On the Auction Block (16 page)

She thought about that for a minute. “How
would I find out?”

“I guess you have to try it for yourself.” He
thought for a minute. “Try this. Put your finger inside your cunt.
As far as you can reach.”

She did.

“Now try squeezing your finger.”

She did. She frowned and pursed her lips and
concentrated. Her hips twitched and her stomach muscles contracted.
After experimenting for a couple of minutes, her eyes grew wide. “I
felt it. I felt my cunt squeezing my finger.” She tried again. “It
happens when I squeeze myself like I’m trying not to pee.” Again.
“It’s not very strong, but it’s definitely happening. I wonder if a
man could feel that?”

Barry shook his head. “I’m going to be able
to tell you that.”

“Of course not.” She withdrew her finger. “Do
you mind if I ask you something personal?”

“What?” He raised an eyebrow.

“Do you ever get real sex? I mean something
besides blowjobs?”

“Feeling sorry for me?”

“No. Just curious.”

“I have a wife and two children.”

“Oh. I guess you do, then.”

He smiled. “I do.”

“Good.” It made her happy to know that Barry
got proper sex when he wanted it. She liked him, probably more than
any man that she had ever known.

“So what are you going to do about squeezing
things with your cunt.”

“Squeeze things with my cunt. See how strong
I can get with exercise. See how much control I can develop with
practice.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

* * *

After three weeks of small dinner parties,
Flame was getting a better idea about what Dodge was up to.

At first, she thought that Dodge was mining
the highborn for business opportunities. He was a successful
businessman and never lost an opportunity to engage a wealthy man
in a contract. Soon, though, it was clear that Dodge was looking
for more than that.

“May I be blunt?” she asked after their
latest post-dinner-party debriefing.

“Of course.” He frowned. She knew that he
expected her always to be direct with him. If she felt that she
needed special permission, she must have something exceptional to
say. “I won’t cane you for honesty.”

Rather than relaxing, she tensed at the
mention of the cane. She never wanted to feel its bite and was
instantly on guard when she saw that it was on his mind.

She could think of no way to choose her words
delicately so she laid it out in bald language. “You want a
knighthood.”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“Sir Drake is helping you by introducing you
to society. I’m helping you by telling you and Mrs. Dodge how to be
presentable.”

“Yes.”

“I would like to see you knighted. Not just
because you own me but because you would be an asset to
society.”

He raised an eyebrow. She was right to be
concerned for her skin. Any other slave would be beaten for daring
to offer an opinion about something so far above her station. But
Flame was a special case. Titled ladies were sometimes adjudicated
into slavery, but almost all of those were the daughters of knights
and other minor aristocrats. The wife of a lord had never been
known to fall so far from her station so she was given considerable
latitude. “Thank you.”

She was encouraged by his gratitude and
continued. “You have a problem. Drake can’t knight you. He can
introduce you to baronets, but they can’t knight you, either. He
doesn’t have the status in society to introduce you to a lord and
that’s the lowest rank that can bestow a knighthood.”

“I know that.”

Flame wasn’t sure that he really understood.
“You have to understand that, among the ranks of knights, Drake is
not highly esteemed. His status is barely higher than Sir Anthony’s
and Anthony is always only one creditor away from bankruptcy. That
Drake managed to introduce you to two baronets surprises me, but
I’m not surprised by the ones that he found. Both are at the bottom
of the baronets’ social class. There’s a good reason why I only met
Grenfeld at a large ball and never met Baronet Lazard at all.”

Dodge stared at her in silence.

“I’m not saying that Drake isn’t doing you a
service. You need to be introduced to society at his level. And you
and Mrs. Dodge are getting excellent chances to practice your
skills. You would have little difficulty being accepted in society,
now.” She was exaggerating somewhat. The Dodges’ behavior was
mediocre at best. They had a lot to learn yet. But they would no
longer be an embarrassment, either. “But this is as far as Drake
can take you. All you can expect from him is more of the same. From
what I have overheard, you may be disadvantaging yourself in your
business dealings with Drake in exchange for promises that he can’t
keep. I caution you from giving away too much for the little that
you are receiving in return.”

Dodge’s face drained white. He slapped Flame
hard across the face.

She reeled from the force of his blow.

“Get on the bench!”

She had never heard her owner snarl like an
animal. The sound was terrifying.

She fell to her knees. “Please. I didn’t mean
to offend. Please forgive me.”

“The bench!”

She scrambled to obey.

He cuffed her wrists and ankles with sharp,
angry movements.

“Please, sir. Please have mercy.”

She watched him pull the cane from the hook
on the wall. It was a dense black plastic rod, three feet long and
a half inch in diameter.

Her stomach knotted with fear. “Please, I’m
begging you. I’m so sorry. Plea–”

Her pleading was silenced by the first cut of
the cane across her buttocks.

The rod was made of dense black plastic. When
it struck, the thick, dense thud of the blow echoed from the
walls.

Agony flared in Flame’s ass. Her arms and
legs contracted, pulling hard against the chains that restrained
her.

She howled in pain.

Dodge did not pause. He raised the cane and
brought it down with his full strength a second time.

The rod whistled through the air.

The high-impact plastic snapped a second
bright red line into her buttocks.

Her howl turned to a mindless scream.

A third stroke laid across the first two
broke the skin at the intersections.

Her screams intensified.

A fourth. Fifth. Sixth. Nobody was counting
as stroke after stroke blistered into the woman’s suffering
flesh.

Her screams drowned out the thud of impact
after impact.

As suddenly as he had begun, Dodge stopped.
He stared at his slave’s abused flesh for a minute.

Blood was flowing from red and black and blue
lines that were etched into white skin. Welts and cuts furrowed her
buttocks like a new-plowed field.

He dropped the cane to the floor and left the
room without saying a word.

Flame lay across the bench and sobbed
inconsolably.

Dodge did not return to release her.

She lay chained to the bench all night,
enduring wave after wave of pain as her muscles twitched and jerked
involuntarily.

Barry, the kennelman, found her still chained
to the bench at seven the next morning.

“Looks like someone has been a naughty
slave,” he said, appraising her tortured ass. “Upset our owner, did
we?”

She groaned and turned to look at him with
red eyes.

He consulted his clipboard and left without
saying any more.

A few minutes later, he returned. “Okay.
Let’s get you off the bench, shall we?”

He unbuckled the cuffs from her wrists and
ankles and said, “Now, can you stand up by yourself?”

She could stand only by leaning on him.

“Let’s get you to the toilet, first.”

She couldn’t sit. Barry supported her while
she squatted above the bowl and emptied her bladder. Some sprayed
on the seat but she didn’t notice.

It was one of her most humiliating
moments.

Then Barry wiped her vulva dry and she sank
into an even deeper pit of humiliation.

She couldn’t sit so he helped her shuffle
into the kitchen and supported her while she drank two glasses of
water. “You have to stay hydrated when you’ve suffered a trauma.
You lose fluids.”

Then he gave her a bowl of porridge that she
had to eat standing up.

When she finished, he took her to her cell
and laid her facedown on her cot.

He dabbed a salve into her wounds. “This will
fight infection and promote healing. Unfortunately, there’s no
anesthetic in it. That would defeat the purpose of the punishment
so kennelmen are always prohibited from using anything that dulls
pain.”

A fresh sob escaped her lips.

“I know.” He finished treating the wounds and
then began taping gauze across them. “You’re lucky. Mr. Dodge is
allowing me to bandage you. A lot of owners don’t want the bandages
because they like to see the stripes. The bandage helps healing so
it’s good that he’s letting me do this.”

She groaned so softly that it came out as a
sigh.

“It’s not as bad as it feels. You’re going to
have some minor scarring. A few red lines that will fade to almost
nothing in a year or so. I counted nineteen strokes, but only five
or six of them are bad enough to scar. A caned butt isn’t so bad as
a caned back. I’ve seen slave’s backs that have been cut down to
the ribs from shoulder to waist. Their scars will never fade. Their
flesh has been rearranged.”

Flame remembered Sapphire’s back. Sapphire
had suffered like this, over and over. The thought was
overwhelming. She wondered if Barry had been Sapphire’s kennelman,
too. Probably not. A lot of slaves had scarred backs.

“But yours will fade,” Barry said. “In a
couple of years, all you’ll have is a few silvery lines, barely
visible. Just enough to prove that you’ve been perfected. That’s
what they say you know. That a slave isn’t perfect until she’s been
well and truly caned.” He stroked her hair gently. “Now you’re a
perfect slave.”

“Thank you,” she muttered softly into her
mattress. “If I could move, I’d give you such a sweet blow
job.”

He laughed softly. “You give the best head
but I’ll take a rain check on that. You just lie there and heal.
I’ll see you tomorrow.”

She stayed on the cot all day.

Mr. Dodge brought her a plate of food at
suppertime.

He couldn’t meet her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

“It’s okay,” she said. “you haven’t lowered
my value too much.”

He jerked as though he’d been slapped.

She bit her tongue. She couldn’t afford to be
sarcastic. If he ordered her back to the bench and caned her again,
she feared that the pain alone might kill her. It was her turn to
say, “I’m sorry.” She meant it. There’s nothing like a good caning
to make a slave well and truly sorry.

He looked miserable. “I never thought that I
could treat another person like that.”

“You didn’t. I’m not a person. I’m your
property and you can do whatever you like to me.” She didn’t
understand his problem. Fucking her every day whether she wanted it
or not was okay. Handing her over to a half dozen strangers who
formed a line, waiting to violate her asshole, one after another,
was all right. Sending her out on errands in pouring rain wearing
only a cotton housedress was okay. Letting his wife make her eat
table scraps off the bathroom floor every night was okay. Even
taking a leather strap to her just to watch her flinch and hear her
cry was fine. But beating her with a cane after she had actually
insulted him was over the line?

“I’m afraid that you’ll never trust me
again.” He still wasn’t meeting her eyes.

“So what? Why would you care if a slave
trusts you or not. I’ll do what you say, obey any order,
regardless.”

“You’ll obey me because I’ll beat you if you
don’t?”

“I’ll obey you because that’s the proper
order of the world. You paid a lot of money for me. You own me. I,
of all the slaves in the world, have the least right to complain
about that. I wasn’t forced into this. I decided of my own free
will that I would let men own me for the rest of my life. You can
beat me half to death any time you want. You don’t need a reason.
You can tell me right now to crawl back onto that bench so that you
can cane the flesh from my back and I’ll do it even if it means
that I’ll be disfigured for the rest of my life. I’ll put the cane
in your hands, personally, and kiss your feet afterward.”

“I’ll never understand you.”

She didn’t answer that. She didn’t really
understand herself. She understood only that she would do it.

“Do you like being caned? Is that how your
brain works? Don’t you feel pain at all? Or do you feel it, but the
pain is a pleasure for you?”

She flinched at the thought. “No. I feel pain
as acutely as any person. Maybe more acutely, now that I have
experienced so much more of it. And I hate it. I have never asked
you to beat me. Never deliberately done anything to give you cause.
I seek as much pleasure as I can get but I never seek pain.
Never.”

“Yet you made yourself a slave. How much
pleasure can a slave get?”

“More than a lady. When I was a lady, I felt
very little pain but I also felt no pleasure, either. Now I feel
both. More intensely than I ever thought possible, and far more
pain that pleasure, but even pain is better than feeling
nothing.”

“So you find slavery a happy state?”

“No. A happy state would be having much
pleasure and no pain. But I don’t know anyone who achieves that. If
I thought that a carpenter lived in such a state then I would have
become a carpenter.”

“I employ carpenters. They don’t strike me as
living in bliss.”

“I thought not.”

He looked at Flame lying on her cot on her
stomach, her bandaged ass sticking in the air, too tortured for her
to sit or lie on her back, and a look of guilt returned to his
face.