Sir Simon pushed up with his knees and pressed down on Rudi’s shoulder blades and then, quickly lowering his buttocks and jutting forward, thrust down and up, sending his hard shaft deeper up into the fourteen-year-old Russian boy’s ass, in a dipping deep fuck of the boy whore. Rudi groaned and Sir Simon grunted as he thrust again ... and again ... and then, with a release of breath, came in the boy’s ass channel. He tensed and then, with a sigh, released again ... and then, in a weaker seeding, released a third and last time. Rudi quivered, unable to move further as his wrists were bound to the edges of the headboard of the small bed with leather bonds and his ankles to the edges of the footboard. A leather bolster had been inserted under the boy’s belly to lift his buttocks to the desired angle for Sir Simon’s maximum access. Rudi had not cried out during the whole taking. He was a sturdy lad, trained to this, and there was no one to heed an relieve a cry.

A leather hand whip lay beside Rudi on the bed. The boy’s back and buttocks were crisscrossed with red welts. Sir Simon had taken his pleasure before taking his pleasure again.

“Boy. Come,” Sir Simon called out, and the door to the small bedroom on the second floor of the Alister Club in London’s Knightsbridge district opened and another fourteen-year-old boy scurried in and helped Sir Simon sponge off his loins before aiding the man, robust nearly to the point of obesity, into his day suit. Rudi, still bound, would continue lying on the bed until Sir Simon had left the room and someone could come to his aid.

While he dressed, the man listened for moans and groans to be heard from the used boy, but heard none. That did not please Sir Simon much. He walked to the bed cupped the boy’s chin and turned Rudi’s face to him to see of the boy was conscious. He was, although his eyes looked a bit glazed over. The man let the boy’s head drop, but he slapped him hard across the face. Still not getting a yelp, Sir Simon turned and strode out of the room.

The Alister, a very exclusive and discreet men’s club, was located in a nondescript, but quite well-kept townhouse on Montpelier Walk. All of the male members were either titled or fabulously wealthy and powerful in the city and beyond; all seven of the boys on offer in the club were fourteen. They weren’t admitted to the service until their fourteenth birthday and at fifteen they were sold to one of the several male brothels in the city. The philosophy of the patrons sponsoring this club was that fourteen was the perfect age for a boy to be used—he was beginning to form into a man, but he was still pliable and obedient. If he was small, willowy, and more pretty than handsome, it was all to the good—until, by the age of fifteen, he had been spoiled of innocence.

There was only one men’s parlor in the house, located at the back of the house, on the first floor. It was not a club where men either dined or spent much time in each other’s company. The club service rooms—a kitchen and dining room for the boys, an office, and bedrooms for the club manager, Felix Lampon, and for the two male guards—were located on the ground floor. Felix had his own cottage and family in the back garden of the house, but he maintained a room with a bed in the main house because it was he, sometimes with the assistance of one of the guards, who trained the boys to their duties.

The first and second floors housed bedrooms where the members used the boys. The bedrooms were well-appointed but small, but each had its own water closet, with a bathtub where the member either could clean himself or use one of the boys, if that was his desire. The third floor was where the boys slept and where, in one room, they took their lessons. The club promised to teach the boys to read and write, highly desirable skills in the last decade of the nineteenth century, before the boys went to an adult male brothel. This service was a ripe plum for boys happy with going with men. It offered them room and board and a bit of extra when they pleased the men, and the pain and unusual taxing often was no more demanding than they would experience otherwise. Despite their contracts being subject to sale, no boy was doing this involuntarily. They all had sought the position, or their parents had sought it for them.

The basement of the building was a stone-walled and -floored chamber outfitted with equipment where the boys could be used more exotically and taxingly.

The Alister was a club catering to extreme fetishes with fourteen-year-old boys, a very specific service for a very discerning, private, and well-heeled clientele.

Rudi had satiated Sir Simon’s basic need although he had not fully satisfied the man. Rudi was Russian and, although fourteen, was of large-boned, muscular, sturdy stock. His life had been a rough one before entering the service of men. He had learned too quickly to separate himself from the pain and humiliation that the patrons sought from the boys. He managed what Sir Simon took from him and performed on him stoically, with little response. Sir Simon preferred his fourteen-year-olds small and pretty and at least seemingly vulnerable. He wanted to hear the boy cry and scream and beg, even if largely feigned.

The club engaged lads who could take it, who had a rod of steel inside them and who got some pleasure out of being used totally themselves, but it understood that men like Sir Simon wanted a boy who writhed and cried out and who seemingly were broken by the use as if for the first time—even though Sir Simon new the boys well enough to know it was not the first time, that it probably wasn’t even the first time that day.

He, like most patrons of the club, didn’t usually linger, wishing to leave as soon as he had relieved his fetish need, but on this day he did linger as the day was snowing and he’d sent his Hanson carriage back to the Belgrave Square house rather than have it sit and wait for him in Knightsbridge. Felix sent one of the boys to fetch the carriage and ushered Sir Simon to the small parlor in back, where there was a fire in the fireplace and port on the table. Lord Cameron, a younger man that Sir Simon and also in fitter shape and more handsome of face, was already in the parlor, occupying one of the wing chairs drawn up to the fireplace and drinking port. The two men knew each other and their country estates were nearly adjoining in Kent, near Maidstone, but they reacted to each other in this environment as merely polite strangers. Neither would mention to anyone else that they had seen, let alone sat with, the other on this day.

Lord Cameron gestured Sir Simon into the other wing chair by the fire, and Sir Simon sat there. They could hardly talk in this environment about affairs in parliament or their estates in Kent. So, they talked of what they could not discuss anywhere else. They conversed on the shared reason that brought them here and that they would not mention elsewhere if they could avoid it.

“Clarence, me,” Lord Cameron said. “And you?”

“Rudi,” Sir Simon answered.

“Ah, yes, the Russian boy. Endurance. I no longer ask for him myself.”

“Yes, I doubt I will do so again.” It was spoken almost as if by regret.

“Satisfying this time, though?” Lord Cameron asked.

“To a point. That endurance issue, though. He takes the whip well, but possibly too well. But he is pleasantly tight.”

“Ah. You like to break them?”

“Yes. Or at least seem to have. A fourteen-year-old boy. Just the right age.”

“I quite agree. Signs of manhood, yet still supple, yielding, a certain innocence still. Recognizing authority, trusting, and in awe of the pleasures received and given. Not questioning, whatever they are tasked with—how much they are tasked. Still learning, and thus still seeking.”

“Rudi has perhaps been here too long, become too enduring.”

“Yes, I completely understand. Clarence falls a bit short as well.”

“Rudi doesn’t cry anymore. He doesn’t scream or beg.”

“Clarence screamed a bit this time—not with the cock, but with the fist. Not enough for highest pleasure, though.”

“Timothy, the redhaired Irish boy, with the curly hair, hazel eyes, the slight body, the lovely skin. He writhed. He cried. Just the way he lay afterward, the way he lay quiet and followed you with his eyes around the room, and asking if there would be more—giving the impression he both wanted and didn’t want more.”

“There was that impression conveyed with Timothy, yes,” Lord Cameron said. “After you’d prepared and covered him, you found you had another hardening in you after all—and more strength in your flogging arm.” The two men shared a companionable chuckle. “Yes, that Timothy was the best in years.”

“None of the boys this year compare.”

“Yes, I completely agree.”

Felix, who had been listening at the door smiled grimly and then knocked, opened the door, and took one step inside. Although he managed here, he didn’t belong in this room with these men, and he accepted that.

“Your carriage is here, Sir,” he said, looking directly at Sir Simon. He couldn’t address the man by name, as the patrons studiously would not recognize each other by name, pretending they would not know. He stood to the side as Sir Simon walked by him and to the front door of the fetish brothel, and when he was gone, Lampon turned to Lord Cameron and said, “If you are on the rise again, Sir,” which the young Lord Cameron obviously was, as he was stroking the bulge at his crotch, “Jimmy is ready for you in Room 2.”

Lord Cameron was an athletic, virile young man. He did not take the risk or waste a trip to the Alister Club to dally with just one boy. He stood and reached into the chair and came up with his riding crop. He would need his riding crop. Jimmy was the third son of an impoverished country squire Lord Cameron knew. The father raised thoroughbreds. Jimmy was a thoroughbred. He would give Lord Cameron quite the ride—even if doing so wasn’t in Jimmy’s plan. Especially if doing so wasn’t in Jimmy’s plan.

Eddie huddled in the falling snow against a wall on Belgrave Square in a position that he could see the entrance to Sir Simon’s townhouse on the adjacent side of the square. The occupants of the house he was crouching before were gone for the Christmas holidays or they might have sent a servant out to send him away. He wasn’t the only one who came to Belgrave Square to beg for spare change, though. He knew the people weren’t in residence because he’d already been around the house, testing the windows for possible entry, and coming up short. He would have preferred to case Sir Simon’s house from the shelter of a parlor even if it would be nearly as cold inside as it was on the outside. And the house may have some treasures he could “borrow.”

What he could see of the entertainment rooms through the windows from outside, though, revealed that the furniture was covered. There also were no Christmas decorations—no tree or trappings—and Christmas was less than a week away. This family was elsewhere and would be so for some time yet, probably into the new year. Eddie would come back, with tools to gain entrance on another day. He was pursuing other interests today, however.

He remained on lookout, watching the doors of Sir Simon’s house—both the main door on the first floor and the door under those stairs at the English basement level. He was there to see Sir Simon return to the house from the Alister Club. Then later, after the man would have supped, he saw the cook and a maid come out of the door under the main stairs and walk away arm in arm. Eddie had been told Sir Simon would be alone in the house tonight, so there only was the butler to go. The man’s wife had left him recently and taken most of the servants with her. He lived there alone, at least for now, and not really knowing what to do with servants other than that they took care of all of his needs, Sir Simon had let them all off tonight. No doubt in days to come he would realize that was a mistake, and Eddie’s chances would be cut down.

An hour later, dark having fallen, and the snow beginning to taper off, the butler came out of the front door and walked away. Eddie knew the other men in employ, the carriage driver and a houseboy, lived above the stables in back. Eddie knew the houseboy, who was sixteen now, and thus no longer of interest to Sir Simon. The carriage drive had taken him over after his year under Sir Simon’s whip, and he and the carriage man, Eddie was sure, would be fucking in the rooms over the stable until both went to sleep. They wouldn’t enter the house tonight unless Sir Simon called them.

Eddie had already found his point of entrance—a small window in the pantry, at the side of the house, where there was little room between the wall of the house and the fence between the lots and where the molding on the window had rotted and could just be pulled away—and put back, if need be. The window was, Eddie was sure, deemed too small for a man to climb through, and it probably was, but Eddie wasn’t a man. Eddie was an undersized fourteen-year-old, perfect of trim form, red-haired, with freckles and hazel eyes; and very easy on the eyes of anyone who, like Sir Simon, was attracted to small fourteen-year-old boys.

Late into the night, Eddie fit through the pantry window without trouble and put it back in place. He listened for well over half an hour, and when he decided no one was astir, he emptied a potato sack and went shopping in the house. The state of the house bore out that the mistress had departed. The furniture in most of the first-floor entertainment rooms were covered. There was a Christmas tree in the front parlor, but it looked like it had been decorated indifferently, perhaps by an inattentive servant gauging that the master wouldn’t be fussy about it. There were decorative pieces lying around on mantles and tables, but they too were haphazardly arranged, as if the mistress didn’t prize them when she was stripping the house for her own use elsewhere and that they were considered to be inferior in value.

Value is relative, though. None of what had been left behind was inferior goods to Eddie. He was particularly taken with a small display of Chinses cloisonné vases on a table in the back parlor that were picked out by a moonbeam through a window in the now-cloudless night sky. There were several vases. The room looked like it was not in use now, and Eddie thought that Sir Simon probably had no idea what had been taken by his wife and what had been left here anyway. He picked out two vases and put them in the potato sack. From there, he went into the master’s study, which obviously was the only room on this floor other than the dining room the man was using now. There were still embers from a fire in the fireplace grate. That provided Eddie enough light to go through papers he took from the desk to look for what he’d been sent for—something of use in controlling Sir Simon. His father had taught him to read for this explicit purpose, and it wasn’t long before Eddie found likely papers. He put them in the potato sack with the cloisonné vases, returned to the pantry, and put the sack through the window. The sack would be found and taken from there before dawn.

Then Eddie went back into the front parlor, seeking a brass bowl he had seen earlier. It might dent but it wouldn’t break. He picked it up, walked out to the entrance foyer, lifted the bowl over his head and slammed it down on the stone floor of the entrance hall. He stood there, waiting.

The wavering light of a candle appeared at the top of the stairs to the second floor, casting an eerie glow down into the foyer. Eddie stood his ground, taking on what he thought would be a look of confusion and indecision laced with fear.

“Who’s there? What’s happening?” a gruff voice sounded out and Sir Simon, holding the candle aloft came down the stairs scantily clothed in a voluminous nightshirt and leather slippers.

“Please, sir, I meant no harm,” Eddie called out in a tremulous voice.

“Who are you? What are you doing in my house?” Sir Simon’s explosive anger was assuaged a bit upon gazing on the figure of the fourteen-year-old boy. He was beautiful in Sir Simon’s eyes. Just what the man liked and was attracted too: small, golden-red curly hair, a perfectly formed, trim body, mesmerizing hazel eyes. Full lips. More pretty than handsome. Of a size that Sir Simon liked and could easily physically control. When he hit the bottom of the stairs he was right there, close to the boy, who, taking on the aspect of a deer caught by a beam of light, didn’t move.