The Surrender of Lady Charlotte (3 page)

The dungeon of Mountbane Castle was accessed by a series of stairs, which wound their way through darkness, where a damp climate bred fear and tension with each step. Charlotte lowered herself with each footfall in her twisted descent, closed in by corridors, by thick wet stone, by air hardly pure enough to breathe. The pace of her plunge was so swift that she felt faint by the time she was halfway down.

“Please,” she tried pulling back, “where does this lead?”

“Your new home,” was all the mighty brute would reply as he tugged her faltering form.

Her fear magnified.

Hitting the bottom step in their journey was like reaching the ends of the earth, the last possibility for life before the chance to breathe ceased inside the bowels of dark matter and nonporous stone. Charlotte couldn’t imagine living so close to her grave.

“Have I earned this travail?” she cried as they came into an opening where walls gave way to Caius’ dungeon lair. Iron bars marked off cubicles where female slaves where roused by the noise of the master returning. A young maid with bronze skin and flowing black hair moved out of the shadows, falling before Caius with her lips pressed to his boots.

“In the corner until I need you, Loria,” he pointed toward the opposite wall and the woman scurried quickly to take her place in a subservient but relaxed pose. Kneeling, knees apart, her ass rested on her feet behind her, while she bowed her head, parted her lips and opened her hands at her side as a sign of her willing acquiescence to the dungeon master.

Slowly rising from beds of straw, the jailed slaves moved toward the forward bars of their cells, which were little more than cages, stacked three high, embedded in the stone wall. Though they were mute, a few even gagged, they did not want for some degree of care, appearing clean, hair washed, and eyes, while remote, certainly clear and lucid.

“Your home, wife of Mountbane,” Caius announced dropping his grip on the bewildered woman. “There are easier ways to fit into the life of Ilusia, but none quite so profound as this.”

Charlotte’s frazzled nerves made her weak. Infinitesimal seconds ticked by too slowly—drawn out to the weary end of each one before the next began. This eternity might just be hell.

“Remove your clothes,” Caius ordered abruptly.

Her eyes opened wide and she didn’t move.

“Do you not hear, or do you simply refuse to obey?”

“I cannot remove my clothes…” she uttered the strained cry as her parched throat could hardly form the words.

“Oh?” Caius looked amused saying mockingly as he motioned to the cages and the slave he called Loria, “You’re better than these slaves? Shall we order you a wardrobe of silk so you can graciously lord over my chattel here?”

“Are women chattel in Ilusia?”

“That would be a fine guess,” he answered. “There is not a female of any worth who has not spent some days learning the fine art of submission in a dungeon like this one.”

“That is absurd!”

Caius wasn’t prone to argue. “You will take off your clothes,” he assured her. “You refuse me now, it will be a long term in this place before you’ll see the light of day again.”

“I cannot,” she was in tears now, trembling.

“I swear you can,” Caius countered. His voice appeared to thunder and yet his words were no more strongly spoken, just the force behind them seemed to rise until the whole place quaked.

“I-I …” she tried to form another sentence while her eyes were fixed on the man. He’d left her to comply, turning away and striding toward his slave, Loria, in the corner, whispering words to her Charlotte could not hear. He then turned about, removing his muslin shirt, revealing a body tanned from the sun. His smooth skin rippled with muscles, which were already gleaming with sweat in the close and tepid air.

Charlotte’s hands had remained immobile at her side as she watched the tender meeting of slave and master. Only when she saw his face again, and he leveled her with a biting scowl, did her fingers haltingly begin the anguished disrobing in obedience to his command. He didn’t have to say a word; he spoke in glances and grimaces, with brows and mouth and his generous presence.

“Sir, please,” she begged, slumping to her knees before him with the front of her dress only half open. “I shall do anything but this…”

“On your feet!” he roared.

“With this you make me—a noble daughter—into a humbled slave!”

“I have my orders and no pity!” he retorted. “If I have to remove your clothes myself, I will tear them off. You’ll receive twice the chastisement for causing me such trouble.” Grasping her hair in his fist, he pulled her to her feet.

Bewildered, Charlotte stared about her to the impassive crowd of witnesses, seeing how they wore their nakedness with ease. Seeing no way out of this horror, she began to undo the ties that held her dress in place. Tears streamed down her face as she let it fall to her feet.

Caius stared at each deliberate move, as though his eyes instructed her to continue. Her chemise followed her dress, and with the last of her undergarments removed she hunched her shoulders together to cover her breasts while leaving her chastity belt to conceal her lower regions.

“Stand for inspection,” he ordered.

Her eyes screamed with fear and she didn’t move.

“Hands behind your neck, your shoulders back.”

What exposure! Her embarrassment leapt ten-fold as she struggled to comply. Charlotte stared down to see her pink nipples swell, forming tight wrinkled knots in the centers of her breasts. Her chest heaved, her whole bosom swaying erotically. Even in her fear, she was a breathtaking picture of female loveliness. Only the chastity belt marred the view of her beauteous physical assets, and yet, in a curious way, her guarded loins seemed to enhance the mystery of this virgin’s promise. Just as well, she’d been so captured, Caius thought. Some thief in the night would come and steal away Mountbane’s prize were she not so surely shielded from assault.

Caius stalked her, naked torso gleaming, eyes molten, lust breeding in his loins, swelling the pouch at his crotch as his erection responded to her womanly grace and his own power to contain this fractious female beast. She was his prey, the spoils of his war with life, the recompense Mountbane owed him for his faithful service.

Dangling from his hand, the long talons of a flogger jolted the frightened wife of Mountbane as her eyes took note of their meaning.

“Oh, sir! Please don’t whip me.”

“Would that I could lay this as heartily on your loins as I will the rest of you.”

“Oh, please, sir, what have I done!”

“Hush, slave!”

Her mouth snapped shut, Charlotte left with just her pleading eyes to sway this savage man.

“Loria, the manacles.”

“Ah, sir, noooo,” Charlotte struggled with the brown-skinned woman whose hands pulled at her wrists to bind them.

The flogger snapped against her back when she fought too much, “Stand still!” Caius boomed.

With her hands wrapped in leather, her arms were lifted high above her, joined to a joist in the ceiling, where a complicated apparatus of chains, ropes and bolts of iron loomed ominously.

“Keep your peace or I’ll gag you!” the man proclaimed.

Caius roamed about her, tickling, jostling and flogging her shoulder, thighs, ass and belly with his whip. It appeared torturous. But if this act was to punish her, it was almost self-defeating. Charlotte’s body seemed to swoon with an unbidden passion arising as the striking leather thongs held her at the edge of pain and perfect pleasure—neither state complete, both seducing her with the promise of more; but not delivering on that promise, she was left restlessly aroused.

As often as she screamed in pain when one daunting strike would rip at her ass and thighs, she would moan as the instrument caressed her lightly across the belly and breasts—as though Caius might be loving her through this horrifying ordeal.

Ah! She groaned to herself, if only he would rip aside the awful barrier locked tightly over her most sacred region and let loose his fire in full force. Her empty cunt clutched for something more than this cunning tease. What thoughts! What inspiration now! What was happening to her sense of decency? What was altering in the order of this world that she should feel such things while in the midst of this mortal terror, this very threat to her body and soul? What was this? Peace? Contentment? Aye, no! But life, raining down on her, filling her so sweetly and so vilely. The world had gone awry.

Charlotte closed her eyes, trying to absorb the nature of this new knowledge. But there was no answer to her constant questions. It was beyond reason, in the realm of mystery where the secrets of the universe were never revealed.

At one point, her body seemed to scream, to open wide as the flogger descended with an unexpected fury down her back side from her shoulders to her knees. No pleasure here, she still ached for more and wondered why.

Her body screamed again and suddenly the flogging stopped.

When, at last, she opened her eyelids on the cruel and silent dungeon, she expected to see Caius with his feral darkness looming over her. Instead, she gazed on Mountbane standing before her with a dispassionate expression—one that only deepened her abject humiliation.

“Are you with me, or have I lost you already?” he quipped lightheartedly

Her heart poured out her grief, but she said nothing. She had no words now.

“Your silence speaks,” he said. Striding forward, she recognized the key to her chastity belt. With one simple turn of the lock, she was free of it, more vulnerable and more wanting now than what she imagined she could be.

Her husband’s hand was at her recklessly speaking snatch. “This, wife, is the truth about you,” he declared while running his fingers through her shadowy cleft. Her groin lunged for him shamelessly. “Even now, you cannot refrain,” he only faintly snickered. Mockery was unnecessary when her body spoke so plainly. “Lust boils from this hungering belly. I will show you that a hundred times over. Today has just barely plumbed your depths.” The fiery pleasure shooting through her body came with ruthless spasms, one riding high atop the one before until she was shuddering uncontrollably while she wept tears. “How easy you are, slave.” Mountbane turned to Caius, “My whip.”

This implement was not the miraculous flogger with both bite and seduction in its leather talons, but a mean tool of punishment.

“Your defiance will cost you bitterly. You will greet each day wondering what terror will be meted out. I have so many, I would be glad to try each one on you before you quit my dungeon. But for now, you’ll have the whip—the real one, the one that will bite your flesh and leave marks that will not heal for days. See if your body hungers now.”

He stood back from her and strode to her bare backside, finally laying his whip in cutting snaps against her flushed skin. Sweat and body oil made the brisk strikes singe the surface, and Charlotte began to scream as the pain supplanted all thoughts of her previous pleasure. Again, again and again the braided cord unfurled across her undulating loveliness, wrapping at her sides where it cut unmercifully, striking her ass and back straight on. Then, when Mountbane moved to face her one last time, he ripped at her belly, breasts and exposed virginity leaving daring stripes of red.

Mountbane done, she slumped exhaustedly. With her feet failing to support her, she almost hung by her wrists in misery.

“Bring her to her knees,” he ordered his company.

Loria obeyed the command having her master’s newest slave kneeling at Mountbane’s feet. She backed away as Charlotte looked upwards.

“And what do you say to surrender now, my miserable wife?” he asked.

It took some time for her to draw the words from inside a confused brain and bring them forward into her dry mouth, where they finally spit with venom from her lips, “I shall not surrender to you now or ever. You are a vile and evil man! I’d rather endure this dungeon a hundred years than spend one as your wife!”

Mountbane smiled, sighing, then turned away—not at all disturbed by Charlotte’s scathing retort. “This is how she treats my gifts?” he bantered to no one special as he haughtily circled the room. He seemed to devise new schemes as the next few minutes moseyed by, while the dungeon and Charlotte waited for his decree. Finally, having all things clear in his mind, he announced to Caius, “Shave away her hair and let her serve as the lowliest of your slaves.”

It took some seconds for the intent of his decree to dawn on his withered bride. She climbed to her shaky feet, imploring him, “Ah, please no, sir. You take my pride, my hair, my self-respect, all that?”

He shook her off as she clutched his arm, while Caius grabbed the desperate woman with a firm hand. “If it takes robbing you of everything including your beauty, so shall it be. Besides, since we have the rest of your life to accomplish your surrender,” Mountbane went on, “what are a few months of abject degradation when eternity stretches before us? By the time your body has repaired from the bruises and your hair has grown to its full length, you will have succumbed.”

“No, I cannot,” she struggled with no results, but more frustration.

“Oh, but you can,” her husband countered. “And gag her, Caius, if she can’t keep her tongue.”

Resolved, Mountbane strode into the darkness to the stairs, while the silent dungeon heard the shuffle of his footsteps as he returned to the lands above.

d

That evening there was a pile of flaxen hair on the dungeon floor, mingling there with Charlotte’s tears. She wept bitterly over her fate—turned into an abject creature of vile abuse, with a collar about her neck and metal manacles that would remain about her ankles and wrists should, in her jailer’s mind, the need for them arise. The chastity belt returned, fitting even more securely being tightened down by Caius’ mighty force. It was customary for idle men to scour the dungeon for a slaves to bed. Because Charlotte was considered the most prime target for an anxious dick in Mountbane’s realm, the device was necessary to ensure that she would finally come to her marriage bed the virgin she was when she arrived in Ilusia. (This was, perhaps, Caius’ greatest fear—that he would fail his master. The enslaved wife of his noble Lord was too fair a flower in his eyes) Though Charlotte vowed against Mountbane’s intended outcome, no one else doubted his resolve or his schemes for realizing his wish. His God-like ability to woo, inspire and manipulate was what made most women in the tiny northern province lust for their handsome Lord.