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CHAPTER6
Heather
I felt my brow furrow as I let Pyotr take the coat from my shoulders, so that I stood naked but for my heels in the foyer of the palace. The butler had decided on what represented my formal rank and title, more or less:slut. In Ivan’s presence, of course, he called memademoiselle.
A few times during the four months I had belonged to Ivan, I had raised my eyes to meet Pyotr’s. I hadn’t forgotten, on those occasions, that it could mean the birch for me—applied not by my unwillingly beloved master but by this horrible servant. Despite my mission and despite my reluctant affection for Ivan, however, I still had the intelligent, independent mind that I knew had in part attracted the Pretorian Guard’s interest.
When I stood, or knelt, or lay prostrate, in the presence of the man who owned me, an electric current of submissive need made it easy to keep my eyes where they ‘should’ be. My nameless Guard trainer had forced me to acknowledge that shameful, dark part of me with his birch and his probing hand, the night he had kidnapped me. Accepting it, when my gorgeous master was nearby, merely required giving in to the bodily urges that my affection for him seemed to make simply undeniable.
My eyes seemed even to seek out Ivan’s feet, rather than his face, when my master had clothes on—and his enormous penis, so often rigid with desire for me, when he didn’t. When he told me to look him in the face, the rush of elation that filled my chest at the sight of his handsomeness seemed like an ample—even an excessive—reward for my compliance with his dominant protocol.
But when the only people present to witness and to remind me of my degradation were Ivan’s servants, I found that compliance much more difficult. Above all, the butler, an angular older Russian who seemed like a relic of the imperial days brought my rebelliousness to the fore. For an instant, here in the foyer, naked before his censorious eyes, I looked into his sharply featured face.
I saw in his implacable gray eyes the same contempt and the same warning I had found there before. I could probably—presumably, even—get him into trouble with Ivan for calling me slut and instructing—as I felt sure he had done—the other servants to do the same. He, on the other hand, had obtained from my owner the absolute right to birch me when and if he decided I had misbehaved.
Pyotr hadn’t exercised that right, and I didn’t feel certain that if he did it would meet with Ivan’s approval. My master had awarded his butler the power to chastise his concubine on my first full day in the palace, four months ago. I had wondered more than once if things had changed since then; if Ivan had developed the same kind of feelings for me, his degraded bed girl, as I had for him—in which case the butler might find himself in hot water with a criminal warlord who even I had to admit had a deserved reputation for stern vengeance.
But I also knew full well that any report I could make to Ivan of Pyotr’s overstepping his bounds would only arrive after the whipping he would administer. Worse, I knew from the housemaid that the butler had birched two of Ivan’s previous concubines on very slight pretexts, and the warlord had applauded his head servant for maintaining discipline in the palace.
“You want I tell Master that you look me in eye, slut?” Pyotr said, his face hard and his accent thick. “You want I give you birch?”
I swallowed hard, working mentally to quell my defiance and trying not to let the conflict show on my face.
“No,” I said, lowering my eyes to the butler’s shoes. I forced myself to add the other word, whose absence would equally give Pyotr reason to punish me. “Sir.”
“Good slut,” Pyotr said. “Smart.”
He wouldn’t dare whip me, I felt certain, while Ivan was at home. He seemed to have sensed the possibility of his employer’s real affection for me, just as I had, though I also guessed that he didn’t feel any surer of it than I did. Whether that meant Pyotr thought he could birch me with impunity when Ivan went out, though, was a question that to my dismay made me feel even more rebellious in the butler’s presence.
My eyes seemed to quiver in my face, the urge to raise them again nearly uncontrollable. I wondered wildly for a moment whether something in me supposed I could find out whether my master loved me this way, at a terrible cost—by compelling this awful man to whip my bare backside within an inch of my life, as I had heard he had done to the previous two bed girls. Much, much worse I felt the need begin to build between my thighs at the picture of it, in my head: the butler standing over me with the birch in his hand as Ivan looked on, weighing my fate, poised between protecting love and dominant lust, between sparing me and watching with pleasure as his butler turned my bottom into a fiery agony I couldn’t bear to sit on for days.
“You wait for something?” Pyotr asked, his voice mocking. “Master is waiting.”
I let out my breath forcefully through my nostrils, hoping and fearing at the same time that the butler would perceive it as the snort of defiance I meant. Once again in danger of raising my eyes, I made my feet turn and start to move toward the hall that led to Ivan’s study.
“Stop,” Pyotr said from behind me, just as I had almost reached the entrance to the corridor. I froze, closing my eyes as a wave of anxiety went through me. I knew why the man had stopped me, because he had done it before. “I want good look at that bottom.”
I heard the butler’s shoes move across the foyer’s marble floor to stand behind me. I felt his hand take hold of my ass lightly, fingers tracing the welts from my birching at Feodorov Devushkin’s palace. This, too, Ivan had authorized Pyotr to do, to keep me in my place.
I bit my lip hard as the butler pressed his middle finger between the whipped globes, until it pushed against the terribly sore little ring where my master’s friend’s friend had used me so roughly.
“Da, slut,” the butler said in a soft, menacing voice, “you get it here tonight,da? This is place men like to fuck slut like you,da?”
I squeezed my eyes shut more tightly as the waves of heat seemed to travel all over my body. I grasped at the shreds of my scant memories from my all-too-brief training for this mission, seeking a way to keep some small piece of composure.
My trainer had informed me without any apparent regret that if the Guard gave me too much information or made me into too polished a sexual servant, not only would Ivan quite possibly suspect me of being a mole but—much more important from the Guard’s perspective—he wouldn’t find me as irresistible as my trainer intended me to be.
Your innocence, the man in the mask had told me, as I lay for all intents and purposes paralyzed over the whipping horse in the tiny cell to which he had walked me after getting out of the van,represents the most important of the commodities we’re going to sell to the man whose family destroyed yours.
I felt my brow working in distress as the butler’s finger pushed harder against the sore little ring between my whipped cheeks, and squeezed firmly, to make me whimper.
Nothisfamily,I thought back furiously, at the hooded man in my memory from months ago.And even if Boris Klimatovhadbeen Ivan’s grandfather, Ivan would still be his own person. Ivan… I think maybe Ivan loves me.
The trainer in my head, half actual memory and half my own imagination, responded, speaking words the real man had never said.
But your master put you in his butler’s power, didn’t he? What a tender, loving thing to do!
The awful finger pushed into my anus. My cheeks blazed as I felt how slippery the tip had become, with the semen the unnamed friend of Devushkin had left as a shameful reminder of his enjoyment.
