Instead, she thought about Lady Linda and Lady Kaitlin. They had enjoyed themselves at her entertainment. That helped validate her choice to sell herself into slavery many months ago. A choice that ultimately led to her starvation in a locked cell. But she now knew that other ladies were also so bored and unhappy that they were willing to become slaves for a while. It’s true that they only pretended for a few hours instead of committing themselves to a lifetime – a short lifetime – of unceasing submission. But even wanting to be slave for a few hours indicated that, like Irene, they needed relief from being ladies.
If it had occurred to Irene that she could have merely dabbled with slavery instead of selling herself to the highest bidder, she would have done that. She was a slave today because she lacked the imagination to have found another option like Lady Linda had.
She supposed that it is always true that people are bored only because they lack sufficient imagination to entertain themselves.
She opened the water bottle and sipped at it. She was terribly thirsty and she wanted to upend it over her gaping, upturned mouth, but she controlled her urge. Sipping slowly helped pass the time for a few minutes. As well, it ensured that she didn’t dribble even a single precious drop.
After a bit, she opened her wardrobe and located her vaginal weights by feel. She assembled a combination that totaled four and a half ounces, inserted it into her cunt, and clamped her muscles around it. She stood up with her legs apart and concentrated on keeping the weight from falling out. After a while, she tried to do better than that. She tried to hold it in with the lower part of her vagina while she contracted her muscles deeper inside to see if she could pull the weight further into herself by vaginal massage alone.
She thought that she succeeded but couldn’t be certain. The flare at the end kept it from actually moving inside. But she kept trying until her cunt was exhausted.
Then she imagined that it was Lord Snow’s cock and tried to squeeze it until it turned purple, developed gangrene, and had to be amputated from his miserable carcass.
That’s when she decided on the design of the next entertainment. Not in detail, just a general outline, but that was enough to start planning.
As soon as her concentration was broken, the weight slipped out and clattered to the floor. She had to get down on her hands and knees and feel around half the floor before she found it wedged against the base of the wardrobe.
She cleaned the weights as best as she could with no water and then packed them away. She would take them out again in a couple of hours and work more on her control.
Next, she sat on her cot and tried to remember everything that Cherry, Tamarind, Lime, and Peach had told her about their early lives.
One was adjudicated into slavery because she had taken a joyride in an aristocrat’s car; two were pressed by bankruptcy, one of those because her landlord had lent her more money than she could afford and the other because her husband had gambled her family into debt; and one was born into slavery.
It struck her that all three of the women who had been enslaved as adults were lucky that they were exceptionally beautiful. If they had been homely, they would have gone straight to the labor auction where they would have been worth a lot less money and had a much shorter, more brutish existence.
Maybe it wasn’t just luck. Maybe the creditors assessed the beauty of a women before they decided to lend her or her husband money. Homely women would be a far worse credit risk.
Something about that idea began chewing industriously on the underside of her mind. She felt it down there and tried to drag the thought out in the open to take it to its logical conclusion, but she just couldn’t get a grip on it and eventually gave up.
When recalling the other slaves’ lives got old, she opened her wardrobe to retrieve her butt plug and lube.
She was locked up, but that didn’t mean that she could exempt herself from staying stretched and lubed. A man might come to her cell to bugger her even if she were being punished. It didn’t seem likely, given Lord Snow’s insistence on her chastity, but it could happen. Besides, she had been lubing herself every day for so long that it felt wrong for her asshole to be tight and dry.
But as she was feeling around on the shelf, her door slammed open and her cell was flooded with blinding light. Her eyelids snapped shut instantly.
“So, bitch, you want something to eat? I got something for you to eat.” Nickel grabbed her by the arm and pulled her away from the wardrobe.
The cell door slammed closed.
“Git down on your knees, bitch and get eating.”
Irene was pushed to the floor by her shoulders. She heard her cot creak and then felt the insides of Nickel’s thighs against her ears.
Her eyes were still too sensitive to open, but she stuck her tongue out and leaned forward until she tasted cunt. She had done this so often, she could navigate around the whiphand’s crotch by feel alone. She didn’t need to see Nickel leering down at her.
Her tongue was barely wet – a pint of water in the morning didn’t keep her flush all day long – but Nickel was secreting enough to lubricate her wide licks along the full length of her slit.
Irene was certainly getting the full, raw taste of Nickel today.
She couldn’t tell if there was any lingering semen from last night’s orgy in the mix but she wouldn’t have been surprised if there was. After she had forced Nickel into the center of the festivities, the gentlemen wouldn’t have let her alone. They would have fucked her, but good, in every available orifice. And she wouldn’t have dared to deny any gentleman access to any hole.
She had no doubt that Marquette Kelly and his friend had voted to punish her with starvation because Nickel had serviced them with less than full enthusiasm. The word that they had used was “perfunctory.”
She would not forgive Nickel for that.
She suspected that, if those men didn’t find satisfaction in one hole, they would have moved on to the next. And she further suspected that Nickel would be less than diligent about keeping herself lubed and stretched than most slaves who expected to be used hard.
While she was licking and thrusting her tongue into Nickel’s cunt, she ran a gentle finger down below her chin until she felt the tight, puckered opening below. She pressed her index finger into it.
The effect was electric. Nickel screamed in pain and sprang backward, pulling away from Irene’s face and hand. “What the hell are you doing?” she shouted.
That was an informative reaction. Nickel’s asshole was damned sensitive. Any other slave would accommodate three fingers without batting an eye. Irene wondered how badly Nickel had been torn last night. She hoped it was bad, but she controlled her expression to keep her satisfaction from showing on her face.
“I thought that you might like a gentle massage there. You know. Just a bit of extra stimulation to add to your pleasure.”
“God fucking damn it. You keep your goddamned fucking finger out of my damned asshole. You try that again and I’ll whip your pussy right off. You’ll be nothing but raw bone between your legs. You got me?”
Irene’s eyes were finally adapted to the light. She looked up at Nickel with an expression of proper submissiveness. “Yes, ma’am. Some men really like that when I suck their cock. I thought that you might find it special, too.”
She thought that she could detect tears in the whiphand’s eyes.
“Don’t you ever, ever, ever do that again.”
“No, ma’am. I certainly won’t.”
She had broken the mood. Nickel pushed herself off the cot and minced toward the door.
Irene noted a spot of blood on her blanket. The last thing that she saw before the lights went out again, was a smear of Nickel’s blood on her finger.
Taking a shit had to be excruciating. If Nickel were wise, she would limit herself to soup and juice until she healed. Better, she should mention her anal trauma to the kennelman and get it repaired.
But Nickel would rather tough i
t out than admit any weakness.
Irene didn’t care. If that were the way Nickel wanted it, that was the way she could have it.
* * *
Irene marked the second day of her fast by the second visit of the kennelman in the morning and by the second time that Nickel came into her cell to get her cunt serviced in the middle of the day.
This time, Irene didn’t try to ream out her asshole. That would be fun only once. As she was licking Nickel to a climax, she wondered why Nickel didn’t order one of the other slaves to service her.
It was risky for Nickel to interrupt Irene’s isolation this way. Nobody except the kennelman and Lord Snow had permission to enter Irene’s cell when she was being confined for punishment.
That Nickel insisted that Irene had to be the slave to service her could be taken as a compliment to her skill. Not the kind of complement that she desired, but a complement, nevertheless. But Irene was not deluded. Nickel liked the way she licked cunt, but she liked, far, far more, that she was humiliating Irene by forcing her to her knees and making her to give service. It was all about power. Nickel loved that Irene had once been one of the fine ladies who looked down on slaves with hateful contempt and now she could look down on Irene’s bobbing head with her own contempt.
If Irene had even a slight inclination toward other women she would have not minded having her face buried in Nickel’s crotch. She might have even found some pleasure in it. But even that wouldn’t have ameliorated the humiliation of forced submission.
But Irene didn’t complain. The humiliation of forced submission was exactly what she had accepted when she had mounted the auction block to sell herself into slavery half a year ago.
So, on the third day of her fast, when Nickel entered the cell and announced that she had, once again, brought something for Irene to eat, Irene, once again, forced herself to kneel between Nickel’s widespread thighs and push her face into the dripping crotch.
She tried to feign enthusiasm, but she had no energy for it. The slaves were kept svelte. At the best of times, hunger gnawed at their bellies for most of the day. Irene had no reserve of fat to sustain her through a three-day fast. Even the fat in her breasts was being depleted and they were beginning to sag on her chest.
“Lick me properly, little bitch, or I’ll strap your cunt raw. Put some effort into it.” Nickel’s voice was loud and demanding.
Irene tried harder but her head was foggy. She felt faint.
“Lick my cunt, bitch! Get your goddamn tongue into me!” Now Nickel was shouting. “Work it, bitch! Work it!” Her voice was cracking as she shouted as loudly as she could. The small cell rang.
The cell door banged open.
Both slaves looked up to see Lord Snow standing in the doorway. “What in hell is going on in here?”
“Nickel brought me her cunt to eat,” Irene said. She wasn’t trying to be funny. She simply wasn’t able to think clearly and was repeating what Nickel had told her a few minutes earlier.
“Well, I hope you like it because that’s all that either one of you is going to eat for the next three days. You can both break your fast on Saturday morning.”
He slammed the door shut and the cell went dark, leaving Irene kneeling on the floor with her head between Nickel’s widespread thighs.
Irene began to sob quietly. Three more days! She had already been fasting for three days. Her last meal had been on Saturday night and she wouldn’t eat her next meal until the following Saturday morning.
She wouldn’t survive.
Wrong. She would survive. Six days without food would be pure hell, but she would survive. She would lose weight, come out rail thin, but she would survive.
Unless Nickel decided to turn cannibal. To strangle Irene in her sleep and snack on her flesh.
What about Nickel? Both of them were locked in the same cell now, and there was only a single cot that was barely large enough for one. There was no way that Nickel would share. Irene was going to have to sleep on the concrete floor.
Unless she wanted to fight Nickel for the cot. But that wouldn’t turn out well. Even if she won the cot, she would suffer some even more terrible punishment for fighting. Maybe an additional three days of fasting. Nine days? Endless days until she starved to death. That really would kill her.
She rose to her feet in the dark and dried her eyes. The fog was lifting from her head and she felt like she was thinking clearly again.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Nickel asked. “You get back down there and finish me off. In fact, you can stay down there and keep licking me for the next three days. You’re going to keep your face in my cunt, even when you’re asleep. You’re going to keep me entertained until I get out of here.”
“I don’t think so,” Irene said. “A few minutes ago, you were whiphand and spoke with the authority of Lord Snow. It was right that I obey you. But now you’re under punishment. Your authority over me is suspended for the duration.”
“My authority over you comes from my strap and I’ve still got it right here. You get down and get licking or I’m going to start swinging and I won’t stop until every inch of you is bruised black from head to toe.”
“You can try it if you like. But you’re going to have to explain to Lord Snow how you were enforcing your discipline on me when I was already being disciplined exactly as he wished. Listening to you try to explain that might well be worth the price of admission. Assuming that I don’t get the strap away from you and give you a taste of it myself. If you want to get into it with me, then you might be surprised what I can do when I’m not obligated to obey your orders.”
There was a long silence from Nickel. She was seriously thinking about the pros and cons of getting into a full-scale brawl in this tiny cell with someone who might turn out to be a lot tougher than she expected.
Irene felt her way around the cell and sat down on the cot next to her. “You know that it’s your fault that I’m in here in the first place. If you’d been enthusiastic about giving the marquette the pleasure that was his due, he wouldn’t have voted to punish me. And if you hadn’t come in here to force yourself on me just now, Lord Snow wouldn’t have doubled my punishment.”
“Don’t blame me for your failures,” Nickel countered. “I was doing just fine hiding in my corner during the entertainment. If you’d left me alone, the marquette would have been serviced to his satisfaction by the other slaves and you would have had him on your side. And if you’d been as enthusiastic about servicing me today as you usually are, I wouldn’t have been so noisy trying to get your attention and Lord Snow wouldn’t have come in here and found us.”
“My god, you are a piece of work, aren’t you? In your mind, everyone but you is to blame for your shortcomings.”
“You think that everyone but you is to blame for your bad judgment. You think you’re still a fancy lady with high hair who can do no wrong. And Lord Snow goes along with it, treating you like you’re some kind of special person instead of just another piece of property. You think that I don’t know that you send the kennelmen on shopping trips to buy things for you. You order new clothes for yourself. You tell the lord how his billiard room is going to be decorated. You think you’re still more lady than slave. Lord Snow better damn well put you in your place or he’s going to end up married to a slave. A man who marries his slave is no gentleman, let me tell you. He’s no better than a slave himself.”
“Don’t you worry yourself on that account. Lord Snow isn’t going to marry me because I’m already married. I was married before I sold myself and, as near as I can figure out, my husband has never bothered divorcing me.”
Nickel hooted. “Wouldn’t that be a fine how-de-do. A gentleman married to a slave by default. You think that’s possible? Don’t be an idiot. You’re property. Marriage is between two people. The minute you were sold, you stopped being a person, so you stopped being a wife. Your ex-husband can no more be married to you than he could be married to a rubber doll. And Lord
Snow can’t marry you, either, for exactly the same reason. There’s not a court in the land that would authorize such a contract. And why the hell should he try? He can get anything he wants from you already. Cooking. Cleaning. Sex. Babies. What in hell can a wife give him that a slave can’t?”
“Status,” Irene said. “Don’t ever underestimate the importance of social status.”
“Status. Fuck status. You can’t eat status.”
“You’re wrong. The aristocracy feasts on it. It’s all they have. They don’t work the fields or labor in the factories. They don’t produce a damn thing yet they own it all. And the only reason that the commoners don’t take it all back is because the aristocracy has status and they don’t. Within the ranks of the aristocracy, every step up in status gives them more power to lord it over more people.
“You wouldn’t believe how much of a gentleman’s status comes from his choice of wife. She organizes the social calendar, manages their friendships, enforces the cultural rules.”
Irene sighed. “You know what I was doing just before I sold myself into slavery? I was destroying the happiness of the oldest daughter of a dear friend. Her daughter was infatuated with a young man whose father was a knight. He was a lovely boy and would have someday managed and eventually inherited his father’s fishing fleet and other commercial concerns. Technically, the knight’s title is not inherited, but as the heir to his father’s interests, he would have been elevated to knighthood almost automatically when his father died.
“All that sounds good, but it’s not good enough for the daughter of a lord. She would have stepped down two full ranks on the social ladder. Instead, I was arranging for her to step up. She was beautiful enough to have attracted the attention of an earl. True, the earl was fifty-two and she was only eighteen. True, he was one of the dullest, most pedantic men that I’ve ever met. True, she would most likely be over forty when he finally kicked the bucket and widowed her. But he was an earl. Her family would have been invited to a much higher class of social events. They would have been rubbing elbows with other earls and marquettes. They would have been the envy of all their friends.
A Gentlemen's Agreement (Slave of the Aristocracy) Page 12
