Smoke

by C. P. Mandara

  Adie's face was terrifying as it loomed above me. Forget the ‘bulldog chewing a wasp' expression – think of the poor dog with a sea urchin and a couple of porcupines thrown in and you were a little closer to the mark. I shrank away from him automatically, but it made little difference with his hands tightly fisted in my hair. Wrenching me over to the bench, he almost threw me at it headfirst, and I only just managed to stop myself slamming my head into the steel supports. My hands were then yanked upwards, and the handcuffs that encircled my wrists were removed with the blink of an eye. There was no cause for celebration, though, because I was then heaved onto the bench, face first, and every moveable limb was then secured tightly with nylon straps. Even though my brain was riddled with alcohol and I was leaking champagne through every pore, my body did manage to kick itself into alert mode. I knew I was in trouble, but I also knew there was nothing I could do about it.

  “Do you want to know what we do with disobedient, lazy slaves, here in Carte Blanche? Do you want to see first-hand what kind of punishment you can expect to receive?” Duh, no, I thought, but speech was yet again impossible, and even facial expressions were rather pointless when your nose was pressed against a thick leather bench. “Now while I realise this is your first day, we have certain standards that need to be upheld. If I tell you to clean the floor, you clean the floor. If you don’t do exactly as you’re told, there will be consequences. Nod your head if you understand.” I nodded my head. I understood all right. I was about to be punished for Adie’s entertainment, nothing more, nothing less.

  "Good. Let's hope you're a quick learner." He then stood in front of me and propped my chin up on the bench, so I had a fantastic view of his chest. If this was punishment, I was all for it.

  “I’m going to take the gag off now because I’ll want to hear the delightful sounds of your screams later.” That dampened my ardour a little.

  Adie freed my jaw from the awful device but left the nipple clamps in place. The throbbing had by now reached unbearable proportions, but I didn't demand he take them off. Mostly because I knew he wouldn't and it would be a waste of my breath. I did have one question for him, though, and it had been burning a hole in my brain.

  “How was I supposed to have cleaned the floor any better than that with my mouth gagged? Honest to God, I did the best job I could.” My words came out in a rush, due to the panic swirling around me, but they were just about legible.

  In response, Adie got a cell phone out of his pocket. “Send Mathilda up to the dungeon and make it quick. Tell her if she’s not here in under a minute, I’ll give her a taste of something very unpleasant.”

  What the hell was that when it was at home? I didn't think I'd ask, partly because I'd already overstepped the boundaries with my earlier question, and partly because I really didn't want to know. In any case, Mathilda was bursting in through the door before I'd even fully made a decision. Her face was bright red, and she was breathing heavily, and it was obvious she'd been sprinting. Dropping to the floor to cross the threshold, she raced up to Adie on her hands and knees as if he'd dialled 999 and required cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The ladies clearly took his threats seriously here.

  "Mathilda, there's shit on my floor, and I want it cleaned up." Mathilda's face dropped at that, as well it might. "Thirty-Eight was told to clean it up while wearing an O-ring but declared the task impossible. You're here to prove that it isn't. Get to it." Adie tossed her a gag similar to the one I'd been wearing, and she quickly fastened it around her head. Adie, meanwhile, moved over to the sticky spot on the floor and pointed down at it. This should be interesting, I thought. I was very much looking forward to watching how a professional handled it.

  Mathilda didn't waste any time. Initially, she got her tongue out of the gag and tried the same tactic I had, but quickly gave up on it. The mess was then wiped clean with her thigh and forearm, which was a novel way to attack it, but after a few attempts of using most of her available skin to scrape the stuff up off the floor, she'd done a pretty good job. Her ass was then employed, covered in panties equally as useless as mine, to polish up what little remained. Grimacing at my defeat, I figured this was probably going to be the first of many lessons that were going to teach me how to think outside the box. James had warned me about this.

  "Good girl, Mathilda. The floor looks spotless. You may go now, and I think you may even have earned yourself a reward this evening." Adie had his trademark dark look on his face, but there was a slight lift to his left lip. As Mathilda scurried out of the room without a backward glance, Adie came to stand in front of me. Lifting my chin up once more, he said, "Well, Thirty-Eight?" His voice sent shivers of ice into my spine.

  I tried my best to look contrite. The man had me pinned down and restrained to a spanking bench, so it was probably time to apologise. “I’m sorry. I’ll try much harder next time.” Well, honestly, what more was there to say?

  "Sorry is not going to cut it, Thirty-Eight. In Carte Blanche, we pay for our mistakes." He ran his fingertip along my shoulder blades, so lightly I could barely feel it, but his presence looming over me was unmistakable. I think my core temperature dropped a good ten degrees, and I wasn't even looking at the man.

  “Ever heard of knife play, Thirty-Eight?” His voice was so close to my ear that I shot up, but only an inch or so due to the restraints. Damn the man.

  “Isn’t that where you pin someone to the wall and throw sharp objects at them?” James and I had covered knife play, but I didn’t see any reason to make his job easier for him.

  Adie patted my ass. “Only in the movies. Mind you, I like the idea. Maybe we can try that later. Anyway, as I’ve previously told you – your education or lack thereof is one of the reasons I shouldn’t have bought you. Still, you’re here now, so I guess it’s time to cross this particular form of play off your to-do list. Hope you like trying new things, slave.”

  There was the soft pad of footsteps as Adie moved away from me. Banging my face into the black leather pad in front of me, I mouthed every cuss word I could think of. Knife play? What sort of knife play? Were we talking sharp knives? Blood? I didn’t think I could deal with lots of blood on top of everything else I’d had to put up with today, and fainting wasn’t going to be good for my reputation. For chrissakes get a grip woman. You work with blood. So what if it's your own?

  Lost in my own thoughts, I barely noticed when Adie came up alongside me. Picking my head up to try and see what he’d brought with him, I was most disappointed to find he was now wearing a black t-shirt. I most definitely preferred the half-naked look and my pout must have told him so.

  “I haven’t got time to shower after I’ve finished with you and black doesn’t show blood.” Well, that told me. Giving Adie a weak smile, I then examined his hands, but they held nothing bar a long strip of black material. Oh no.

  "I swear I can read you like a book, Thirty-Eight. Your facial expressions are adorable." They couldn't have been that amazing because Adie then covered half my face in black cotton. Now I was restrained and almost entirely blind. This made me very twitchy.

  "Why do I need a blindfold?" My voice was weak and feathery like someone had knocked all the stuffing out of me. I guess, in a way, they had.

  “You’ll feel everything much more keenly with a blindfold. If I’m going to carve you up, I want to make sure you enjoy every single incision. Each bite of the knife that melts through your skin should have you gasping out or screaming. It depends on your pain threshold, and I find I’m very interested to find out which one it will be.” Adie brushed his fingers down my back once again, and it was all I could do to hold my body still. What I really wanted to do was struggle wildly and test the restraints he had me in, to see if they had any give in them at all. That would be a bad idea with him watching, so right now I just had to lie here and take whatever it was he intended to give me.

  "Well, let's get a move on, then. You aren't going to find out by standing around chatting to me, are you?" My voic
e was brisk, and it was pure bravado, but I needed him to get on with it. Alcohol, adrenaline, lack of breath, and a shit load of palpitations had me in a complete mess, and we hadn't even started yet.

  The sharp crack of a hand across my butt focused my attention. “Silence. I’m the one that gives the orders around here, not you. Keep your trap shut, or I’ll gag you. Your choice.” Another vicious smack followed his advice, just to make sure I took him seriously.

  "The first thing I'm going to do is lightly run the tip of my knife down your spine. The point is sharp, so it'll tug a little, but this time I won't break the skin. I want you to tell me how it feels. Got that?"

  "Yes," I bit out. Oh God, was this really happening? If I hadn't been so stubborn, I could be back in the office of Cellular Operations right now, doing something as pleasantly mundane as filing. What the hell was wrong with me? Memo to me: stop asking that question.

  “Here goes, Thirty-Eight. Just relax and feel.”

  My first reaction, as soon as the tip of the knife pressed against my shoulder, was to tense up, which was the opposite of what I should be doing if I considered James and Adie reliable information sources. Forcing myself to relax, I waited to see what would come next. Adie was in no rush. If the man wanted to build anticipation on my behalf, he failed miserably. Terror, anxiety and the beginnings of an intense panic attack were not my ideas of sexual foreplay. Oh, wait – this was supposed to be torture. Yep, that sounded about right then.

  When the knife began to move, I had to battle my instincts to remain calm. At least Adie was true to his word, the blade didn't press down hard, and though I could tell it was sharp, it wasn't puncturing skin – yet. For the moment, I could breathe.

  "Well, Thirty-Eight? I'm waiting." Crazy Monster had an almost hypnotising purr to his voice, and I felt my insides clench. Oh, God. The man had a knife at my back, and I was excited. This had to spell the end of my sanity.

  "It feels like I made a terrible decision when I decided to sell my soul this morning. Is there any chance I can have it back?" That statement was probably half-true. Unfortunately, Adie wouldn't be the person to return it to me.

  In response, the knife bit down harder into my skin, and I gasped. "Tell me what I want to hear, Thirty-Eight. Unless you hadn't guessed, I am not a patient man." Adie's free hand then came between my legs, as if he thought he might coax my response out of me with a few well-placed circles of his fingertips. I'd never fall for that kind of trick, of course.

  "It feels exquisite. Like you've got your fingers all over my pussy, and I can't wait to devour them whole. Please give me another four or five inches, and I'll be your friend for life." I had no idea where this bravado was coming from. I swear someone had taken over my brain since I'd set foot inside this place. When I was around Adie, I just seemed to say and do crazy things. Maybe I was being seduced by his darkness. Perhaps I was completely drunk, or maybe, just maybe, I'd gone mad, too.

  Adie didn't like my answer much and chose to fight dirty. The tip of the knife was then leveraged higher, and he pressed it down into the skin at the top of my neck with brute force. He easily punctured my skin, and to prove it, the tang of my blood bloomed upon the air.

  “If you don’t want me to continue that line all the way down to your ass, I suggest you answer my earlier question properly.” The knife continued to cut my skin, dragging itself downwards very slowly, but with exhilarating and agonising force. It should have scared the hell out of me, but the opposite was true. Maybe the adrenaline junkie in me was clamouring for a high.

  "It feels heavy, sharp and fucking dangerous. That's how it feels. I'm tied up to a bench, and a crazy madman is trying to pull a Hannibal Lecter on my back. It's terrifying, horrible, and I think the man behind me is completely insane."

  The pressure of the knife eased as Adie soaked up my words, although his fingers became far more animated beneath me. I was turning him on, and in return – it seemed he wanted to return the favour. There was a long, protracted silence as the man appeared lost within his thoughts, but finally, the knife firmly repositioned itself, and the madman was back in charge. Bending over me, so his voice was little more than a whisper, he said, "All of that may be true, but that's not all you feel, Thirty-Eight, is it? If I check your pulse rate right now, it will be hammering, and not through fear as you'd like me to believe. I don't need to be a genius to figure out this type of play excites you. Your body can tell me all of that and more, just by lying there.

  "It can?" I had no idea how my body was revealing all of these juicy details to him, but apparently, I was easier to read than I thought.

  "It can. You're flushed, you're warm, you're wet, and your body is incredibly responsive right now. If I wanted to make you come, I could do so in a matter of seconds." He pinched my clit hard, and as if to confirm the matter and I nearly orgasmed on the spot. "See?"

  I saw. A whole new world of bizarre sexual episodes were in my imminent future unless I found Dumortier and got the hell out as quickly as my feet could carry me.

  “Is there any chance of an orgasm in my imminent future?” My voice was a little on the whiney side, but I needed to know.

  Adie patted my backside gently. "It depends if you please me or not." He then grabbed hold of the knife and pressed down hard, making me gasp out loud. Whether it was in pleasure or pain, I had no clue.

  “How do I please you?” The question was a whisper of air because I didn’t dare draw in enough breath for anything louder. There was a chance that it might raise my back up towards the knife, and that was not a good idea.

  “You do everything I say, of course.” The pressure on the knife eased.

  “You don’t seem like the kind of guy that would be pleased, even if I did.”

  “You are a very astute young lady, Thirty-Eight, but it’s not your job to think, is it? Out of curiosity, what did you do before you decided to devote your life to carnal pleasures?” The knife bit down once more and began to drag itself along my spine. The fuzzy, hazy, happy effect of the champagne was all that stood between me retaining my marbles, or throwing them out of the window. When I began to sober up very shortly, I was going to go nuts.

  “Is it your job to think?” I countered, “and if so, are you making sensible decisions with that knife so close to my spinal column?” I prayed the deflection tactic would work. I had no desire to start chatting about my personal history so soon.

  "This is nothing. The knife I'm holding is blunt. Only the very tip can pierce the skin. You wait until I pull the sharp ones out. That's when the real fun begins."

  “Can’t wait,” I said, daring to let my lungs inflate a little this time. “Are you going to carve anything pretty upon me?”

  It didn't take Adie long to become tired of my sass. When he came round to stand in front of me, he held a large mahogany box in his hand and inside its black velvet confines were differing degrees of scary sharpness. The blades varied from ordinary kitchen knives to surgical stainless steels, and there were plenty of them. Long ones, short ones, some curved, and some with evil-looking serrated edges. This was probably about the time I either woke up from my Alice-In-Wonderland-style dream or had a fit. As I didn't wake up, I went for option two.

  “What the hell do you intend to do to me you crazy bastard?” My arms and legs began flailing around, but the nylon straps that held me didn’t allow me more than an inch of movement in any direction. This didn’t please me much, so I rocked my whole body weight about on the bench, trying to get some leverage. As far as I was concerned, getting a few bruises as I fell to the floor was far preferable than being a human guinea pig who was about to be split open with Gordon Ramsey efficiency.

  Adie's hand pinned my back tightly to the bench, and I felt a sharp searing pain in my neck, far too close to my jugular.

  "Stop squirming and shrieking, or I might puncture something vital." Adie's voice was menacing, and I stilled instantly. "You know, Thirty-Eight, I was wondering when you'd finally lose it. Most
of the girls usually go crazy at the first sight of a knife, but not you. Why is that? You wouldn't happen to have been a chef in a previous life, would you?" If only you knew, you arrogant fucking bastard. I didn't care what James had said earlier about keeping the death toll around these parts small because now both Dumortier and Adie were on my hit list, and I wasn't leaving here until both of them had gone stone cold.

  “Get that knife away from my neck you bastard,” I bit out.

  “Gladly. It’ll be no fun to kill you just yet – but just to be clear, I give the orders around here, not you.”

  “I think I’ve figured that out,” I growled.

  “Oh, I don’t think you have, not yet at least,” was his obnoxious reply.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Adie had me tied to the spanking bench for two hours. In that time he tested out every single blade in the velvet box. Sometimes, he just lightly dragged them across my skin leaving nothing more than a graze in his wake, and other times I wondered whether he was trying to dig one of my kidney’s out. Screaming for mercy had no effect on him whatsoever – I discovered that within the first half hour of our session. I figured my best bet was to keep quiet, and hope he got bored with his game.

  Unfortunately, he seemed to delight in every stroke. Time and time again, he came to stand in front of me, with my blood on his hands. I wanted to rip his head from his neck and feed it to a herd of ravenous pigs, but for the time being, I was going nowhere. The pain was now locked safely away in my head, where it bounced around soundlessly. One day, I would need to let it go, but it wouldn't be anytime soon because I swore to myself that Adie would never hear it.

  When we'd hit our third hour of play, Adie ripped my blindfold off and held the Swiss Army knife in front of me, two inches away from my nose. I knew that whatever he was about to dish out would scar me for life, and I also knew that this would be the first of many trials that the bastard would spring on me. Unless I was mistaken, I had piqued his interest, and that had been a bad move on my part.