An ex-soldier, Arthur "Kuhn" Conrad, now a debt collector of sorts for a corrupt company, can't sleep one night, and as he's walking the streets, sees a coworker - on a whim, he follows, and ends up in an underground club.

The older man, Ignatius Kasovitz, likes to tie people up, it seems, and Kuhn finds he wants to try being tied up, if it's Kasovitz doing the tying.

Set in London, circa 1953, in my Magic Beholden universe, readable as standalone. 15k, rated E, cis M/M.

Contains asexual kink and recreational power dynamics explored between two coworkers; age gap of approximately fifteen years between two middle-aged men; references and descriptions to clowns and the circus as well as vague criminal work; content warnings for references to grief and trauma as a result of the Shoah and deployment in WWII respectively, with discussions of Nazi death camps and POW camps.