by Sophia Reed
He reached around me from behind, took my left nipple between thumb and forefinger and twisted and squeezed so hard I jerked against all my bonds and screamed.
"Oh, good, you are still with me. Annie, do not go dark. Stay alert. You're not going to be allowed to go under during this."
I nodded, temporarily incapable of speech. Stars careened in front of my eyes. Had he ever hurt me that badly? And that was just to jolt me awake.
He didn't seem to require an answer. While I panted he continued. "You've agreed to stay without a contract. That doesn't mean the terms of the contracts have changed. I am responsible for your health and welfare, for your wellbeing. That means having healthy food available for you and having someone prepare it and feeding you things that are good for you. It means taking you in hand where your physical fitness is involved and your mental fitness."
I mentally growled at that.
"It means that you obey me to the letter the instant I ask something of you, command something of you. You answer me, you tell me what I need to know. You bend over when told, you accept your punishments and you thank me for them. You understand that this is a process. You are growing and changing and becoming something other and if that other is something that I want, so be it."
I felt tears start to prickle and blinked them away furiously. This was my life. mine. He was invited into it. For a lark. As a game.
The anger was rising again. That's where the tears were coming from. Not from guilt or shame. Other than the shame of hanging naked before him.
"We are not equals, Annie. I respect the fuck out of what you can do. I respect the career you've had and I believe with my whole heart in the career you're going to have. But we are only on an equal footing when I say we are. I love the fight in you. But I will not accept the anger and the fight you exhibited at the table and definitely not the idea that you can call me Cole, or look me in the eye, argue with me as you see fit, refuse to eat what I give you, refuse to grab your ankles or strip when ordered to."
"Sir." My voice was halting. "We were outside. It's hard when we're outside." He fucking knew this.
There was a tense pause when I wondered if I'd just made everything worse. Then he said, "I know that. Annie. It's one of the reasons you're ordered to strip outside. You're my sub, Annie Knox. You're in my care. Do you really believe I'd let anything happen to you?"
And I remembered knowing if a car came and he ordered me to stop running before I noticed it that his next move would be to shield my body from sight with his own while I dressed.
"No, Sir. I know you wouldn't."
Long pause and the skin on my back seemed to crawl, as if at least some part of me might escape what was coming.
"Do you believe you should be punished?"
God, damn it, Cole, don't ask me that! Don't make me complicit. Don't humiliate me and make me see what I am! Just do it!
Please, please do it!
"Yes, Sir. I believe you should punish me."
"For …?"
I drew in a breath. "For not obeying on the trail the second you told me to. For my behavior at breakfast. For not eating – " the fucking – "the fish. For assuming that we were on the same equal footing when you hadn't allowed it and for being angry."
Cole had moved around to the side of the bed, standing where I could see him if I raised my eyes. I carefully did not.
"This is going to be long, and very hard and very painful," he said and if there was anything in him now feeling sorry for that, he hid it well. "But just maybe after this we'll have a more – thorough understanding."
Without thinking, without my permission, my fingers scrambled for the leather straps that held the cuffs. If I could shove myself up high enough, maybe I could unsnap just one of the cords form the wrist restraint and get that hand free.
Impossible, of course. The tension in the way I was tied was specifically to keep me from even the idea I could do that.
I subsided.
I waited.
My heart pounded and my breath didn't go deep enough.
"Are you ready?"
"I'm ready, sir."
"Do you want me to punish you?"
I swallowed, hating the response, needing to get it out as much because I needed the whole thing over with –
As I needed to say it.
"Please punish me, Sir. For as long as you feel necessary to correct my behavior. As hard as you deem necessary to correct my behavior. As painfully as you believe I need to be punished."
He didn't speak again. He almost always started with his hand, hard or soft, fast or slow, he'd warm up my ass. Somehow, it mattered.
I couldn't see what he was doing behind me. I wouldn't turn my head even if I thought I could crank my head around far enough to see.
I'd maintain some decorum.
He started with a wooden paddle, one made of some very hard wood, in an oval, thick and highly glossy, with letters cut into it that read, simply, PAIN. I knew the size and shape and feel of it. I knew how very bad it hurt.
I gasped with the first blow and screamed with the second. He landed them flat across my ass, taking in both cheeks, making me lunge forward against my restraints but there was nowhere to go, only an inch or two of play in the bonds. He hadn't told me to count. He hadn't told me how many.
Now he paused between the second blow and however many would follow. His hand almost felt cool my ass was already so fevered. At first he brushed the palm over my cheeks. Then he pinched, savagely hard, a handful of flesh in his hand.
My fingers tightened around the straps. My teeth gritted. I threw my head back, staring at the ceiling and he left off what he was doing and sent three more blows across my left cheek, three more across the right cheek, and then with the paddle, no less force, one each on the back of my thighs.
I howled, waiting for the pain to subside, choking back the sobs that wanted to escape, panting hard as the pain slowly, slowly eased down.
I heard him moving behind me, the slight clatter of the paddle being put down as he picked up something else.
Sir? May I know what's coming?
A pause, and then he'd say, What difference does it make? You can't do anything about it anyway.
So I didn't ask.
The next set were all across my upper back. Like wasp stings, the crop worked me over, stinging strike after strike until I lost track of the number and just repeated to myself one, one, one over and over, as if I thought I could make myself believe he'd only just started and of course it couldn't hurt so bad yet, or as if I could make myself believe there was only one more.
I'd lost count at two dozen. The crop stings like a motherfucker but it doesn't do ongoing damage. The sting burns away. A light pink design shows briefly. It's a great tool for the in between times when you're a sadist with a lot planned.
I tried to laugh at the thought and found myself fighting tears again.
"Annie." His voice was sharp. I'd tried to slip away. Before I could respond he grabbed the other nipple this time, twisting and squeezing so hard I'd have fallen from the pain if I wasn't tied up.
When it started, it hurt.
When it started, everything I'd fantasized, I hated.
The moment before it started, I dreaded.
But this moment? I bit my tongue. Because I wanted to beg him to hurt me. To see what I could take. To feel the intense pain and fight against it and wait for it to fade and all the while I was wet, so wet, so hungry for whatever he'd do.
The canvas firehose straps, doubled it felt like, landed across my ass. Cole didn't go sparingly. He rained down a dozen blows on me, leaving me writhing and fighting the bonds again, then came around to stand on the bed, facing me.
"No." It was out of my mouth before I could stop it. "No, please no, please Sir, please, I'll – "
I still wasn't looking at his face. That wasn't allowed.
"Annie."
I cut off mid plea.
"This is going to happen."
He went after my breasts, blows landing on nipples, on the sides, underneath. He spared nothing. He used his muscle. He left me sweating and hanging from the bonds. My face was wet. I no longer knew or cared if I was crying or if that was all sweat.
He jumped from the bed, leaving the straps behind, and moved behind me. Yanking my head back by the hair, he lengthened my neck, pulling my head back taut, then kissed the length of it, ending at my mouth. "Not much more," he whispered. "You're doing good."
Then he brought out the cane.
He called it a dragon cane. It was thick and thudded rather than being springy. It bruised. It left a heavy print, the railroad tracks of a cane with two marks surrounding equally angry flesh. They struck, thudded hard with impact and pain, waited a minute and released the very worst stinging angry deep and aching pain imaginable.
If I could have run, I would have, no matter what the consequences.
"Six," Sir said, and I started to scream.
He didn't choose sides. He hit directly across the middle of my ass, one strike below the other until he reached my thighs. That was four. Four more followed on my legs.
When he finished I was shivering, nauseated and half out of my head in a bad way.
Half out of my head in a good way. A way I didn't want to think about too much.
My legs burned and ached and stung like I stood in a hornet's nest. My ass felt the way I did when I'd been slugged particularly hard, missed a block and caught a punch with some part of my anatomy while sparring. My back felt hot, the skin still prickling around where the crop had hit.
And my breasts? They wanted him to lick and suck them. They wanted him to slap them with his hands or hit them with a slapper, a paddle. They wanted him to twist nipples, squeeze and pinch.
I wasn't finished. What was wrong with me? Cole had just put me through hell and part of me liked it.
When I'd been with my fiancé, my ex-fiancé now, I'd always wanted something more than what he gave me, and I was always thrilled those times he'd pin my arms over my head and hold me down. As if I couldn't break his grip. As if I were at his mercy and he could do anything he wanted to my naked body.
Now I was in that situation. Cole had hurt me. I'd have small cuts on my ass and legs and deep bruising.
And I wanted more and after more I wanted him to fuck me.
But he had left the room, turning the lights down and letting me hang by my wrists, drifting. Part of me panicked. Part of me didn't give a shit about anything enough to panic.
And part of me knew whatever it looked like, Cole would never leave me hanging there.
A moment later I heard him in the bathroom that was just inside my cell. My suite. My room. I giggled stupidly. My rabbit warren. My subspace.
That part made me laugh out loud.
"Something funny?" Cole asked. He'd returned and I could hear water splashing somewhere beyond him. He was drawing a bath.
Oh. After care.
I'm not done yet.
He knelt at my feet. "I asked you a question."
I muddled my way through the cotton batting in my head. He'd asked me if something was funny. "Yes." That made me laugh, too.
I could hear the smile in his voice though he tried to hide it. He unbound my other foot and stood to carefully release my arms, holding me to him as he unlaced the second binding. The instant it let go I was a ragdoll in his arms. He scooped me up like I weighed nothing and carried me into the bathroom.
"Annie. Focus. What was funny?"
He was drawing me back. I didn't think he actually cared that much about what I'd found funny. He was trying to make me focus on something to bring me out of the headspace I was in. I didn't want to be in that weird twilight realm and I didn't want him calling me back, either. I didn't want him to touch me and I definitely didn't want him to fuck me. Not yet. I wasn't done, damn it.
Cole lowered me into the hot water and I yelped, tried to claw my way back out of it by digging my nails into his naked torso. When had he taken off his shirt? Damn, the water was hot. I tried to climb out. I tried to climb him.
"It'll only feel hot for a minute. Relax, Annie, you're not in any danger."
"What was funny," I said, panting a little at the heat of the water. "Was that I couldn't think of a name for this room."
I looked up at him as I said it and was struck again at how beautiful he was, the Loki from the comic book movies, his hair swept back. He was blonder than Loki, but with storm dark eyes and a triangular smile, all wide at the top and mischievously pointed at the bottom. His body was all lean muscle. He'd taken his shirt off to avoid getting soaked and wore sweats that rode low on his narrow hips.
He raised an eyebrow at me. "You couldn't think of the word for bathroom?"
"Not this room this room. This room," I said but helped out with a finger circle and jab that took in my – whatever it was.
"Your apartment?" he asked.
"Apartment! That's another word! I had squirrels. No, I mean rabbits."
He bit one lip and did not smile at me. Intentionally, I thought. "You're a little tiny bit stoned," he said. "Endorphins are wonderful, aren't they?"
His hands were soaping my breasts, which apparently were very, very dirty. He circled them, lavished the soap on them, dripped handfuls of hot water over them and started over.
"Sir?"
He met my eyes. I couldn't think how to say what I wanted. I was still ashamed of what I wanted, confused at wanting it, and somehow Mark was back in my head, the way I had to ask him for things because our styles were so different.
I thought he'd make me ask. I thought I wouldn't quite admit I thrived on the humiliation as well. But he just met my eyes and smiled so slightly it could have been an illusion. Then he slid both hands down the slopes of my breasts, grabbed both nipples and squeezed, twisting and pulling, making them ache and the place between my legs throb. I thrashed in the water and despite all the soap, he didn't let go, just kept pinching harder until I was ready to shout Red and I didn't even know if we were playing, if I was being punished, if he was responding to what I'd wanted.
If he'd stop.
My mouth started to form the word.
He let go of both breasts, slapped them hard back and four half a dozen times, then plunged one hand under the frothing water, finding my entrance with no hesitation. He shoved two fingers deep inside me and his thumb went hard on my clit.
"Come," he growled.
I obeyed. Over and over and over.
He put me to bed, still slightly damp, and cuffed my wrists and chained them to the headboard. He wrapped the sheet confiningly tight around my legs.
"Not safff," I muttered, because the word wouldn't come out just right. I could barely focus on him or the fact that, impossibly, the sun seemed to be setting.
"Shh," Cole St. Martin whispered, his lips against the bath-damp wisps of hair at my temple. "I'll be right here."
I saw him settle into the armchair near the bed right before my eyes closed.
He was still there when I woke in the morning.
7
Annie
Breakfast was small and fast. Coffee, protein shake, banana, strawberries. Bacon, probably as a reward because I'd gotten through the day before.
I was sore to the point of aching, and still in a weird mindset. My thoughts would start after something and then veer off like jackrabbits off a perfectly straight trail, bounding off into the sage. Lots of other thoughts would fly up then, the way quail shot up out of the sage when they felt threatened.
I didn't necessarily feel threatened. My thoughts were just – jumpy. I was a little too, or maybe jumpy mixed with languid. Little flashes of what Cole had done to me kept coming back. I wondered what he'd done for his own release the night before, or if what he had done to me had been release enough. I wanted to ask, but like being stoned, my mind wandered off before I could
find or form the words. Cole was distracted anyway and in my present state I doubted I could be coherent long enough to capture and keep his attention. Once I had it I'd probably mentally wander off anyway.
Morning sun slanted through the window. That meant it was late. Late October, the sun rose later than Cole and I usually did.
While we were at the table he studied his tablets, reading from one, making notes on the other. More than once my fingers sort of spasmed with the need to reach over and take the tablets from him. The day before had done nothing to curb the need in me to find out what was going on and start making plans for what I'd be doing undercover.
It had curbed my temper, though. I accepted that he wasn't ready to tell me.
On the other hand, I was having trouble with being bored out of my freaking mind. I had nothing to read, nothing to research, nothing to watch or listen to, and I was bored. Part of the boredom was being dressed. Not that I'd ever tell Cole. But there was something dull about just sitting there in jeans and a t-shirt when the cook came and went and when his butler or head of household or whoever the man was came in with mail and the like.
"Are you going to continue fidgeting all the way through breakfast?" Cole's voice took me by surprise. He hadn't looked away from his tablets.
"No, Sir. I'm sorry. I didn't realize I was fidgeting."
That time he did look up. He was smiling. Sort of. "You're practically leaping out of your seat and back down like some kind of fish."
The word made me go still. But he wasn't threatening me with a meal of fish. He was saying I reminded him of one. I didn't know what to say to that so I didn't.
If I was having this meal with a vanilla companion, I'd be asking what we were going to do after breakfast and for the rest of the day and chattering. As it was, I tried not to fidget conspicuously but Cole had not provided anything out of the ordinary to sit on. The chairs at his table were hard wood, easier to clean after some of the dinner parties he gave where guests got naked and spilled substances both from outside themselves and from within. My ass and thighs had initially appreciated the coolness of the wood. After that they'd begun to scream from the contact. My boobs, too, were feeling the excesses of the previous day; they didn't like even the weight of my t-shirt.
