Chapter Seven
Morning sun finds its way through the heavy brocade drapes in Master Damon’s room. I wake in the softness of his big bed and have to blink in confusion.
In his bed.
Then I remember last night. How he fucked me on the floor, then pulled me up onto the bed and spanked me until I screamed, then fucked me again before we had dinner brought to us on a silver tray by the calm Robert.
It occurs to me if I don’t turn my head to see if he is here, this can still be real. I ball my hands into fists, wanting to fight the urge to find out.
Do it. Don’t do it.
“What are you concentrating on so hard, lovely Aimée?”
Biting my lip, I open my eyes, let my lashes flutter while I take in the fact that I am truly here, that this is happening.
“Aimée. Tell me.”
Blinking up at him, I whisper, “I wasn’t sure…if this all existed. I thought it was simply one of my pretty dreams.”
He laughs. “Are your sore ass and your sore little cunt pretty too? Yes, your cunt is perhaps the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen. And you know I love the marks on your ass—my own handprints. Unfair question.”
I smile then. “Master Damon, you are the master of unfair questions, Sir. Or so I’ve been led to believe, given my brief time in your schoolroom.”
His smile widens. His teeth are so sharp and white. Makes me itch to be bitten. Again.
“Well said. Now, shall we have breakfast? I find I’m hungry.”
“As you wish, Sir.”
“Ah, in that case…”
He pulls me with him as he sits up, dragging me across his lap, and I feel his erection pressing into my belly. If I squirm a bit I can press my mound against his muscled thigh.
He smacks my exposed ass, one wickedly hard slap.
I bite my lip, focus on keeping quiet.
“Are you trying to be a good girl for me? Yes? Well, today you will be good for me by moaning and screaming without holding back. I want to hear it. All your sighs of pleasure. All your cries of distress. You give those sounds to me. Understood?”
I smile only because I am certain he can’t see me. “Yes, Sir.”
He shifts my body until most of my torso rests on the bed, on the sheets that are the finest Egyptian cotton soaked with our sweat and come. I breathe in, then exhale, my lungs emptying in a loud bark that burns my throat as he bites my ass with his evil teeth.
“Ah, fucking God!”
“Not I,” he says. “The Devil might be closer.”
“Yes, Master Damon,” I answer through teeth gritted in pain.
“Say it to me,” he commands.
“You are closer to the Devil,” I tell him obediently, smiling.
“And how do you finish that sentence?”
I can hear the humor in his tone.
“You are closer to the Devil, Master Damon, Sir.” I’m careful to cover all bases, even though I know he will bite me again, or worse.
Oh yes, he might do something worse.
I am luxuriating in that idea.
“Better,” he says.
But he bites into my poor flesh anyway, then over and over again, layering teeth marks upon teeth marks until I can smell the blood seeping from my skin. I want him to make me bleed. Anything and everything, as I’ve thought to myself, as I’ve told him. I want him to kiss the blood from my wounded flesh, and he does, kissing and licking, luring me into the lovely heights of subspace, where the world is all sweet sensation and the brain chemicals I’m addicted to. But in a flash everything changes as he spreads my thighs and starts the hard stroking motion inside my cunt that made me squirt over and over that first day.
I try to prepare myself for that sense of abject helplessness I felt the first time—only eight days ago, but it feels like a month—but now it’s tempered by the connection I know I felt with him last night, that seems so apparent even this morning.
My body goes loose inside as I give myself over to it.
“Good girl, Aimée,” he murmurs, and I can hear the sharp lust in his voice, feel it in his swelling cock. “Not that resisting would be of any help to you.”
I let out the smallest laugh, and he pauses to press a thumb into the most tender pressure point in my groin.
“Oh!”
“Let me hear it. Did you forget so easily?”
He presses harder, that evil thumb, until I’m panting and squirming, unable to stop myself from trying to escape from the pain. But he stops me with the hand he has inside me, using all his fingers to fill me up. I hold still, hold my breath.
“No, Aimée. Are you going to be bad, suddenly? No, I don’t think so.”
He starts the hard stroking against my g-spot once more, and I know better than to fight it. He strokes and strokes, harder, faster, then his hand pumps up and down, fast and cruel, hurting me, although I love it. And I’m squirting all over the place, soaking his hand and the bed and my naked thighs as I scream. He begins again, and it takes only seconds before it happens once more, and this time my calves get wet, my ankles.
“Again,” he says, as if I could possibly argue.
My head is spinning, light, as he forces me to squirt again, then twice more before I collapse onto the bed. He turns me over with rough hands, straddles my face and tells me, “Suck me.”
I open my obedient, greedy mouth, my body buzzing with sensation, my mind misty but full of need. Full of wonder that I am allowed to take him into my mouth. He shoves his cock down my throat, choking me, and my eyes tear up. I try to breathe through my nose, but he’s fucking my face so hard there’s no time to breathe. The steel piercing hits the back of my throat and I fight not to gag too hard, glad my stomach is empty. He snakes a hand around the back of my head, grasping my hair in a punishing fist, holding my head up off the bed while he keeps ramming his lovely cock down my throat. My face is full of tears and snot and I can’t pull any air into my lungs, but I want this. I want to please him. I want to swallow his flesh whole. To take all of him into my mouth, down my throat, into my body any way I can.
He arches above me—I can feel it rather than see through my tear-glazed eyes—and he cries out, plunging into me, and I taste his hot come as it shoots down the back of my throat.
Yes. And now some small part of him is mine. In me. Belonging to me, and no one else.
He draws his softening cock out, smacks my lips with it, then my cheek. Then he’s using his hand to slap my face, making my cheeks sting, making me feel like his.
“Where are you, Aimée?” he demands.
“Right here, Master Damon. Sir.”
He grabs my face in a crushing grip, forcing me to focus on his face, on his blazing blue eyes. I see so much in there, something I don’t know how to describe. Something is happening here that feels…different. With him. For me. And so, it comes as no surprise somehow that he keeps me in his rooms and all to himself for the next two weeks.
It’s a Sunday, which I only know because I’ve come to realize the weekly bells I hear in the distance are church bells. Fifteen days I’ve been in the Master’s chambers, taken out only to be exercised in his private gym next to his suite. Sometimes it’s Robert who takes me, and sometimes it’s one of the brunette slave girls, who now cast me resentful looks, and even the one who talks remains silent. But I am too giddy to care.
Although…when I am left alone, I still find myself wondering about the beautiful, bad Christopher. What must he be doing now? Is he as resentful as the Girls that I am monopolizing the Master’s time? Does he think of me? And is any of this some sort of mind fuck for him, the way it is for me that I am thinking of anyone but my Master?
My beloved Master. He works me mercilessly, still, which I need. Crave. He has instructed me to wake him with his cock in my mouth, which I do happily every morning. And just as happily I give him massages, serve him meals on my knees. He has taken to using leather, laced arm binders to hold my arms tightly behind my back, placing a piece of toast or a small berry between my teeth and making me feed him, which thrills me, makes me wet for him. Everything makes me wet for him. Everything makes me love him.
We’ve talked more. All the time. He’s asked me so many questions about my past, but I’ve managed to mostly find a way around answering when it comes to my horrible father, my lovely, dead mother. We talk instead about my time in Paris, the trouble I got into at school, which amuses him. He never truly laughs, but tiny creases appear around his eyes when he smiles, or chuckles a little. So sexy I can barely stand it.
The sex and the kink are so intertwined now I can hardly remember how I’ve ever done it any other way. Not that he allows me to come all the time. Often it’s only the squirting, which is still sort of like coming, and yet it’s not. He loves to do that, and to leave me needing to come so acutely sometimes my stomach actually aches with the need. But I cherish it, that sign of his absolute authority over me, even when it wakes me in the middle of the night.
And the nights… I am always collared now, and I sleep chained to his headboard most nights, yet there is enough slack that I can move around, and he keeps me close enough that he can touch me. He does touch me. Before I am allowed to sleep. At three in the morning. Some days he must attend to the House or other duties, and he leaves me chained for hours at a time. I love those quiet moments alone too, when I’m left to meditate on the soft cotton sheets, on the weight of my chains, on the scent of him left lingering in the room like some ghost of his presence. When I allow my thoughts to dwell for brief moments on Christopher. But even in those moments I understand he is nothing but fantasy material, and what is real is the Master, what is happening now between us, what I feel for him.
When my Master returns to me he is always more aggressive than ever, and those are often the times he really hurts me. I am covered in his marks, from the cane, the metal claws he uses to scratch my flesh, the whip, which makes me swoon in some lovely and awful way. I have teeth marks on my breasts, on the insides of my thighs, in my armpits, which he delights in torturing. He has hung me in complicated torture rope work from the ceiling, the knots carefully placed to make me scream in dizzying pain. I love the helplessness in being suspended, the sensation of being decorated in his rope. But I love the chains even more. The cold steel. The primeval clank and rattle. I love it all. I love him. And as he suggested—as I knew would happen—the love has only grown, until it’s like a balloon overfilled with air, needing to burst. Until it’s like the building pressure just behind my g-spot before he makes me gush all over him.
I have swallowed those fearful moments in which I’m uncertain how this will end. The pain and my deep submission help me do this. I have little else to hang on to.
He’s been away all day, and I know to expect some harsh treatment when he returns. I’ve been in my chains for only a few hours. One of the sullen Girls took me for exercise, then bathed me in the Master’s bath. She wouldn’t even look at me, and her hands on me were cruel, but I find it hard to mind. I have not, after all, been asked to stay permanently. If only they knew that I’m as tortured by seeing them and their proud House brands as they appear to be seeing me kept in his rooms.
I’m dreaming in my chains when he is suddenly on me—I’ve failed to hear him come into the room—and he unfastens my leather cuffs from the chain and yanks me off the bed with one fist around the cuffs. I stumble to my feet, and he catches me just before I fall. He loves doing this sort of manhandling with me, keeping me literally off balance. And it does the job beautifully, my head sinking down and down into subspace. Into confusion. He yanks me around by my long hair, kicks my legs apart, then again until they are spread as wide as they can go, and I can barely keep my balance.
“Hands behind your neck,” he orders.
I bring my hands up and over my head, then behind my neck, and clasp them there.
He goes to work right away with his hand, fucking my cunt, still sore from his attention last night.
“Don’t you dare come, Aimée. You squirt for me, but don’t come.”
And I do. I soak his hand, his arm, my thighs.
“Ah, look what you’ve done to my rug. You must be punished.”
“Yes, Master Damon,” I say, filled with agonizing need and shimmering joy.
This was what I was made for. For him.
He moves around behind me and shoves me toward the bed, and I catch myself on the side of it with the front of one shoulder. My hands are still clasped behind my neck. Then he’s behind me, and I can feel his bare thighs against mine. He parts my ass cheeks and plows into me, which hurts like hell without the benefit of lube. But he does this often, and I’ve learned to take it. To take great pride in it.
“Beautiful, tight little ass,” he says from between clenched teeth. “But you insult me, Aimée. Your marks are too faded.”
“My apologies, Master,” I manage to gasp as pleasure moves through me.
“As you should be,” he says before he hits the side of my thigh with a sharp blow—sharp because the wooden paddle he’s using is covered in razor-edged metal spikes.
The pain is exquisite, even more so when he starts to fuck my ass once more, the strikes of the spiked paddle keeping time, until I feel the blood trickle down my leg. But I will gladly bleed for this man. My Master. My love. I am so, so grateful for all that he gives me.
He pumps hard into me, his hot come filling me up, his hand dragging the metal spikes up my thigh as he convulses in pleasure.
“Ah!”
“Ah!”
We cry out together. Pleasure and pain. Love and wonder. Perfection.
Everything goes a little dark for me after that, until he lays me on his big bed and cleans my bloodied thigh with his own hands. My bindings are gone, and I am naked other than my collar. Letting my gaze explore his beautifully muscled body, I sink into the softness of the mattress and the fine sheets. Into his oddly gentle touch as he tends to my wounds.
He looks down at me. “My good girl, Aimée,” he says, stroking my hair from my cheek, that mysterious smile on his beautiful lips. “I am so pleased with you.”
There is nothing I want to hear from him more than these words. Except…
“I love you, Master,” I tell him, the words issuing from my lips before I can stop them.
But he only smiles, moving onto the bed, pulling me with him until my head rests on his chest.
We lie quietly for a long time, and I begin to wonder if he’s fallen asleep when he says very quietly, “I lied before.”
“About what, Sir?”
“About my Master—Master Stephan. I did love him.” A long pause, and then, “I did. I hate that I told you I didn’t. I feel as if I’ve dishonored his memory. But even after all these years…this is the first time I’ve said either of those things out loud—that I didn’t love him, that I did. And since I’m being so honest with you, I have to tell you, it left me unable to ever love again. Watching him die for two years…I was so young. It was a terrible, terrible thing. At some point I made a conscious vow never to love anyone the way I loved him.”
“Never?”
“Not until you, Aimée.”
I pull in a sharp, gasping breath. “Surely not me,” I say.
“What do you mean? Why not you? You are imminently loveable. If I can see it, the rest of the world must see you the same way.”
“No, Sir,” I have to whisper. I don’t want to think of my cold, cold father. Not now, when I am in the arms of a man I have come to love. “And Sir, I haven’t been here very long.”
“And yet you say you love me.”
“I do.”
“Then how is it impossible for me to feel the same?”
I chew on my sore lip for several moments. “Forgive me, Sir, but I am not sure you do.”
He strokes a hand over my hair. “You’re probably right. Everyone feels these things differently. You may love me only as a slave loves her Master, which is only right. And I may love you only as a Master loves his lovely, obedient slave, who strives so very hard to please me, and I do. But it’s more a starting point than I’ve experienced in years. That in itself means something to me. I want it to come to mean much more. Do you, Aimée? Do you want to stay with me, learn to love me as I learn to love you? Do you understand what I’m saying? Asking of you?”
“I think I do, Master. You make sense. I’ve always loved those who commanded me a little bit, but it’s different with you. I love you, Sir. Enough to make my heart ache with it. But I know I’m only dancing around the edges of what might be. So yes, I understand you, Master Damon. Yes, I want what you’re asking of me.”
He turns and lifts my chin with his fingers, looking into my eyes. “I am asking. I never ask anything of anyone, I simply tell. I’ve been doing that for a very long time. But this I have to ask. Because love can only be given freely.”
He leans in to kiss me, and it is so sweet, this strange, utterly unexpected moment. I drink him in, wondering how I can want this along with the harshness. But I do. I want it all from him.
Everything. Anything.
He pulls back, and I feel him retreating, but I understand that too. This will take us both some time to get used to. I don’t want to think about the fact that we may never be able to, freaks that we are. But why can’t freaks love? Why not?
It hits me that the Master may love Christopher too, and the idea makes my heart leap and fall in the same breath. Is that why he has a name in the same way I do now? I haven’t dared to ask, to utter his name. I’m too afraid it will reveal how drawn to him I am. And suddenly I’m afraid I may be some passing fancy for the Master, and my chest aches with the thought.
Don’t lose your love for me, Master.
Don’t lose your love for Christopher.
I can’t bear to think of the bad, beautiful Christopher going unloved, he seems to need it so badly.
Don’t think of him.
Finally, we sleep, and I dream I am in a boat on turbulent waves—they crash around me, tearing the boat to pieces, until I’m floating in the cold water, hanging on to one piece of wood. Alone.
I wake with a start to find my Master standing naked at the window, his back to me. Realizing I’ve been left unchained, I think perhaps the dream is nothing more than a result of sleeping unbound.
I have become very good at lying to myself.
When he returns to the bed I pretend I’m asleep, and after a few minutes of lying stiffly beside me, he curls into me, taking me into his arms, burying his face in my hair. And I cry myself silently back to sleep, careful not to shed too many tears, while he holds me in a way he never has before. Desperately. So tightly I can barely breathe, his legs wound around mine.
I don’t know how much later it is when I’m startled awake. Something is slipped over my head and it’s pitch dark in a way the room never has been before. Rough hands binding my ankles together with rope, then I’m dragged from the bed and thrown on the floor, rolled onto my stomach and my wrists are bound in the same manner.
These are not the Master’s hands on me, and I’m panicking. The panic turns to full-blown terror when I’m lifted by two sets of hands and carried from the room.
Down the stairs and outside—I can feel the cold air on my skin, smell the salt of San Francisco even through the bag covering my head and fastened around my neck.
Where am I going and who is taking me? Taking me away from the Master’s House! But I’m too scared to even cry. I am afraid someone has broken into the House and kidnapped the Master’s slaves. That it has been raided by the police, which can happen at these places where kink is practiced to such an extreme. Or—even worse—that the Master is sending me away.
No!
A small sob catches in my throat as I’m thrown down onto what feels like carpet over metal, and I know I’m in some sort of vehicle. A van? The door is slammed shut and I’m left alone.
I want my Master, my beloved Master, to rescue me from this. To come and take me back into the House, into his rooms, to tell me it’s all a mistake. But I know already it’s not. Except maybe my mistake, for telling him I love him.
Master!
The tears pour down my cheeks unheeded. This is a form of torture I really cannot endure.
The door opens with a creak and I cringe, wondering what they will do to me. But no one touches me. Instead there’s a grunt, a loud thud, then a voice.
“Are you people fucking kidding me?”
I know that voice. It’s him. Him! The bad, beautiful slave.
Christopher.
The engine starts with a rumble as my heart turns over in my chest, and we drive off into the night.
* * *
The Training House stories continue in Book Two: BOY and Book Three MASTER