Chapter One

 

Saul Kramer plugged his Gauloise into the pile of butts in the ashtray and scratched pensively at the two-day growth on his chin. The man sitting across the desk from him was silent now, waiting for an answer and Saul couldn't decide whether or not to take the case. There was something not quite right about the man's story, something left untold. He swung his chair round to face the window and stared out through the grimy glass at the bleak London skyline. The intercom buzzed on his desk and he reached across to answer.

"Yes Kitty?"

"Would you like some coffee now, Mr Kramer?"

"Yeah, good idea, bring some in."

He released the button and swung his broad shoulders back around to face the client. Beneath Saul's heavy frame the chair creaked as if it might collapse at any moment and send the hulking private investigator sprawling across the worn carpet of his tatty office.

"What I don't understand, Mr Towers," he said.

"Please," the other man interrupted, "Call me Ron."

"OK. Ron it is. What I don't understand, Ron, is why you don't go to the police with this. It's a cut-and-dried case of kidnapping and if what you say is correct, slave trading too."

The office door swung open and Saul's secretary, Kitty, walked in carrying a tray. She put it down on the desk and began to pour coffee from a stainless-steel pot into two cups. Ron Towers glanced briefly at the staid-looking young woman in the knee-length plaid dress and horn-rimmed spectacles. With her long brown hair tied back in a ponytail and her black lace-up shoes Ron thought she looked like a librarian and gave her no further consideration.

"I can't take this to the police," he said. "They'd ask too many questions. You see, up to three months ago I was Carlos' partner. That's why he's doing this to me. When I found out just what it was we were exporting I bailed out and this is Carlos' way of punishing me for that." He ran his hand nervously through his slicked-back hair and straightened his tie. "The police would never believe I knew nothing about the women. I'd end up doing time myself, for Christ's sake." Kitty passed him a cup and he sipped the strong black coffee. "Will you take the job or do I have to find somebody else?" he demanded, the tone of his voice growing harsh.

Unimpressed by this display of anger, Saul lit another cigarette and drank some coffee, giving himself time to think. Finally he made his decision and as he did he knew that, in reality, there was no choice - business was slow and he couldn't afford to turn away any client. Least of all one as rich as Towers.

"Pull up a chair, Kitty," he said. "Take down some details. We're working for Mr Towers now."

Towers sighed with relief and smiled.

"It'll be two hundred a day plus expenses," Saul added. "And I'll start tomorrow. We'll get your wife back, Ron, don't worry about that."

 

An hour later Ron Towers climbed into a cab outside the offices of Kramer Investigations and disappeared into the London rush-hour traffic. Upstairs Saul Kramer leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. He was smiling broadly.

"Lock her up, Kitty," he said. "I think we've done enough business for the day."

Smiling to herself, the secretary stood up, placed her notepad on her seat and went downstairs to turn the sign around and lock the front door. When she returned Saul was pouring a glass of Scotch from a bottle he kept in the lower drawer of his desk. She closed the office door behind her and removed her spectacles, placing them on the top shelf of a battered grey steel filing cabinet beside the doorway. Then she loosened her hair, kicked off her shoes and waited, motionless in her black stockinged feet on the worn carpet. Saul watched her, saying nothing, sipping his whisky. He allowed his gaze to drift across the hem of her plaid dress, up over the shapeless garment to her neck, where the dress was buttoned all the way to her throat and on to her blushing face and dark sultry eyes. She avoided his stare, gazing down at a fixed point on the floor, waiting.

"Take it off," Saul said quietly.

Kitty's fingers rushed to her neck and began to undo the dress, fluttering clumsily around the buttons, working downward until the garment gaped open to her waist and she was able to shrug it off so that it slipped silently to the floor. She kicked the dress to one side and again waited motionless while Saul examined her body.

He watched the pale flesh of her arms goose-bump in the warm office and marvelled, as always, at the powerful tides of submission that buffeted this woman. Her large firm breasts, bulging over the cups of her black satin bra, rose and fell gently as her breathing grew heavy with lust. He felt his cock rising in his trousers. She wore matching panties and suspender belt and he could see from across the office that the crotch of her underwear was already damp with her juices.

"Come here," he ordered.

She walked across to him and stopped beside the desk.

"Turn around."

She obeyed, swivelling on the balls of her feet so that she had her back to her boss. Saul reached up and unclasped her bra. He flicked it from her shoulders and the flimsy black satin fell to the floor at her feet.

"Again."

Kitty turned to face him and Saul stared up into her perfectly round tight orbs with their tiny puckered nipples and smiled. He took another drink of his whisky, leaning back in his chair so that he could appreciate her fit smooth body in its entirety and then he slowly placed his glass down on the desk.

"The coffee was too strong," he said quietly.

Kitty swallowed.

"Have I told you about that before?"

"Yes, Mr Kramer."

"So I've told you before and still you make it too strong."

Kitty whimpered and nodded.

"I'm sorry, Mr Kramer," she said. "It won't happen again."

Suddenly Saul's hand shot out, the palm flat and hard as a board and slapped across his secretary's naked breasts. She shrieked in pained surprise as her fine round tits shook violently from side to side. Saul watched the imprint of his hand redden on her pale flesh.

"That's not good enough," he said. "When I tell you to do something, you do it. Understand?"

Kitty nodded.

Saul slapped her again, harder this time so that she stumbled backwards and nearly fell from the force of the blow. She caught herself and returned to her position beside him, chewing her lower lip and stifling a sob.

"Bend over," he said. "I intend to teach you a lesson in obedience."

Kitty bent at the waist and pressed the upper half of her body down against the cold wooden surface of the desk, crossing her wrists in the small of her back. Saul rose and stepped around behind her. He stroked his hand gently over the satin smoothness of her panties, feeling the muscled roundness of her buttocks. Then he tugged the underwear down to her ankles and left her, walking across the office to the filing cabinet. Jumbled together in the bottom drawer was a selection of whips, harnesses and restraints. He removed a riding crop and a set of steel handcuffs and returned to where his secretary stood, bent across his desk. The shaved rounded prominence of her vulva was clearly visible between her thighs and Saul dipped his hand to the moist slit and ran a finger up and down between her slippery labia. She moaned quietly. He pulled one of her suspenders away from her buttock and let it go so that it pinged back against the skin. She was silent. Saul grasped her wrists and fastened the steel cuffs around them. Then he took a step back and raised the crop into the air.

"I'm waiting," he said, dangerously.

In a voice weak with a heady mixture of fear and lust, Kitty asked for her punishment.

"Please whip me, sir," she said.

The crop whistled as it scythed through the air and there was a loud crack as the tight leather lacing struck the skin across her buttocks. Kitty screamed. A thin red weal rose on her pale flesh; a bright line across the myriad other, duller scars left by previous beatings. Saul's cock was like an iron rod now and he felt the throbbing grow in its head and the ache in his balls intensify as he raised the crop once more. He whipped her again, the leather meeting the line left on her flesh perfectly and wrenching a loud howl of agony from Kitty's contracting lungs.

"How many do you want?" he said.

"Ten," she sobbed. "Please give me ten, sir."

"Ten it is," Saul laughed and brought the crop slashing down again.

After the fifth stroke he paused to remove his shirt, already damp with his exertions in the hot office and then continued more violently than before, wanting her to beg for mercy before he stopped.

It was after six and there was nobody in the adjoining offices to hear the vicious crack of leather on flesh and the accompanying screams. Nobody to hear the pleading and the uncontrollable sobbing but if there had been, they would have turned away and gone about their business, for this building was down in the dungeons of London's commercial world. Discretion was the watchword here: faces went unseen, conversations unheard. In this world nobody saw or heard anything unless they were being paid to - and even then there were other allegiances, loyalties to codes of conduct that were above the rule of money.

Saul dropped the riding crop on the floor and ran his hand over the fresh red weals, sliding his thumb roughly along the sore raised flesh. Kitty was crying quietly, the tears pooling on the desk beneath her face. He pulled her upright by a handful of her thick dark hair and looked into her face. She was at her most beautiful after a whipping. Her eyes grew even darker and more liquid than usual and her eyelashes, weighted by the dampness of her tears, appeared longer and more definitively feminine. Even the blotching of her cheeks seemed to add to, rather than detract from, her beauty. Holding her tightly by her hair with one hand he reached up with the other and pinched her nipple, watching her eyes for a reaction. There was none so he squeezed harder and slowly they widened. Saul smiled, enjoying the effect the mild pain was having on her body. Then he released her, spun her around and unlocked the handcuffs.

"Get under the hook," he said.

In the ceiling, halfway between the front of Saul's wide wooden desk and the door was a steel hook. Saul had screwed it through the plaster and into the joist himself, a long time ago when he had first taken the office. Kitty stood beneath this hook, breathing heavily. Both nipples, with their tiny, puckered aureole, were solidly erect and the holes where she had been pierced were clearly visible in the pink flesh. She was still wearing her suspender belt and stockings. Saul opened the lower drawer of the filing cabinet again and took out a black leather sleeve designed to receive a person's two arms with hands clasped together and to lace around them in such a way that it could not possibly be removed by the wearer. He also selected a short length of nylon rope and then closed the drawer.

"Hands."

Kitty intertwined her fingers as if in prayer and extended her arms out straight before her. Saul slipped the tough leather sleeve over them and laced it to her elbows, pulling the cords tight so that no movement was possible inside the strange garment. At the end farthest from her body a steel ring passed through the leather and Saul poked one end of the nylon rope through this ring and tied it back on itself tightly. Then he tossed the other end of the rope over the hook in the ceiling and pulled down, raising Kitty's bound arms above her head. Saul yanked it tighter until his secretary was teetering on the tips of her toes and then he crossed to the wall where a metal cleat was bolted and he wrapped off several figures of eight to hold the rope in place.

Now almost all of Kitty's weight was supported by the leather sleeve around her arms. Saul stood in front of her stretched body, stroking her goose-pimpled flanks, running his hand down her arms, letting his thumbs trail into her armpits, down her ribcage, feeling her slim, drawn-in stomach, then moving back up to her breasts, riding high on her chest and on over her face and pausing there, the palm of his hand resting gently over her mouth and nose, his fingers touching lightly on her closed eyelids.

"Tell me, Kitty," he said quietly. "How much do I have to hurt you before you'll learn to do a simple thing like make the coffee properly?"

Tears seeped from beneath his fingers and ran down her cheeks. She opened her mouth and he felt her hot breath against the palm of his hand.

"I don't know, Master," she said. "Please make me learn."

Saul stepped away and went around to the other side of his desk. He rummaged in one of the drawers until he found a tall tapering red candle and then he took that and his cigarette lighter back to where his secretary was hanging from the ceiling. He lit the candle and held it an angle in front of her face and waited while the tip warmed up and began to drip onto the carpet. Then he moved closer to her body and the red-hot drops of molten wax began to splash onto her breasts, bursting on her nipples like hellish raindrops and spattering across her stomach in tiny explosions of liquid fire. Kitty began to scream, frantically trying to twist and turn away from the onslaught of agony and yelling her pleas for mercy through a mouth stretched wide by terror and pain.

"Please God, no more. Oh Master, it hurts so much! Please have mercy on me! I will try harder, I promise. I will do better. Please, God, stop this pain!"

Saul was pleased by her reaction and continued to direct the drops of molten wax on to Kitty's writhing body. As the wax cooled it solidified, leaving large red patches on her pale skin and he knew that later the act of peeling these from her body would cause her a great deal more pain and soreness. Finally he grew bored with this treatment and blew the candle out and released the rope from around the cleat on the wall. Kitty collapsed to her knees and Saul untied the other end of the rope from the ring on the leather sleeve but left the sleeve itself in place. She looked up into his eyes, her face damp with tears, her mascara-stained cheeks blotched and her lower lip quivering.

"You're disgusting," he said. "You look like a drunken whore."

Kitty flopped forward onto her elbows and pressed her face to her boss's dusty shoes.

"No, please, don't say that. I'm sorry," she moaned. "Please don't send me away."

"You know, Kitty," Saul continued. "I want to fuck you. I really do. But I can't stand the sight of your miserable face. What do you think we can do about that?"

Kitty knew exactly what Saul was talking about and her pleading became more frantic.

"No. No. Not that. Please master. I'll clean myself up. I'll make myself look beautiful again. Don't make me do that." Her tongue shot out and began to lick across the tops of his shoes, leaving wide damp marks on the brown leather. Saul stepped back.

"Get up," he ordered. Crying, Kitty obeyed. "Open the window." She walked behind the desk and struggled to raise the sash window with her arms still bound together in front of her body. Eventually she succeeded, getting her leather-wrapped clenched double fist beneath the frame and lifting with all her strength until the window slid upwards. When it was done she looked over her shoulder. Saul was behind her, sitting on the edge of the desk, his muscular chest pumping up and down as he watched her.

"Go on," he said. Kitty hesitated from the briefest of moments, long enough to see her boss's expression darken and then she ducked through the open window.

Kitty had a deep-seated fear of heights and the office of Kramer Investigations was on the second floor. She poked first her bound arms, then her head and finally her naked chest through the window and then stopped, dropping to her knees in the office so that her belly rested on the sill and she was half in and half out of the building. Thirty feet below her, the cobbled backyard of the office blew with scraps of newspaper and discarded burger wrappers. She whimpered with terror, her mouth dry and her pulse pounding in her ears. If anybody walking past in the park beyond the yard had looked up they would have been astounded to see the sobbing naked woman with her bushy dark hair hanging around her face and her arms bound together in black hanging beneath her pendulous breasts.

Behind her, Saul slid the window back down so that it rested on her back, trapping her, and undid his trousers to release his monstrous cock. Without hesitation he rammed into her vagina, pushing through her sopping labial lips with one powerful thrust. Through the glass he watched Kitty's head fly upwards as she stifled her scream. He pulled halfway out and pumped into her again.

As he worked her squirming body the pressure built in his balls and he felt his orgasm rising from the depths of his loins. He pounded into her faster and faster, his slab of stomach muscle slamming against her bruised buttocks, knocking her thighs against the sill and grazing the skin from her back where the weight of the window rested. At last he came, spurting great gushes of spunk into her sopping pussy, ramming in and out of her in a frenzied rape that ended only when he was completely spent. He pulled out, wiped the purple end of his cock on her buttocks, slid the window up and slumped back into his chair, his trousers still around his ankles. Kitty slipped back onto the floor of the office, sobbing. She turned so that she was sitting, leaning back against the wall and Saul extended his foot so that the sole of his shoe pressed between her open legs. Full of shame, she humped herself against the rough, gritty leather, her mouth wide open and her eyes staring and empty. When she came, her orgasm squeezed a liquid mixture of her own juices and Saul's spunk out onto the carpet and her body trembled and shuddered beneath the rolling impact of the waves of ecstasy.

Saul reached down and lazily loosened the laces holding the leather cuff around Kitty's arms. Once released, she immediately pushed herself forward onto her hands and knees and crawled between his open legs so that she could clean him. He sat, waiting for her to finish, enjoying the sensation of her warm tongue licking around his cock and balls, cleaning away the spunk and pussy-juice and he thought about Ron Towers and decided that he trusted him just about as far as Kitty would be able to throw him.