The Tied Man

Finn

I listened to Henry’s regular, brisk footfalls echo and recede as he escaped Blaine’s dungeon to the haven of his kitchen to crack on with the washing up.  The poor bastard always hated stringing me up; he apologised all the while even though he had as much control over his job as I did, and he couldn’t bring himself to look at me once I was naked.  I was only glad it wasn’t Coyle’s job tonight.

I waited in the darkness, breathing deeply and urging the everything I’d necked over the last few hours to kick in fast and hard so that it would begin to quell the panic that the shadows always caused me.

A nocturnal junkie, scared of needles and scared of the dark.  The irony was hilarious.

After what could have been ten minutes or an hour, I felt the muscles in my shoulders begin to release their grip as the dope continued its steady, reassuring journey around my body.  I shifted my weight whilst my legs could still support me:  I had minutes at most until it would be easier to give in and hang by my wrists.  Payback would come the next day when every joint in my arms would scream at me for the slightest movement, but in the now of my immeasurably fucked-up existence, ‘tomorrow’ was nothing more than a shifting, inconsequential concept.

What I needed more than anything else in the whole wide world was for the grey blanket to cover my soul and turn my thoughts into muffled thuds in a distant room and to smother the loathing like it always did once I trusted and let go.

Lilith’s ice-blue eyes, piercing the evening’s darkness as she challenged me, haunted me still.  I had been a cunt to the only woman who had ever shown a sign of giving a damn, and as the velvet fog closed in I gave a secret smile to the wall.  It looked as though my penance had already been worked out.

I heard her voice first.

‘I see the guards have caught our runaway.’

Great, I thought.  Role-play, and crap role-play at that.

The location really didn’t help.  In my time at Albermarle, I had been fucked and flogged by more knights and their ladies than I cared to count, and it was always the same banal, predictable shit.  However many grand a night, months of meticulous, erotically-charged planning, and they couldn’t get beyond ten yards of lurid polyester satin and a few mangled thees and thous for their money.

‘Now slave, you’re going to have to be punished,’ Royce said, in a low voice that was his best pissed attempt at command.

Scriptless,  I kept still and silent.  Knew that my first wrong move could get me seriously hurt.

Naturally, this was my first wrong move.

‘I said you’re going to have to be punished, you ignorant shit,’  Royce snarled.  ‘I expect a fucking response.’  He grabbed a handful of my hair and wrenched my head back, and I yelped in equal parts pain and shock.

‘Yes master,’ I offered, sounding like a complete twat, but hopefully playing the role.

‘Yes, Emperor,’ Royce corrected me, and I squinted and forced myself to focus on my clients.  For the first time I saw what they were wearing, and I thanked God that I was too doped to remember how to laugh.

I should have guessed by the after-dinner smalltalk:  Royce plainly fancied himself as Julius Caesar, or more likely Caligula, and had changed into an ill-fitting homemade toga that emphasised a pot belly and legs like twigs. He looked like the same, sad little man, albeit in a white king-sized sheet, but in his mind he was a Roman emperor.

Selena sat on the edge of the bed, stoned and pissed to high heaven on the cocktail of narcotics they’d been necking over dinner, her new and improved breasts spilling out of a lime green chiton that barely covered her long, bronzed thighs, and her calculating gaze appraising me as though I was her latest purchase.  Which, to my rapidly gathering concern, I was.

To start, Royce ran a trembling hand over my hair and then down my neck, spine and arse.  There was the usual moment’s dread that he had suddenly decided to get curious for his money, and I began to alter my breathing and will those muscles to relax in anticipation of the coming assault.  I could hear his excited, raw breath and I wondered if he was together enough to remember to use lube.

He bluffed me.  The only time his hand lingered was when it reached the soft flesh behind my left knee.  I felt the ball of his thumb brush across the tendons and delicate skin there and foolishly thought, Not too bad.

‘Are you sure you brought it?’ Selena demanded, her voice urgent and shrill.

Royce straightened from his examination.  ‘It’s in my bag, darling.  I was hardly likely to forget now, was I?  I even found a sterile one.’