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I had risen. Until Heather had come into my life, I hadn’t even realized why. I had risen, it seemed entirely obvious to me now, because of my empathy. I had had the uncanny ability to know precisely what Chemin wanted, almost before he wanted it. Because, over and over, what Chemin wanted put me in situations where I had to kill or be killed, I gained the reputation for violence that had perversely endeared me to my boss.
I couldn’t escape, and because I couldn’t escape I couldn’t fall in love with any girl, no matter how enchanting, submissive, or lovely she might be. Worse—much worse—in getting rid of her I had to deliver Heather visibly into the clutches of others. I had to show anyone looking that they couldn’t get to me through the American girl I had seemed to find too bewitching.
Giving her to Pyotr, as much of an ordeal as it would be for her, would at least spare her the dangerous cruelty of one of my other henchmen. The butler liked to show his power in the palace, but he knew I wouldn’t tolerate it if any actual harm should come to Heather.
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 kidnapping me, though—that would… that could give 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.”
