Chapter One

 

The dildo spread her sphincter then slipped smoothly into her ass. Megan's first gasp of pain turned into a pleasurable shudder as the device settled into place. Pain and pleasure...they were two sides of the same coin. It was as if celestial accountants were balancing the scales, ensuring that every pain was offset by pleasure of equal intensity.

This is the way life is, she thought philosophically. My situation is no different than anyone else's, it's just more extreme. Normally, people experience pain and pleasure in small doses. In this place, the doses of pain and pleasure are supersized. Here, at the Shenandoah Horse Farm, unbearable pain and addictive pleasure are the rule not the exception.

She kept her eyes closed, remembering the day she had arrived. It had felt like she was being rescued at the time-the good guys were saving her from the villainy of the FBI interrogation center on P Street. The truth was that she had traded one kind of bondage for another.

How was she to know? Her life had been full of privilege before the cops had taken her to P Street. She had been a student at Columbia, where she spent her time learning the classics, protesting the government, and learning about sex and love. She had been a champion of human rights, using her haunting beauty and intellect to lead Columbia students in protest.

That girl was long gone, replaced by this strange and sensual creature who didn't fit into any known mold of human behavior. They called her a harness-girl because who wore a harness and pulled a man in a cart, but there was more to it than a simple debasement. She was subordinate to men, like every other creature on the planet, men dominated her. Instead of spending her time thinking about great philosophical questions, she now thought about her feelings, about the extremes of pain and pleasure she had or would experience, about her submissive lifestyle forced on her by powerful masters.

Forced...forced on her?

Did she have a choice? Did they force this role on her or had she submitted willingly? Was this a rationale to excuse her own perverse behavior, her own need to submit? She honestly didn't know the answers. The pain, humiliation, and dominance were real, and they were delivered with a cruelty that she never knew existed in ordinary men, but the big question remained-despite the duress and the lack of other options, had she submitted willingly?

The truth was that she found the lifestyle...easy to accept. It was a mystery to her how anyone could find a whipping, or pulling a cart like a pony, or sleeping in a stable ankle-chained to the floor, but she did. After all this time, after all this pain and pleasure, she had finally admitted to herself that she needed the stimulation. Returning to the moderation of her old life was impossible to imagine.

She squeezed her tight ass and felt the shiny metal dildo inside. They penetrated her like this sometimes to remind her that her asshole, her vagina, and her mouth were most valuable as receptacles for a man's cock, and always available for this purpose. This belief was acceptable in this world-men took the woman they wanted when they wanted, and no one batted an eyelash. She was no longer a person an American citizen with the same rights as everyone else, she was a lesser creature, a harness-girl, a beautiful creature who existed in the nether space somewhere between an animal and a human being.

After six months on the farm, she began to believe this. She had morphed into a slave, not just in name but in character, in the fundamental ways her behavior had changed. Her sexual appetite, for example, had no limits...none. The gentle fondling and petting of the past, the considerate fucking of college boys, and the soft tremors of her de rigueur climaxes had been replaced by vicious whippings and leather bondage, by the rough and demanding thrusts of a master's rock-hard cock, by mind-numbing orgasms. Things she had never imagined she would tolerate, she now craved.

Craved...?

It was more than a craving. She could not express her feelings with mere words. She didn't simply crave a master's dominance, she needed it to live. This need was no simple addiction, no simple dependence that she could break if she wanted. She didn't enjoy pain, she hated and feared it with every ounce of her being, but she understood that extreme pain was the price of extreme pleasure. There was no ecstasy without suffering. It was the truth that drove her.

The mind-bending orgasms she found in her bondage had the same priority for her as air, water, and food. This was not a passing phase, not a daring youthful experiment, this was who she was.

 

***

 

"Are you okay?" James asked.

She looked up at the black man and smiled. James was the senator's valet and butler...and her keeper. He decided where she went, what she ate, and where she slept. It was on his word that she was punished or pleasured. His will defined her existence and therefore-she thought-he was her "master" in every sense of the word.

The senator was the Right Honorable F. Lewis Ignatius (Flip) Price, the senate majority leader and former governor of Mississippi. He was her "guardian," her pro temp owner as per the handshake agreement between him and Major Jake Faris, USMC

Jake was her official owner and master. He had taken her from P Street and brought her here to Shenandoah. He had defied her torturers, especially Deputy Assistant Director Frederick Roberts, the P Street commander who had tried to compromise Jake's integrity by assigning him her extreme interrogation.

Her owner...

It still felt strange to think that someone-a man-owned her in the same way he owned a pet. She had been a feminist in college; the idea that she was now someone's property offended her to her core. It also excited her. The notion that she was a man's property, his chattel, that she did not have any of the natural rights of a human being made her feel, well, owned. And being owned by someone like Jake sent a shiver of pleasure down her spine. She couldn't explain it, but the feeling that she was exactly where she belonged was real.

She blinked then without thinking answered James's question with, "Yes, Master."

He responded by laying his crop down hard on the bare inside of her thigh.

She screamed with pain as her nerve endings exploded. The crop wasn't the most painful implement in his collection, but it was one of the most accurate and severe for delivering sudden agony. For a moment, all she could see was a blinding white light, and all she could feel was the burn, and for that instant, unbridled rage showed in her eyes. The next moment it was gone.

James stared at her without anger. He had recognized the rage in her eyes but decided to let it go. The philosophy at the Farm was not to kill a harness-girl's spirit, only to control it. Anyway, this was not the time to fine-tune her responses to the whip.

"I told you not to call me 'master,' Megan."

Even though he was her master, he didn't like being called by this title. In his mind, which was filled with a perverse sense of bondage propriety, "master" was the senator's title not his. Major Faris had given guardianship of the girl to the senator, not to him. In any case, the senator was the master of this house, these lands, and all the harness-girls who lived in these stables. Megan knew this and understood the logic of it, but she saw him so infrequently that it was hard for her to think of him as her master. James, who tended to her every day, was her master, at least in her mind.

This was the way it was with all the senator's harness-girls, he thought. They lived "in the moment;" they didn't worry about what had happened before or what was going to happen in the future. Their focus was on the here and now-the whip, the harness, the stable, these were their realities. The past and future were nebulous abstractions. He had known harness-girls who simply could not remember their time before the harness. It was a strange phenomenon, one of many.

"You need to make obedience your priority, Megan," he said quietly as he fastened her thigh and ankle in the leather strap.

"Yes, Mas...James."

Even with the pain of his cane stroke still echoing in her mind, it was hard to get the word "master" out of her head, she thought. She was a slave, and he was her master, at least for the moment; why deny it? She didn't understand, then again, it wasn't necessary for her to understand, only to obey. He cinched the strap tightly, and she felt the pleasure of a man's skin-on-skin contact as he worked.

The strap was part of the leg yoke under her ass. It was a heavy metal bar about thirty inches long that was designed to hold a harness-girl on the ground and immobile on her haunches. It achieved this with five contact points-short straps on the ends for her ankles, long straps near the ends for her things, and a long, thin silver dildo welded in its center of the bar.

James pulled hard on the leather strap until it was tight on her thigh and ankle then fit the strap's holding pin into the hole, slipped its free end into the keeper-loop, then doubled it and slipped the end back into the keeper-loop. James was always neat and symmetric about her bondage. He wasn't worried about her using her hands to loosen the belt; a black-leather arm-sleeve with matching shoulder straps kept her arms behind her back, her slim torso straight, and her lovely tits pointed forward. Around her neck was a high collar, also made of stiff black-leather, that severely restricted the movement of her head.

She could feel the dildo in her ass. There was no way to expel it with her legs strapped to the bar. Not that she wanted to expel it. She liked having something hard and thick inside her, it reminded her that a man would be back inside her soon. A man with...

She glanced contritely at James again then down at the thick grass, but she didn't apologize. Megan might be addicted to the farm's regimen of extreme pain and pleasure and to the intoxicating effects of her bondage orgasms, but the idea that she was more than someone's sex slave still existed in her mind. It was a difficult contradiction to live with under these conditions, but it was true-she wanted both the joy of total submission and the satisfaction of achieving something important.

"You just sit here and listen closely, okay?"

"Yes, Master," she said, purposely defying him.

He frowned at the repeated offense but didn't strike her again. They both knew he would punish her later for her obstinate disobedience, but he had more important things to deal with now. He stood up and glanced at Francis, the next harness-girl in the line.

Why were they assembled like this, Megan wondered? Every harness-girl on the Farm was here. There were twenty-eight of them altogether under the senator's protection, and they were all here-all sitting naked on their haunches strapped to their leg yokes, all attired in their best leathers, all facing an impromptu stage.

The stage...

The senator had never needed a speaker's platform before. On those rare occasions when he spoke to them, he just walked in the grass between their kneeling bodies, speaking in his deep resonant voice with its exaggerated Southern drawl. His words and tone always conveyed the impression that keeping beautiful girls in harness was a perfectly ordinary pastime. The drawl helped cement this illusion; she was sure he affected it to create his homespun image.

The platform he had chosen today was symbolic, she thought. It was a harness-girl racing cart, a sulky, with a carriage whip rising ominously from its side. The sulky was identical to the ones they pulled day after day. The symbolism was not lost on her or anyone else-something big was happening, something was changing for them. She could feel it in the air, sense it in the staffs' rigid faces, see it in James's eyes. She wasn't afraid of change, especially if it involved spending more time with Jake. She was ready for it, ready to get back with him in whatever role he saw for her.

He had saved her from the Dunford government's soulless interrogation center at P Street; he had brought her to the farm, to the senator for safekeeping...and admittedly for "slave training."

Jake had come to P Street as a virgin, but he had become fascinated by domination and emerged as a Dom. It was an amazing transformation, almost as if the instinct to dominate had been in him all the time and only emerged in the extreme of P Street. It was the same for her. She had had only limited experience with bondage before her arrest and interrogation. P Street had introduced her to the cruel horrors of torture, but it had also forced her to face the reality of her own submissive instincts. She had been fascinated by her reactions.

Fascinated...?

That was the wrong word again. She wasn't just fascinated by her reaction to dominance, by her submission, she was defined by it. This was who she was. She could feel it in every cell in her body. Despite the pain, the humiliation, the bondage, she felt as if she was finally home.

She locked eyes with James and silently asked him what the senator's address was about. He shook his head with an almost imperceptible movement that spoke volumes. He didn't want to say, he didn't even want to hint at what the senator would say. He knelt by Francis and began to tighten her straps.

She watched him work for a minute then turned away and just waited in the grass as the Virginia sun rose higher in the sky. On any normal day, they would already be on the road, pulling their one-man sulkies as if they had been born to the task, their tanned and naked bodies gleaming with sweat, their new muscles rippling with ecstasy and pain.

Ecstasy and pain...

That phrase pretty much summed up the life of a harness-girl on the Shenandoah Horse Farm. Long periods of bondage and forced isolation punctuated by the most intense pain and the most extraordinary pleasure she had ever known.

And she had consented to it! She had agreed to become a harness-girl when the senator had posed the question.