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“I’m Shelby.”
“You were there, you saw it all, huh?” the girl wondered aloud, cocking her head. Her face was quite pretty now that the thick make up had been worn away from all her crying.
“I did. You must have made the Madame very angry.”
“Ach! Madame always angry. Nasty bitch. Only when she makes love is she human.”
“And you’ve made love to her?”
She laughed. “Of course, everyone in this house is hers. We belong to Madame. We worship her. Then she tires of us and she sells us down the river.” Eugenia chortled in a strange sort of way. Frowning, her face looked miserable and disturbed, pale as a ghost. She fidgeted nervously with her clothes. With the bright halter dress long gone, she wore a thin white shift that hardly hid a thing from a discerning eye. Her heavy breasts pressed against the fabric, her dark nipples just small pebble-like shapes making clear indentations against the stark white.
“Is that what she’s doing to you? Selling you down the river?” Shelby wondered.
“Me. I’m just like everyone else. I try to be different. I try to love her, I try hard to love her and do what she wants. But, always she ends up hating us. Don’t bother with Madame, you end up scorned like all the rest.” She gave up a deep sigh and settled into the side of the cell, with her hands clutched to her breast, her eyes shifting, then her entire being drifting away for a long while.
Had she gone mad!
“So, what has my poor Eugenia told you, Ms. Ryan?” a sultry voice interrupted Shelby’s reverie.
She looked up, seeing that Madame Pavlenco had glided down the corridor unseen and had obviously
been listening to the strange dialogue between her two slaves.
“Nothing, ma’am. Nothing that makes any sense to me.”
Madame stood in the corridor beyond the cell’s bars, dressed in her black from neck to toe, her hands on hips, her demeanor more benign than what Shelby had previously experienced.
“But maybe it will make sense to you after you’ve been here a while,” her voice was mellow and melodic now, quite different than the harsh one that had crackled in the morning air. “Eugenia is very astute. She will have lots of nasty tales to tell you about me. You can assume that her stories are true. If you think she’s mad, you’ll find that she only takes after her mistress. Some think I’m as mad as the mad hatter. I prefer to think of myself as wickedly brilliant. You see, those that think I’m mad haven’t had the opportunity to see me when I’m sane, or if they did, they didn’t realize what they were seeing. I find it exhilarating to be seen as eccentric and peculiar. I even get that lovely ‘mysterious’ label sometimes. I’ve spent a good deal of time crafting my persona. Years in fact. I studied corporate executives in the West for many years, which is why my English is so precise.” She laughed lightly. “It’s a bit daunting when my customers travel so far into the wilds of these shadowy places only to find a woman with Eastern blood speaking to them in the language they understand. All part of my craft.
“One thing you’ll surely learn is that for all the talk of madness and eccentricity, I rule my little kingdom here with an iron fist and no one crosses me. I think perhaps you got that point today.” Madame Pavlenco suddenly sighed heavily, a little sadly in fact, as if she felt some remorse clutching at her hardened heart. Suddenly, her mood shifted and she spoke crisply. “Well, now that you’ve heard my little speech, you can prepare yourself for tonight. I’m afraid that I need to call you into service immediately, since Eugenia is going through a spell, as you can well see.” In fact, Eugenia seemed to have passed out on the cell floor; she hadn’t budged or made a sound since the Madame had announced her presence. “You’ll take her clients tonight, standard fucking mostly, but if one of the men should ask for something out of the ordinary – which here would mean heavy bondage or beating – you will direct them to me first. I do make certain that my girls are protected from the thugs. Since you will eventually be sold, I don’t want to see your value slide. What I’m glad about is that you are amenable to the hard action. So many of the girls have to be sexually reprogrammed to endure pain. And that takes so much time, such a tedious thing. However, Col. Jessup assures me that won’t be necessary with you, that you have a natural predilection for masochistic sex. He also said your body heals fast. That’s very good. You don’t know how grateful I am that you won’t be out of service for too many days after a good session. But then that sometimes can’t be helped when most of our customers tend to prefer a clean slate on which to write their tales of power.”
The women sighed again, “So, Shelby, Victor will be along shortly to get you ready for tonight. And please,” her brow furrowed as if she were perplexed, “do put a little sweetness into your expression. You’ve looked like nothing but a dour urchin since you’ve been here. Certainly we’re a far cry better than that grimy detention facility the Colonel runs. Here, my whores can’t afford to wear their emotions on their sleeves. So whatever feelings of gloom and doom you might be entertaining because fate has led you to me, rid yourself of them now. If you enjoy sex at all, you might even enjoy the night. There are no injunctions against a few good orgasms, so why not indulge yourself? Most of the men are clean and well kept. Not those rugged-smelling brutes you normally find. I’m very particular about my whores and my clients, which makes my brothel one of the finest in Eastern Europe. I think you’ll find it a rather pleasant place.” Her attempt at a smile was strained but reasonably genuine. And then her glib speech was over.
For one brief moment the bizarre thought flashed through Shelby’s mind that she was in the presence of a country club wife arranging a cocktail party. Weird, how the mind twists itself in extreme circumstances such as these. Only after Madame Pavlenco left and Shelby shook herself back to reality did she let that crazy thought go.
As far as Shelby could tell, the Madame of the house was quite sane, alarmingly sane in fact. Everything else was just a show, intended to throw the rest of her world off guard so that she could remain in control. For God’s sake the woman even spelled it out in plain, and, yes, very articulate English. Who could argue with that? If she hadn’t feared her so much, Shelby might have admired her cunning.
Of course, there was Eugenia still huddled in the corner of the cell. Her white shift had ridden up so that Shelby could see the marks from her beating, savage welts that would take days to heal. She seemed to be sleeping peacefully, until Shelby’s staring eyes penetrated her somnambulant stupor and the girl awoke.
“Oh, damn! My pussy aches!” Eugenia sat up, grimacing. Suddenly wide awake, she launched into an amazing monologue. “You know the way she stretched my labia? She likes to do that, she likes to make it hurt like hell. She’s teaching me to absorb the pain. I’ll bet that you didn’t know that she attached the weights to my inner labia, did you? Not the outer ones. That’s what everyone would think. Those wouldn’t have hurt at all. No, it’s the inner ones that arouse her, that caught her fancy because mine are so naturally pronounced. She says she’s only enhancing what God has already given me. She’ll stretch them out until they are dangling between my outer lips, until they are red and swollen, signaling my sexual ripeness, my fertility.” Eugenia laughed for a moment before being reduced to tears again. “Isn’t that ironic. I’m not fertile at all. That was taken from me…” her sad voice drifted and she gazed down at her bruised knees, picking at the skin in a disturbing way. Then her face transformed again, and she looked up with a lighter expression, speaking wistfully. “Sometimes I think she’s making me into a freak. She does that, you know. Turns us into freaks, when it suits her. Watch your back, Shelby Ryan, make sure you watch your back. I was once a little American girl from Maine. Maine, what a nice sound that has, firm, steady. It’s a very sober place, but not nearly as sober as Madame’s Pavlenco’s house.”
Shelby shivered from the base of her spine to her fingertips. The warning from Eugenia’s lips might have been so much nonsense, just like much of what she said. But in that instant, the redheaded girl was brutally honest. As sane as Shelby would ever know her to be. And her warnings were not ones that she would take lightly.
For nearly three days Shelby was on call in the house as resident whore. Because she was new, all the regulars had to try her out. They took turns, rolled dice to see who had the right to initiate her as a prostitute, then rolled the dice again to see who had her next.
In a few hours, once word got around that there was a sexy American in the brothel, a fight nearly broke out. Shelby was huddled on the sidelines, her eyes wide with fear as the men tussled with each other, trading barbs in a foreign tongue.
Suddenly, Madame Pavlenco appeared on the scene in the common room, hands on hips and a withering smile on her red-painted mouth. The room fell silent and the fight immediately stopped, four petrified men shaking off their anger, knowing what would come of it should they continue.
Madame looked at Shelby. “You’re the cause of this. On the table!” she ordered tersely.
Once the champagne glasses were swept away, Shelby mounted a small cocktail table with the help of a vigilant Victor. Balance proved difficult since she was wearing high heels along with the slinky red dress. But when she was about to stumble back against Victor, Madame rifled a reproving grimace her way. “Deal with this, Ms. Ryan. Don’t make me have to take out my anger on your lovely body.”
“Yes, ma’am,” and Shelby stood up straight as an arrow, finding a focal point on which to focus her attention. A few seconds ticked by and she almost relaxed.
“So,” a more pleasant Madame Pavlenco gazed at her minions, “you want her, you’ll have to bid for her servi
ces. Let’s start with a thousand, you’re all good for twice that, so don’t complain.”
