The Pleasure Palace

by Caroline Swift

  Then things began to alter. It was late July. The Contessa maintained that the waning of Verena’s enthusiasm was the result of over-flogging and the unremitting demands made on her flesh by the Venetians with their energy and imagination. She began to dither when summoned by Sergio, the majordomo; during beatings she was seen to clench her buttock meat unorthodoxly; her response and performance became frankly disappointing to her owners. The slave became uncongenial, unentertaining.

  True, Ashley had reverted to her former habit of sleeping, if only occasionally, with Fortunato and, to add insult to jealousy, one night Sergio had forced Verena into the room to watch. Ashley lay on the soiled mattress, bound like an animal in heat, caked with semen and viciously bruised. Her beautiful body was shuddering with wild contentment as the fellow continued to work on her, using both hands - the whip in the right and masturbating himself luxuriously with the left. Verena was taken aback at the loathsome spectacle and protested. It earned her a dozen lashes from the majordomo there and then in front of the fornicating couple, Ashley in her frenzy applauding crazily: “Ahh.. yes ...yes, whip the bitch ...while I come ...Flog me too, Forty, my love ...nice and slowly...” Her moans mounted to meet the man’s gush of gism over her belly. The sight made Verena sick.

  Ashley’s promiscuity was not the only reason of the slave’s despondency. She had begun to tire of Venice. A strange pining for Paris nagged at her, for her cosy room at the Quai d’Anjou, the view over the Seine with a gay bateau-mouche sliding by, lit up at night casting chiaroscuro reflections on her ceiling. And she missed Gemma with her annoying habits. And even Mikhail and the odour of his cigars. He fucked so deliciously with that stout cock. It had made her proud of her orifices.

  She was homesick. So much so that she tried once, clandestinely since the telephone was strictly out of bounds for slaves to phone Mikhail or Claudia, preferably Mikhail, if only to sense the air of Paris, of her room and even of the Lycee Charlemagne. It proved to be an agonizing venture. Sergio’s wife, the pert, pretty Rosa caught her struggling with the international codes.

  She was taken to the lowest cellar, on orders from the Conte Franco to his majordomo, attached by her cunt rings to a hook in the damp wall, and beaten almost senseless over the buttocks. Such was the price of an abortive phone call. The blood welled out of the welts and the dear old doctor had to be sent for once again.

  Nevertheless, several days and several whippings later, Verena tried again to call, despite the risk and the same difficulties with the Italian phone system. She got through to Gemma who only slammed the phone down with a “Putana, vai al diavolo!”

  At one moment Verena thought of Marina and the gorgeous days a year ago in Paris and even in the sinister Slave Hall of Beaucastel where their sweating, naked bodies provided each other with such unbelievable orgasms through the dark winter nights. The sudden image of Marina made Verena screw up her eyes to dissolve it. All that was past, relegated beyond recall. She crossed out Marina once again from the record of experience. Ashley had been too fabulous to resist. That much was clear. But not so evident was why Ashley’s attraction had begun to pall. For a last fleeting second, Verena recalled how Marina had given up her very career to sleep with her. All that, she murmured, was so much water under the Bridge of Sighs...

  One night she was brought to the salotto and her final crisis matured. The Contessa ordered Ashley to flagellate her, Ashley, of all people! It hurt more than any beating she had ever undergone. That was the end. She sank into deeper lethargy, utterly miserable.

  Neither Marisa nor Franco was accustomed to failure with their slaves and they had had many. They encouraged Ashley to reason with the girl, to get to the root of the problem. Ashley’s attempts were fruitless. Worse still, their lovemaking was spiritless, without orgasms. The flame in Verena was quenched.

  The family consultation, which included Ashley, was duly convened one stifling August afternoon after siesta. Once the spremuta di limone and cakes had been served the group took up the discussion of Verena. She had cost a great deal at the outset and her disconsolation was worrying. Whatever, the Contessa claimed, might be Ashley’s shortcomings - and her recent offhand manner towards her lesbian lover might well be among them - she was immediately exonerated. For her adoring mistress, Ashley was pure sex and beyond disparagement.

  The Conte wondered if stringent measures should not be resorted to, using exceptional corporal punishment to invigorate Verena. Like the half-conscious slave below in the cellars, she could well be chained and hooded in an adjacent cell for flogging, raping and torture alongside the Kosovo whore every three hours or so and that for, say, two or three days and nights. “At ablution time, she can be hung and hosed down with her sister cellar slave and...”

  Gently, the Contessa interrupted him. “Franco, caro, you are incorrigible,” she sighed, promptly vetoing the suggestion. “The girl has probably been overused - you know, all those prolonged flagellations for the benefit of Commendatore Undino last week may be partly to blame. I’m sure it’s only one of her temporary moods, Franco, and we should not be too, brutal with her, however much she seems to enjoy it. What do you think, Ashley darling, you who know and love the whip?”

  The beautiful face was as radiant as ever, despite dark rings under the eyes, as she replied. “Oh, no, Mistress, that’s not the way. She’ll only ask for more to give herself the chance to spend when she feels the pleasure overcoming the pain. As I do.”

  “Yes, I know, darling. And you’re right.” The Contessa thought for a moment. “Perhaps she’s homesick or something.”

  Before the cocktails were brought out the Contessa had taken her decision.

  “She must be returned to Beaucastel. An excellent training house for slaves. They really produce excellent, docile flesh.”

  Sergio was called to fax the Master who, in his immediate reply, felt honoured and sympathetic. An early date of induction was fixed and special therapy was promised.

  “If that old bounder of a whore master can’t help her over her blues, no one can,” the Conte Franco remarked, stimulating his ice cubes. “Of course, if the worst comes to the worst, she can always be put up for sale on the slave market. After all, she’s Class A slave material, we should not forget.”

  With that decided, the gondola was ordered out for an evening’s moment of pleasure on the canals. Both Marisa and Franco adored being stared at from the bridges, publicly displaying their girls to plebeian gaze.

  Verena objected to outings but had to accompany them. Throughout the trip, she seemed preoccupied, trailing her hand in the water. Then Marisa told her.

  “Verena, darling, you’re going back to Beaucastel for a spell. You need a change and a rest. It will do you a world of good, my sweet, and cheer you up.”

  Verena’s heart missed a beat. She considered protesting but finally remained silent. A submissive does not argue with her owners. Moreover, Beaucastel was nearer to Paris, to home and to the lycee.

  Chapter Twenty

  Beaucastel looked almost inviting under the sun. When Verena was ushered in by the grinning Restif, still faithful to his calling, she saw the dogs again on the battlements. As if recognizing an habitué, they growled once and sought slumber again in the shade. The valet led her across the ominous drawbridge, under the portcullis, her gorgeous silks billowing in the warm wind as if she was floating aloft to her destiny but her heart was heavy, her sex tense with fear.

  At the entrance to the dreaded castle, Restif clipped a black strap round her throat and attached the customary chain to the forward ring.

  “Welcome back, 106.” His brusque comment made Verena glance at his huge cock she knew so well. It was swinging in repose which somehow was a bad omen.

  They entered the induction chamber. All was cool and menacing.

  The shock was immediate. Directly in front of her sat Marina, the black boots resting
on the desk, the heels armed with glittering spurs. Restif bowed to his superior, leaving the girl facing Marina. Verena’s womb contracted again with fear. She dutifully held out her passport, staring in incredulity. It was just not possible that she was faced with whom she saw. Marina! Oh, no!

  The leather lash Marina fondled over her naked lap was slender but thicker than the proffered document.

  The overseer took the passport and dropped it into the waste bin.

  “You don’t have to identify yourself, Verenka. I’ve been waiting for you. Oh, so, so long! And, strike me dead, there you are, in silks!” The blue eyes, those same uninhibited blue eyes, as at the lycee in class, glowed like acetylene. “I hear from Venice that you require some special attention. Well, who would have believed it? And you so sure of yourself with that whore of yours.”

  The girl saw the heavy whip jerk like an adder disturbed. Her loins conspired against her determination to appear self-composed, as she bowed her head of dark hair in a dread she thought she had long since discarded. Her tongue flicked over the parched lips, adding only an attractive sheen. Sweat broke out over the brow and trickled from the armpits while sex juice seeped from the labia below. Unaccountably, she felt her vagina muscles tighten with a new jolt of warning entangled in ripples of vague desire she could not control. Desire for what? For amnesty, for some word of pardon? Verena merely sensed her viscera churning within a body that no longer seemed to belong to her but to the magnificent, terrifying overseer before her. After the contractions in her loins, she was aware that her cunt had suddenly slackened as it did when she gave herself to a lover; it seemed to disown her. Yes, it belonged entirely to the other woman and the very same sluggish secretion Marina used to be able to draw out of her, crept down, soft, warm, syrupy. She knew her clitoris was swollen at the apex of her aching cleft but now the labia were throbbing and unfurling and probably Marina could see it all, just as she could observe the flush over the cheeks. Adrenaline pumped and laced through her entire body as she stared wide-eyed at the relaxed figure reclining before her.

  The woman was superb, completely changed; the hair had regrown since that fatal night in the Black Dungeon. But then Ashley had been waiting for her. What a shambles it had all become. And now what was going to happen to her? She felt like crying.

  Yet Verena noticed that Marina no longer wore flesh rings, only confirming the fact that the woman must now probably be an overseer with unfettered power to do almost what she wished to a naked slave. Her brain reeled in a vacuum of guilt and helplessness.

  As Marina pressed a stud on her interphone, the fair eyelashes flickered with a smile but not the smile of Marina in bed. It was malignant, vengeful.

  “Ah, Pierre darling.” Verena could scarcely believe her ears as Marina spoke into the receiver. Not Lalaniere, the overseer, the flogger! “She’s here, safe and sound. Will you send someone to collect the thing? Yes, Sandra will do fine and tell her to prepare that nice cell next the main cellar, the one with sawdust on the ground for the blood.”

  The swivel chair squeaked as she leaned back.

  “Right, 106, or rather 211/S as you are now - strip nipple-naked and let’s have it all hanging out.” Marina’s command was curt. “By the way, the ‘S’ is for Special, Verenka, and special it’s going to be. As Krystyna used to say, you’re going to wish you’d never been born but, then, as you yourself are bound to admit, you deserve it.”

  Verena watched the rays of sunshine splinter on the spurs of the gleaming boots poised on the desk between a bowl of roses and the computer. “You see, sweetheart,” Marina went on, “it’s I who am going to deal with you, which is only just, you will agree, I’m sure. So let’s not waste time, off with all that Venetian finery.”

  The trembling slave had little to discard. She obeyed scrupulously and immediately until she stood in all her unimpeachable, breathtaking beauty, adopting the customary Beaucastel posture of submission, legs parted, hands behind the neck. Marina had to stare at the sight. The breasts were heavier than before and had begun to sag; the vagina seemed to be already soused with the usual silky discharge which she had loved. No doubt the slit was still fetid and curdled with Princess Ashley’s saliva but Marina would whip all that out...

  The pink, stiff prong of the clitoris was the same, powerful and wet, pouting through the dark hairs Marina knew so intimately. No, Verena hadn’t changed. Still the responsive whore she had been and, to Marina’s delight, the insolent, heavy poundage of the rump bore no signs of scars or welts. She would put that right forthwith...

  Yet, as she let her eyes rove idly over the flat belly, stabbed with its perfect whorl that she had tongued so often to excite the girl, Marina sensed the odour of the restless, spicy sex. She closed her eyes, invaded with memories of Verena crying, laughing, and moaning as she lapped, frigged, caressed and sucked, night after night in the room at the Quai d’Anjou.

  With a conscious effort, the overseer collected herself. There was work to be done and her whip twitched, reminding her of her duties. She shook herself alert.

  “Gracious me, Verenka, you’ve grown quite flabby! And there was I thinking they would keep you slim with the whip. Too much pasta asciutta, I presume, you look a sight! You need a taste of dear old Beaucastel, don’t you, whore that you are?”

  The girl wiped away a tear. She was being humiliated before the real humiliation to come. How many lashes was she going to receive? Fifty? A hundred? More? She felt sick, her cleft awash with thick seepage. She dared not speak to beg for mercy, forgiveness. Instead, she stared at the menace of the supple thing Marina was fondling and at the honed spikes adorning the gauntlets. A rash of gooseflesh pimpled her body just as it had when Claudia came for them to lead them to the library columns. It was the same fear.

  “I’m sure you recall the Quai d’Anjou, 211/S.” Marina seemed to read her thoughts.

  “Yes, mistress.” The reply was no more than a whisper. Why didn’t the bitch get on with the flogging? Verena felt the overseer was savouring the agony, as remorse built up.

  “And the Slave Hall here where we used to orgasm to high heaven?”

  “Yes, mistress.”

  “And the torture chambers when we hung together, back to back?”

  “Yes, mistress.”

  “Well, 211/S, you absconded,” - Verena hardly understood - “and gave yourself to a pretentious English whore, didn’t you? You really missed your vocation, sweetheart. You’re no sex slave. You’re a common slut of a whore- bitch.”

  The nude felt the hostility emerge like a famished beast as Marina went on. “Your owners have asked us to deal with you and you’ve been entrusted to me. Just a matter of settling an old score.”

  Verena’s womb tensed: it seemed to be clogged up with terror and a strange excitement, enhanced by the sudden entry of a pretty servant, almost naked but for her service straps and calf-high boots. The girl was a stranger to Verena who had expected Gabrielle. But no doubt this one was just as expert in the lethal underworld of indescribable pain, hissing whips, the thud and cut of the leathers welting the sweating flesh with blinding flashes shattering the brain. Just as expert in leading her victim slowly and inevitably up the slope towards the wild orgasm that would erupt and heave the submissive body into that incandescent void where pain and euphoria could coalesce at last.

  The servant smiled in anticipation. Sandra loved being summoned by her adored overseer to help in a session of sex torture.

  “Take this nauseating bitch straight down. No cleansing - just as she is, please. Shave the head and sex. Oil the carcass well, shackle its ankles and hang it for me, nicely open.”

  Verena bit into her nether lip, watching the girl grin like a vampire athirst. Yet curiously a thrill rippled through her entrails, stimulated by the girl’s savage beauty; the tits were large, the pelvis broad, the skin dark and tawny like her own. The servant’
s eyes seemed to return her gaze as she sought the clitoris ring in the wet pubis to attach the chain. The flaccid hood had retracted to reveal the unsheathed erection. Sandra smiled.

  “She’s in full sail down here, mistress!” The lithe fingers flicked at the throbbing prong.

  “Let’s have less of your impertinence, Sandra, unless you want to take her place. Get the dirty slut out of my sight and down to where it belongs. If the blubber of her fat cunt attracts you, you can have a taste of it later. Now, get moving, girl!”

  Clipping two short lengths of chain to the inner labial rings, Sandra opened up the sex and passed the links over the thigh to join them behind over the mass of buttock flesh. Verena gasped as the chain hauled the tender cowl outwards. She grappled with her still free hands to alleviate the tension that almost tore the metal out of the umber skin. Not even Vasa or Claudia in one of her crazed, erotic moments had jerked that hard.

  As the slave staggered after the girl through the Gothic archway, Marina coiled up her flesh scourge in her spiked, suede gauntlets, switched off her computer and followed. Her high heels echoed in the vacuity of the vaulted passage and spiral of steps.

  During the descent, the group passed by the body of a naked male slave virtually suspended by the penis to a ring in the rough wall, the distended testicles carrying a hunk of iron. It was as if the spectacle had been organized for Verena’s benefit, to scare and excite her in preparation for what was awaiting her. Though accustomed to such sights and moans, Verena felt her last morsel of courage crumble. Then the solid oak door slammed behind her. Marina had disappeared, leaving the two girls together.