“I don’t understand,” Merritt interjected. “What do you mean, 'put under'?”
“Becca can tell you.”
“Becca begs mistress to punish her,” the girl grabbed at the legs of Ileana's trousers. “Please?” she whimpered, looking up into the woman’s cold gray eyes.
Ileana laughed. “You are a pathetic little thing. Take off your clothes and stand in the center of the room. Doctor Fisher, we’re waiting on you.”
Merritt glared at the page. She could not focus on the words. Becca was taking off the skirt, stripping her body nude. Her motions were methodical and graceful, those of a woman resigned to her place.
Ileana had gone to a glass display case on the wall containing various whips and scourging devices. Merritt had assumed it to be historical and decorative only but now she saw it had another, more practical purpose.
“’From the instant a woman is claimed,’” Merritt picked back up further down the page. “’She must know fear and terror, desire and lust. She must love you as only a woman can, in cringing submission, cunt and breasts, belly and backside constantly offered and ready.’”
Ileana swung the short riding crop she’d selected through the air. “Now find another place to read. Choose a page at random.”
Merritt stole a glance at Becca, standing with legs apart, hands behind her head, pretty breasts thrust outward. She was naked and barefoot, stoically prepared.
“’On the ornamentation and abuse of the female breast,’” Merritt read the header at the top of page 135. In the margin, a woman with outrageously large breasts, her hands tied behind her back, was crying out as a man with the head of a bear was coming towards her, his jaws poised to swallow her white mounds whole. “’That the female is born to be savaged is in no way greater way evidenced than in the fact of those fleshy bowls which depend from her torso, rendering her both desirable and helpless as a source of milk and amusement, fascination and mayhem.”
Ileana flicked the whip over the tips of Becca’s nipples. “Go on.”
Merritt tried to concentrate. “’To break a female, one may tie her down over a barrel, ankle to wrist. Keep her blindfolded and deprive her of food. Work the sex, keeping her at the brink of orgasm. Alternate stimulation and deprivation. Manipulate sensation over the breasts, utilizing flagellation and fire or wounds by knife according to whim. Nipples in particular may be pinched and the mouth clamped for convenience of torturer. Eventually, the female will be made to ejaculate from the whipping of the breasts alone. Pleasure will be unobtainable for her without pain. Beware of limits of mortality. Excess breeds death and spoils a man’s joy every time.’”
The air sizzled with the crack of Ileana’s nasty little whip. Becca drew a sharp breath, but she neither moved nor screamed. Merritt tore her eyes from the page in time to see the angry red line cut across the pretty flesh just above Becca’s pert little nipples.
“Another page,” demanded Ileana, delivering a slice across Becca’s quivering, undefended belly. The girl sucked in her breath, stifling a pained whimper.
“’P—page 213,’” she announced, her sweaty fingers having slid over the gilded edges, parting the contents half way through. “’On the virtues of orgasm engines being a mechanized means of keeping the female in a state of perpetual sexual subjugation and usage.’”
“So-called rape machines,” Ileana translated, circling the helpless prisoner. “Though it can hardly be rape when slaves beg to be put on them and weep to be taken off, can it, little slut?”
“No, ma’am,” answered Becca, the whip rubbing between her legs from behind. Merritt could feel the girl’s heat, her building need. She wanted to be scourged and fucked as well.
“Tell me, doctor. Why did you choose to study the history of Belok?”
“To set the record straight. To put the man’s name in correct historical perspective and—”
Ileana lashed at Becca’s arse, viciously, unexpectedly. “Liar. Now tell me the real reason.”
“I…I have always dreamed of Belok,” she unleashed, the words never before having been spoken aloud. “Since I first became…sexual.”
Ileana shoved Becca’s head forward, bending her at the waist. “Belok is your natural master. That is why you’ve never had a man. Nor will you until he possesses you himself.”
Becca tried to hold herself up.
Ileana had taken the whip handle and was thrusting it deep in her sex. “Come, you insolent little bitch. Show Doctor Fisher what a pathetic slut you are.”
Becca's body shook, orgasming on the whip handle. Her grunts were deep and shameless, the release of a girl who climaxes on command, who knows her body and all its properties are owned.
“Now look what you’ve done. You’ve dripped on my floor,” Ileana shoved her down. “Clean it up.”
Becca lapped with her tongue, removing the evidence of her submission.
“Now it’s your turn, Doctor Fisher.” Ileana’s glare was cold, the lips curled into a look of pure evil.
“I—I won’t let you do anything to me,” Merritt told her without much conviction.
“No?” She mocked. “And yesterday, crawling into the kennel, was that nothing, too?”
“I’ll tell Dr. Karisvan,” she threatened, not at all certain what good that would do.
Ileana pressed the heel of her boot to Becca’s back, forcing the girl to her belly. “Karisvan serves his purposes, but make no mistake who is in charge here.”
“You, I suppose?” Merritt spat the question, concealing her fear with contempt.
Ileana laughed, the sound cutting at Merritt’s tender insides. “Look at the last page,” she challenged, “and then tell me.”
Her fingers hovered, quaking over the pages. The end was easy enough to find. What she saw, however, was anything but straightforward.
“There is some mistake. Some kind of joke.”
“It’s the original manuscript. What mistake could there be?” Ileana shrugged, moving her boot to the girl’s neck to make her whimper.
“I want to go home,” she slammed the cover. “I want you to let me out of this nuthouse right this instant.”
“And if I refuse?”
Defiance welled in Merritt. Linked with her suddenly unleashed self-preservation instinct, it was a powerful combination. “Then I’ll go, anyway. I’ll fight my way out if I have to. I know karate. I’m a black belt.”
Actually, she’d never even seen a karate movie, but this seemed a reasonable time to lie.
“I’d no idea you were such a force to be reckoned with,” said Ileana.
Merritt did not bother to respond to the woman’s sarcasm. She was already on the move, fists clenched, her breathing steady, instincts on guard. To her surprise, Ileana did nothing as she passed, already in a half sprint as she reached the doorway.
If she were being rational, it would have occurred to her they could stop her at will. It was a prison albeit defunct and there were guards here, though they kept a very low profile. Merritt saw them occasionally in the shadows, black shirts and pants, gun belts and clubs with leather straps across their chests, Sam Brown style. They seemed casual enough, but Merritt had seen the looks in their eyes, and she didn’t want to cross them.
Yet there was no one here now, not even a locked door to block her way as she ran down the long, silent corridor, past Karisvan’s office, under the watchful, unmoving eyes of the portraits, pictures of Belok, his top officers, and also of his victims. The suits of armor, likewise, made no objections to her progress.
Even the courtyard was vacant. No limousine, no smiling, fawning Piko to spirit her away. Which meant she’d have to run to the gate. Could she make it? She’d have to try. Halfway across, she heard a whistle blow. There were footsteps behind her, the sounds of heavy boots on the stone. What would they do if they caught her? Had she committed any crime under Zuravian law? Was changing one’s mind about a sabbatical a crime in this country?
Let me wake up in my bed, she
thought. Let me wake to the sound of the telephone, Lena at the other end, waiting to tell me about the latest dating disaster in her life. Some new married man having deceived her or some young hot body having dumped her after a quick, humiliating screw in the back seat of her car or in the darkened corner of a biker bar. For a prestigious professor, Lena had a dark side, a life that would get her in trouble one day.
Trouble like this.
Merritt threw herself against the iron bars. The portcullis was closed, and no amount of female grunting and pulling would get it open again.
“Annie, over here.”
She couldn’t believe her ears. “Petrok?”
The youth grinned at her from the top of the high, stonewall. He was lying flat on his stomach, dangling a rope to the ground at her feet. “Use this to pull yourself up.”
Merritt scrambled for the rope, treating it as an exercise from her aerobics class. In her current state, she needed little incentive to run straight up the wall, the bottoms of her sneakers pounding the irregular stones. Petrok was helping, pulling hard.
In just a few moments, he had her on the back of his scooter. Merritt grabbed his waist eagerly, pressing her face to his strong back. He smelled of sweat and musk and was just about the dearest boy in the whole world as far as she was concerned.
It was a good five minutes before she dared look back. They were on a main street now, and she saw no sign of anyone following her. Had they given up that easily or was there another game afoot? She wouldn't put it past them after what she’d seen so far.
Petrok took them to a small café overlooking a marketplace near the river, that long, winding black snake of a body known in Zuravian as Frenaul Klestin, the old bloodline. In ancient times, the river demarcated the border between Roman held territory and that of the barbarians. Throughout the ages, empires had risen and fallen along this line. Until the Soviet victory in the Second World War, only Belok had succeeded in holding and maintaining a city and a state on both sides of the river.
“So you saw a book,” Petrok tried to comprehend from her breathless, disjointed story. “And something in it frightened you. But what?”
Merritt clutched the mug, gulping the warm, rich Zuravian coffee spiked with brandy. For some reason, she was freezing cold despite the warm sun. “I’ll tell you, Petrok, but first you must answer something. How did you come to be at the Institute? I’m not a big believer in coincidence, so don’t tell me you just happened by with a hundred feet of rope to rescue me.”
Petrok smirked. “Ghroulsh,” he evaded for the moment, offering her the native toast and gulping from his own mug.
“Tell me,” she teased, her fears oddly forgotten as she ran her foot along the inside of his denim-clad leg. “Or I won’t play with you ever again.”
He licked his lips, the brown of his nipples showing through his white, sweat soaked T-shirt, “Actually, your friend Simon tipped me off. He’s taken a shine to me and has made me his junior agent.”
She pulled her foot warily back. “What do you mean, ‘junior agent’?”
“It means, my sweet Annie,” the grin widening to unbearable dimensions, “that you have been given to me for the afternoon.”
Merritt pushed at the walls of her own mind. Should she laugh or cry? Out of the frying pan and into the fire…wasn’t that the saying? She thought for a moment about her airline ticket. It was a fixed return date but for a small penalty, maybe seventy-five dollars, she could be on her way home this very evening.
“They could have doctored that picture,” she said, not realizing she’d spoken the words out loud.
“The book,” he leaned forward, eager to bond. “The thing that frightened you, you mean?”
Merritt swallowed the rest of the coffee, mainly for the effects of the alcohol. “I’d like another, please.”
“Earn it, then.”
Earn it…oh, god, she’d left her purse back at the Institute.
“I’m not in the mood,” she said grimly, weighing her options for getting it back. “I’m just letting you do the ordering so you can feel more like a man. I want a coffee, and I’ll have it with or without your permission.”
Petrok reached with his long arm and slapped her across the cheek. Merritt held her face, her eyes wide.
“Take off your bra, Annie. Put it here on the table.”
She looked about for help, but no one seemed to be taking notice. “But—but we’re outside, in broad daylight.”
“You’ll have to manage. Or would you prefer I drag you to the men’s room and do it?”
“Surely you couldn’t get away with that,” she snorted.
“These are liberal times, Annie, and you’re a foreigner. Maybe in the Institute you’re a big shot, but out here you’re just another whore.”
Her heart thundered. Was this part of the game? And how had she gotten away so easily really? And the Book…the Book…
“I’m waiting, Annie.”
Merritt obeyed. It was a tricky affair, reaching behind her under her sweater for the clasp. She gave a little gasp as the material gave way. She prayed no one was watching as gingerly, one arm at a time, she lifted the shoulder strap up and over her arms, the sweater tented over her. At last she was able to pull the red silk item through and lay it on the table.
Red…the color she’d picked in such haste this morning, never realizing where she and it would end up.
“You’ll hide that. Won’t you?” She asked nervously
He reached for it, setting it prominently on top of the small napkin dispenser. “Waiter, more coffee please,” he signaled.
Merritt was flush with shame. She hunched her shoulders, desperate to hide the swollen nipples, the obvious arousal.
“Sit straight. Arch your back,” he chided.
She did so, her nipples chafing the sweater. It was a V-neck and without the bra she felt painfully exposed.
“I fucked my girlfriend last night, Annie. Don’t you want to know all about it?”
Merritt blinked, a deer in front of headlights.
“I went to her apartment. It was very late and her roommate Tatia said she was sleeping. I told Tatia to wake her up, so she could get her arse out here. When Tatia hesitated, I slapped her breasts. They are very full. Tatia is a blonde with a big chest. She had only a nightgown on with nothing underneath. She was very frightened, and she ran to tell my girlfriend that there was a mad man here who looked like Petrok but couldn’t possibly be him. But it was me, of course, happily changed after having had a few drinks and a very interesting night in the Pristiene. You do remember running away from me there, don’t you?”
“I—I didn’t mean to run away. I’m sorry, Petrok.”
“Pinch your nipples through your sweater, Annie. Show me how hard you can make them.”
She looked left and right. “Not here," she begged.
He raised his hand to her, the mere threat enough this time. “Harder,” he commanded once she’d begun.
Merritt winced under her own torture.
“My girlfriend wanted to phone the police, but I was ready for that. When your friend, Simon, found me looking for you, he asked me if I had a woman. I told him yes, and he said I should go and do what I secretly wanted to her. Can you imagine such a thing? And then he gave me a card with the name of some colonel from Zuravian Intelligence on it.
“’Don’t let her give you any guff,’ he told me. ’Show her this card; let her know she has no recourse. And afterwards, for heaven’s sake, don’t be a cad. Buy her a nice meal.' Can you imagine such a thing?”
Merritt grimaced, trying to redistribute the self imposed pain. “Actually. Knowing Simon as I do, I can imagine it just fine.”
The waiter returned, setting the cups down noisily. Merritt could not see the expression on his face.
“So there was my girlfriend screaming at me about what I’d done to Tatia and how I was practically breaking into their apartment in the dead of night. Then I showed her the card and said t
hat no one would want to listen to her, that powerful people would back whatever I said. That was the first time I saw fear in her eyes. It strengthened me considerably. I slapped her as I had Tatia, then I made both girls take off their nightclothes and kneel on the hard wooden floor.
“’I’m going to fuck you both,’ I told them, ‘and if there’s any trouble, I’ll beat your arses with my belt.’ I made Tatia fetch me some vodka. I like to watch her run because of how her tits bounce. And her hair is so silky. My girlfriend has floppy tits, and her skin is blotched. But I fucked them both, good and hard. One after another, side by side, their arses pointed nicely while they knelt on all fours.”
Petrok was observing Merritt, insuring she was pinching her nipples the whole time. “Does my story turn you on, Annie? Should I make you take your top off and show me?”
“Please, don’t,” she shook her head, no longer sure just how far he might go.
“What about your pants, Annie. Should we have you skin down your tight jeans and show your arse? I bet it looks very pretty. Simon told me what he was going to do. Tell it to me, Annie, say what he did to you.”
“He…he caned me,” she whispered, her arousal flooding onto the material of her silk panties. “And then…he took me…anally.”
“Did you orgasm?”
She squirmed forward. “Many times.”
“Is his cock very big?”
“I…I think so. I have no comparison.”
“Maybe we could help you today. What do you think?”
“Simon wouldn’t like it.”
Petrok laughed. “Who do you think gave me the idea?”
Merritt swallowed. “But he says I’ve been chosen for something…special.”
The actual word 'bait' stuck in Merritt’s throat, unable to release itself.
He placed the mug into her hands. “Only your cunt is sacred, Annie. The rest is fair game. Now drink up.”
The fresh cup of coffee cleared a path for itself down her gullet, filling her insides with hot need, hot ideas. She had a pretty good idea what Petrok was talking about, but she preferred not to say the words.
“Let’s go,” he said rising abruptly to his feet. “Leave it,” he snapped when she tried to take the bra from the table. “Where we’re going, you won’t need it.”
Belok's Bride Page 13
