Chapter 11

I sat down on the end of my bed and smiled at the girls. "Kristine, come and sit right here beside me." I ordered, and the blond girl immediately hesitated, actually stepping back.

"Please don't make me." She begged. "I can't."

Something was deeply bothering this girl, so much that she was resisting my compulsions. With a thought I slid into her mind and traced the lines of fear. It was her nakedness that was causing her fear. For some reason she was absolutely terrified that she was naked. The other girls were upset at their condition and afraid of what I might make them do, but being naked didn't make them totally irrational. I decided to work around the problem and picked up one of my dirty shirts from the floor with a wave of kinetic force and tossed it to her. "Put that on then, and come sit down."

She instantly threw the shirt on, covering her from her neck to her thighs. Then she glided forward and spun gracefully, seating herself beside me. I reached out and brushed her hair away from her face, feeling the smoothness of her cheek. She shuddered at my touch.

"Please don't hurt me." She sobbed.

"I can't promise that it won't hurt." I told her. "But I'll make sure you enjoy it." I turned to the other three girls. "Go and get a warm bath ready for us. Use the master bathroom down the hall, and pull out plenty of towels from the closet. Lay some of the towels on the floor so they make a path from the bath to the door." I told them. "And don't screw this up." I warned, and then offered some incentive. "But if you do a nice job, I'll make sure you're rewarded."

The three girls quickly hurried out of the room. Whether they did so from a desire to escape from my presence, or from a fear of not following my orders, hardly mattered to me. I reached out with my powers and made sure that neither of my parents would disturb my games. Both of them were in the basement playing poker with my stepdad's work buddies. We were separated by two floors, but I wasn't going to take any chances.

"Can I put the rest of my clothes back on?" Kristine asked, looking away from me.

"Only if you don't mind taking them off again in a few minutes." I told her. Apparently she didn't mind, because she stooped to pick up her things and had herself covered again in seconds. She kept my shirt on, however, and didn't bother with her shoes.

"Are you really going to do this?" Kristine asked, staring at the far wall of my room.

"Kristine..." I began, shaking my head at my own reluctance to continue what I had started. "Look at me Kristine." I ordered. I continued when she turned her head to face me. "I want this to be something special, for me and for you. I know that you wouldn't have chosen me if you were given a choice, but I'm not giving you any. Try to accept that."

"I can't." She said. "It isn't fair!" She wanted to scream, but she couldn't because I had made it clear that I didn't want her to, and my desires were what mattered. She opened her mouth and put all of her force of will into her voice, but the only noise she produced was a faint hissing that turned scratchy after a minute of soundless screaming.

While I had mastery over her body, I had not touched her mind. She was the same person she had always been, and I intended for her to remain that person, albeit with a few new life experiences. My stepsister was the only one whose mind I deliberately altered. She was just too much of a bitch to be left alone.

Thinking of my stepsister, I looked back to see how Grace was progressing. She saw me glance at her and gave me a pleading look, and I relented. "You can stop now." I told her, and she immediately fell back, plopping her pert little ass on my bedroom carpet.

"That was disgusting beyond words!" She moaned, gagging reflexively.

"I'm glad you liked it." I told her.

Karen slowly came down from her high and flashed me a radiant smile. "Thank you, master." She said.

"Now that you've finished with that, I want you both to clean my room. Make sure everything is nice and neat, switch out the bedding, that sort of thing."

"It will be our pleasure, master." Karen said, her smile never wavering.

"I will do no such thing!" Grace protested. She really didn't understand her situation yet.

I was having none of it. "Grace." I said, getting her attention. "From now on you will obey any order Karen gives you until I say otherwise." I stated, turning to Karen. "If she doesn't cooperate, feel free to punish her as you see fit."

"I will do as you command, master." She replied.

I faced Kristine. "I know none of this seem fair, and maybe it isn't, but it is what it is, and I mean to see this through now that I've begun."

She started sobbing again. "But ... I don't ... I don't want this!" She wailed. Her voice was hoarse from all of her silent screaming, and tears were flowing freely from her eyes. "Please don't do this to me. I swear I'll never do anything mean to you again. I'm sorry I hurt you. I'll leave you alone; I'll never bother you or speak to you if that's what you want. Just don't do this! Please don't do this!"

"Shhh..." I said, putting a pair of fingers against her lips and feeling her jaw tremble. There was something deeper here that I wasn't aware of. There was no reason for her to be this afraid. "Why are you so frightened?" I asked. "I promise that I won't injure you. I even promise to let you go afterwards, if that's what you want. As powerful as I am, there is no reason for me not to keep those promises. So why are you scared?"

While I asked these questions, I gently placed my hand on her shoulder and locked my eyes with hers. Her pupils began to dilate as I scanned through her mind, delving for answers. She tried to resist only once, jerking her head away and breaking eye contact, but I merely tightened my grip on her chin and forcefully turned her head back to meet my gaze. Her body relaxed and her mind opened up to me.

And her thoughts shocked the hell out of me. The very thought of sex brought abject terror to her mind. And I was beginning to learn why.

"It's your parents." I realized, and her eyes told me that I was right. "What did they do to you?" I asked, and her mind answered with flashes of intense emotion and frightening visions of torment. I saw her bound tightly to a chair, felt her naked shame as her clothes were cut away, and shared her pain as her back was whipped.

She was shaking violently in my arms, reliving her memories as she unwillingly shared them with me.

"What were you being punished for?" I prompted, and was answered by another flash and a vision of her and the other girls at the local mall, where Whisper bought her a shirt she had been eying. Then the vision flashed again and the new scene was inside her home, where she had an argument with her parents over the shirt and her desire to wear it. Her father called her a whore and a slut, hitting her across the face and knocking her senseless. She woke tied to the chair and the first vision repeated.

Her trembling had become so severe that my arm was now the only thing supporting her.

"Why would they do this?" I asked, demanding answers from her mind. Visions flashed repeatedly, sending me a montage of feelings and knowledge. I saw her with her family, outside of a church. I saw them again, inside that same church and heard snippets of the lecture.

It was something unbelievable to me, but her parents both belonged to some kind of perverse church which taught that abstinence was holy law, and thoroughly conditioned all of their members to believe that all of the problems faced by society were caused by sin. And these teachings claimed that the true sin of society was sex, and taught that women were at fault for this sin because they aroused lust in men.

From a very early age her parents had punished any behavior that even suggested sexual implications. It was no wonder she had never had a boyfriend; the very concept of a boyfriend was outside of her thinking. It also explained her fear. If her hymen was no longer intact, her parents would know that she had had sex, and would punish her for it. Even if she had been raped, the blame would have fallen upon her, because she was at fault for being a woman.

I wondered how her parents could even have had a child if they so totally believed the garbage that this cult put forth as the will of god. Surprisingly enough, many of the punishments that her parents had given her in the past included elements of bondage and submission. In fact, the whole thing was so full of contradictions that I wondered how they kept their story straight. It made me sick inside, knowing that they had done this to their daughter.

I broke my contact with her mind and reached behind her, pulling her shirt up and exposing her back. Terrible scars crisscrossed her flesh, the marks of her punishments. There were five fresh slashes, barely scabbed over. Grace had paused in her cleaning to stare at her friend in astonishment. I slid my hand along her back and willed her flesh to heal. In a few minutes, no trace of the scars remained.

"Are you still in any pain?" I asked her.

"No." Her eyes were watery with tears.

"You don't have to be afraid anymore." I told her.

"But they'll kill me if you do this!" She protested.

I focused on her eyes and held her stare for a long, silent moment. "I promise you they will never touch you again." I said, and she was wracked by sobs, tears streaming down her cheeks. "I promise you that they will never hurt you again."

Her eyes widened and she nodded slowly.

There was a thud from behind me, and I turned to see Grace staring wide eyed at her friend. She had been picking up some of the clothes that I left laying on the floor, and had just dropped everything she had been carrying. "Jesus Christ!" She said. "I never knew Kristine was that fucked up."

The blatant insensitivity of her statement pissed me off, and sent Kristine into an even harder fit of sobbing. "Shut up." I said angrily, the order silencing anything she might have wanted to say in response.

Karen looked at me, her expression contrite. "It was my fault that your property displeased you, I am very sorry, master." She told me.

"It isn't your fault; you have nothing to be sorry for." I told her, and she instantly brightened again, showing me that beautiful smile. I turned to Grace. "If you can't learn to behave yourself, I swear I'm going to rape your mind as well as your body, and I'll make you into my devoted slave, just like my sweet stepsister." I warned her. She came very close to pissing her pants, and I let my laughter loose at her expression of terror. Grace tried her best to give me a sneer, but failed to muster her bitchiness over her fear, and turned away in disgrace.

I felt a pair of lips softly kiss my cheek, and turned to look at Kristine. "Thank you."

Her words startled me for a moment, and I grinned despite myself. "Shall we go to our bath?" I asked, and she met my words with a smile. I rose to my feet and offered my hand. She took it, and I pulled her up beside me. Still holding her hand, I led her from the room.