It couldn’t have hit Bach any plainer than that. Regardless of Ralhan’s and perhaps even the rest of the world’s opinions, Pani definitely had a thought process. There was more than just a substandard intellect at work behind those cross, grey eyes. There was reasoning and logic. Pani was sentient.
Pani was people.
Etle clasped her hands before her. “A session or two with my hairbrush will take care of all that naughty pridefulness.”
Pani turned on her heel and gave him the most blatantly irritated look. She began to tap her foot.
She couldn’t possibly be people, Bach thought with a sudden irrational anger all his own.
She was a mimic. A clever little pretender who had the moves down right, but none of the thought behind them. This was a force of wills. She was being defiant, nothing more.
“Do it,” he said darkly.
From the moment that Etle caught hold of her arm, Pani fought, kicked and howled the whole way down that dark hall to the back room. From the sounds of it, she fought, kicked and howled the whole way over Etle’s lap.
“Why you silly bit of nuisance,” Bach heard Nil’s wife say, a mild expletive stated in her mild, unhurried and unconcerned tone.
Then the crisp smacking began, hard and quick and Pani’s howls became screams. It was everything Bach could do not to run down to that room and grab Pani out of hairbrush’s reach, especially when she began to scream for him by name.
“They all sound like that when Etle wields the brush,” Ralhan said. “She’ll be sitting tenderly for a day or two, but then she’ll be fine.”
He was getting that nervous look on his face again, so Bach smoothed his expression into the same unreadable mask he’d used so often while working as an agent for Remeik.
“She’s getting only what she deserves,” Bach said, but he still felt guilty. And it was made even worse when, presumably realizing that he wasn’t coming for her, Pani’s wails turned wordless and forlorn.
Bach was so intent of Pani that he didn’t even hear when Sassa broke down, covering her ears with both hands to block out the sounds. Ralhan got up to comfort her, leaving Bach on the verge of charging down that hall to snatch up his beloved pet and leave with her while she still had a bottom left.
The spanking seemed to go on forever. And just when Bach was sure he couldn’t take one more smack, it stopped.
A few seconds later, the door flew open hard enough to send it crashing into the wall, and Pani came racing back into the living room. She fell even as she flung herself into his arms, but he caught her and hugged her fiercely.
“No more spanking, Papa,” she wept into his shoulder, and Bach was instantly angry all over again.
He shook her by her shoulders. “Then be good!”
He marched her back to the pets’ table and plopped her none too gently onto her seat.
Ignoring her shout of pain when her bottom made contact with the chair, he took three cookies from the tray and slapped them onto her plate.
“Eat!” he ordered.
And she did, but she cried the whole time. She cried even harder when Etle came out of the back room with the hairbrush in her hand. Bowing her head, her tears splashed off her cheeks onto her plate of crumbs.
“Well,” Nil Ralhan said cheerfully. “Now that that’s settled. Let’s have lunch.”
He made soup and sandwiches, and Pani picked up and ate every single thing Bach put on her plate.
“There’s nothing a good stout hairbrushing can’t cure,” Etle said with a smile. “I found mine on sale at Lady’s on the Square last month.”
Bach stopped there on the way home and picked one up.
*
“What’s this?” Bach said, holding up stackable toy bowl.
“Cup,” Pani answered.
They sat together on her play blanket on the living room floor, legs crossed, going through her toys. Pani was an incredibly fast learner where talking was concerned. Her vocabulary seemed to grow by leaps and bounds on a daily basis.
“What’s this?” Bach held up her doll. Originally the hair had been the funny but popular blonde color that humans sometimes came in, but he’d had it dyed to match Pani’s. She hardly ever touched it though, except after serious punishments, when she’d would curl up around it if he didn’t hold her and hug it while she cried.
When she was slow in answer, Bach shook the doll and asked again. “Come on. You know this one. What is it?”
Pani stared at the doll, but what she eventually said, she said in her gargling, gibberish of a language. He could tell from the expression on her face that whatever she’d called it wasn’t likely to have been kind.
“Pani,” Bach warned.
She sighed. “Bad girl Pani doll.”
“No, this is Pani’s doll.”
She rolled her eyes and sighed, propping her elbow on her knee and her chin in the palm of her hand.
Bach frowned and picked up the wooden-backed hairbrush, which he’d kept close by his side all morning. He held it up. “What’s this?”
She dropped that look immediately. Folding her hands in her lap and ducking her head, she contritely said, “Bad girl Pani’s hairbrush.”
He cocked his ear. “What’s this?” he asked again, holding out the brush again. Had he really heard that?
Pani fidgeted, squirming where she sat. “Bad girl Pani’s hairbrush. Spanking Pani’s bottom hairbrush.”
He had heard it. Pani’s. She was using possessive word structures. Bach grinned. “That’s right. Pani’s hairbrush.” He put the brush down, and the set of her shoulders relaxed slightly. He went back to the toys and tapped a red block with one finger. “What’s this?”
She blinked at him twice, then exhaled noisily and said, “Block.” Then hurriedly she touched her own nose and blurted out, “What’s this?”
Bach frowned. There was that disturbing flare of individual thought and reasoning again.
He cleared his throat, not entirely sure he liked it when she showed how smart she might really be. Owning an intelligent pet was one thing, but having an intelligent pet that rose beyond pet smarts into people smarts was downright scary.
“Papa?” She tapped her nose again. “What’s this?”
“Your nose.”
“Your nose,” she repeated.
Bach frowned even more fiercely, before reaching reluctantly out to touch first hers, “Your nose,” then his. “My nose.”
Her grey eyes flickered in that by-now familiar glimmer of understanding that he was alternately growing to both dread and, curiously, to anticipate.
“My nose,” she said, then crawled up onto her knees and, watching carefully for the slightest sign of refusal, hesitantly slid into his lap.
He accepted her closeness, taking great care to keep himself motionless. It was still so rare when she initiated physical closeness—at least not that didn’t first start with a sound bottom smacking—that he was always a little surprised when she came to him to be held.
Straddling one thigh to bring herself eye-level with him, she scooted close, her belly touching his, her soft breasts pillowing his chest. “What’s this?” she asked, lightly trailing the tips of her fingers over his lips.
“My mouth,” he murmured against her hand.
“This?” She touched the end of his jaw.
“My chin.”
Her hands flowed down his arm to lift his hand. She caressed his fingers and looked his curiously.
“Fingers,” he supplied.
She touched each one slowly in turn.
He didn’t know what got into him at times. He should have gone back to cups, but instead, when she started over, catching hold of each one in turn, he began to count them for her.
“One finger…two finger…three finger…four finger or thumb, as we call it. Four fingers total.” He waggled them at her.
She smiled, then held up her own hand and pointed to the outside digit first. “One finger or…” she looked at him questioningly.
“Thumb,” he supplied.
“One, two, three, four.” She waggled her extra finger at him.
“Five,” he said.
“Five.” She looked at her hand. “Five fingers.”
It was unnerving how quickly she was putting things together.
Pani scrambled up from his lap and went to the door. “Papa, what’s this?”
“The door.”
“This?” she patted the latch.
“Door knob.”
She pointed up to the lock high above her head. “This?”
“That’s the lock.”
Her eyebrows quirked. “That?” she parroted, then looked about her. She touched the lamp beside his favorite chair. “This?”
“Lamp.”
She pointed across the room. “That?”
Very unnerving. “A picture.”
She went to the window. “What’s this?”
She was doing more than improving her vocabulary. She was identifying escape routes.
Lesson over.
“Go get your stretch kit,” he said, and stood up.
Pani stopped at the window. Her shoulders drooped in disappointment, and then tapping her fingers together with nervous anticipation, she trudged slowly upstairs to his room to get the kit from his bedside table. It was the daily treatment she disliked most. Hated might even be closer to the truth. But he had seen a remarkable transformation in her submission levels that began the first day he made her set up the room for her own session. So now, like it or not, she not only had to prepare for the uncomfortable procedure herself, but he made her ask for it as well.
Bach sat down in his favorite chair just as she came back downstairs. He liked to watch her expressive face as she argued with herself every step of the way. She had the most woe-be-gone ‘Do I Have To’ look about her when she handed him the kit.
“Go on,” he told her, crossing his legs and folding his hands in his lap to watch.
Her shoulders drooped again and resignation settled across her features. She gathered up her blanket and toys, and he got up long enough to bring out the padded horse he would fasten her to, the only article of furniture that was too big for her to move on her own. She heaved a big sigh when he went back to his chair. Then sighed again and moved in to unstrap the buckles that would hold her legs in place.
She paused to look at him again.
“You’re not done yet, now are you?” he told her.
She went and got the sleeve for binding her arms, and the pan and syringe that would begin the session. When everything was out, Bach got up.
Pani began to sniffle, a forlorn and sad sound.
“Now, now,” he said as he undressed her. “None of that. I should think you’d be grateful for tonight. Finally, no more stretching exercises.” He brushed her hair back from her face, cupped her chin and tilted it up so he could look into her eyes. He hadn’t really been sure if he wanted to do it or not until that moment. Oddly enough, what decided him was the very same flicker of knowing intelligence within her brilliant eyes that at times so unnerved him. Strange how something so simple could stir his interest.
She looked so much like a real woman, and he was growing really quite fond of her, despite all her eccentricities. Especially after several weeks of sleeping beside her, those soft breasts and round buttocks pressing against him night after night.
“Tonight,” he told her, “will be the real thing.”
Chapter Seven
She was absolutely gorgeous, a miniature version of a woman, spread out and splayed for him. Her quivering buttocks clenched anxiously as she mewed into her gag. Resigned though she may have been to his authority, she still didn’t like the procedure and her mew became an indignant squeak when he inserted one finger past the tight rim of her little brown anus and into the moist passage of her bottom. Three large, soapy enemas had left her well and truly cleaned out for him, and all her previous stretchings meant that she couldn’t tighten her muscles near enough to keep him from smearing a thick lubricating gel deep inside her. As deep as he could reach, his questing finger moved gently in and out to make sure no part of her escaped his touch.
“Good girl,” he told her soothingly, and she squeaked, twisting her head back as if to beseech him mercy. He had blindfolded her so she couldn’t see him or anticipate what he was doing. It made her very uneasy, so he touched her, constantly, never letting his hands abandon her skin for longer than a few seconds at a time.
He loved the feel of her pretty vaginal folds, slippery with gel and her body’s own unwilling responses to being touched just right. He made her clit swell with lust, despite her whimpered protests. That wasn’t a new torment, though. He liked to play with that part of her during her stretchings, distracting her from the pain until her whole body was straining against her bonds, every muscle tense with an ecstasy so intense and unstoppable that it soon had her sobbing and shaking like a leaf in a summer gale.
If he slipped his fingers inside her at just the right moment, her sex would contract around him in the most delicious sucking motion, trying to pull his fingers further up inside her while she groaned out rough, hoarse gasps of absolute ecstasy. The larger the insert, the harder it was to make her do that. But he was determined that she should find some enjoyment in this.
Especially the first time he skewered her on the length of his cock (no larger really than the largest insert) and rode her tiny body for his own gratification.
So he touched her and caressed her, slipping the first of the inserts into her well-greased anal opening and fondling between her trembling legs, slowly loving it in and out of her. It took only a few thrusts before she began to make those reluctant little sounds of pleasure and her squirms to evade him became squirms to push back on the plug.
He removed it, upgrading two sizes to the third insert. She made a muffled sound, not so much protest now as anticipation when he pressed the round oblong tip to her back entrance. She was trying to mount it, he realized, and the corners of his mouth turned upward.
“Would you like to seat yourself, Pani?”
He nosed the tip in and out, gradually making her take more with each gentle thrust. She threw her head back, her long braids whipping across her back and a low harsh grunt escaping her gritted teeth as the widest section forced her bottom to accept it. As it settled into her, her hips began that by now familiar humping motion.