Alexander did not impose on her time with the boys when she issued last minute directions and information.
It was enough that he would see the rewards of their trip, but Cynthia needed the feeling of control by initiating the route they would take and making the final decisions alone with them.
A slight girl with a pretty figure, short golden curls, and a natural deep blush to her cheeks and lips, was naked and kneeling silently on the carpet by the deep tub, nervously waiting for Cynthia to enter the room.
Rose had filled the bath and added the flowery scented oils that stepmother liked, and she prayed that she had not done it so soon that the water had chilled too much.
Rose had remained curled in her cage by the bed, until she heard stepmother and the Master rise.
Over time, she had learned to recognize the change of their breathing when they were close to culmination of their sexual trysts.
When she was first brought to stepmother’s room to be her personal servant, Rose had been surprised that the cruel vicious nature of the pair was not evident when they were alone together.
It seemed the sadistic thrills they enjoyed were limited to their servants.
Their times together were passionate and arousing, but did not involve the games they used when training new slaves or for punishment.
Rose crept to the bathroom when she heard the moaning gasp Cynthia was beginning to make, and she drew the water.
When the tall woman walked into the room, Rose began to tremble.
It was as natural an act for her as breathing, because stepmother’s presence always meant pain.
The direction or amount that Rose would be subjected to was determined by Cynthia’s mood.
Cynthia dipped a toe into the water, and she smiled as she climbed into the bath.
“The tray, Rose.”
“Yes, stepmother,” Rose replied.
Ironically, this cruel torment meant that she was pleased, and the slave ran to the cabinet for the appropriate device.
She held it in her hands while she knelt within Cynthia’s reach.
Cynthia finished winding her long hair up into a bun, and after hooking the leather strap on the back edge of the tray to the loop in the front of Rose’s collar, she picked up the clamps with the chains attached to the far corners.
Rose felt a damp finger from each hand tickle her nipples until they stiffened obediently with a shadowed promise of pleasure.
It was quickly destroyed when the clamps came down, biting into her excited stiff tips.
Rose inhaled a gasp while the flat rubber bars squeezed her light pink nipples, causing them to darken as the trapped blood began to pulse.
She stared at a tile on the far wall of the tub until she was sure she could control her anguish.
Cynthia stared at the purpling nubs, and when she studied the girl’s face her eyes narrowed in satisfaction at the torment just below the surface of the tears.
After months as stepmother’s personal slave, Rose still could not ignore the pain.
She waited to see which bottles and soaps Cynthia would place on the surface, to pull and torture her poor breasts further.
She had overheard stepmother tell Master Alexander that the sons would be leaving this morning.
In the past, this had put the woman in an excited good mood, and Rose was relieved when only two small flasks were set on the quivering surface of the tray.
At least, with the device attached and balancing from her nipples, it meant that stepmother would be washing herself.
Thirty minutes later the clamps were removed, and Rose’s eyes blurred with more tears when the blood flowed back into them.
It felt like needles were piercing the sensitive tissue, and it burned.
She quickly stood with a soft fluffy towel and dried her beautiful, cruel stepmother.
“My sapphire robe, Rose.”
“Yes, stepmother.”
Rose walked to the wardrobe and dared to let her hands lightly massage her bruised tips.
If stepmother caught her trying to comfort herself, to ease the throbbing in her nipples, it would mean punishment.
Rose pushed the silk gowns aside until she located the dark blue one just as Cynthia came into the room.
Rose stared at the intimidating woman.
She seemed impossibly striking with her tall, taut figure that enabled her to endure long sessions working in her garden.
Rose was certain that no matter what situation Cynthia had chosen in life, she would have been the leader.
Her regal bearing commanded respect and compliance, and her edicts along with the cold gazes she cast, terrified the servants.
After helping stepmother into her gown, Rose brushed her black hair until it was gleaming while Cynthia applied her light make-up.
They left the room and Rose followed her downstairs, veering off towards the kitchen.
When weather allowed, stepmother always had morning tea and a pastry in the garden.
She would spend a short while in a meditation that made Rose nervous.
Sometimes the woman would close her eyes and smile while she inhaled the scents of her flowers… and other times, her eyes would focus on some weed.
A quiet, seething anger would build until she flew to the offending plant and ripped it from the ground.
She would stare at it with an almost insane look of hatred in her green eyes while she slowly shredded it to pieces.
She had been tearing one once, and Rose thought she heard her whisper, “Do you hear the screams?”
Cynthia was sitting quietly with an indiscernible expression while she stared at the flowers and sipped her tea.
A pebble was digging into Rose’s knee, but she knew better than to move and possibly disrupt the woman’s silent musings.
For her own part, Rose had been distracted with the thought that the sons would be gone, and she had not studied the ground before she knelt as she usually remembered to do.
This particular torment was of her own making.
Master Alexander was already in the dungeon after saying goodbye to his boys.
This was another reason for Rose to be optimistic.
With the four sons gone for at least a week, stepmother and the Master would be busy with the garden and she would be left alone.
She tried to forget the stone under her knee and concentrate on thoughts of the calmer relief of the week ahead.
Cynthia ignored Rose while she scanned the sunlit blooms.
At first she had a smile on her face, but then her eyes located the daisies.
A sad melancholy settled over her and her mind spun back to the past… over forty years ago.
It was the rare time in her childhood that had been happy, and she remembered another sunlit garden where she used to sit with her mother.
Cynthia Eleanor Strega was destined to be a beauty from a very young age, and had her circumstances been different, that beauty might have flourished within her.
Her father was a dangerously good looking gambler with little success and no interest in looking for employment.
He ignored Cynthia, though he continued to manage to charm his wealthy wife into providing him with funds for his addiction.
Cynthia’s mother was young and fragile, and she decided that it was easier to let her husband wander off and leave her alone with the daughter she adored.
If he returned in a foul mood from yet another loss, Cynthia’s mother would take her out to the garden where they were surrounded by colorful blooms and fragrance.
“You are the most beautiful flower in the garden.”
Her mother smiled and she ran her fingers through her daughter’s silky black hair, curling a stray lock behind her ear as her gentle fingers caressed her little girl’s cheek.
Cynthia was often dressed in green to match her eyes, with pastel accessories that matched the petals of their current blossoms.
“Today you are Tulip,” her mother laughed softly, and she reached to straighten the wide-brimmed coral hat on Cynthia’s head.
“And you are Daisy, mama,” Cynthia replied while she looked at her mother’s pale complexion and golden waves.
Cynthia missed the slight wince her mother made, realizing that even her little girl could see her pallor growing wan as her illness consumed her.
Added to that, she recognized that her husband’s insatiable need to drain her funds on games of chance had not dwindled.
She had made the cautious decision to change her will, bypassing her husband’s access to her family trust.
She left the inheritance to Cynthia, in an effort to ensure her little girl’s welfare.
Although he was aware of the change in his wife’s will, at the time her husband had not worried.
He was convinced that his charm would lead her to eventually change her legacy, and he was away so often at parties and functions that he had not paid attention to his wife’s failing health.
His façade of initial acceptance turned bitter and cold when his wife became ill, and without changing her intentions, she had died just after Cynthia had turned six.
With no funds of his own and no inclination towards honest employment, the man had been livid when he discovered the trust would not be released to Cynthia until she was twenty-one.
There was not even a monthly stipend to take care of the girl’s basic needs that could be tapped into, in his wife’s misguided attempt to convince him that he needed to give up his gambling ways.
Cynthia’s father had spent so much of her childhood involved in his nefarious games that she did not understand his increasing coldness towards her was due to his dire financial straits.
The strict conditions of his former wife’s unbreakable will infuriated him, and he envisioned his daughter’s little fist clenched around his empty wallet while she mocked him.
Cynthia was surrounded by a bewildering atmosphere of resentment.
She would sit in the garden… a colorful, magical place… and cry, desperately missing the warmth her mother had shared with her while she looked over the flowerbeds they had planted together.
Frustrated at not being able to get to the money, Cynthia’s father quickly turned his efforts towards finding a wealthy substitute wife.
His charm continued to persuade unsuspecting targets, though he was older and there was a slightly haggard edge to his handsome looks.
The beautiful women that used to encourage him were now looking for younger escorts.
With his money all but gone, he finally resolved himself to marriage to an arrogant widow whose purse was much more desirable than the woman herself.
He arrived home from one of his trips and introduced Cynthia to her shrewish new stepmother.
Ava had two daughters a few years older than Cynthia, and they had inherited their mother’s harsh, pinched looks.
The snobbish girls despised Cynthia as soon as they saw her, and her father offered her no refuge from their taunts and belittling.
He had his own reason to dislike her… in the form of a binding trust keeping him from his deceased wife’s money.
By seven, Cynthia was cleaning her stepsisters’ rooms and doing chores for her stepmother.
She quietly seethed as she completed the never-ending bidding of the woman and her daughters.
Over years of unfair treatment in the cold household, Cynthia’s kind nature changed as her psyche began to twist.
Her reluctance or refusal to work long hours after school while her sisters played with their friends, had been met with a cuff across the ear or a swipe of a cane across her legs because of her ungrateful attitude.
Cynthia was constantly bombarded with the accusations that she was an expensive burden on Ava, and that she should consider herself lucky she was not cast out of the home to live on the streets.
During spring cleaning while Cynthia was sweeping the winter ashes from the fireplace, careful to avoid getting them on the carpet, stepmother walked in with her beastly daughters by her side.
Their arms were filled with bags from their shopping spree, and they looked across the room at their pretty little stepsister covered in soot.
Ava narrowed her beady brown eyes.
“Cynthia Eleanor, look at the mess you have made of yourself.”
The little girl’s eyes widened in fear and she saw one of her stepsisters smile and mouth, ‘Cinderella’.
The stepsisters had called her that almost from the day they had met her, and Cynthia hated it so much that she had ripped out the story from the fairytale book her mother used to read to her.
The stepmother sneered, “To think, I wasted money to buy you a dress for your sister’s birthday party.”
Oh, she had wasted money, all right.
Her daughters had several new dresses and matching shoes, while Ava had made a quick stop at a secondhand shop to pick up a dress for the brat.
Cynthia would be serving the drinks and gathering dishes, so Ava certainly was not going to spend money on a garment that the ten year old would stain.
It was at the party, while Cynthia was running more punch to her stepsisters’ friends who were dressed in their ruffled creations with black shiny shoes, that one of the girl’s pointed to her.
“Who is
that
?” she asked, in curious disdain.
The girl had never seen such a young servant.