The Pleasure Palace

by Caroline Swift

  Her description left a soft smouldering in the elder girl’s eye but it came from watching Verena. Her reaction had been prompt and she would need satisfying very soon. Right there.

  Ashley shifted closer on the car’s floor of cushions until she was cradling the sultry beauty, her fingers busy from the brown bud of the anus to the pubic bone. To provoke Verena further, she mentioned casually: “They’re thinking of getting rid of the slave, either by public auction or through dear old Beaucastel after a refresher course there. And we all know what that means! In fact, she’ll be thrown on to the trash market and sold off for a song. In any case, she can’t be worth much after all that wear and tear. And she’s only just nineteen. Like you, darling.”

  Ashley had the stalwart clit-prong firmly between her fingers; it was hot and slimy, set for another journey into the galaxies. She had prepared Verena well but going down on the swollen, quivering gash was precluded. That, one did not do in a Hispano-Suiza under the nose of one’s owners, even if they were asleep.

  “You don’t think, do you, I’m meant to replace that girl?” Verena’s voice was little more than a waft of breath at Ashley’s ear. There was fear in it but it did not seem to impede the building up of a massively complex orgasm, combining pure yearning, wild love and cunt-lust for the milk-fleshed Englishwoman masturbating her under the soft furs, and once again, more coherently than ever - a frantic erotic desire to be put to the whip, abused, hurt and humiliated before this dream of a lover...

  “Don’t be absurd, honey. We’ll live together in the west wing of the Consenzia overlooking the canal. You’ll see, it’s all fabulous and magical - as long as you obey and reciprocate sexually, even in the torture chamber - and you’ll adore it, darling. You get a perfumed bath with oils and massage first.” She withdrew her white hand from Verena’s vagina, leaving it gaping and throbbing. “You know I became a trifle soft and needed tuning up, hence my fortnight at Beaucastel. It did me the world of good. Even Vasa agreed!”

  Verena nodded. She too felt toughened and more at ease confronted with a table loaded with instruments of sexual arousal, as Lalaniere used to term the things.

  Ashley went on gaily. “Of course, one’s always under strict surveillance, as slaves must be. But in the day it’s all fairly free as long as you’re fuori lavoro - I mean, out of session. But things change in the evening...Not every night but most. You’re taken into the salotto di preparazione - how’s my Italian? You’ve got to teach me more, I’m hopeless - and stripped naked. It’s there that all the paraphernalia’s kept: masks, beautiful hoods, body straps, leather corsets, cache-sexes with delicious sharp points all over. And gorgeous, heavy silk cloaks and high-heeled shoes, plenty of chains and weights, and so on... Are you with me, darling?”

  Verena lay inert, her eyes closed. Her vagina was clenching and releasing with lust.

  “Yes. Go on. I don’t think I can last much longer.”

  “Well, Sergio and his pretty, sexy wife are in charge, and following their orders, there you’re stripped naked, as I say, oilled and loaded with gold chains on all your rings. Often they want you to wear breasts thongs with silver spikes inside to hold you nice and tight. It’s simply too erotic for words. And you hear them, if you’re not too hooded up, talking about your body and deciding how to chain and flagellate you. I adore that moment, darling. Oh, and I forgot the cunt harnesses. You’ve got to know about them, treasure. Neat, thin, tight straps round your loins with barbs in them to splay you out wide so that they can work on you to their hearts’ content. You spend time after time...”

  The older woman then glanced up warily at her owners. They seemed fast asleep still and so she slipped her long, delicate fingers between the furs into Verena. She found the slit fluid and yet congested and crusted with earlier viscous discharge. The girl was only too ready and needed help.

  Skilfully and maliciously, the hand stirred and stimulated the quivering vent of soft mucus. The clit was stiff, supplicating...

  “Don’t, Ashley, or I’ll come.” The warning sounded hoarse, intense with a need more urgent than Ashley had ever sensed with her.

  “All right. Just because this is not quite the right time and place for you start screaming and thrashing around as you did every night back there.”

  Verena was both relieved and frustrated to be rid of the tempting hand.

  “Well, the guests gather in the torture chamber.” Ashley, all the same, refused to let the girl go. “And it’s quite a sight. They appear in sombre cloaks, split down the front - to leave their cocks and cunts free. They’re very appealing, at least to me. They always wear that rather frightening bautta, you know, that sickly white mask of the Carnevale under the three-cornered hat. It’s sinister, especially when they come up close to maul you and you’re stretched naked between pillars. That’s when Marisa unlocks my bunch of cunt-rings to free me for the entertainment. And entertainment it is!”

  Ashley drew her lover’s hand towards her to touch the cluster of metal protecting her major sexual orifice. Verena felt the rings and tiny padlock amid the superbly furled labia bordering the cleft. The sex was exquisitely wet, drenched with expectancy.

  “Then they draw lots as to whom should deal with you first. And the evening commences.” She paused, enjoying the fingers.

  Ashley caught her lover’s wide-eyed stare; Verena really was still a beginner.

  “Don’t worry your sweet head about anything just now. Our thoughtful Contessa has such a vast array of equipment; you’ll never believe it. Fabulous, delicate, beautiful instruments she has had designed for sex torture on sumptuous slaves like us, and rows of incredible whips, all specially made for her and the Conte. You know, everything from those whippy, supple canes for your rump to scourges with twenty thongs for the rest. Even if you’re blindfolded, you know them by their effect. You’ll love it!” She repeated her enthralled reassurance to which Verena nodded uncertainly. She was afraid of whips with twenty tails. Even Claudia didn’t go that far.

  “All the whips are hung in front of you by crimson cords and often the Contessa asks you to decide which you want. And after all that, she is very generous about orgasms - not like those bitches Vasa and Gerda who used to stop us, remember? on the brink of coming and went on whipping. No, Marisa plays the game. None of your three holes is ever neglected and you’ll go beserk when they ream your behind with a big, ribbed dildo and mangle your clit to orgasm. You travel up to the stars, darling, and dissolve, well whipped and tortured, into a galactic space of exaltation, dripping with sperm and cum...”

  Verena was herself about to spend in the midst of her lover’s lyrical effusions. She was erotically outdistanced and Ashley knew it, despite the girl’s quite adequate performances she had witnessed at the castle.

  “Just follow me, my sweet. You know, when I’m stretched and chained open and naked on the iron grid or over their trestles, I give them all I’ve got in return for what they give me. What more are qualified slaves like us for? Tell me. Isn’t it precisely that you yearn for, nude and breathless in the hands of your mistress or master?”

  Verena nodded, her eyes began to shine like black diamonds as she smiled. “Oh, how I love you!”

  The older woman kissed her lover, tonguing her far into the mouth, causing Verena to clench her vagina again, squelching it in anguish. Closing her eyes, the girl imagined Ashley’s clean, neat body spread naked, the ribs standing out, the belly concave, between Venetian lion-crested columns before a hooded, sweating valet with a black whip and a rampant penis, flagellating and flagellating...

  She opened up, offering her sopping sex to the woman she desired more than anything in the world. And to hell with the sleeping couple. Sergio or whatever his name was could flog her to death, for all she cared...

  “I’m coming, Ashley!” The voice was a hushed, choking capitulation. “Rub it hard. Harder! Push into me. Plea
se!”

  Ashley cupped her free hand over the gaping mouth, stifling the cry of orgasm.

  She came promptly with force under the powerful fingers, not once but several times in a rapid mounting succession of violent spasms, each more maniacal than the previous paroxysm. It lasted a long moment before, with a soft wail of abandon, she collapsed into the protection of Ashley’s furs, her cum frothing and spewing out, molten spume over the cakings of the previous discharges that had congealed on her during the journey. Ashley’s hand was sheathed in glittering liquids. She was delighted.

  “I don’t think it appropriate, girls, to make love in a car on a bitter winter’s day. Cover up and sleep. You need rest, both of you, and so do we.”

  Without opening her grey eyes, the Contessa spoke with her customary low-pitched voice that brought the two slaves back to earth, back to the floor boards of the Hispano.

  “Scusi, signora Contessa, Verena was just teaching me some Italian, Mistress.” Ashley’s rejoinder was almost pert. After all, an orgasm was an orgasm; neither more nor less.

  An elegantly stiletto heeled foot reached out and found its way through Ashley’s fur coat to grind down on a naked breast. The slave moaned and twisted as the thin point lanced into the soft flesh.

  “Well, do it more quietly, darlings, tonight we sleep in Monte Carlo and you can suck and drain each other dry at the hotel. You’re unconscionably naughty, Ashley. And you too, Verena. Now go to sleep.”

  The Contessa turned back into the warm splendour of rich upholstery while the car slid past Beziers, rippling on to the sets of the autoroute stretching out towards Provence.

  Verena was in quite another geography, hardly aware of the change of speed and different countryside; all she could see were magenta and rose clouds. And Ashley left her in them just as she left her hand, hidden from her owner’s eye, deep inside Verena.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Scarcely able to believe her good fortune and determined to justify it over the following week, Marina attended the changeover of slaves with a mixture of wistful nostalgia to watch her companions leaving and of excitement to see a fresh batch of males and females arriving. Seated next to whichever senior overseer presided over the intake and exodus of slaves, the apprentice took scrupulous note of the procedures; it was she who was given the task on the computer of recording each movement. Gradually, all her former colleagues departed with different coloured throat straps, and some deplorably emblazoned with stripes and welts from their final flagellations in Cell VII.

  The girls, particularly those newly bought, left with delight, a delight blended with a certain apprehension as to what awaited them. Whatever it was, it could hardly be as demanding as Beaucastel, yet they were like strung bows, hoping that their newfound ability to swallow ejaculated gouts and gouts of scalding sperm while under torture would satisfy their owners. Marie-Laure, Marja with her new Belgian owner, Birgit at last re-united with her adoring owners, Krystyna, Katia led away by her septum ring; all left in due course, glancing at Marina with puzzlement and envy.

  It was the new arrivals that intrigued Marina; they were to be her victims. Some of the girls were totally unprepared, she noticed, for the initial humiliations that lay in store; stripping naked, marking, manacling. On the other hand, a beautiful, chestnut-haired youngster named Elodie seemed to take pleasure in exhibiting her outsized, double-ringed breasts, one circle of metal hanging from the teat, the second, far larger, pierced deep within the base of the areolas; a girl who boasted her ability to undergo a hundred lashes, attached to the flogging pole by the rings alone. The girl seemed to thrill at her presence at Beaucastel, offering herself immediately to Restif, who hesitated, being in the presence of his seniors. During the induction and for reasons unknown to Marina, Vasa condemned the slut immediately, not to the Slave Hall, not to the cells, not to the Black Dungeon, but the small adjacent chamber where peculiarly cruel sex tortures were performed on over-demonstrative slaves. Elodie merely smiled at Marina, as Vasa introduced the one to the other from which Marina gathered that she would be called upon to deal with the newcomer. This pleased her as the girl had a fabulously attractive body for the whip and for far more sophisticated instruments. And Marina had to train her up.

  “This overseer will deal with you, 126, in accordance with your owner’s request.” Vasa seemed relieved, being grossly overworked, to be able to pass flesh on to someone else and Marina passed an unimaginably erotic hour in Cell III with the girl, aided by Lalaniere who showed her how to rake a female’s flesh with a hand- harrow. Then Marina scourged the slave senseless. It constituted her first real flogging and she revelled in it. Pierre had to congratulate her as, fully excited, he fucked Marina against the whipped body. Marina was stirred as much as her lover and came magnificently over and over again.

  Marina continued to be nurtured and educated by her lover not only in bed but in every one of the training cells. She made outstanding progress, assuming her routine cell duties with groups of slaves with diligence and truculent devotion to the cause. She seemed to require only summary instruction in handling female slaves and learnt rapidly how best to deal with the bodies and stout cocks of the males. Pierre was a mine of advice, explaining the intricacies of bondage, rump and breast flagellation and the insertion of dildos of dimensions Marina hardly believed would enter, though she herself had received the same in days gone by. To be at the delivery rather than the receiving end was different.

  Pierre Lalaniere was the first to realize her gifts, not only with the lash, cane or knotted scourge but in grasping the dichotomy - as he put it - and balance of pain and pleasure. The Master concurred, noting by means of his video, her inventiveness and a sexual imagination - as he remarked to his imperturbable, long-suffering secretary - which was more than could be claimed by some of the senior staff. The secretary nodded, handing him the latest faxes. Together the Master and she listened to the intern’s introductory remarks when, for the first time, Marina was put in charge of an induction. She spoke in French, translating now and then the essential phrases into English and German as she explained the three aims of their training. Firstly there was the acceptance and enduring of pain, secondly they would learn to provide pleasure, mostly under the whip for those who used their slave flesh and thirdly they would learn how to derive pleasure for themselves.

  She paused to caress the cleft of one of the more luscious females and to frig the straining cock of a youth standing next to the slave; her studded glove slid neatly along the glistening shaft, causing the youth to thrust out his pelvis in hope...

  “Bear these principles in mind while you are worked upon during your training here, never forgetting that your distinguished owners are paying generously towards your education. Those of you who do not have owners and are up for sale, should work doubly hard in order to attract potential buyers. We demand of you full co-operation whether you are being fucked, masturbated, sodomised, whipped, tortured or merely kept in bondage. I hope this is clear to all of you.”

  In the ensuing silence, the Master felt his trust in the woman, shared by Vasa and her three colleagues was well requited. Attentively, he listened as Marina went on to emphasise that complete nudity was demanded at all times unless owners had requested otherwise. And as she ran her twenty thonged whip through her fingers she explained how the Slave Hall was available for any sexual recreation the inmates desired but that any slovenliness, lack of enthusiasm or recalcitrance would be punished at the first instance by a hundred lashes, hung by the ankles. Any further offences would entail the Black Dungeon.

  There were no questions, the slaves were too petrified to utter a word.

  Only ten weeks after assuming her duties, Marina was appointed full overseer. Even Lalaniere was taken aback by the self-confidence of his protégée and now his official mistress.

  One event, however, had contributed towards Marina’s meteoric graduation.r />
  Towards the end of January, Gerda resigned, leaving her prestigious position vacant. It went without discussion that only Marina should fill it and she did so like a whip hand sliding neatly into a chain mail glove. Her future was secured.

  Chapter Nineteen

  As the days went by in Venice, where time trickles slowly through the hourglass of history, Casanova’s salacious eighteenth century being over, Verena lived in a sensuous dream of love and sex, despite the heat and the occasional obnoxious smells from the canals. Apart from servicing her owners in their own particular manner, she and Ashley shared all the delights available: outings with gay parasols aloft, expensive dresses and trips in the Palazzo’s gondola, guided by the obsequious, well-membered Gino.

  But there were unexpected surprises, wild evenings organized by the Contessa, invariably terminating with vicious scourgings. Like the Campanile San Marco and the bulging breast of the Salute, they were part of the scenery.

  Verena was at her best. Whether in the powerful motoscafo on the lagoon or visiting Torcello and other islands - she loved the quiet cemetery and the yews - or strolling round the city or in bed with Ashley and sometimes with Marisa, or even when she writhed and screamed her lungs out at the marble pillar next to the statue of Aphrodite coyly concealing a pristine pubis. Verena, sometimes to Ashley’s discontent, was admired and sought after, particularly by several male guests who candidly demanded her on account of the way she controlled her cunt and sphincter muscles so magnificently, contracting and clenching on the erection working within her and yet at the same time allowing her own climax to gather and explode to the delight of the Contessa and her guests. All found her lewd, depraved and shameless, insatiable in bed and always ready for the whip.

  On certain occasions the Contessa and her husband would wake her up in Ashley’s arms, take both down to one of the infamous camere speciale to excite them and themselves by handling the instruments and accessories, describing the use of each object in turn - the breast vices and throttling cords, the nipple and labia pincers and clit clamps, the tongs, flesh rakes, needles and screws, hoods, spiked breast cones and the vast array of whips, canes and studded paddles - with which paraphernalia both slaves were fully familiar already. But the perverse inspections by candlelight excited the group prodigiously, especially when the Contessa invited her slaves to select what they would like to have used on them to complete the evening.