For a sixth morning in as many weeks, when Cecil went out to get the newspaper off his doorstep, he found that Valorous King was holding it. The boy was fresh from the gym, swaddled in a dark green hoodie, and Cecil could smell the musky scent of his sweat on the air, smell the acidity in it, the slight sweetness.

He pressed his lips together to keep from parting them or flaring his nostrils, and Valorous looked up at him with his heavily shadowed eyes, bags visible and obvious underneath them, focused on Cecil’s face.

His lips were smiling in an easy, confident smirk – he hadn’t used to smile like that, at school. This was a dead-eyed smile full of implication. His smiles had been a lot more innocent, once upon a time – doom had been something in his future instead of in his past.

“Weekly check in, Mr Hobbes,” said Valorous King. “May I come in?”

Cecil closed the inside door, so that he was stood in his porch, separate from Valorous on the doorstep, but not letting Valorous so much as see inside.

“More death threats?” asked Valorous.

“No more than usual,” said Cecil.

“Liar,” said Valorous. “I keep an eye on your mentions in online groups and that. A lot more this week than normal. Waymore if you count phrases like “Lashton’s local nonce” and “that paedo PE teacher”.”

Cecil pressed his lips together, his hand twitching at his side. “I don’t use social media.”

“You wouldn’t be allowed if you wanted to.”

“Why should I know about this, then?”

“You didn’t clean all the blood off your window,” said Valorous, and Cecil frowned, his eyes flitting to his porch steps and the glass of the porch. Valorous didn’t look, but he did smile: his eyes, wrinkled and shadowed beyond his years, showed the crinkle of crow’s feet at their edges, and the frown lines around his mouth moved with his smile, too. “Oh, Mr Hobbes. All those years lying your arse off, and you still don’t know a bluff when you see one.”

Cecil pressed his lips tightly together. Very tightly and coolly, he asked, “Is there something more I can assist you with, Corporal?”

“Pig’s blood again?”

“I expect so.”

“Multiple nights this week?”

“Just Wednesday.”

“You keep the messages?”

“There weren’t messages.”

“Mr Hobbes,” said Valorous chidingly, raising his eyebrows and flashing a grin that was probably boyish enough for his age, but looked like it was too young for him. “Just let me do my job.”

“It’s not your job to stalk me.”

“The stalking’s by the by, man needs a hobby – show me the messages and I can make it stop.”

Cecil laughed. It was a low, embittered sound. “No,” he said. “You can’t. You’re just curious, and want an insight into what you believe is my suffering.”

“Curious is right,” said Valorous. “I want to see you with your clothes off.”

Cecil looked down at Valorous King – he wasn’t yet thirty, but he looked like he could easily be forty-five, some days, and days like this especially. Though his face glowed with energy from his exercise, he looked exhausted, and sapped of spirit.

“Let me in,” said Valorous softly, leaning forward but not crossing the threshold into the porch itself. “Don’t you want to see, Mr Hobbes? See what I look like, under this? See how I’ve changed, these ten years? You can touch, if you want. Taste, if you want.”

“You want blackmail material?”

“I want what I always wanted,” said Valorous. “Your hands on my body, and your cock in my—”

Cecil shut the door in Valorous’ face, and went back inside.

* * *

Valorous King had been fifteen, the first time he’d made a play at Cecil Hobbes. He’d met Myrddin by that point and he’d begun receiving his tutelage, but he hadn’t yet joined the king’s service, not officially. Oh, he was special, certainly, and people knew he was special, too, knew he was dangerous, knew he regularly went on little trips off to Camelot, and they knew that it wasn’t wise to piss him off, or try to have a go, though people still tried.

They should have known better. What with the scars that criss-crossed all the way up one of his arms and kissed his neck and chest and the back of one shoulder, like he was wearing his gauntlet and pauldron even when he wasn’t wearing his knight’s armour, it wasn’t like there wasn’t a visual cue to back off.

They should have known it wasn’t a good idea because he was a King, but that was the trouble, really – people forgot, and thought that Valorous was dangerous in the way that his cousins were, until they remembered that he posed a very different kind of danger, one that went beyond bloody noses and wounded pride.

It all seemed a very long time ago, now, but he remembered how it used to feel, walking those halls and feeling like it was all worth nothing, sapping away what little time he had in his life to enjoy anything, when he wasn’t in the King’s halls or training in Camelot or off on some fucking quest, pacing around, writing essays he didn’t give a fuck about, hoping his grades were decent enough that people would just leave him the fuck alone.

Cecil Hobbes had never treated Valorous like the other teachers did, either with kid gloves as if he was going to shatter, or like he was a walking liability, or like he was impressive, somehow, and needed to be shown some kind of reverence or respect.

Old Cecil had treated him the same way he treated everyone else – like he was the scum of the earth, like Cecil fucking hated the sight of him.

PE classes were when people gave Valorous the widest berth, apart from the occasional magic classes where they stripped down to their undershirts. The white polo shirts they wore for PE at the Idloes Academy were slightly transparent, especially once you started sweating, and that didn’t matter anyway, because with the short sleeves the scars from the spell damage rippled all the way down his arm, a litany of lightning-strike scars in raised, stark white against the rest of his skin, where too much magic had left burns and ripped out the pigment. Some of it reached up the side of his neck, brushed the edge of his jaw, but people forgot about that, especially when his hair was longer.

People tried to forget, tried to do anything but look at it, even though you could see it on his hands, his neck, his chest on the days he stuffed his tie into his pocket and unbuttoned his shirt. They looked away, looked past it, didn’t want the reminder of what magic could do to a man like Valorous King, because he had command of so much more of it than you did.

They couldn’t forget it in PE.

Old Cecil Hobbes didn’t need to forget – back then, he’d been a hard man of forty-something, with severe features and a big nose that had been broken at least once or twice, thin lips in a permanent square scowl, his dark hair worn long for a man and either tied in a bun or brushed back from his face.

Hobbes was average height, square shouldered and muscular but with a sort of brittle strength to him, like he would snap before he’d bend, and he didn’t have a paunch or a real swell at his chest like the other PE teacher, Mr Garrity, because he was preternaturally thin and barely seemed to eat.

In retrospect, Valorous thought as he took a drag from his cigarette and watched Hobbes approach him – he’d realised that Valorous was watching him, only took half an hour this time, over six months or so he was getting a lot better at it – he looked a lot like Myrddin Wyllt. Not actually resembled, no: Hobbes’ skin was a little darker and more sallow than the king regent’s, and his eyes were dark blue instead of silver grey, and his hair was brown-black rather than pure black, and he wasn’t as tall, was more short and square. Where Wyllt was thin like a willow tree, Hobbes was thin like a cancer victim, but stout. Where Wyllt looked exactly like the hare Valorous was pretty certain he could turn into made into a man, Hobbes looked more like a war-torn, emaciated rabbit.

But he was the sort that would do, in a pinch, if you couldn’t have the king regent, but you wanted him enough that you’d settle for a knock-off.

Valorous would have done more than settle.

“The fuck are you at?” demanded Hobbes, and snatched the cigarette out of his hand just like he’d used to do at school, when he’d found Valorous peeking in his window or lounging by the bike sheds when he was meant to be bored out of his mind in a chemistry seminar. Once, Hobbes had come into the groundkeeper’s shed when Valorous was smoking, just after sucking the man off – he’d been seventeen, he thought, although he couldn’t quite remember, and Hobbes’d been so full of rage and anger he’d spat.

Valorous still tugged himself off sometimes to the thought of Hobbes with his hand around the groundskeeper’s throat, choking the life out of him so hard that his soft cock almost got hard again.

The groundskeeper had gotten the chop, obviously – funny, how it all came out later, that Hobbes wasn’t any better than he was, just better at disguising it, and less susceptible to Valorous’ particular charms.

Hobbes was a smoker himself, of course – or, he used to be, now he had those patches on his arm, but back at school, Valorous had used to wank himself off to the thought that when Hobbes snatched his cigarettes away and confiscated them, he’d take the packet himself, and his lips would wrap around the fag butt just where Valorous’ lips had been, like a kiss with two degrees of separation.

“Keeping a watch, aren’t I?” asked Valorous. “Making sure you’re safe.”

“The only thing I need fucking protection from is you,” hissed Hobbes.

“Funny,” said Valorous, spreading his legs a little where he was sitting on the wall, leaning forward. “Someone looking at the two of us might chance a guess which one of us was predator and which was prey. Don’t know that they’d get it that way around.”

“Very convenient for you, I’m sure,” spat Hobbes. “Fuck off.”

“You seem stressed. Want me to help?”

“I don’t want you to touch me.”

“I’ll keep my hands to myself, let you touch me.”

“Fuck off!” growled Hobbes. “Do you want me to make a complaint to your station manager?”

Valorous laughed. “The fuck do you think a complaint is gonna do? I’m the only cop for two hundred miles that doesn’t want you dead, mate. Calling them up and asking for someone other than me is just gluttonous for punishment – unless you want them to bring you in again, crunch something else out of place? There’s no shortage of officers in Lashton who’d stop at a chance to fuck a nonce about.”

“Ironic,” said Hobbes coolly, “given that most of the men on that joke you call a police force are more nonces than I am.”

“Shame, isn’t it?” asked Valorous, sighing. “If I’d known when I was a kid, I’d not have kept appearing in your office like I did – I might’ve walked down to the station, got the fucking I was after.”

There was something funny in Hobbes’ expression. If it was just anger, if it was just his being defensive and angry and wanting to be left alone, Valorous probably wouldn’t have been oh so fucking obsessed with him, but it wasn’t.

No, there was hurt in Hobbes’ expression, hurt, and sympathy, and everything else that Valorous had neither wanted or particularly deserved as a teenager and didn’t particularly want or deserve now, but God, if he didn’t want to lick every trace of it out of Hobbes’ mouth.

There was a part of Hobbes that wished he could go back in time and be nice to Valorous King, a part of him that wished he could go back and speak up for him, get him out of that situation, actually look after him even if it made him look bad.

Of course, there was just as big a part of Hobbes, Valorous wagered, that wished he could go back in time and take Valorous up on everything he’d offered then, the same as he was offering now.

“You’re gonna say yes sooner or later, old man,” said Valorous. “And it’s not like you’re going to do much better than me, anyway – there’s no one else who’d touch you with a two-hundred-foot pole.”

“Who says I want touching?”

“If you didn’t want touching, you’d not be in the mess you’re in, would you?” asked Valorous, sly as he dared, and he leaned in as he asked the question, fast enough that Hobbes didn’t have time to draw away. He held his breath with how close Valorous’ body was to his, their chests almost touching, Valorous’ lips nearly brushing against his, their noses almost glancing against one another.

Hobbes wasn’t tall, but Valorous was short:

For all that, Valorous actually ate, and to his stocky form there was a little fat as well as all the muscle, so he didn’t have the emaciated, wiry tendency Hobbes’ body had. They looked like an exercise in cartoon juxtaposition.

“Your old mates at Idloes still talk to you?” asked Valorous.

“What mates might those be?” asked Hobbes.

“Oh, yeah,” said Valorous. “Never were popular on the staff, were you? Alright, what about your old regiment? You were in the army, weren’t you?”

Hobbes’ smile was a bitter, unsurprised thing – he wasn’t surprised that Valorous knew, of course, and he pulled back from him, huddling in his old leather coat, a thing that was probably as old as he was – was likely the old man’s father’s before it was his own.

“Go get a real fucking hobby, King,” said Hobbes. “I wouldn’t fuck you when it would get me fired if not arrested, and I won’t fuck you now.”

“What if I arrest you for not fucking me?” called King after him. Hobbes just gave him the finger over his shoulder.

He’d taken Valorous’ fags with him.

Big Cecil was nothing if not predictable.

* * *

Until he was nine years old, Valorous King had gone to another school. Cecil didn’t know what school it had been, except that it had been quite a fancy private place up in Alba – the sort of place that never had more than ten kids to a classroom, and had tutors who went with the students one on one. He’d known how to fight with traditional weaponry, had been taught enchantment, spellwork.

Vainglorious King hadn’t been a traditionalist in his day to day life – he’d been more comfortable with a gun than a dagger, his suits were off the rack in mundie shops, and Cecil was pretty sure he was barely up on basic magical geography outside of Lashton, let alone the complicated geography that came once you started delving into the fae and avernal realms that overlaid their own.

But his son he’d wanted to be magical – with all the power that Valorous had crackling in his veins, it only made sense to really hone it all so that he could use it.

After Vainglorious King had been murdered, by all accounts, it was Valorous who’d killed his killer, shot him in the back of the head with his own gun as he was patting Vainglorious down for his valuables.

Cecil didn’t know if that was true.

He did know that Valorous had lived with his cousins after that, and that within two years, Valorous was boarding at Idloes even though the rest of his family only lived around the corner, and that a year after that, they hired a properly wizened old fuck who’d used to teach at the Castle onto the boarders’ staff as security, because any magical kid’s nightmares could be dangerous, but Valorous King’s were liable to burn the whole of Lashton down.

Even then, Myrddin Wyllt had already been taking an interest in him, and that was before they were on a school trip to one of the old industrial museums in Lashton proper, and King ripped his arm to shreds holding back twenty tons of stone boulders that were going to be put out in the Laithes’ new fancy fucking rock garden, to keep the rockslide off the truck from crushing him and a dozen other kids into slurry.

Cecil hadn’t witnessed it – he never volunteered to help on the school trips unless it was for matches and he didn’t trust Garrity to drive the minivan without being drunk – and he hadn’t witnessed the recovery, either. King had been laid up in the big magical hospital in Camelot for at least three months or so, and for three months after that, he’d been on bedrest…

In the King’s Palace.

He’d never been right in the head, Valorous King, but he’d been a bright kid. He wasn’t popular, because the other kids were too fucking scared of him, or too interested in gossiping about him – even when he made friends, they never stuck around – but he was liked, because he was charismatic and rebellious and funny, and the kids liked that as much as they hated it. Cecil remembered what a fucking terror he’d been until that overextension of his abilities – very high energy, good at everything he did, a little fucking genius everywhere, but especially in PE.

Oh, yes, Valorous King was a short lad as a boy, stayed short even as he grew older, but he was good at any sport you put in front of him, magical or mundie, and that aside, he knew well how to spar hand to hand, how to use his magic or his fists. He liked to run, and he liked to exercise, liked the strain it put on his body, liked to sweat.

He’d liked Cecil – Cecil would never have admitted it, but he liked him, as far as the snot-nosed little cunts in the lower years could be liked. Valorous was always the first to volunteer for something, but didn’t shout over someone else if they volunteered instead, and not irregularly, he’d gently encourage someone else to try, or take over showing them how to do it if Cecil hadn’t gotten to them yet.

He was funny with Cecil – if Cecil was too nasty to one of the students, Valorous would tell him he thought so, and be just as nasty in retort. If Cecil was sarcastic, Valorous King was sarcastic right back – if Cecil wasn’t sarcastic, he was sarcastic himself anyway.

Most of the kids didn’t like Cecil Hobbes, which was how he liked it. They liked Garrity instead, if they liked either of them – which, to be fair, most of them didn’t, you liked PE teachers if you liked sport and exercise, and if you didn’t, you fucking hated ‘em – but Cecil wasn’t there to be liked.

Cecil barked orders and he expected them followed; he didn’t piss about with jokes and games; he told the ugly ones they were ugly, the stupid ones they were stupid, and the cunts that they were cunts.

King had only ever been one out of three, but he’d stand up for the others, and Cecil grudgingly respected that no matter how annoying it was.

After the rockslide, after his six months under Myrddin Wyllt…

He’d come back different. Still laughing, still a terror, but there was a bitterness to it, a weight on his shoulders, a heaviness to the way he walked. He spent one week out of four in Camelot to study, and that aside, he was often away – on one quest or other, representing the king’s service, slaying monsters, winning tourneys. If not any of that, he was skiving off his classes.

Not PE – no, he liked PE – and rarely did he skive out of his magical classes, either. It was the mundie stuff he tended to skip out on, especially sciences and mundie history.

He’d been brittle, stressed.

It wasn’t a surprise – Cecil had been older when he’d first met Myrddin Wyllt, had been a new recruit in the magical llueodd arfog, barely eighteen years old, but he’d been young and stupid and naïve, and when the king regent, the left hand of the king himself, had cupped Cecil under his crotch and pulled him out of the army line-up, Cecil had been hypnotised by the power he radiated, had gone very willingly, ready for the first willing sex he’d ever had.

King was different, of course – King wasn’t meat to play with like Cecil had been, and he wasn’t one of the dreamy, dangerous monsters that Myrddin truly had relationships with. No, King was a protégé, and worse than that, he was a figure in some of Wyllt’s prophecies – and figure was right, because Wyllt treated him like a piece on a chessboard, moved him about, carved bits away from him, developed him.

Wyllt would never have fucked King while he was a lad, and King was at an age now where Cecil was fairly certain he’d missed out on his chance to fuck him at all. King had served out all the destinies Myrddin had been interested in, and now he was chaff separate from the wheat.

The first time he’d tried to get Cecil to fuck him instead, no doubt tired of failing at seducing the king regent, he’d been fifteen.

He’d noticed Cecil looking at him, although Cecil was always good at not looking, and hiding when he did look – but King wasn’t like the other kids, noticed what they didn’t. He’d taken to stripping naked in the changing rooms and brushing off the kids that complained at him or laughed and smacked him with their towels, and every time Cecil trudged in to tell them to stop pissing about and hurry the fuck up, he’d see the muscle on King’s body, the ripple of the scars he was always collecting more of, see his cock soft between his legs, even the pinkness of his teenaged hole when he realised that Cecil was there and rushed to bend over.

Cecil wasn’t stupid, of course.

Yeah, he liked teenagers, would have bounced more than a few of the young boys on his cock, and sometimes his skin and his teeth thrummed with hunger for some of the ones like King, the ones that were young and eager and too stupid to know what it was they were asking for, the ones that were small and would be tight, but were big enough and developed enough that they’d loosen. The ones who were young enough still that even a sudden breeze could make them stiffen up, so you could make them come at nothing, and then make them come again – and then a few more times, ‘til they were sobbing and begging you to stop, no matter that you wouldn’t.

Technically, sixteen was legal, but Cecil had only ever fucked lads that young in the army, gave the new recruits that came to him with their lips pink and slick with spit what they asked him for, and wished he could fuck the ones that were scared of him instead, lay them out and really give them something to sob and flinch about, open them up with his cock like he was coring an apple and see if that didn’t fix their stance when he had them marching.

Once he became a teacher, he only fucked eighteen-year-olds and up, and he liked the ones who looked younger than they were, the ones who were scrawny or chubby-cheeked and permanently youthful, and if they were students, they weren’t ones he’d ever had in his gym or his sports hall, or ever would.

He liked to fuck them hard and rough ‘til they had drool sticking dribbling down their chins and their cheeks were sticky with snot and tears, and he liked it when they called him sir and Mr Hobbes and Daddy, and he knew precisely what that made him – and it still didn’t make him as bad as his dad, who’d actually fucked him.

That was the thing that King hadn’t understood, when he’d first mounted his clumsy seduction, started showing Cecil his cock and his hole and his nipples and his mouth, started letting him catch King in flagrante with the other students or occasionally a groundskeeper or a nurse or, once, the inspector from the office of education standards.

(In fairness to King, that last one had been pretty fucking funny, and the first inspection report Cecil had ever enjoyed reading, most of all because it was the last one the bloke ever wrote before he quietly resigned.)

What King hadn’t understood was that wantingwould never be enough.

Cecil wanted him, of course he did – of course Cecil saw King’s attitude and his fat little muscled arse and heard his cheek and wanted to fuck it out of him, wanted to twist King in knots until he broke to tears and begging, of course Cecil wanted to fucking ruin the lad and bend him to the will of Cecil’s cock.

But wanting wasn’t enough.

Wanting wasn’t justification, and Cecil wasn’t a good man, had never much given a fuck about being one, but as much as he was a nonce, he didn’t ever want to be an actual rapist, and fucking King would have been rape, after a fashion.

Cecil didn’t know what exactly they’d call it – coercion, maybe, or just an abuse of power, because King was underage and later, he was still Cecil’s student, still looked up to him and knew that Cecil had power over him, and that was without what he knew that a court never would, that the king regent’s method of moulding his heroes wasn’t above getting them reliant on the promise of a fuck that would never come, and that in the absence of Wyllt’s touch, King probably wanted for Cecil’s instead.

How many times had King thrown himself at Cecil, come into his office in shorts he’d borrowed off of a fucking first year, come still wet from his shower or soaked with sweat from his classes?

When King said, “You want me. I knowyou want me,” Cecil had threatened to wash his mouth out with soap, and King had suggested he wash it out with something else; when Cecil had told King it was a dangerous line to walk, being a slag and a faggot, King had promised he’d not be a slag if Cecil would keep him satisfied; when King gave Cecil a heart attack, appearing under his desk when Cecil came in from a staff meeting, Cecil had hauled him out from underneath it and almost beaten him on the arse, until he’d seen that King’s legs were spread and his mouth was open in anticipation of the blow.

Every time Cecil caught him with another student, usually ones that were a bit older, a bit bigger than him, King would try to say he needed Cecil to keep him in line, and Cecil would shrug and say he didn’t give a fuck how many other students King shagged so long as he stopped putting on such a performance, but the lad got wise to that – after the groundskeeper, after each nurse, after the head of geography, King would say that it was Cecil’s fault, that if Cecil would only fuck him himself, he wouldn’t have to sleep around.

He laid on that act pretty quick after the second nurse had made him bleed, and part of Cecil’s goddamn incident report had been ringing a hotline about it so that the counsellor would take King to the hospital for a fucking rape kit and to make sure he didn’t get an infection, because Cecil had point-blank refused to, but knew the lad wouldn’t go himself out of pure stubbornness.

Funny – at the tribunal, he’d almost wondered if they’d bring up Valorous King, or any of the other teachers that Cecil had reported over the years, or any of the other students that Cecil had scowlingly referred to counselling or child services. There’d been a lot of them. He remembered going to an interview at another school down south, before the opening had come up at Idloes, and the headmistress had quietly mentioned his record of… what the fuck had she called it? Student safeguarding?

He hadn’t liked the soppy tone of approval she’d had, or the way she’d looked at him all fucking gooey-eyed and sympathetic. He’d never have taken the job even if somewhere else hadn’t opened up.

It had never come up, no matter that it was evidently a reputation he had, at Idloes and with other teachers, the grumpy ex-army cunt who never came out for a pint even though he obviously drunk, who gave a fuck about student safeguarding.

It would’ve gone against their argument, he supposed, as far as they saw it, as if what Cecil did would have been more okay, because he saved more than he hurt. Cecil had always thought it was a slippery slope to say you could fuck a few kids so long as you made life better for enough of the rest.

He used to catch King smoking a lot.

He’d caught Cecil smoking once on a day where he was stressed and irritable, had a mountain of fucking paperwork to do – and wasn’t the point of being a PE teacher that they weren’t supposed to have paperwork? – for all his students and Garrity, after he’d spent the last two weekends ferrying the rugby team and then the netball team hither and fucking thither. Cecil had been almost off of the school property, and he’d jumped a mile when King had peered around the corner, snotty sixteen-year-old prick that he was. His eyes had lit up with delight at seeing his teacher break the rules.

He’d taken it up himself, after that – made a point of smoking where people, especially Cecil, could see him; he took up smoking with thick paper, smoking cigars, once, a fucking pipe, and making rings out of the smoke.

By the time he was seventeen, he could do more than make smoke rings with his tongue and the movement of his lips – he could weave magic through the smoke, and animate it, and didn’t that have all the boys falling over for him, not to mention a few of the more clueless girls?

Cecil had confiscated the pack of cigarettes from him on autopilot, and when he got back into the house, he looked down at them, running his thumb over the cellophane packaging, the nasty picture printed on it of some poor prick’s vivisected lung, as if you were gonna buy a box of fags, watch them take it out of the stupid covered up lockbox where you couldn’t see them just in case, hand over the money, get given the box, and then realise, oh, fuck, these cunts can give you cancer? And try to hand them back.

They were his brand.

He’d not been able to get them when he was in lock-up except through King who, being a smuggler from a long line of smugglers, could get anything in and out of anywhere, but Cecil had refused his offers of “help”.

He’d been trying to quit, more because he couldn’t afford them like he used to than because he gave a fuck about the health risks. He’d been working four nights a week at a shitty old boxing gym in the basement of the old men’s club, and frankly, they’d given him that as a favour.

He had the house bought and paid for. All he needed was money for food, and he was saving money to swap over from electric to an enchantment grid that he could charge himself, so long as he got someone reputable to set it up for him.

In the meantime, he could choose between money for gin or for fags, and he normally chose gin.

He was no real witch or sorcerer, but he could do one or two things: he could light a cigarette with a murmured word and a flare of his fingers, and this was what he did. Bringing the fag to his mouth, he wrapped his lips around it, inhaled and felt the wonderful rush of nicotine and poison, held it thick in his mouth, and then exhaled.

Felt—

Warm.

The heat radiated out from his lips and tongue and crept along the surface of his skin, up above his hairline, down his neck and under his clothes, a tingling, pleasant warmth that left a sort of weight, a heaviness, in its wake.

“Oh,” he slurred, trying to get to the kitchen sink to swill out his mouth with water, but he stumbled as he went and hit the tile. “You little fucking cunt—”

Too warm, too thick, too heavy, too dark.

He couldn’t keep his eyes open, and he groaned as his forehead touched the cool laminate of the kitchen tile underneath him. He didn’t bother trying to struggle any more – he knew it would help any.

* * *

Valorous made the room up nice before Hobbes could wake up.

He’d set logs on the fire and put them to cheerfully crackle and burn, had a bit of a clean-up, thrown out the cans and bottles, opened the windows, dusted, thrown out the ashtrays, and before he’d picked up the old man and carried him to it in a fireman’s lift, he’d hoovered out and scrubbed over the old armchair, so that it smelt fresh and clean and slightly lemony, and not like stale sweat and fag smoke.

He’d done Hobbes’ dishes, he’d put on a load of washing, taken out his bins, tidied up the kitchen, changed his sheets. Hobbes had been out for four hours – he didn’t sleep much, and Valorous figured he could do with it.

As he slowly stirred in his seat, he grunted, and Valorous brought a glass of lemonade up to his mouth, tipped it forward, got Hobbes to take it into his mouth, swallow it, drink some more.

Hobbes looked up at him with baleful eyes.

“Hullo, Cecil,” said Valorous. “Didn’t anybody tell you you shouldn’t ever take cigarettes from strangers?”

“You weaselly little cunt.”

“Mmm,” Valorous agreed, sitting back on the little ottoman matched to the chair, although Valorous had been disappointed to find when he’d peered inside it no dirty magazines or spare batteries or anything, just a few blankets. He’d pulled one of them out, and it was now over Hobbes’ lap, tucked around him. “That’s me.”

“Gonna rape me now, are you?” asked Hobbes.

Valorous smiled, and shook his head. “It’s no fun if I rape you, Cec. You know full well what I want is for you to rape me.”

Hobbes was slowly coming to, and as he did, he sat suddenly up and looked around the room, gaze flitting over the living room. Valorous hadn’t finished up everything, of course – he’d hoovered the floor, but the carpet needed scrubbing out if not replacing, and he wanted to take all the lampshades down and wash them clean, and he wanted to dust and sweep for cobwebs, and it would take him a few hours to properly do out Hobbes’ bathroom, and he wanted to have a go at his cupboards, too, organise them – that wouldn’t take too long, because they were pretty bare and empty.

But with what Valorous had done, the dank, dark room that Hobbes’ living room had been was greatly improved: it smelled much nicer and fresher, there was no longer rubbish on the sides or bottles and cans stacked up on the floor, and there were no stains from beer or vomit, except for a really difficult one near the door.

Hobbes’ nostrils flared as he inhaled.

“It’s a beef joint,” said Valorous, shifting where he was crouched on top of the ottoman, his feet underneath him, his knees pushed up under the bottom of the hoodie. “It’ll be another thirty minutes. Veg, too, and Yorkshires.”

“What the fuck?” asked Hobbes.

“Your house was dirty,” said Valorous. “You don’t eat. I wanted to help.”

“What, you’re trying to show me your virtues as a domestic, is it?” asked Hobbes.

“It’s my day off,” replied Valorous. “It’s not so different to what I’d do at home, albeit more labour-intensive.”

“Is that what you wish you’d grown up to be? A fucking housewife?”

“Rather than what I am? Yeah, Cec. It is.” He said it bluntly, not in the mood to play as much as normal because going through Hobbes’ flat had made it less fun, because he was sad, and he ached, and he wished he could make it better, but who the fuck could? Hobbes’ expression flattened a little, his lips twisting, and he turned his head away.

“When I saw you still had the dog bowls on the mat on the kitchen I thought you were maybe hoping you’d get your dog back, that you’d given it away before you went to prison, but I checked. Your last dog died eight years back, when you were still teaching,” said Valorous quietly. “You’ve still got leads hung up. Toys in a box. I threw out the dog food because it’s surely gone off by now, but you had that, too.”

Hobbes didn’t say anything.

“I put a load on, stripped your sheets,” said Valorous softly. “I didn’t realise you were on a meter – you never much used electric at school, I assumed you’d be on enchantment instead. Your kettle’s broken.”

“I know,” said Hobbes.

“Why don’t you throw it out then?”

“Because it’s my fucking house, and none of your business.”

Valorous sat his arse down on the ottoman. He hadn’t expected Hobbes’ house inside to be… like this. He’d expected it to be like Hobbes’ office had been, to be like Hobbes always liked the gym to be at school – ship-shape in Bristol fashion, everything neat and clean and perfect and tidy. He didn’t have any proof or pictures or that, but Valorous was fairly certain that before he lost his job, his house would have been just like that.

It'd made him pivot a bit, change his plans.

“Where the fuck did you learn to be a cleaner?” asked Hobbes. He hadn’t tried to get out of the chair yet, although he’d moved his legs, which meant the drug was wearing off.

“At home,” said Valorous. “When I wasn’t at school – when I was staying with my cousins, in the summers, at Christmas.”

“They made you fucking clean?” asked Hobbes, disgusted, and Valorous laughed.

“No,” said Valorous. “I’d tell the cleaners to take the day off sometimes and do everything myself. I like it. Or… I don’t know if I like it. But it’s therapeutic, in’t it? When stuff is dirty and you make it clean, or when it’s all fucked up and out of order, and you set it right? I didn’t much like living with my cousins, but I liked that. Doing stuff. Having… a home. Looking after it. I always kept my bunk right at school and when I was a king’s man, but that wasn’t the same. When I was in the army, I’d go home with people when we were off-duty – I’d learn off them, or do stuff in their houses, or on their farms and that. Whenever I was on intel jobs, I’d get a job doing manual labour. Work on a farm, in a carpenter’s, a mason’s. I used to wonder what I’d be, if it hadn’t all happened the way it had.”

“If it hadn’t all happened the way it had,” said Hobbes, scoffing, “you’d be a smuggler and a criminal like the rest of your fucking family, like your dad was. You’d not be a fucking carpenter.”

Valorous knew that was probably true, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.

Valorous stood up, rolling his shoulders as Hobbes leaned forward, rocking a little in his seat to try to work out the rest of tranquiliser.

“Where the fuck are you going?” Hobbes asked.

“Change of plans,” said Valorous with a shrug of his shoulders. “There’s no drugs in the roast, you know. It was meant for after.”

“After?” repeated Hobbes, but Valorous was already in the kitchen and opening up the door, which he slammed behind him as he went.

He was antsy as he walked around the back of the old estate, his hands in his pockets, his hood pulled up over his head. The agenda had been pretty simple before – go in Hobbes’ house, give him the antidote on his own turf, dose him with an aphrodisiac that stripped off inhibitions, provoke him enough that he lost his wick and fucked Valorous exactly the way he wanted to, over the table, on the floor, against a wall, didn’t matter.

Food, after, and Hobbes would have to admit that Valorous was right, that this was the right thing for both of them after all, that he wanted to do it all along and he was glad he’d done it now.

Valorous wouldn’t have been able to enjoy it in a dirty house where nothing was in order, and it wasn’t nearly as fun anyway, thinking of Hobbes as really that depressed, all sad and pathetic and a shadow of the disciplinarian he’d used to be.

He was walking by one of the canals that criss-crossed down toward the docks, and he narrowed his eyes as he saw a bloke dressed much like Valorous was walk hurriedly past him, head bowed so he couldn’t see under the hoodie.

Valorous slowed his gait slightly to come around the corner, and he took in the scene, the big guard – what was he called? Vince? Lance? Something that ended in -ce – and Valorous’ cousin, Dandy, who was just buckling up a briefcase.

When he saw Valorous, he straightened and tried to hand the bag back to his man, but Valorous had already grabbed him by the wrist and hauled him forward, bending him over and slamming his nose into the bar of the canal’s safety rail.

“Hi, Dandy!” said Valorous cheerfully, and threw back a flare of crackling energy when the guard tried to grab for him, not turning to look when he cried out in pain and stumbled to the floor with a wet splat of muscle on cobblestones. “Long time no see! What’s in the bag, cuz?”

“You fucking—”

Dandy choked as Valorous shoved his throat against the bar instead, and he watched dispassionately as Dandy coughed, blood spattering from his nose over his mouth and dripping down into the canal water, the red turning muddy. With a neat flick of his wrist, he spelled the bag open, and didn’t pull out anything inside with his magic, not wanting to contaminate it.

The bricks were neatly packed and wrapped in cellophane, but he saw the shine and shimmer of the pixie dust – about 240k’s worth, or so it seemed to him, if it was twelve half-kilo bricks he was looking at.

“Tut tut, Dand,” said Valorous cheerfully, and pulled a pair of cuffs out of his pocket. He’d wanted Hobbes to use them on him, but at least the day was still good for something, and he cuffed Dandy’s wrists behind his back.

The bodyguard was about to lunge for him again, and as he fished a latex glove out of his side pocket and put it on, Valorous clucked his tongue at him. “You do realise I’m family, right, Vince?” Fifty-fifty chance of one or the other.

The bodyguard stopped, looking uncertain.

“Valorous King,” he said in a pleasant voice, picking up the case with two fingers. “No touching family, that’s the rule, right?”

“Dand?”

“He’s a fugging cob, Chance,” slurred Dandy through his broken nose, and Valorous gave Chance – okay, so he was way off, but at least he tried – a dazzling smile.

“I’m not just a cob, though,” he said, “I’m Valorous fucking King.”

Chance stumbled back a few steps, and Valorous chuckled, hauling Dandy up by the back of his jacket and picking up the briefcase in his other hand.

“That’s what I thought. Why don’t you run along, sweetheart, and let the family know that Dandy’s about to be brought up on charges of possession with intention to distribute of a Class A controlled substance under the Alchemical Narcotics Act, 1973.”

Chance was looking at him blankly, but in fairness to him, he was bleeding not insignificantly from the crack Valorous had given him to the back of the head when he’d knocked him down.

“Not too good on the big words, is he?” asked Valorous.

“I’m being arrested,” told him Dandy slowly. “Tell the fabily.”

* * *

Valorous King, damn the little cunt, was a Hell of a cook.

Even if he hadn’t known that King had grown up half under Myrddin Wyllt’s wing, he’d know tasting the beef joint that he’d spent time around someone who was at least a few centuries old: he’d wrapped it not just in leaves of wild garlic, but seasoned the thing with maritime pine needles and laid it on a bed of wild chervil and yarrow leaves, so that it was infused with a citrusy acidity and a tang of almost-aniseed; there were wildflowers in amongst the vegetables, the wild leek and carrots, and there must have been a three or four different mushrooms in the selection he’d roasted, and every one of them was fucking sublime.

“That bitch,” he said to himself, sitting at his kitchen table, and he cut off another slice of the beef, eating it from his fingers as he opened up the cupboards in his kitchen, looked at where King had washed every plate and re-stacked everything in his cupboards, tossing what had been smashed or cracked and that Cecil hadn’t bothered to throw away.

The whole house was much like this – he’d not gone through Cecil’s wardrobe or his chest of drawers, probably hadn’t had time, but he’d spritzed the clothes in them with something to make them smell nicer, and two stacks of neatly folded laundry were on top of his chest of drawers.

Funnily enough, he’d never actually been scaredof King.

Oh, sure, he’d seen the lad now and then over the years, was always aware even after he left school that he was a little bit obsessed with Cecil, that he remembered him more than any other student would, that he wanted his attention, his approval, his cock, but that wasn’t anything but mildly offputting; then, once he’d left the king’s service and come home to Lashton, the stalking had started, and even that hadn’t been frightening, not really.

It had been nearly a year now since King had come back to Lashton and joined up as a pig, just before Cecil got out of prison; it was a few months later he’d started following him on his days off or watching him when he was at work, coming by the boxing gym to ogle him or show off in the ring, peering in Cecil’s garden, calling his phone.

It was fucking annoying, yeah, and was obviously the sign of a distinctly unbalanced mind, but Cecil had always known King was unbalanced, and that hadn’t much bothered him.

But this, this was something else.

If King had drugged him and broken into his house in order to rape him, bounce himself on Cecil’s cock, even smack him about a bit, something like that – well, it wasn’t as if Cecil would approve, because he didn’t like being raped anymore than the next man, but at least he could understand the impulse.

Drugging him and breaking into his house so that he could do Cecil’s chores and cook him dinner?

That was fucking mental. That was scary.

And scariest of all was the fact that he was fucking good at it, and Cecil almost wanted him to come around and do it all again.

He’d barely been able to keep the house in order since he’d come back from the nick – he’d lost his way a bit at home after Archie had died, when it had been a little harder to keep to a schedule without the dog to keep him in line, and then he’d lost his job, and then he’d done his stint…

Standing in the kitchen the next morning, he stared at Archie’s old food bowls, the leads still hanging on the wall. Eight years – had it been that long? Eight years since Archie had died, five since he’d lost his job, three since he’d been done for GBH, a year since he’d come home from lock-up.

He pulled on his coat, put his hands in his pockets, and walked across town to the shelter, because if he was going to shell out for a dog, he’d be fucked if he was going to waste a quid on bus fare.

The shelter was quiet, owing to the fact that it was a Thursday morning, and he sidled through keeping his hands in his pockets along the fenced-off dog pens, looking at the dogs inside.

Archie had been a rescue – all of Cecil’s dogs had been rescues, all of them adults when he got them. He’d thought about it a few times over the years, getting a puppy, but he didn’t know that he really had the patience to train a puppy right, liked how much quieter, calmer the older dogs were, and anyway, what was the point in a man like him getting a puppy, anyway?

Puppies were nice for families and yuppy types who’d never see the heart in a dog who’d been knocked about a bit – if he could take them, it was right that he did, because not many people would.

“Surprisingly noble, aren’t you, Sergeant Hobbes?” he remembered Myrddin Wyllt whispering in his ear when he’d followed him to the dog shelter one day, and walked along behind him, studying Cecil the same way Cecil had been studying the dogs.

Archie had been some sort of greyhound thing, and he’d been vaguely thinking about picking up a dog like him, but none of the ones in the pens were greyhounds or whippets. There were two bulldogs in a pen together, two different Frenchies, a pug, but he preferred the big dogs, the ones that needed exercise, and were more likely to demand more than less.

He came to a stop in front of a pen with a German Shepherd mix with some kind of mountain dog – a Newfoundland, maybe, or a Leonberger, something like that, something with a rounder muzzle and a bigger head, not as sleek as a pure GSD would be.

“Hi,” said Cecil, glancing to the little bit of laminate paper clipped to the mesh, and smiled, “Ruby.”

Ruby was a big bitch, a little under fifty kilos, already spayed, and she looked at him with doleful dark eyes from her little pallet on the far side of the pen. When he slowly dropped into a crouch, her big brown tail did two or three blunt thumbs against her bed, and she stood to her feet, lumbering over. Those eyes, mournful as they were, had intelligence in them, and she sat back on her haunches in front of the edge of the pen, her ears with enough structure that they stuck up a bit, but floppy at the tips, so they curled around her big fat head.

“Hi, sweetheart,” said Cecil. “Tells me there you’re looking to be an only dog in a house with a garden, no kids, no cats, no other dogs.”

Ruby tilted her head to the side, looking at him with her careful, focused eyes.

“Would you like to meet her up close?” asked a voice behind him, and Cecil glanced around, inhaled through his nose and didn’t let his expression change. He was a pretty boy, skinny enough that he swam in the small polo shirt they’d put him in, and there were freckles scattered on his cheeks, his eyes big enough that he looked even younger than he was, which couldn’t have been older than nineteen.

Cecil’s fingers twitched, but all he said, after smiling, was, “I’d love to, thanks,” and when the lad turned away to get the keys, he only let himself look at the flat curve of his arse for a second before he looked back to the dog.

* * *

It was three days later that Valorous went over to the boxing gym Hobbes worked at and watched him correcting some big, fat man’s form. Valorous distantly recognised the fat man – he worked at the train station, or he was a bus driver, something like that. He had a nice body, big, hairy, and tough as mutton, and he had complicated patterns tattooed all around his shoulders and across his chest, an octopus that had been tattooed so it bulged all around his belly, tentacles disappearing under its outward curve.

Cecil saw Valorous watching, and nodded over to a free bag, which Valorous took. It wasn’t often that he came for the exercise more than he did for Hobbes himself, but Hobbes somehow always knew just by looking at him, and Valorous adjusted his finger wraps as he shrugged off his hoodie.

Another of the guys there, the brother of the owner, saw Valorous and started to walk over, ‘til Valorous hauled his sweatshirt over his head and he saw the scars on Valorous’ body.

His eyes lingered on the lightning marks that burned up one side, and Valorous pretended not to notice the way he almost-gracefully pivoted away, walking to pick up a brush and clean up the entrance hall instead of coming to offer tips or chat to Valorous as he exercised.

There was a sheen of sweat on his skin when Hobbes came over, put his hands on the back of the bag, and said, “Stop fucking your hips about. You’re not in the king’s arena now, don’t need to show off your arse for all the noblemen you’re hoping’ll put in a bid for your cunt.”

“Maybe I’m showing off my arse for you,” retorted Valorous, but he straightened his form a little and punched straighter – he didn’t punch as hard, but he put in more fast jabs, watched the way Hobbes absorbed the impact, solid a fuck as he was.

“Funny,” said Hobbes. “Thought you’d lost interest getting my cock in your arse, going AWOL like that.”

“Didn’t know I needed a by-your-leave.”

“Bet you’d like it if you did.”

Valorous put magic in the next punch, sending a tremor of power through his fist as it made contact with the bag, and Hobbes let out a low noise, winded, but then shoved the bag aside, and put up his fists.

Valorous laughed. “Bad idea, old man.”

“You want to fight or not?” asked Hobbes.

Valorous had picked one of the bags over the mats, and he adjusted his stance as he stepped back, loosening his hands out of his fists.

Hobbes was old, but he wasn’t as unfit as he looked, and he made contact in a lot of places as they circled one another – jabbed at his side, his chest, under one of his arms. When Valorous tried to go for his neck, Hobbes caught him in a hold and flipped him over, making Valorous grunt, and then laugh into the mats underneath him.

Hobbes’ weight on top of him was nice – the outline of Hobbes’ cock, hard and fat in his shorts, against Valorous’ arse was even nicer.

“You’re out of practice,” said Hobbes.

“Yeah,” said Valorous. “Don’t do hand to hand often – and I never do it without magic.”

Hobbes gave a disapproving little sniff, the way he used to when Valorous was at school and kicking the shit out of all the other boys in PE, most of all the ones who thought that just because Valorous was littler than they were, that meant he’d be easy to beat.

“And what will you do when you can’t rely on magic?”

“Use blades or poison,” said Valorous, and flipped himself onto his back, not pulling out from under Hobbes as he did.

Hobbes’ eyes were dark as they looked down at Valorous, and when his hand landed on Valorous’ throat, Valorous sighed with pleasure, but didn’t try to drag or pull away. Hobbes’ hand was warm, calloused, hard.

“Want to take me home?” asked Valorous softly. “How long’s it been since you last got your cock wet – when you were in the nick?”

Hobbes huffed out a noise that wasn’t quite a laugh, and he climbed off of where he was straddling Valorous’ waist – it was the end of his shift, and when he put on his coat and clocked out, he didn’t say anything about the fact that Valorous was following him home.

“Heard you arrested your cousin,” said Hobbes. “Sure that’s not gonna get you killed?”

“I’d love it if one of them tried,” murmured Valorous. “Not Dandy, he’s too much of a bitch, and Courageous and Fancy are above that sort of thing, but I wouldn’t put it past Righteous or Exalted, let alone Elegant.”

“I never used to remember all their fucking names,” muttered Hobbes. “Always used to get complaints when I mixed Just with Virtuous, or Magnificent and Nefarious.”

“You always got Courageous right.”

“Well, he’s a memorable lad, face like a knight out of a picture book. Looks far more the part than you do.”

“You were in the army with my Uncle Heinous, weren’t you?” asked Valorous, and to his surprise, Hobbes laughed. It was a genuine sound, and when his lips curved up, all the lines in his sallow face moved, crinkles showing around his exhausted eyes, the lines in his cheeks drawing up.

“I was,” he said slowly. “Christ, I’d fucking forgotten him. Why’d they call him Heinous? He was probably the gentlest soul I’d ever fucking met – they made mincemeat out of him in basic training. He ended up a clerk in the records office.”

“He’s secretary for one of the witch generals now,” said Valorous quietly. He’d never liked Uncle Heinous as a child, had found him twitchy and too soft-spoken – he’d been the one to sort it out so he could board at Idloes most of the year instead of staying with the family. He’d met him for the first time in a while a few years back, and he’d been amazed by how well they’d gotten on, how much better he understood him, now that he was old enough to be patient enough with him. “Heinous was oldest, and then it was my dad, Vainglorious, then Noble, she’s the leader of the Kings now, and then Contemptible, Roguish, Felicitous, and Blessed.”

“How the fuck do you remember them all? Sounds like we’re just throwing fucking words between each other.”

“I don’t know,” said Valorous, shrugging his shoulders. “It’s normal for us. Go back through my grandparents, and there’s Valiant, Vital, Venerable, Virulent, Vulnerable, Vandalous, Veracious, Victorious, Voracious, Vast, Verbose. Virtuous King was a commander in his majesty’s navy half a millennium ago, and I’m of the same bloodline as him.”

“Wyllt told you that, did he?” asked Hobbes in a wry, surprisingly knowing voice. “Got his skull in his collection of favourites, mounted on that wall of skulls in his crystal room?”

Valorous studied Hobbes’ distant expression, trying to parse out precisely how genuine he was being, trying to see if he’d really beenin Myrddin’s crystal room. Valorous remembered long evenings in there, starving or high off his face, trying to concentrate as Myrddin made him breathe in hallucinogenic smoke or stare into crystals and magic bowls and liquid mirrors, seeing versions of the future, versions of himself, all while a wall of dead men’s heads, some of them his own ancestors, stared down at them with empty eye sockets.

“He ever let you lie down, have a nap on that nice soft bed he has in there, that one low to the ground with the Indian sheets?”

Every time Valorous had tried, over the years, Myrddin would grab him by the upper arm and pull him to kneel on the floor instead, or have a guard carry him out of the room. Brushing the mulberry silk with his fingers was liable to get him a zap of painful magic as punishment and never the warmth of a real slap.

“He used to have me on my back,” said Hobbes. “Them sheets’d move and tangle around my wrists, pin me there – when he wasn’t fucking me, he’d be pouring faerie silver over my chest or dripping wax on my thighs, dropping crystals over my belly. Fuck me ‘til he could see the future on my torso or glinting in my eyes. Didn’t know that, did ya?”

“No,” said Valorous.

Hobbes didn’t stop him from following him into the house.

* * *

Cecil hung up his coat and put his boots aside.

King was standing at the kitchen table, looking down at the adoption paperwork for Ruby there. They were coming around to inspect his garden on Tuesday morning.

“D’you want me to lend you the adoption fee?” asked King.

“What’ll it cost me?” asked Cecil.

He hadn’t fucked the pretty little cunt in the dog shelter, even though when Cecil had leaned over him to grab a pen from the counter, showed how much bigger he was than him while touching their chests together, he’d shivered and looked away and come over like the pretty ones often did, shy and scared and curious about how much it would hurt, how it would feel, letting a nasty man treat them as nasty as he wanted.

“I was going to drug you,” said King casually, crossing his arms over his chest and looking at Cecil seriously. “The other day. I was going to make it so you fucked me – once you’d done it under the influence, you’d do it again after. But it was too dirty in here, too messy. It would have ruined it.”

So he was planning to rape him before – that was a relief, actually.

“I wa—”

Cecil shoved his fingers into King’s mouth, not interested in hearing him talk anymore, and Valorous choked around them as Cecil slid them toward his throat, but he went down on his knees without even hesitating, staring up at Cecil with his eyes big and eager and wanting as Cecil pulled himself out of his shorts. If the acrid smell of a day’s worth of gym sweat clinging to Cecil’s cock and balls put him off, King didn’t show it: Cecil didn’t go easy on him, shoved himself down to the root and fucked the lad’s throat, and King—

Well, of course he looked pleased as fucking punch.

He’d only been waiting for this for a decade.

* * *

Cecil Hobbes had served two years for grievous bodily harm.

He’d never fucked one of his students in all the years he was a teacher – the employee tribunal at the school had been because he’d been shagging a sixth-former on the other side of Lashton, one who was nineteen and finishing up his A-Levels a year late, and it turned out that the sixth former had been the son of the new French teacher, who’d taken offence.

It had been her husband – the lad’s step-dad – that Cecil Hobbes had dislocated the jaw of and shoved into the Lashton harbour later on, ‘cause the step-dad had called Hobbes a nonce and said he should be in jail, and then started throwing punches when Cecil had said at least the boy had wanted Cecil’scock in his arse, and had never wanted his.

“You get raped when you were a kid?” asked Valorous, and Hobbes didn’t flinch as he took a drag of his cigarette, exhaling.

“Yeah,” he said. “My dad started buggering me when I was seven, and sometimes he’d pass me around the pub. You?”

“Don’t know,” said Valorous, taking the fag out of Hobbes’ hand, and Hobbes gave him a sceptical look as Valorous brought it up to his mouth.

“The fuck do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I’ve never been fucked and not enjoyed it,” said Valorous.

“You been fucked when you’ve said no?”

“Yeah.”

“You been fucked when you’ve said no and tried to struggle free, and they’ve kept you stuck in place?”

“’Course.”

“Then you’ve been raped.”

“Huh,” said Valorous, and passed back the fag.

“That fucking pigpen’s rotted your brains,” said Hobbes, and brought the lit head of the cigarette down on the inside of Valorous’ thigh – Valorous cried out in pain, hissing, but his mostly-soft cock gave a twitch of interest, and automatically, his thighs spread wider apart. “’Course,” muttered Hobbes, “your brains were pretty fucked to begin with.”

“Fuck me again,” said Valorous.

“Cook me dinner again,” retorted Hobbes, “and I will.”

Valorous was smiling before he even realised it, and a warm glow settled in his belly, so encompassing that he forgot the burn on his thigh, stopped rubbing at it with his fingers. “You liked it?” he asked, his voice soft.

“Jesus, lad,” said Hobbes, and dipped his head between Valorous’ thighs.

Valorous cooked for him after.

He slept that night in Hobbes’ bed, face mashed up against Hobbes’ back, and slept without nightmares, which was a nice change. When he woke up, Hobbes was sitting up, Valorous’ head in his lap, and Hobbes was watching his face.

“What?” Valorous asked.

“Nothing,” said Hobbes. “You’re just the oldest lad I’ve ever had in my bed, that’s all.”

“You could’ve had me younger,” pointed out Valorous.

Hobbes smiled a thin, nasty smile. “I’m not even halfway to the oldest you’ve had in yours, am I?”

“Can I suck you off?”

Hobbes’ laugh was cold, bitter. “Fuck,” he said, pronounced the word, almost, but he didn’t say no. He pulled Valorous’ hair in just the way he liked, choked him the way he wanted, without ever having to be told how.