Since she’d be standing a while, he unzipped her mouth and held the straw to her mouth. She sucked down eight ounces of the electrolyte mixture, and then he zipped her mouth back up, exchanged the cup for a cane, and took aim at her ass.
Chapter 13
Standing felt wrong in a way Tuesday couldn’t articulate even to herself.
Her spine was straight, when the muscles wanted to arch, and her nervous system was expecting things that no longer matched her body’s reality. The floor was solid under her feet, but she didn’t trust it. Gravity pulling in the correct direction felt like a trick.
And after being so tightly bound for so long, her skin felt…wrong. Was she imagining she could still feel the ropes pulsing away? She felt each one separately, possibly louder now than when they’d been compressing and constricting muscles and nerves.
The rest of her was —somewhere. Not quite here, but not completely gone. The cinnamon had faded so it wasn’t asloud, but it was still strong enough she couldn’t scent anything else.
And the silence was still absolute, along with the dark. She floated in the nothingness, exhausted and aching and strung tight as a wire underneath all of it.
Her body had been waiting all day. Had been brought to the edge and pulled back so many times she’d lost count, and theneedhad stopped feeling urgent and started feeling elemental. Kind of like the weather. Something that simply exists, sometimes more and sometimes less, but either way, it had no interest in how she felt about it.
Her wolf lifted its head.
Something was coming. Her wolf knew it before she did, the animal reading the room through whatever channels were still available to her — the shift in his breathing maybe, or vibration through the floor, or some frequency of attention she couldn’t name. The bitch was suddenlyveryawake.
Tuesday held still and waited.
A line of fire landed across both cheeks and made her jerk against the cross. The pain was sharp and intense, but then a second later came the true agony, and she screamed and yelped.Fuck, only a cane does that.
But she barely had time to suck in a breath before another strike landed lower, then another, layering fresh fire down her ass.
Her legs shook, but the cane didn’t care. It moved to the backs of her thighs, strike after strike, until her knees buckled and her weight was hanging on her wrists.
She tried to make her legs work again, but she couldn’t brace. Couldn’t anticipate.
A sharp line at the top of her ass again, when she didn’t expect it, and it moved down again. Strike after strike, laying pain over what was already there, but at an angle now.
She screamed into the silence, no choice but to take it, floundering in the darkness, the cross her only anchor to this world.
And then the pain stopped, and she jumped and yelped when the butt plug buzzed back to life. The sudden vibration deep in her ass made her hips buck involuntarily, pressing her marked ass back into the next cane stroke. Pain and the relentless buzzing twisted together until she couldn’t tell which was making her whimper louder.
Finally, the cane stopped, and for a handful of heartbeats there was only the high, steady buzz in her ass and the burning lines across her skin.
Then something struck her back. Vertically this time. Cruel and vicious, and she’d have sworn it took skin off, but she didn’t feel blood dripping.
A second strike, and she was certain it was a whip. A single-tail. Possibly the horse-whip.
The third lash wrapped a little and bit into the side of her breast. She screamed into the hood, body trying to pull away from the cross, but her chest harness wouldn’t let her.
Another lash landed across her ass, then her thighs. Each strike left a hotter, sharper line than the last.
The lashes to her ass and thighs layered over the bruises and marks left by the cane, and she couldn’t stop screaming, couldn’t stop moving and pumping her hips.Fuck, the vibrating plug crammed in her ass had her clit throbbing likecrazy, her pussy clenching on fucking nothing —needingto be filled.
She had no idea how long he whipped her, or how many times the whip landed, but after a short pause, not even close to long enough to let her catch her breath, there was no doubt the next instrument of torture was a belt, or possibly a strap.
She couldn’t hear the leather cracking across her ass, but she sure as fuck felt it — heavy, thudding impacts that drove deep, crushing already-abused flesh, each strike sending shockwaves through every bruise and welt beneath it until her ass and thighs were a continuous, roaring fire. Each lash was a detonation that radiated through her hips and into her gut, jarring the plug so her hole spasmed around it, and made her clit throb so violently she sobbed.
He set up a rhythm, and she thought she might be able to come from it. The steady, punishing tempo built something deep and low in her belly, and her hips rocked back into the strikes, needing it harder and faster. Just a little more, and she’dfinallyfind release.
But then the belt moved to her thighs and the rhythm broke, she lost the edge, and she screamed in frustration.
The pain was different on her thighs — it kept her right on the edge, but it didn’t let her approach the brink.
She whined when the belt stopped. She wanted more of it. Harder. Faster.
