Alex pointed at EZ, who hand just punched in some redneck rock'n'roll, and Joy. “I'll go along to supervise,” she said, “but I don't want to say anything or touch her. I want to make absolutely sure she doesn't know I'm here.”
“Better ask Michael to help you, then,” Tyre said. “Don't take any risk of dropping her. She's going to be too disorientated by sensory deprivation to walk.”
“Aye-aye. Come on, crew. Shanghai time.”
Tyre and Kay stolled over to keep Anne-Marie company. They could hear Chris's bullwhip break the sound barrier, even over the shit-kicking music EZ had put on. Anne-Marie tapped her toe sedately to both rhythms and pumped up the bulb on her Bardex enema apparatus. She smiled at them and slowly released the air, then hung it on something that looked like a steel hat-rack (actually made to hold IV bottles) by the operating table. Then she went over to the wall and took down each cane, examining them minutely for cracks, and took a few practice swishes with each one. She handed one, easily a foot longer than any of the others, to Tyre, who cleaned its tip with an alcohol swap. Kay mimed a shudder. “You'll never take one of those things to me,” she grimaced.
“Let's just hope I never have to take one to EZ,” Tyre chuckled. “It would cut that skinny little boy-rump or hers to ribbons.”
“Lemme see one of those things, please,” Kay said to Anne-Marie.
“No one ever died of pain alone,” Anne-Marie said briskly, handing her a length of rattan with a leather-wrapped handle. “But a good many people have died, or otherwise wasted their lives, because they lacked the discipline that pain alone can inculcate in a stubborn heart. It's all in the wrist, dear.”
Kay hit the padded top of the leather horse. “The idea is to aim for the surface beneath the buttocks, rather than the bottom itself,” Anne-Marie counseled. “Thighs are better, though. They don't bounce as much, so the cane both crushes and burns. An edifying combination.”
“Salutary, even,” Tyre confirmed, putting her own cane back on the rack.
“If you mean it hurts like merry hell, I believe you,” Kay said, returning the implement to Anne-Marie.
“Yes, but it's an educational pain. Tidy, controlled, and very directed. The opposite of brutality.”
“Oh, bullshit,” Tyre said. “Tell it to the British navy.”
“But sailors were never caned,” Anne-Marie protested. “Military flogging and keel-hauling are usually excessive for the schooling of young ladies.”
“Keel-hauling?” Kay said. “Now you're talkin' something that might bash some sense into EZ's thick skull. If she survived to remember the lesson.”
They all laughed, then turned as the door of the dungeon creaked and gaped wide. EZ, Joy, and Michael (who was, indeed, in Marine Corps dress blues) came in, staggering a little under the weight of a long, leather bag bound with straps and buckles. Alex brought up the rear. Her eyes never left Roxanne's mummified form.
Tyre pulled a robe down from a ceiling pulley and opened the panic snap at the end of it. She gestured for them to bring Roxanne to her, and unzipped the bottom of the bag. Two manacled feet in spike-heeled shoes were revealed. Alex unbuckled a strap that went around the outside of the body-bag at mid-calf height, and the three other women put Roxanne on her feet. After unbuckling the thigh strap, they continued unzipping the bag, up both sides. As soon as the chained wrists were revealed, tucked into the small of the girl's back, Tyre stopped them and fastened the panic snap midpoint between Roxanne's wrists. Alex unbuckled the strap that went around the upper arms outside the bag, and EZ and Joy finished unzipping and removing it. Michael rolled it up and stowed it behind the bar.
The girl was wearing a black silk slip and stockings of the same material. Anne-Marie knelt behind her and adjusted the seams with minute hitches. Roxanne was hooded. Alex had gathered her long, curly blonde hair into a ponytail and pulled it through a hole in the hood. The only other openings in it were the nose holes. A piece of tubing, ending in an incongruous orange valve and a black rubber bulb, dangled from the mouth of the hood. Tyre cocked Roxanne's head, made sure she was breathing freely, then drew the rope down hand over hand until the girl was standing bent at the waist, her chained hands high up in the air behind her back. Tyre secured the rope by winding it in a figure-eight around a cleat on the wall.
Alex put her arm over Michael's shoulder. She was stroking the sky-blue fly of the Marine Corps uniform. “Do you always strap it on before you come to work?” she asked.
Michael grinned. “Well, you know who I work for,” she replied. Her hips rocked in response to Alex's touch, straps pulled tight up against her cunt. She wanted Alex to take out her cock and suck it. Anne-Marie was stroking the chained girl in much the same way, but her cunt had no protection other than a pair of crotchless silk panties held together with tiny ribbons tied in bows. The rest of the pack gathered around and watched Anne-Marie pull up the girl's skirt and untie each bow, then plunge her fingers into her cleft from behind. The chains made a pleasant accompaniment, barely discernible over the music. The girl staggered, tossed her shoulders. The rope was not long enough to let her escape. She could not lower her hands to cover her exposed vaginal lips. She was helpless. She tossed her shoulders again as Anne-Marie worked one finger into her ass.
“I think you oughta stick around,” Alex growled in Michael's ear. She had moved behind her and was massaging her butt.
“Pleasure's mine.”
“It will be,” Alex promised.
The girl in the middle of the pack didn't turn her head in response to this dialogue. Apparently the hood completely sealed off hearing as well as sight.
“You put in ear plugs?” Tyre asked Alex.
“Yes. And it already has pads over the ears. The blindfold can be unsnapped. And you can see the gag. There's a rubber insert that fits inside the mouth and gets pumped up.”
Kay went over to the girl, took the bulb that dangled from her face, and pumped it once or twice. Roxanne shook her head, and her long hair sprayed across her back.
“I already pumped that up pretty good,” Alex warned. “Why don't you turn the valve and let some of the air out, then pump it up again? I like keeping something big in my mouth.”
Michael reached over her shoulder and touched Alex's lips. She got her fingers bitten. She gave Alex a lazy smile and put them in her own mouth, sucked the pain away. When she noticed that EZ was watching them, looking bitter and hungry, she ran her tongue around her lips and gave EZ a slack-jawed come-on so ravenous that it made EZ look away, abashed.
The hood was an alien face, insect-like, fish-like, sitting atop the body of a beautiful young woman. It depersonalized her, made her even more sexy, removed any inhibitions the assembled dominatrices might have had about getting their hands on her. Anne-Marie had allowed Joy to take her place. The fly-whisk was in her hand, and she was dangling its scarlet horsehair tips across Roxanne's up-turned cheeks, then striking full across them. It left very thin red lines, as if it were a big paintbrush. Joy ran her fingertips across them, cooed something in dialect, then ran her tongue over Roxanne's ass. The next strokes fell on wet skin, and Roxanne's slender heels made a staccato noise upon the planks of the dungeon floor.
“Can she keep her footing in those shoes?” Tyre asked.
“Can you?” Alex said, glancing down at the madam's boot-heels.
“Could you?” Tyre asked.
“You're trying to change the subject.”
“C'mon, answer my question.”
“Tyre, she never wears any other kind of shoes. She dances in them all day, for Chrissake. Even her bedroom slippers got high heels.”
“I see. You like girls in six-inch spikes, huh?”
“You could say that,” Alex said, rubbing Michael's neck. Michael's hands were behind her back, and she had a couple of fingers hooked under Alex's codpiece. The master's pubic hair was damp.
“She ever fuck you with them?” Michael asked innocently.
Alex gave her a little push and went to join the group clustered closer to Roxanne. Tyre shook her head. “That mouth,” she whispered, putting two long fingers tipped with sharp nails into the orifice of which she spoke, “is going to get you into soooo much trouble some day.”
Michael swallowed her fingers easily, arrogantly. Her eyes said she couldn't hope for a better fate.
By now, Joy had turned Roxanne's entire ass a bright red. Kay was to one side of her with a doubled-over belt, and she used it in overlapping strokes that moved from the buttocks to the thighs. Then she changed sides and repeated the maneuver. The red deepened, the ass seemed to swell. Roxanne's wet thighs, when she moved under the belt, chafed each other. EZ was kneeling in front of her, holding her by her waist, and had somehow managed to get her tongue up between her labia, and was teasing her orally while Kay strapped her.
Alex watched impassively, but inside she was flame, barely contained, so close to what she wanted that her throat and chest ached. When she saw Anne-Marie with one of her canes politely gesturing to Chris that she should use her signal whip first, Alex nudged EZ out of the way with her boot and took her lady's torso in her arms, standing to one side of her, to steady her against these new forms of pain. Chris kept shaking her head, and insisted on holding back, so it was Anne-Marie who stepped forward and gave Roxanne six cuts, close and fast. Each cane stroke left two parallel marks across both buns, and Anne-Marie was so accurate that the top edge of each blow lined up perfectly with the bottom edge of the prior stroke.
It was a good thing Alex was there, because Roxanne threw herself sideways, apparently losing track of up or down when the pain from the caning faded, then returned in shocking force. Chris waited until she was steady on her feet and in Alex's arms before she hurled the leather snake in her hand out and down toward Roxanne's tender flesh. Impact! Impact! Impact! Impact! Just four explosions, each leaving a v-shaped kiss that was already turning purple. Alex passed her hand over the marks and smiled. She crooked her index finger at Michael, who came along as if it were tied to a string around her dick.
“Gonna help me out, my man?” she asked, letting go of Roxanne and reaching for Michael's fly.
The chauffeur put her fists on her hips and stared at her insolently. “Get it up for me and I won't be able to help myself,” she replied.
Alex extracted her cock. Kay was already at her elbow with a can of Crisco and a towel. “Oh, yeah, slick it up, stud, get that big fuck-pole ready to do that fine piece a favor. Gonna fuck that slut right offa those high-heeled shoes.”
Alex milked Michael, led her to Roxanne by her hard-on, and put the well-greased tip of the instrument up against, just barely inside, Roxanne's wetness. Then she got behind Michael, wiping off her hands, and once they were clean, she clamped them onto Michael's hips and humped her ass as Michael fucked Roxanne, drawing the girl smoothly and relentlessly back and forth on her thick shaft.
The pack shouted obscene encouragement. Alex's lips were drawn back in a snarl, Michael's hands were like claws on Roxanne, and when she finally lost control and threw herself into the girl, no one could tell if Roxanne had come or not because of the gag in her mouth, but it was very clear that Michael had. Alex plucked her off Roxanne, tucked her inside her jacket, and began to kiss her, sloppy butch kisses that made everybody cheer.
Kay gave EZ a towel and sent her over to clean off Michael and put her equipment away. When EZ knelt in front of her and began to swab at her dick, Michael couldn't resist turning her hips just enough to slap the side of it into EZ's face. The look she got was hatred laced with lust and panic. As if knees weren't made to bend! She was going to remember that look and hope she saw it again sometime, when her own knees weren't so weak.
Tyre had pulled a slim blade, Damascus steel with a horn handle, from the sleeve of her jacket. She ran its edge up the back of Roxanne's legs. The girl stopped panting and immediately froze, obviously trained to mind the blade. “I think I'm gonna wet my pants,” Kay said to Anne-Marie. “This is too delicious.”
“I know just how you feel, dear. It's such a cleansing release. So good for the system.”
The knife traveled the inside of Roxanne's thighs. The girl had spread her feet as far apart as her manacles and chain permitted. When the tip of it probed her clit, she jumped a little, then steadied herself. Shoulders, neck, upper arms felt the fine scrape of Tyre's weapon. Then the blade disappeared between her slip and her skin, and its tip plunged through the thin material. The silk made a grieving sound as it was cut, as if it knew it could not heal itself. Tyre let the elegant rags fall from Roxanne's body, and the girl shivered. Tiny goosebumps came out all over her. She smelled like pure sex. God, she was pretty.
Under the slip she wore a leather corset, cinched so tight that her waist was visibly compressed. Six short garters on each leg kept her stockings taut. Alex motioned everyone close, and all eight women held their hands above Roxanne, then simultaneously lowered them. She jumped when she felt herself handled by so many. The rude hands went everywhere. Obviously, much was going to be demanded from her. She shook beneath their hands, but her nipples got larger and firm as cherries, and her pussy was already producing enough slippery stuff to pave the way for all of them to take her in turn. And, in fact, they did just thatâhand after hand plunging as deep as it could go, turning slowly into her, then being withdrawn to give its neighbor a turn. She was being laid open to the pack, made equally the vessel of each of its members.
Alex took her head between her thighs and worked on the hood's laces. She let all the air out of the gag before peeling the thin kid off Roxanne's face and tweaking out the ear plugs. Tyre had unwound the rope from its cleat, and she slowly lowered her hands. Roxanne sank until she knelt in manacles at Alex's boots. Alex took the rubber band out of her hair and spread the long, curly mass out with both hands.