“Uh-huh.” Silas pulled off his own neckcloth, with deliberate friction. He wanted Dom to hear the movement and to wonder. He tightened and twisted the cloth in his hands. “Well, if you don’t want it, you’d better say so. Just a moment, though. Head up. Right, now open wide.”
He pushed the makeshift gag into Dominic’s mouth. Dom made a noise that sounded bloody like terror. His knuckles on the rail were white, skin tight-drawn over bone, but he didn’t let go.
Silas knotted the gag, controlling his hands because they had to feel sure to Dominic, even if he’d never felt anything less himself. He couldn’t tell if this was going a bit too far, or a lot.
But he was no use to his Tory if he went soft, was he?
“Right,” he managed. “You can say what you like now.”
He swung himself off the bed to undress, watching Dominic stretched over the sheets. Silas missed watching his eyes, but there was something about the way the gag pulled at Dom’s mouth and forced his lips apart that made up for it.
Dom’s body was rigid with tension, muscles standing out on his arms, toes curling into the mattress. Fighting for control, and afraid, and prick undeniably flagging. He was scared, blinded, and silenced, but he had his hands on the rail, and he still wasn’t letting go.
There really were no chains like the ones in your head.
Silas crossed to the dressing table. There was oil but no toys here—Quex’s gentlemen probably brought their own or were too dainty to use them, and anyway, that wasn’t what he was after. He’d found what he needed on the marble stand of toiletries for making the gentry look respectable again. A comb with long, sharp steel teeth.
He sat on the bed, listening to Dominic breathing harshly through his nose, watching the tension of his body. Silas contemplated the expanse of chest and thigh, the goose pimples on Dominic’s skin though the fire had been blazing all day.
He ran the comb across Dominic’s chest.
The Tory arced like a bow, lifting right off the bed in shocked reaction, and cried out, sound muffled by the gag. Silas did it again, a little harder, leaving a faint white line, and again, every scrape of the teeth making Dominic thrash and twitch. Caressing his lover with steel, leaving a lacework tracery of fine grazes, watching him curl and groan and make noises that sounded like begging. Didn’t matter what he was begging for, to Silas’s mind, as long as he was doing it.
Up his chest. Skimming the nipple, which elicited a hoarse shout of pain. Across his throat like a murderer’s razor. Over every inch of him, slow and careful, and then faster, light slashes, and then pressing the teeth in till they left pinprick dents. Over and over, until Dominic looked like every inch of him was quivering, and he was as hard as a barber’s pole. Silas had decided the steel comb might be excessive there. Perhaps Dominic might like even that, but he wasn’t going to find out, because the thought made Silas’s eyes water.
“How’s that, Tory?” he murmured, stroking the comb down the inside of one tensed thigh instead and watching Dominic shudder. Silas pressed the teeth in a little harder, forced a cry that sounded like protest. “Not that it matters if you like it or not, not if it gets you ready. And you are, aren’t you?”
Dom was thrashing now, fighting it so hard you could almost believe he was tied to the bed by anything but his own will, and the sense of power was dreamlike. Silas could take something that Dominic hated and make him need and want and plead for it. His Tory, every inch of him, belonging to Silas. He wanted to dig the comb in, to break the skin and leave a mark that wouldn’t fade. Mine. Mine.
“God, I’d do anything,” he whispered aloud and had to pull himself together. “I could make you do anything. Look at you, desperate for it. Like a bitch in heat.” Dominic jerked as if struck. Silas ran his other hand over Dominic’s tensed arse. “You’ll take all the fucking you can get, won’t you? I ought to bring someone in. Rent you out.”
Dominic made the kind of anguished noise that suggested Silas had hit a nerve. Hard words could do more than steel to bring his Tory down.
“Aye, I could do that,” he went on. “Get some strong young lad in to fuck you a few times, scratch that itch of yours, till you’re begging him to stop for real. However long that takes. I’d like to see that. Sit back and watch while some big bravo makes you yell. Stroke my prick and let him do the hard work on you, and then once you’ve had enough, I’ll make you kneel for it myself. Christ.” Dom was curling up, whimpering his need, and the picture Silas had conjured was too fucking much. He nearly spilled the oil, his hand was shaking so.