Kenny exhaled and stood, and for the first time in what felt like hours, she felt something release.
“That’s better.”
He set the loopy Johnny down and gently ran his fingers through her hair.
“Tell me what you learned.”
“That I can’t lose control,” she managed to whisper. “That I don’t get to lash out when I’m tired. My tone reflects my submission, and it has to be right, even when everything else is falling apart.”
“And?”
Her voice shook. “That I belong to you, to all of you, and my tone has to reflect that. Always.”
“Good girl.” He stroked along her spine, skipping over the welts and blistering heat from the nettles.
“You belong to us,” he said. “Allof you. Your obedience is not conditional. Your tone is not optional.”
She sobbed again. This time, not from pain. He stroked her hair in silence. Let her cry.
His words drilled into her psyche where the pain hadn’t reached, and they settled. She was theirs. Not just in body, not just when it was easy.Always.
After another stretch of silence, he snipped the plastic holding her arms into reverse prayer, gently helped her lowerthem down to her sides, and said, “Go write a handwritten letter of apology to Boone. Start with that, then you can beg to make it right.”
“Yes, Sir.”
She slipped off the desk with agonizing slowness, every joint protesting. Her shoulders screamed. Her thighs trembled. Her wrists throbbed. Her whole body felt like a battlefield, but she sat at the table in the horrid wooden chair, picked up the pen, and began to write.
Chapter 8
Silas didn’t say a word when she followed him out of Kenny’s office, blotchy and trembling after giving Boone her apology letter. After kneeling and telling him from the bottom of her heart how sorry she was.
Boone had told her he loved her, and he was glad the lesson had taken. He’d looked at Silas and back to her before saying, “It’s Silas’s night with you, and you don’t get to cheat him out of his time with you because you had to be punished.”
And now, Silas walked ahead of her and expected her to follow like she was a dog who already knew her place.
What did it say that she followed? She was so tired, she couldn’t even consider the answer.
Her legs trembled with fatigue, her ass burned from the chemical irritation, her breasts pulsed with engorged hypersensitivity, and her entire groin blazed like a flayed open wound. It felt like she still wore the damned bra and panties, because every inch of skin where they’d been pulsed with the nettles’ lingering poison.
She smelled clean earth with a hint of floral on the way up the steps. Soothing, but with a sharp edge beneath it, and the scent deepened as they entered her room.
When they made it to the bathroom, steam curled from the tub in lazy spirals. A bag of Epsom salts beside it along with two bottles of essential oils — chamomile and comfrey. Also, an empty bottle of witch hazel.
Silas stepped to her vanity, to a tray covered by a towel, and ordered, “Get in.”
The thought went through her head that this didn’t bode well, and a moment later, when she obeyed, the water hit like liquid needles.
She felt the heat first. Soothing and completely misleading because the punishing, blazing sting came two heartbeats later.
She gasped, muscles seizing, hands shooting to the sides of the tub for balance. It felt like being lowered into acid. Every welt and inflamed patch from the nettles screamed. Her raw skin didn’t soak, ithowled.
Her clit pounded like an exposed nerve, raw and swollen, her heartbeat amplified and radiating so her entire cunt was nothing but nerve endings begging for mercy.
“All the way,” Silas ordered, voice like velvet steel. “You’ll soak like a good girl. Soothe the muscle strain. Burn away the disobedience.”
She nodded, but he expected compliance. Her agreement wasn’t necessary.
Her thighs trembled and her spine bowed, but she bit her lip and slid lower. When her ass touched the bottom and the water closed over her breasts, she was shaking.
