She would have fallen on the hard marble floor and probably cracked her skull open if Malik hadn’t had the reflexes of a cat. Letting the lid to the bug box slam shut, he jumped around and caught her in his arms just before she landed.
“Oh!” Nikki gasped as he lifted her easily, holding her as though she weighed next to nothing (which she knew was not the case.)
“Mistress,” he said frowning. “Did you trip on your drying fur?”
“Um, yes. Yes, I did,” Nikki gasped, still trying to regain her composure. “The, uh, drying towel…I mean fur.” She motioned down to the black furry towel and realized that in her fall it really had come loose. It was gaping open to show her bare breasts framed in the soft, black fur.
Oh, God! Quickly, she tugged the towel closed. She could feel her cheeks heating with a blush she could do nothing about.
“Thank you for catching me,” she said, trying not to look him in the eyes. “You have very fast reflexes. But you’d probably better put me down before you throw out your back.”
He frowned. “Are you implying that you are too heavy for me to lift, Mistress? That’s ridiculous and you know it. You are the perfect size and I am well accustomed to lifting three or four times your weight in my daily training regime.”
“That’s really impressive but just, um, put me down please.” Nikki wished her voice wouldn’t come out sounding so breathy. Being so close to him she could feel the heat of his big body radiating against her own. Also, he smelled really good—a dark, masculine spice with a wild, almost electrical note to it that seemed to fill her senses and make her dizzy.
“Very well—shall I deposit you in the box?” he asked, raising an eyebrow at her. “I can easily lift the lid with one hand and place you inside on the bed of tska beetles with the other. But you’ll have to discard your drying fur first.”
“Put me inside that box? With all those…those…things?” Nikki could scarcely keep the panic and revulsion out of her voice.
“Of course.” Malik looked surprised all over again. “They nibble away the dead skin from all over your body and groom your hair at the same time. You always say an hour in the tska box is the most important part of your beauty regime.”
A whole hour crammed inside the shiny white coffin while thousands of roach-like insects nibbled her? The very idea was enough to make Nikki’s skin feel like it was trying to crawl off her body.
“Well today I’m skipping it,” she said firmly, trying to repress a shudder. “My head really aches and now that I’m clean and dry, I just want to lay down on my bed and take a nap.”
“Very well.” He nodded gravely. “And shall I lie beside you and serve as your pillow, my Mistress?”
“What? No!” Nikki exclaimed and then added more gently, “I mean, that won’t be necessary Malik—thank you anyway, though.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Then perhaps you prefer me to pleasure you with my tongue as you relax on the sleeping platform? You always say that having an orgasm or two releases your tensions and allows you to sleep more peacefully.”
By this time Nikki felt like her face was so hot with blushing that her hair might catch on fire. It wasn’t that she wasn’t sex positive—she was. It was just that Gary was the only man she’d ever been with and he wasn’t very…creative in the bedroom. The few times he had gone down on her in their sixteen-year marriage, he had quickly given up, saying that it took her too long to come.
So while Nikki greatly enjoyed getting oral pleasure, she didn’t have a whole lot of experience with it. Also, she didn’t even know Malik! And she was technically still married to another man.
A man who has been cheating on you and wants to divorce you, whispered a little voice in her head. You already signed the paperwork—Gary is probably filing it right now. You’re practically already divorced. So if you did decide to take Mr. Muscles up on his offer to go downtown, nobody could blame you.
But there was no way she was doing that. As attractive as Malik was, he was also a stranger—a deadly stranger. She couldn’t let herself forget that if he decided she wasn’t his real mistress there could be severe consequences.
“Mistress?” Malik rumbled and she realized she had been taking too long to answer.
“Um, no—no thank you, Malik,” she said, trying to smile. “That’s very kind of you but I just want to be alone for now.”
“As you wish,” he murmured. “Then I will take you to the sleeping chamber.”
Before Nikki could protest that she could walk just fine, he carried her out of the fancy spa room and down a long corridor lined with gold and black filigreed wallpaper. There were golden statues every few feet on black marble pedestals—muscular men frozen in erotic poses that showed off their naked bodies and looked really uncomfortable, she thought. Whoever this Mistress Hellenix was, she was clearly a connoisseur of the male form.
Then Nikki saw one of the statues move.
It was just a twitch, as though the statue was tired of holding his arms above his head, but she gave a little gasp when she saw it. When she did, the statue’s eyes, which had been closed, flickered open and looked in her direction.
Malik saw it too because he stopped and glared at the statue.
“Slave Ganter—you are in violation of your orders not to move.”
“Forgive me!” The golden statue—which was apparently a male slave painted all over with gold body paint—dropped to his knees and groveled at Malik’s feet. “I’m so sorry, Mistress!” he moaned, daring to turn his eyes up to Nikki. “I swear it wasn’t on purpose. It’s just that I have been holding my pose for hours and my arms got so tired.”
“For hours?” Nikki could hardly believe it. Were all these statues actually live slaves who had been stripped and spray-painted gold and forced to hold still for hours on end? Looking up and down the hall, she was pretty sure they were.
“Do you wish to have him whipped, Mistress?” Malik asked blandly. “Or do you prefer to use his pain collar to punish him?”
“Pain collar?” Nikki managed to get out. Then she realized that—like Malik—the golden slave was wearing a thick black collar. In fact, all the statue slaves had them.
“Yes, Mistress—his pain collar. You can use it to shock him into submission.” Malik frowned at her. “Are you feeling well? You are not acting like yourself at all today.”
“I…I really do have a headache,” Nikki said, groping for an explanation as to why she wasn’t “acting like herself.” “And I don’t feel like punishing slaves today,” she went on, trying to get out of whipping or shocking anyone. “Just take me to the, uh, sleeping chamber, Malik. I’ll deal with this other slave later.”
There—that had sounded imperious enough to be the real Mistress Hellenix—she hoped.
Malik frowned and a look of disbelief spread over the statue slave’s face, but no one said anything. The big bodyslave gave a short nod to the golden statue slave and the other man quickly resumed his pose on the black marble pedestal. Then Malik carried her down the hall and through a set of double doors. The doors were carved with elaborate designs and three times the height of a normal door and they led into an equally imposing bedroom.
The room was dominated by a bed about twice as big as a king-sized bed back home, Nikki thought. It had a heavy, black wooden bed frame with four tall posts and an upper frame as well for bed curtains. But there were no curtains in evidence and no sheets or blankets that she could see, either. Instead, a vast, crimson-red mattress that looked like a spilled puddle of blood sat in the black frame. It had long, round red pillows with black tassels to match at both the head and the foot of the bed.
The rest of the bedroom was done in red and black too, Nikki saw, with soft black fur carpets and red flocked walls bearing intricate designs in gold. Also, there was a great deal of what looked like bondage equipment—a rack by the door held a variety of paddles, whips, canes, and other instruments she had no name for. There was a black bench padded with red leather wh
ich had chains that ended in thick metal cuffs attached to all its corners, a whipping post, and a cage big enough for a large sized man as well.
Holy crap! She barely managed not to say the words out loud, but she was sure her eyes were as wide as saucers. Mistress Hellenix must be heavily into the Lifestyle—something Nikki knew little about, having refused to read the 50 Shades books on the grounds that they were rather poorly written. Although, to be honest, she had seen at least one of the movies. The amount of sexy paraphernalia she was seeing here would have made Christian Gray green with envy.
All in all, the effect was extremely intimidating—especially for someone like Nikki who had never had anything but vanilla sex. Not that she wouldn’t be willing to try other things—it was just that Gary wasn’t into anything kinky. And since it took two to tango, she’d been stuck with plain old missionary position love-making with nary a whip or a paddle in sight for her entire married life.
“Are you well, my Mistress?” Malik was watching her again, a slight frown on his chiseled features.
“Oh, um—sure. Just fine.” She swallowed. “You can just put me down on the bed, please Malik.”
“As my Mistress commands,” he murmured and carried her over to the vast red mattress. He sat her carefully down but didn’t leave just yet. Instead, he went to a large chest of drawers in the corner of the room, which was carved from the same shiny black wood as the bed frame, and began searching through its drawers.
He came back to the bed holding what looked like a scrap of black lace and started to take off her furry black towel.
“Hey! What are you doing?” Nikki protested, clutching the furry towel to her chest when he tried to pull it away.
“Getting you dressed, of course.” He frowned. “It is part of my duties as your primary bodyslave.”
“Well, you’re excused from your, uh, duties for now,” Nikki said, snatching the black lace garment he was holding and sitting back on the bed. “I can manage just fine on my own, thanks.”
His eyes widened but he only nodded.
“As my Mistress desires. I shall leave you then.”
“Yes, please do,” Nikki exclaimed. She was dying for some privacy. Dying to examine the purple stone and see if she could find a way to make it send her back home.
At last, to her relief, Malik made a low bow and then left the room silently, moving much more gracefully than a man of his size should have been able to do.
Finally, she was alone.
Chapter Three
As soon as the doors shut behind the big bodyslave, Nikki heaved a relieved sigh and some of the tension she’d been feeling leaked away. Her stomach, which had been tied in knots, slowly relaxed and she could breathe again. At last Malik was gone and she had the whole room to herself!
The first thing to do was get dressed, she thought. She didn’t want the stone sending her back home naked or only wrapped in a furry black towel—that would be really hard to explain at Rosy Ray’s Realty, where she was currently over an hour late for work.
Dropping the towel, she examined the lacy black garment Malik had chosen for her. Right away she could tell it would be practically see-though but it was better than nothing. She decided to put it on so she would have something covering her while she searched for something different.
Sure enough, when she pulled the slip-like garment over her head, it clung to her like a second skin, hugging her curves and showing the neatly-trimmed patch of curls between her legs as well as her displaying her nipples prominently. Even worse, it didn’t want to cover her breasts. She had to keep tugging it up or it would slip down and show everything.
“Wow—this looks obscene. Sexy, but definitely obscene,” Nikki muttered, looking down at herself. Maybe if she’d gotten something like this to wear earlier, Gary wouldn’t be leaving her.
Screw that asshole, whispered a little voice in her head. You tried to get him interested over and over the last few years and he couldn’t be bothered. This divorce isn’t your fault, Nikki!
But it felt surreal to think about her impending divorce in the huge BDSM bedroom. Instead, she got off the bed and went to look in the large chest of drawers for something less revealing to wear.
Unfortunately, the drawers only held more of the same. Nikki found demi-cup bras that would leave her nipples bare, leather bustiers that laced up the front, crotchless panties and thigh-high hose as well as some articles of clothing she couldn’t even identify.
The top drawer had all kinds of piercing jewelry—not much of it meant to go into ears, Nikki thought. She wondered if the real Mistress Hellenix had a pierced belly button or nipples or something else. There were also two tiny vials of powder in the drawer—one was composed of tiny red and gold crystals and the other was filled with blue and silver particles. There was a third little glass bottle with a tiny brush as well.
Nikki wondered what the mysterious vials were for but then she realized she was wasting time. She needed to find something decent to wear, didn’t she?
Or did she?
Come to think of it, hadn’t she found herself in the tub of yerba blood completely naked? So maybe the purple M&M-shaped stone didn’t take clothes. Maybe it only transported people. In which case she was wasting her time as well as invading the real Mistress Hellenix’s privacy by digging through her things.
Where was the real Mistress anyway? What if she walked in right now? If she bathed in blood and forced slaves to stand for hours on end in uncomfortable poses and then shocked or spanked them when they so much as twitched, she would certainly have no problem doing away with an imposter like Nikki.
The thought made her shiver and she left the tall chest of drawers—after carefully shutting all the drawers she had opened—and walked quickly over to the other side of the room, as far from it as she could get.
There was something strange on the flocked wallpaper here—a long black curtain was hanging from the ceiling. Did it conceal a door or a window, Nikki wondered. But when she pulled the curtain back, she saw a shiny, reflective surface twice as tall as she was.
“Oh—a mirror,” she murmured to herself.
But it wasn’t—at least not quite.
As she watched, the shiny surface started to hum to itself. Then two other shiny panels slid out of it on either side, forming a kind of 3-way mirror, Nikki thought. But then another panel appeared at the top which showed her from the back as well—so she could see herself from all directions.
She gasped at what she saw.
“Where are my grays?” she muttered, combing through the front of her long, black hair. “And the wrinkles around my eyes are faded too! What in the world?”
Maybe there was something to that weird beauty routine of Mistress Hellenix’s after all. Nikki estimated she looked a good five years younger if not more. Also, the cellulite seemed to have magically smoothed out of her thighs and her boobs felt firmer. Her skin had a glowing, polished look to it.
I guess I might have looked even better if I’d spent some time in that awful beetle box, she thought and shivered. Anti-aging treatments were all well and good but nothing would be worth that particular beauty treatment!
“This is amazing,” Nikki murmured, still examining herself in the mirror. She was just thinking that the black lace gown Malik had chosen for her was even more revealing than she’d initially imagined—there was a little heart cut out at the back which showed the top of her ass—when the purple M&M rock she had been clutching all this time started to vibrate in her palm.
“Oh my God—what now?” Nikki almost dropped the rock but as before, her fingers had clenched tight around it and she couldn’t let it go. Then the reflective surface in front of her began to ripple and suddenly…she was staring at someone who looked exactly like her.
The woman in the mirror had big dark eyes, plus-sized curves, and long black hair which was damp and slicked back from her forehead, as though she’d just taken a shower. Or maybe had a dip in the ocean—Nikki remem
bered how she had woken up in the tub-full of blood. Maybe her doppelganger had fallen into the surf the same way she had fallen into the bloody tub. If so, the woman she was seeing had certainly gotten the better end of the bargain.
“Oh, there you are! It took you long enough to find a reflective surface!” The person who looked like she could be Nikki’s evil twin glared at her. “What are you doing wearing my lounging attire?”
“You…you’re wearing my clothes too,” Nikki pointed out.
It was true—the other woman had on her best gray business skirt and blazer along with her white silk top. She had left off the bra, however, and had tied the tails of the blouse tightly under her breasts, which caused her dark pink nipples to poke out obscenely against the white silk.
“You’re wearing them wrong, though,” she added, hoping no one else had seen the woman who looked exactly like her walking around with her top done up like a naughty school girl.
“I could say the same for you,” the other woman snapped. “Why are you hiding your breasts like that instead of displaying them proudly?”
“What?” The conversation was getting more and more bizarre and that was saying something, considering she was talking through the mirror to someone who looked exactly like her and had, apparently, taken her place on Earth.
Was the other woman on Earth though? She must be, Nikki decided. Not only was she wearing Nikki’s clothing, she was also standing in what appeared to be one of the rest area/changing stations that were placed around the perimeter of the beach. The image reflected behind her showed restroom stalls lined up in a neat row.
“Are you Mistress Hellenix?” she asked hesitantly.
“Of course I am! And you must be…” Mistress Hellenix dug around in Nikki’s purse for a moment and came up with her driver’s license. “Neecolay Dahvees?” she said, frowning. “What a strange name.”
“It’s Nicole Davis,” Nikki corrected her. “But how can you read English? And how can we understand each other? And how can I understand your slaves?” And why do you own slaves in the first place? she mentally added but didn’t say aloud.
Twisted: Brides of the Kindred 23 Page 4