House of Dark Delights

by Louisa Burton

  “N-nay,” said Charlotte, squirming in evident shame, and perhaps arousal, at being so exposed.

  “But you do it to yourself after she leaves, don’t you? You send her away and finger yourself and imagine it’s Bridget being forced to attend to your basest needs. Either that or she gets the cane. Isn’t that right?”

  Charlotte hesitated.

  Darius dealt her ass another taste of the crop, harder this time. “Isn’t it?”

  “Yes…sometimes.”

  He slapped the crop down on the small of her back. “Back arched, head up, ass high. You’re getting sloppy.”

  “I…I’m sorry,” she said as she corrected her pose.

  “When I position you, Charlotte, I expect you to maintain that position until I give you leave to move. You expect discipline in others, but you lack it yourself. Discipline cannot exist without humility and a willingness to obey. You must be punished when you falter in your obedience, else you’ll never learn. You’re like some wild, wicked little mare that bucks and kicks whenever someone tries to saddle her. You must learn to be ridden, Charlotte. You must be broken to the whip. Like so.”

  Stepping back, Darius set about thrashing her with the crop, a rapid battery of smacks alternating in direction so that each backhand struck the left cheek of her ass, each forehand the right, as if he were whipping a horse into a gallop. She greeted every blow with a little high-pitched cry that excited Darius on a primal level, the level of the beast. Each slap of the paddle left a rosy little stain in its wake. He found himself aiming his blows so as to form two hot blooms of color, one on each alabaster globe.

  “Hold the position,” Darius ordered as she squirmed, instinctively trying to avoid the blows.

  “I…I’m trying.”

  “Did I ask you a question? Did I say you could speak?” He shifted the direction of the crop, giving her quim a slap that was sharp enough to shock her but light enough to do her no harm.

  “Oh, God.” She squeezed her legs together, stammering, “Please, I…I…”

  “You’re hopeless.” Hurling the crop aside, he knelt behind her and wrested her legs apart. “Spoiled, headstrong…There’s only one thing for it.”

  She drew in a breath, trembling in anticipation, as she envisioned him ramming his cock into her and fucking her, fast and furious, slapping her ass as he did so. The image was so real, so clear, that it took Darius a moment to realize that it was coming from her rather than him. Not that he didn’t want to fuck her. He did, desperately. His erection pushed against the front flap of his breeches, nearly popping the buttons from their holes; if he didn’t take her soon, he’d end up spurting in his drawers.

  It would be so easy to give her what she hungered for, and so gratifying, too; because she wanted it so badly, so did he. Yet her deepest, most compelling desire right now was for him to punish her for some unspoken sin by mastering her, bending her to his will. Were he to give her the good, hard spank-fucking she secretly craved, at least in this moment, he would be doing her bidding, instead of forcing her to do his.

  “You’ve asked for this.” Lifting the leather strap attached to the left-hand leg of the whipping stool, he buckled it around her thigh, good and tight, then bound her other thigh in the same manner. He leaned over to secure her upper arms to the stool’s front legs, his loins pressed to hers as if he were about to take her from behind. The suggestive nature of the pose, and Darius’s erection, weren’t lost on Charlotte, who rubbed against him in a way that urged him perilously close to orgasm.

  “Feeling a bit ruttish, are we?” he murmured in her ear as he reached around her to squeeze her breasts.

  “Please…”

  “Yes?” He grasped a hard little nipple in each hand and pulled, coaxing a breathy little moan from her.

  “Please…oh, God, please…”

  “Please fuck you?”

  “Yes. Oh yes, do it,” she begged, thrusting against him again. “Do it now.”

  “Charlotte, Charlotte…” Backing off her, he buckled the waist strap around her, which had the effect, in concert with the leg straps, of forcing her rear end up and keeping it there. “You speak when you ought to hold your tongue and move when you ought to be still, forcing me to restrain you. And now you expect to be rewarded for your defiance in dictating when and how I shall take my pleasure? I think not.”

  Rising, he came to stand before her, unbuttoning his trouser panel from the waistband. “You must earn the right to slake your lust, Charlotte. In the meantime, I shall slake mine, but not in that greedy little twat of yours.” He knelt and pulled his rampant cock through the slit in his drawers as he gripped the back of her head. “Can you swallow a lob whole, like Lili?”

  “I…I can try.”

  “Do more than try, Charlotte,” he said as he pushed himself into her mouth, “and I just might let you come.”

  She proved herself an accomplished fellatrix, employing a firm, rhythmic suction without once scraping him with her teeth. The way she looked, bound to the stool in a posture of submission as she sucked him in and out of her mouth, only heightened the sensation. On the verge of spending all too soon, he pulled himself out and told her to lick just the tip, then the shaft and balls, lightly, teasingly, as he fought the urge to shoot, letting the pleasure mount higher, higher…

  “Take it in your mouth again,” he ordered her, in as calm and authoritative a voice as he could muster, under the circumstances. “Deep this time, as far as it will go.”

  She struggled to obey him, eyes watering as he shoved deeper, deeper…

  “You can do it,” he said. “Open your throat. That’s it…”

  He withdrew when she began to gag, waited a moment for her to regain her breath, then said, “Again—deeper,” and pushed himself in even farther before retreating. “Again. Take it all the way to the root. Good girl.”

  He fucked her mouth, thrusting faster and faster as the pleasure sizzled through his veins, surging in his loins like lava ready to spew. “I’m coming,” he rasped. “Swallow it down. All of it.”

  He gritted his teeth to keep from crying out as he exploded in her mouth, pumping it full as he hunched over her, clutching her head. Breathless and sated, he slid out from between her lips and tucked himself back into his drawers with unsteady fingers.

  Charlotte dropped her head, her back heaving as if she were struggling for air.

  “Charlotte?” he said gently as he crouched down.

  There came a sound like a cough as she spat her mouthful of come onto the floor.

  He stood and rebuttoned his trouser flap.

  She looked up at him, her eyes wide and contrite. “I…I couldn’t,” she said. “I never could. I just can’t bear the thought of—”

  “Silence,” he roared. “You refuse to follow commands, refuse to keep your mouth shut. You claim you want to be here, that you’re ready to bend to my will, yet—”

  “I do,” she exclaimed. “I am. I…I just…”

  “You just need a little assistance in overcoming your natural willfulness, is that it?”

  “I…suppose…”

  “I had hoped you wouldn’t start out quite so obdurate,” he said as he crossed to the shelves next to the bed. “I must say, I’m disappointed in you, Charlotte. It seems you’re going to require much in the way of external restraint before you can be trusted to exercise that restraint of your own accord.”

  Darius stood for some time, examining the various implements of punishment on the shelf. From the corner of his eye he saw her watching him fretfully.

  He paused to contemplate the brank, a hinged, skull-shaped framework of iron welded to a heavy band meant to encircle the lower part of the face. Dangling from the front was a chain with which to control the movements of the wearer. There was a triangular opening for the nose and mouth, the bottom of which was fashioned to accommodate one of two iron appendages designed to serve as gags; these Darius examined one by one. The most benign was a flat tab. More sinister
by far was a fat little shaft studded with spikes.

  “No,” Charlotte begged as Darius scrutinized the latter, even going so far as to fit it speculatively into the mouthpiece. “Please don’t, not that. I won’t speak out of turn, I promise.”

  “And yet you’re doing so right now.” Removing the spiked bit, Darius inserted the iron tab. “Calm yourself, Charlotte. My intent is not to maim you to the point where you can never speak again, but rather to teach you to master that insolent tongue of yours on your own.”

  Kneeling before her, Darius pried the brank open and fitted it around Charlotte’s head, shoving the knob over her tongue as he snapped the device shut. He secured it with the attached padlock and slipped the key into his trouser pocket.

  Standing back, he admired his captive, now not just naked and bound to the whipping stool, but gagged with an instrument designed as much to humiliate as to silence. Emitting muffled little mews of distress, Charlotte twisted her head about like a puppy trying to divest itself of its collar, her little breasts bobbing and swaying with her efforts.

  Darius felt a heaviness unfurl between his legs as his arousal reasserted itself. She was entirely within his power, this iron-masked strumpet, and of her own volition, no less. He could do with her what he wished, his excitement, and hers, escalating in direct proportion to her suffering.

  It was a heady, even thrilling sensation, yet at the same time unsettling. This wasn’t the first time Darius had been compelled through casual contact with a human to change into something he was not, to feel things he wouldn’t ordinarily feel, to do things that, when recalled later, would appall him. Experience had taught him that the longer such an episode lasted—and it would not end until the human was ready for it to end—the deeper his immersion in the sensations and desires he’d been forced to embrace. Right now, there was still a part of him that was Darius, the real Darius, with his familiar ideology, principles, likes and dislikes, self. Before Charlotte was done with him, however, he might be so consumed by this new, casually brutal persona that his old self was barely a memory.

  She had ceased struggling, and was regarding him warily through the iron bars of the brank, wondering, no doubt, what further indignities he had in store for her. Her eyes were a golden green, and quite fetching, really, or would have been but for all that ridiculous paint.

  “So much for your training,” he told her. “Now for your punishment.”

  Five

  ROOTING AMONG the heap of clothing she’d deposited on the iron chair, as Charlotte craned her caged head to watch him, Darius came up with her crook.

  “Methinks you deserve a taste of that which you so liberally dole out to your gentlemen associates,” he said. “What’s sauce for the gander may be sauce for the goose, eh?”

  Taking up position beside her and facing her upraised ass, he bent the slender cane this way and that, testing the whiplike suppleness of the rattan. “Have you ever been caned, Charlotte?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “But you’ve wondered what it feels like.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, she nodded grudgingly.

  He said, “There are—as you must know, this being your weapon of choice—any number of techniques one may employ with the cane, depending on whether one’s aim is to inflict excruciating pain and permanent scars, or merely a few temporary welts. I would imagine that you wield it with a relatively judicious touch.”

  She nodded vigorously.

  “Of course,” he continued, “your purpose in administering canings is erotic stimulation. Mine is chastisement.”

  He whipped the rattan switch through the air with a malevolent whistle.

  She cringed.

  “How many strokes do you generally deliver?” he asked. “Five?”

  She shook her head.

  “Four?”

  She shook it again, her gaze on the crook.

  “Fewer?”

  She nodded.

  He cocked a skeptical eyebrow. “You shall receive six.” Taking careful aim at the plumpest part of Charlotte’s bottom, still flushed from the riding crop, Darius said, “One.”

  He delivered a stroke of the cane, just a short one, with a little twist of the wrist to give it some sting. It connected with a snap that drew a muffled gasp from its recipient, who strained vainly against her bindings.

  Across the rosy mounds of her bottom there arose a thin, pale welt, which reddened as Darius watched. From the way she squirmed and groaned, it was apparent that the pain was actually intensifying, rather than easing, as blood rushed to the point of impact. It took her close to a minute to settle down, at which point Darius took aim again.

  “Two,” he said, and dealt her a new welt just below the first.

  He waited, as before, for the pain to blossom fully, the welt to redden prettily, before counting off and delivering strokes three, four, and five, each time connecting just a little farther down.

  “Six.” With his final blow, he aimed for the crook of her thighs, a location that seemed, from her reaction, particularly sensitive. When he was done, she bore a neat ladder of welts down her hindquarters that struck Darius as cruelly beautiful.

  Charlotte’s little snatch looked, if anything, more inflamed than before. Moisture glistened between the distended lips. “You found pleasure in that,” he said. “The pain, the humiliation, it rouses your passions, does it not?”

  When she hesitated, he flicked the cane again, leaving a fresh mark just below the last one. “Does it not?”

  She nodded.

  He stroked the crook upward over her quim to the little puckered aperture above it, pressing into it just deeply enough to force a natural ridge near its tip into the tight sphincter. Charlotte drew in a sharp intake of breath. He popped the ridge out, then in again, and again, and again, provoking a satisfying gasp every time.

  “Have you ever been ass-fucked, Charlotte?”

  She hesitated, then nodded.

  “Did you fancy it?”

  She shook her head violently.

  “Why not? Because it’s degrading?”

  She shook her head.

  “Because it’s painful?”

  She nodded.

  “It needn’t be,” he said, “if one is properly conditioned.”

  Tossing the cane back onto the chair, he unbuckled her restraints, took hold of the chain attached to the brank, and tugged. “On your feet.”

  She stood, bending over to swipe at her stockings, grimy from her having crawled across the earthen floor.

  He yanked her up by the chain. “Are you utterly incorrigible? I said, ‘On your feet,’ not ‘Get up and dust yourself off.’ Stand up straight, damn it. Shoulders back, tits out, hands clasped behind your waist.”

  She did as she was told.

  “When you are standing or sitting,” he said, “you shall maintain this posture unless I instruct you otherwise. When I say, ‘Down,’ you are to turn away from me and kneel while keeping your hands behind your back, and lower your head until your forehead touches the floor as close as possible to your knees. At all times, you are to keep your back arched, your movements graceful, and your bearing humble. Do you understand?”

  She nodded.

  “Yes, of course you understand,” he said, “but knowing you, you will need a little help in learning to comply.”

  He strode back to the bay housing the bed, Charlotte stumbling along behind him as he pulled her leash. One of the shelves held several straight belts—hinged bands of iron made to fit around the waist and pinion the arms by means of attached rings, some on the sides, others on the back. As luck would have it, the smallest belt had its rings on the back. This Darius fitted around Charlotte’s waist, instructing her to interlock her fingers behind her as he clamped the rings around her wrists.

  “This will serve as a reminder of proper demeanor,” he said, “till you’ve learned to exercise it on your own.”

  Turning to the bed, Darius pulled off the mattress
and blanket and tossed them onto the floor, exposing an interlaced network of ropes—hemp cord, like that coiled around the bedposts. Tugging Charlotte forward, he ordered her to lie facedown.

  She hesitated, blinking at the bare rope bed. Darius unceremoniously lifted her and laid her down with her vulva and each breast positioned over one of the six-inch-square gaps formed by the intersections of the ropes; then he reached for the coil of hemp. Pulling her stockinged legs wide open, he secured them to the rope bed by wrapping them tightly from ankles to upper thighs, tying off the bindings just short of the bottommost welts from her caning. Bound and gagged with iron restraints, her legs utterly immobilized, she was as helpless as a fly in a spiderweb.

  Charlotte observed Darius fixedly through the brank as he returned his attention to the items on the shelves. Most were ugly, monstrous even, but a few struck him as malevolently beautiful, like the collection of pear-shaped shafts forged of embossed steel with ornate knobs at the stem ends. He chose the smallest one; six or seven inches in length, its bulbous tip—the blossom end of the “pear”—was about as thick around as the head of a prick.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, Darius glided the little instrument over Charlotte’s red-striped ass and between the lips of her sex, still inflamed by cantharides and damp with lust. She emitted little pleading moans through her gag, lifting her hips reflexively. He obligingly pressed the pear against the mouth of her quim.

  “Are you so very eager to be fucked?” he asked as he worked it around and around, teasingly, in the dewy little opening. “Even by cold, hard steel?”

  She nodded.

  He slid it into her, sheathing it to its full length. She thrust her hips, wordlessly begging him to frig her.

  “’Tis a rather cunning machine you’ve just invited into your cony,” he said as he shifted it this way and that inside her. “Lovely to behold, but with a nasty little secret. La poire d’angoisse, they call it.”

  He waited for her to translate it in her mind from French to English: the pear of anguish. Her movements ceased. She turned her caged head to look at him.

  “Would you like me to demonstrate how it got its name?” he asked.