held his, flat and cold as the gun in her hand. “Ye grow.”

And, in spite of himself, Ruben shivered. “And your friends?”

“My friends?” she repeated. “Well, my culls, if it ain’t your lucky days. Lord Iron wishes for an introduction to your right respectable selves.”

None of them seemed willing to meet his eyes. Or to speak to him at all. He thought it wasn’t so much fear as a kind of superstitious avoidance. As though he were a black cat or a ladder they preferred not to walk beneath.

“See,” Nell went on, “the canting crew tend to get a might particular when it comes to fings could be put on a poster or told t’ the beck. But, err—” she gestured carelessly towards the others with her free hand “—this ’ere fine gentleman is one Jemmy Fellow, and this gentry mort ye can call Daisy Cutter, and this topping cove is Nob Thatcher.”

The so-called Jemmy Fellow sniggered unpleasantly into his tankard. And Ruben knew he was being mocked, though the precise nature of it eluded him. Not that it mattered. His pride could be easily healed later.

“Now, if we’re all done wif making civil whiskers—” Nell grinned at him, her incisors flashing gold “—what can I do for ye?”

He was out of his depth. Too many people recently had seemed to know far more about him than he did about them. But he knew better than to show his uncertainty. “I was only looking for information. You know there will likely be consequences were you to hurt me.”

“Are you threatening me? In m’own ken?”

“Not at all. It was simply a . . . a point of information.”

She huffed out a sigh. “Y’see what’s staring right at you? That’s the point o’ my gun. She’s called Stella. Her sister Fanny’s in m’other boot.”

Ruben had never been introduced to ordnance before. He was not particularly enjoying the experience.

“Trust me, Ruben, you don’t want to know ’em any better.”

Sweat had gathered under his hat brim. “What do you want with me?”

“I want you to pike off, and I reckon the sharpest way t’ see it ’appen is giving you what you came for. Chant says, you bin up t’ the top o’ the Spire.”

He didn’t see why it was any business of Nell’s, but he supposed the presence of Stella made it her business. “I was sent there, yes.”

“But now you’re sniffing abaht ’ere. Bit of a rum turn abaht, wouldn’t ye say?”

And Ruben, at last, understood. This woman thought him Milord’s cat’s paw. Which meant . . . “You’re his . . . usurper.”

“Successor, luvvie, falls more kindly on a lady’s lugs.”

“I truly have no interest in the politics of your . . . of your operation. I am not—” for some reason he stumbled over the name and could not bring himself to utter it “—his agent.”

Nell’s eyes, which were simply brownish, unremarkable, narrowed as she studied him. “Y’know sommat, I believe you. But it still don’t esplain what you’re looking for.”

Ruben felt himself blush like a schoolboy. “I was looking for something that would help me understand him.”

Laughter from around the table. He had truthfully not expected otherwise. But it still made him feel foolish.

“Ain’t nowt to understand. He was the Arch Rogue, til he weren’t.”

“You betrayed him.” It wasn’t quite a question.

“Someone was going to. Just ’appened t’ be me.”

“But they’ll kill him for what he’s done.”

“And ’ow any people do you fink he’s killed? Tortured? Maimed?”

“He’s still a man,” said Ruben sharply. “And he’s not beyond hope. Or redemption.”

Ruben’s words spun in the silence like gold coins. Then Nell chuckled. “You sweet on ’is lordship, Preacher?”

He tried not to cringe. What he’d felt, shoving the fragile, straining body of the erstwhile crime prince of Gaslight against the floor of his cell, had been far from sweet. “I have been tasked with saving his soul.”

“Hypocrisy don’t look good on you.” Nell shrugged. “You’re not the first, Ruben. I reckon you won’t be the last. He’s got his ways, ain’t he? Ol’ Black Jack Callaghan would’ve pulled the stars down one by one if Milord had only asked ’im.”

“Who was—”

“Arch Rogue afore Milord. My bleeding eyes, you’re as green as a flat after a bubber of All Nations. I ne’er met the cove, but from the tellin’, Black Jack was a balls-the-wall baddun through ’n’ through. Though Milord twisted him rahnd his little finger like he was ribbons for a Mayday maiden.”

Ruben thought of cold eyes and a voice of silk and a face to make devils weep with longing—and could believe it. “And he took over when Black Jack was caught?”

“Lord love you, you don’t catch a cove like Black Jack. They’re still finding bits ’n’ pieces of ’im in the Humber. Compared wif what Milord did t’ him, what I done’s a kindness.”

“Somehow I don’t get the feeling kindness figures much in your thinking.”

“’Tis a luxury for ’em as can afford it. And I like a little luxury in m’life. Silk stockings ’n’ wine that ain’t been watered ’n’ being able t’ be kind when the occasion warrants. And there’s plenty’d see that poncy motherswinker dead.”

“He will be dead. In less than a week.”

She laughed, tossing nut-brown braids clear of her shoulders. “The Spire won’t hold ’im. But it’s a bit of a deterrent for them as ain’t too committed to snuffing him personal-like.”

“You aren’t worried about him coming after you?”

“’Tis a risk, but I don’t reckon he will. He knows he can’t be Arch Rogue no more so what’d be the point?”

Ruben lifted a brow. “Personal vengeance?”

“That ain’t his dance. He don’t do what’s personal. He does what’s necessary.”

“It sounds almost like you admire him.”

“Mebbe. He’s a queer cove, make no mistake, but he had a clean way abaht him. Ne’er went back on hisself, ne’er backed down, ne’er left aught t’ chance, paid up ’n’ paid well.”

“I see,” said Ruben, at the same time thinking he probably didn’t.

“Don’t go bobbing yourself, Ruben. He ain’t walking no road to Damascus wif you. E’en half-dead wif the dustlung, there ain’t no turning back for a man like that.”

“A man like what? It sounds to me that he did dishonourable things in an honourable manner. We cannot always choose what life makes us.”

“Oh, he chose. He knows wrong ’n’ right ’n’ the difference betwixt ’em, same as me. And dishonourable fings is dishonourable fings, don’t matter how you do ’em. Black Jack liked what he did t’ folks. Kept ’em in line. Milord didn’t and did it jus’ the same. Kept ’em in line e’en more. Y’flash?”

And suddenly Ruben remembered those cold words: I do what is necessary.

“Had enough, Preacher? A little hinformation goes a long way, don’t it?”

“Truthfully, I feel no more illuminated than I did when I came here.”

“Mebbe it’s cos you don’t know what you’re looking for. Mind you, neither does he. Y’make a pretty pair.”

Ruben’s hands clenched on the tabletop. “I don’t understand how I’m supposed to help him.”

Nell shrugged. “Mebbe you ain’t.”

“I don’t believe that. I believe divine purpose drives our actions, most particularly when events takes us down paths we would not have previously contemplated.”

“Ruben Crowe, you’re sitting where the sun don’t shine, talking to a woman who rules a court o’ vagabonds, murderers, and thieves.” She stretched out one of her arms so the candlelight twisted over her tattooed skin. “This is the story o’ my life. Written on my skin so it won’t belong to any bugger but me. It’s everyone I’ve e’er killed. Every act o’ violence. Every act o’ cruelty. Every hurt I’ve e’er endured. Every deed I’ve e’er done, good or ill or in-fucking-different. I’m twenny-one last time I reckoned it. And y’know sommat? It’s just some stuff I done. There ain’t no purpose.”

“Someday you may look at it and feel otherwise.”

She snorted.

“It is, after all, a pattern of a kind. A rather beautiful one.”

There was a long silence, and Ruben wondered if at last he had gone too far.

But then she chuckled and slipped the pistol back into her garter. “Well, give fanks for the purpose behind your pretty glims cos I ain’t gonna cut ’em out. ’Tis a shame your inclinations don’t favour me ’n’ mine.”

Ruben coloured a little. “I’m afraid they do not.”

“All that fervour. I reckon you’d be a wild ride.”

He had no idea how to answer that.

Nell smirked and brought her chair crashing back onto its front legs. “Reckon we’re done ’ere, don’t you?”

They were letting him go? Ruben was still too wary to feel much relief. Just bewilderment and a faint sense of dissatisfaction. He had come here for something, and he had quite spectacularly failed to either work out what it was or to get it. But he’d pushed his luck enough for one day. Possibly one lifetime. “Thank you for your time.” He rose carefully, keeping his hands where everyone could see them, for there was no need to get shot or knifed while he was making his escape. “One more question, if I may?”

Nell gave him a slightly cold look. “S’pose I’ll indulge you.”

“What . . . I mean . . . What manner of man is he?”

“Ye what?”

“Who is he? What are his passions, his pursuits?”

“He was the crime prince o’ Gaslight, Ruben. He don’t have hobbies. Unless . . . knife work mebbe. I watched him strip the skin from a man once. ’Twas a fucking masterpiece.”

Ruben swallowed. “There is more to a person than what they do.”

“Not him. I flipped his ken, y’know, after the clappers took him. Nowt there but a bed to kip in and a chair t’ sit in.”

“That’s it? The sum of everything known about him?”

She shrugged. “He weren’t someone you knew. Or cared to.”

Suddenly one of the others spoke up. The man Nell had called Jemmy Fellow. “He saw a bawd once a month. Same place, same time, same way. Apparently used to wipe his prick off after, like the bloke’s mouth was dirty.”

Ruben had no idea what to do with that information, so he simply said, “Thank you.”

“And,” added Daisy Cutter, “he ne’er touched a drop o’ liquor.”

So the man bought oral sex from a prostitute once a month, didn’t like alcohol, and murdered people. Ruben was suddenly consumed by the oddest desire to laugh. At what or whom, he didn’t know.

“Oh aye.” Nell nodded thoughtfully. “He liked that nasty smoky tea or what-ave-ye. Told you he was a queer ’un. Now, if that’s everyfing, you was about to pike it.”

Ruben was, indeed, very ready to pike it. He bent slowly to retrieve his sword and slipped it into its scabbard. But just as he was reaching for the door handle, Nell’s voice made him turn back.

“Oh, Preacher? Two more fings.”

“Yes?” This time he was probably definitely dead.

“If you still got questions need answering, and you will, ducks, you will, you should mebbe go see Lord Silver. And if you come rahnd ’ere again, I’ll kill you m’self. Gottit?”

“I’ve got it.”

He didn’t run. That really would have been fatal. But he felt like it. And the feeling didn’t abate until he was standing in Lord Iron’s mansion, sealed behind its high metal gates.

The next day, Ruben returned to the Spire.

Milord was standing beneath his window again. His clothes were, perhaps, a little more rumpled than Ruben remembered. There were streaks of dirt upon his hands, a smudge that might have been a bruise upon his cheek, but his beauty shone like the edge of a knife in that dank little cell.

Ruben wanted to twist his hands in all those ash-pale curls. Run his tongue over that gleaming scar.

Make the man writhe, pant, and yield.

If Ruben’s reappearance reminded Milord of their last encounter—struggling together on the floor, not quite like enemies, not quite like lovers—he gave no sign of it.

“I had hoped,” he said, “the authorities would tire of sending me priests.”

“What have you got against priests?”

“I dislike being bored.”

“Is that why you murdered the last one?”

Milord yawned, more than a little theatrically. “It seemed the most efficient way to dissuade his ilk from troubling me.”

This was a man’s life they were discussing, but it seemed abstract somehow, distant. Unimportant even in this strange otherworld of chains and prisons and fallen angels with ice-chip eyes. Ruben wondered briefly if this was what evil was, this unchecked fascination.

“It seems,” said Ruben finally, “you might have miscalculated.”

“Perhaps.” Silence slipped between them. Ruben had Milord’s full attention now, but his face was its own mask. Some restless, unintended movement made his manacles clank. Perhaps he was not as calm as he pretended to be. “Why did you come back?”

“I brought you something.”

Milord tilted his head, wary as a wolf.

“I’m afraid it’s not a file or a rope ladder.”

“At this height a rope ladder would be inadvisable. I could, however, make use of a file.” He paused thoughtfully, then added with a faint sneer, “Ah. You jest.”

That Milord had no sense of humour should not have humanised him. But somehow, for Ruben, it did. It reminded him that this was a man who the world had shown nothing to teach him joy. “You disapprove?”

“Not particularly, but I do not see the value in frivolity.”

God, thought Ruben helplessly. God.

Nell had been mistaken when she had called him a hypocrite. He did want to save Milord’s soul. But not with parables and prayers, sermons and psalms. He wanted to make him laugh. Subdue him with ecstasy. Cover him with good things until his own goodness—or lack of it—didn’t matter.

Of course, it wasn’t biblical.

But it was the only redemption Ruben knew how to give in such a place. To such a man.

“Well?” There was a touch of impatience in Milord’s voice. “What have you brought me if not something useful?”

“Rosary beads.”

His cold eyes turned, if anything, even colder. “You are fortunate I am currently ill placed and ill equipped to kill you.”

“I was wondering if we might arrange some kind of moratorium on your desire to kill me.”

“If we could arrange some kind of corresponding moratorium on your desire to save me.”

“As you wish,” said Ruben mildly, lying.

“Do we shake on it?” Another rattle of chains.

“So I come close enough that you may try again to strike me with my own sword?”

Milord’s lips twisted into their uneven, mirthless smile. “Why make a bargain with me, Lord Iron, if you do not trust me to keep it? Unless you have no intention of honouring your side?”

This was probably a terrible mistake. Another one.

But Ruben crossed the cell as cautiously as Daniel in the lion’s den. Milord did not lunge for him. Only watched with his predator’s eyes.

At last Ruben was close enough.

Then a little bit closer still. Close enough to feel the faintest of tremors running through the other man’s body. Close enough to get well and truly stabbed.

Milord was not a short man, but he was not a tall one either, and he had to lift his head a little to meet Ruben’s gaze.

And Ruben found himself staring helplessly at that unprotected, unoffered mouth as he held out his hand to be shaken.

“In the Stews,” whispered Milord, “we would spit first.”

“On each other? That does not seem conducive to diplomacy.”

“On our hands. It is how dirty deeds are sealed. But as I have only the handkerchief you gave me on your last visit, I suggest we dispense with that custom.”

“Will it still count if we don’t?”

“Shall we see?”

And Milord slipped his hand into Ruben’s. Ice-cold, and clumsy from the metal weight at his wrists, but as smooth and well kept as any gentleman’s. Enough to shame Ruben, for his own was rough and ragged and knobbly with untended calluses from boxing and fencing.

And what next? A vigorous shaking to solemnise this devil’s bargain? It would have felt wrong somehow. So he just clasped Milord’s hand gently. Communion, not transaction.

But the man was too still. His face too empty.

“You’re thinking—” Ruben tightened his grip “—of trying for my sword, aren’t you?”

Milord closed his eyes and nodded.

“You won’t win.”

The tip of his tongue flicked across his lips. “No, I think . . . I think you would overpower me again.”

“Yes.”

“Pin me with your body.”

“Yes.”

“Render me helpless.”

“Yes.”

“Force my—”

“Yes.”

Milord pulled his hand away abruptly, and stumbled as far from Ruben as the limits of his prison would allow.

His chains clattered wildly, too harsh, too loud.

And Ruben . . . Ruben burned like a sinner in torment, though it was not torment he felt. He was glad of his coat, for there were some secrets he could not have kept.

Milord had half turned away. Keeping his own.

The cell seemed at once too vast and too tiny to contain them.

“I brought you some tea,” said Ruben.

Milord’s expression pinwheeled rapidly through incomprehension, confusion, and incredulity, before settling into simple mistrust. “I beg your pardon?”

“When I said I brought you something . . . it’s tea, I brought you tea.”

“Not rosary beads?” One of his tight, annoyed little pauses. “Another joke.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Must you do that?”

“Joke?” Ruben considered the matter gravely. “I think I must.”

An odd light flickered for a moment in Milord’s eyes. “You mock me.” He sounded almost . . . confused. His lips pressed into something that, on a lesser man, might have been a pout. “If I were not ill, imprisoned, and chained to a wall, you would not mock me.”

In truth, Ruben had meant only to tease a little. He had been laughing mainly at himself. But he did not think he could easily explain that to Milord. Who, Ruben reminded himself, was the worst sort of criminal. Not someone whose odd responses he should care about. But he seemed so bewildered, and so put out about it. And the touch of vulnerability, if it was indeed vulnerability, had its own peculiar charm.

Was this what Nell had meant when she said he had his ways? Was this what he’d done to Black Jack Callaghan?

“I would,” he said. “I would just do it from farther away.”

“Ah!” Milord’s eyes widened.

And now he looked so genuinely outraged that Ruben might have laughed had he not developed something of a misplaced concern for the man’s pride. He wanted him like that. Proud and on his knees, free and wild and safe. He wondered how to explain that he spoke in gentleness, not in cruelty, but he was not sure Milord would believe him. If he possessed the necessary mechanism to make such a distinction.

So, instead, he simply apologised, and was rewarded by a rather imperious nod from Milord. Who then asked, a touch wistfully, “Was the tea also a jest?”

“Oh, no. Not at all.” Ruben reached hastily into the pocket of his duster, and dragged out his silvered vacuum flask.

Milord tilted his head, wary again, but curious. His eyes glittered. “That is tea?”

“Well, it contains the tea. I’m afraid it may be a little overbrewed by now.”

“And surely lukewarm.”

“Ah, now, that will not be a problem.” Ruben unscrewed the lid, turned it upside down, and poured some of the liquid into it. Steam curled lazily upwards, along with the rich, slightly acrid scent of Milord’s preferred tea. “Take it. I brought it for you.”

Milord stared for a long moment at Ruben’s outstretched hand and the tarnished holder cradled in his palm.

“Is something the matter?”

“I . . .” Milord stirred in his chains. “What is it you want?”

“In general?” Ruben looked confusedly down at the flask. “For the tea?”

“Let us begin with the tea. It is true I have . . .” Ruben was not used to hearing Milord hesitate. And this was twice now. All over a cup of tea? “It is true I have something of a fondness for the drink, but you will not win my soul with tea.”

And Ruben laughed. He could not help himself.

Milord glared. “Now what is the cause of your mirth?”

“I just . . . I have never been cast in the role of tempter before. I’m not sure I’m suited to it. Will you tell me that man shall not live by tea alone?”

“You underestimate yourself,” returned Milord sourly. “And I do not want your tea.”

Don’t be hurt, Ruben. He’s an amoral crime lord, and it’s just tea. “But why? I thought you would like it.”

“That does not affect whether I want it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Wanting is weakness, Ruben.” So easily did it seem to issue from between Milord’s lips that it was only later Ruben would remember the use of his given name. “The greatest weakness of the human heart. It shackles you far more surely than these chains of mine.” An odd, almost dreamy softness crept into his voice, brought light to his eyes. “I have built my life on the wantings of others. It has given me such power.”

“That sounds like a contradiction—to claim you want nothing, and yet to seek to control others.”

“It is simply a choice I have made. A preference, perhaps, no different to my preference for smoky tea.”

“You know, it’s getting cold while you pontificate.”

“What is?”

“The tea.”

The gentleman slipped, just for a moment, leaving only the man, in all his frailty and savagery. “I don’t want your fucking tea.”

“I think,” murmured Ruben, “if you didn’t want my fucking tea, you wouldn’t be making such a fuss about it.”

Colour streaked across the stark angles of Milord’s cheekbones. Now he just looked confused again, shockingly young for a man who would die in less than a week and, in some ways, had not lived at all. The world would rejoice and call it justice. And maybe it was justice. But to Ruben, just then, it simply felt like waste.

“If I wanted to buy you or compromise you or place you in my debt, do you not think I could have done slightly better than dried leaves in hot water?”

Milord stared miserably at a spot on the floor. “The worth of a thing is not its value, especially in prison.” His voice had slipped into a scratchy, anguished whisper. “And it is my most particular favourite type of dried leaves in hot water.”

Ruben’s heart couldn’t bear it. “For the love of God,” he cried. “Please, just have the tea. I beg you. I want nothing more than for you to have something you wa—something you prefer.”

There it came again: that uncomprehending tilt of the head. “You are very strange.”

Which stuck Ruben as a rather unwarranted observation from a man who saw no value in beauty, laughter, or kindness. Whose main activity was violence. And whose only pleasure tea.

The chains stirred as Milord held out a hand. Bloodied, crumpled, prison stained, it should not have been possible for him to be haughty, but somehow he was.

Ruben hid a smile as he passed him the makeshift cup.

“Oh,” said Milord blissfully. “Oh. It is warm.”

“It’s the flask. It keeps hot things hot and cold things cold.”

But he didn’t think the man was even listening. Milord’s eyes were half-closed, and he seemed to be simply . . . simply what? Inhaling? Anticipating? Ruben thought it was the most appallingly sensuous thing he had ever seen: the naked pleasure on Milord’s face.

“I hope—” his eyes snapped open “—you do not expect my gratitude?”

“No.” To bring Milord a flask of the tea he favoured had been nothing more than the shallowest of impulses. A means, perhaps, to reach the man in some small way. And, in truth, watching him like this was more than thanks enough. Ruben wondered if Milord realised. If he was as manipulative as Nell had said, surely he must. But he had always been so intensely guarded that Ruben was inclined to doubt it.

Or maybe that was the trick. The double, triple, quadruple bluff. Ruben didn’t know any more. He was starting to wonder if he cared.

With a jangling and a tangling of chains, Milord dragged the cup up to his lips and sipped.

Ruben saw the sheen of dampness upon his lips and the ripple of his throat, heard him swallow, then sigh, so softly like a fresh-kissed lover. He did not care for lapsang himself. His tastes ran to strong, sunshine teas, Ceylon and Darjeeling, the sort he had shared with Jaedrian at Cambridge. But now he wanted to put his mouth against Milord’s and drown in smoke and pine and darkness.

Flustered, he looked instead at the square of brightened sky that waited behind Milord’s window. “The time . . .” he said helplessly, his mind lost to other thoughts, other images, none of them utterable.

“A quirk of prison life, I find.” Milord glanced anxiously at the cup he held. “One always has an insufficiency and an abundance.”

Ruben forgot himself and smiled. “There’s still enough time for tea.”

“How gentlemanly.” Something played about Milord’s lips, a softening of their curve. A smile? An answering smile? Then he lowered himself to the floor. The weight of the chains had stripped his grace from him, but there was still a precision to his movements, a care that stopped just short of fussiness.

Not wanting to loom, Ruben dropped to his haunches, clasping his hands before him.

Milord regarded him, his expression unreadable. “I have had few opportunities in my life for conversations with educated gentlemen.”

“I’m not sure I’ve much faith in the value of education, and I’m not sure I’m much of a gentleman, but would you like to talk now? For a little?”

“You know,” said Milord wonderingly, “I do believe I would. Perhaps you could begin by explaining to me the workings of this flask of yours. And then I would like to know why the sky is beautiful.”

“Ah, Ruben, Ruben, please.”

Milord’s wrists were beneath Ruben’s hands, his legs about his hips, his head thrown back to bare his throat to Ruben’s teeth.

He was a man of moonlight and steel, and Ruben was falling, falling into his body, like falling into fire.

And now Milord was laughing, the chains nothing but silver tears on his forearms, his teeth gleaming like knives.

When Ruben leaned down to kiss him, he moaned and twisted, pulling Ruben into the most intimate spaces of his flesh.

Then came the knife, driven deep into Ruben’s heart.

He startled awake on dampened sheets, gasping, sickened, and still faintly aroused, tearing at the bedcovers, and pressing a hand to his chest as though to banish imagined pain. Slowly the shapes in the darkness resolved themselves into familiar ones. Safe. He was safe, in Lord Iron’s mansion, and Milord was in prison far away.

He sat on the edge of the bed, naked and shaking a little, and put his head in his hands.

I would like to know why the sky is beautiful.

He could not go back.

It is my most particular favourite type of dried leaves in hot water.

He could not go back.

Ruben had few High Church leanings. His prayers were personal, almost instinctive, a kind of wordless reaching, but tonight he feared to open his heart in case terrible truths would come slithering out like snakes. So he sat there, in the dark, with St. Augustine echoing endlessly through his thoughts: da mihi castitatem et continentiam.

He had never wished for such things before. But then, he had never felt like this before.

The Bible was fairly explicit on the Christian virtue of loving the sinner, but Ruben did not think this included wanting to make the beast with two backs with the sinner until you were both breathless with ecstasy.

He was no closer to guiding the man towards repentance than he had been at the beginning of the week. Worse, he had barely tried. Instead he had brought him tea. Swooned over his loveliness. Spoken to him about aesthetic philosophy. Nothing that would bring him a swift death instead of an agonising one, which was—to Ruben’s mind—the whole reason he was there.

Officially, he was supposed to be returning a lost lamb to the fold before he was publicly executed. But for him, repentance was private not public—a problem for the hereafter. It was not his place to assess authenticity. Ruben was simply there to save a man from torment, even if that torment was supposed to be a mercy that gave a man longer to repent and longer for the Lord to save his soul from Hell.

Ruben did not believe in Hell in any traditional sense: fires and demons and torture without end. Free will was after all the freedom to turn away from God. And he did not care if Milord was sorry for what he’d done. Even the idea of it, on the wrong side of dawn, seemed juvenile. If there was goodness in him, even the most meagre spark, then God would find it. He had made him after all. Apparently in the image of His most beautiful and unfortunate angel.

He just didn’t want Milord to burn. He had seen men die that way. He remembered the screaming. And, of all the things, the bitter reek of hair as it ignited.

He didn’t want Milord to hang either, to dance and die before condemning eyes, but at least it would be quick.

It wasn’t unreasonable to think such things. It was compassionate. Charitable. Repentance, forgiveness, the alleviation of suffering—all very Christian, very biblical.

But this was personal. Ruben’s wishes were all for Milord. Not for his soul, but for the man himself. That he might . . . what? Drink tea? Surrender his pristine body to Ruben’s caresses? Continue his life of cruelty, depravity, and vice, flouting without check or penitence all temporal and spiritual laws?

What was wrong with Ruben’s soul that he could desire such a thing? And why? For the basest of physical needs? Because pity moved him and fascination held him?

Because when he looked at Milord, it was hard for him to see evil. He saw pride and strength and a ruthless will to power. He saw curiosity and cleverness and a certain animal cunning. He saw fear and fragility and so much of an entirely untouched selfhood it made him ache.

He groaned.

He was fucked. Utterly fucked.

And he could not go back.

He could do nothing for Milord. And nothing for himself.

He crawled back into bed and tried to sleep. He woke early, and the hours crawled past. Did Milord think of him? Wonder at his absence? Would he care? Or did he simply stand beneath his window and wait to find beauty in the sky?

Frantic, Ruben nearly went to Jaedrian. But what could the bishop do? Remind him of his duty, of his faith, of the truth of Milord’s character. The problem was, it was all too abstract. It was impossible for him to reconcile the pale gentleman in his chains with the monster who had apparently ruled the Stews.

Ruben’s life was too sheltered. He had witnessed so little suffering, save what he tried in small ways to alleviate. No doubt Milord’s victims would see him differently. Perhaps Ruben should spend more time in the Stews. But the misery there was abstract too, the causes social and personal and political, impossible to untangle from each other.

And then he remembered something Nell had said about Lord Silver, though it was hard to imagine what association he might have with the crime prince of Gaslight. Ruben did not move much in society—people were too apt to try and get him to marry their daughters, a situation likely intolerable to all—but he was familiar enough with the city’s leading families to know that Lord Silver was reclusive in the extreme. Indeed, if the gossip mongers were to be believed (not that gossip mongers ever were to be believed), the name was cursed. The current Lord Silver was a mere cousin, the rightful heir having vanished in some mysterious tragedy a few years back.

Ruben called for his coat and hat and made his way up the hill. The day shone around him, diamond pure, as he walked briskly through the leafy boulevards of the Golden Quarter.

Lord Silver’s estate was set back from the main thoroughfare, its once well-tended grounds grown wild and twisted. The house itself had fallen somewhat to neglect, its ornate facades tarnished, its fashionably arched windows sealed up with grime. In the courtyard stood a long-dry fountain which had for its centrepiece an elaborate orrery. The arms had presumably been designed to turn with the water flow, but they were rusted into place and thick with lichen.

Ruben climbed the steps to the front door, and finding no knocker, struck it boldly with the head of his cane.

The only response he got was an irritated coo from the pigeon roosting beneath one of the crumbling pediments.

So he knocked again, and then again, until eventually his hammering attracted the attention of a servant from within.

“Lord Silver is not at home to guests.”

It was too dark inside, and Ruben’s eyes struggled to adjust. The figure in front of him was a blur of flesh and metal. “Can you tell him Rube—Lord Iron wishes an audience?”

“Lord Silver is not at home to guests.”

“Please. It’s important.”

“Lord Silver is not at home to guests.”

Ruben squinted at the servant. Its eyes were flat grey discs like dirty shillings. An automaton. He pushed past it and into the house.

“Lord Silver is not at home to guests.”

The gloom enclosed him, sticky and stifling and hot, far too hot, for the time of year.

“Lord Silver?” he called out.

It was hard to breathe. The air was heavy with dust, and the whole place smelled sweet and stale, like flowers left to wither in their vase. In the distance, he could hear the whirring and clicking of automatons, the turning of gears sheathed in skin.

“Lord Silver?”

He pressed deeper into that terrible darkness, the everyday processes of his body resonating too loudly in his ears: the rasp of every inhalation, the thump of his heart, the rush of blood through his veins.

Theseus, he thought wryly, would have come better prepared.

Eventually he came to a door under which he could see a gathering of pale light. It seeped over the shadow-smothered floor like a bloodstain.

He knocked, enquired again for Lord Silver, and—still receiving no answer—pushed inside. He was briefly dazzled, but his overriding impression was of a heat so intense as to be almost intolerable. It crawled over him, heavy like some living beast, enveloping him in a shroud of sweat that plastered his clothes to his skin. Salt-sharp moisture dripped down his face from beneath his hat brim. His hair felt absolutely sodden.

“Who is that?” The voice was refined, but terribly thin, rough with disuse. “It is not today. I have counted. Today is not my day. The payment is not ready. Please. It is not today.”

“I’m not here about the payment.”

Ruben took a step forwards, pushing through the heat. Other than a single chair set before the fireplace, the room was unfurnished. A bare floor, walls of peeling silk, the floor-to-ceiling windows covered by thick curtains, cloth of silver faded grey.

Of the man in the chair, Ruben could see little. Just the barest outline of a profile, and a cane that supported one slightly shaking hand. If hand it could be called. It was good work, delicate, articulated, and wrought of the finest silver. The join where it met the ragged red skin of the forearm was a neat, glistening line. But the skill of the artificer could do nothing to disguise the artificiality of their creation, or the twisted brutality of that glittering metal claw.

Some part of Ruben recoiled on instinct. He had seen fleshgrafting before, and rarely to benign purpose.

The man in the chair shifted weakly, restlessly, and half turned where he sat. “Why are you here? I do not know you.”

Ruben stared helplessly. Lord Silver must have been his match in years, but he looked much older. His long, lank hair was threaded through with white, his eyes lustreless, his face devoid of animation or hope. His skin was a network of thin, silver scars, as intricate as old lace. They writhed where the firelight touched them, transforming the man’s features to monstrous patchwork.

“I’m Ruben Crowe. Lord Iron’s so—Lord Iron. I hoped to speak to you.”

“I am not at home to visitors.”

“I had hoped to speak to you about the man they call Milord.”

Lord Silver’s hand clenched convulsively upon his cane. “I know nothing . . . nothing.”

Ruben mastered himself, his pity and his revulsion, and the sickly intersection between them where pity became a kind of revulsion and revulsion became a kind of pity. He crossed the room to the chair and the shattered creature who huddled in it, and dropped to his knees in the firelight. “They have him,” he said gently, “locked in the Spire. He can’t hurt you now.”

Lord Silver’s empty eyes roved agitatedly over Ruben’s face. “The Spire cannot hold him. He is the Devil.”

“He’s just a man, my lord. But what has he done to you?”

The metal hand twitched with an involuntary tremor that ran through Lord Silver’s whole body. “I gave him my soul. And for what? Baubles and vanities and empty rooms.”

The man was clearly half-mad, and Ruben had no idea how to reach him. Or if there was anything left to reach. “I don’t understand. What power can he possibly hold over you? You are a Lord of the Realm. He is the prince of rogues.”

“I went to him. To the alehouse where he sat at cards. And I made a deal with him.”

Ruben could hardly catch a breath this close to the fire. He pulled off his hat, and wiped some of the perspiration from his brow with his coat sleeve. “What kind of deal?”

“I wanted what Lord Silver had, so Milord gave it to me. The title, the house, the wealth.” Lord Silver was shivering uncontrollably. “In return for gold and future favours, he gave me everything. Everything but the signet ring, which is my cousin’s still, though they will not find his body. Not unless Milord wills it. He has the man who killed him too. And this shell they now have named Lord Silver.”

“From what I have heard,” began Ruben, though his mouth felt coated with copper and bile and the taste of his own sweat, “Milord is, in his way, honourable. He would not betray you if it was not . . . was not . . .” Ruben had to swallow, half-sickened “. . . necessary.”

Lord Silver made a strange noise, partway between a sob and a laugh. “I betrayed him. I reneged. I told him I would give him nothing. I th-thought once I had the power and the n-name, he could not touch me.” His other hand, ghost pale, seeming almost transparent, crisscrossed with scars and grey-blue veins, drifted to his face and then back to the arm of his chair. “I was wrong.”

“Oh God.”

“At n-night. He came at night. Killed the household. All of them. The footmen and kitchen maids, the cook, my valet, the butler, the housekeeper, the b-boy who cleaned the knives and boots. There was b-blood. So much blood.”

“Oh my God.”

“M-my doing. All that d-death. Not his. Not his. I m-made him do it. I made it necessary.”

“No.” Ruben’s cry rang out in the room, queer and frantic. “It was not you. It was him. He held the knife, he did it, he murdered them.”

“But he would not have done it,” said Lord Silver, in a brittle singsong, “he would not have done it but for me.”

“He could have chosen not to.”

“He did what was necessary. Only what was necessary.”

Ruben leaned forwards, sweating, trying not to vomit.

“They brought me to him here. It used to be a library. There was a Tintorini hanging over the fireplace.” He pointed at the blank wall with his trembling, still-human hand. “I r-remember he asked me if I thought it was beautiful. He said he did not understand art. He was all in white like an angel.”

Ruben shuddered helplessly. The worst of it was how wistful the man sounded.

“Th-then they tied me to a chair, and he s-sat down opposite, one leg crossed over the other. H-he looked s-so pale and so harmless like one of those g-gilded boys from the Crescent, and he said, ‘Is this Monday? I don’t like Mondays.’ I didn’t truly believe he c-could hurt me. I was a lord n-now. Who was he?”

Lord Silver’s eyes stared blankly, through Ruben into the past.

“I r-remember he had a handkerchief in his breast pocket, w-white silk, and he kept running it over his hands, over and over, a-although he had the b-best-kept hands I’d ever seen. He s-sighed and said this was all so terribly vulgar, and he was irritated that I h-had put him to it. I just struggled, hopeless and foolish, and t-told him to let me go. He looked up from his perfect fingernails and asked me . . . He said quite gently, ‘Have you mistaken me for a quicunque vult?’ I th-think that was when I first knew to be afraid.”

Lord Silver’s metal hand twitched open and closed, the claws leaving deep gouges in the arm of his chair. “And when I did not answer, f-for my mouth was t-too dry for speech, he asked again, and I stammered out some nonsense, and then he struck me, openhanded, as though I was not a man. It humiliated me more than it hurt me, but it still stung. I had n-never been t-touched in violence before. It drove my lip onto the edge of my teeth. And he sighed again.”

“I’m sorry,” whispered Ruben helplessly. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Then he m-made me look at him. His touch was so cold, like ice. ‘Let me put it another way, dear boy. Are you labouring under the misapprehension that I am a whore to be fucked for your pleasure?’ I protested, and t-tried to reason with him, or p-perhaps to plead, but he stood. He took out his handkerchief again and cleaned his hands. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘I have your blood on my handkerchief. How vexing.’ And I . . . I s-said I was sorry for it, but he did not answer, reaching instead for one of the cases he had brought. He lifted one onto his knee and opened it and inside . . .”

His voice failed, and he began to shake.

“You need not tell me,” Ruben told him hastily. But it was for himself he said it.

“I r-remember his hands, his perfect hands, moving s-so lightly, so easily among such t-terrible things. ‘Pilliwinks,’ he said, ‘you might call a local favourite. Brutal but effective. Ah, but have you seen one of these? From the East, I believe. It has a rather fanciful name. How was it translated? “Flower of Anguish.”’ He lifted the object, p-pressing something in the base that caused it to blossom into metal spines. I . . . screamed. ‘Of course,’ he went on, p-paying me no heed at all, ‘not everything need be quite so imaginative to fulfil its purpose. I myself favour simplicity.’ And he put the case aside and picked up a second.”

Lord Silver was silent for a long time. Ruben half wished he would never speak again.

“It was full of knives. G-gleaming, beautiful knives. He f-favoured silver filigree and mother-of-pearl. He picked one up and held it to the gas lamp so the flame fell across the edge of the blade like shadow. Th-then he . . . then he . . . he sat upon my lap like a lover, s-so close that I t-tasted his breath, smelled the night in his hair. He was c-cold, as cold as his knives. Always so cold when he touched me. And then . . . then he cut me.”

Ruben made a soft, wordless, choking sound.

“It t-took him hours. I screamed and wept and trembled, and he’d . . . simply wait. And . . . and afterwards, he cleaned my wounds and sewed them up again. And th-the next night, he came and did it all again. Th-there is no part of me that is not his. The f-final day, I don’t know when it was, he came to me, and sat by my side and explained to me wh-what a bind I’d put him in. ‘We had a deal,’ he said, and I c-could see how unhappy I’d made him. ‘It is not gentlemanly to renege on a debt of honour.’ And I b-begged, I begged him to let me pay my dues, but he said it was t-too late. N-not enough. I was s-so sorry for what I’d done. S-so sorry. I said I would d-double it, triple it, I said I would pay him every month, and I wept and I pleaded with him and f-finally he was merciful. He agreed. I have given him everything. All the wealth. All the power. He has used my name as th-though it were his own.”

Suddenly he looked straight at Ruben, and Ruben could hardly bear to hold his gaze. “But that still left the matter of what I owed him. He has a distaste for violence, and I had disrupted his schedule. So when he . . . when he put the knife in my hand . . . it felt like he felt, smooth and cool like . . . like his skin . . . and I cut off my finger for him. But it was n-not enough so I cut off the others. And th-that was not enough but I . . . was . . . the pain . . . but he helped me . . . he held me steady . . . he guided me, and I cut off my hand. And I th-thanked him for his kindness.”

Moisture had gathered at the edges of Lord Silver’s eyes. “He knows he can trust me now. I will not make him h-hurt me again. I will not make him hurt me again. I will not . . . I will not . . .” Ruben feared he had lost the man to the past, but finally his murmuring ceased and his trembling subsided. “Before he left . . . he t-touched me . . . on the cheek where he had first begun to cut. There was no pain . . . though I sometimes . . . sometimes . . . in my skin there is the memory of knives. He was so g-gentle with me then. He said, ‘You know, Lord Silver, the only thing worse than not getting what you want, is getting it.’”

The cure had been about as painful as the poison, but it had, at least, proven efficacious. Ruben did not return to the Spire, and the days to Milord’s execution slipped away until only one remained.

They were building a pyre in Salvation Square.

Ruben’s principles had not wavered. He still believed no man deserved to burn, regardless of the crimes he had committed, but he could not help Milord. Not because his meeting with Lord Silver had changed the way he felt, but because he knew it had not.

He would still find Milord beautiful. Still want to touch and hold and claim and gentle him. Still want to speak to him of beauty and tea and teach him how to laugh. And maybe how to trust and give and . . . love. In truth, Ruben feared it was he who lay beyond redemption, not the crime prince of Gaslight.

But on that last long night, Ruben knew he could not stay away. Whatever the cost or the consequences, whatever damage it did to his soul or pain it brought his heart, he could not leave Milord to live those final hours alone.

When he entered the cell, Milord turned in his chains, careless for once of their rattling. “Ruben,” he said, “oh Ruben, I did not think you would come back.”

“My God, what happened to you?”

He was in his shirtsleeves, and the informality of it seemed so alien to him that he might as well have been naked. There was a gash upon his cheekbone, a bruise around one eye, and a cut upon his lip. His hands were manacled tightly behind his back leaving him . . . unprotected, somehow. As on Ruben’s first visit, he cultivated the air of a mildly inconvenienced gentleman, but it was less successful than Ruben remembered. The man was more than a little shaken.

He managed to shrug. “Nothing of consequence. One of the gaolers mistook me for a doxy.” At Ruben’s oath, he went on. “Please, there is no need to concern yourself. The man is dead now.”

“Oh God.” Ruben was fast losing all control over his feelings. His thoughts were impossible. “You had to kill him? You could not have taught him a less terminal lesson?”

“It was necessary. And the lesson was for his fellows. None will touch me now.”

Ruben looked at him, so cold, so proud, in his chains and tattered clothes, a monster and a gentleman, a demon with the face of an angel. “Repent,” he begged. “For the love of God, repent.”

“I am not interested in God, and I do not wish to repent.”

“Surely you don’t want to burn?”

“That would be a nonsensical desire.”

“Then repent, and save yourself.”

Milord shifted slightly, tipping his head back that he might meet Ruben’s eyes. “But I am not repentant, or remorseful. You would have me lie?”

“You’ve murdered, tortured, and maimed. Surely you can’t balk from lying?”

“As it happens, it is not one of my vices.”

Ruben took off his hat and ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t understand you.”

“Nor I you.” There was a pause. “I began to think I would not see you again.”

“I . . . I’m sorry.” And, God, he meant it. Milord would die tomorrow, and Ruben had wasted too much time. He strove for lightness. “I’m afraid I did not bring you any tea.”

“I am not concerned with tea at present.”

Ruben took a step across the cell. The other man shivered a little but did not move away. “Please don’t make me watch you burn.”

“I am what I am, Ruben, whatever the world and my choices have made me. I will not change, I will not feign remorse, and I will not seek atonement.” His lips turned up into their thin semblance of a smile. “My only regret is this premature cessation of my activities. It has been quite vexing.”

But there was something else, some pale, shifting shadow at the back of his eyes that belied his words.

“Are you frightened?” asked Ruben gently.

And, after a moment, Milord nodded. “Yes. I am frightened.”

Ruben murmured something he hardly understood himself and drew the man, chains and all, into his arms. Milord did not startle, or pull away, but he was completely unresponsive, rigid against Ruben as though he had never been held. “If you let me help you, even if we know your repentance is nothing but words, it will be quick tomorrow. Very little pain, just the fear of the moment itself.”

Milord twisted, clumsily rubbing the top of his head against Ruben’s chin. “I am not afraid of dying. I am afraid of . . . something else.” He drew back a little, and turned his face up to Ruben’s, his expression intent, uncertain and seeking. “I . . . I have been . . . preoccupied since your first visit. I am unaccustomed to such distraction, and I wish to overcome it. I wonder if . . . if it would not be too great an imposition if you could perhaps—” his voice broke on something perilously close to a plea “—assist me.”

“Of course. What can I do?”

“I wondered if perhaps . . . if perhaps . . .” Milord’s tongue flicked lightly over his cracked lips. “If perhaps you would be willing to . . . fuck my mouth. Or my body, if you would prefer. I am amenable to whatever partialities you would wish to exercise. You could perhaps take me against the wall, or we could use the bed, such as it is, or you could have me on my hands and knees upon the floor—”

“Wait, stop, please stop.”

Milord blinked up at him. “You are not amenable?”

Ruben’s body was very amenable indeed. His mind, however, needed a moment. “It’s not that . . . It’s just . . .” Milord had spent his life transforming want into weakness. It would have been the height of foolishness to trust him now—to believe that this was truly reciprocal, and that he himself was anything other than a mark. But the problem was, Ruben wanted to believe. Deeper even than the physical ache: this fragile hope that a man like Milord could desire him, could feel something that was neither selfish nor cruel. So he took him—as he did so many things—on faith alone. “Are you quite certain?”

“Oh yes. The matter has occupied my thoughts, I will confess somewhat excessively, for some time now. I would be glad to be relieved of such speculations.”

“I see,” said Ruben stupidly. He was starting to recognise that, if this was not merely a manipulation, it was—in some extraordinary way—a seduction. A unlikely word, perhaps, for the obscene invitation of a condemned murderer, but the starkness of Milord’s need stirred him, and the man’s bewilderment touched him.

And he too had been . . . equally and, just as excessively, preoccupied. Ever since Milord had lain beneath him and surrendered.

“You must forgive me,” Milord went on, “but I am not sure how these things are done. When I have previously been troubled by the inclinations of my flesh, I have found it most efficacious to employ the services of a harlot.”

Ruben’s lips twitched. “I’m flattered.”

“I mean no disrespect.” Milord frowned, fidgeting impatiently against Ruben’s body. “If you indeed share my current peculiar particularity of preference, tell me what I must do to properly negotiate your engagement.”

Milord was not a man of soft words, and he clearly knew nothing of affection, but Ruben desired him even so. He could only guess what this confession might have cost him, how foreign to his nature it must have been. So he slid a hand round the back of Milord’s neck, beneath the fall of his seraphim curls, and drew him close, so close. “Nothing,” he whispered, and kissed him.

Milord’s mouth was warm and slick beneath Ruben’s, but otherwise he was perfectly quiescent. Ruben half opened his eyes to find the man staring at him. It was more than a little eerie.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

“No.” Milord gave an awkward, chain-rattling shrug. “You may do that if you wish.”

“You don’t like kissing?”

“I simply do not see the value in it. It seems inefficient.”

Well, that took the fun out of it. He slid a hand between their bodies to discover if Milord’s prick was equally indifferent, and found it hot and straining beneath his trousers. But then Milord twisted away, almost as if his own passion embarrassed him, and dropped at once to his knees on the prison floor.

Ruben’s too-loud, too-rough, too-needy gasp echoed against stone. Milord gazed up at him, his eyes wide and shining, framed by the silver of his lashes. His colour was so high that he looked a little feverish, and while he was perfectly still at Ruben’s feet, it was an edged stillness, full of anticipation and something that might have been fear.

“You’re so beautiful.” Ruben’s voice came out in a growl, thick with lust and possession and the thrill of sexual power.

“So I have been given to understand.” Ruben reached out to caress him, but Milord twitched away, shy as an unbroken colt. “I’m afraid you must assist me.” He tugged against his shackles, making them sing their harsh song.

Ruben shrugged out of his big coat and let it fall to the floor, unheeded. He put his hands to his belt and unbuckled it. Milord watched him, breathing hard, and when Ruben freed his cock, he moaned softly, the sound full of bewildered yearning.

“I . . . I have little facility at this.”

“It’s you I want, not your facility.”

The flush deepened on Milord’s cheeks, and he closed his eyes tight with something that looked like shame. “But I may not please you.”

Ruben stroked the fingers of his spare hand through the curls that gathered sweetly at Milord’s brow. “Look at me.”

No response.

“Look at me.”

But even Ruben’s gentlest, most coaxing voice could not ease the tension in Milord’s shoulders or soothe the pained expression from his face. So he twisted his hand tightly in the man’s hair and jerked his head back.

“Ah.” There was very little pain in the cry. It was submission, as pure as church bells.

“I said look at me.”

Milord looked, his exposed throat rippling as he swallowed his unsteady breaths.

“You please me. I like you on your knees.”

“I . . . I have never wished to be here before.”

“You’re safe with me.”

Milord’s eyes closed again for a moment, and then fluttered open, focusing on Ruben only hazily. “I wish,” he said dreamily, “you would put your cock in my mouth. You may . . . be rough with me, if you would like it. You may . . . do as you please.”

Ruben adjusted his grip on himself, and ran the head of his cock across Milord’s lips, nudging lightly at the scar that marred them. “Open for me.”

Ruben thought he might balk, but no, he yielded, and Ruben pressed inside. God, that a man so cold could be so hot. The interior of his mouth seemed to cling to Ruben’s cock like velvet, and Ruben heard himself groan, pleasure and a touch of shock at the warmth, the softness, and all these surrendered secrets.

He went carefully at first because Milord took him in so uncertainly, glancing up at him almost shyly through the fan of his lashes. And, truthfully, it felt strange—wrong and darkly exciting—to perform this act when Milord’s hands were bound, and the man could take no control of what was done to him. But his own helplessness seemed to simultaneously excite and soothe the man. There was no fear on his face, just something that might have been trust, and an undeniable ardour for this, or for Ruben, or for some inextricable mixture of the two.

Milord’s claims of inexperience had not been mere modesty. It was far from the most accomplished service of its kind that Ruben had ever experienced, but the strangeness of it, and of Milord himself, and his wish to perform it, made it somehow extraordinary, a twisted fantasy of power and powerlessness, lust and tenderness the like of which Ruben would have flinched to imagine, let alone indulge. He had played games, of course, silken bonds and well-trained whores who had begged prettily for whatever he had desired them to. But tonight he stood in a prison cell—the chains were forged of rusted iron and the man on his knees would probably have killed him had he deemed it necessary.

And yet it was the sweetest bliss he had ever known. Milord, all fire and wanting at his feet, his mouth moving clumsily upon Ruben’s flesh, hot and damp and eager, catching him occasionally upon the edges of his teeth; not enough to truly pain him, but spangling brightly through his pleasure like stars upon the deep.

“Oh God.” Profanity, not prayer. “Oh God.”

He had meant to be gentle, he had truly meant to be, but the moment rose up like a great wave and swept him under. Made him wild and a little bit cruel and a little bit helpless, his hands clenching in Milord’s hair and his hips driving him hard into the man’s mouth.

Milord choked, moisture leaking from his eyes and the corners of his mouth, glistening in the wavering moonlight that made silver curlicues of his sweat-damp curls. Horrified, Ruben tried to pull away, but Milord moaned desperately around his cock, his body trembling so hard chains rattled.

He looked utterly debauched, devoid of dignity or shame, yet—to Ruben—perhaps more beautiful than he had ever been. Lost and undone and mine, he thought, startled by the savagery of his own desires. A sort of depraved pleasure surged through him and his hands tightened and he thrust again. Milord made a sound that was not quite a gasp, not quite a sob. A great tremor wracked him, and his spine arched, his hips snapping up in echo of Ruben’s.

And then Ruben yelped in agony, Milord’s teeth scraping fire down the length of his cock as he unceremoniously disgorged it, dripping with spit and mucus and Ruben’s own anticipatory fluids. Ruben’s hands jerked protectively over himself, and Milord crumpled into a heap on the ground, shaking and moaning.

“What . . . what the deuce . . .”

Milord simply lay there, forehead pressed to the flagstones.

Through teary eyes, Ruben risked a glance between his fingers. His cock, though severely discouraged and still horrendously tender, seemed otherwise unharmed. No actual bite marks. Or blood. He shuddered and carefully pulled up his drawers and trousers. It was not his expected or preferred culmination by any means, but now that his initial distress had abated somewhat, it was clear enough that what had occurred—whatever it was—had been largely an accident.

He crouched down gingerly next to Milord. “Are you all right?”

“Don’t touch me.”

Ruben withdrew his instinctively outstretched hand. “Yes, but—”

“And don’t look at me.”

“You’ve assumed a somewhat distracting position. I’m finding it difficult not to. What on earth is the matter?”

“Leave me alone. Leave me the fuck alone.”

There was a long silence.

“Also,” Ruben pointed out, “you bit my prick. I think if anyone gets to lie with his face on the floor, it’s me.”

Milord said nothing. He was still shaking very slightly. Was he weeping? Perhaps the reality of tomorrow had finally struck him. It was not uncommon with criminals on the eve of their execution. Ruben had seen such things before, though admittedly not under quite these circumstances.

“Please sit up. What did I do? Did I hurt you?”

“You . . . you didn’t hurt me.”

Relief rolled through him. “Then what happened?”

“I—” Milord seemed to be trying to actively burrow through the stone. “I was . . . overcome.”

“I was too rough, I’m so sorry, so very— Oh.”

Milord moaned again. “Don’t—”

“I know, I know, look at you or touch you. May I at least offer a handkerchief?”

Since Milord was in no position to object, Ruben levered him up off the ground, unbuttoned him, and cleaned him up. He hissed as Ruben touched him and struggled a little, though perhaps it was only instinct.

Once he was done with his task, Ruben found himself at a loss, suddenly self-conscious. “It’s all right,” he said, as much for his own benefit as Milord’s.

And Milord turned on him with a snarl and a clatter of metal. “It’s not all right.” His voice sounded like the voice of a stranger. “It’s not fucking all right.”

Tomorrow loomed blood red in Ruben’s mind. No. It wasn’t all right. “I’m sorry.”

Milord tried to pull himself to his feet, staggered, and crashed onto his knees again. He made a noise at the back of his throat, all pain and animal rage. “What have you done to me? What the fuck have you done to me? Why do I still feel this?”

Ruben stared into his wild eyes. “Feel what?”

“This . . . this wanting.”

“Oh.”

“How do people live like this? I cannot live like this.”

It seemed too brutal to remind Milord he would not have to live with it for long, so Ruben simply reached out to hold him. He had expected Milord to resist or pull away, but to his surprise, he didn’t. He curled into Ruben like a kitten, as though he had temporarily forgotten what manner of man he was.

He pressed his damp face into Ruben’s neck. “Make it go away,” he pleaded. “Make it stop.”

Ruben hugged him tightly, chains and all. “I’m not sure I can.”

“It was supposed to pass with fornication. Why did it not?”

“Well, at a wild guess, I’d say it’s because you like me.”

Milord’s eyelashes fluttered against Ruben’s skin as he blinked. “That would be unnecessary.”

“Some things just are.”

“How vexing.” Ruben ran his fingers through Milord’s hair, and the man made the softest, most impossible sound. Pleasure? “Besides,” he went on languidly, “you are sentimental, overeducated, sanctimonious, and have used my mouth most ill. How could I possibly like you?”

Ruben cringed and made Milord lift his head. He ran a thumb tenderly over his swollen lips. “God, I’m sorry. I don’t know what—” And then he caught it: some rare glimmer deep in Milord’s eyes. “Wait. Are you laughing at me?”

“It seems only equitable.”

And he would have laughed too, but then he remembered. “Oh, I don’t want you to die,” he whispered, clinging. “And I don’t want you to suffer. Please . . .”

Milord shushed him impatiently. “Ruben,” he said, “I have reconsidered something.”

“You will repent?”

“No. But I would like you to kiss me again. If you would not object.”

“I would not object.”

Ruben cradled Milord’s face between his hands and brought their mouths together. And they kissed and it was awkward, the sort of fumbling collision Ruben thought he had left behind with adolescence. But it was sweet, too, this fresh-born kiss, full of things unspoken and undreamed, and Ruben simply closed his eyes and let it bloom between them. Milord’s lips softened under his and welcomed him, and together they gently learned the ways to move and give and take and dance, sharing breath and warmth and a slow, deep pleasure.

Distantly, Ruben heard the jangle of chains, and then Milord moaned desperately into his mouth, the sound so naked and so afraid that Ruben forgot everything. Everything but Milord, his strength and his need, his loneliness and his unwanted wanting. And a kiss that felt like the first and the last.

It took him a moment to realise Milord embraced him in return, coiled around his body as tightly as a serpent.

Then he felt it: a swift, sharp scratch along his neck.

He broke away with a cry, reaching a hand to the wound. It was shallow, but it throbbed with a peculiar, spreading heat.

Surprised . . . he should not have been surprised.

Milord, kneeling to remove the shackles from his legs, standing, looking down at Ruben.

Who could not move or speak, the world turning slowly round him, smearing black at the edges.

Between Milord’s fingers, a blade: small and silver, the handle made of mother-of-pearl.

Then Milord’s lips were on his again, hungry-harsh, taking, taking, and still so full of wanting. And the blade to his throat, a bright line of pain.

Then gone. The click of a lock.

And from far away: “I just know I will come to regret this.”

And when Ruben woke again, it was to a bleary sense of lost time, the weight of manacles on his wrists, and the taste of a kiss upon his mouth. The cell door hung open, a guard lay crumpled just beyond, his throat a gaping, crimson smile. The prison bell was tolling: distantly came the muddled sounds of screams and gunshots, the clash of steel, and the rough chaos of a riot in full swing.

It would likely be some time before rescue came.

Still half-insensible on whatever drug had been used to incapacitate him, Ruben lay staring up at Milord’s piece of sky where the moon floated in a haze of silver upon a sea of stars.

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Glitterland

Glitterland: Aftermath (Free download)

Sand and Ruin and Gold

Kate Kane, Paranormal Investigator series

Iron & Velvet

Shadows & Dreams

Prosperity series

Prosperity

There Will Be Phlogiston

Coming soon

Waiting for the Flood (March 2015)

For Real (June 2015)

Pansies (September 2015)

Looking for Group (November 2015)

Alexis Hall was born in the early 1980s and still thinks the twenty-first century is the future. To this day, he feels cheated that he lived through a fin de siècle but inexplicably failed to drink a single glass of absinthe, dance with a single courtesan, or stay in a single garret.

He did the Oxbridge thing sometime in the 2000s and failed to learn anything of substance. He has had many jobs, including ice cream maker, fortune-teller, lab technician, and professional gambler. He was fired from most of them.

He can neither cook nor sing, but he can handle a seventeenth-century smallsword, punts from the proper end, and knows how to hotwire a car.

He lives in southeast England, with no cats and no children, and fully intends to keep it that way.

Website: quicunquevult.com

Twitter: @quicunquevult

Goodreads: goodreads.com/alexishall

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