Shackles by Alexis Hall

Author:Alexis Hall [Hall, Alexis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Riptide Publishing
Published: 2014-10-29T16:00:00+00:00

“Ah, Ruben, Ruben, please.”

Milord’s wrists were beneath Ruben’s hands, his legs about his hips, his head thrown back to bare his throat to Ruben’s teeth.

He was a man of moonlight and steel, and Ruben was falling, falling into his body, like falling into fire.

And now Milord was laughing, the chains nothing but silver tears on his forearms, his teeth gleaming like knives.

When Ruben leaned down to kiss him, he moaned and twisted, pulling Ruben into the most intimate spaces of his flesh.

Then came the knife, driven deep into Ruben’s heart.

He startled awake on dampened sheets, gasping, sickened, and still faintly aroused, tearing at the bedcovers, and pressing a hand to his chest as though to banish imagined pain. Slowly the shapes in the darkness resolved themselves into familiar ones. Safe. He was safe, in Lord Iron’s mansion, and Milord was in prison far away.

He sat on the edge of the bed, naked and shaking a little, and put his head in his hands.

I would like to know why the sky is beautiful.

He could not go back.

It is my most particular favourite type of dried leaves in hot water.

He could not go back.

Ruben had few High Church leanings. His prayers were personal, almost instinctive, a kind of wordless reaching, but tonight he feared to open his heart in case terrible truths would come slithering out like snakes. So he sat there, in the dark, with St. Augustine echoing endlessly through his thoughts: da mihi castitatem et continentiam.

He had never wished for such things before. But then, he had never felt like this before.

The Bible was fairly explicit on the Christian virtue of loving the sinner, but Ruben did not think this included wanting to make the beast with two backs with the sinner until you were both breathless with ecstasy.

He was no closer to guiding the man towards repentance than he had been at the beginning of the week. Worse, he had barely tried. Instead he had brought him tea. Swooned over his loveliness. Spoken to him about aesthetic philosophy. Nothing that would bring him a swift death instead of an agonising one, which was—to Ruben’s mind—the whole reason he was there.

Officially, he was supposed to be returning a lost lamb to the fold before he was publicly executed. But for him, repentance was private not public—a problem for the hereafter. It was not his place to assess authenticity. Ruben was simply there to save a man from torment, even if that torment was supposed to be a mercy that gave a man longer to repent and longer for the Lord to save his soul from Hell.

Ruben did not believe in Hell in any traditional sense: fires and demons and torture without end. Free will was after all the freedom to turn away from God. And he did not care if Milord was sorry for what he’d done. Even the idea of it, on the wrong side of dawn, seemed juvenile. If there was goodness in him, even the most meagre spark, then God would find it.

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