He should’ve jumped, Leo thinks, madly. Even if it meant destroying himself — it would be better than this, hustled back into a waiting coach and home to his chambers like a sick child. Better to have caused a scene — his head is still buzzing, and he cannot possibly explain what went on upstairs to make him bolt. In the bedroom Daimler faces the wall, as if studying the play of the moonlight over the leaves outside, but the great tension in his bearing would otherwise suggest he holds the palace gardens below in some kind of particular contempt. When he talks at last, he does not raise his voice; it is with the close, tight tones of a man who wishes to make himself understood.

“Did you expect I wouldn’t notice? I, a man who has been entrusted with your care by no lesser authority than your mother. Are her cares so few? Are her responsibilities so small?”

Daimler isn’t speaking to him like he’s the son of an empress — the man’s anger is scarcely restrained. The dizzy confusion in Leo’s head is only continuing to mount. You’d think he had had done something truly unacceptable, worse than refuse a marquess’ daughter, even worse than running wild all over the East End at night — but for the life of him he cannot remember what it is.

The man continues. “You know what it would do to your mother if you were to come to harm. I’ve moved heaven and earth to let you attend tonight, and you’ve squandered that freedom. For your whole life your status and your infirmity have spared you the responsibilities of ordinary men, but there are consequences to such repeated ingratitude.”

“I know it already. I don’t need to hear it from you,” Leopold says, but his own voice sounds strained to him, like an insolent schoolboy’s.

There is a glass waiting for him on the desk blotter already — its contents are the color of dark-brewed tea, but they have the familiar bitter odor of medicine, and Daimler presses the cup into his hands

“Drink this, sir. I have a mind to call your physician. It won’t be the first time we’ve woken him up in the middle of the night.”

“I just need a cold compress, that’s all.” The pain in his leg has only grown — Leo steadies himself against the table, but he can hardly give the impression of grace and ease.

How tired one grows of being given things. The strange taste of the pill Eleanor had given him is still lingering in Leo's mouth — whatever it had been, his brain is still in a whirl long after the pleasanter effects have faded. If he can open a window, perhaps the evening air will clear his mind — and perhaps from there it will be easier to affect his escape.

Daimler recovers his temper somewhat and gives a tight-lipped frown. “You’re very weak, sir, and you’ve had too much excitement. Sit down.”

It isn’t weakness he feels, only pain, and pain is a familiar guest by now. Settling stiffly there against the bed, Leo finishes the bitter draught in two obedient swallows; a flush of resentment rises in him as Daimler kneels down on the carpet to slip the shoes from his feet. His lowered head is beautifully sleek, and not for the first time Leo wonders if he combs his hair in the hallway before he enters a room. The silence is full of recrimination.

There’s still time to keep his word and to meet Bea where he’d promised — he’d almost forgotten that promise, in the evening’s chaos. Men have broken into the palace before half a dozen times; it stands to reason that a sufficiently motivated man should be able to break out of it. He’ll run to Bea if he needs to.

It isn’t that Leopold means to be difficult — his brothers have all caused their mother enough worry for a lifetime and her disapproval is always with him, even in his happiest moments alone in the city with dear Beatrice and her sister. The four of them living together as fast friends like a band of thieves in some fairy story — and Leo wanting nothing more than to be a part of it, to learn how it is that they not only survive but thrive there, living under conditions a prince could hardly dream of. How it is that all four of them have such an easy way with one another, even in the face of impossible mysteries?

Leo has never known the kind of casual touch even other men of his own class seem to enjoy — a friendly arm across his shoulders and he might stumble, too many kisses and caresses and he might be done an injury. Never to go riding, never to play games, never even to go walking outside the privacy of a walled garden. Those forbidden things had only made London and its hazards more inviting. If a fellow might suffer and die from a twisted ankle or a fall from bed then it'd be just as well to die doing something with meaning — something interesting.

It wouldn’t be nearly so disagreeable being looked after if he had better company than an iron-willed equerry and a handful of physicians. Bea would think him worse than a dabbler if she saw him like this, being dressed and undressed like a child too young for long trousers. Daimler goes to unbutton his braces next; his fingers slip loose the embroidered straps and let them fall.

“I’m not made of glass,” Leo says, setting the cup aside. It isn’t worth hiding his sullenness.

“Of course not, sir. What you are made of is much more precious.”

Daimler lets his hand rest against Leo’s waistband, as though waiting for an order. Leo frowns.

“I’m going to bed. I’ll call for you in the morning.”

His vision has begun to swim at the edges. He left Beatrice for this, Leo thinks — he left Beatrice alone. In the morning, then — God knows what he will do, but his new friends need him now. He’ll throw himself on Louise’s mercy and explain it all, even if it humiliates him. She understands what it’s like to be both cosseted and scrutinized, kept under lock and key in a state of protected purity.

“Not yet, sir.”

Leo’s brow furrows. “What do you mean, not yet?”

“What do you think would happen to you if you were to go out at the mercy of rough men?” Daimler’s pale hard face is fixed, and his voice is a low murmur. “They would harm you, Leopold, and for them, it would be easy.”

“I don’t need you to tell me that. I don’t need you to manage me. I don’t need you at all.” Despite his fatigue, his pulse has quickened — something is askew, not just the taste in his mouth but the whole scene. Even the light in the room seems to flicker and jump.

“Look at me,” Daimler says sharply. His voice is queerly husky.

His attendant isn’t an uncommonly tall man, but from this position, Leopold must lift his head to look up at him and the action of it dizzies him. For a moment he stumbles, catching himself by Daimler’s sleeve, but Daimler seizes him in a kiss.

He kisses him on the mouth like a man might kiss a woman, with a deep penetrating pressure — Leo's lips spring apart from the surprise of it, and for a moment the insidious softness of the drug tempts him to yield entirely, to permit this outrageous familiarity for the sake of the thrill of pleasure it stirs in him. Even in his most private imaginings, Leo has never entertained the thought of being with a man — a fellow his own age, maybe, someone to trade pleasures with by hand the way schoolfriends must, a companion. But Daimler is insistently strong and his kisses come too ardently — his hands twist in Leo's shirt and the prince can only tremble at the pressure of his lips.

No one has ever taken such a liberty with him, not ever. This is what the poets must mean, or something like it — when they write of burning kisses, and lips that ache to touch. His own mouth aches like a bruise, and the slick piercing motion of Daimler's tongue fills him with a rising panic that cuts through the dull compliance of intoxication.

Daimler’s grip on his arm is too-tight, sending a throb of pain through him — his hips twitch up in an involuntary motion and he cries out against Daimler’s mouth. That much breaks the spell. Leo presses against him with both arms, struggling to force them apart, but Daimler’s embrace is insistent and he grips him tightly. At some point, Leo doesn’t know when, Daimler has taken off his gloves.

“You’ve never been kissed like that, I wager, a young man should learn how. Look how good you are when you want to be.” Daimler slips between his legs to cup at him; Leo’s cock jumps at the touch.

Shame seizes him, making his chest go tight. “What are you doing?”

"Something you'll like. Was it this you were looking for, creeping off to the slums like a thief in the night? I won’t tell. It will be a matter just for the two of us.”

What does he know of what two men do together? What one man might do to another? Whatever had been in that bitter cup has begun to take effect — Leopold can feel himself beginning to slip into a drowse, even as a creeping dread makes the back of his neck prickle and his new bruises throb.

Daimler strokes the shape of Leo’s stiffened prick through his shirt, at first lightly and then with emphasis. The insistence of his caress brings a pang of sensation so urgent as to be painful — there is a wet patch growing there on the front of his shirt where the seed is welling up from the head of his prick. It feels good to be touched by another person, but it can only be wrong — the man’s touch is slow and deliberate and coaxing. Perhaps this is what all young men learn from their elders and it’s only he who’s never been told.

When Daimler lays his hand on bare flesh, he’s already near the brink. It’s all wrong, it all comes too fast — Leo comes gasping, spilling his stuff in Daimler’s hand with an abrupt intensity so sharp as to be painful. Wrenching himself away, he falls back against the sheets, panting helplessly — his eyes are smarting with tears, not of shame now but of surprise.

“There, now we’re better already. Are you ready to behave yourself? Your mother doesn’t know what you’ve done, or where you’ve been. I’m sure we can both agree that’s for the best.”

Leo is frozen in place listening to that voice, yet not understanding. There on the edge of the bed, Daimler is undoing the buttons of his own trousers. Beneath his gilt and offices, he’s only a man, only another man, with all the desires of one. He has the body of a soldier — there’s nothing weak about the cruel lines of his chest, or the strength of his arms.

“I won’t do it,” Leo manages; he even manages not to stammer. “You haven’t the right.”

“The Lady Eleanor would have given herself to you tonight, if only you weren’t so very ungrateful. I would have given her to you. We’ll have to devise some alternate arrangements ourselves.” He presses his face to Leo’s hair and breathes. “What a beautiful boy you are.”

He ought to scream. He ought to raise some kind of alarm, but the thought of the whole household charging in to find him like this is completely intolerable.

It must be that Daimler wants Leo to do it to him — the shameful things he does to himself when he's alone in bed and his desires have reached an intolerable height, the things he does to please himself and relieve the awful tension of loneliness. All boys must do it, or at any rate, it must be common enough from the amount of censure the topic receives. It hadn't taken long for Leo to connect his solitary pursuits with that unspecified wickedness none of his tutors would dare to elaborate upon. Then what is this?

A man and a woman might kiss, embrace, and touch, all as a prelude to their ultimate coupling — nothing could be more natural than husband and wife coming together. What two men do together is a sin too great to be imagined; when he’s thought of it in his most private moments it’s been only as impressions, fleeting images of strength and of violence. Billy would laugh at him for being so simple, for letting himself be led — but Billy is tall and strong and unafraid for himself, he’d never permit such a thing to happen to himself. Spike is clever, he’d know the words to talk his way out of it, and Beatrice—

With the last of his strength Leo strikes Daimler’s face, but the man catches his wrist and squeezes. The strength in that slim-fingered white hand gives a terribly clear intimation of how easy it would be to wrench his arm back or to squeeze tighter until the bones would creak. Accidents happen to delicate boys.

Leo feels himself grow pale.

At first bleeding beneath the skin feels only like pins and needles — then a rising heat and a terrible stiffness in the affected joint, then the swelling, and all the while, pain. If Daimler were to lay hands on him with purpose, he might have a bleed going in mere minutes — in his wrist, in his shoulder, in his throat, beneath the skin. Days of agony, weeks of convalescence — and questions, about where he had been and what he had done wrong to cause such an injury to himself. Foolish, reckless, defective, broken.

Leopold isn't a soldier, or a fighter, like Billy. He isn’t brave in the face of pain. He’s questioned all his physicians and read everything there is to read about his ghastly condition, and all the while the uneasy truth is clear — he will not grow old, and more than likely he will never marry. He can only submit.

In a detached sort of way, he is aware that Daimler is removing his drawers, that he is handling his unclothed body. He arranges him the way he wants him, until Leo finds himself flung over the bed’s edge, cushioned by the rucked-up bedclothes. His shirt has slipped up past his waist, and his naked stomach trembles against the coverlets.

Behind his back, Daimler is rubbing his own yard with something slick. The sound of it is grotesquely familiar. The next thing he’s aware of is the heavy smell of rosemary and clove, cutting through the clouds of uncertainty — somehow the scent is familiar but its sudden intensity is cloying. Leo has smelled the same stuff before on Daimler's own person, faint and body-warm as a woman's perfume, but he can't imagine how. He is frightened but more than anything he is uncertain of what will come.

“You’ve made things very difficult for yourself,” Daimler says, “and for me.” His tone is firm and reasonable, like a schoolmaster’s, and the heel of his hand rests against the small of Leo’s back. Leo can feel his breath against the nape of his neck. "I daresay you'll never have a wife. I've been more than a wife to you, haven't I? I've dressed you and minded you and put you to bed. I've watched you grow into a young man, and I know what young men need."

Daimler’s hand slips down between his legs to part his buttocks — the intimate touch makes Leo flush with shame and his impulse is to flinch his limbs together, but the terrible laxness has come upon him again. Those cool dispassionate hands press inside him candidly — strange to be touched in such a shameful place, where no one's ever touched him before, not a whole army of physicians and surgeons. He's teasing open that band of muscle, teaching it to slacken, and the strange touch is agonizingly gentle — his blunt fingertips press in and find strange places, doing things to him that Leo doesn’t know the words for. He opens him with his long white fingers, until his hole is raw and swollen and the perfumed grease paints the whole split of him, to the root of his cock.

It takes a terrible effort to keep from sobbing, but Leo can scarcely breathe. He twists his head to the side, gasping. "Please stop, I don't want it, I insist—“

Daimler’s elbow digs in at the small of his back. "Don't struggle. It would be a terrible thing if you were to hurt yourself.” He presses with his thumb from the outside, there on the tender seam of him, and draws his fingertips down in lingering strokes — something inside Leo tightens sharply and he cries out, a startled oh of pleasure-pain, despite himself. “You like that, don’t you? There now, it isn’t so bad as all that.”

The same soft clear voice as if he is chiding him over a spoonful of medicine or a painful injection, as he does this unspeakable thing — coaxing that pang of pleasure into something treacherous, something science hasn’t a name for.

“I hate you for this,” Leo says, with sudden clarity. “I do. I hate you.”

He has never had the liberty to hate anyone or anything — always to suffer and be good and patient and bear it all with self-control and Christian forbearance, when he hates it now, the whole suffocating program of it, of which Daimler is only the agent.

Daimler’s laugh is almost gentle. “You don’t mean that. You don’t know what it is to hate. Now keep still.”

It’s impossible to think after that, for all his thoughts have come unstrung — he’s hard again, so achingly stiff that it twitches and tightens with every slight touch. In shame, he presses himself against the bedclothes, as if letting up his grip long enough to touch himself would mean a total collapse, total oblivion.

The weight of another body against Leo’s back is frightful — stout arms cradle him from behind, and the head of Daimler’s prick is brushing against him, there between his legs. Leo's heart batters away violently in his chest, and his elbows have locked with the effort of holding himself still when every inch of him burns to escape.

His hair is sticking to his forehead, and his cheeks are burning, but all the strength has run out of him like water. His whole body has been overtaken by a kind of drugged laxness, but his mind remains urgently alert, struggling against the seductive drowsiness of oblivion. Daimler toys with him like a doll — he kisses his bare throat, there where the frightened heartbeat is fluttering beneath the skin, and fits himself against him. His left hand has crept up beneath Leo’s shirt to caress him there, raising gooseflesh, but a subtle heat has seized him like a fever.

Daimler’s skin is cool to the touch, and he moves in him slowly and deliberately, pressing his hips against him with obscene delicacy and cupping the soft swell of his nipple. If it were anyone, anyone else, maybe — how he wants to be touched, to surrender to what can only be inevitable now, if not for pain. Even the frailest girl would resist such an assault with tooth and nail, until her last breath.

Leo’s legs are trembling now, and Daimler is fumbling there behind him, sweating into the split of his thighs — his prick is already wet with heavy pearls of spunk, and the slick blunt head of it presses against Leo like a hot coal. It seems impossible — even with the oil running down his thighs and the awful slackness of being opened like a wound for the surgeon’s knife it cannot be possible to be fucked by such a monstrous thing and not be split in two.

Daimler exhales shakily as it presses inside, forcing him open past what the body can bear — the strain of it burns as the blunt head of Daimler’s cock eases past the first ring of muscle. When the first thrust breaks through Daimler gives a shuddering breath, as if in pain — Leo gives an involuntary cry, twisting against the bedclothes, and in turn, Daimler grips onto him tighter for the next great thrust as if to fix him in place for his use. The sound of his breathing is something terrible, raw and alien, as though he is angry with him — as though he is determined to seize him by any means he can and bring him under rein.

The intrusion is too much to bear. He wants to beg him to take it out, he wants to cry that this is killing him, but weakness has come over him; weakness presses the words from his lips and the breath from his lungs. Daimler’s tool is moving inside him, slick with oil, and its crude thickness distends that shameful part of him more and more with each advance. He’s impaling him inch by inch, working that horrible thing inside him with small rocking thrusts that slowly quicken. The shattering pain of it is worsened still by the lewd satisfaction Daimler takes in driving home each thrust of his cock — the filthy sound of his hard breathing and the slap of skin all sound like they’re coming from another room, somewhere very far away. There must be blood, Leo thinks — he must be bleeding, this is too much. He will bleed and bleed and never stop.

He’s going to have a fit like this, right here on the bed, he can feel it — the storm is raging inside his head, the world has come unanchored and there is only the indignity of it battering him like a wave. He is going to die like this. Split, ruined — come unstrung, like a badly-made doll. He must be crying again, because Daimler shushes him like a child, stroking the nape of his neck. When oblivion takes him it is a mercy.

*

Daimler finishes inside him, after the boy has gone still — he pours himself out in a hard hot expenditure and stays inside that warm tight hole until his cock has softened. He holds him then a while, breathing in the sweat of his own satisfaction and cleaving to his charge like a drowning man; he presses kisses to his neck.

The prince is beautiful even now, rumpled and bruised. The translucent skin of his throat is shining with sweat, and his young face is no less pure in aspect than before — purer, for being sunk in sleep and not furrowed with discontent. There is a steady rivulet of blood running from his nose. Daimler blots it firmly with a handkerchief until the flow stops.

The world is his within these walls. Daimler will make him see that.

*

The prince wakes in a clean shirt, lying in an empty bed. There are spots of scarlet on the bedsheets, and Leopold is alone.

He has had enough examinations in his short life to know what to look for — to single out the places where the pain is worst, or the sensations most concerning, to assess his own condition on an hourly basis. All his joints are throbbing, and his head aches like he’s had too much wine. A gingerly scan reveals a body awash in bruises and their accompanying aches— but then he acquires such marks easily, dark purpling stains there at his hips and shoulders where the joints already stand out, deep discolorations like the prints of a hand. It doesn't take much to leave him lamed, and the painful hitch of muscle in every motion of his leg is unhappily familiar. His knees are reddened and sore, but that much is no more than can be expected, from a stumble on the Marquess’ terrace or a jostling carriage ride.

They’d left the ball together; they’d argued; Daimler had given him his medicine and put him to bed. What he’d dreamed after that is inconsequential. And — that, too, the dull splitting pain and the uneasy slickness at the meeting of his legs. There are ordinary reasons for that too — perfectly humiliating ones, but normal enough for an invalid, so unremarkable that he needn’t remember. No reason, then, why Leo should feel as if he hasn’t rested at all. No reason then why his mind is awash in fractured images, memories that bring the heat of shame to his cheeks. All of it is nothing. He doesn’t even remember what it is he hasn’t done.

At the washbasin he inspects himself, taking up the towel with shaking hands. The blood has scarcely dried on his upper lip, and on the side of his throat there is a spreading bruise like the pressure of a thumb.