by Maren Smith
Five thousand. His heart wasn't just pounding now, it was strangling inside his chest. He fought for calm, to look as if he had all the money in the world and no reservations about spending every penny of it here tonight. But the other Dom, despite letting his irritation show, wasn't backing down, and Alan was almost at his limit.
Fifty-two hundred. He was going to lose her. The edge of the auction paddle's handle cut into the soft flesh of his palm as the cold realization began to snake through him.
Fifty-four. That was it. That was all he had. He felt it, a real and physical pain, when the other man's hand shot up and he took the bidding out of Alan's reach. He'd just lost. Tavy was going to spend the next few days with someone else.
Marshall looked to Alan expectantly. "Five thousand five hundred, do I hear six hundred?"
"Put your hand up," Jackson told him.
Alan didn't move. He couldn't make himself look at Marshall, because looking at him would mean seeing her… and right now, just knowing he couldn't have her felt like a knife to the gut. "I can't." It made him sick to his stomach to admit that.
Shifting on his chair, Jackson unfolded his thick arms and leaned closer, saying for his ears only, "Do you want her? Because if you do, put your paddle in the air. I've got your back."
"Going once…" Marshall warned.
After staring at Jackson for just long enough to assure himself the man was serious, Alan shot his paddle high into the air.
"Six hundred." Marshall pointed back at him. "We have five thousand six hundred, do I hear seven?"
The other Dom accepted the bid.
"Enough of this pussy-footing around," Jackson muttered. "Tell them, six thousand five."
Alan snapped him a startled look, but his voice, when he called that offer out, was as strong and in control as any he'd ever used. "Six thousand, five hundred."
"Choke on that, cocksucker," Jackson chuckled, meeting the other Dom's irritated glare with a very toothy smile.
"We're at six thousand five hundred, do I hear six hundred?" Marshall drawled, patting Tavy's hip again.
She was still bent over, still gripping her ankles with her round bottom offered high. She was also still crying, sucking broken breaths through her open mouth in an effort to keep her body from shaking and her sobs from being heard.
"We have sixty-six hundred," Marshall said, pointing to the other Dom.
"Do seven grand," Jackson said.
"Seven thousand," Alan called loudly. There was no way Tavy could feel the caress of his gaze from here, but as soon as she was off that stage he was going to discover the reason for those tears, and she'd feel the comfort of his hand.
"Now he's squirming." That came from Sam, unexpectedly sliding into Jackson's vacated seat directly behind Alan. Alan felt the brush against his shoulders when Sam leaned his folded arms across the back of his chair, keeping his voice low so no one but Jackson and Alan could hear. "He looks pissed. I'll bet he doesn't go much higher."
"We have seven thousand one hundred," Marshall said, when the other Dom stuck his paddle in the air. But Sam was right. He was slowing down, punctuating each new bid with longer pauses and irritated jerks of his hand.
"Seven-five," Jackson encouraged, one finger idly stroking back and forth across his bottom lip.
"You're helping him?" Sam asked, and Jackson nodded once as Alan hiked the bid to the next five hundred mark.
Across the room, the other bidder shifted angrily in his chair, then slapped his paddle up into the air.
"Do eight," Sam chuckled, thoroughly enjoying the show of frustration. It must have tickled his sadist's bone.
"Is this your money or mine?" Jackson asked.
"I'll throw into the kitty."
"Eight thousand," Alan called out, loud and strong.
Erupting out of his chair, the other bidder threw his paddle on the floor and stalked out of the room.
"Eight thousand," Marshall said, a faint smile curving his lips. "Going once… twice… bidder number?"
Alan checked his paddle. "One forty-eight."
"Come take command of your submissive, One Forty-Eight."
Already out of his chair, Alan didn't need to be told twice. He headed down the main aisle, turning left once he reached the stage. He knew Jackson and Sam were following him, already digging their wallets out of their pockets, but his gaze remained locked on Tavy as she rose from her position. Marshall patted her bottom, gesturing for her to exit to the left as well.
Alan kept a steady pace—her, walking in those impossibly high fuck-me heels on the elevated stage; him, at floor level a good two feet below her.
"Tavy," he called to her, but she pretended not to hear him and kept walking.
Reaching out his hand, Alan tried to touch her leg, but she shied, side-stepping away from his hand.
This time when he called to her, he let a touch of authority color his tone. "Tavy."
Having reached the three short steps that led off the stage and into the sectioned-off back area, where payment would be made and purchases would met their purchasers for the first time face-to-face, she paused.
There was no guard rail, and her heels were incredibly high. Alan offered her a steady hand. "Look at me," he said, when she simply stood there and made no move to accept his help. "Tavy?"
"My name is O," she said, that single initial so softly spoken that if he hadn't seen her lips move, he'd have thought he'd imagined it. Even more faintly, she shook her head once. "I wish you hadn't bought me."
She took each of the three steps slowly and carefully, but she never touched his hand, and she never looked at him. Not once.
Chapter 3
The relief of at least recognizing the man who had bought her didn't last beyond the time it took her to reach the bottom of the stage steps. Master Grimsley, (the Castle's head butler in charge of all the servants, both guests and staff) was already waiting for her, stiff and formal in his black and white uniform. He snapped his fingers and pointed his switch to one of several chairs lined up beside a row of temporary cubicles, each forming a private little area where newly-bought submissives could acquaint themselves with the Dominants who now owned them. She had made it through the auction. Now came the hard part—everything she would be asked to do between now and Friday.
Selecting a chair slightly away from the rest, Tavy placed her hands on her knees and did her best to avoid looking at the man who had bought her. She didn't know him, although she did suspect he worked here. She'd bumped into him way too many times over the last few years for him to just be another guest. She remembered talking to him a time or two as well—or at least as much as she talked to anyone here. Had he ever told her his name? She had a feeling he had… something that began with an 'A'. Adam or Andrew… no, that didn't seem right. Not that it mattered. She was going to find out who he was soon enough.
Two other men trailed A-Whoever—Aden? Aaron? Hell, it could be Aardvark for all she knew; she was so bad with names—from around the red velvet curtain that blocked her view of the next girl coming out onto the stage.
"Please welcome Silver…" Master Marshall's voice rang out over the microphone speakers, but when it sank in that the two men weren't just following A-Whoever, but were actually with him, Tavy stopped paying attention to the announcement.
It was a threesome. She had just been bought by three different men; the devil she sort of knew, another with brown hair so long his ponytail hung down past his shoulders, and a third who looked like he ate professional bodybuilders for breakfast and wrestled gorillas every day before lunch. A single knot of panic wound its way inside her chest, choking her… until she realized that her purchase might have been a joint effort, but only one of those men intended to enjoy the benefits. Muscles and Ponytail cracked a couple of jokes with the unsmiling Devil, Ponytail slapping him good-naturedly on the shoulder while Muscles tossed her a casual wave, and then they were gone, heading back out into the auction audience.
Lingering
at the payment table, apparently oblivious to what the Castle Master seated there was telling him, A-Whoever stared straight back at her. He was dark-haired and dark-eyed, his olive skin darker than most Caucasians, with distinctly exotic facial characteristics, although she couldn't quite place the nationality. He was calm, unsmiling in a contemplative way. Hard to read.
Wiping her suddenly sweaty palms on her knees, Tavy was first to look away. His eyes stayed on her. She could feel them boring into her with drill-like precision, the sensation only growing more unbearable the longer she sat there, stubbornly refusing to meet his eyes again.
For reasons she couldn't quite put her finger on, she didn't want to play with him.
Play… what an awful word to use in conjunction with what she was about to do. She closed her eyes, willing the knots in her tightening stomach to ease, and then discreetly wiped away the last of the wetness from her cheeks. She had no idea if she'd messed up her make-up. It probably didn't matter. Some guys liked the teary, 'freshly choked on a big cock' look. She rubbed her hands on her knees again. Four days. That was all she had to do this for, and she could do anything for four days.
Taking a manila file from the Master at the desk, her dark-eyed devil found a chair five seats away, allowing Tavy the distance she had tried for, while presumably going over her likes, dislikes, and the hard limits she had spelled out on the application Marshall had given her to fill out that morning. Except it soon became obvious that he wasn't reading her forms at all. He was still watching her. She quickly averted her eyes again, but he must have mistaken her aversion to any kind of intimacy with him for a come-hither invitation. Snapping his folder shut, he stood up and came to her.
She clasped her knees, willing her hands to stop trembling. The closer he drew, the more intensely intimate that open receiving area began to feel, which was ridiculous, since they were anything but alone. Only one previously auctioned submissive remained—a dark-haired woman in kitty ears and a butt-plug tail knelt at the feet of her new owner, her head resting on his knee while he idly stroked her ears and read through her file. Another, the one Master Marshall had introduced as Silver, was just coming off the stage. She looked shell-shocked, a little exhilarated and a lot apprehensive. The moment she sat down, her purchasers—twin Masters with the same hungry eagerness in their eyes and their strides—stalked off the main auction floor to claim her.
"Why don't you like mouth-to-mouth kissing?"
Tavy jumped when a chair thunked down directly in front of her, and the dark-haired, dark-eyed devil she now belonged to—for four days, only four, she could do anything for four days—sat down. They were so close now, their knees were touching. "What?'
"Kissing," he repeated, opening the folder in his lap. He turned the file around and pointed to a line on the anonymous section of her application that included her likes and dislikes. "It's not a hard limit, but you have it listed under activities you don't enjoy. I was just wondering why. Have you never enjoyed kissing a man?"
Tavy's instinct was to withdraw, but with her chair backed up against the partition wall, there was no way for her to retreat without first crawling over the top of him. "Of course I have."
"And you disliked it so much you decided never to repeat the experience?"
A tiny blossom of heat sparked deep down inside her, unfurling like an early morning flower in the very pit of her belly. She blamed his eyes. He was looking into her way too deeply, as if he were trying to see into all the darkest shadows of her soul.
She shivered, quickly turning her face away. It was silly to think him even capable of that. He was just a man, just another Top with illusions of grandeur, thinking himself capable of rocking her world. "Mouths are filthy. And in a place like this, you never know where they've been."
She jumped all over again when the tip of his finger touched her chin, turning her back to face him. She had to stop doing that. This wasn't her first visit to the Castle. She was no newbie to what she'd be subjected to, and she didn't want him to think she was. But if he noticed how nervous she was, he didn't comment on it. He only said, "Since I do intend to kiss you, thoroughly and often, where do you think my mouth has been?"
Her gaze was pulled to his lips. Her breathing quickened and she tried again to look away. "I—we don't need to talk about this."
He cocked a dark eyebrow and, ever so slightly, tipped his head to one side. The flower in her stomach was now swarming with bees, all of them humming nervously inside her. In all her visits here, Tavy had submitted to the attentions of many different men. Not one of them had ever questioned her about her rules before—aside from Master Marshall, who was much more subtle with his questions, and who still persisted in asking a few, but even he grudgingly accepted her tight-lipped refusal to comply. Her visits here each month were to fulfill a very specific need: the need for absolution, the kind only pain could give. She didn't come to get to know these people, and she certainly didn't want them to get to know her. Eventually, everyone played by her rules… rather than risk her not playing at all. Not one of those men, some of them now little more than faceless shadows in her memory, had ever looked at her like this.
His stare was unblinking, unwavering. Cold.
"I beg your pardon?" he said, the softness of his tone at complete odds with the chill of his expression. Looks like that made it hard for her to breathe.
Tavy fought to keep the tremble growing up inside her from coming out in her voice. "I don't want—"
Abandoning her file, he reached for her. Fight or run—the instinct for both shot through her—but already his fingers were locked upon the fragile velvet of her auction-appointed collar. In one smooth motion, he stood, shoving his chair back even as he dragged her off hers and dropped her to her knees on the floor.
"If you thought you had a choice as to which questions you were or weren't going to answer, I apologize for the misunderstanding. Let's try this again, shall we?" His grip on her collar absolute, he forced her all the way down until she had to turn her head to keep from bumping her nose against the stone floor. Her cheek pressed to it instead, leaving her bottom sticking straight up in the air behind her. It was a familiar position; one she'd been both spanked and fucked in many times, but the dark-eyed devil did neither. Letting go of her collar, he returned to his seat, repositioned one booted foot to rest upon the back of her neck, and picked up her file again. "My name is Alan," he said, opening back up to the page he'd left on. "You may address me as Master when you are being good, or as Sir when, like now, you are not. Is that understood?"
Tavy stared across the room, seeing nothing but an endless expanse of bare gray stone, hardly noticing as the twin Masters led their shell-shocked submissive from the room and Master Grimsley brought another down off the auction block to be claimed by her Top for the week. She swallowed hard, the coolness of the stone beneath her cheek, palms and knees sinking into her, while the wild hum of all those bees grew into a stinging, prickling hive. "Yes, Sir."
"We're going to play a game. I will say a word, and you will answer with the first thing that pops into your head."
"Yes, Sir." Across the small waiting area, the kitten kneeling at her Master's feet rose when he did. She broke into a bouncy happy dance when he leashed her and they both left smiling, something Tavy couldn't bring herself to comprehend. She'd never understood it—all the smiles she saw from both Dominants and submissives. She had never smiled here. Not once.
Right now, Master Alan wasn't smiling either. "Ready?" he asked.
She closed her eyes. "Yes, Sir."
"Auction," he began.
She had no idea what to say to that. She almost shrugged. "Charity."
"Submission."
That heat of embarrassment in her stomach grew gnawing teeth. "Humiliation."
"Interesting," he said, his head cocking slightly.
"Not really," she replied, though she knew that hadn't been part of the game and she wasn't expected to provide an answer.
&nbs
p; He chuckled, a slow dark sound that rolled down over her back like a cold ocean wave. She fought back an involuntary shiver.
"Punishment," he warned.
She did shudder then, though her answer was just as involuntary. "Yes."
"Spanking."
"Hard."
"Bondage."
"Tight."
He tipped his head the other way. "Pleasure."
"No." She didn't need to think about that one either.
"Orgasm."
"No." Her tone sharpened. Every nerve inside her pulled in tight and cold.
"Kiss."
"Fuck you."
"Intimacy."
Tavy felt sick. "I don't want to play this game anymore."
He was implacable. "Intimacy."
"No, damn it!" She tried to get out from under his boot, but he applied only the slightest bit of pressure and, rather than make a spectacle of herself, she yielded and laid her cheek back down on the floor.
Leaning back in his seat, he propped his other boot upon her hip and made himself comfortable with his new footstool. "Pain," he calmly continued.
"Deserved," she replied, hating both him and his game.
"Humiliation."
"Release."
"Bruises."
She swallowed hard, the bees in her belly spreading down now to prickle and sting the flesh of her buttocks and thighs. A dreadful sensation, it made her trembling worse. "Absolution."
"Masturbation."
She turned her face to the floor, bracing her forehead upon cool stone and breathing deeply in an effort not to succumb to the angry tears welling up in the back of her throat. "If I have to," she whispered.
"Sex."
"Punishment."
"Very interesting," he mused.
"No," she told him. "It's still not."
Taking his feet off her back, he sat forward to rest his elbows on his knees. "What are you here for, exactly?"
"I filled out my paperwork. Everything you need to know, you'll find there."
"You checked every possible option on the fetish page."