"What wouldn't I do with a pretty little thing like you? This must be my lucky night."

Marcus has thrown himself into the role of train-robber with abandon — there is a sharp deliberation to his step that makes Laszlo's skin crawl pleasurably. With his turned-up collar and fierce young face, scarf tugged down to his breast, he looks like a hungry young bandit — there is a terrible bottomless cruelty in that face, a cold and steady flame of cruel contempt. He opens a folding knife without a flourish, as coolly and simply as if he were going to carve away a sliver of evidence for sampling and laboratory testing — but it is Laszlo who is his specimen here, and he advances on him to conquer.

Seated, Laszlo wears a simple nightdress of eggshell white and stockings without a corset. Some elements have proven a bridge too far, and such light and flimsy dress more easily straddles the line between outraged modesty and indecent boldness. Marcus makes swift work of him, catching at the smooth linen with the blade of his knife — the motion is so brutally efficient that Laszlo startles, nearly forgetting his role as his assailant goes about slashing the linen and lace into strips to bind him. He does not do this carelessly; the highest and most removed faculty of Laszlo's mind notes that the strain on his bad arm is only a dull sensation of tension.

The unnatural pose forces his chest forward, in a posture of which he is acutely aware when Marcus rises and rounds on him — his heart beats dreadfully in his chest, and the touch of air against the skin of his chest raises his whole body in delicate goosebumps. The reflexive uncounterfeited dread must show in Laszlo's face — the delicious apprehension of what comes next, and of how he has surrendered himself to the judgment of another. Marcus tilts his chin up with one hand, rubbing the cold metal of the blade against his cheek. It is a slow and deliberate act.

How can such an innocent face assume such thrilling cruelty? There is heat in his every motion, a terrific banked heat. If being a police detective were not to his taste, Marcus would do well to take to the stage.

"When I first saw you, you were dressed so prim and proper. But you're no angel, I can tell."

The higher part of him thinks: dear God, where does he read these things? But the part of him that is here now answers like a struck chord, deep and low. Beneath the linen and lace, his prick is filling with blood — the delicious awfulness that fills him now is not purely sexual, or at least not relegated to the kind of animal reflex that traditionally characterizes arousal in the human male, but his body is responding regardless. Not just in the steady hardness that strains at pretty cloth but in the quickening of his breath, the reflexive readiness of his body for struggle.

Marcus strokes the back of his neck. Laszlo spits at him and earns a hard jostle of the chair's back legs against the carpeted floor.

"That's not very ladylike," Marcus says. "Now sit tight, and don't fight me. If I see you move an inch, I'll give you the kind of treatment that'll make you sorry, and you don't want that, do you?"

He is taunting him, or more aptly teasing him. Laszlo twists in his bonds uneasily but accepts the touch from a hand that still holds the cold handle of a folding knife. He comes to desire the punishment that is promised, not to dread it, and resignation to his bonds becomes an easier prospect. His conscious mind is sinking deeper into ritual. Yes, there will be struggle; yes, he may beg and plead and be as mouthy as he pleases, and Marcus will bear him through it unrelenting, undisgusted and undeterred. If this is the woman's part — pursued, exposed, taunted for his weakness — then Laszlo will take it on himself, the better to understand.

Marcus rends the garment to the waist, destroying the last covering to his modesty — kneeling against the chair to which Laszlo is bound, he presses a knee between his legs. He experiences the mad desire to press himself against him, to squeeze out his release, but he must resist. Bound hand and foot, his body is like a statuette — shaped by the hand of desire without the plumbline of rational thought to guide it. Beautiful and terrible and completely subordinate yet inflexibly strong. The hard wood presses against his backside, the torn cloth cuts creases into his skin, but he is fierce as stone and his loins are stiff as ivory. His prick is hard and proud, and the taut stirring in Marcus' trousers suggests a similar state of affairs on the part of his tormentor.

Marcus brushes the backs of two fingers down the slope of his chest — he is relishing his helplessness with a diabolical pleasure, but also with the pride of the craftsman, the actor who sets the scene or the artist who lays in the broad strokes of underpainting before building up finer details stroke by stroke. He is proud of what he's reduced him to.

"I won't give you what you want," Laszlo says.

His voice is broken, but he can still summon up an admirable hauteur — the maiden on the brink of her own outrage, the virgin about to be sacrificed. Marcus breathes a laugh, gripping the back of his neck.

"Who said I was asking? I'm here to take."

"If you don't untie me, I'll scream."

"Scream all you want. I might like it."

Marcus' thumb grazes his nipple; the coolness of his thumbnail makes it harden to a shallow point. Laid bare now, Laszlo wants to be struck, caressed, pricked with the blade of a knife — all these possibilities now are laid out before him like surgeon's instruments on a dark cloth, any one of them ready to be taken in hand. He must let it happen.