She made a mental note to replace the cord as soon as possible in case Caleb or one of her other owners wanted to use it to gag her again.
* * *
It was difficult for Irene to speak. Her tongue was swollen and dotted with raw spots.
It was Ernie’s day to have her. At twenty-four, he was the youngest of her owners. She didn’t know how he’d come up with the fifteen hundred plaqs for his share of her. Presumably, he’d managed to save it because his expenses were low. He worked at the plywood mill north of the city and lived at home with his parents.
She was surprised when she answered the doorbell and found that it wasn’t Ernie, but Adele, who was waiting at her threshold.
“Come in,” she said.
Adele stepped inside. “You’re not wearing any clothes.”
It had been so long since Irene had worn clothes at home that she’d forgotten that it was unusual for a woman to entertain a guest in the nude. “I’m a pleasure slave. I only wear my housedress when I’m in public.”
“Is something wrong with your mouth?”
Irene tried not to mumble. “I was gagged with a spiked piece of wood for six hours last night. My tongue is swollen.”
Adele looked horrified.
“If my nudity makes you uncomfortable, I can slip my dress on.” Irene tried to enunciate her words.
“No. That’s all right. I guess I better get used to slaves being naked. Now that I’m going to be one.” She waved a piece of paper.
“What’s that?”
“My summons to court. Sir Drake foreclosed on my loan yesterday. I have to go to court in two weeks and be found bankrupt. I don’t have the money so I’ll be taken away in handcuffs and given to Sir Drake to be sold. I’m told that that’s how it’s done. One of my friends’ friends was enslaved for bankruptcy.”
That was quick. Irene had gone to Sir Drake to plead Adele’s case only four days previously. He must have filed the papers as soon as she left his office. The bastard.
“I met with Sir Drake on Monday,” Irene said. “I tried to negotiate your freedom, but he was having none of it. I offered that you would pay back forty thousand plaqs in monthly installments starting as soon as you got a job, but he wouldn’t accept even that much.”
Adele’s eyes grew round. “Forty thousand! I only owe nine!”
Irene shrugged. “I had to offer to cover the principle of your debt, his expenses, and his expected profit from selling you. But it doesn’t matter. Even forty thousand wasn’t enough to satisfy him. He really wants to sell you.”
“Just as well, I guess,” Adele said. “If I owed him forty thousand, I’d never be able to repay it. I’d be living my whole life under threat that he could foreclose and enslave me any time he got in the mood. Better to just go bankrupt now and get it over with.”
The girl was trying to be brave, but she couldn’t hide her misery. A couple of months ago, she was halfway through university. She was dreaming of marrying an aristocrat. Her future was bright. Today, she was facing a life of imprisonment, rape, and torture, followed by an early death.
Irene’s heart broke for her. “Being a pleasure slave’s not so bad,” she said. “It’s not a walk in the park, but it has its compensations.”
“Like having a spiked piece of wood forced into your mouth for hours?”
“That was cruel. But that doesn’t happen often.”
“I don’t want that to happen at all. Not to me or to you or to anyone.”
“It’s… Unpleasant things happen to everyone, not just to pleasure slaves. There’s no avoiding a little pain in life.”
Adele shook her head. “Do you have it?”
“Have what?”
“The gag. The spiked piece of wood. Do you have it or did the guy take it with him.”
“It’s in the drawer.” Along with her butt plug, lube, handcuffs, rope, and other implements of confinement and torture.
“Can I see it?”
Irene fetched the gag. “I had to cut the cord to remove it. I’ll have to replace it so that the gag can be used again if my owners wish.”
Adele examined the bit of wood and nails. “This was in your mouth?”
“Yes.”
“For hours?”
“Yes.”
“With these nails pressing against your tongue?” Adele ran her fingers over the sharp points.
“Yes.”
Adele opened her mouth, carefully inserted the spiked wood, and closed her mouth again.
Immediately she began gagging and pulled the wood back out. “That’s awful. How could you stand it?”
“I had no choice. I do what my owners demand. It’s a good idea for a slave to learn to suppress her gag reflex as much as possible. The trick is to swallow whenever you feel like gagging.”
“Like when a man has his dick in your mouth?”
“Swallowing when your mouth is wide open is a skill that you’ll want to learn.”
“Geoffrey tried to put it in my mouth once, but I didn’t let him.”
“I assume that you’re not a virgin.”
“I had a boyfriend before Geoffrey. He was a nice guy. I shouldn’t have broken up with him.”
Irene was pleased to hear that Geoffrey, the rat bastard, hadn’t been given the gift of Adele’s virginity. She didn’t tell Adele that she’d be sucking plenty of dick before long. The both knew that was a given.
“What can you tell me about being a pleasure slave? What do I need to know?”
There was so much that Adele needed to know that Irene didn’t know where to start. So she simply told her story, not quite from the beginning, but almost. “I was first auctioned ten months ago. A slave is tattooed, registered, and inspected before being put on the block.” Irene parted her hair and showed Adele the registration number that was tattooed on the back of her neck. “What happens after you are sold depends on your new owner. I was first sold to…”
Adele listened raptly for the next three hours as Irene told her what had happened to her, including details about servicing her kennelmen with blowjobs to ensure good treatment and keeping her asshole stretched and lubed to avoid damage from anal rape.
The only thing that she omitted was telling Adele that she had been the wife of a lord and had voluntarily put herself on auction for sale. She wanted her owners to continue to believe that she had been a commoner like them. And she’d never found a way to explain to anyone why she’d put herself on the block without sounding insane.
When she told about having the hateful collar locked on her neck, she said only that she had been given a lady’s name to humiliate her. She didn’t say that it had been her own name before she had been enslaved.
“So I’m not going to have to wear a collar?” Adele asked.
“I’ve never seen another slave who was collared like an animal.” Irene fingered the gold band around her neck absently. “This is just for me.”
When she told how she had helped the professor design and build devices that he could use to torture her, Adele was confounded.
“I don’t get it,” Adele said. “You built new torture devices for the professor to use on you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“It was interesting in a perverse way. He was going to do terrible things to me, no matter what I did. Thinking about how to design and build the machines made me feel better about it. It was like I had some say in what was done to me. That was better than just waiting for someone else to decide. Even if it was something terrible.”
“I don’t think that I’ll ever understand that,” Adele said.
“I hope that you’re never in a position where you have to,” Irene replied.
After Adele left, Irene’s tongue was aching from all the talk. She hoped that Ernie wouldn’t want a blowjob.
She lay down on her bed and took a nap. She fell asleep trying desperately to think of some way to save Adele from slavery.
* * *
“Lad
y Snow.”
“Who is this?” The familiar voice was frosty with false formality over the phone.
“Irene.”
“The last time that I saw you, the professor was parading you out my front door, naked.”
“I’m so sorry, Felice, but I couldn’t do anything about that. I was chained and handcuffed. It was the professor who dragged me through your house.”
“You were naked. You went out my front door naked. Don’t call here again.”
“Wait. Please don’t hang up. I need to speak to Lord Snow.”
“He doesn’t need to speak to you.”
The phone clicked in Irene’s ear.
Her old friend wasn’t going to give her any consideration. Not after Irene’s previous owner had humiliated her by dragging Irene naked on a leash through her manor. It didn’t matter that there was nothing that Irene could have done to stop it.
George didn’t have a day scheduled for a while – he had already traded his most recent day for one later in the month – but Tim was sympathetic to George’s plight.
She didn’t dare call Tim directly – he was married and his wife probably didn’t know that he owned part of a pleasure slave – so she relayed a message through George to ask him to call her.
“You don’t mind if I spend most of the day out of the apartment?” she asked after explaining that she needed to spend some time trying to help George’s niece.
“No. Do what you have to do for George.”
“I’ll be back by supper time. You can have me for the whole evening.” Which is what usually happened anyway – all of her owners had jobs. “If you want, I can do something special for you.” That was an odd thing for a slave to say because any slave’s owner could have anything he wanted from her. There was no such thing as a pleasure slave offering a special treat. But these men weren’t like the usual aristocratic owners. They didn’t seem to realize that a great number of different sexual variations were possible. Ninety-five percent of the time, they asked only for sex in the missionary position, which Irene found rather boring.
“Okay,” Tim said.
She didn’t know if he really wanted something different, or if he was just agreeing because he was an agreeable chap and didn’t really care what he was agreeing to.
But this gave her a convenient excuse for getting Tim to experiment a little.
As soon as she hung up the phone, she set out for Lord Snow’s manor. It would be a two-hour walk so she didn’t have time to waste if she were to be back by suppertime.
As she neared the manor, she found one of Lord Snow’s slaves walking toward her. Irene had been a slave in Lord Snow’s kennels for three months and knew his slaves well. “Hello, Cherry.”
Irene recalled that the beautiful twenty-five-year-old had grown up poor. Her landlord had loaned her three thousand plaqs and then pressed her into slavery at the age of nineteen when she couldn’t replay the debt.
Her story was eerily similar to George’s niece’s, but coming from a poor family, she had been pressed more cheaply.
Cherry smiled warmly. “Hello Irene. But I’m Daffy, now. It’s short for Daffodil. After you and Nickel left, Lord Snow decided to name us after flowers. Except he gave us nicknames. So Peach became Daisy, but he calls her Dizzy instead. And Apple became Aster but he calls her Ass.”
“I bet you all love that.”
Daffy shrugged. “It makes him laugh. And I’ve been called worse than Daffy.” She nodded at Irene’s collar. “You still called Irene?”
Irene made a face. “Yeah.”
“Pity you can’t get your owner to cut that awful thing off you.”
“I’m pretty much resigned to it, now. I don’t think about it much, any more.”
“Slaves endure.”
“You said it. Are you going back to the kennels soon?”
“I’m getting some flour and sugar and eggs for Lady Felice’s cook so I’ll be going back after that.”
“I need to talk to Lord Snow. If I get you to let me into the kennels, do you think that he’ll be coming out this afternoon.”
“Probably.” Daffy frowned. “I don’t know if I can let you into the kennels, though. You don’t belong to Lord Snow any more so you shouldn’t be there.”
“It’ll be all right. I won’t tell him that you let me in. He won’t care when he sees me. We have other things to talk about.”
“I guess it would be okay, then.”
“Sure. I’ll walk with you to Sam’s Market and help you carry stuff back.”
“That would be good. I was afraid that I might drop the eggs if my hands were full of the flour and sugar.”
Irene carried the flour back. It was the heaviest item. While they were walking, she said, “Once, you told me that you were pressed into slavery when you defaulted on a three-thousand plaq debt. Do you remember the landlord who lent you the money?”
“Of course. I’ll never forget Sir Drake. He looked so smug when he took possession of me after the bankruptcy trial. Like he’d won a great battle. The look on his face hurt more than anything that has been done to me since.”
“I’ve seen that look. I’d like to wipe it off his face forever.”
“I don’t know how you can do that.”
“Me, neither. But it’s something to think about.”
Daffy shrugged. “I’ve been thinking about it for six years and it hasn’t done any good yet.”
Half an hour later, Irene was back inside Lord Snow’s kennel, chatting with the other slaves while she waited for their owner.
She knew three of them. The absent two, the ones that she had known as Lime and Tamarind five months ago, had been sold. Three others had been purchased to replace them – Tulip, known as Lips; Lupine who was called Loopy; and Peony, called Pee. Aristocrats tended to exchange their pleasure slaves frequently. Irene suspected that they were afraid of developing emotional relationships with them if they kept them too long. Men are suckers for women who give them good sex.
When Lord Snow entered the kennel, they were reminiscing about the elaborate orgies that Irene had organized.
He stopped dead. “Irene! What the hell are you doing here?” His face grew pale. “You didn’t run away, did you?”
Running away was a death sentence for a slave.
“No, Lord Snow. I have my owner’s permission to come here and speak with you.”
“Good. Come and talk.”
She followed him into the pleasure room.
“So what’s this all about?”
“I need help to save my owner’s niece from being pressed into slavery.” He listened while she explained what had been done to Adele. “If she can borrow nine thousand plaqs from you, then she can repay her debt and avoid bankruptcy. She’ll be happy to sign a note that promises a fair rate of interest that will start accumulating now and that she’ll repay in monthly installments after she graduates from university and finds a job.”
“Or gets married to someone who has a job?”
“Of course. As long as she’s in debt, she’s in danger of bankruptcy so she’ll pay off the loan as soon as she can. There’s no question about that.”
Lord Snow stared at her for a long time while he thought about her request. Finally, he said, “I’m sorry. I can’t. I’d like to give her the loan, but I just can’t do it.”
Irene was shocked. “Why?” Nine thousand plaqs was nothing to a Lord. Lady Snow would pay that much for shoes and a gown to attend one ball.
“There are several reasons. First, because Sir Drake is a bastard. You know that. But he’s a very rich bastard. If I thwart him and cost him the windfall profit that he’s anticipating, he’ll find out and come after me. He’s a bad man to have for an enemy. If I’m going to take him on, and I may have to do it some day, it will be for a cause that I consider important. This isn’t it.
“Second, it wouldn’t be good for you. This Adele is only one of hundreds of young women who are pressed into slavery by bankruptcy
every year. Every one of them has a sad story. If you help one, then you’re going to have all the others coming after you. You’ll spend the rest of your life telling one sobbing girl after another that you can’t help her like you helped Adele.
“Third, Felice is unhappy with you. Eventually, she’ll find out that I helped you, and then she’d make my life a living hell. I love her dearly, but I don’t trust her to look at this fairly or objectively.
“Fourth, it wouldn’t be good for Adele or for your owner. She got herself into this mess because she’s the kind of girl that gets into messes. If you pull her out, she’s most likely to climb back in. She’s going to be short of money before long and it won’t be hard for her to find someone else who will give her a loan. If she’s beautiful enough for Drake to sell into slavery, then she’s going to be a target for every slaver in the city. Before you know it, you’ll be back here needing another loan for more than nine thousand, and soon after that, an even bigger one. Someone who borrows once will keep borrowing forever.
“There’s no upside to doing what you want to do and there’s plenty of downside. Being a pleasure slave isn’t so bad, is it? Well, maybe it was bad being owned by the professor, but he was a rare case. Most pleasure slaves are treated pretty well. Adele won’t find it as bad as she thinks once she’s sold and she sees what’s what. If it would make you feel better I can go to the auction and try to buy her for my own kennel. Break her in easy. You know that I don’t mistreat my slaves.”
Lord Snow had owned Irene for three months. He had kept her celibate from most of that time. He had starved her. His whiphand had forced her to eat out her cunt daily. And in the end, his whiphand had whipped Irene’s cunt raw. Being owned by her old friend from her pre-slavery days hadn’t been her worst experience, but it hadn’t been a walk in the park, either.
Irene didn’t remind Lord Snow about the bad things that had happened to her in his kennel, she said only, “I guess it’s likely that Adele will be purchased by someone as reasonable as you.”
Lord Snow heard the ambiguity in her answer and laughed.
Owners by the Dozen (Slave of the Aristocracy Book 4) Page 8