by Maren Smith
This wasn't going to take her where she needed to go, and yet knowing that didn't stop Tavy from stepping into place at his side. Her stomach tightened the way it did every time that awful moment of atonement finally loomed. The last bridges had been crossed, the last turn taken. There was no more going back and no stopping what was coming, even if it was only a spanking; one of the gentlest of all the many kinks practiced here.
Taking hold of her wrist, Alan drew her in as if her arm were a ribbon tether, his other hand trailing up to her elbow, guiding her down into place.
Four days. She could do anything for a four days, including this. And if she never got what she needed from Alan, then there were still those two extra days Marshall had promised. A new Dom, a different kind of torture—either way, when she went home again, she would go home clean.
The awkwardness of being a grown woman bent over a man's lap was jarring. His muscular legs felt harder than human flesh should have under her stomach and hips. Her bottom felt too high up in the air behind her. Long as her legs were, her toes had difficulty touching the floor. Her nose bare inches from the stone on the other side, she gripped the feet of his chair, white-knuckled and tight-lipped. In the very pit of her stomach, that hive of frantic buzzing had gotten smaller. Even more unwelcome, came the memory of once upon a time, like a storybook princess in a BDSM fairytale, when her whole body would come alive with erotic anticipation just at the thought of being put into this kind of position.
She tried to banish the thought. She wasn't that woman anymore. She was O now. Just a letter. A woman undeserving of a name. She hadn't found enjoyment in this sort of thing in years. If she had, she'd never have been able to banish the guilt.
"Relax your bottom, Tavy," Alan said, the first soft skim of his hand, as his arm settled across her back to hug the outer curve of her hip, amplifying the hum inside her. Her skin crawled with a prickle of electrical awareness that moved up the backs of her thighs and followed the figure-eight brush of his other hand as it outlined its target area, from cheek to tensing bottom cheek, until all she could think about was the scantiness of her corset and what it didn't cover. "This is your reward, remember. It's what you wanted, right?"
"O," she corrected. It was, perhaps, the wrong moment in time to correct him.
The first swat of his bare hand was as far from either warm-up or childish as anything she had ever felt. He flattened the fleshy hill of her right nether cheek, jolting her toes right up off the floor behind her. She snapped her feet up, the shocking smart making her gasp and her hips buck and grind against his thighs. She sucked hard air, struggling to process the unbelievable force behind that single spank. She'd felt worse pain, but only with paddles. How was it possible for a man's bare hand to feel like that?
"This is what you wanted," he calmly repeated. "Right, O?"
Tavy fought to hold still, but inside she was scrambling. Pain was the sole reason she came to the Castle, but this dark-eyed devil was so unlike anyone she had ever partnered with before that she honestly hadn't believed him capable of providing what she needed. Now, from the very first stroke of his palm, she knew how wrong she had been. Her entire right buttock was ablaze with smarting pain. She wasn't in the right headspace for this, she suddenly realized. This quietly dominant man had thrown her so completely off her game that she couldn't get where she needed to go mentally in order to process what she had to physically; channeling the pain into the proper remorse and repentance, or bracing herself to endure.
"You seem to be having difficulty answering my questions. Perhaps you'll find your concentration improved if we remove the eye-patch."
Tavy stiffened when she felt his fingers reach up under the frilly back of her corset and hook the elastic of her g-string. Eye-patch—it was little more than a triangle of pussy-covering black fabric and butt floss. She hadn't heard it called an eye-patch in quite a while. But even though it afforded her no cover or protection whatsoever, she still felt that fissuring race of panic zip up through her when he skinned it down over her hips.
The triangle of cloth caught between her thighs, and mortification stiffened her all over again when he reached between her legs, the backs of his fingers skimming the folds of her pussy before he tugged it free. He could see every bit as much of her now as he could before. It was only a self-deluding fantasy that made her think she was any more exposed than she had been previously, and yet she'd have given anything just then to pull her panties back up again.
"How is your concentration now?"
"Please, can we do this without talking?" She bit her bottom lip, struggling to find that elusive place within, where she could lose herself in her punishment.
"No. In fact, we're going to do quite a lot of talking over the next few days." Letting the floss of her underwear fall around her ankles, his deceptively soft hand returned to her bottom, tracing another figure-eight. "I've watched you for years. We've spoken only a handful of times—banal greetings, glances as we pass in the hall—I doubt you remember half of them. We scened together once. I doubt you remember that, either."
"I sucked your cock," she said bitterly. "What do you want from me?"
"Everything." His hand circled the stinging outskirts of the place he'd struck, blurring the edges of smarting discomfort, smoothing down the backs of her thighs until she could no longer tell if the stinging in her flesh was due to dreaded anticipation of the next clapping fall… or excitement.
This was not where she needed to be. She gasped again, struggling to find some kind of mental detachment to escape him.
"I want everything," Alan said, his hand returning to her bottom. "Before I'm finished, you're going to want that, too."
"Don't bet on it," she snapped, and then kicked her feet up with a teeth-gritted shout when he began to spank her. Really spank this time; harder than she thought possible for any man to do with just his open hand. It was slow, agonizingly long seconds spacing out each loud clap of his palm, and steady as a metronome. Sting built upon sting upon breath-robbing sting, giving her nowhere near enough time to absorb the hurt before his next bottom-flattening swat came crashing down.
She wasn't in the right headspace for this… it was all she could think about. Choking back cries with every breath, she gripped the chair legs tighter and tighter, fighting with everything she had not to snap her hands back like a disobedient child. Her toes scrabbled at the floor, the hurt flaring into a deep-muscle fire which burned her. She was the submissive who never used her safeword and never said no, but the harder she fought to endure the pain, the faster she began to lose the ability.
Her feet took on a life of their own, snapping up in an errant attempt to cover her bottom. She must have come close to hitting him with her heels because he paused long enough to remove her shoes, tossing them aside before shifting her on his lap. She tried to get up, but he merely pried his right leg out from under her, clasping her thighs in the unbreakable vise of his, before resuming the spanking as if he'd never stopped at all.
She withstood two more before she broke. "I can't!"
"Can't you?" His hand came to an immediate stop. "Isn't this the reward you wanted?"
She hated herself. Shoving against the chair first, and then his leg, she tried to get up. "Let go of me."
His grip on her became like iron. She slapped back to dislodge his arm, but he countered easily by catching her wrist and pinning it against her own hip.
"You know the Castle safeword. Between us we're going to use standard traffic signals: red, green and yellow. What color are you?"
"Go to hell!"
"Fair enough."
His hand vanished off the top of her blazing hot bottom, only to come cracking back down every bit as vigorously as before. Only now the metronome had picked up its pace. The brief pause did not make the continuation easier to take. If anything, the hurt was much worse. Tavy grit her teeth, eyes squeezed tightly shut. She tried to detach herself, to find that small and fragile place inside where she c
ould hide until it was done, but something was wrong. Everything was wrong. She couldn't.
She just couldn't.
Her left hand shoved back, worming in between them to flail at empty air in that mindless moment when she forgot the goal was not to fight him. She tried, just as frantically, to grab back onto the chair, but he was faster. He caught that wrist too and now both were tightly pinned, held together in one strong hand against the small of her back.
"What color are you, Tavy?"
Her bottom blazed hotter. She began to sweat. "Fuschia!" she spat.
"As in, the old Hanky Code? Sweetheart, I am spanking you." His hand rose and fell faster now, making the hurt all the more intense. "You're very pretty when you can't hold still like this. But then, you wanted to be broken, didn't you? All right then, break for me, little slave. Let me hear you cry."
Tavy couldn't count the number of tears she had shed in this place—tied to benches, to beds, to crosses… sometimes simply bent into position while measured strokes grew welts and drew blood. Never once had she fought back the need to cry when the pain and humiliation finally overwhelmed the guilt, triggering the soothing wash of much-needed release. Tears were cathartic, the ritual bath her soul needed to wash itself clean. The men who brought her to that release were incidental. Most had relished in her tears, capturing them with their fingers or their tongues as if savoring the liquid proof of their success as Dominants. And Tavy had allowed them that, giving them their little victories so they would continue to bring the pain, deepening the sense of forgiveness that kept the emotional release coming until she was as limp and exhausted as she could be. Wept out, felt out. Finished.
This was different. Alan was different. His hand cracked across her bottom, spreading the burning ache until every inch of her behind began to pulse with an odd combination of wounded numbness. She could still feel the hurt, but the numbness was making it manageable. Just manageable enough for her to want to fight on.
She wanted to be broken, but she would never break for him.
She wanted to cry, but she was just angry enough not to want to give him that badge of satisfaction.
So she held it in, clamping her lips tightly shut against the sobs that kept trying to escape from her on the yips and high-pithed yelps that accompanied each crisp slap, and squeezing her eyes closed against the flood of tears that brought her here every month like a drug addict perpetually chasing rehab. Some things were just too personal to share, with anyone, much less the dark-eyed devil holding her pinned across his knee.
"Let it out," he encouraged, and shifted his target from her hot and throbbing bottom to the tops of her unmarred thighs.
Her toes were scraping furiously against the cold stone floor, but she kept her cries stubbornly locked behind tightly sealed lips. Holding still wasn't possible. She arched and writhed, threw her head back and bared her gritted teeth to the ceiling, but she didn't let him hear her cry. She kept her tears inside, and in the end, she won the fight, though she hardly felt victorious.
The spanking ended. It was, without a doubt, the worst she'd ever endured, though she didn't know why it should feel that way. She'd been beaten for longer before. She'd been beaten harder. For all that her bottom felt swollen and aching and hot, Alan hadn't flayed her open or drawn a single drop of blood. He held her, not as a Master held his newly-won slave, but as a man might hold the lover he disciplined. His grip on her arms and legs were as gentle as they were inescapable, and that comparison was one she just couldn't let herself acknowledge. If she did, she really would burst into tears.
And wouldn't that please him.
Everything inside her rebelled. O could not have cared less about what anyone else wanted. She would do nothing for Master Alan; she was here only for herself.
Despite the burning of her flesh, Tavy made herself go cold and she did not move, not until Alan's grip on her wrists loosened. She started to sit up, but froze when she felt the subtle comb of his fingers, gliding up along her scalp to wrap themselves in her hair. When he pulled back, she obeyed the unspoken command, pushing herself up until she had no choice but to sit upon his right thigh.
She looked everywhere but at him until his fist tightened in her hair and he forced her gaze to his. His dark eyes reflected his displeasure, and his already soft voice grew as cool as tempered steel. "I do not appreciate defiance, Tavy."
O was a glacier, and she looked right through him. "My name is O, and I don't care."
Chapter 5
Seven minutes after Alan sent out his single word text; 'Help,' a softly knocked 'Shave and a Haircut' rapped out upon the Bordello's door. Arms folded across his chest, Alan frowned at the back of Tavy's bowed head. She knelt facing the corner, the flesh of her bottom as dark as the crimson walls, her hands obediently folded behind her head. He knew better than to believe the image she projected. That obedience was as feigned as any he'd ever seen. There wasn't a submissive line anywhere in the whole of her tense body.
"Don't move." Leaving her to contemplate the redness of the walls, and what his absence might mean for her upon his return, Alan went to answer the door. Slipping out into the hall, he found himself facing not just Marshall, whom he had texted, but Dominick, Sam, and Kade, the playboy 101 instructor as well. In other words, every Castle Master who had scened with Tavy to date. All of them were still clad in their ceremonial leathers, except Dominick. The burly Dungeon Master must have come straight from the employee gym. He was still in sweats, with a towel slung over his shoulder.
"Are you ready to stop being a lunatic now and listen to us?" Sam asked, breaking the heavy silence that seemed to fill the fantasy wing.
Shoulders sinking, but far from defeated, Alan sighed. He hadn't felt this green and ignorant since the day he'd walked into Marshall's office for his first employment interview and found out that a few slaps on the ass didn't make a man a Master. "What am I missing?"
"There's the million dollar question if ever I've heard it," Kade said, with a wry smile no one else echoed.
"I've been trying for years to break through her walls," Marshall added, thumbs tucked in his pockets, his ice blue eyes unreadable. "There are injuries there, but I can't quite put my finger on what they are."
"She acts like a pain slut, but I doubt she is," Dominick said, rubbing a hand over his shaved head.
"Something's driving her." Sam lifted his shoulder, acknowledging the uselessness of his observation even as the others nodded agreement. "All I know is, a true pain slut isn't destroyed by the hurt she courts. We're killing O. Every time she comes here, we kill her just a little bit more."
"You're not banning her." Alan didn't mean to say that as sharply as it came out. He should have bitten his tongue, but the way his friends were looking at him said it was far too late for that.
"O will always have a place here," Marshall told them all. "Whenever she needs to come."
"We aren't helping her," Sam repeated, not arguing so much as reaffirming the fact as he saw it.
"If not here," Marshall softly pointed out, "where else does she have to go, and what do you think they'll do to her?"
The silence in the hall grew even heavier. It was all Alan could do not to think about all the groups he had belonged to before his personal journey in the lifestyle had brought him here. The Castle was far from the only playspace in the area. It was the grandest. Indisputably, it was the largest. But there were others; kinky munches and private individuals with homemade dungeons. God, the things that could happen to a woman who wouldn't say no if she went to the wrong place, submitted to the wrong man…
"Have you fucked her yet?" Kade asked, interrupting the dark direction his thoughts were taking him. Alan shook his head. "Don't. Not that I'm telling you your business, but she'll turn it into a punishment. Every time."
Breathing out a cross between a hum and a chuckle, Sam said, "I never did get off on that."
"I do," Dominick said. "Sexually broken is a personal favorite of mine, but whi
le she says she wants that, she doesn't really. That's the problem, right there." He looked to Alan. "What have you done?"
"I spanked her," Alan told them. "She won't talk to me. She won't safeword. She won't even acknowledge 'green' or 'yellow', so I can't get a bead on where she is in the process. I stopped when it began to feel like I was beating her."
"Yeah," Sam said with another humorless laugh. "That's our O."
"What am I missing?" Alan asked again, staring straight across at Marshall.
"I don't think she's submissive," Kade said.
"She is absolutely a submissive," Marshall corrected. "She is a submissive who has been trying unsuccessfully to punish herself for a very long time. She is angry and hurt. The only difference between her and an emotional cutter is, she's letting us wield the knife for her."
Snorting, Kade shook his head. "You never should have let someone like that into the auction."
"I knew she was going to be in good hands," Marshall said simply.
"You had no way of knowing that."
"He did if he rigged who bought her," Sam interjected. Laying a hand on Alan's shoulder, he flashed a dry smile. "Hi. I'm glad you followed through, because I was the fail safe, and I have no idea what I would have done if I'd had to buy her."
Alan stared back at Marshall, feeling the ice in the Master of the Masters' pale blue eyes in a whole different way. The cold sank into him like teeth. "You knew I was going to bid."
"From the moment you broke into my office," Marshall told him. "Don't worry. We're going to talk about that at great length later on. You, me, and the twins, who also seem to think my office is fair information game. In the meantime, however, you have a job to do, and I'm going to leave you to get to it." Turning, he paused, and then looked back at Alan. "If you figure out how to break down her walls, please let me know. I've been worrying about her for almost four years. I'd like to stop now."