Piper's Price

by D. A. Maddox

  She made a V with two fingers under Robbie’s penis, moved back and forth, back and forth.

  “And what happens to Mistress Jasmine’s bad bitches, do you think?”

  “I’m sure … I think they get … punished, Mistress Jasmine.”

  She waited until the glove working Robbie’s junk started to feel a little extra … slick—and then recovered the cattle prod with her other hand. She clicked it on, waited to hear the sizzle, see the spark. She lit the top of his crack with it, heard a pop, a brief fizzzz…

  “Fuck!” Robbie yelled, fingers splayed in the restraints, his whole body bucking.

  Jasmine never stopped masturbating him, and his cock hardly flagged. “That’s right, Robbie-bitch,” she said, keeping her rhythm. “And just think, if you hadn’t opened your big mouth during yesterday’s punishments, this would not be happening to you. We wouldn’t be allowed to do it.”

  Eyes on the wall clock, she waited forty-five seconds instead of thirty before zapping him again, this time at the sole of a foot.

  No chest, no nipple, no cock-shock, she’d been told. And no more than three.

  “If you had behaved yourself, this would have been so much more pleasant for you.”

  Robbie howled and howled, but his penis stayed stiff.

  “Mistress Jasmine enjoys riding her bitch like this,” she said, pressing her hips up against his naked ass again, waving the prod over her head in circles like the handle of a lasso while she kept on jerking him. “I’ve always been a cowgirl at heart.”

  She grinned most winsomely for the camera positioned directly in front of them both, rocking him, rocking him.

  And zapped him a third time, left butt check, just as Robbie succumbed to a second orgasm, spilling a fresh wad of slightly more watery semen onto the floor.

  ****

  Robbie was already exhausted when Officers Kersey and Thompson straightened his suspension beam yet again. And again, they did him head to foot with the hose washing, this time adding a long rinse to the floor between his feet as well. He didn’t complain. He steadied his breathing.

  He found his Matron, still standing at the end of the third circle near the back. Pleaded at her without speaking.

  Am I almost done?

  She was as good as ever at reading him. She shook her head, no.

  The penultimate torture at the hands of the “Besties”, Jasmine and Heather, required their combined effort to assemble.

  Robbie recognized the cylindrical vacuum pack that had collected his semen sample on two prior occasions. It was now affixed to a latex tube that ended in a lubricated plastic ring—and from the back, to a mechanical arm they fixed to the top of the suspension beam. The ring they slid over his cock, working together until the latex tube had him enclosed in something like a ribbed condom.

  Around that tube they snapped into place two snug circlets of metal, mindful to go slow and not pinch him. Once in place, those two metal rings rode his shaft on opposite ends, mid to top and mid to bottom, a repeating pattern, while the top ring of plastic massaged his cockhead.

  He orgasmed once right away, just after they had finished. The vacuum tube took his contribution, allowing none of it to spill.

  His cock went hard again as the girls looked on and laughed at him.

  “Twice more for the state, Robbie,” Heather said, giggling. “Then it’s paddle time. Then we’re done.”

  “No rush,” said Jasmine, watching his sagging balls swell and refill as though by magic.

  Robbie’s eyes had gone so dry, he thought they might bleed.

  ****

  Maddy had replaced her glasses with the contact lenses. She’d taken off her Volunteer Humiliator clothes and put on the “Devastator” dress with all of its dangling accessories. She’d put on her crown of black metal laces and crimson stones.

  She allowed the stage hands to lead her into position. From where she was now, she could look down and see the top of the suspension beam ten feet below her. It would be taken away soon, and she would be lowered in its place.

  “Arms out, love,” said one of the stage hands, an elderly lady with a calming voice. “Time to make you an angel. Time to make you fly.”

  Maddy stretched her arms and let them tie her into place, as though for crucifixion.

  Don’t punk out on me, girl, she said to herself. And don’t you dare punk out on me either, Robbie.

  ****

  The last trial with the suspension beam involved folding it in half, down the middle, forcing Robbie to bend at the waist.

  The thing he had known all along was to come was the last to actually happen: Jasmine on one side of his helpless, exposed ass, Heather on the other, “BAD BOY” paddles in hand.

  “Five swats each,” Officer Thompson reminded them, never speaking to Robbie. “Just like I taught you. Wait a bit between each one. Let them all count.”

  Oh, this is going to suck, Robbie had thought upon first seeing them. It would be worse than the swats he had gotten from the rubber paddle, from Officer Thompson herself.

  He was right.

  They alternated—first Heather, then Jasmine. Then Jasmine again, and then Heather again. And every time, he yelped, he hollered, he squealed.

  But he didn’t cry. His was all out of tears. He could feel the indentations, the letters that made up “BAD BOY” rising up on his flesh, running over each other, imprinted in several places.

  As loud as he was, he never said a word. He just took it. Unlike his final flogger, neither Jasmine nor Heather cut him a break.

  And yet, somehow, bad as it was, it was never so bad as that flogging session had been.

  Or maybe, Robbie thought, I’m just used to it.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Crown

  “Now?” Maddy asked, mindful to keep her voice whisper-soft.

  She was uncomfortable, being dressed like this. The stupid circlet was starting to lean over an eyebrow. She didn’t wholly trust the two thin straps of sequined black velvet that held up the rest of the dress. And she was scared, standing in a transparent harness, supported by invisible wires over a twenty-foot drop, all without being able to move her arms.

  “Not yet,” said the elderly woman who had thus positioned her. She straightened the diadem, patted her cheek. “Almost.”

  The other stagehand, a guy no more than four or five years older than Maddy herself, glanced over her shoulder through the small gap to the floor below. “Your boy just took quite the ass-whuppin’, miss,” he said, fingering his goatee. “They’re giving him a quick break. Patience, my lady. They won’t let him rest long.”

  She’d heard the ass-whuppin’ in question. It had been impossible not to, given the acoustics of the Arena. The sounds Robbie had made, the screaming without pleading, the hopelessness and surrender and pain, still echoed in her mind. How had Jasmine and Heather kept doing that to him after he’d started screaming?

  He’s paid, she thought. A thousand times over. Why can’t we let him go?

  She answered herself, We just can’t. And that thought was somehow, inexplicably and undeniably, hot to her. The situation was bigger than Robbie, bigger than Maddy. All they could do was play their respective parts—and deal with the aftermath later.

  Anyway, if it was such a problem for her, why had she chosen the very worst of the punishment options available? Had she done so simply because she could? Because no one would stop her?

  She looked down on him, on his naked and bound frame hanging vanquished and loose in the suspension beam. She wanted to comfort him, cry with him. She was eager to torture him.

  God, I don’t understand this. This feeling. I don’t understand myself.

  “No more questions,” the woman said, running her hands the length of Maddy’s arms in an apparent effort to sooth her, which only succeeded in raising creeped-out gooseflesh instead. “Put on your brave face, Madison.”

  Normally, reflexively, she would have said, Just Maddy, please. But not to this p
erson. To her, “Madison” was just fine.

  “Remember, from the moment you drop, you’re the one in charge.”

  ****

  As soon as Jasmine and Heather jogged off—sharing a running high-five as they went on their tittering way—the cops moved in. Officers Kersey and Thompson straightened the suspension beam, then worked from either side undoing the restraints: first the ankles, so Robbie could settle on the floor without losing his balance, then his wrists.

  It was a good thing that the rather sturdier Nurse Reyes-Garcia was on hand to catch him from behind at the armpits when he came free. “I have you, tough guy,” she said. “Few minutes. Catch your breath.”

  Robbie labored to catch it as the others took hold of him and she came up front. She peeled up one eyelid at a time—which Robbie found amusing, since he hadn’t suffered any head injury that he was aware of.

  “You hold your breath too much,” she scolded him. “You have to breathe through it all. I will have no blackouts from you, Robbie McNeal. Am I clear?”

  “Yes, Matron. How does my ass look?”

  “I ask the questions. You answer. That is all. Am I clear?”

  “Yes, Matron.”

  “Your ass looks like a subway graffiti job done all in hot pink, but you will recover. Now, you will drink. Can you stand independently?”

  Robbie nodded, and the other officers let him go. Instead of raising the suspension beam back to the ceiling, they got to work dismantling it. Sturdy as it had seemed to Robbie, it came apart quickly, and they were dragging the thing away by its own wires by the time Nurse Reyes-Garcia had an open bottle of water to his lips.

  He meant only to take a sip—but as soon as the first splash passed his teeth and hit his tongue, he leaned back with it. Water had never tasted—no, felt—so good in his life.

  She stopped him after the third gulp. “Again, Robbie. Breathe.”

  He obeyed, and she pried at his eyes again, this time with a dropper in hand. It made him blink but didn’t hurt. Just more water. More hydration.

  “All right, Robbie. Go slow, but finish.”

  He did. He made himself take a full two minutes doing it. He nodded a “thank you”, not having permission to say the words aloud.

  “Fine, Robbie,” she said with motherly restraint. “You may speak—but briefly. You are not done. This is the home stretch. You do not want to draw it out. Nor do I think does Miss Piper.”

  “You want me to be able to cry,” he said. “I wasn’t able to cry for the last part.”

  “I want you to be able to, yes. I should not have allowed you to become so dehydrated, if I am to be completely honest with you—but you were almost through that part, and there was no system shock or any imminent failures.”

  Robbie contemplated that.

  “Do you not see, Robbie? I want this done. For you. No, do not look at me in that way, you insufferable little scrotum monster. I am a goddamned nurse.”

  Robbie nodded, chuckled, wiped his freshly hydrated eyes. “Don’t I know it,” he said. “Funny, you calling me a tough guy. I was going to play tough guy today. Kinda blew it, early and often.”

  “For your tough guy father?” she asked, hand on his shoulder. “Robbie—”

  “Fuck him,” Robbie said. “For me.”

  And for Maddy, he thought. So she can do this without guilt.

  His Matron’s lips curled in a half smile, her hand tightening on his shoulder. “There is time for that still,” she said. “Are you ready?”

  Robbie let himself breathe, forced himself not to hold it. “Hell, yeah,” he said. “Bring her on.”

  “Momentarily,” she said. “No more talking from you. Get back on your hands and knees.”

  ****

  The lights go out as Robbie McNeal drops to his knees. For a moment, the audience sees nothing—the cameras see nothing—as audio focuses on his breathing. The young man sounds nervous but determined, his breaths short and hard, passing through bared teeth.

  Voiceover, Gloria Wholesome: “The final question from our own beloved Nurse Reyes-Garcia to the boy who would be brave: ‘Are you ready?’ Well, are you, Robbie?”

  A snick of metal, the clasping of a lock. Receding boot-falls. The voluminous clang of an overhead spotlight cranked on by a lever, deliberately amplified for effect. A cone of harsh light falls over Robbie McNeal, now on all fours, the leash once again about his neck, its cord lying over his back and trailing between his buttocks to where the loop grip rests between his legs on the stone floor.

  Voiceover, Gloria Wholesome: “You sure as hell better be ready, if all that I’ve heard from the girls is true. One thing’s for sure—the audience is. We’ve got twelve million new subscribers as of nine o’ clock this evening, and there are forty-two million people watching you, Robbie. Word is, the Jumpstart campaign for your liberation has passed a quarter million dollars.”

  But the voiceover is for the benefit of the audience only. Robbie cannot hear anything outside the Arena, and the video walls remain dark. His body trembles, and fresh color rises in his cheeks as a second light—several feet in front of him and well over his head—casts a figure in shadow who seems to float in empty space, hovering over him, regarding him in cold judgment, merciless in the dark.

  Voiceover, Gloria Wholesome: “Such a thing has not happened in the two-year history of Consequences, Live! That a young convict should capture the attention, the sympathy, of our audience in this way is simply unprecedented.”

  Robbie turns his head up to the form, which for a moment rises higher still, shadow arms spread. And then the arms become wings, feathered with small objects of shimmering steel. The sleeves of the dress, cut wide down the middle from shoulder to wrist, are adorned with chains, clamps, cuffs, pinwheel spike rollers…

  Voiceover, Gloria Wholesome: “When this is over, Robbie McNeal, you might as well take the money. You’ve earned every fucking cent of it.”

  The spikes are not rubber. They are not fake. They are real, and they glitter in the black, reflecting the luminescence directed at the shadow down to where Robbie kneels before it on the floor.

  The shadow comes for him, the double tails of a twin bullwhip uncoiling from its left hand.

  The tails, like the steel pinwheels and chains, are part of the dress. They are not attached to it, not in a material or mechanical way, but they are its most essential accessories. The shadow does not need to direct them. It does not need to manipulate them—nor to fear an errant strike, nor any inadvertent harm to itself. The coils writhe and twist on their own.

  Voiceover, Gloria Wholesome: “Ladies and gentlemen, the victim.”

  ****

  To Robbie, her coming was like that of an angel—innocent and untouchable, terrible and divine. Whatever illusions were at play, making her seem to float down to him from above, only highlighted the awe he could not help but feel whenever he was in her presence. The black evening gown with silver trim was as nothing compared to the natural beauty of the woman who wore it. The diadem studded with crimson gems might as well not have been there, eclipsed as it was by her shimmering black hair, which fluttered and waved in a wind that did not reach him. Nor could it truly enhance the simple, uncomplicated beauty of her high-boned features, her wide green eyes, her eminently expressive lips.

  It had been that way from the moment he first saw her in government class. Robbie’s inherited social position at the very top of Washington’s high society—something he’d always tried not to think about—and Maddy’s more modest standing somewhere in its lower-middle stratum, didn’t make him good enough for her. She was more than out of his league. She was mythic, ethereal, absolutely unattainable.

  And she was deliverance. Whatever punishment was in store for him at her hands, this would be the end of it. As she gracefully set down on bare feet—first one, then the other, alighting with perfect ease upon the outermost edge of his circle—he thought he might have caught a glimpse of the rigging being silently withdrawn from
her, back to the ceiling. But he couldn’t be sure.

  All he knew for certain was that she winked at him. Smiled softly at him. Then pointed her free hand to her own feet, beckoning him to come closer.

  Robbie crawled to her. This is right, he thought, feeling the leash against the skin of his back, its loop grip trailing behind him. This is how it should be.

  Only when he drew close could he make out the tiny spikes on pinwheels that hung from her split sleeves, the buttons on the whip handle in her right hand. He tried not to focus on its tails, which flicked and twisted like livewires strewn over rain-soaked pavement. Instead, he saw the black nail polish on her fingers and toes, the bit of lower leg showing through a cut in the hem of her dress.

  She was perfect. Devastating.

  And—he almost had to laugh at this—she was a little bit awkward with her arms still slightly apart, guarding herself against the possibility of pricking herself with her own pinwheels.

  Maddy’s face hardened as he stopped in front of her. Robbie looked down. She tapped her right foot, expectantly.

  Robbie drew forth the leash, still on his knees, and offered it with both hands.

  She leaned down and slapped his cheek, hard—forcing a surprised and rather wounded gasp from him—but then she took the leash. Again, she seemed to wait, foot tapping.

  Robbie shrugged, confused.

  “Are you stupid?” she quietly said. “Kiss my fucking foot, you spoiled little asshole. And don’t you look me in the eyes again.”

  “Yes, Mistress Maddy,” he said, bending to carry out her command.

  “Mistress Piper,” she said. “You don’t get to use my first name—Robbie.”

  “Yes, Mistress Piper,” he said. His lips were mere centimeters from her toes, which she now wriggled and flexed. He took a steadying breath. This was a whole new kind of obeisance for him, and very humbling. Hands flat on the floor, ass up, he tentatively, very tenderly, kissed her foot.

  The press of a button—the swish of leather cutting air—and the twin tails of the electric bullwhip slashed against his upper ribcage on either side, their precise and calculated strikes terminating at his nipples. Robbie cried out—