Dhammazhedi grinned ruefully. ‘It’s not so tight though, these days, as it was before I started on her. She got a bit … stretched, you know. I’ve probably ruined her for other men.’ His eyes twinkled. ‘You want tight, you have to go for her other hole. She likes it that way too – and gods, the grip on her! You can hardly believe it, can you? She gets a hold and she just wrings the spunk out of you. That sweet little round arse could drink a gallon of hot jism.’ He paused, running his tongue across his lips, his eyes upon Veraine’s flushed face. ‘You know, just thinking about it is giving me the bone.' He ran his hand up the inside of his thigh, patting what was clearly a tumescent ridge beneath the cloth. ‘What about you?’ he whispered playfully     Veraine, his muscles rigid with tension, flinched. Despite the coolness of the cell sweat was standing out on his temples.     ‘You see,’ said Dhammazhedi, and even though he was still showing all his teeth one could not have described it as a smile any more; ‘that’s the other thing I like to do before the Arena: put my mark on my prey. So I can smell them out. So that they know they’re mine.’     Veraine felt the floor falling away beneath him.     The Rao inclined his head. ‘So what do you say – shall we try out one of Mouse’s favourite positions?’ He reached up and grabbed his prisoner’s head.     Veraine convulsed into movement and there was a brief, brutal struggle, both men kicking to their feet. It couldn’t last. Veraine had no hands and no leverage, and the other man was far heavier; he got his face mashed against the wall and then was flung face down on the bench, still struggling wildly, his cheek missing the food-tray by a hair’s breadth as it was pressed into the leather. The breath was forced from his lungs in a roar of outrage. Dhammazhedi had one hand on the back of his neck to bear him down, and kneed him hard in the thigh, numbing the leg.     ‘Fuck!’ Veraine cursed, spittle spraying out between his clenched teeth onto the leather, his good leg scrabbling vainly for purchase .     ‘Oh, I’m trying to,’ Dhammazhedi said, taking the waist of his fouta and ripping the cloth away. Cold air licked his clammy skin. Veraine’s field of vision had gone dim red with blood and his chest was so choked with rage he could hardly breathe. He heaved and twisted like a beached fish but his struggles were entirely in vain: Dhammazhedi proceeded with cool efficient movements. The sound of him spitting into his palm and lubricating his phallus, then the little wet noises his foreskin made as he worked it to full juicy readiness, made Veraine’s spine contract to a knotted rod.     I will kill him, he howled into the red darkness engulfing him. And some tiny part of him that was somehow separate noticed that it wasn’t fear that made him scream. There was no fear of this. And it wondered why.     ‘Open up,’ Dhammazhedi said curtly.     Veraine felt him then, as thick as a fist or so it seemed; pressing down, pressing up, pressing in; a bludgeoning weapon, an invading force, a club of red-hot iron forcing his sphincter. Sweat was pouring off him like acid. And that little voice inside him said: Don’t fight it. Whatever you do, don’t fight it.     He listened.     He yielded. He took Dhammazhedi’s cock in his arse, inch after inch, though it was so thick it felt as though it would rip him in half, though it was so long it seemed like it would never stop. Sweat trickled down over his balls. His muscles spasmed, relaxing and contracting, sending electric waves of coruscating sensation up his spine and down his legs. He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his face to the leather, fingers knotted into talons by the strain.     ‘Good boy,’ grunted Dhammazhedi, finding his rhythm with thrust after monstrous thrust. ‘Take it to the hilt.’ And Veraine’s clenching anus opened up around his drooling prick like a flower. Inside the abyss behind his eyes Veraine could see it; a soft dark-velvet rose, crimson petals unfurling one after another.     ‘Oh yes,’ said the Tiger Lord in satisfaction, and then there were no more words, just the sound of the two men panting, their exhalations intermingling in aural counterpoint under the echoing walls, Dhammazhedi bending lower over Veraine’s back until his breath was beating in harsh staccato gusts on his neck.     Veraine, pinned and crushed and impaled, felt his violator quicken. In the crimson interior darkness of his mind’s eye, Dhammazhedi’s prick burned like molten gold. As the Tiger Lord rammed deeper and deeper, his pace becoming frantic, it began to bleed a liquid light. ‘Uh,’ coughed Dhammazhedi, spraying Veraine’s shoulder with spit, fingers digging into his hip. Three more great convulsive thrusts and then those big balls contracted, spewing their burden into him in jet after foaming jet, and he saw that ejaculate blazing like magma as it fell upon the bloody, burning roses.     For a while Dhammazhedi rested on his forearms, sweat dripping from his chin between Veraine’s shoulders. ‘Next time I do that,’ he whispered, ‘it’ll be in the Arena, to your corpse. Remember that.’     Veraine lay like one already dead.     Slowly, with the air of one who has done a tricky job well, Dhammazhedi withdrew. ‘No blood,’ he remarked, half-disappointed, half-amused. ‘You’ve done that before, Mouse’s Man.’     It seems so, thought Veraine bitterly. Between his body and the leather his own penis lay flattened, no longer tumescent, in a sticky wash of semen. The arousal and frustration and brutal stimulation had been too much for it. He did not move as Dhammazhedi rose, chuckling.     ‘Remember this,’ the Tiger Lord said as he prepared to leave the room. ‘You think about it as they put you into the Arena.’     He lay silent. Let the bastard think he’s broken me, said Veraine to himself. It will give me that much more pleasure when I kill him.