Rise of a Fallen Man (A Look in the Mirror #2)

Chapter 4

Salas

Eight years later

“ A nd that’s how it’s done!” I smirked triumphantly, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. “You’re on fire tonight, my lady.”

Madam Edirp, the banker from Main Street, moaned one last time, then closed her legs, and rolled to her side.

“Did I beat my last record, Salas?”

“Close, madam. If we count from before the dinner tonight, this was your orgasm number seven.”

“Really?” she murmured, raking her fingers through the hair on my chest. “You’re simply magnificent tonight, sweetie.”

“You flatter me, my lady.” I caught her hand and removed it from my chest.

At times, I felt worn out to the point when physical contact irritated me. I placed a kiss on her hand to make it look like a caress rather than what it really was—a rejection.

She giggled like a girl half her age. “It certainly felt like you sent me all the way to the afterlife a time or two. Come here, handsome.” She hooked her arm around my neck to pull me closer. “You deserve a kiss.”

Kisses were not necessary. I worked for money, not kisses. My job was to give Madam Edirp as many orgasms as she could handle. In exchange, she paid Traeh handsomely, and Traeh provided me with room and board, as well as put some money aside for when I’d be too old or too sick to work.

But of course, I couldn’t pull away from Madam Edirp, not without risking to offend her. So, I let her guide me down to her puckered mouth and parted my lips when her tongue prodded against them.

“Hmm,” she hummed in pleasure, breaking the kiss after a moment or two. “I love tasting me on you. It’s so deliciously wicked.”

Wicked boys grew into wicked men.

I’d been working at Traeh’s fun house for eight years now and had grown rather comfortable here. Most clients treated us kindly. There were a few who preferred to dominate. Some were even aroused by cruelty, just like Lady Lana. But unlike before, I was never left to deal with them on my own. Traeh and Erif had rules to protect the men working for them and tried not to let any situation get out of control.

By the age of twenty-five, I had a solid base of regular customers. Most, like Madam Edirp, paid for an evening and the entire night after. For many, sex wasn’t the most important or even the most requested activity. Madam Edirp, for example, went through this type of multi-orgasmic indulgence only about once a month. If she visited me on any other night in between, she usually just ordered me to make her tea and spoon her as she slept. She claimed that my tea improved her digestion and the spooning was good for her backache.

I had one client who only requested a massage of her legs and feet. While I delivered it, she liked to complain out loud about her neighbors, her store’s customers, and her in-laws. Our conversation rarely required any input on my part.

Another one liked to recount to me all the dreams and night terrors she’d had since the last time she saw me. I’d serve her tea and listen patiently as she talked. Some nights, she’d allow me to make her come on my fingers. Other nights, she wouldn’t let me touch her at all.

I tried to make sure my clients enjoyed the time spent with me, but there was one thing I couldn’t give them, no matter how much they offered to pay me. It was love.

Most women understood that their money bought them only my time and access to my body. But some had the love fantasy in mind. They demanded an emotional involvement, too, and that was impossible to feel for me and very hard to fake. Despite my extensive experience with sex and pleasure, I still knew nothing about love.

Regardless of whether it was sex or love they searched for in a fun house, loneliness was the main reason that brought many of my clients into my arms. And in that, we were similar. Despite falling asleep while hugging a woman almost every night, I often felt alone.

Madam Edirp stretched in bed, her eyelids drooping.

“Oh, I’ll sleep so well tonight,” she murmured, relaxing into the bedding.

I pulled the covers over her bare shoulders. The old house sometimes got drafty at night.

“I’ll be right back,” I said and padded into the adjacent bathroom to brush my teeth.

I changed from my pants into a pair of long underwear that I liked to sleep in. During the entire night so far, my pants had never come off. For a man of my occupation, I didn’t have nearly as much sex as the general population might think.

Like Traeh had warned me back when I’d first crossed the threshold of this establishment, our work here was all about the clients’ pleasure. Women paid me for their orgasms, not mine. Some enjoyed the actual fucking, but not everyone requested it and not for every visit. Even when a penetration was requested, my climax was never the goal. If I came, it often happened as a side effect.

The visits when I was required to be inside a woman were when the clients brought their daughters to me to help them get rid of their virginity.

These visits were often shorter. The daughters acted uneasily around me, looking like they couldn’t wait for it to be over with. Some focused too much on the process, as if I were giving them a lesson in class. They clearly were educating themselves on what to do with their virginal husbands afterwards.

Once we finished, they would shove a silver coin or a cheap cigar into my hand as a personal thank-you for the experience, then leave promptly to marry their innocent grooms with unsoiled reputations.

It hadn’t been hard to follow Traeh’s advice and keep my heart to myself. At first, I had occasionally longed for a connection. But as the time passed, my heart grew numb and my mind tired.

I no longer missed the physical intimacy. On the contrary, I often loathed it. So many women had come and gone. I’d grown tired of so many faces and so many different bodies in my bed, treasuring the rare nights when I got to sleep alone in my bunk in the attic.

Worn out by all her orgasms, Madam Edirp snored softly by the time I returned to the bedroom. I took a spare blanket and lay on the other side of the bed. There would still be enough time to spoon her before morning as she’d requested and paid for. Until then, maybe I could get some sleep too.

ERIF SHOOK ME AWAKE , frantic with terror.

“Salas, fire!” He coughed in the smoke that was filling the room through the open door. “The house is on fire. You need to get out.”

Alarm speared through me, sending me into action. I tried to wake Madam Edirp, but she only rolled her head on the pillow, keeping her eyes closed.

“Smoke. She must’ve breathed it too much.” Erif ran out the door. “Get her out. I’ll wake the others.”

Taking shallow, careful breaths, I carried Madam Edirp out of the room. The fire had nearly completely taken over the main floor. The flames licked under the stairs, their bright tongues flicking through the gaps in the boards.

Pressing the unconscious woman to my chest, I ran down the stairs as fast as I could, leaping over two steps at a time.

The cold winter air met me outside. The flames brightened the night, flooding the fence and the frozen ground with a sinister red glow.

Wearing only her nightgown, her long hair unbraided, Traeh ran to me with a blanket in her hands. “How is she? Alive?” She tucked the blanket around my client.

“I think so.” I gently laid Madam Edirp down a safe distance from the fire. She groaned, then coughed, gripping her throat.

Traeh clawed at my arm. “Where is Erif? Did you see him?”

“He was inside, waking everyone.”

Someone else ran out of the burning house, and Traeh rushed to them with another blanket.

The freezing cold bit my skin and seeped through my thin linen pants. Frost covered the ground, numbing my bare feet. I ignored it, looking around wildly.

What happened?

Why was the world ablaze?

A window frame collapsed, shuttering the glass panes. Flames burst out, illuminating more of the yard.

“Burn the evil in the cleansing fire!” a female voice shouted over the roaring flames and the crashing of burning wood. “Burn the wicked!”

Wind tore at the pristine white robes of the priestess who stood in the gap in the fence around the yard, surrounded by townspeople. She wore white—the color of Yarnus, the God of Purity. The priestess held a long pole with a ring mounted on top. It represented the circle of life, the symbol of marriage and procreation.

“Burn the wicked!” a man parroted, kicking another section of the fence in.

He tossed his torch through the kitchen window, as if it would make any difference at that point. The house I’d called home for the past eight years was burning to the ground, and nothing would either save it or make it burn faster now.

“There are people inside!” Traeh screamed at the priestess and those who came with her. “You’re burning people alive, you monsters!”

Except that for them, we weren’t “people.” They held us below the animals. We were whores, with less right to exist than scum under their shoe.

Traeh frantically dashed between the men and women in the yard, checking on them and counting the survivors.

Madam Edirp coughed again, then sat up, staring at the fire in horror.

“What’s going on?”

“Are you alright?” I kneeled at her side and pulled the blanket higher over her shoulders.

She spotted the townsfolk by the broken fence and shoved me away.

“Don’t touch me,” she hissed in a half-whisper. A ripple of reflection pulsed through her body. “Where is my wagon? I’ve got to get out of here before anyone sees me with you.”

She paid me to fuck, kiss, and cuddle her in private, but wouldn’t accept a friendly touch from me in public, ashamed to be seen with me. Her rejection burned, but I tamped it down promptly before even a hairline of reflection could mar my skin.

No one could ever see me reflect . No one could know how much their insults hurt me or how scary the world’s disdain could feel.

Since reflection was a public display of fear and shame, a part of dealing with it was to control those emotions. The other part was to physically hold back the ripple, which I’d learned most people couldn’t do. I started training this ability of mine back in Lady Lana’s manor. By flogging myself with the riding crop, I’d learned how to hide my fear of physical pain. During my years at the fun house, I’d trained to conceal my shame too.

“Salas!” Traeh rushed to me. “Erif... He didn’t come out. Everyone is here now, but he’s still inside.”

A beam crashed in the kitchen, sending fireworks of sparks out of the broken windows all around the house.

“Oh no. No, no, no... Erif.” Traeh wailed, falling to her knees beside me.

“I saw him on the stairs,” one of the men said. His leg was bleeding, either burned or cut.

“Erif!” Traeh lurched toward the house, but I managed to grab her just in time.

“You need to take care of the men.” I pointed at the one with blood dripping down his arm and all the others huddling in the yard, half-naked and shivering.

The villagers poured through the broken fence. They threw torches and curses at the house. I feared they might turn their wrath from the inanimate objects like the fence and the house to the people who were taking shelter in the yard.

“Stay here and keep the townsfolk at bay,” I told Traeh, then tipped my head to the closest of our men. “Keep her here. I’ll be right back.”

I picked up the blanket that Madam Edirp had dropped in her escape to her wagon. Throwing it over my head, I ran back into the burning building.

A wave of heat slammed into me inside. The smoke proved disorienting. I dropped to the floor, where the smoke wasn’t as thick, and crawled toward the stairs.

The staircase had burned through and prolapsed. Erif lay at the bottom, his foot stuck between the boards of the lower step. He didn’t move when I grabbed him under his arms. I hoped with all my heart he was just unconscious, not dead.

I freed his leg and dragged him to the exit where Traeh was waiting for us.

“Oh, thank gods...thank gods...” She grabbed Erif’s arm.

Two other men from our house rushed to help.

With a loud cracking, the door frame collapsed. The top beam just missed my shoulder, but the side post caved in, crashing down and scorching my side on the way. My right pant leg caught on fire. The searing pain sent me out into the yard. I fell and rolled on the frozen ground, trying to kill the flames that burned my skin and flesh.

Terror and agony ravaged me. Shame pulsed through it all, fanned by the screams from the crowd higher than the flames. But I didn’t let a single line of reflection show anywhere on my body.

The world did not deserve a visual display of the torture it’d been putting me through.

“Burn. Burn. Burn,” the villagers chanted. “Burn, filthy whores!”