Cowed, even if it was inexplicable to her how, she leaned forward until she was on her hands. She wasn’t enjoying this, was she?
Rychor stepped back to give her space to get into the demeaning position. He opened the door and they exited—Rychor walking, and Sonya on her hands and knees, crawling like a dog on a leash.
CHAPTER9
If there had been some determination in her mind not to be affected by the crawl to her punishment, it eroded almost instantaneously. Reciting to herself that these were alien creatures, not humans, and so none of this should matter to her, she made it only a few of Rychor’s long strides—which he was thankfully taking slower than usual—before the shame began to burn inside of her.
Without looking up, she could feel the stares of the Ryvokia as she crawled among them, her head bowed, a leash tugging at her neck. Her knees and wrists began to ache after a short while, but the pain was negligible compared to the shame. Shame as she imagined herself, shame as she thought of the way the shame was making her cunt wet and her thighs ache. The two sources of her shame amplified each other.
The walk seemed impossibly long. She was grateful when they entered a quiet corridor, and then she heard the hiss of a door. She stared at the floor to distract herself; it had the appearance of stone, but felt as smooth as a polymer, and in spite of her situation, she managed to have some curiosity about what it was composed of.
That kind of attitude, she reminded herself,was what got you into this mess.
Once the door closed behind them, Rychor paused, and so she waited, holding back the wet tears of humiliation in her eyes. Finally, as the time dragged on, she dared to lift her head and her eyes and take a few furtive glances around the room.
She wished immediately that she hadn’t. The white floor and white walls that she had detected around her ended a dozen or so meters in front of her and fell away into an open space that a very brief glance told her was like an auditorium.
She was on a stage. And she had an audience.
“Rise to your knees,” Rychor commanded her, destroying any hope she possessed of Rychor salvaging the situation for her. Her heart was heavy as she rose up onto her knees, and she kept her eyes down, fighting back tears of shame as he affixed her collar to something that dropped from the ceiling.
At the same time that the new leash, or whatever it was, pulled very lightly from above, she felt something wrap around her ankles.
She tried to lift them and discovered very quickly that she had been bound to the floor. Rychor lifted her hands, which she gave to him limply and without resistance, to attach them to another unknown fixture that apparently hovered above her collar leash. He pulled them together at the wrists behind her, leaving her in a position that was not uncomfortable physically, but left her totally helpless and forced into a submissive position.
As he did so, she became aware of the immense noise in the room—there were many, many Ryvokia here, and they were all exchanging sounds in voices that seemed to be attempted hushes, but were failing. She refused to look up at first. Let whatever was coming, comeather.
Just as she lifted her head, something strange began to happen, and her sense of gravity turned upside-down as vertigo gripped her. It was momentarily difficult to align what she was seeing with what she thought to be true, until she realized that the ground beneath her was rising from the floor, as it had in other rooms, and soon she was on a platform.
All the better for them to see her humiliation.
Rychor’s hands, which announced themselves before they touched her by creating the tingling sensation she had almost become accustomed to, went to the base of her scalp and her lower back. Before he tugged on her hair to tilt her chin up and make her face her audience, while pushing on her lower back to arch it, humiliatingly, he swept his fingers over her skin in an act that she knew better than to interpret as tenderness, but did, nonetheless.
“Remember, human. You have brought this upon yourself, and you will now be whipped publicly anduntil you beg me for mercy.”
He seemed to be adding emphasis to the latter half of his sentence, and now that she was on display like this and facing the sting of awhip,not just his hand, Sonya’s resolve was diluting quite a bit.
“What if I beg you for mercy right now?” she asked him, in a whisper.
Rychor didn’t answer this question and instead moved another one of the floating trays she had seen from somewhere behind her, until it was in front of her.
She didn’twantto look at it, but it was either the tray or the audience of Ryvokia. On the large tray there were a variety of implements, but these were much more easy to understand than the ones they had brought out for her medical examination: a whip was a whip.
They came in a variety of shapes and sizes, thicknesses and materials. None of it was familiar to her, and since she had never used a whip or thought about how a whip would feel against her skin, she realized she had no idea what any of them would do. But the tightly bound straps of what looked like leather, and the stiff crops wound in alien material, their large handles soon to be in Rychor’s grip, all had the peculiar effect of making her cunt throb.
“Choose the implement of your punishment.”
She shook her head, a wave of heat coming over her again. “I don’t… I don’t know anything about… whips,” she stammered.
“You will choose, human. Or you will be made to sample each of them in turn before your punishment begins.”
Her eyes flew over the implements, her discomfort growing alongside the shameful desire that was building up between her legs. “I d-d-d-on’t… I don’t know, Rychor,” she whispered, her eyes already watering. What was best? Thin? Thick? How severely would he whip her?
Rychor didn’t give her much time to consider it. His hand moved to a thick-strapped whip, which was in his hand as he made a loud announcement in his own language. This happened before she could even think, and so it seemed the choice had been made.
The tray disappeared, and Rychor walked behind it. He dragged the straps of the whip over her bare shoulder and along her back. Pieces of the material, which felt just like leather, slipped on her skin and tickled her on the ribs. He moved it up the length of one arm and down the other. The sweet caress, the playful tickle, sent a thrill through her that was amplified by the implicit threat in the device. Rychor was huge, all muscle, and could flay her with the whip without breaking a sweat.
If he even did sweat.
