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The match over, the brown-haired pet stood and left the ring. His softening cock bounced against his thigh like a testament to his victory. The blonde pet tried to stand and fell, catching himself on his elbow. The crowd’s murmurs got louder; they were distracted, impatient. An un-painted servant came onto the sand and helped the pet onto his feet. They came towards where Damen knelt at the prince’s feet and Damen could see the pet’s face. He searched it. Something very important was in there, something Damen had to find quickly, he needed to know.
Both pets were slight, not trained wrestlers by any means. The bout had been a farce, perhaps the victory was choreographed, as was the struggle afterwards. The mock rape.
The servant and the pet passed out of the ring, close enough for Damen to almost touch. The blonde’s eyes were hazy, his mouth was open. Sand stuck to his cheek. The shifting crowd swallowed him even as Damen turned his head to look. The pet was still naked, and there was blood on the back of one of his thighs.
Laurent tugged a little on the leash attached to Damen’s collar. Damen turned forward, back to the ring where the blonde pet had been fucked. He realized he was hard. The soft silks around his waist did nothing to hide the thickening of his cock. It made sense, didn’t it? All around the ring, pets tended to their masters after the show. The loser…blonde, small, shivering. In Akelios he would have been treated differently, even as a slave. He would have been fucked in private, gently. Damen would have made sure he orgasmed.
He couldn’t think. Hadn’t the other pet had fucked the blonde to an orgasm, every eye in the room on his whimpering release, bleeding or not? It was a performance, pre-arranged.
The ring was empty and the crowd was impatient. Damen knew what was coming, a hazy certainty like in a dream.
Laurent lifted refined fingers in a pre-arranged signal to the guard.
His delicate fingers were at Damen’s throat and the chain detached from the collar. The gold slithered against his bare chest and Damen’s mouth fell open, the sensation was so much. Something was wrong. He couldn’t think…
The guard, a bearded man in livery, clamped his hand down on Damen’s shoulder. He seemed to expect Damen to walk into the ring of his own accord and when Damen did not, he pulled out his sword. Damen went.
“You kept pestering me to put a pet in the ring,” Laurent was saying to Vannes and the other courtiers who had joined him. “I thought it was time I indulged you.”
But I’m not a pet, Damen thought. He was a slave. His master arranged for him, and his choice was either to obey or be forced at swordpoint.
It was nothing like entering the arena in Akielos, where the fight was a show of excellence and the prize was honour. The guard stripped the silks off Damen’s hips with one hand and pushed him to his knees, naked, in the center of the ring. He was still hard. How…? His asshole was warm from how it had been opened—prepared—in the baths. He felt again a strange sort of sick dizziness that robbed him of clear thought. The sand was coarse and painful under his knees.
It was impossible that this was happening. It was impossible that he had to participate in it, his own debasement. The crowd blurred until he did not think he could pick Laurent out of it, even by his white blonde hair or hateful eyes.
Then his opponent settled to his knees in front of him, and Damen was afraid.
There was no way that this brute was a pet. He had been chosen for his size, not his looks. His hair was a lank black cap. His chest was a thick pelt of hair that extended all the way down to his exposed groin, where his cock dangled, soft and already daunting. His nose was flat and broken; he was clearly no stranger to fights. Damen imagined Laurent pressing a scented handkerchief to his nose as he walked through a mercenary camp, in search of the largest cock in the bunch. Fight the Akielon, fuck him, and you’ll be well rewarded. If only Laurent could hear how his own men talked about him…! He must know how they wanted to fuck him, that his aloofness only encouraged their fantasies about spreading him, ruining him. Dainty Laurent, who looked more like a slave than Damen ever, ever had.
The man Laurent had chosen to rape his slave put his arms around Damen’s shoulders. A parody of a wrestling position. His arms were heavy, furred, and he smelled of sweat rather than oils and perfume like Damen. The mercenary’s eyes were cold as they passed over Damen’s body. Cataloguing, no doubt, the marks of yesterday’s beating, the weaknesses that days of harsh confinement left on his body. Damen tried to appraise the mercenary as he would a partner in a wrestling match in Akelios, but he could not concentrate. His thoughts broke to pieces at every shift of the man’s skin against his own, even the smell of his breath.
The mercenary’s hand found a bruise forming on the ball of Damen’s shoulder and pressed down. Damen’s eyes narrowed and he refused to make a sound. The mercenary marked Damen’s helpless erection with a crook of his eyebrow, as if it was a joke. Damen felt sick.
Around him, the crowd began to shout its impatience. The presence of two powerful adult men in the ring released something that the pets had not; insults, bets and ribald speculation filled the room with noise.
“Barbarian,” they shouted.
Damen would not be raped in front of these courtiers and their painted pets. They wanted to see a barbarian in the ring? They would get a barbarian.
He raised his arms around the mercenary’s broad shoulders. This was not a wrestling match; the violence here, now, was real as battle, as blood.
The red scarf lifted and fell. Begin.
The mercenary was a mountain. Damen was ready for his first heave: he kept his knees under him, braced his chin to his chest, his forehead on the mercenary’s shoulder, surrounded by his bulk. His limbs felt strange, sluggish, as if they didn’t belong to him. His cock throbbed.
It wasn’t him… Something…
The mercenary held Damen’s skull between his palms and his thumbs sought the soft jelly of his eyes. Damen twisted instinctively, putting distance between them. His opponent allowed it, showing his teeth.
This was not, Damen told himself, an honorable man. Those parts of the body that were soft and tender and that, in fair sport, would be avoided, must now be protected at all costs; his opponent was willing to tear, rip, and gouge.
The exertion of fighting dizziness to stay upright was itself enough to overheat him. Damen pushed forward and gained a hold on the man, but when he tried to call on his strength to take advantage of the leverage, dizziness unsteadied him. The mercenary hit his stomach with a closed fist, layering the blow on top of old bruises.
Damen coughed, robbed of breath. The crowd roared in his ears. He got back to his knees. He thought suddenly of the over-sweet smell in the baths…the incense in the brazier…drugged, he realised as his breath heaved. A drug to scatter his thoughts and arouse him. Pre-arranged by Laurent.
Some of the wetness that the servants pushed inside of him in preparation trickled down Damen’s thigh, or maybe he was sweating. All of this, a horrible joke played on the prince’s slave.
The mercenary twisted Damen’s bruised arm, that yesterday one of Laurent’s men had hiked too far up Damen’s back while another beat him. He choked out a pained noise—swallowed by the crowd’s dull roar. The mercenary’s hand slipped on Damen’s rose-scented, oiled skin, and Damen took the advantage. He couldn’t run; he was a slave; he had to participate. He grappled with the mercenary, relying on his better arm. He felt the man’s warm breath against his neck.
In the next second he was on his back, pinned by his bad shoulder and a hand just under his chin, crushing the gold collar down into his windpipe. Damen gasped for breath. The ceiling spun, the sound of the crowd surged. He felt the push of the man against him, the damp, hot trail of his cock across Damen’s hip.
Now Damen recognized the drug clouding his head. Chalis. A slave’s drug. He’d taken it as a prince once, a small dose calculated to keep his cock hard on a birthday he’d spent with Lykaios. She had gotten sore so he had another slave brought in to satisfy him while she rested; at that time of night there were no blondes left and Damen settled for the best trained, a slender youth who licked Lykaios as Damen fucked into his oiled hole, unable to wait. It’s nice, isn’t it, Lykaois had said sweetly, a little sly like Damen had allowed her to be with him. Chalis makes everything easy.
The heat now was unbearable. Damen wasn’t aroused by this brute of a man thrusting against Damen, his breath now coming in soft grunts. But his body was aroused. His cock twitched. His mouth fell open and he choked for breath.
The mercenary’s hand fell away from Damen’s throat—Damen’s thighs were forced apart. He struggled to break the man’s hold, to no avail. He wasn’t strong enough.
A hand holding his wrist to the ground, a hand on his diaphragm, pushing the air out of him. The mercenary’s hips ground forward, the tip of his cock bumping against Damen’s thighs, the split of his ass.
The man was trying to mount, searching dumbly for Damen’s hole: slick and open, prepared for this rape. Damen pressed the crown of his head to the coarse sand, pointing his chin up at the ceiling. It was just a performance.
It hurt when the cock penetrated him. Of course it hurt. Nothing like the slender, talented fingers of the slaves he guided through pleasing him with their hands and mouths. Worse than the humiliation of the impersonal servants’ fingers in the baths, slicking Damen but not enough. Brutalize him, Laurent would have told the mercenary, His people want to kill you, rape your women and children, and turn your grandchildren into savages. Fuck him hard.
The mercenary did, heavy flesh crushing Damen into the sand. Damen ground his teeth together and thought only of keeping silent. He had been a soldier; at age thirteen his brother stabbed him through with a sword; soon the Veretian guards would make a mistake and leave an opening for Damen to escape. First he would be raped in front of the slavering courtiers of a degenerate court, but he would take it quietly.
He almost did, except a small gasp that escaped when the mercenary dropped Damen’s hips onto the sand and came across his thighs.
The crowd was quiet, sated at the spectacle. The triumph of Vere over Akielos. Lights and colors moved slowly in the corners of Damen’s vision. The mercenary was gone from the ring, having earned the gold he was no doubt promised. Damen’s cock was hard and wet at the tip. He could not tell if he had orgasmed. His head was spinning and he couldn’t remember.
He had lost. His head lolled and he looked for the prince, his master. The blur of his vision sharpened on Laurent, picking him out of the background as if he sat in a painting. Damen expected triumph on his face, abject cruelty, or perhaps a pet in his lap, this victory shattering the ice that the guards so bemoaned. What he saw was worse than all those things. Laurent had his blonde head propped on a fist, and he stared off slightly to the side of the ring. He looked bored. He looked as if he had not even watched.
Damen was filled with a rage so sudden and so vile that his stomach lurched with nausea. No. He would not vomit. He would follow this carefully pre-arranged performance to its conclusion. And when the Veretian guards made their mistake, Damen would kill their prince. He would do it with his own hands. He would watch.
Damen pushed himself to his feet. He went slowly, but he did not stumble. He did not look down at his wet thighs. He did not flinch at the ache and, against every rebelling instinct, he forced himself forward and dropped to his knees before Laurent.
The words of Councillor Guion came back to Damen, almost crazily. It’s in poor taste.
Laurent looked at him. He was blonde and beautiful and indifferent, as if he had never tasted rage. Damen looked down and said nothing, only offered himself, as a slave should. Look at me. Look at what you have done.
For a moment, silence. The crowd was murmuring, bored again, already looking for the next spectacle.
Laurent extended his right leg slightly, the tip of his well-turned boot presenting itself to Damen.
“Kiss it,” Laurent said. His voice was flat, as if he did not care if Damen did it or not.
Damen swallowed bile, bent his head, and pressed his lips to the smooth leather. The arch of his back ignited the ache inside his passage, turned it sharp and piercing, even as the chalis kept his cock heavy with blood. He forced himself to move with unhurried respect.
He kissed just the curve of the toe tip. In Akielos an eager slave might have continued upward, kissing the arch of Laurent’s foot, or, if they were daring, like Lykaios, higher.