by Sebastian Ex
Moments pass, and Penny’s sobs grow softer.
There’s a knock on the door, and Penny manages to manoeuver so she’s sitting with her back against the raised section of the bed.
Her face is horrendously bruised and battered, but even with all the tears and stress etched so deeply, she’s still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on. And now, as she’s lying on the bed, broken and exposed, I see all her strength and power.
“Come in,” I say as I continue to watch Penny’s features gain stability as she pulls herself together.
The door opens and Doctor Chambers enters. She comes into the room with a tense look on her face. “How are you today, Penny?” she asks as she picks up Penny’s chart and peruses the information recorded there.
“Better than yesterday, not as good as tomorrow,” Penny answers with a smile.
“Good, good, good.” She lowers the glasses perched on her head and flicks to the start of the charts. “You’ll be in here for another week, and then if all’s good, I’ll be discharging you. Your pelvis suffered what’s commonly known as an ‘open book’ injury. The left and right of the pelvis separated, the front opening more than the rear. Because of this, and the fact the pelvis was fractured, it’ll take a while longer to repair.”
“I know,” Penny says almost in a whisper.
“You have to know the effects of the car accident, but more specifically, the operation on your pelvis.”
“Okay,” both Penny and I answer in unison.
“The healing process can take up to a year.”
“The nurses told me, but they said because I’m healthy and slim, it may be quicker than that.”
“Yes, that’s correct. However, I consulted with a friend of mine who’s an OBGYN and we’re both in concurrence there’ll be substantial scar tissue in your uterus, which makes it very unlikely you’ll ever be able to conceive and carry a child.”
My eyes go straight to Penny. Her face whitens and her breath hitches as her hand goes directly to her heart.
“I can’t ever have kids?” she whispers as her tears start to freely fall again.
“That’s right,” the doctor says. No messing around, just a straight answer.
“Ever?” Penny asks through heavy sobbing.
“It’s very unlikely. I wish I had better news.”
Penny moves and sobs into my shirt, drenching me with her tears. But at this stage, I don’t care anymore. She’s been given devastating news, and I can only imagine what she’s feeling. The door to the hospital room quietly closes and I know the doctor’s left.
“I’m sorry, Brandon. I knew, I just knew he was bad news.”
What? “Who’s bad news?” I continue to stroke her hair.
“Lucifer. I should’ve known.”
“You’ve lost me, what the hell’s going on?”
“Lucifer… he… he…” She cries even harder.
Who the fuck is this Lucifer? And what the hell did he do to her? I’ll fucking destroy him.
“He’s the guy from the club. He… he…” She’s hysterical now, and she can’t finish saying whatever she’s trying to say.
“He what, Penny?” I ask gently, mindful of Penny’s condition. I count to ten in my head, calming myself before I lose it. He fucking what?
“It was because of him I had the accident, and I lost the baby because of the accident.”
What. The. Fuck? “What did he do?” My voice lowers; goosebumps cover my entire body. The hair on my neck stands, and I feel my jaw clench tightly together.
“He hit me, and he beat me, to the point that when I left his house I wasn’t feeling well. I thought I’d be able to get home, but…” She sobs as she clutches my shirt.
“Keep going. I need to know what happened.” I can’t help her if I don’t know what’s happened. And I can’t hurt him if I don’t know who he is.
“I blacked out, Brandon. I knew it was coming, but I couldn’t hold on, and I passed out at the wheel.”
My knee jerks. My forearms strain. And the only color I see is red. Blood red.
“It’s okay,” I say in the calmest voice I can muster.
“It’s not. I went looking for something more, and all I got was a try-hard who sold himself as a sadomasochist. But he’s not, he’s an abuser.”
There’s a huge difference between the two. Lately, there’s been an increase in wannabe Doms, claiming to be one thing, with absolutely no research or training. Their main purpose is self-satisfaction and power over women. And unfortunately, women are falling for it, especially if the abusers know enough to fool a submissive.
But this stops now.
ELEVEN
“Nathan,” I say as he answers the phone.
“Yeah, what do you need?”
“Can you find out what you can about the Velvet Room? Whatever information you can. The guy Penny was with beat her and she blacked out, which is how she got into the accident. If you can get me some information on the owner, I’ll try to talk to him and find out who this guy she was seeing is. Maybe the owner knows him, or maybe he’s a regular,” I say as I pace the hallway outside Penny’s room.
“Sure, it’ll take me a few days, but I’ll see what I can get.”
“Thank you, brother.”
“How’s she doing?”
“When she had the surgery last week, she was in a lot of pain, but that’s easing a bit now. However, the doctor came in a few days ago and delivered some really fucked-up news.”
“What?”
“Doc said no way is she going to have kids.”
“No way! As in absolutely?” he asks.
“She said she has a low chance¸ actually I think her words were ‘an incredibly low chance of ever being able to conceive and carry a child.’ And since those words left the doc’s mouth, Penny’s just gone backward.”
“Fuck, man. How do you feel about it?”
“Kids weren’t anything I was overly keen on, but if there’s anyone I’d want to have them with, it would be Penny.”
“Seriously fucked-up situation, man. Look, I’ll ask some questions and get the information you need.”
“Thanks. I’m going to call in reinforcements for Penny. Can you send Bianca over tomorrow? I’ll get Matthew to send Ella. Penny needs those two, especially now.”
“Yeah, I’ll put it in her schedule for tomorrow.” Nathan’s girl, Bianca is his slave. Nathan’s not like Matthew and I. Well he is, but he’s a Master and not a Dominant.
Nathan’s told Matthew and me some horrific things about Bianca’s traumatic childhood and why she now craves the stability and routine of a Master/slave relationship, so he stepped up, researched what it took, was trained and is now her Master.
“Thanks. Keep in touch about what you find.”
We hang up and I keep pacing the hospital hallway. Not because I don’t want to go back into Penny’s room, but because I need to figure out what the hell I can do to get her past this major fucking blockade.
I dial Matthew’s number.
“Hey, how’s Penny today?”
“Not great, so I’m thinking, can Ella come over here tomorrow? Bianca’s coming, and if I can get the three of them here, I’m going to arrange for a hairdresser to come in and do their hair. And I’m going to get them some cakes and those dainty little pissy finger sandwiches women like.”
“Fucking cake?”
“Yeah, you know all that crap women like. Chocolate cake, shit like that.”
“You know, you’re so screwed when it comes to Penny.”
I run a hand through my hair as I stop pacing. He’s right, I’m totally fucking screwed. “Shut up, butthead,” I say.
Matthew chuckles, because we know either of us would do anything for our girls. “What time?”
“I’ll message you when I book the hairdresser and the food people.”
“How the hell do you think you’ll be able to get food inside the hospital?”
“What they don’
t know won’t hurt them.”
“Seriously, brother, you better do something about that before your cock falls off.” He’s ribbing me about the lengths I’m going to for my girl. Fucker.
I hang up, damn well not wanting to hear any more of his shit, and get to work calling in a few favors.
My girl feels like shit, her whole world has been turned on its axis. And although I can’t give her a baby, I can sure as hell help her cope with losing one.
TWELVE
Penny
Brandon’s been elusive.
He hasn’t left my side for one moment since I’ve been in here and yesterday he was taking and making calls outside for a few hours.
Today I feel worse than I did yesterday. I lie in this God-forsaken uncomfortable bed and stare out the window. It’s been raining, not unusual for this time of the year. I watch the water cling to the glass and roll down. The sky outside is dark, filled with gray clouds and reflecting my pain.
Exactly how I feel.
How the hell did I get into this damned situation?
I grew up in a family filled with love, acceptance, and discipline. There was no abuse, no drugs or alcohol, or even extreme religion. We were a middle-class family, which consisted of loving parents and me, their only daughter. There was nothing I wanted that I didn’t get.
Dad loved me, and so did Mom, but both passed away within a year of each other, Dad when I was nineteen and Mom when I was twenty.
I’m convinced Mom died from a broken heart, although the doctors said it was a heart attack.
I knew I was different when I was almost thirteen. Not different as in physically, but different as in mentally. I stole a cigarette from my dad’s packet and smoked it right down in the corner of the backyard, where I thought no one could see. I wanted to be cool, and I thought smoking was it because I saw how some of the older girls at school would sneak out of the schoolyard to go and have a smoke. I wanted to be cool like them.
My body was going through changes, and Mom had to talk to me about periods when I first bled. I screamed the house down, thinking I was dying because I was bleeding out of my vagina. Mom told me about them, and explained what would happen, but the first time I got one there was so much blood I thought every drop had been drained out of me.
And I had started to develop breasts, enough to wear one of those training bras girls wear when they’re young. And the boys – suddenly I was seeing them and they weren’t all horrible. Some of them were even cute.
I desperately wanted to be cool and grown up, so I stole a smoke and went to smoke it. The whole time I felt like an adult. Like I was invincible and I knew everything.
Of course that was the first and last time I ever touched a cigarette.
Mom must’ve seen me from the kitchen window, and when I came inside the house I thought I had her fooled.
Mom told Dad, and Dad got angry. He grounded me and did something he’d not done in a long time. He put me over his knee and smacked my bottom, more than once. And although it hurt, it did something else to me too. I didn’t know what it was. I couldn’t quite figure it out. All I knew was I enjoyed what had happened. I didn’t have the maturity to know what it meant, or what exactly it made me feel.
It took me years to discover who I was and what I wanted.
And many failed relationships.
When I was seventeen, I had sex for the first time with a boy from the football team. Cliché? Yes, in every sense of the word.
He was sweet, and careful and came within three seconds of having his cock inside me. A boy, an inexperienced boy. We lasted as a couple for about six months, until I finally found the courage to ask him to pull my hair.
He was horrified, told me I was sick and he wasn’t interested in doing anything that could inflict pain on me. The sheer thought of pain excited me. And the next time we had sex, I got off on the images running wild through my head. Him lacing his fingers in my hair and tugging at it until the pain turned into pleasure.
We broke up that night, and the next weekend I had my first one-night stand.
The guy was rough with me. I didn’t need to ask, he simply took. He bent me over the side of the bed, spanked me with his hand until it hurt him, then he picked up a paperback book and spanked me with that. I came so hard, before he even fucked me.
When he fucked me, he owned me. He bit me, pulled my hair, and spanked my pussy and breasts. And I loved every single moment. At one point, we were having sex doggy-style when he pulled out, spanked my already red and tender ass with his hand before plunging his cock back into me and pulling my hair so hard I thought he ripped some out. That night was the first time I experienced what’s known as subspace. The pain awakened every cell, every drop of blood and every pore in my body.
I drifted off and stayed under a cloud of deliciousness. My body was spent as my mind was completely shredded by the intoxicating need to have that feeling again and again.
I don’t remember drifting off to sleep that night. Just that I woke in a hotel room completely and utterly screwed. My body ached, and I had the biggest smile on my face. I did remember him calling me his “dirty little slut”, and he also asked me to “submit” by kneeling by his feet. I had no idea what that meant. But I did it and it felt weirdly right.
When I left the hotel, I went home, jumped on the internet and typed “submission” into the search engine. What I got was a lot of shit, but once I sifted through it, I began to find an on-line community about BDSM. There was a whole other lifestyle out there and I had no idea about it.
I did the one thing I could do. I researched it and found out what I could. I became a submissive to my first Dom when I nineteen. We worked well together, however he didn’t take the pain to the level I needed. And much like what I did to Brandon, I left him when I was twenty-one.
I played casually for the next two years, until I found a true sadomasochist…or so I thought.
The first few sessions with him had me chasing subspace. However, it all quickly changed early on when I called my safeword, and he disregarded it. It was then I realized he wasn’t a sadomasochist, he was a sadist. The pain he gave me was good, but the pain I’m sure he would’ve given me later on scared me. And so I left. Not because I was scared of the pain, but I was frightened he’d disregard my safeword again if it got too much for me, much like he’d already done.
I played some more, just holding onto the hope of finding a sadomasochist who could give me what I wanted.
When I met Brandon, I knew he was a Dom. His light brown hair was spiked up on end, his brown eyes just looked through me. From the first time his tall frame stood protectively over me, he made me feel safe. Brandon’s a gentleman first. He and Matthew are both so similar in the way they treat Ella and myself. I fell in love with Brandon even though he couldn’t give me what I needed most. I thought what he could give me would be enough. I thought the spankings he gave me, the cane, the paddle, and the belt would keep the hunger fed. But I needed more. And I left him to find it.
That’s when I went on-line and met Lucifer.
He was charming, knew what he was talking about, and seemed to understand my deep need for pain. The first time we played was at his house, and it was three nights after I left Brandon. I needed a release. He was everything I needed.
I safeworded the first night and he immediately stopped all play. Because of that, I thought he was the real deal. Now I know better.
In the days that followed, he wanted to try asphyxiation. I lost consciousness and when I came to he was holding me and telling me he was sorry. The bruises on my neck didn’t seem right, but I forgave him because I thought he wouldn’t do anything to hurt me.
Two days later, I was kneeling beside him as he ate and he dropped his fork on the ground beside me. As I looked up to give it to him, his elbow came down and hit my eye. He apologized saying it was an accident. And again, I believed him. That night at play, we were playing out a rape fantasy when he picked me up and threw me
against the whipping bench in his dungeon. The way I landed I knew I hurt my ribs because I was in complete agony. He called off the scene and cared for me, the way a Dom should do.
The morning of my accident, he summoned me to his dungeon. He strapped me onto his St. Andrew’s cross, and began to play with me. My ribcage still hurt, and I told Lucifer I wasn’t completely comfortable on the cross.
“Let me check your restraints, slut,” he said as he walked over to the cross.
But instead of checking them, he tightened them. “Sir?” I questioned, feeling my heart rate pick up.
“My slut will take what I give her,” he said and began to cane me. No warm-up spanking with his hand, or a flogger. He’d done that to me at the club we’d been at when I saw Brandon, and I loved it. So I thought that’s what he was doing now, too.
But it turned out, he was angry at me. For what, he never said. I was restricted to the cross, and I couldn’t move. He shoved a cloth in my mouth so I couldn’t safeword, and he proceeded to beat me.
The abuse lasted for I don’t know how long. He finally let me down from the cross, helped me dress and sent me home.
I wasn’t sure what happened. I wasn’t able to think clearly or concentrate. I simply got in my car and left.
The next thing I remember was a dark curtain of black slowly falling over me. And then Nathan asking me if I remember anything.
There’s a knock on my door, and it completely snaps me out of the heaviness enveloping me.
“Come in,” I say, as I wipe away the tears clinging to my cheeks.
“There’s our girl,” Ella says as she comes in with Bianca following her. Both the girls come and sit on my bed and hug me. The three of us stay wrapped in our embrace for a long time. I can’t help but cry.
When I left Brandon, both the girls called and I ignored them because it hurt too much to talk to them, and I didn’t want to tell them about Lucifer. Because even though he kept apologizing, there was still the niggling sensation that something was wrong. And I was humiliated I’d left a good man to pursue a need that turned out to be venomous. A dangerous desire.
“How are you feeling?” Ella asks as she kisses my cheek and strokes my hair.