“Nobody’s above the law,” Marie insisted.
<b>The man laughed at her.</b> “Marie, how naive you are. make no mistake,
we can and we do remain above the law. This place doesn’t exist, you see. There are no
plans, no photographs, no records. It doesn’t appear on any maps, apart from as a military
zone, and air traffic controls are under strict instructions to forbid any flights
overhead. We don’t pay council taxes, we don’t have mail delivered... As I said, we don’t
exist.”
The man stood and walked round his desk, looking her up and down. Reaching down, he
weighed her breasts in his hands.
“Yes, I can see why David might want to persevere with you. You’re not unattractive, or
you could be made attractive anyway. A new hairstyle, some sexy clothes, a manicure. Maybe
you need to lose a little weight here and there. Nothing we can’t handle.”
“OK, the joke’s over. You can let me go now.”
“Marie, there is no joke. Your life has already changed. We could keep you here forever
if that’s what David wants. Oh, we’d have to come up with some story to explain your
sudden disappearance, but we’ve done that before and we will again. That way David could
visit you here whenever he wanted and use you in any way he wanted. He’d be able to make
the decision as to whether you’d be made available to our other guests.”
“You have to be joking...” Marie protested.
“You are persistent, Marie, I’ll give you that. But I can assure you there’s no joke.”
He paused to let the message sink in. “Like I said, it’s up to David. He may prefer to
take you home again. After you’ve been trained he will get much more use out of you than
he was able to before. You, of course, will no longer have any choices in the matter. You
will obey him in much the same way as you obeyed Sally in the car. She really got to you,
I noticed.”
Marie wondered how he could know, but he nodded up at a video screen at the top of the
wall to her right, one that still showed the empty car’s interior.
“There aren’t many places you’re not watched, Marie,” he continued, picking up a remote
and flicking round a succession of views in rapid rotation. Most showed people preparing
for whatever party they had planned, but the Director found one he wanted and left it on
screen. A helpless girl was stretched across a frame like a large X and was being
systematically whipped by a man in a white shirt and trousers.
“What if I run away?” Marie asked, still defiant, though uneasy about the video image
still being played out on the screen.
“Then you’d be brought back, and you would be beaten. But you won’t run away. Thanks to
one of our recent members, an ex-military scientist with a delightfully deviant mind, we
have a new device that, should you decide to leave a predefined zone, will bring you to
your knees in quite exquisite agony. If you tried it once, you never would again.”
“This can’t be happening.”
“Now you’re starting to bore me,” the Director said, moving round his desk to press a
button.
Moments later Sally appeared at the door.
“Sally, take her to the blue room, please. She’s still not convinced.”
“Yes, Director,” Sally grinned.
Sally released the chain holding Marie’s arms to her ankles and pulled her to her feet,
holding her arm to guide her out of the door and across the passageway to another doorway.
This room had no glass panels, so they were already inside by the time Marie saw its
content. In the centre of the room stood an X shaped cross, just like the one Marie had
seen on the video screen in the Director’s office, mounted solidly in the floor. It was
padded with black leather covering. Marie recoiled, well aware what the cross was for from
what she’d already seen.
“No. Please. I’ll behave...” she stammered, trying to pull back from Sally’s grasp.
Sally, meanwhile, kicked the door closed with her heel and pulled the struggling Marie
to the cross, holding her against it by pushing her arms up her back till she thought
they’d break.
“Be still, Marie. You know this is inevitable. Once the Director has decided something,
there’s no going back.”
“What’s he going to do to me?” Marie begged.
“That’s up to him,” Sally answered matter-of-factly. “Whip you, at a guess.”
Marie kept on her useless and unheeded pleas as Sally passed a rope around her waist and
tied her tight to the centre of the cross. Once there, she unfastened Marie’s wrist cuffs
from each other, just long enough to pull each arm in turn up to the top reaches of the X
and fasten them there. Once done, her ankles were clipped to the lower cross. Sally
pressed a button by the door and asked to be connected to the Director.
“Yes, Sally?” his distinguished voice asked after a couple of seconds.
“She’s ready, Director. Do you want her gagged?”
“No,” came the reply. “I think we’ll hear her screams properly.
If that was said to scare Marie, it succeeded.
“Ready when you are, then,” Sally grinned.
“As you say, ready when I am. Thank you Sally.”
The intercom clicked and went silent.
“See you later, Marie,” Sally said, patting Marie’s tear-stained cheek before walking
out and closing the door.
The Director kept her waiting. She had no idea how long, but it was enough time for her
tears to stop and dry on her cheeks. Calmer now, perhaps resolved to her fate, she took
time to glance around the room, straining against her position to see. Above, two video
cameras, set high in the wall in two of the corners. Each showed a red light, so perhaps
she was being watched right now. To her left, against one wall, an item of furniture that
she would grow to fear, though she had no way of knowing just yet that a similar chest of
drawers would be found in most of the rooms at The Complex, and that each contained an
array of items of restraint and punishment, from ropes through cuffs, chains and tape.
From whips through paddles, leather straps, riding crops, canes and birches. From candles
through creams and lotions, each designed to react chemically with the skin to burn or to
freeze. From vibrators through strap-on dildos designed to enter any or all of a woman’s
bodily entrances.
Soon she would discover why the drawers were there.
Meanwhile, with a smile, the Director was arranging to have a similar chest fully kitted
out for David to take home with him, to sit in their marital bedroom for when the desire
to take his new wife (new, because she’d never before been like she would soon become).
Marie’s arms were starting to ache. And she would need to use a toilet before too long.
Yet more silence was all she got. Close to half an hour of it.
She jumped when the door suddenly opened. The grey haired man she recognised as the
Director stepped confidently into the room.
“Well, Marie,” he said after he’d closed the door. “Have you stopped being difficult
yet?” He walked round the cross and stepped into her field of vision.
“Yes, yes, I’m sorry. I’ll behave.”
“Sir. You will call me Sir from now on. Any other guests here will be treated with the
same reverence. Sir or Master for the men and Mistress for the ladies. Any problems with
that?”
Yes, she had problems all right, but now wasn’t the time to address them. She hoped her
eyes didn’t give her away.
“No, Sir. Sorry, Sir.”
“Better. Now, what to do with you.” The Director walked to the chest and opened the
second drawer.
From her position, Marie could see the range of whips it contained.
“Please don’t punish me, Sir. I promise to behave,” she begged.
“That’s good, Marie, because failure to do so will just cause you more and more pain.
There will be times when you’ll be punished because you disobey or hesitate. There will
also be times when you’ll be punished just because one of our guests wants to do it.
Obviously you can influence the former, but not the latter. But....” he paused, picking up
a crop. “That’s future behaviour. We still have your recent lack of respect to deal
with.”
“I said I’m sorry, Sir. I was wrong. Please don’t. I won’t do it again...” Marie was
starting to babble.
“But you can’t undo it, can you? You already did it, and that can’t go unpunished. You
may as well accept the inevitability of that. Plus, I think as a matter of your training,
you need to know what punishment means.”
“God, please, no!”
“I consider myself something of an expert in the administration of punishment. I can
cause you pain you could never have imagined, without leaving much physical evidence.
Or...” he was in front of her again, stroking the end of the crop between her labia. “Or I
can mark you so anyone can see how rebellious you have been.”
Marie swallowed hard, fighting back the tears.
“But you are new and I’ll make allowances for that. Just be aware that what you are
about to receive will be extremely mild. But don’t try my patience, slave. It can be ten,
twenty, fifty times worse. Maybe, in ten minutes, you’ll not believe that, but take my
word that it’s true. Now, are we ready?”
Of course she wasn’t ready. How could she be? She watched as the Director walked to her
right, round back of her. She hoped her eyes were conveying her fear. His merely conveyed
confident absence of mercy.
He stopped, directly behind her, and she tensed, waiting for the inevitable. Instead the
crop stroked her, Slowly, from her neck to the crease of her bottom and back. It made her
shiver, despite the controlled warmth of the room. Then the crop left her skin.
“Count,” he told her.
Marie was about to question what he meant when her world went into overdrive. She became
aware that he had tensed and was about to strike, but only a fraction of a second before
he brought the crop down hard across her back; certainly it gave her no time to avoid it
or even tense to accept it.
The thwack of the crop on her skin echoed around the room to accompany her scream. Fire
had ignited on her back and she wriggled and pulled against the bonds in a fruitless
attempt to get free, or at least to rub away the pain.
“I said count,” his menacing voice reminded her.
“One,” she sobbed.
Again he tensed, and again the cruel instrument took over her nerve endings, an inch
below the previous blow. She was crying fully now, pleading for freedom or an end to
this.
“Count!” he called angrily, bringing the crop down hard across her bottom.
“Two!” she shouted. “Three!”
“Better. Now, be ready, we’re going for four, five and six,” he told her.
This time she was tensed, ready. But he was better at this than she was. Experience, she
supposed. He waited for her readiness to pass, and then a second longer before swiping
across in a Zorro-style Z shape, right to left between her shoulder blades, then lower,
left to right, the middle of her back, and finally right to left again, just above the
swell of her buttocks.
“For, five, six,” Marie sobbed, her strength ebbing so that all that was holding her up
were the straps around her arms and waist.
“I give you a choice now, Marie,” the Director was telling her from somewhere within the
red veil that threatened to take away her consciousness. “Make the most of it, because I
don’t often give slaves choices. You can have one more, very hard, or another six like
you’ve just had. Think carefully.”
God, was this really happening? How much worse could really hard be than what he was
already doing, i.e. excruciating? But the fact he said it at all meant it could be, and
the thought scared her. One or six?
“One,” she said before she’d had time to think it through too much. “One, Sir.”
“Ask me for it. Say please. I want you to want it. When you’re fully trained you may
find you do need pain.”
“I doubt that, Sir. I’ll never want this.”
“We’ll see,” the Director told her, his assuredness really getting to her. “But ask me
anyway.”
Marie swallowed hard. What was she doing? “Please, Sir, can I have one more?”
“One more how?”
“One more hard one, Sir.”
“How hard?”
“Very hard, Sir.”
“OK,” he said with a smile. He loved this.
He took his time, watching her reddened skin waiting for him. He selected his spot; in
fact he’d been saving this area of skin, as yet unmarked from the earlier blows. he knew
she’d opt for the one. They always did. And always regretted it. But at least it gave him
the opportunity to show them what the word hard means. He pulled the crop back, flexing
the muscles in his arm, ready. Letting out a gasp as tennis players sometimes do when they
want to summon up extra strength, he lashed out across his chosen spot, calmly tossing
away the crop at the end of the stroke.
He didn’t admonish her this time for not giving him the count at the end of her scream.
There was no point in trying to reason with a slave who had passed out.
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