The evening air in the garden was drenched in jasmine and the faintest trace of the girls' perfume. Floating magelights cast soft shadows across the marble statues. Their glow slid over the bare shoulders of the serving girls. Servants had already arranged chairs for the lords and their ladies, side by side, so they could watch and encourage their champions. Kali observed the preparations with mild curiosity. For an ancient demoness, human rituals of dominance were an amusing performance.
What charming toys, she sent her thought to Jean and Sophie.
Jean felt the pulse quicken in his temples. Sweat formed between his shoulder blades despite the garden's cool. Every touch of the evening sea breeze on his skin raised the fine hairs on his arms.
"My love." Sophie leaned to his ear. "This is a battle for who we are."
Jean nodded. From Kali came only amusement and calm. That was his trump card now. A trump card over which he had no full control.
Kali and Astarte took their positions in the circle, facing each other. The serving girls followed their masters and settled them into chairs. Their movements were a graceful, playful dance designed to offer the eye a feast and set the mood.
Felix worked the metal buttons of his waistcoat. His fingers were not entirely steady. His jaw flexed, his throat jerked once as if to catch a swallow it did not find, and a faint sheen of cologne-sweet oil mixed on his tongue with the metal taste of his own blood where he had bitten it. A tight heaviness was already gathering in his loins.
"Begin!" the ladies said in unison.
Hilda came to Jean first. Tall and fair, full of bosom, with eyes the colour of hazelnut. Behind her stepped Aiko, slim as a willow, the oriental calm of her features schooled to perfect stillness. The warmth of their skin reached him before their hands did. Rose and vanilla lodged at the back of his throat. They knelt, breath grazing his wrists, and their palms slid up his thighs to loose the belt. Buckle and buttons gave. His cock stood into the cool night air, hard and heavy, and the skin shivered at the contrast. Above him the two exchanged an involuntary glance.
"Sir… this is…" Hilda faltered.
The silk of their dresses rustled with every movement. Jean closed his eyes, focusing on his breathing. Deep through the nose, slow through the mouth. Every touch sent a wave of warmth through him. But he had to hold his control. The stakes were far too high.
Hilda closed her fingers on the shaft, and heat rushed into his skin beneath them. She swept her tongue across the head, paused at the frenulum, pressed exactly where the nerve lived and withdrew before the pressure could build. Every touch sent a small charge along nerves he had forgotten he owned. He drew a broken breath; his hips lifted of themselves and he forced them down. She fed him fire without feeding him release.
Aiko followed the cool of her lips with her tongue across the head, and he shivered in spite of himself. They ran together down the shaft and parted to either side. One beneath, along the thick vein. The other above, along soft skin. They met again at the tip. From that doubled pressure blood surged to the head until the skin stretched taut and shone. Hilda laid her free hand on Aiko's breast and took the nipple between her fingers, and Aiko answered in kind without breaking the kiss she held just above Jean's crown. Saliva ran warm in two ribbons down to the root.
Well trained, Jean noted, feeling his breathing quicken, his stomach muscles clench, his toes cramp inside his shoes. Sweat broke out on his forehead. One drop rolled down his temple, leaving a cool trail.
Felix was breathing in broken bursts, nostrils flared, fingers clawed into the chair's arms as though he meant to pull them away from the frame. His heart banged against his throat. The full-breasted, red-haired Olga, all freckles and plump mouth, knew his favourite order by heart. She took him to the root until the head struck the back of her throat, held him there for three beats, and her throat contracted around him in long slow pulses. Then she withdrew, pressing the frenulum with the point of her tongue just long enough to shoot a current from his tailbone to the nape of his neck, and gave way to Aliya. The dark, golden-skinned brunette played a different game. Aliya took only the head between her lips, closed them in a tight ring, and drew the air out of her mouth in a long suck so that wave after wave of drawing pressure ran down the shaft like something meaning to pull the soul out of him.
"Master… your little whore loves your cock…" Olga murmured between turns, pressing the spit-wet length against her cheek, slapping herself lightly with it, smearing saliva and beaded moisture across her freckles, looking up at him from beneath her lashes.
The submission of it. The alternation of depth and clench and sudden air and greedy vacuum was rolling Felix to pieces. His sack drew up tight against his body, and each time one of them released him his hips rocked up hunting the lost heat.
"See the difference, Dantes?" He meant the words to come level. They did not. "Between theory… and practice."
Jean was past minding the taunt. Aiko held Hilda's head in both hands and turned it on his cock. Hilda had taken him to the root and locked him there. Her throat closed around the head, her nose pressed into the hair at his groin, her lips to the very base. Aiko pressed her even tighter on it, stealing her breath, looking Jean dead in the eye. Hilda swallowed once, twice, and each swallow ran down the length of him in a tightening wave. His teeth clenched so hard that the taste of iron rose on his tongue.
His thighs locked into a tremor. He pressed his boots flat against the stones, hunting purchase. A fine shake ran up through his pelvis. The weight in his legs climbed higher, gathering below his navel, swelling for its outlet.
Can't give in. Not now.
Sophie watched her husband fight himself. Saw his fists clench. Saw his eyelids twitch. Her own breath was short with the echo of pleasure pouring across the bond, and between her thighs a slow wet heat had begun.
"Breathe, my love," she whispered.
She caught Izabella shifting in her chair, all composure and no composure at once, breath trembling, a small vein ticking at her collarbone. Her mother's pupils had swallowed the iris whole. Her eyes did not leave Felix and the two girls at his feet. Aliya had already climbed astride Felix and pressed his face into the hollow between her small firm breasts. He kneaded the muscle of her buttocks, and she rocked upon him, and every pitch of her rode back along the shaft buried in Olga's throat.
Felix tried to speak, and what came out was a rasp; his tongue was glued to the roof of his mouth. Olga chose that moment to rotate her head the full compass along his length and then released him with a jerk, dragged a deep breath, and took him back inch by inch. Under that pressure and wet heat his sight narrowed to a single red crown bobbing between his knees.
"You chose them for Uncle, did you, Mama?" Sophie took her mother's measure. "You know exactly what he likes."
"I know very well what my brother enjoys." Izabella smiled and let it sharpen. "These days I suppose it is your concern. Though when did you and your father grow so… close?"
Jean's pulse had moved into the shaft itself. Aiko released Hilda's head and closed her hands around the base, working it in tight rings; each squeeze drove the jolt deeper, into the belly and up the spine. Hilda drew back to the head and closed her lips over it, rolling it with her tongue, pressing it to the roof of her mouth, releasing, the small rough papillae sewing hot stitches into the crown. Behind his eyelids sparks flew. The air in his lungs had gone thick; each breath had to be shoved out.
A drop of sweat slid down his spine and tickled the skin beneath his shirt. A heavy musk rose through the scents of rose and vanilla and the garden's night flowers.
Control was running out between his fingers. Each new stroke of Hilda's tongue answered with a clench in his belly. A growl that he barely managed to swallow kept climbing to his throat. His breath tore into ragged bursts.
Through the bond Sophie caught his fight, digging her nails into the velvet of the armrest.
Not now. Please, not now.
Her fear coursed through the bond like an icy wave over hot skin.
Jean set his teeth and gathered himself around her voice, around the place in his chest where she lived.
Kali. They reached for the demoness with a single thought. Your turn.
A sadistic joy of a bear-trap finally snapping rolled back along the bond.
My turn to do what, darlings? Kali teased.
Bite!
Kali moved toward the centre of the circle. The air around her seemed to crackle with static. Gooseflesh broke out over Jean's skin. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Even without looking at her, he felt the force.
Astarte had gone rigid. He stared at Kali with an expression Felix had never seen on him before. Every instinct screamed run, but the demon's legs would not obey.
Felix felt the primal terror through the bond with his familiar. His mouth went dry. An icy void opened in his stomach. And inside it rose a dark, twisted arousal at his own helplessness, so that the cock in Olga's throat tightened to the point of ache.
Aliya sank lower to join her friend, and they took him between their tongues in turn, braiding a wet knot at the main vein, parting and meeting again at the head. Every fresh slip of hot spit along the shaft struck Felix from coccyx to neck. Olga moved to the perineum, tracing the inside of his thighs with her fingertips, venturing to the pucker itself with a teasing press. At each touch his whole pelvis clenched, and a new bead rose at the crown only to be licked up by one mouth or the other.
In the ring, in place of the duel, something stranger was unfolding. Without hurry Kali drew a chaise longue out of the air in the middle of the fighting circle. The air of the garden thickened at the casual ease of it.
"That's against the rules!" Felix gasped. "A duel without weapons or magic!"
The protest carried no weight.
"Darling, it doesn't look like a weapon." Izabella soothed him, eyes on the fight. "I'm sure it's fine."
Kali settled on the chaise, raised a bare foot, and studied it, turning it this way and that in the lamplight. To ignore the duel so openly was worse than any blow she could have struck.
Astarte had not moved. Had not changed his stance. He understood that this was his chance. Years of training, the experience of hundreds of duels, all of it thinned to water in the face of true power. What stood across the ring from him was not simply a stronger demoness. It was a creature of another order. From the moment she had crossed the threshold, he had felt himself a small thing, a beetle at her foot. And with power like that one does not fight. One kneels. In the demon's fawning eyes a small understanding moved.
Astarte crawled to her on all fours, like a dog on its belly. The demon's hands shook. He touched his lips to the arch of her foot and, not daring to handle her, traced his kisses along the bone of her ankle, along the hollow beneath it. Kali pressed her big toe against his lower lip, and he parted his mouth, ready to receive the treat.
She shoved her toes into his mouth, and, forgetting himself, he set to greedily licking them. The demon's hand crept up her ankle.
Know your place! Kali drove her heel into his chin, sending Astarte flying back.
He tucked his hands behind his back, crawled forward again, and pressed his mouth to her sole, running his tongue down to her heel.
Naama rose and stepped into the ring.
"Naama, what..." Izabella broke off, unable to finish the question.
Her familiar went to one knee beside Astarte and bowed her head.
Beneath Felix's feet the floor fell away. Through the bond the familiar's awe and horror poured into him, and behind it the physical humiliation of Astarte. The bright burn of shame fused in him with a strange release of surrender. Astarte, who was a part of him, had cast down their shared will. Nothing stood there now but the will and the want of the mistress. The dark wave lifted Felix from beneath and carried him up to his throat; his stones drew up hard, and the shaft between Aliya's lips jerked with its last warning.
A choked cry tore loose of him. Felix arched on the cushions. Every muscle locked at once and a thick hot endless release broke over him. The first jet struck Olga on the cheek and on her parted lips. She took the hot seed on her tongue, swallowed, and pressed forward for the next. A long thread laid itself along her chin and slid down her throat. Aliya held her face to the rest. A hot ribbon crossed the bridge of her nose, another traced the curve of her breasts. Her eyes closed. Her slow palm worked the warmth into her skin, and a small quiet purr rose in her throat. Olga licked her own lips, turned, and ran her tongue along the line of Aliya's neck, gathering what had fallen there. Aliya shivered and tipped her head back. A salt-musk taste passed between them. Felix let his head fall against the cushion, wrung dry, still quivering, empty to the marrow.
Jean stood at his own edge. Low in his belly the heat was beating to discharge, the stomach muscle already moving ahead of it, the first bead rising in the shaft. Pride, or stubborn will, or some harder thing beneath both, held him a hair from the fall. He made a small sign to the girls.
"Enough."
Hilda drew her mouth off with care, Aiko released her fingers, and he was left pulsing to the cool air, wet and dark and congested but unbroken.
The garden held nothing now but Felix's ragged breath. The scent of sweat and crushed flower hung low. Jean opened his eyes. His body came back to him by degrees, palm by palm, finger by finger.
His shirt clung to his back. His hands still shook faintly from the effort. But he had stood, and a warm unmistakable pleasure of having won moved under his ribs.
Felix sat slack in his chair. His chest rose and fell too fast. His skin shone with sweat in the lamplight. His cock, still damp and spasming faintly, was settling against his thigh and leaving a dark patch on the trouser cloth. He had the look of a man who had walked into his own banquet and found, in the middle of it, that he was standing at someone else's table holding a tray.
"It would seem the wager is mine, Felix." Jean rose. "Your restraint was not quite the match of your conceit."
Kali moved her toes against Astarte's mouth and then pushed him away. The demon held still where he had been left, not daring a muscle, wrapped in a grateful sort of ecstasy.
Felix sat gulping for air.
Izabella reached for her brother's sleeve and gripped it. A bright feverish hope burned in her eyes.
"That power... Kali... Father must see this! Jean, with might like that you could reclaim everything. Your name! Your standing!"
"Mother, stop." Sophie stood, took her uncle by the hand. "I don't need his name. And neither does he. All we need is to be together."
"You don't understand what you're saying." Izabella looked at her daughter with pain and desperation.
"That's enough for tonight." Jean killed the argument. "Sister."
He offered his arm to Sophie and stood. The serving girls put his clothing to rights. Kali rose with the same grace she had spent on sitting. Astarte stayed prostrate at the centre of the ring, daring to move nothing without permission.
The heavy doors closed behind them. The echo of that visit would ring through the halls of the Lexin estate long after they were gone. Felix sat in his chair, drawing down breaths. His world had been rearranged. He had met a true power, and he had met it on his knees.