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Louis’s hand is tight around Armand’s. Awkward clasp, Armand’s thumb pinned against his other fingers.
A sick, floating kind of high propels them through Paris. Down alleys. Through parks. Louis doesn’t know where he’s going. He doesn’t seem aware of Armand—in his grasp or in his mind. He is thinking of Lestat: thinking of Lestat thinking of them. Thinking of Lestat thinking of him thinking of Lestat.
The touch of his consciousness has the same flickering mania as it did before he struck the coven down.
Am I next, Armand wonders. Or did he mean it?
Armand is shoved against a brick wall. Face momentarily too close to his, a little flicker, a smack of a hand on his cheek, the smell of the sea, the panting of the ship’s captain—
playing dead?
—Louis studying his face.
“I meant it,” he says, an answer to the question Armand hadn’t really asked. Then, “Open your mouth.”
Armand obeys automatically. Louis presses their mouths together and slides his tongue between his lips. They are not alone, there are the nighttime passersby who always haunt Paris at this time of night, and someone mutters an ugly word in their direction. There is no Lestat here. Only the one in their minds, and when he appears there, Armand sucks on Louis’s tongue and pushes a knee between his legs, not to urge him on but to remind him of who he’s kissing against the wall.
Louis pushes him back again. He holds Armand by his chin.
“Want me to fuck you here?”
Armand can’t read his tone. Unease shifts in him. He swallows, brushes their mouths together. He dares to stroke his cheek.
“I want what you want. Always.”
Louis scoffs.
“That your idea of atonement?”
“Louis,” he begins and then stops.
Louis puts his hand over Armand’s where it rests on his cheek.
“I could drag you down this street by your hair and not one person would think I was going too far. God would stand up and applaud.”
Armand breathes out slow and steady. He swallows.
“Yes.”
“That all you’re gonna say? Yes?”
Armand closes his eyes.
“I want what you want. I’m yours now.”
Louis unfolds Armand’s hand from his cheek and presses it against the hollow of his own throat.
“Yes,” he says.
#
The first thing his master did after purchasing him was bring him to a hot bath. He had washed his hair for him, laid folded, fresh clothes within his eyeline as a silent promise, and then slipped into the water himself. There had been kisses, slow ones, with his big hands cradling Armand’s face, and when Armand was gasping and halfway to begging for it, then he’d sunk further into the water and swallowed Armand’s cock. He didn’t seem to care how long orgasm took to find, just worked him sweet and steady with his mouth as if little Amadeo’s pleasure was all he wanted.
In the haze of steam and breath, Amadeo wondered if, before Venice, he had ever looked at a man and wanted him. Or if he was only finding it now.
Now when he looks back, he doesn’t think he ever imagined an end to the fucking, even in his most desperate dreams at the brothel—fucking was just what he did now. He would have mounted anyone who took him out of that place, if it meant staying out.
If he was handsome and rich and gentle, then that was only the best of all bargains.
Marius to Santino, to the Coven, to Lestat, to the Coven, and so now to Louis. Burning beam to burning beam.
Those terrible nights in Louis’s arms, after he’d made his devil’s bargain. Playing at a life with each other. Funny how good fucking didn’t feel like a safe bet in Paris until he’d already bet against it. Then it felt like the surest thing in the world.
They gave me a choice. I chose.
He hadn’t worn clothes for days. Every time affairs wound down, he found a way to get them going again.
“Is it gonna be like this for good?” Louis had laughed when, after about forty minutes of stillness, Armand started kissing down his chest again. “Not sure even we got the energy.”
“Just for now,” Armand whispered into his navel. “Let me enjoy you.”
Yes yes yes, came Santiago’s voice in his head, as condescending as it had been when they’d fucked. Armand sank his teeth into the tender skin at the crook of Louis’s pelvis and his thigh. Blood trickled like honey into his mouth. Enjoy, mon jeune.
Lestat had said, Enjoy him.
And Marius too, when a very good friend came to call.
Enjoy.
How sweet now to think of Louis kicking Santiago’s severed head and imagining it was done for his, Armand’s, honor.
#
The hotel room is cramped and ill-equipped, the bed barely large enough for one man. As Louis shuts the door behind them, Armand decides he can take the floor.
He looks back at Louis, who is now leaning his back against the door. His face is terrifyingly blank, the way it had been when Armand came to him, bargain newly made.
I did not care. I did not care.
Does he go to him? Does he wait for the signal to approach? He resists the urge to rub his shoulder. His fingers twitch against his sides.
A car horn sounds outside. Someone shouts. In the distance, a barking dog.
Louis, Armand thinks. Maître.
A miserable, exhausted laugh from Louis.
Still on that?
At a loss of what else to do, Armand goes to his knees. He stares up at Louis, willing him to act.
Louis’s mouth twists, shattering that terrible blankness, and he strides forward and yanks Armand to his feet again. He shakes him by the shoulders. Once. Twice. He’s not blocking his mind from being read, but there’s nothing concrete to be found there, just a mix of exhaustion, rage, and bitterness, and underneath it the broken howl that has been omnipresent for weeks.
When will she be back?
Why can’t she just come back?
Louis lets go of him as if scalded. He stares as if searching for something in Armand’s face. Armand lets it go blank and open.
Louis’s lip curls. Then his hands go to his belt.
It makes a slithering sound as it slides out of its loops and as Louis winds it around his hands—halving it, then quartering it—an exhilarating thrum of anticipatory fear winds from Armand’s gut into his thighs and his cock.
He’s going to hit me.
The ghost of a remembered pain blazes down his back—not from the rod, but from two of his sad, scrawny peers dragging him across the dirty floor to the brothel keeper and wrenching his feet out, the most expedient part of his body to beat—
he’s giggling between yelps, facedown in silk and velvet, with bloody legs and his master’s hand cracking against his ass, drunk both on pain and the novelty of something that feels like care alongside it—
he’s trapped by his master’s arm in the same spot, every part of him on fire, howling like a dog—
Instead Louis holds the folded belt out.
“Bite down,” he says.
There’s a challenge in his eyes.
He holds the belt just far enough away that Armand has to arch his neck for it. His teeth sink into leather. The seam of the belt lays across his tongue, and it reminds him a little of the frenulum of a cock. The leather tastes strange, somehow animal and vegetable all once. He tilts his head to balance the weight of the buckle, which hangs heavy and limp past his chin. He feels a little like a dog holding its leash, begging for a walk.
Louis must have caught the echo of the thought. He snorts and pats Armand’s cheek a few times, lips pursed. The belt buckle clinks.
“Good doggy.”
He has Lestat’s eyes—no need for mind-reading; Armand had known at first glance who must have sired him. A coldness lives in them now, however, that he never saw in Lestat. Not so long ago, Louis used to smile at him. Will he ever have that again?
Does it matter, so long as he has him?
Louis pushes him back onto the narrow bed. The metal buckle slaps Armand’s neck when he goes down. A little sting. A beating in miniature.
Louis steps forward between Armand’s spread knees. Armand holds his breath. He waits—for fucking, for a slap—but what happens is something flickers in those cold eyes, and then Louis gets on his knees by the bed and nuzzles between Armand’s thighs for his cock. He opens his trousers, pulls his cock free, and his mouth sinks blood-warm onto Armand. Armand hisses around Louis’s belt and bites further into it. It smells like him.
Louis sucks his cock with long, firm pulls of his mouth, his nose in his pubic hair.
He recognizes in Louis a familiar impulse—that urge to self-soothe by servicing somebody else, and in so doing servicing oneself. Nothing so meditative or comforting as a simple task. Cover one’s teeth, hollow one’s cheeks, be pleasing. He lays a tentative hand on the back of his bobbing head, caresses the softness of his hair. Saliva collects around his tongue; he coughs past the makeshift gag and it splutters down his lips.
His core tightens. He chews the belt and tries not to thrust into Louis’s mouth, but Louis is ahead of him. He shoves Armand’s hips flat against the bed, and he’s coming into Louis’s mouth before he realizes it. It’s that bruising pressure that does it, he’s in a tiny hotel room in Paris, and he’s in Venice with a stranger holding him just like this, his master kissing him from above and upside down, and he’s seasick on a tipping boat with two men holding his arms and legs apart so he can’t kick the captain, and he’s in a tiny hotel room in Paris with Louis spitting short and sharp onto the floor and climbing on top of Armand.
He tugs off Armand’s clothes as he might a doll’s. Kicking his pants the rest of the way down, yanks the buttons on his shirt. Armand smells blood. Louis pauses to swipe at his eyes and then resumes his work. Saliva dribbles down the sides of Armand’s chin. A flash of contempt from Louis at the sight. Armand hears himself whimper.
I’m gonna fuck you, Louis says. Armand nods his head. The belt buckle knocks against his jaw. Louis hikes his legs up.
#
When Armand is upset, he fantasizes about crawling into bed with his dead master—not as he would when they were together, but as he would now, old and tired and footsore. Padrone, he’d whisper, and wait for his master’s arms to fall open and pull him close, anointing him with his old name and thereby turning him back into a boy, a little boy in the arms of something greater.
Eighteen. Nineteen.
He gifted him out more and more as years went by. Amadeo still slept at his side, still woke in his arms, but his eye didn’t linger as it used to. He went out some nights and returned smelling of the boy-houses.
Twenty. Twenty-one.
He had only to find a new sad, starved boy to be his little one, whom he could cradle like a wounded sparrow, and that would be it.
The petty humiliations Amadeo inflicted on himself, just to stretch the time out. He pretended not to understand what his master wanted.
I don’t know, Padrone.
A furtive thrum of heat as he sucked his own thumb.
You’d have to teach me.
What a gift to feel like a child again. To his memory, he’s had no childhood. He started life half-dead. In later decades, that velvet-soft, insular feeling would creep at the edges of him, and he would have to beat it back lest whoever was on him realize and do the right thing, which he never wanted.
I’m too little.
And after fucking and feeding had made them honest again, he mumbled I just want to stay your child into the blood spattered on Marius’s chest. A big hand had lifted his chin, stroked his hair.
Oh, Amadeo. You’ll always be that.
A promise. A threat.
#
Louis’s breath is hot on his face. His weight pushes Armand further into the creaking mattress. He doesn’t want to feed, but his fangs have descended, and Armand watches them gleam in the lamplight as his body jerks back and forth, back and forth. Louis grabs his hips, tilts them a little for a better angle, and it isn’t until a real moan bursts out of Armand’s throat that he realizes he was faking before.
A sweet pain in his gums. His own fangs. They sink through the leather completely. He digs his heels into the backs of Louis’s knees, rolls his hips down into his—this same position when Lestat had fucked him on the floor of the theater box with a hand over his mouth, kissing his own fingers in an imitation of a proper embrace.
That box is ash now.
Decades before Lestat, he had woken in the catacombs one early evening and vomited onto the filthy stones.
What could I have been if I hadn’t stayed his? he’d thought, shivering and cold with no blood to warm him. And why did ever I believe I was happy?
Maybe he’s doomed to only find clarity in hindsight.
His chin and his throat are slick with saliva. The lower half of his body hurts with how Louis is fucking him, the kind of ache he usually relishes in the moment. He wonders when Louis will be done, and then wonders if he’ll wonder this every time forever. Then he wonders if it matters.
And something fractures a little bit suddenly, a weird kind of euphoria seeping like honey into the room.
Louis starts to laugh. Laughing with Armand sprawled underneath him—shoulders shaking, blood-tears leaking out of his eyes, wheezing, and Armand starts laughing too, the belt going slack between his teeth.
At fifteen, although he wouldn’t be turned for many years yet, he had his first taste of the Gift. His body never cooperated with him; every sensation, good or bad, was blunt as a worn knife. But Amadeo had sucked blood from a wound in his master’s wrist one night, a lazy hand on his own cock while his master held him close and covered his throat with kisses, and it had been like the world exploded into color again. He’d finished so hard his vision went white.
Laughing here in Louis’s shaking arms feels like that. Eternity before them, and a bliss so sweet it verges on madness.