by Kitty Thomas
“It’s not her business. We’ll say we can’t have them.”
“And then they’ll wish you’d married someone who could have babies.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think they would, but if it became an issue, I would tell them the doctor told us it was me. I won’t make you bear their contempt.”
It was another thing to add to the list of things that made Leo feel safe and honorable. None of it matched the change that came over him in the dungeon.
“You can return to your room now. That’s all I wanted to talk about.”
Faith got up to leave, confused that nothing scary had happened, and that he was keeping her in the east wing for now. He intercepted her at the door, wrapping her in his arms. His lips pressed against her forehead.
“You will survive me, I promise,” he whispered.
Chapter Fifteen
A week passed and Leo still hadn’t taken Faith to the dungeon, though he had resumed meals with her in the kitchen. One afternoon, he’d given her a few books on BDSM and asked her to read them so she would know more of what to expect. That night at dinner she’d been more pale than the night she’d offered herself to him in Mei Lin’s place.
When he asked if she had any questions about anything, she’d shaken her head and looked at her plate, her hand shaking as she brought the fork to her lips.
Leo had spent much of the week digging through old medical texts on psychology. He had little respect for the field—considering it a pseudoscience at best. And yet everything he did with women in his dungeon, and everything between himself and Faith… it was all psychology.
He’d skimmed past the parts about Stockholm Syndrome. He didn’t want to believe Faith’s feelings could be merely a survival mechanism. The look in her eyes when he’d kissed her, the way she responded to him… that had to be real.
Hadn’t the scientific community determined we were all just chemicals swimming around—that behavior was a mechanical reaction to stimuli and nothing more? Nothing mystical or magic, mere cause and effect. If they were right… would any love or feeling be real? Would Stockholm Syndrome be any less real, if that was what she had? Did a personal judgment on the value of one set of chemical reactions over another make one empirically better or more real than the rest? Leo believed humans were more than stimulus-response machines, but the men who’d written the psychology books in his den didn’t.
Leo shook the textbook thoughts from his head as he watched his timid slave. He could drag this on for another six weeks without touching her once, and she’d still have that terrified look on her face—maybe more intense.
He poured wine as they sat down for their Friday meal together. “I’m taking you to the dungeon after dinner.”
The tension that had been coiled in her for the past week pulled tight, jerking her head up like a puppet on a string. Her eyes widened as if she wanted to beg him to go back to Mei Lin or any other woman and leave her in peace.
“What did I tell you before I sent you off to bed last Friday?” He had no doubt she remembered everything he’d said or done since that moment. She’d watched and listened to him as if her life depended on memorizing every nuance of every interaction between them.
“Y-you said I’d survive you, Master.”
“And you will. I’ll take you into my world slowly. I’ll make you crave it.” Since she’d given her consent, Leo had been filled with anticipation over the idea of turning someone with no kink inclinations into his willing slave who learned to beg for each lash of the whip or strike of the cane. After a week of delving more deeply into Skinner and Breland’s work on conditioning, he was convinced he could create in Faith everything he needed. She already had the most important component—an inborn submissive tendency. With that one trait, he could work miracles.
In their early weeks together, he’d assumed her reactions to him were all fear-based, but as time went on and she’d begun to trust him, her behaviors hadn’t changed. Her shy deference, the way she couldn’t meet his eyes—not due to some duplicity as would have been the case with Caprice, but rather, something in him made her shrink back in recognition of his dominance.
He watched as she picked over her meal.
“Are you all right?”
“Fine, Master,” she whispered as she tried to get through the baked ziti.
He was toying with her. Leo wondered if his sadism had kicked up a notch. Was he now only satisfied if there was more fear and resistance? What separated him from a serial rapist or a serial killer if he was willing to let this line of consent blur? She’d said she would do these things, but she was clearly so terrified, she might pass out at any moment. Could any attraction or feeling she’d developed for him make this okay in her mind? Or his?
He went to the side pantry to get a roll of aluminum foil. He wrapped his dinner and put it in the fridge then took hers away as well. She was too nervous to eat; she was picking over it. It was better to move them forward now, to let her see that he could ease her into his world and there was nothing to fear.
“The human body is a funny thing. It can be programmed like a computer,” he said. “I can reprogram you so that you like the things I like. I don’t want to torture you.” He wasn’t one hundred percent sure on that last part. But if he said it out loud enough times, maybe it would become true.
“Come here, sweetheart.”
She took his hand and he pulled her into his arms and held her. It was the first time he’d touched her since the previous week when he’d kissed her in her bedroom and sent Mei Lin away. He’d been afraid if he started touching her again he wouldn’t stop. And his touch involved whips and belts and canes and clamps.
He held her for several minutes, rubbing her back as she trembled in his arms. He was moments from canceling everything, but that would solve nothing. The only solution that didn’t involve her tied up in his dungeon was setting her free, and no matter how much guilt he felt, or how much he believed she was no longer a threat to his family, he couldn’t let her go. He had to possess her.
When she’d settled in his arms, he picked up a cloth napkin from the table and pressed the soft fabric against her face to catch the tears.
“Please don’t cry, Faith. These aren’t the kind of tears I want from you.”
“I’m sorry, Master.”
“Shhh.”
***
Faith’s appetite had fled the moment he’d said he was taking her to the dungeon. She was glad he hadn’t forced her to eat dinner because she was sure she wouldn’t be able to keep it down.
For the past week she’d been on edge, her appetite shrinking each day. If Leo had noticed, he hadn’t said anything. Each day she woke wondering if today was the day. She wasn’t like those other women. She couldn’t do this.
The reality of what was coming should have made her hate him. It should have wiped away any residual attraction or fuzzy emotion. If it could have, she might have begged to be released from her promise. Even if it meant she’d never have love or companionship, it would protect her from the things downstairs.
But she still felt for him, and watching him take other women would only kill her by degrees. When he’d pulled her into his arms, he was the safest person in the world. She’d almost forgotten he was the cause of her angst.
When he opened that metal door, she thought her legs would buckle, but Leo prodded her down the winding stairway into hell.
He didn’t speak at first, instead going to the wall where all the whips and crops and paddles hung. Her legs stopped supporting her and she crumpled into a ball on the floor, her knees tucked under her body as if she were practicing for a school tornado drill. Her instincts screamed that she needed to protect as much of herself as she could from him.
“Faith, come here.”
His voice had taken on that change, that edge she’d always heard while eavesdropping. Was the nicer version of him there anymore? It was as if the upstairs Leo had receded to allow the beast in the shadows
full reign while down below.
She crawled to him, not sure she could force herself to stand. When she reached him, he bent and pulled her to stand beside him.
“Now,” his voice curled around her and squeezed, “which of these things is scariest to you? I want you to rate them from least to most scary.”
She searched his face. What game was he playing? Sure, tell the sadist which items would upset you the most so he doesn’t have to do any work to figure it out.
He sighed. “Faith, what happened to the trust we built?”
Her gaze went back to the lined-up canes.
She gripped the tray to stay upright while he went to get the black leather book. He opened it to a fresh page and uncapped a pen.
“Well? We don’t have all night.”
Faith ran her fingertips over the smooth canes. “This one is the worst,” she said, touching the metal cane. “Followed by this one and the rest like it.” She pointed to the rattan.
The pen scratched against the paper in a quick scrawl that probably only he could read.
She took a breath and looked up at the wall. “I-I don’t know what these are.”
“Those are clamps. Those are called butterfly clamps and the others are alligator.” he said.
“What are they for?” She thought she knew, but she hoped she was wrong.
“Nipples. But I have other kinds for labia.”
Not wrong.
“Do they hurt?”
He raised a brow at her. Stupid question.
“Of course they hurt, but the alligator aren’t bad. They hurt more when they are being removed than when they go on.”
“Why?”
“Blood rushing back to where it was denied. You go numb so it doesn’t hurt as much, but when the clamps come off, sensation rushes back all at once.”
“Why do you like this?” She couldn’t blend the Leo who was into causing pain with the Leo who had protected her more than once from Angelo. Or the Leo who’d shown her mercy and given her a private room, or who had chosen to create a sham engagement and marry her so she wouldn’t have to be kept tied up in the dungeon during the holidays. All of those things were so extremely kind, and this was so extremely evil. His contradiction was more frightening than if he could keep to one persona consistently.
He shrugged. “I’ve experienced every object in this dungeon. When I first decided to explore this lifestyle, I hired a dominatrix to teach me. I asked her to use everything on me because it was my responsibility to be intimately familiar with each item. She taught me how to moderate my strength and how to deliver the amount of sensation I wanted to deliver and nothing more or less. There is nothing here you will endure that I haven’t been through myself.”
Leo raised his sweater and turned around. Faith couldn’t help running her fingers over the thin, faint scars that criss-crossed his back. They were old and almost faded now.
“Are you going to mark me like this?” she asked, working to keep her voice steady.
“I haven’t decided.”
“I’m not as strong as you. I can’t take what you can take. Please…”
He pulled the sweater down and turned to face her, his hand resting on her cheek. “Whatever happens or doesn’t happen, when it happens you will be able to take it, whatever it is. I’m not going to throw you down and scar you. I’m not an animal.”
She looked back at the tray of canes. “What made your scars?”
“A bull whip.”
“W-which one is that?”
Leo pointed to a large, single-tailed whip on the wall.
“I want to change my list. Make that one the worst one, and then the canes underneath it.”
He chuckled but scribbled in his book. “Noted.”
“What kind of whip is this?” she asked, pointing to a smaller whip that had several strips of leather instead of one. Amazingly, talking about the things in the dungeon took the edge off her fear, though she knew that wouldn’t be the case when she was tied down somewhere and he had one of these things in his hand.
“That’s not a whip. It’s called a flogger.”
“How bad is it?”
“I usually start a sub off with that. Floggers can be very pleasurable, even on someone who doesn’t consider themselves much of a masochist.”
Faith wrinkled her nose. “How can it be pleasurable?”
“It’s hard to explain, but I’ll show you. It can be made to hurt, of course. Any implement with enough force behind it can hurt. I could hit you with a vibrator and it would hurt. Though I wouldn’t do that. Pleasure toys are for pleasure.”
His expression was sexually hungry, and Faith was sure she hadn’t imagined a double entendre when he’d used the phrase pleasure toy. No doubt that was how he saw her, now that she’d signed the last shred of her life over to him.
He could have taken anything from her at any moment, but her verbal agreement had removed any remnant of guilt that may have otherwise held him back.
Faith stared at the flogger for a good thirty seconds and said, “Make that the least bad one.” She caught the ghost of a smile on his face as he wrote it down.
“What’s this?” She pointed to a leather strap that was split down the middle about halfway so that one end formed a fork.
“That’s a tawse. They were used in Scotland for corporal punishment in schools. Only, they rapped a student’s palm with it. I can’t promise I would limit it to that. They sting quite a bit.”
Faith filed that away and looked back over the wall. There were several whips with one tail that were smaller than the bull whip. And there were a few floggers and paddles, and the tawse, and a belt. She quickly rated everything ending up with bullwhip as worst, followed by canes, the belt, clamps, then the smaller whips, then the tawse, paddle, and the flogger.
He seemed surprised by the belt ranking so high on her list. She held her breath, waiting for him to demand an explanation on why a belt should be so terrifying, but he simply noted it in the leather journal.
The flogger, she was going to try to trust Leo on. If he was lying, she would never make the mistake of trusting him again. Not that trusting or not trusting him mattered, but it was one thing she could still control. The clamps made it pretty high on the list because of the uncertainty. She’d had a difficult time deciding whether the smaller whips or the clamps would be worse, but the clamps were so foreign that it made little sense to put them low on the list.
In the event that he intended to slowly work her up going by her list, she wanted to move the clamps further into the future. Given that, should she have listed the belt as the worst?
***
Leo observed as Faith went through each item on the wall and in the tray. They’d yet to catalog everything in the toy box. There were still many things in the large box she might find fearful—things she may not have gotten a good look at on their previous tour. He was sure she thought the violet wand was another vibrator and that the concept of playing with electricity would send her over the edge. It would be months before he could introduce it.
And then there was simply the matter of how certain things—even meant for pleasure—might humiliate or scare her because of how much they would expose her to him. He’d seen her naked once in those fleeting moments the first night she’d been in his home—in his room, and briefly in his bed. He’d gorged himself on the look of her, the lush, soft curves. The unmarred flesh. He’d held the memory in his mind for weeks as he’d jerked off in the shower.
He’d been new to her then, but he wasn’t foolish enough to think her shyness was all about newness or the circumstances of them being thrown together. It was something innate that he wanted to exploit.
Leo could practically hear her heart trying to escape out of her chest as he peeled his sweater off and laid it over a spanking horse. He crossed to the far end of the dungeon to stand in front of a large, leaner mirror, typically a tool used for humiliation, and it would be again—most likely in a few moments.
But for now, he looked at the scars on his back. It was true he’d hired a dominatrix to come to his dungeon when he’d first created it. But the marks were about so much more than that.
Since puberty, he’d had the fantasies: tying women up, hurting them, fucking them, sometimes kidnapping and forcing them. The latter fantasies disturbed him the most. He’d tried to be good. He couldn’t understand what evil had possessed him or what he’d done to deserve these thoughts and feelings that wouldn’t leave him no matter how often he went to church or how much he prayed or tried to be good.
For a long time, it had only been thoughts and masturbation. He’d avoided the fairer sex, fearing he’d hurt someone. But once he’d made his money and everything became possible, he’d started collecting. The estate had been built from the beginning with what he’d originally said was going to be a large and extensive wine cellar. And true, he did keep wine down here, but not nearly the collection so vast a space demanded.
Over months he collected the toys in the box and the implements on the wall and in the sliding tray, as well as all the furniture—both kinky and standard. As he’d put the room together, he’d told himself comforting lies. It was a simple extension of a fantasy. He’d never bring a woman down here. He would never hurt anybody for real.
Even if it was consensual, women like that… they must be as fucked up as him, maybe more. Surely they had some history of abuse or trauma that he was merely capitalizing on. He wouldn’t cross that line.
But then he did cross it. Instead of bringing a masochist or submissive to his pristine and untouched dungeon, he’d brought a dominatrix. He’d wanted to know what it was that he fantasized about doing to someone else. He didn’t want to sugarcoat it. He needed to use the pain to jolt himself back to reality and convince himself to stay away from this fascination.
But the sessions with the dominatrix only made his desires stronger, awakening the beast inside him, making it hungrier and determined to surface—angry that someone else got to play but he didn’t.