Chapter 26: The Cold Art of Discipline

Angique cursed, when the heavy clouds of her orgasm lifted. She pushed Alicia away from her crotch. The girl's eyes seemed misted over, her face gleaming with Angique's juices.

"So, are you glad now, slut?" she asked, angrily rubbing the tears from her eyes. "Was that why you came back? Is this your revenge on Anna? Did you find out that jealousy is her weakness? Or did you return so you could plunge yet another knife in my back later on?" She closed her robe and kicked the naked girl away from her.

Alicia didn't even wince. She crawled back to her knees and knelt in front of the angry woman. Her forehead touched the floor. It forced her to talk into the marble, which made her words hardly audible. Angique kicked her again.

"Speak louder, bitch!"

"Please, Mistress," the girl repeated, lifting her head, but keeping her eyes down. "Please, forgive me. I am a selfish and silly girl and I have acted selfish and silly. I am sorry for Anna; I would never come between you and her, but please take me back. I won't mind to be a slave to you both. I found out I just can't live without you. I missed being your slave. Please forgive me."

Angique smiled without humor. Her eyes were hard.

"Forgive you?" she said, stressing the 'give.' "Why should I? And what for? Should I forgive you for being the slut you are? For being unable to keep your promises? You are a disloyal, cheating slut looking for her own satisfaction. That's who you are and always will be, whether I forgive you or not. So what's the use of taking you back?"

She walked away, turning her back on the sobbing girl. She went to a black, ominous chest that stood next to the fireplace and opened it. It had huge iron rings and a vaulted lid. The inside was lined with purple satin, the outside carved with French fleurs-de-lys.

When she returned, she held an ancient riding crop in her hand. Angique grabbed the girl's hair to pull up her face. She forced her throat to arch back and watched it ripple when the girl tried to swallow. Angique waved the crop in front of her.

"If you need to talk so much, talk to this, whore. Maybe it could become your Master if you beg hard enough." She teased the girl's face with the flap at the crop's tip. "Taste His tongue, bitch. Suck on it." She pushed the soft flap past the girl's teeth and onto her tongue. Alicia automatically started to suck the leather.

Alicia's eyes never left Angique's while her mouth worked on the coarseness of the ancient leather. Angique pulled the dripping flap free and struck her across the face with it, raising an angry welt. It made the girl cry out in pain. Angique dropped the crop in front of her.

"Pick it up and hug it close to you, bitch. It might be your only companion in here for a long time to come. Its name is Angelthorn and to you it's a He and He is your Master. You are His. You will always have Him with you. His handle will be between your bare tits when you go to bed. That way His tongue will touch your clit — always, every night, whether you are alone or not. And whenever you feel you should be punished, you bring Him to me and beg me to use Him on you. Do you understand?"

It took the girl two seconds and three flutterings of her eye lashes to slowly start nodding.

"I understand, Mistress. Thank you."

Angique kicked her once more, making her slide a half circle on the tiles.

"No! You don't understand at all, whore!" she said, her voice ice cold. "Calling me Mistress proves you don't. You are not worthy of calling me Mistress, silly twat. You can't even talk to me; you lost that privilege. All you do from now on is talk to your new Master. You are so far below me that I would never hear your voice. Understand?"

There was another kick, another bruise. Alicia winced. Her face sank to the floor. She hugged the crop, mumbling inaudible words to it. Her lips touched the leather. She'd stopped crying, although her shoulders still shook. Then her voice became clearer. She sat up, fixing her eyes on the riding crop in her hands. It looked like praying.

"Master," she said. "Sweet Master, please tell your Mistress how sorry I am for betraying her. Please make her see that it was weakness, not evil planning. It was wrong and thoughtless and hurtful and stupid, but please, I beg you, Master, ask her to take you and punish me with you until I lose consciousness. Let her make your cruel leather break my skin and my will and teach me obedience. Please let her use you to purge my body and my treacherous mind. Please, Master? Please..."

Angique looked down on the groveling girl. Her heart was in turmoil, but her face was a mask. She reached down for Alicia's hair and drug her naked body over the tiles to where the black chest stood. Moments later Alicia's wrists were cuffed and she was strung up on a chain. She soon dangled from a hook that was set in one of Villa's beams. Her own weight stretched her muscles painfully, but she was silent, sweat streaming from her body. Angique grabbed her lower face between thumb and fingers, forcing her mouth to open. She spit into it and said:

"Wait, whore. Learn to wait as long as it takes." Then she pulled a black velvet cap over the girl's face, plunging her into total darkness.

She turned away and went to her suite, leaving Alicia to dangle and wait. Let her think her nervous thoughts, she mused, let her feel her muscle pain until both recede into numbness.

There is this romantic notion about bondage and sado-masochism. It includes exciting outfits, chains, cuffs and whips, sexy nipple clamps and shining piercings. Of course all that is part of the scene and very arousing for whoever watches. But it isn't the essence; not for the slave. The essence is waiting, helpless waiting. The essence is not to know what might happen next, or when — or if anything might happen at all. But most of all: it is discovering that nothing you might want or wish is of any importance; maybe, you realize at last, maybe you're better off not wanting anything at all. Perhaps you discover that the reward is in the waiting — if there is reward at all.

It is by waiting that the true goals of discipline are reached. It is at deserted crossroads that the mind is shaped and molded. Short-lived corrections may be achieved with physical punishment, but true changes are made by pointless waiting. It is after hours of lonely dangling inside the pitch darkness of a blindfold that a girl realizes how irrelevant her needs are. She is nothing, she discovers; she is nobody until her Mistress decides what's left for her, if anything at all. It is also after hours of cruel loneliness that a girl finds out if she is a true slave at all — or just a fashionable wannabe.

Alicia waited — and learned. She went through all the stages of the process, feeling how time became syrup. Initially there was panic, of course, as she suddenly found herself dwelling in a darkness she could not escape from. It felt like a nightmare she wanted to run away from, but couldn't. Her dangling feet started treading air. The useless movements sent sharp flashes of pain up her stretched arms. She moaned, even cried, but the only answer she got was an echo of her own desperate voice, muffled by the hood.

The next stage was anger, a rage against herself for allowing the woman to tie her up and leave her like this. Why had she come back, leading herself to the slaughter? Sure, Carmela had dumped her, turning down every effort to get in touch — but was that a reason? Sure, the bitch had made this one awful phone call telling her that she was in San Francisco. She had put her house up for sale and wouldn't be back. Bye, mia cara, thanks for everything. When Alicia protested, she'd just cut the connection.

Alicia cursed and cried out, screaming at the top of her lungs — to no avail. She begged and prayed to be freed, but it only took minutes of indifferent silence to make her realize the uselessness of it. Just as useless as she had felt these last few weeks. She'd drunk herself into a stupor every night, almost living at the Club and letting her body be fucked by anyone who had the slightest interest. And then she'd watched Anna's show of humiliation. God, had she envied the slut, feeling the pain right through her alcoholic buzz. But when Angique rubbed the jealousy in, taunting her with everything she'd lost, she'd crushed under the weight of sheer shame — and run. She'd run until she broke down in the last stall of the restrooms, vomiting until the final remnants of her wines and beers and awful fast food had left her stomach.

Alicia dangled from her wrists, sweating and crying into the darkness that surrounded her. A cloak of claustrophobic heat descended on her, causing great difficulties breathing. The fear made her whine like a panicked dog. She shook and tore at her chains, only to exhaust herself and intensify her pain.

The exhaustion was a blessing in disguise as it made her faint, allowing her body to relax and adapt to the circumstances. When she came to, she seemed to have reached another level; a level that took her past the immediate discomforts and into a very private realm of introspection. Her thoughts slowed down. They seemed to accept the quiet pace of a new reality. A first kernel of acceptance was formed. But even as slow as her thoughts had become, they still popped up like belching, stinking bubbles in a sloshing oil field. They were like slow-motioned flashes of herself licking boots, or kissing the slick insides of pale thighs. And under it was this sound track of a stretched voice taunting her, mocking her, laughing at her. It seemed to worm into her, gnawing away at her flesh until she was just a bloated skin around infinite emptiness. She seemed to pass out again.

The next surfacing emotion she became aware of felt like guilt, but not the guilt she'd been familiar with her whole life. It was a new guilt, heaped on top of what had been already there — always there — the everyday guilt of her numerous failings. How she'd failed the expectations of her parents; the irrational guilt she felt for the death of her sister; the guilt of not having been a good lover and wife to her ex-husband — even the guilt for cheating on sweet Rita.

This newest guilt surprised her. It was not for betraying Angique, for cheating on her and being the willing prey of her own weakness. As she dangled in her private night, she felt a surprising guilt for betraying Anna. She had talked with Anna and learned how much more dedicated the woman was to Angique than she had ever been; how Anna sacrificed her private and corporate certainties to be the perfect slave. The woman must be hurting immensely from being sent away by Angique. And she, Alicia, had played a major part in that with her jealous need to get back into Angique's favor.

Surprisingly, though, her feelings of remorse lacked the sharp edges one might expect. They were there. But they were as numb as her body, losing the urgency they might have had if she hadn't been floating in this private, lonely place — waiting and realizing with the passing minutes how totally irrelevant her emotions became; her needs and wishes.

At least an hour seemed to have passed when even those feelings ebbed away. In reality it had only been ten minutes. Wallowing in her guilt had caused her mind to go in circles, taking her consciousness with it in a down-spiraling free fall. Gradually the floating sensation turned into a machine-like churning. She felt as if she'd left her body, watching it from a distance. She wondered how this girl, slowly gyrating from a chain, could be so ... distracted. Why wasn't she mad, outraged? What happened to her fear? Why wasn't she upset, scared about what might happen?