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That didn’t help—indeed, it did the opposite—with the true problem: my heart.
* * *
Heather
Strapped naked over the punishment bench with my spread backside on display for Ivan’s men as they ate supper, I heard, at last, the intelligence that I knew could save me.
Could…as in, if I had the chance to act on it, which seemed terribly unlikely at the moment.
Two of Ivan’s senior lieutenants had, it seemed, used their prestige relative to the rest of the henchmen to claim seats directly behind me. Misha had already made it very clear that if Pyotr fucked me, he would claim the next ride in my whipped bottom for himself. Grisha—the two had gotten their nicknames as a pair, given, Ivan had told me, by Viktor Chemin—had asserted that he intended to come on my face after face-fucking me, presumably at the same time as Misha’s degrading ride in my anus.
At least my nights of service to Ivan’s friends and colleagues had inured me, more or less, to that kind of casual obscenity. I hardly even started listening until, after laboriously translating into English his intention to use me like the misbehaving slut the fading bruises on my ass-cheeks showed me to be, Grisha shifted back into Russian.
“Ivan must have figured out that Boris was going to kidnap her. No wonder he gave her to Pyotr.”
Boris.It took a moment, because by that time I had so many Russian names floating around in my head, but I got there. Boris Belkonov, the boss of the power plant. I knew Ivan had had trouble with him, but regarded the man as a necessary evil. Knowing that Belkonov had actively plotted to cripple Ivan’s authority by kidnappingme, though—that would… thatcouldgive Ivan an opportunity to make the kind of change Belkonov’s simple, everyday dereliction of duty wouldn’t permit.
That change might end up being very violent, but here and now, displayed naked for my master’s minions, I couldn’t help feeling very violent. At the same time, the idea that Ivan had passed me to Pyotr out of anxiety for my safety, rather than from boredom with me, gave me hope.
I had fixed my eyes on the marble floor of the dining hall as I thought through the possibilities, trying desperately to figure out how I could get to Ivan and tell him about Belkonov, even if my master refused to see me—the thought of which made my face pucker into a sob and my blood run cold in my veins.
So I didn’t notice that Pyotr had come to stand before me until I saw his shiny black shoes directly in my field of vision. I looked up, worry filling my belly, and immediately found that worry multiplied by a hundred: Pyotr held not a birch rod in his hand but something else—something I hadn’t ever actually seen before, except in a terrible, fascinating picture in an old book, my grandmother’s last remaining possession from the old country.
Pyotr had a knout in his right hand, its three long leather tails curled across his left.
“For an exceptional whore like you,” the butler said in a voice as cold as death, “we must go back to the old ways, I think. Master didn’t see fit to give me the device that makes you obey, but stout straps are just as good for making sluts take their whippings, no?”
The handle, and a full foot of the whip itself, were of braided leather, reinforced I knew by wood inside the part Pyotr held so casually. The tails, which looked frighteningly stiff at their ends, stretched another six inches.
“When my great-great-grandfather disciplined his master’s serfs,” the butler narrated in a cruel voice, obviously doing his best to articulate each English word as clearly as possible, in order to cause me as much fear as he could, “he used a knout like this one on the women. They knew very well how to punish a whore like you without damaging her and lessening her value. If she couldn’t walk afterwards, and it hurt when her master used her, that was only the best way to complete her lesson.”
He gave me no further warning. He stepped to the side, out of my field of vision. Terrified, I twisted in the stout restraints that bound me to the whipping bench, trying to look over my shoulder. I could just catch a glimpse of Pyotr, raising the horrible knout to shoulder height, his other hand behind him like some old engraving of ancient punishment.
“No… please!” I cried. Not since my anonymous Guard trainer had first punished me had I felt anything like this much fear. My whole body shook. My mind felt like I might mercifully pass out before the lash reached my naked backside.
I didn’t, though a moment later I wished I had. The awful leather tails of the knout made a terrible sound as Pyotr laid them with full force across my bottom, and nearly instantly came the agony. It felt as if he had laid a burning brand across both my rear cheeks. I cried out, rearing my head back as my backside started to squirm, helplessly, my body desperate to try to ease some tiny part of the pain away.
The butler struck again, and though I had resolved not to give the brutal man the satisfaction, I heard myself scream as if I were listening to someone else. In some distant part of my mind, I hoped irrationally that my cries of agony might somehow reach Ivan’s ears, wherever he was. I felt certain he had left his palace, though, so that he wouldn’t have to watch or even to hear Pyotr’s triumphant enjoyment of his master’s fuck toy.
When the knout’s lashes bit into my poor bottom, in what felt like exactly the same place Pyotr had just whipped, twice, my entire body convulsed, screaming and crying and writhing in my leather bonds. I knew I couldn’t bear it. I knew that when the moment came, as it must—as I thought it would right this instant, because the butler had stopped and I felt certain he had started to unbutton his fly—I would beg. I would plead with Pyotr to fuck me anywhere he wanted, for as long as he wanted, to keep him from bringing the knout down on my bare backside one more time.
I hung my head, eyes closed and hair falling all around my face. I sobbed quietly, my bottom-cheeks clenching and unclenching desperately. Behind me, Grisha said, “Look at that little cunt. She needs it so bad. What a dirty slut.” At least the shudder of shame that went through my whole body at the coarse words could easily be mistaken for the effect of my terrible whipping.
I waited for Pyotr to walk around in front of me. To make his lewd demand.
But instead of having the butler’s aged cock presented to my face, I felt a hand—a gentle hand that couldn’t be Pyotr’s, on my cheek.
“Look at me, girl,” Ivan’s voice said, from high above me.
I looked up, and saw my owner gazing down at me with an expression that made my blood run cold, as fiercely as my heart had been pumping it an instant before. Ivan’s face looked like some gifted artist had carved it from a block of ice. So handsome that my heart ached as I thought about the tenderness in him that lived alongside the cruelty. So hard-set and guarded that I feared not just for my backside but for my life.
He’s putting it on for his henchmen,I tried desperately to persuade myself.He wouldn’t have come here if he didn’t actually care.
“I was going to leave you to Pyotr and these loyal men,” he said, “but I need to return a favor, so I’m going to give you to Boris Belkonov tonight. He and I had a little problem today, and I had to go a little rough on him. I want to apologize the best way I know how, by giving him my used fuck toy.”
I watched him look over at Pyotr. He spoke in Russian.
“Bring the knout here, please. I want to make certain this slut understands her place in my household.”
