The Sex Slave's Final Punishment (BDSM Erotica) (4 page)

The atmosphere is strangely subdued. I wasn’t
expecting raucous, bloodthirsty cries. But I wasn’t expecting this
glum silence either. Perhaps there have been too many executions.
Perhaps this comes in wake of a pogrom. I don’t know. No one tells
me anything. I’m just one of the condemned.

The truck stops just outside the plaza. I am
not sure if we are to be herded to a holding cell. I certainly
don’t see any holding cells, like they have at gladiator rings.

The three Guillotines have already been
erected on the raised platform, facing the statue. At the base on
the statue, another platform hosts two chairs. Their seats are
plush red velvet. Potchenko and his daughter are already seated.
They are too far away for me to make out the expressions on their
faces, but I can well imagine the look of undisguised delight upon
Aimelie Potchenko’s features. She is the embodiment of cruelty in
the highest degree.

I don’t know what they have lined up for the
day, but I reckon ours will be the piece de resistance. The
foreigners – executed as a message to future dissidents.
You are
not safe here, wherever you come from.

We are quiet now. Accepting. There is no
point for the condemned to kick up a fuss. We just have to go
gracefully to our deaths, like Marie Antoinette before us, and hope
that we will be avenged without our countries and innocent people
plunged into a war.

We watch through the darkened glass of the
truck as three people are marched to the platform. Once again, they
don the grey smocks of the condemned. My heart clenches in my
throat as I spy Mansk, Suri and another prisoner I do not know. Max
and Greg grip my hands on either side. They are just as shaken as I
am. These are people we actually know. People who have helped us,
for motive or for worse.

And now they are being led to their deaths as
we watch.

Mansk and Suri are the very picture of
despondency. I can only hope their children are not watching from
the crowd. But knowing Potchenko, he would want them to – before he
sends them off to the fields for a lifetime of harsh labor. This
would be a very harsh childhood lesson for them:

“See what your parents did? Now they will die
for their sins. Renounce them, and spread the word around.”

I turn my head and face the other side of the
truck. I don’t want to watch. Max and Greg tighten their grips
around me.

“Tell me when it’s over,” I whisper.

I wait. The crowd outside gives a collective
shout that tells me the blades have descended. Max waits a while
before murmuring, “It’s over.”

I turn again. They have collected the baskets
with the heads and taken away the corpses. Max has waited until
they finished before alerting me.

Oh Mansk! Oh Suri! This didn’t have to happen
to you! It’s all my fault. If only you hadn’t met me. If only you
had said no when I pleaded with you for help.

And now . . . it’s our turn.

Any second now, they would open the doors of
the truck and force us to wear the grey smocks. There will be no
last phone call. No last cigarettes to smoke. No last rites given
to us by an ordained priest.

Every muscle in my body is tense and stiff.
Every fiber of my brain is fraught with anxiety.

Three more people in grey smocks go up the
podium. Two young men and a young woman, possibly still in her late
teens. I do not recognize them, but something strikes me about
their coloring. The woman has hair the color of mahogany, and she
wears it the way I wear mine. One of the youths is blond, and the
other brown-haired.

They are led to the Guillotines and made to
kneel before the wicked contraptions. Something stirs in my fuzzy,
angst-riddled brain. Something that refuses to connect.

Something . . . mind-blowing.

It is Greg who articulates the answer.

He whispers, “They look just like us. I think
. . . I think that they are our substitutes.”

The truth slams into me full frontal, like a
truck zoning in for my midriff. I feel faint. My knees buckle, and
Max has to grasp me by the waist.

“They’re being executed in our place,” I
say.

“Yes,” the guard confirms it.

I am floored with the enveloping realization
of it all. I’m going to have difficulty processing this. I just
know it. But the bits and pieces begin to swim into a building
jigsaw as I struggle for cognitive coherence.

That nagging suspicion that Potchenko
wouldn’t execute us is true. He wouldn’t risk American wrath, and
yet he has to show his iron will to the masses. So he has three
lookalikes executed in our place. This way, he can broadcast to his
people that he still rules them with a dictator fist, and satisfy
our families by letting us go before they can raise a ruckus with
our government.

I shudder to think of those three lookalikes
they found. What have they done? They are likely not political
dissidents, and so Potchenko must have raided the hovels and
farmhouses to find three young people who resemble us as much as
possible.

Three innocents – who have probably been
hauled out of their homes without trial or mercy.

Did Potchenko pay their families compensation
to take our place? Did the state police plant ‘evidence’ of
political dissension amongst the belongings of those three hapless
victims? I will never know, and I believe that I will never find
out.

More than ever, I do not wish to view this
execution of our almost Doppelgangers. Max holds me, with my nose
buried in the crook of his shoulder, until the deed is done. Then
he releases me. Greg’s shining eyes hold mine. They are blurred
with tears.

“What happens now?” I ask the guard.

I am terribly afraid to hear the answer.

7

In the castle, we are led to a chamber we
have never been in before. Previously, all our encounters have only
been in the back part of the castle. We were never allowed in ‘the
front’, where all the decent people congregate.

The chamber is obviously a parlor of some
sort. Luxurious, ostentatious – with brocaded furniture and
tapestries. We are even ‘dressed’ for the occasion. Max and Greg
are in clean white shirts and dark pants. It’s not what they would
normally wear. In fact, it would be something we consider
‘old-fashioned’, back in the days we were allowed to complain.

I am in a powder blue dress suit. I look
every inch the prim and proper young lady, European finishing
school style.

When Max sees the people waiting for us in
the parlor, he gives a strangled cry. His mother holds out her arms
and he dives straight into them. Russell Devlin stands awkwardly
beside her. I don’t know if he’s fully aware of what we have been
through, but from his embarrassed expression, he probably has some
clue of what he has subjected us to.

But I can’t be angry with Russell. I’m too
glad to finally be out of this nightmare to hold any grudges. Maybe
the anger will come later, but right now, I’m too delirious and
lightweight with relief to be anything but teary.

Max hesitates for a fraction of a second, and
then he hugs Russell too. So he has decided to forgive and forget .
. . for the moment. Greg hugs the handsome pair next, and I follow.
We don’t say anything but the briefest of pleasantries. It’s almost
as if we have been away on an exchange student program, and this is
now Parents’ Day.

“How’s the weather?”

“Splendid.”

“How’s the food?”

“Passable.”

“Were you well treated?”

“Uh, as well as they could treat us.”

No mention is made of our ordeal. At least,
not right now. Not until we take the first flight out of Urskan
soil. And even that, I wouldn’t trust the attendants. Not until I’m
safely through US Customs would I dare to breathe a sigh of
absolute relief.

There is no sight of Potchenko or Aimelie.
Perhaps they are out executing more dissidents. But I don’t want
them here. They might change their minds. Especially Aimelie, as
volatile as she is. Perhaps Potchenko is keeping her away for this
very reason.

“Well,” Russell says, “what are we waiting
for? Let’s go.”

What are we waiting for indeed?

We have packed nothing for our trip here, and
so we go back as we came. Only we are fully clothed now, as a
marking up of our status.

We are no longer sex slaves.

There are two vans to take us to the airport,
but we opt to squeeze into one. We daren’t let one another out of
our sights. We wouldn’t be able to forgive ourselves if one of us
went astray.

We are brought to the airport. We board the
private plane Russell has charted. We clamber into our seats and
buckle up. I am as tight as a wounded clockwork toy. I keep staring
at the runway, willing my surroundings to move.

It is only after we have taken off and flown
for about an hour that I allow myself to relax. After all, they
still can shoot us down when we are in their airspace. It has been
known to happen.

Later, much later, when our stomachs have
been filled with a healthy dose of filet mignon, caviar and more
fresh bread than we can eat, we learn the story.

When we escaped, Potchenko contacted Russell,
and explained the grim situation. On one hand, he was tied to the
ideals he had created behind his own Iron Curtain. On the other
hand, he doesn’t want to risk a diplomatic incident that could
spark an unhealthy Western interest in what he was doing behind
it.

So for a fee of two hundred million dollars
in his personal coffers, he made a pact with Russell to let us
go.

Two hundred million dollars!

Are our lives worth that? Certainly, Russell
thinks Max’s life is priceless. But we came in a package, and in a
package, he paid up.

I’m grateful, of course, to Russell for
negotiating a way out for us, but it was his fault that we were
there in the first place. So I shouldn’t feel too grateful. I
should keep that anger and caution simmering beneath my
surface.

When we land upon American soil, I literally
run out of the private jet to kiss the ground I am walking on. I
have never been so glad to be alive. I gaze at Max and Greg, and
they too seem transported in paroxysms of delight.

My rapture is short-lived when I realize the
choice I would now have to make between them.

8

I am in my bedroom in Russell’s mansion when
Max comes in. I am dressed in a simple white nightgown. My bedroom
is as serene as ever, with its softly billowing curtains at windows
which open out to sea. It’s so tranquil that I can scarcely imagine
the nightmare we have been in only a few days ago.

It’s as though nothing has happened. But I
won’t forget. I won’t allow myself to forget.

Russell has credited the $250,000 in my sex
slave contract into my account – with an added bonus of $100,000
should I not speak to anyone about what happened in Ursk. I readily
agree. What’s the use of revisiting the painful past when I could
cement my future with riches? $350,000 is as great a start as
any.

But nothing prepares me for what Max has to
say.

He waltzes in as casually as the day I first
saw him. Has it really been that long ago? I remember the first day
of my Initiation, when he fucked me with a metal dildo in my ass
and with my nipples and labia clamped in metal seashells. That was
a hot memory. An extremely hot memory.

He looks different now. More careworn. Wiser.
Sadder. As if life has steamrolled him into a pancake; and although
he has managed to pick himself up, he has been irretrievably
crushed by it.

I hold my arms out to him. He comes to them
gladly. We hug. Fiercely.

He says, “Thank you for looking out for
me.”

“You looked out for me too.”

“We’re good together.”

“I know.”

A pause as we exchange a loving kiss.

“I love you,” he says, with meaning.

“I love you too.”

“That’s why I wanted to give you this.” His
hand reaches in his pocket. He takes out a red velvet box.

My heart leaps. Is that what I think it
is?

“Go on. Open it,” he urges me.

I gingerly take the box. My hands are
trembling ever so slightly. This is what I’ve been waiting for. Or
is it? So much has happened. I too have changed. I am no longer the
naïve ingénue I once was. I’m a woman of substance now. I have been
through hell and lived to claw out of it. I have my own money. I
need not to be owned by any man.

Thoughts of Russell and Alice tumble in my
head as I open the box. Inside is a huge diamond ring.

Tears come to my eyes as I look up at Max. He
smiles and nods.

“Take it, Gina. Please. I’m asking you to
marry me.”

I lick my lips.

“Does Russell know?”

“It’s none of his business who I marry,” he
says shortly.

“What if he says no?”

What if Alice says no?

“Then we’d just have to go to Reno and get
hitched.” His face is steadfast and his jaw determined. I can only
hope this means that he won’t be cowed by his father again. I can’t
even begin to plumb the depths of their strange relationship, but I
do know that I will not sleep with Russell ever again. Not even if
Max begs me to.

There’s another matter as well. Max is a
dominant. He has it in his blood, his genes.

Do I want to be a sub for the rest of my
life? He will get tired of vanilla sex after a while, and he would
beguile me to submit. Do I really want to live this way? It was fun
and exciting when I was involved in it, but it was also dangerous
and terrifying at times. I don’t want to live the rest of my life
at breakneck speed. I need to settle down. Be normal.

Or do I?

Do I even know what I want?

With a heavy heart, I say, “I will think
about this.”

He appears crestfallen. I think he expected
me to say yes on the spot. After all, he is the son of a
billionaire. He’s extremely handsome and eligible. What woman would
say no to him, right?