Caine released Daphne's hair, allowing her head to flop back down again. He strolled around behind her, running his hand over her smooth flanks and into the gorge between her buttocks. "Open up your legs," he ordered. "I want to feel your pussy...unless you have some objection, of course," he added with heavy irony.

Whatever objections she might have had, Daphne kept to herself. She obediently shuffled her feet out to the sides, allowing Caine access to her sex. But instead of feeling his fingers exploring her virgin sheath, she heard a faint whistling sound, then felt the blades of the three tailed whip he had used on her breasts nipping at the lips of her sex and bottom-hole.

She made a muffled screech and involuntarily drummed her feet madly on the cold floor, driven by the pain of the lash across her labia. It felt momentarily to her as if he had sliced the vulnerable flesh of her girlhood with a hot wire, and she pictured a terrible wound, deeply cut and bleeding. However, after she was able to bring her body back under her command, she was stunned when looked back between her legs to see there was no more than a little pink mark and a slight swelling on her lower lips.

Daphne twisted her head around to face Caine, and made a sound suggesting both puzzlement and rage. She had followed his orders, so why had he hit her?

"I told you to open them," Caine explained, as if she had spoken aloud. "Spread them wide enough to show me you understand that the most important thing in your world is making me happy. Show me you truly understand that I am your Master, and that I hold your life in the palm of my hand."

Although it made her upper body sink an inch or two lower and thus increased the strain on her tormented arms and shoulders, Daphne moved her feet even further apart, until the lips of her pussy opened, and the brown star of her anus was plainly visible to Caine.

The vicious little whip struck again, this time tracing triple paths across the white expanse of her buttocks. "Present yourself like a humble slave," Caine snapped. "Arch your back and get that overbred ass of yours up higher. I want you to present yourself to me as if you are begging to be fucked."

Daphne was by now too exhausted both physically and mentally, to resist in any way or even to glare at him again. She shifted her body obediently, bowing her back to raise her hindquarters to a positively obscene angle. From where Caine stood, it did appear that she was almost demanding to be taken.

"That is an adequate position," Caine conceded, finally deigning to accept Daphne's reluctant cooperation. He cupped her sex in his hand, then probed inside with two fingers. "I have heard that you blueblood cunts are cockteasers, who love to let the boys play with your pussies and get all worked up, then leave them high and dry with their tongues hanging out. Is that what you did?"

"Nnnn!" Daphne answered, indignant at Caine's slanderous characterization of young female aristocrats as "cockteasers." She and her friends had very old-fashioned attitudes about sex, and she did not know anyone who fit Caine's description. Daphne herself had never allowed any boy more than a quick feel under her bra, and that only twice.

"Hmm," he said thoughtfully as he batted her suddenly inflated clitoris back and forth with a fingernail. "Perhaps not, since you still have your cherry. Now that I see how easy it is to get you lubed up, I can't imagine you playing that game for very long without giving it up to the first boy to get his hand in your pants."

Daphne was momentarily bewildered by Caine's accusations. She was not a cocktease, and she had never let anyone's hands in her pants (at least, not before that night on the train coming from the auction, when she had no choice), so what could he be talking about? Then she realized she was already responding to Caine's handling. Her hips were moving in tiny circles, as increasingly strong waves of an unfamiliar sensation flowed through her body each time he twirled her swollen love button in his fingertips.

"Nnnn!" she said again. She was prepared to be taken by her new owner; indeed she had expected him to use her sexually, and she knew that she would eventually have to submit to him. But she had not considered the possibility of being forced to enjoy the experience. That was too degrading to even think about. And yet, it was happening. "Nnnn!"

She had no way of knowing Caine was using one of his favorite tricks on her. He had surreptitiously smeared a dollop of a powerful contact aphrodisiac on his fingers while Daphne was thrashing in pain. The cream tripled the sensitivity of the female sexual tissues, so that she could not help but respond.

As Caine continued to manipulate her love button, Daphne grew more excited and the movements of her body increasingly urgent. In a surprisingly short time, Caine's expert handling had her on the edge of an orgasm and her hips were rotating ardently on his fingers. Daphne closed her eyes to better concentrate on the wonderful, overwhelming explosion...

Then his hand was gone, and she heard herself begging for him to continue, which came out as "Nnnn ahhhh! Nnnn ahhh!"

"You will be allowed to come as a privilege, a reward for good conduct, but only after you have earned it" Caine told her. "At the moment, you are a completely ignorant, untrained and practically worthless slave. But you will have the opportunity to change that and then, perhaps, you will be permitted to enjoy an orgasm."

Daphne clenched her jaws and made a sound compounded of loathing, frustration and humiliation. She hated Caine more than she had ever hated anyone in her life, hated the casual way he toyed with her most private parts, but to her shame, she wanted, no, she needed his fingers back inside her again to finish what he had started.

He again had no trouble interpreting her wordless complaint. "You still have the wrong idea, my girl," Caine admonished. "You continue to cling to the notion that you are somehow entitled to something, and for a slave such an attitude can only result in additional and unnecessary punishment."

She watched Caine as he selected a solid-looking oblong object from a cabinet on the wall. When he returned, she saw he was holding the handle of a paddle. He waggled it a little, as if testing the suppleness of the inch-thick leather oblong.

"As you will note," Caine said, squatting before Daphne and bringing the paddle close for her inspection, "the pattern on the face is raised a quarter inch above the surface, which is then reproduced clearly and quite attractively on the skin with each stroke."

Daphne's eyes widened when she considered how it would feel when the thin, stiff edges of the raised polygonal design were driven into her flesh with the weight of the thick slab of leather behind it, propelled by the force of Caine's arm. After a few seconds, she looked up from the paddle to Caine's face, and began weep and babble panicky pleas for mercy, the remaining tatters of her pride forgotten.

"Please, don't hit me with that thing, it'll kill me, I'll do whatever you want, just let me...," rose unbidden to her lips, even though she knew very well that: 1. it was perfectly useless to ask Caine for mercy; 2. In fact, it probably encouraged him to hurt her even more, because he obviously derived great pleasure from her terror; 3. in any case, the gag prevented her from articulating anything other than earnest, meaningless noises, so that her words came out as "Mmmm ehhh nnnn mmmm..."

Caine waited he judged Daphne was as frightened as possible, then moved around behind her. She turned her head to follow, edging her exposed hindquarters as far away from him as she could.

"No, my dear," Caine said, shaking his head in disapproval, "I did not give you permission to move." He knelt down, seized her ankles one after the other, and restrained them by cuffing them at the base of the legs of the horse. Daphne was spread even wider than before, and was helpless to protect her exposed sex and bottomhole.

She turned her head back and forth anxiously, trying to see what he was doing, but her view was so limited that she was afforded no more than intermittent glimpses of the hems of his trousers and his shoes. She heard a faint swish, and then something landed with a heavy impact on the base of her buttocks. The blow was so hard that it momentarily lifted her an inch off the ground.

For a fraction of a second, Daphne felt nothing. Then came a rush of pain that made the earlier whipping seem like a mother's kiss by comparison. The raised edges on the face the paddle bit deep into the soft flesh of her bottom cheeks, so that when Caine drew the paddle back, as he had predicted, the complex design was printed plainly in pink on the whiteness of her smooth hemispheres.

The sensation produced by the raised pattern was what Daphne imagined it would be like to have a hot waffle iron pressed on her ass, a terrible shock, but one which gradually ebbed away. The effect of the weight of the paddle was slightly delayed, but even worse. This was more akin to being pounded with a mallet, like a side of beef being tenderized for the table. The pain went into her gluteus maximi, inflicting deep bruises which spread and grew worse as the injured muscles clenched in protest.

Daphne flung herself forward, back, to the sides and finally appeared to attempt to launch herself into the air, all the while making stifled screams of mindless suffering. Caine waited patiently until her thrashing slowed and stopped.

"Now you begin to have some idea of how unpleasant the lot of a disobedient slave can be," he said, when he thought she was again capable of comprehending him. "Do you think you understand what I require, and are you ready to provide it?"

Daphne nodded vehemently, dislodging tears which flew off in every direction. She tried to communicate the idea that she was ready to obey him unhesitatingly, no matter what commands he gave her. Whatever he had in mind, however perverted or disgusting it might be, could not be worse than another terrible blow from that paddle.

"I almost believe you are...," he said, nodding. Daphne sighed in relief, her body slumping over the bar. Whatever happened next, as long as she did what she was told, at least he would not hit her with that fearsome weapon again. Then she stiffened in alarm, when he continued, "...but I think you need another ten, just to be sure the lesson stays with you."

Panic-stricken protests burst forth from Daphne, ending with a muffled screech, when the paddle landed across both buttocks, creating a new network of pink lines just above and parallel to the first. The third stroke pounded the quivering girl-flesh exactly half-way between the first two, and after that Daphne stopped counting.

For the remainder of the punishment (or lesson, or whatever it was), Daphne did not experience the individual blows of the paddle as such. She left the world behind, and drifted for what seemed an eternity in a hellish private universe until finally, a black pit seemed to open before her, and she fell into blessed unconsciousness.

Caine ran his hand thoughtfully over the multicolored, heavily lined surface of the unmoving girl's hemispheres. "Awfully delicate, these high-society bitches," he mused.