She lowered herself to her knees.
“I’ve had an auto warning. You know the mechlings monitor you...”
Cenwyn was right. The girl gave a gasp that degenerated into a whimper. Poor thing was scared to the depths. She crept her hand across, found Cenwyn’s, and squeezed reassuringly.
“Slave Twelve will come with me.” He pointed at the door.
Me?
Ugh, Cenwyn must be right. It was the rebellion word. Still...she had planned to try to entice him. Her last effort had failed. This was an opportunity if she could swallow her worries. It really was.
“You’re okay,” she whispered to the trembling Cenwyn, before she rose and headed out the door.
He stopped her when she was beside him, with a tap to the shoulder, his attention still on the room of slaves – in particular on Cenwyn. Mako hesitated.
“Slave Ten, and the rest of you, I consider innocent.”
Was that kindness, from Mako? Hell must’ve frozen over.
His hard fingers dug in and urged her onward – no kindness there.
Once in the corridor, he drew a light chain from his pants pocket. The loops dropped and hung from his hand. “Raise your head.”
There was a snick and a clink as he attached the leash to the front of her collar. Devious sounds – they excited her in some dark fashion. They also suggested he’d be as interested in cock-teasing as her dentist would be if she was in the chair getting a tooth pulled.
Punishment was coming. Fuck. It shouldn’t make her hot, but he’d never leashed her before. It kind of made her an extension of him. That also shouldn’t be hot. She almost groaned at her own irrationality.
He gave the chain a small jerk to make her follow.
Every corner they turned, he tugged again on the leash.
After the third time she became afraid the collar would tear loose and she’d bleed out on the floor. Unlikely – it was riveted to her skin.
She put her hand over the chain to take some of the force. “Please?”
Mako turned to her. “Take your hand off it.”
A paint-blistering look. She was in dire trouble.
“Just one word did this?” she asked quietly.
“When will you learn to say ‘master’?” He twisted his hand in the chain and urged her to the floor, followed her down until his fist was pressed to the cold riveted metal, as was her face.
Anger, why was he so angry? Her apology gushed out, automatic for once. “I’m sorry, Master.” That last word still felt repulsive, as if her tongue betrayed her.
“Are you? Then why do you keep flaunting your ignorance? You’ll get yourself executed for sedition.” He straightened and his boot pressed on her neck, pushing the collar to her skin and her neck to the floor. “You’re going to memorize the rules and repeat them multiple times before I’m done with you, if it takes me a day to do it. If this is the only way to keep you safe –” His word had been severed unnaturally. Then he continued. “This will be a painful lesson.”
He wanted her safe.
This echoed quietly, like the falling of the keystone of an arch on a distant mountain.
They continued on, never stopping where she thought he might.
Once in the atrium of the house, he had her kneel on a pillow. A pillow to kneel on was a consideration he rarely gifted.
He ordered one of the automated rickshaws. She’d learned the Mekker term for them – hoppers. Then he spoke to someone on the house comm, before returning to her.
They were going outside the house? That, of all the things he’d done so far, freaked Emery the most. He tended to do the most alarming things when they left the house.
She wanted to ask why but silence seemed advisable, safer. He stood above her, his arms by his side, one hand holding the end of the leash and his fingers idly playing with the chain. She stayed on her knees and watched guards and mechlings drift by, while barely shifting in her position.
Afraid.
This behavior of his was so different.
Chapter 19
The hopper carried them to a destination he’d considered carefully. He wanted privacy yet a place that might finally instill caution in her, and fear. She had to understand how crucial it was to avoid the dangers, to comply with the rules and laws of the Swathe. The Hall of the Lawgivers was the primary punishment area for the Governance. When you came here you knew you were in great trouble.
The arch under which they passed to enter was decorated with cogwheels overlaid with skulls and bones, though the very peak had a plaque with a set of numbers engraved upon it. OOO111 A balance of digits, to represent justice. Neither side was favored.
That wasn’t quite true. Slaves were never treated as fairly as the free citizens, and it was that fact that he needed to engrave on her soul. She had to be wary.
Had to.
They reached punishment chamber seven, which he’d reserved from the house. He paused outside the steel doors, had her kneel by use of the gesture, pleased that she recognized it. She’d not forgotten everything.
Rust dribbled down the closed metal door and something sharp had made its mark also – as if claws of some horrendous creature had raked across it, the door was scarred with parallel gouges.
Mekker legends spoke of dragons. Here be dragons was the undisguised symbolism.
“This is chamber seven in the Hall of the Lawgivers,” he intoned. “The guilty are not allowed to enter clothed. Strip.” When she made as if to rise he shook his head and pushed down with his open palm. “While in place.”
Since she wore only the standard, cream-colored dress it wasn’t that difficult. Still, watching her wriggle from it and pull the dress over her head, seeing her body emerge, nude, because of his command...he missed none of this.
He fed the dress through the leash, threw the garment aside.
“Come.” The groan of the door’s hinges was hideous. They were oiled to a precise amount.
The circular room was mostly dim but slashed with dark shadows as well as radiance spearing from cracks in the ceiling. The floor was rutted with grooves and hollows, and colored in concentric, yard-thick circles of a dark brown and amber stone. At the edges circled a grilled drain wide enough to toss a body down.
In the middle sat a huge metal cage, shaped like a ball, with only the upper two thirds of the ball above floor level. The very top was bolted to the ceiling. There were only vertical bars and the gaps between were wide enough to step through.
Mako unclipped the leash. “To the center of that cage, Slave Twelve. Stand there and wait.”
Once she was in place, he walked to her, pulling on the black gloves he’d taken from a table just inside the door. A timber box on wheels came with him, rumbling as he towed it.
Everything a torturer might need was in this room and in the box. From her trembling, she was already nervous.
Good.
“I intend to scare the fuck out of you,” he murmured as he circled her. “Nothing. Nothing that’s been taught to you so far has stuck. If you continue as you have done, you will be dead within a year. Sedition alone is punished by shock treatment, once, if the crime is considered mild. Two offences mean immediate execution. I intervened this time. Your record has not been adjusted as far as the lawgivers are concerned.” He leaned in and ground out, sotto voce. “I can’t do this again!”
Emery...Slave Twelve flinched away.
Brutal but necessary.
The facts were true.
It pained him. How could she forget something so important?
“And so, this will be a milder version of what they would have done to you. Do you understand?”
She nodded. “Yes, Master.”
The next statement, he felt compelled to say, though it watered down the other.
“I’m being...kind. Really I am...” He raised his eyebrows. When she only nodded again, he added a word he should never utter. “Emery.”
The sideways shift of her eyes as she locked ga
zes was like water being dumped on him. Cold water. He’d done something he shouldn’t.
Mako walked behind her, stepped back a yard, two, until he was leaning into the rear bars of the ball cage. From here he could think and observe her, without her knowing.
Her body called to him. Those curves, caressed by the pale lighting. The shadows where her ass cleft in two, and the others he remembered between her breasts, at the navel, between her delicate toes. The shadows met the gloss of skin at her thighs and the secrets between those always drew him, even if he’d seen her cunt before.
His boots echoed in the chamber as he circumnavigated her. Her nipples peaked tighter, the areolas scrunching in and wrinkling. Her pink tongue moved inside her mouth. Nervous, he figured.
So innocent of the many ways to hurt her.
His devious ideas for this session should’ve fallen to the ground dead; instead they rose, unbidden.
“I like your tongue, Slave Twelve. In here, even tongues aren’t safe.”
Unsure of what to do, she clenched and opened her hands. “I can’t talk if my tongue can’t move.”
He smiled when she couldn’t see him.
Yes, he would do this.
Yes, it was justified.
It would help her.
Make her safe.
It would please him.
His dick was saluting the heavens, already. He was going to be aching by the end. He knew what the lawgivers kept in stock. The equipment. He’d sent ahead for a list. Basteer would foot the bill once he knew it was essential to maintain the mental stability of this slave.
To make her finally learn.
He reached up and lowered the box controlling much of the gear in here. It hung from a chain, like much of what this room contained, and that would include her, soon.
With a button press, small lights glowed from holes in the gleaming black wall. Chains lowered and swung, snakelike.
“Hands at your back,” he said and stepped closer, took the offered wrists, and checked her cuffs.
“These cuffs are the only soft thing in here, girl.” When he’d attached a chain to each wrist cuff, another button made the chains rise, and her arms.
While they were still in motion, she said something. He barely caught it but it’d sounded like, “You forgot your soft dick.”
Mako laughed.
A joke from a slave, in this predicament too. It was so unprecedented he couldn’t help being amused.
“Was that wise to say?”
“No.” Her chest expanded, fell. “But it felt good.”
But such a fucking lie. “It’s not soft.”
That made her look.
“You are a dirty little slave. I see where your eyes go.” He gave his cock one stroke through his pants then he cradled her from behind, both arms across her body, his mouth beside her ear. His hard-on found the perfect place to rest, along the divide of her ass.
“I know what you want,” she whispered. “My mouth. My pussy.”
Those words stung him, warned him how dangerous this could be, for him. He moved away, around her.
“Say anything like that again, and this will go worse for you. Would you like a wire through your tongue?” He gripped her jaw, added enough force to let her comprehend how rash she’d been. “You’re bound by me, cannot escape, and I will not to be led astray by a slave. What should you say?”
The wrist chains chimed as she squirmed.
“I’m sorry. I apologize, Master.”
“Better.” He took his hand from her jaw then kneeled. Pulling her legs apart to past shoulder-width, he anchored the cuffs to floor rings.
Mako twitched a smile at the sight of her spread-eagled. If only she knew what was coming.
“Let’s begin with you reciting the first page of What a Slave Must Know. There are five pages and we will get through all of them.”
“I...never memorized them properly.” Her swallow was cute.
“I know. While you’re thinking, let me add to your memories. This chamber has another name – the chamber of needles.”
“What?”
He pulled out a drawer – the wheeled box had five of them – selected a smooth-shafted, curved needle, already threaded with wire that wound onto a spool. The needle holders made clicking sounds as he gripped the needle in its jaws.
“There are one hundred needles in this kit.”
“Wait. Please. Don’t. You don’t need to do this. I can learn it anyway.”
“You mean, yes, yes, please Master.”
Violently, Emery shook her head.
“The more you move, the more inaccurate my aim.”
She still shrank her body away, tensing as he took her right nipple between finger and thumb. He placed the needle tip next to it and plunged the needle through beneath the nipple. No blood, for only the needle tip was sharp. Swiftly, he took the metal thread across her nipple and snagged it into a notch below the needle tip, making a loop. The tiniest bleb of blood appeared.
Her breast was a feminine weight, a shape so right for his palm. “Beautiful.” There was something so innately serene about pain. Though she’d whimpered, her lips had fallen open at his touch, her eyes wide and vulnerable and locked on his. He’d never seen into a soul this deeply.
Mine. You’re mine.
Kissing her could’ve happened. Mustn’t...mustn’t. Couldn’t. The moment wavered, stretched, and broke.
She was staring down at her nipple trapped in glistening wire.
With the tiny spool of wire in hand, he walked to the front bars and wound the wire’s end onto the ball frame.
Though she stuttered protests, he did the same to the other nipple, handling her delicately, though she might not realize. He wouldn’t ruin such perfect breasts.
Tapping a button sent a surge of purple power humming through the wires to her nipples. Violet-purple arcs wriggled across her skin, highlighting her upper body. Her spine arched, her feet tensed and she gained inches in height as she went onto tiptoes.
Low power. The machine could go far higher. He knew what low power did. It caused both pain and arousal as the purple sparked across skin. Pleasure and pain, his favorite teaching tool. He left it on until he was sure she’d choked out at least one small climax. Sure because he’d stepped in and shoved a gloved finger up her already slick pussy. The shock went through him a little but he was more than fine with that. His cock was too. For her, the effects would be more intense.
One orgasm, then he walked to the control box and switched it off.
“God. Fuck. What. Was. That?” She sucked in air through flared nostrils and her entire body shook for a second. “You’re not supposed to... Motherfucker. Not supposed to make me bleed.”
“I have permission, and you won’t lose more than a few drops. The more you move, the more it will hurt. I have to fetch the slave manual from the office. Don’t go anywhere.”
When he reached the door, he switched on the lighting in the seating that surrounded the chamber. This made the glass wall turn from black to see-through. A small mechling was perched on a seat, recording this. If anyone chose to, they could witness what he did.
Privacy was foolish when he wanted to fuck her.
Remember why you’re here. A lesson. A punishment. The pleasure of seeing her trapped in his restraints while he did almost anything.
Ahhh. That almost was killing him.
“You forgot the M word too many times. The last needle will be through your clit hood.” He opened the door. The hood only and the insertion wouldn’t be as bad as she might think – which was his whole reason for saying it. If anything, the pleasure might be too much for her.
“That’s not...right. You can’t. Please?”
He left the door open so she could at least hear where he’d gone.
“Master?”
And so it began.
He should get some water. She’d need it.
Chapter 20
Mako took away the cup, and she swall
owed the last mouthful. The water went down her throat in a frigid tide.
She let her head flop back, closing her eyes so the downlights didn’t blind her. Sweat dribbled down her neck, her back, down her arms from where they were chained above, pooled above her ass, dripped from her thighs. She was panting and showed her exhaustion in so many ways, wished she could hide the effects of what he’d done, but couldn’t. He’d see it all.
She wanted him to fuck her, but he wouldn’t.
Wanted to stick him where she was and switch it all on, light him up, until he screamed as she had.
But that last orgasm...
God, that last one.
She remembered, playing it out behind her eyelids, her pussy clenching in sympathy.
Wanted more of this.
Nothing could ever, nothing, could compare.
The lights ticked from overheating and she could hear his breathing. It turned him on, making her scream and moan, making her come while oceans of hurt wracked her body.
She hated him more than she’d hated anyone, even the nutters who used to come up her long driveway to peddle their esoteric religions.
Hated him. Loved this. Hated him for loving this. So mixed up. Figure it out later.
She swung, barely on her feet, muscles aching. The chains creaked and tinkled.
“You need more support,” Mako said quietly. He put his hands on her and strapped some thick belt below her breasts, attached it, winched her up – much of her bodyweight now carried by whatever harness he’d arranged.
“Better. Now recite page five.”
Pages rustled before her. She saw the manual when she flickered her lids. “I can’t take more. Please? Stop?”
“But you’re doing well, baby. So well.”
Had a love word slipped from him, unawares? She eyed him through slits. Yes, it had.
Bad man, but she had him in her clutches. Haha. Her optimism knew no bounds, and she couldn’t even stand unaided.
The water he’d given her had pooled in her belly: cold versus the heat everywhere else.
She found her feet again, looked down. All the needles, all the wires. He’d made a spiderweb of her, a violin human. The wires ran from the cage bars, carrying the power into the needles, then into her. Three in each breast. Some behind her in the lower curves of her ass. Two in her pussy lips with the wires going behind her. They resonated, spun her into infinity, when he switched on the power.
Acquired Possession (The Machinery of Desire Book 1) Page 10