A Captive of Fear and Desire

by Sophie Kisker

  “Stop,” Master 6 ordered. She froze. “If it’s more than a few inches away, it’s not actually meant for you to take. Your new master may choose to tease you with it, as I am doing, and not feed it to you. You’ll be hungry, very hungry, but you’ll watch the food go past you without complaint.” He moved the spoon to the next woman in line and fed it to her. He moved back to the first one, and the second one, and once again, he paused too far from Laura for her to reach, then gave it to the next woman. By this time, she was so hungry she was feeling faint. When the spoon paused once again too far to reach, she broke her silence.

  “Please, sir. I’m so hungry.”

  “Some masters may enjoy begging. Others want complete silence and acceptance of the situation. Right now I want silence.” He continued feeding the other three as Laura struggled not to lunge after the spoon that teased her each time it came around. Tears started running down her cheeks at the frustration and anger she felt, but she managed to keep her silence.

  “Okay, ladies, the bowl is empty.” Laura’s heart sank and her eyes fell to the floor. “Slave?”

  He was addressing her. She looked up at him through her tears.

  “Would you like to eat?”

  It was a trap. She knew it. A trick question, and the wrong response would ensure an empty belly. She searched frantically for the appropriate response. “Only if my master desires me to, sir.”

  “Excellent! Most new slaves mess that up and go hungry for quite a while until they figure it out. Stay here and don’t move.” He stood up and left.

  Where the hell did he think she might go?

  A moment later, he sat before her again with another bowl. This time he fed it all to her, making her take little bites, and big ones, admonishing her when a bit of gravy dripped down her chin, and coaching her in where her eyes should be and how to let him know respectfully that she was full. The other women sat silent and motionless on either side. At the end, he gave each woman a glass of water and Laura had a tough time drinking when she couldn’t control the flow, but most of it went in her instead of on her.

  At last they were done. Laura struggled to her feet and they walked the short distance back to their cell where her arms were finally freed. The women all made a dash to the bathroom and though she joined them, she wondered why the frantic rush until she heard the grating voice of Master 3 yell at them to get in line. A wail went up from the two women who hadn’t gotten to pee yet.

  Laura sidled up next to Claire. “What’s the matter?”

  “The next time we’re allowed to go is after 9 o’clock tonight. They’ll never hold it that long. They’ll pee accidentally at some point today, and be punished for it.”

  Laura bristled with anger but Claire put a hand on her arm. “Don’t. Remember how Shannon was punished for standing up for Staci? You will be too. We all have a pact. It doesn’t do a bit of good to protest on someone’s behalf, and there’s no point to having two people punished. Doesn’t mean we don’t jump in sometimes because we get angry at the unfairness, but try to hold it back.”

  Laura took a deep breath. “What misery is next?”

  “Something that will make you wish you were back in the room with the Sybian.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Claire was right. Over the next several hours, Laura was introduced to all manner of evil, painful torments. She was whipped and flogged. She was tied to the spanking bench and paddled. She had her nipples smacked with the riding crop. They seemed determined to give her a taste of everything. Most of the other women seemed to be working on surviving one specific torment, and they did so mostly in silence. It was eerie. At times, the only cries were Laura’s. At some point, she figured out that if she didn’t beg, they ended the pain sooner, so she did her best to confine herself to screeches and screams and bit back the urge to call them names that would have shocked her mother. When the session ended, she was covered in red blotches and stripes, and tear tracks ran down her face. She stumbled back to the cell with the others.

  There was no time to recover, though. The masters appeared and called out assignments.

  “Bathrooms!”

  “Bedrooms!”

  “Serving!”

  Over the next hour, Laura was drilled in how to serve masters and guests at a formal meal. She was drilled over and over on the smallest points. Her anger rose up when someone observed that she wasn’t being seductive enough and she rebelliously dumped a tray of pretend food into a nonexistent guest’s lap. She was summarily folded over the arm of a chair and paddled until she was screeching by Master 4.

  The next stop in the bizarre rabbit-hole she’d fallen into was something called ‘talents’. Master 2 quizzed her on the possibilities.

  “Do you know how to give a massage?”

  “No.”

  “Paint?”

  “No.”

  “Making anything?”

  “No.”

  “Sing?”

  “No.” Actually yes, but there was no way she was going to reveal anything personal to these motherfuckers.

  “Any music?”

  “No.”

  “Then what do you do in your spare time?”

  She stared at Master 2 for a minute and recklessly answered, “Well, lately, I’ve been planning how to castrate every one of you after this is over.”

  He got up abruptly and walked to the door of the small room, leaning his head out just enough that she couldn’t see it anymore. What she could see, though, was the slight quiver of his whole body.

  He’s laughing? She had no idea what to think of that.

  Eventually he composed himself and came back. “Well, since you apparently can’t remember a single thing you’re good at, I’m going to give you time and incentive to do so.” He propelled her out of the room and back down the hall to an area that had ominous things hanging from the ceiling. She began to regret her reckless statement.

  “Please, sir, I’m sorry! I’ll think of something! Please!”

  He ignored her as he clipped her wrists together behind her back and marched her over to stand underneath a horizontal bar suspended from the ceiling and about six inches higher than her head. From his pocket, he fished out two shiny objects with rubber-coated teeth. She gasped as he applied one to her left nipple, tightening it until there was a sharp pain radiating through her chest. Then did the same to her right nipple. To the clamps he clipped a length of chain that he tossed up and over the bar. She felt it hit her back as it came back down. He disappeared behind her. Suddenly, her cuffed wrists were lifted high into the middle of her back and the chains became taut, pulling her nipples up sharply. He held her wrists high with one hand as his other hand slipped around to her mound.

  “Think, my dear. You’ll have a while to come up with something a bit more respectful than your first idea.” A finger probed between her folds and sought her clitoris. She tried to pull away but his hand was still on her wrists, holding them high on her back and rendering her immobile.

  He teased the sensitive button, rubbing it back and forth, and around in circles, watching her intently, until she was breathing rapidly. Her head dropped back. The pain in her nipples faded. No, that wasn’t quite it. The pain became something… else. Something not entirely unpleasant.

  He withdrew his fingers. She barely held back a moan of loss and protest.

  “Time to think, my dear. Hopefully I’ve given you something to take your mind off your, um, predicament.”

  She felt his hand pull away from her cuffed wrists and immediately realized what was happening. He had held her wrists higher on her back than she ever could have held them herself. Now that he had let go, they tried to come down. But that pulled the chains on her nipples tight. She shrieked, trying to lift her hands behind her to loosen the chains. For a minute, she held them up, but then she grew fatigued and they moved back down, pulling her nipples and breasts up high.

  He watched her struggle for a few minutes, then left, and she was alone, with only
the blinking green light on the camera for company. She bent backwards, thrusting her breasts up as high as they could go, and that worked a little bit, but she couldn’t hold the position. She cried with frustration, moving constantly up and down, leaning back, trying to hold her arms up high. Time slowed down, every second an eternity that had to be endured. She thought of home, and her parents, and Dan, and prayed desperately that people were looking for her.

  And, oddly enough, the notes of a piano drifted into the room.

  Chapter 8

  Claire had already started playing when Josh arrived at the door to the small room. It was an almost ludicrous sound that floated among the concrete, through the steel bars, and around the padded equipment designed for sexual torment. The odd thing was, everyone in the building—almost everyone––felt the tension lift just a bit when the music filled the air around them.

  Josh looked forward to this time of day more than any other right now. The music was pure antidote to the reprehensible things he did, all in the name of preventing an even greater evil.

  When Dan realized that Claire had a remarkable talent as a pianist, he had insisted that a piano be brought in, something that DeLeo had thought very strange. Nevertheless, Dan had found the piano, an old upright that needed a tuning that it didn’t get, and ordered her to play. He crossed his fingers that she wouldn’t balk. When she didn’t and he saw how relaxed she was after playing, he knew he’d made the right choice. To DeLeo, Dan talked about the increase in value of a slave who did more than just fuck well. He painted a picture of a beautiful slave in a silvery, translucent, flowing dress playing for her owner at a gathering of important people. DeLeo saw dollar signs and agreed. Indeed, there had been several inquiries made about Claire already by clients, but Dan insisted he was holding her back for the auction.

  Josh had been fascinated by the willowy auburn-haired woman since the day she arrived, and found himself drawn to her music as a leaf turns to the sun. He tried to be in the room every day when she played, something which he knew had bothered her at first but which she seemed to accept eventually. Now she scarcely paid him any attention as he slipped through the door each day, to sit and listen in silence.

  She played beautifully—not as a professional, but as someone who loved the music. She had a number of pieces memorized, and when she’d run through those, Josh drove into town to buy her an anthology. He knew it probably wasn’t wise to give a gift to someone he was keeping as a slave. He didn’t care. He placed it on the piano before her practice time one day and then left her alone to pour through it. He never said anything to her about where it came from, and she never asked, but she played from it almost daily.

  He slipped into the room and sat on the rickety metal folding chair. Claire played with her eyes half closed, she and the music sharing an intimacy that he found himself strangely jealous of. As she moved her hands up and down the piano, her graceful rhythmic nodding reminded him of gentle ocean swells. Each note rang clearly on the old piano; each triplet rocked gently on the wind of the song. 123 123 123 123… The notes were melancholy in their minor key, as though every tear she had ever cried was emerging from her fingertips. As the last notes sank into the stark concrete walls and died, he broke the stillness.

  “What’s the name of that?” he asked, his voice almost reverent.

  She looked down at her hands, now lying motionless in her lap. “Nocturne in A Minor,” she replied. She named a composer he hadn’t heard of.

  “It’s so sad.”

  “Yes, sir. Kind of fitting, considering what’s happened to us, don’t you think?” she said softly, her eyes still on her hands.

  There was silence.

  “Claire–” he broke off, not sure what to say.

  She didn’t reply.

  He stood up abruptly. “Thank you,” he said, and left, closing the door behind him.

  ~ ~ ~

  The door closed and Claire started trembling. What the hell had she been thinking, speaking her mind like that? Those words spoken to anyone else in this place, save Master 1, perhaps, would have earned a punishment, probably meted out on her poor hands. She shuddered. But Master 2—there was something different about him.

  Claire had been a psychologist in private practice until she burned out. She’d taken a job waiting tables in a diner while she decided what to do with her life, and it was while there that she’d been snatched. As a psychologist, she’d spent years trying to help people understand their own internal struggles, and Master 2 had some sort of struggle going on that was as clear to her as a neon sign over his head.

  He was a bottled-up mixture of contradictions. She could tell he never relished the humiliations the other masters dished out daily. More than once she had caught his eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched tightly as he observed a scene, or a punishment, or even a cruel word. She knew he’d given Staci a cool enema instead of the ice-cold one she’d been sentenced to. She wondered why, if he hated what he saw and did, did he not put a stop to it?

  That was probably why she felt safe blurting out what she had. She didn’t believe she’d be punished for what she said to him as long as she didn’t question his authority.

  They had talked briefly, haltingly, in between pieces of music. He told her his mother had played daily while he was growing up in Puerto Rico, in the small town of Gayama. He spoke of the park in the middle of town with the mangrove trees that rose from the ground, the thin roots twisted around each other up and over their heads until the green canopy spread out to block the scorching sun. He told her of the throngs of tourists that made every resident long for the heat of the summer that would drive them temporarily away. And he talked about the glistening, dancing ocean waves that were so enticing one moment, and then the next moment could rise into dark, greenish-brown, and angry hurricane waves that sent the inhabitants running for shelter and praying to Mary, Mother of God, to spare them and their children once again.

  He spoke of his family with a tenderness that contrasted sharply with the reality that he kidnapped women and sold them as sex slaves. She wasn’t unfamiliar with the concept of psychopaths who loved their families, but there was a difference in him, and she couldn’t put a finger on it. Yet.

  She didn’t want to leave the little room that had become as much of a sanctuary as she’d had these last few weeks. Out there was evil. In here, was just a small sliver of happiness, something she wasn’t sure she’d ever have in quantity again.

  She had time for one more piece, and she was going to take every moment she could. She placed her fingers on the keys and settled in.

  ~ ~ ~

  The piano had ceased by the time Josh returned to Laura. She had stopped crying and struggling and was lost somewhere in her world of pain. He cleared his throat and she opened her eyes.

  “I can sing. Please…” was all she whispered.

  He smiled. “Now, if you’d just said that earlier, you wouldn’t have been trussed up like this.” He moved behind her, his one hand holding her cuffed hands high, giving her nipples relief at last. His other hand moved again between her folds, seeking, finding, and worrying her clit.

  “Since you decided to cooperate, here’s a little reward.”

  The pain suddenly merged into something else—something where she felt everything more intensely. She gasped in surprise as her arousal sprang out of nowhere, rocketing upwards and carrying her over the edge of a climax. Twin explosions of pain burst from her nipples like Fourth of July sparklers and sent her farther skyward. As she came down, she realized the clamps were gone. He had an arm wrapped around her, holding her steady, since her knees seemed to have abdicated their responsibility to keep her upright. He unclipped her arms and brought them slowly down as she groaned in pain, then lowered her to the floor.

  The rest of the afternoon and evening were a blur as she retreated inside her mind, trying to cope with the overload. She went where she was ordered to go, she ate her dinner—the same stew—in silence at the table. W
hen the women returned to the cell to sit on the side of the bed for thirty minutes at attention, she welcomed the respite and retreated even further. When they were given permission to release and allowed to relax and talk, she chose to curl up on her side and face away from the others. They were finally allowed to use the bathroom again, and Claire had to prod her to get up to take her turn for the last time before they were all locked to the beds for the night. Her exhaustion was a blessing, and she fell asleep without pause.

  Chapter 9

  The next morning started as a repeat of the one before. A sense of despair was settling on Laura. Claire held her hand during the run, forcing her to keep up and encouraging her as she faltered. Every joint ached as she attempted to keep up with the yoga-like exercises. As she settled into a squat, prepared to hold on for dear life, Master 3 appeared with the tack mat and, with an anticipatory gleam in his eye, placed it right where she would fall, sooner or later. She hated him. She hated them all.

  Rebellion started to bubble up inside as she struggled to remain motionless in the warmth of the early morning sun. She found herself almost wishing she were restrained right now. When she was restrained, she didn’t have to obey; no active cooperation was required. She simply reacted. But here and now, it was her own will that held her silent and unmoving. Why? Fear of punishment, of course. She was beginning to think she preferred the times when things were done to her. There was no choice, no balancing of the risks of disobedience against the momentary pleasure of exercising free will that she would ultimately regret. And that, she knew, was exactly how they would break her down and make her the slave they wanted her to be. Yesterday she declared she’d never give in and didn’t understand why Claire had looked at her with sad eyes. Today—just twenty-four hours later––she was beginning to see that Claire was right. Rebellion gave way to despair once more, and she tasted salty tears as they ran down her face from her tightly-closed eyes.