“I mean, don’t fight it,” she said in a terse whisper. “Kind of woman you are, should be easy for you.”
“What should be easy?”
“You go. You see yourself.”
Laney waited several hours in the hallway outside the judge’s chambers for the man to let her in the door. She was cold, barefoot and looking like a sad little ragdoll by the time the door opened and she was invited inside with a wave of the magistrate’s hand.
Unlike a judge’s plush chambers in a US courthouse, this room was sparse, painted a flat grey color, and had no carpeting, just a dingy linoleum, and blinds that rattled against the window, responding to the heat pumped from the radiator beneath it. The air was oppressively hot, so much so that Laney could barely breathe.
Where he couldn’t speak a word of English in the courtroom, he was perfectly fluent now that he had her behind doors.
“You’ve made a find mess of yourself,” he boldly spit out as he pretended to review her case file.
“Sir, if you will please let me explain. I can prove to you who I am. I have a hotel room in town, and clothes. I’m an American citizen, a lawyer. I have money, sir.”
His eyes narrowed reproachfully. “No no no bribe me.”
“No! I was not intending to bribe you. I have money for any fine I have to pay.”
He studied her for a minute more, finally pronouncing judgment.
“You will be jailed three months for your crimes.”
“No! You can’t! That’s not what you said in court! Please. You must let me explain.”
“Not three months? No?”
“Please!”
He ventured a thin smile. “Then I will whip you. You pay with your ass.”
“Oh, lord, please,” she sunk back into a chair behind her and sighed. This should not surprise her. Nothing should surprise her, not anything that would mean more suffering or more sex. She was so tired of being afraid, so tired of feeling panic and fear and the hellish accompaniment of arousal that seemed to flourish in her body under these circumstances. So tired, so worn out, so fucked, so used, giving herself to another man hardly seemed fair, but it didn’t seem at all out of the question.
The judge was not a bad looking man, nor was he a good looking one either. He had a long, substantial face and his dark hair was clipped close. His brows were thick over a pair of sad eyes…what color were they? A lovely brown—with a biting edge; that edge she’d grown to love in an authoritative man. His mouth formed a natural frown. It wouldn’t be so hard to imagine him sexually, if she imagined a man wounded many times by love.
She almost laughed out loud at the absurdity of that last thought. Here she was, imprisoned in a foreign country with not a lick of identification, about to be whipped on the ass for being victimized by three of Prague’s horny hoodlums, and she was calling this man wounded…
If getting whipped were what it took to get her out of this predicament, then she’d get whipped. If he wanted it sexual, she could do that, too. She could already feel a tickle between her legs, a heaviness in her crotch.
She gazed at the judge, her eyes a little dreamy now and surprisingly seductive, as if being seductive had been programmed into her psychic circuitry, to the point that there was no fending off this kind of sexual response. Hadn’t Kafka basically said as much? Kafka and how many others?
In turn, the once imperious judge saw the hint of seduction in Laney’s face, and was willing, she could sense that in those sad eyes… “I beat you now,” he said. “Get up.”
Laney rose to her feet as ordered and waited for the judge. Her knees knocked on cue and her pussy melted away into the same lusty place it had been for days… how many days was it now; she’d lost count.
The beating started with the judge’s hands running over her bottom and overtop of the grey muslin prison dress. He let that satisfy him for quite some time, drawing close to her side as he rubbed and squeezed and pleasured himself on the feel of her ass. He didn’t seem to care about the rest of her, her pussy, her lips or her heaving breasts. But the uproar that followed in Laney’s submissive body made her chest heave all the more, and her lips moisten and her pussy clench tight as it would around a man’s cock. She was very close to a climax, starting to pant, while feeling the judge move even tighter to her side, so that she could feel the body heat coming from his crotch, and his penis as it throbbed in tandem to her own spasmodic pulse.
He could have her coming quickly. Just the right touch in the right way and he’d set her off. But instead of bringing the prisoner off with a few strokes of his hand, the judge abruptly pushed her into his desk and pulled the muslin dress up to bare her ass.
Thwack!
She grunted with the first blow of a leather paddle laid on the center of her ass. There must have still been whip marks from previous beatings, but he paid no notice of them as he continued to strike her with the paddle until her entire bottom was scalding hot and scarlet. She’d become so aroused in advance that the sensation from the paddling only increased her arousal, making her writhe in obvious enjoyment against the edge of the desk, which happened to rub directly on her clit.
“A masochist, eh?” the judge finally said, setting the leather paddle aside. “I beat a woman, I expect her to cry, and you will cry.”
Being on the edge of climax, this statement hardly had her worried; in fact, she hardly heard his vow.
But she did feel the wrath of the next strikes that peppered her skin, when a hefty wooden paddle with a dozen holes drilled into the surface bounced against her reddened bottom in a fast cadence of blistering strikes.
Frantic and raving, she was soon screaming, those longed for tears streaming from her eyes—anything to make the judge happy. Her wailing went on and on, as the paddle tore into her as viciously as any implement of punishment she’d ever felt.
Then he was done. As abruptly as he started, he stopped, laid the paddle down and took a deep breath on returning to his seat behind the desk.
It took some time for the recovering Laney to finally lift her head, and when she did, she found herself staring directly into the man’s long sad eyes.
“Get up!” he said.
She slowly rose, snuffing, then started to wipe her nose with the back of her hand. The judge quickly intervened, handing her a freshly pressed handkerchief that he’d pulled from his pocket.
“Thank you,” she said as she blew her nose and wiped her eyes.
“I drop the charges, you go now. Leave through that door,” he pointed to a door at the back of his office.
She looked in that direction. “Leave now, just leave?”
“Yes. Leave, please. Out of here now. I don’t want to see you again.”
She stared down at her bare, dirty feet, assuming that the stilettos Kafka gave her were still in the hotel room, or by now on some other woman’s feet. “But no shoes?”
“You had less when you arrived here,” he reminded her.
“Yes. You’re right,” she agreed.
Memories from all the outrageous events of the last several days seemed to converge at that moment to remind her of how tired and weary she should feel. Her head was heavy, she almost felt drunk, even her elbows and her teeth ached, and now her ass smarted, while a warm, liquid sensation in her bottom continued her ever-present arousal.
The man waited, not budging on his decree, which meant that the barefoot, bone-weary Laney finally walked to the door and slipped into the alley behind the courthouse. Thankfully, this alley was not nearly as forbidding as the one behind the nightclub, where Kafka left her and she waited for nearly an hour for her rescue while slumped against the brick wall.
This time, she had far less time to wait. As soon as she appeared in the alley, a parked car pulled forward and the door to the passenger’s side opened. The driver leaned over the seat. “Laney Priestly?”
“Yes, I’m Laney Priestly.”
“Then get in. The Marquis would like to see you.”
Chapter Fourteen
Pillows, fluffy sweet-smelling pillows, and satin sheets with the scent of lilac clinging to their fibers, and coffee, a rich French roasted brew and a bathroom spa with gilded fixtures…
She wondered if the man was rich, or just a clever pauper with a carefully manipulated set to make women mad with lust, women foolish enough to fall for his line. By the look of it, the Marquis was rich and civil with a house that reeked of his good-breeding, kinky though that was.
As soon as she was escorted through the back door of the Prague house and up the stairs to her room, it seemed to close around her like a warm blanket. She had to smile, feeling in that moment, almost as safe and free from care as she would be if she were home. She’d not been left to bat around the Prague underworld forever, lost to the Marquis, or the life she knew. Her fears seemed to flee altogether as soon as she dipped her toe into the rose-scented bubbly water of the bath she’d drawn. She felt as if she were sliding into cream, although as soon as the soothing water hit her scorched and battered skin she immediately winced, reminded of the punishment, the scourges and whips and quirts and paddles that were used to cause her pain. The burning tightness in her flank where the tattoo had been etched into her flesh turned into a strange though subtle trigger for her physical arousal. She almost smiled, until she remembered whose tattoo that was. If she could have prevented it from happening she would have…but of course that had been impossible.
At least, she could finally see the mark Kafka left permanently imprinted on her skin. She expected initials, similar to the brand. There were letters, all right, but these were oddly aligned: an ‘M’ covered by an ‘X’ of the same size. Exactly what that meant, she could not be certain. Given that there was a war between the Marquis and Kafka she imagined that the ‘X’ was crossing out the ‘M’, simple as that. Kafka’s not so subtle message.
For three days, Laney rested in the wonderful, sweet-scented room, where she masturbated often in the heavenly bathtub to alleviate a constant ache in her groin that made her restless and weary. She slept for long hours, and spent the rest of her time reading paperback novels she found in a bookcase, and quietly contemplating her recent past, and her uncertain present and future. She was waited on by naked servant girls, most of whom didn’t speak a word to her. (She thought of them as girls, while they all looked to be in their mid-twenties or as old as she was. She was reminded of Jannie calling her girl—and now she understood how right that sounded). Several of the girls were actually gagged with ball-gags or bridled, making it impossible to converse with them. All of them were pierced in their genitals with a number of rings, none pierced exactly in the same way as the other girls. But the arrangements all looked like insignias of their servitude. Most wore bracelets like Laney’s bracelet, and most were branded in the same place on their left ass cheek where Laney’s EP brand and now the tattoo was emblazoned. They served her trays of food, removed them when she was done and cleaned the room. When they left her, they always carefully closed the door and locked it, making sure that she could not leave on her own.
Because she assumed, though she had no proof, that she was in the Marquis’ house, she didn’t fight her imprisonment. But after three days she was becoming restless and started to imagine herself overpowering one of the smaller servant girls so she could set off to find the Marquis on her own.
On the afternoon of the fourth day, Laney luxuriated in a warm bath for nearly an hour, when there was a sudden knock on the door. The unexpected sound lifted her from a pleasant reverie and returned her to the present…
“Come in,” she said.
The bathroom door creaked open and she watched as one of the servant girls moved inside. Like all the others, she was completely naked except for a collar and wrist cuffs, and on her left arm was a duplicate of the Marquis’ bracelet that Laney wore.
“I help you, Ma’am?” the woman deferentially bowed. Her accent was so thick that Laney could hardly understand what she was saying.
Laney stared at her a minute.
“Is there some reason I should be getting out now?”
She waited, but the woman didn’t answer.
“Well, I guess I should get out before I shrivel like a raisin,” and she smiled, as she pulled herself from the tub and allowed the woman to dry her with a pale yellow, terrycloth towel.
“Must dress, Ma’am,” the woman said. “Clothes. For you.” She pointed to the bed where, through the bathroom door, Laney could see what looked like a skirt and blouse laid out on the bed. Until now, she’d been dressing in the robes and shifts that were hanging in the closet, since no other clothes had been provided.
“Thank you,” she smiled.
The woman backed out of the room as if she were a Medieval serf and Laney were landed royalty.
The pink satin blouse and burgundy skirt she found on the bed looked exactly like something Laney might have worn for Erik. They felt like her own clothes. She buttoned the tiny pearl buttons as she looked in the mirror, thinking for a moment that she was getting ready to go to court. She brushed out her hair and applied the make-up she found in the bathroom, finishing off with a shade of lipstick that accentuated the color of her clothes. Although she felt almost relieved to finally be emerging from the mindless limbo of the last several days, she was so nervous, that she could hardly put on the four inch heels provided for her, and when she did, she could hardly stand up straight. Just as she was getting her bearings, she heard a knock on the bedroom door.
“Come in,” she called.
The same submissive female who had summoned her from the bath opened the door a crack and peeked in.
“He’s ready for you.”
She took a deep breath and for the first time in nearly four days she left the lovely sanctuary.
Following the saucy naked derriere of the female servant, Laney descended two flights of stairs while tightly gripping the handrail. They walked down a long, but wide corridor until they came to a room with an impressive hard wood door and a gold name plate, etched with the name “The Forum.”
The naked servant girl knocked twice, then without being prompted, she turned the knob and opened the door wide, revealing a room with a slick marble floor, paneled walls and a huge chandelier hanging in the center. Nearly two stories tall, the space felt as cold as a mausoleum and as formal as the grand parlor in a 17th century estate house. As if on stage waiting for their cue, a tableau of men dressed in dark suits were scattered around the room talking quietly amongst themselves. It was an eerie sight that immediately made Laney want to flee. As soon as she stepped inside, all eyes turned her way within seconds, with the exception of two men directly in front of her who continued to confer with their heads together as they whispered. One had his back to her, the other man was angled slightly toward her. As the two continued their conversation, the rest of the room waited in silence until they finished.
Suddenly, the gentleman with his back to Laney swept around and faced her while striding to the center of the marble floor.
“Come closer,” he ordered immediately. His voice was clear, steady and authoritative without being particularly loud.
She guessed he was in his sixties, although he had an ageless quality about him that so many men in their middle years exude, making it difficult to pinpoint an exact age. The greying hair and the lines etched into what was once a smooth and handsome face matured him in a positive way. A dynamic energy radiated from his well-built body—neither too skinny nor too fat—and helped to create a natural charisma that was virile, vibrant and capable of attracting any woman of any age.
Laney hesitated, nerves very much on edge—was this what she’d been waiting for…? She obeyed the order and moved several steps closer to the man in charge—there could be little doubt about who he was. For some reason, she’d thought she would be swept off her feet and transported to a nirvana of heightened sexual grace when she first laid eyes on the Marquis, but her experience now was quite different. Yes, she fel
t like a trembling bundle of raw nerves, but she was transported nowhere.
“I understand that you’ve been looking for me,” the man said.
What a profound understatement was Laney’s first thought, then when she was finally able to answer, she said, “You are the Marquis?” Her clear eyes had opened wide in wonder as she surveyed him carefully and let the reality of the moment and the man settle on her.
“That’s what I’m commonly called,” he replied.
“Yes, I have been anxious to find you.”
“And what is it you want from me?” he asked.
She stood speechless for several moments, until it seemed the bracelet on her arm began to burn her flesh as a reminder of her reason for being there. “This bracelet,” she said, and she held it out for him to see. “You gave it to my husband a year ago.”
“Indeed I did. So sorry about your husband; he was a good man, a good master. I know that you were devastated by the loss and to lose him in such a … a tragic way.”
“Yes, sir. He left so many things…” she struggled for the right word, “undone…” she bowed her head, needing to gather herself. All the emotion of the moment seemed to transfer to that tragic instant when she realized that Erik would not return to her. She fought back tears, then took a deep breath and looked up again. “I felt the need to find you, to fulfill the promise of this bracelet,” she declared simply.
“But you were not content to let me find you?”
“Sir, some days, this bracelet would burn, my desire burning in the same fierce way.”
“Then you should have been content to let it burn,” turning the phrase with an unmistakable hint of disgust.
“But I didn’t see how that was …”
“It’s not in the province of a submissive woman,” he cut her off, “particularly one bound by the code this bracelet implies, to initiate. It is for her to serve, to wait, to wait years if that is what her master demands of her.”
“I-I…didn’t…” she foundered in her attempt to reply, until the reply simply petered out.
The Marquis' Book of Pleasure & Property of the Marquis Page 31