Mistress Alexa stares into my eyes, forcing my gaze to hers. And she begins to explore my body, my responses, by pinching me here and there: at my waist, just beneath my breast, at the side of my neck, the back of my arm. Evil little pinches that don’t last long, but one comes right after another and I’m overloading on pain again. But my body loves this—it’s addictive, being overloaded. As addictive as it is disturbing. I’m soaking wet, my pussy clenching at nothing, wanting to be filled. My clit hard and needy. It’s making me pant, the pain and the desire, and the panting makes me drool a little again—I can’t help it with the damn gag on.
“Oh, poor, poor girl,” Mistress Alexa croons. “Drooling is just not pretty, my pet.” She uses her thumb to stroke the drool from one corner of my stretched lips. She does it again at the other corner, this time her thumb pressing hard into my flesh, her nail scraping as she pushes the moisture away. She does it over and over, and it’s really hurting, but I focus on her lovely blue eyes and manage to hold fairly still.
Finally she straightens. “Her nipples are stiff, her pupils dilated,” she says, her eyes narrowing, her gaze wandering over my body. “She loves it all.”
“Yes,” the Master says, moving around to stand in front of me, and all I can see is the back of his legs, clad in dark trousers. And if I dare—and I do for one brief moment—I can see what a fine, shapely ass he has.
I want to lean in and rest my cheek on that muscular curve. To place a kiss there. Need runs through my system like a shock, like lightning. I try to swallow it down.
“She’s fighting it. Fighting something. I don’t know how far you’ll be able to take her training if you can’t work her past it, Damon. But she does love it. She needs it.”
“She does. Look at this,” he says, bending to swipe his fingers between my thighs.
I gasp, pleasure shivering over my skin.
He holds his hand out to the Mistress, and she strokes one finger over his. She smiles.
“Absolutely soaking wet. It doesn’t surprise me.” Holding my chin in her fingers—one of them still wet with my own juices—she says to me, “You’re turned on by us discussing you, aren’t you, Girl? You like to be objectified. And you love the pain, even if you hate it. But I don’t think you do.” She smiles, then drops my chin.
I want to answer her, but of course I am allowed to do no such thing, even if I weren’t gagged. But she’s right. About everything.
“She’ll get plenty of that here,” the Master says. “Perhaps from you, since you’re staying the weekend, unless you’re too busy with my boy. By the way, I’ll have him sent straight to your room tonight, if you want.”
“That would be wonderful. I’d play with your new toy, but I can only stay tonight, and I really would like Christopher right away.”
“You shall have him.”
“Thank you for your generosity, Damon.”
He nods at her, catches me watching and slaps my cheek. I have to blink the tears away. “Eyes down, Girl, unless instructed otherwise.”
My cheek burns, but shame at having displeased him, at having forgotten myself, burns deeper than the small slap, scalding me to the core. I must remember myself. I was so much better for Master Graham. He called me a “push-button” slave. But Master Graham never challenged my senses the way the Master does. The way the futility of any struggle against this place and the chosen powerlessness of my contract do.
I am so in love with everything about this place.
His attention has turned back to the Mistress as the valet comes into the room, which I know from the toes of his shiny black shoes. My eyes are glued to the Persian carpet.
“Robert, see that Christopher is bathed and sent to Mistress Alexa’s room.”
“Yes, Sir. Right away. Mistress, may I escort you to the east wing?”
“No, Robert—I prefer you see that Christopher is readied for me. Give him a good enema before you bring him.”
“Yes, Mistress.”
I hear her kiss the Master’s cheek. “I may miss dinner tonight. And Christopher may not be able to sit down for a week.”
“Of course.”
“Don’t sound so amused.”
“Alexa, darling, we are always amused at the thought of you fucking one of my boys with your enormous, harnessed cock all night.”
“I think
you
need to find some way to amuse yourself, Damon. All work and no play is making you a dull Dom.”
“Hardly, Alexa. But luckily, my work
is
play.”
“As is mine. And I plan to play very, very hard tonight.”
“So do I.”
She laughs, and I can feel it aimed at me. But I don’t mind. All I can think of, all I can hope, is that he means with
me
. This makes me wet again. It also terrifies me.
I understand perfectly well that part of what I agreed to when I signed the slave contract was being broken in to a new house, to a new Master. This is going to be very, very hard, as he said. I am shivering all over. Wet. Ready. Wanting whatever cruel lessons he sees fit to dole out. I am ready to be his.
The Master stands in silence as Mistress Alexa’s stiletto heels retreat down the hallway. I don’t know what he’s waiting for. What he plans to do. Of course I don’t. My arms have already begun to ache from being bound for so long. Taking a breath, I try to sink into the ache, but my poor brain is too much all over the place. Everything is too new. I try to roll my shoulders, and there is just enough give to get one tiny roll in before the Master grabs me and shoves me to the floor, onto my side, then rolls me over on my back.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Girl?” he asks. “Did I tell you to move?”
He doesn’t need to raise his voice. Every single thing that comes out of his mouth is a threat.
I don’t dare shake my head. He is so thoroughly intimidating, straddling my body. If only I could tear my gaze from his for a moment to collect myself, but he would never allow it. He stares down at me, his blue eyes burning with a dark fire that looks like banked anger and something else. Something impossible not to recognize: banked desire. He
wants
me.
My heart leaps, my body thrumming as he continues to stare at me, into me. There are long, breathless moments in which I feel as if I am held suspended in mid-air. In which I swear desire is like a sound wave just out of reach, then a buzzing in the room, then a drumbeat pounding between my thighs.
He takes a deep breath, holds it for a moment, and I can’t begin to imagine what that means. Then he blinks, leans down and slaps my face—one light smack, then another. He pauses only to take the gag from my mouth, and I have perhaps a single second to press my lips together before he starts slapping my face once more, my left cheek, then the right, harder and harder.
Why do I feel joyous? Maybe it’s because he hasn’t taken his burning gaze from mine. He’s hurting me, but I want the pain. I want to take it for him. To be nothing for him. To be everything. I want it because he is the most wicked sadist I have ever met, which makes my heart trip and tumble. Which makes me need to please him all the more. And something in my chest loosens, opens up like a black chasm lined in silver.
Terrifying.
Yes, please.
Finally he turns me over and drags me on my knees to a small sofa, but I don’t have a moment to see what it looks like—the room is a blur of red velvet and gold damask and God knows what else as he bends me over the sofa, my breasts resting on the seat. I hear him remove his belt, and with the first blow I know he’s doubled it, making a heavy loop of the leather. He hits my poor ass with it, hard and fast. The pain is intense right from the start, and at first I get a nice flood of endorphins, pleasure making me wet, making me need to come. But very quickly he’s hitting me too hard for any of those lovely brain chemicals to help, and it’s simply my unbridled desire to please that enables me to take it.
Anything for him.
I hear his ragged breathing over me as he drops the belt and his fist goes into my hair once more. He pulls me to the floor, onto my back again, and kicks my thighs apart. I watch him through a haze of wonder and pain as he drops the belt and smacks my breasts with his bare hand. My body arches into the pain, into his touch, into the lovely brutality.
Anything for you.
“Do not defy me, Girl.” He places one booted foot on my right shoulder, then reaches down to give my breast another hard slap. “In time—and let’s both hope you’re smart enough—you’ll come to find I have little patience for an unruly slave. You are mine.” He slaps the other breast, the pain making my ears ring. “
Mine.
I will be sure you never have the opportunity to forget that.”
Yes, please.
He stands there watching me for endless moments. Then he leans down and grabs my jaw in his strong hand. He says in a low tone, almost a murmur, “You are too damn beautiful for your own good. Or maybe for mine.”
Before I can help myself, I shake my head my head the tiniest bit, and he allows me to do it.
“Yes. I don’t know what this means, either.” He stops for a moment, takes a deep breath, purses his lips, then squeezes my jaw harder. “If I asked you—told you—to suck my cock, you would,” he says harshly.
I nod, not knowing what else to do, not knowing what’s going on.
“If I beat you—and I will—you would accept it gratefully. And accept me making you come just as gratefully. But if I kissed you… What would you think of that?”
I take a moment, confused.
“You may speak,” he tells me.
Still, it takes me several long seconds to find my voice. “I would accept it all with utter gratitude and desire, Master,” I whisper.
“Because I am your Master,” he says, rather than asks.
“No,” I tell him. Then more harshly, my heart oddly full, “
No
, Master!”
Straightening up, he runs a hand through his hair, then takes a step back and sits on the edge of the little sofa, watching me still. After a full minute goes by in which my heart is a small hammer trying to beat its way out of my chest, I hear footsteps behind me. “Robert, leash her and have her taken to the basement. Let my driver work her over after you’ve fed and rested her for a bit. He’s earned a little bonus.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“And have Cook send my dinner to my suite.”
“Of course. Anything else, Sir?”
“Leave her in her chains down there tonight.”
“Very good, Sir.”
He’s done with me? Tears burn behind my eyes. Robert pulls me to my feet, loops one of those choke-chain collars onto my neck, snaps a leash onto it, then he leads me back to my room. Unsnapping the carabiner which attaches my cuffs behind my back, he draws my arms to my sides, taking a few moments to massage my shoulders, to check my hands for circulation. Then the leash is removed but the choke-chain stays, like a metallic reminder of my utter submission around my neck, and it feels sacred, somehow.
My mind is whirling, creating a tempest within the floating ether of subspace. He is so, so handsome, the Master, but it goes beyond that. His very darkness draws me, calls out to my own. And what was it he said to me? What could it possibly mean? And then to send me away like that… I have to force myself not to cry. I have never cried so much in my life, and I feel certain this is only the very beginning of a storm of tears the Training House will bring.
Yes, please.
“Stay here,” the valet tells me.
And I do, standing in the middle of the room, trying to breathe through the confusion. After some indeterminable time Robert returns with a tray, which he sets on the floor beside my pallet.
“You have one hour,” he tells me, then he leaves, locking the door behind him.
There are so many thoughts and questions whirring through my brain I can barely stand having to eat—I’d rather lie down on my white pallet and think and dream. But I know better. If I am to withstand the beatings and God knows what else, then I have to eat and rest and stretch. And I do stretch for maybe five minutes before I eat my meal: a small portion of roasted chicken and vegetables, all of it beautifully prepared. There is tea on the tray, and I pour some, longing for milk and sugar, but there is none. I know this about the Training House—about all such formal places—that we are afforded few luxuries, and I had mine with my first meal. No, here the luxuries are in being beautifully bound, harshly punished, having no sense of self or time or meaning beyond what the Masters want us to be. Slave. Girl. Without identity. With no need for it. Yes, to sink into that. To drown in it.
Bring it on.
I lie down on my hard white pallet and close my eyes, although I don’t sleep. My mind is churning with images and memories I don’t want to see, but which I am helpless against, as I am at times.
My mother’s face, so, so pretty, with the red lipstick she always wore, and the scarf around her slender neck. She whispers to me in French. “Je t’aime, ma petite.” This is almost the only thing I can remember about her, I was so young when she died. This and the lilac perfume she wore. I was so little, and yet I had the presence of mind to drag a chair into her closet, to pull one of her sweaters down and keep it in my room, where I slept with it until the scent disappeared.
The day of her funeral I overheard things I probably shouldn’t have—my angry father talking to his lawyer. I was a teenager before I understood his implications that my mother had died while driving home from an assignation with a lover. But my father being who he is, I refuse to judge her for it. We all have to look for love somewhere, don’t we? The Training House is where I am looking.
I can find it here. I can find everything I’ve ever needed here. With him.
The gears in my head instantly switch, and I imagine my exquisite Master’s hands on my body, the things he did to me that first time—the forced squirting. I’ve never felt anything like it, and even remembering it now, I have to squeeze my thighs together, the muscles aching with need.
Maybe the driver will fuck me tonight.
Yes, please.
I don’t even care who he is or how he might do it, how difficult he will make it for me. No, I want him to make it difficult.