‘Miss Steele,’ he enunciated. She felt she needed to fill the subsequent silence, but she could not decide how. She breathed in a giant lungful of air, grateful to have that ability once more, feeling that she might have need of it sometime soon.
‘I gagged you. I didn’t cut your tongue out. Do you have nothing to say to me?’
‘I … thought I needed your permission to speak?’
At that, he smiled and a fleeting fondness crossed his face.
‘Yes,’ he said softly. ‘You are so good at this. It is why I can’t let you go. But, regardless of your ability to give me the perfect answer, there is a reckoning to be made. Explain why you left without saying a word to me, Charlotte.’
‘I didn’t say a word to Bryant either, sir.’
‘Master.’
‘Sorry, Master.’
‘That doesn’t even begin to answer my question. Well?’
‘I couldn’t make a choice. You were asking me to make a choice.’
‘Yes, I was. And I’m going to ask you again. A different choice this time. Stay here with me, or walk away. Make the choice, Charlotte. What do you decide?’
Collins rarely, indeed never, showed emotion, but Charlotte could see that his steepled fingers were just that bit more tensed. A knuckle cracked, shocking her into reply.
‘I want to stay with you,’ she blurted. Yes. Colliton was wrong for her, but Collins was right, so right. Never mind Bryant. Bryant had not gone to the lengths of finding and organising her perfect fantasy kidnap. Forget about him. Right here, right now, she could start a whole new chapter of submission, love and pleasure, with this man she had come to adore.
The fingers quivered and he broke their position, pushing the spectacles back up the bridge of his nose in the few seconds it took for him to collect himself.
‘Good,’ he said, calm restored. ‘I think you have chosen well. On this occasion.’ His brow furrowed again, and Charlotte remembered that she should be feeling a little anxious. She bit her lip and looked down at the floor. ‘But we still have outstanding matters to address, don’t we? Your reluctance to make a choice – when you have proven yourself more than capable of such a task – is an inadequate excuse. And I have yet to hear a word of apology from you for the pain you have caused me.’
Pain
, she thought in surprise.
He feels pain. He is not impervious, nor superhuman. He has vulnerabilities too.
‘I’m sorry. I really am. I never meant to … hurt you.’ How odd the words sounded, spoken by her, to him who so often meant to hurt her! But his hurting was at her unspoken behest, always, while she had caused a true and less easily-assuaged pain. ‘Please forgive me.’
‘I will forgive you,’ he said, rising from his chair and walking over to an old metal cupboard in one corner of the room. ‘But first you have to pay the price of that forgiveness. I’m sure you’re expecting that, anyway. And I hate to disappoint.’
He opened the cupboard, took a length of rope, a cane and a box from it.
‘Let’s not deviate from your script too far, though, shall we? I think we should maintain the illusion of this forced kidnapping I took such pains to set up, just for a while. Don’t you think?’
‘If you wish, Master,’ said Charlotte, trying not to smile. Oh, the cane. Oh, how she hated that thing. And yet she had been hoping for it … dreaming of it, back in her bed in Colliton.
‘Saunders!’ he said sharply, and she remembered the guard, turning around and seeing that he had been standing by the door all along. ‘Bring in the punishment equipment.’
What? Was that not it, that stuff in his hands? Rope, cane, box full of dubious toys … seems like punishment equipment to me.
Saunders wheeled in a strange item of furniture, something like a stepstool, padded all over in black leather.
‘I think we need to send a few photographs with the ransom note,’ Collins said to his henchman. ‘Make sure they realise that we are in earnest. When they see what we’ve done to her, they’ll be sure to start finding the money.’
Saunders came up behind Charlotte and untied her wrists, which she was allowed to stretch and rotate briefly before she was marched over to the stepstool affair and made to kneel on its ledge, arranging her upper body so that it lay along the slope on the other side, her face almost at floor level. The padded top of the device ensured that her bottom jutted out, presented in full curvaceous display mode, while a spreader bar fixed between her knees meant that she had to keep her thighs wide too.
‘Take off her top,’ Collins ordered, and Saunders darted over, pulling the garment over her head, then, without prompting, unclipped her bra as well. The smooth leather was cold on her nipples and she was conscious of the guard’s eye, sizing up her breasts even though they were squashed to the slope of the punishment stool.
‘As for that skirt …’ said Collins laconically, and then his hands were on her, tugging it down while she gripped the sides of the slope. The knickers were long gone now, and they were swiftly joined by her shoes until she lay, entirely naked and exposed, ready for the two men to dispose of her as they saw fit.
‘You’re very compliant,’ noted Collins, his tone sharp, and Charlotte had to rouse herself from the luxury of her submission to play the role of agitated victim about to undergo cruel and unusual treatment.
‘You can’t do this!’ she exclaimed. ‘You … when the police get hold of you … you bastards!’
Collins laughed, deep and long. ‘We are the police,’ he said chillingly. ‘Aren’t we, Saunders?’
‘That’s right, guv.’ Saunders was tying her ankles to the stool now, then looping the rope up and around her torso, lashing her to the fetish furniture until she was almost a part of it.
‘You’re here until we get our money, young lady, and until then, we will do what we want with you. Do you understand?’
Collins forced her head up, taking her chin and wrenching her neck to meet his iron gaze.
‘I understand. But you can’t make me accept it. I will never accept it.’
For a fleeting second, Charlotte thought about spitting in his face. But no. Collins would absolutely
hate
that. He did set such store by elegant behaviour in all situations.
‘You will accept what we give you. All of it. Starting now.’ He straightened back up to his full height and watched Saunders complete his expert bondage work. ‘Good. Trussed up like a little chicken, Charlotte. Tied up and ready for your whipping. Because you are going to be whipped. Long and soundly, until your bottom is red and hot enough to glow in the photograph we will take of it. What do you think of that?’
‘You evil pervert!’ she cried, finding the line laughably hokey even as she said it. Ah well. She wasn’t best placed to hone her improvisational skills, bent double over a leather punishment stool, naked and in knots. ‘You won’t get away with this.’ She tried to struggle in her bonds, but Saunders had an impressive way with rope, and the best she could do was squirm.
‘No? Well, if you’re going to call us perverts, I suppose we ought to live up to our billing.’ Collins brought the box down beneath her nose and opened it, selecting a large black silicone butt plug and wafting it in the air before her. ‘I think you’ve earned this, young lady.’
‘Oh my God! No!’ she squealed, recognising the plug as Collins’s favourite Instrument of Sanction. He had used it on her in the past, at times of extreme displeasure with her, and it commanded serious respect.
‘Did you hear that, Saunders? I think she’s starting to get the message. We mean business. Lubricate her.’
Charlotte was unable to prevent anything they wanted to do to any part of her, and all she could do was lie there in her tethers while Saunders greased a finger and began to circle her tensing anus with it, massaging it into the sensitive skin of her cleft until she could feel her muscles begin to pulse and twitch, helplessly betraying her arousal.
‘I think she wants it!’ Saunders was amused.
‘Is she wet?’
Charlotte’s breath hitched at the touch of another finger at her lower hole, dipping in and then slicking out.
‘Is she ever! Fuck me, she’s dripping.’
‘Hmm, wait till after the caning, then. I bet she’ll be even wetter.’ His hand descended briefly on the back of Charlotte’s neck, ruffling the hair at her nape affectionately.
He knows I will.
Saunders re-lubed the finger and sent it, in one clean swift stab, up inside her puckered ring, wiggling it about a bit to get a feel for her size and stretch. Charlotte wanted to roll her hips so very badly, but she could not so much as jiggle them. She gritted her teeth and lay flat, resigned, while Saunders introduced the large fat plug slowly into her captive backside.
‘How does that feel, Charlotte?’ asked Collins, interested, though her faint squeaks and moans were providing quite a detailed answer.
‘Uncomfortable,’ she gasped. ‘Please …’ The widest part of the plug was now stretching her ring, making tears blur her eyes. ‘I can’t.’
I could safeword
. But the thought was gone before she could even have articulated it, and the plug was past the barrier now, firmly seated and unignorable, showing her her place in this scenario.
‘Let me see.’ Collins came around to the back and rotated the plug a few times, then he pulled it partway out, making her babble and plead for mercy, before popping it back in and then, for good sadistic measure, repeating the process. ‘I love this one,’ he said. ‘It really is my favourite. The inflatable one is good as well. Perhaps another time.’
When he came back into Charlotte’s line of vision, a quick strain of her neck muscles informed her that Collins was no longer carrying anything. So where was the …?
‘You may begin when I give the word, Saunders.’
Charlotte meeped in dismay – so she was to be caned by a stranger, not by the expert Mr Collins? His shiny shoes, so close to her nose, splayed outwards a little, and then he was crouching before her, so close that the expensive cloth of his trouser hem brushed her face. He held her by the chin, keeping her pale face upraised towards his.
‘You are going to look at me, Charlotte,’ he murmured. ‘Hold my eye. If you look away, it will be the worse for you.’
‘Oh …’ Charlotte was beyond words. She had never had to do this before. In the past, she had always been able to shut her eyes and become the pain, weightless in subspace. This thing Collins was asking her to do was almost unimaginably difficult – and yet she wanted to do it. She wanted to go the extra submissive mile, because he was doing this for her, and she loved him for it. Would it be easier if he relaxed his expression just a fraction, was ever so slightly less convincing a cruel, authoritarian kidnapper? No. He was Collins. He was what he was. He played every scene to the hilt, and that was how she wanted him. Relaxation could come later.
So she breathed in, set her jaw and opened her eyelids as wide as they would stretch.
‘She’s ready. Give her ten, Saunders. Hard.’
She looked at him, steadfast, through every burning stroke. Her broken cries, her hisses, her contortions of expression, never interrupted the line of contact between Charlotte and her master. Each swish of the rod was a pulse of energy setting her on a journey through pain and love, a journey that set her on fire, that tested her limits, that took her deep inside herself, but that eventually would see her home safe.
‘No more,’ she begged on the eighth stroke, but she didn’t mean it. She didn’t use her safeword. The plug send shockwaves through her every time the cane landed, and then the ferocious fizz of pain streaked across her skin. Two more. Just two more. Her eyes were swimmy now, but she could still see Collins’s face, looking so cold, because it had to, because that was the rule – her rule as much as his.
The ninth stroke made her body convulse, straining against the bonds, sweat beading on her brow. ‘Thank you, sir,’ she whispered, and she saw he was struggling against an impulse to smile. She had won. She had done it. She had not given in.
‘Make the last stroke a good one, Saunders,’ said Collins, his voice very low now, dark smoke in the echoing room. Charlotte let the rod whistle, let it lay its stripe across the hot, stretched skin of her bottom, let the sting grow and grow and grow while she whimpered, then she blinked, hard and looked back at Collins.
‘I love you,’ she said.
He cupped her cheeks in big, warm palms. ‘I know. I love you too,’ he said. ‘Saunders, take a photograph, would you? Then you may go.’ He dropped one kiss on her damp forehead, waited for the camera to flash, then moved back around behind Charlotte, trailing one fingertip along her spine, down into the small of her back, up again and into the crevice of her buttocks. Charlotte began to gasp, feeling the sting and the sensation together, especially when he stopped at the butt plug and gave it a little tap before proceeding onward, to the water valley beneath.
‘Oh, wet, as ever, oh, you are ready. I’m going to take you.’
There was nothing Charlotte could have done about it anyway, but she uttered a silent prayer of thanks, trying to thrust her bottom further towards him, but finding it impossible. He was there, quick and sharp, wide and long, inside her again. She sighed and purred, drenched in lust and emotion, sure that she would come without permission, she was so close already.
‘Please, Master, may I come?’ she asked, before he was even fully sheathed, causing him to chuckle as he placed his hands on her burning backside.
‘So eager, Charlotte. I should refuse you, but tonight I find that I can’t do that. You may come as many times as you wish.’
She took him at his word, feeling her tremors build as soon as he began his initial thrusts. He rode her through two more, pacing himself so perfectly that she was weeping by the time he relented and finished emptying inside her, the tip of his cock nudging against the butt plug with each foray forward.
‘I love your tears,’ he said, wiping himself off and grabbing her hair at the nape of her neck, pulling it gently but firmly. ‘But you must stop crying, Charlotte. I’m going to untie you now, and we are going home.’
‘Home?’
He began to loosen the cords, leaving her to gather herself until only periodic sniffs betrayed her emotional overflow. His fingers traced the patterned lines the rope had left, stroking the woven indents. Charlotte might have been untied, but she was no more mobile than before, her limbs heavy and stiff.