Chapter 7

“Wake up, little girl.”

Strong fingers pinched her chin. Kristen tried to shake them off, but they only gripped harder, raising her head. Her eyes flickered open. Sister Saint Augustine was standing in front of her, her face up close. Her expression was neither kind nor angry — just blank, clinical. The lack of emotion frightened Kristen more than the fact that she couldn’t move.

“How are you feeling, dear?” Sister asked.

She tried to say all, right, but it came out muffled. Something round and hard filled her mouth. She couldn’t close her teeth.

“What was that?”

“What’s going on?” Kristen asked, but it came out, “Uh-ss oh-ee uh?”

“Sorry, but we must take precautions. Things might get loud. You might be more comfortable if you stood up straight.”

Gradually, as sleep wore off, she became aware her shoulders hurt. Her arms were stretched above her, strapped to the ends of what seemed to be a large wooden X, and as she hung by her full weight, they felt like they were about to pop out of their sockets. Her waist was strapped to the center of the X, her ankles to the low ends, with her feet flat on the cold, concrete floor. She pushed up, locking her knees, and the stress went away.

“Eh ee O,” Kristen demanded.

“Let you go? We’re just getting started, precious. Welcome to our Good Friday service. Here you will have a taste — a very small taste — of the sufferings Our Lord went through for your sake.”

She held up in Kristen’s face an evil-looking flyswatter, a stiff black wand with a black, heart-shaped slat at the end. Then she lowered it out of sight and smacked the insides of Kristen’s naked thighs —

“Father — Son ... and Holy Spirit.”

She smacked Kristen’s naked pussy, hard.

“Nggahhh!“ Tears sprang into the girl’s eyes. She bit down on the thing in her mouth. “Uh-eezh!” she said, trying to say “Please.”

With the edge of the black heart, Sister traced a figure-eight about Kristen’s titties. Lightly, she tapped the girl’s nipples, which were hard from fear — but not just. At last, Sister raised the stick, as though preparing to deliver a blow. Kristen recoiled, but she had nowhere to go. She pulled at her straps.

“Uh-eezh, uh-eezh, uh-eezh,” she repeated, more quietly each time.

Sister only grinned and tapped Kristen’s cheek.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I can’t risk leaving any marks on my spotless lamb. But we do have a substitute.”

She stepped aside, and Kristen understood why she couldn’t talk. Sister Patrice, naked, and hanging by her wrists on a pair of chains, was gagged with a red ball strapped to her face. Kristen must have been gagged in the same way.

The cuffs on Sister’s wrists were leather, with a trim of fur puffed about the edges, and tiny silver locks that fastened the chains to silver rings. Her ankles and thighs were tied with tightly seamed layers of rope, expertly knotted. The chains were too short to let her stand: only her toes touched the floor. She twisted in her shackles, slowly, like a sack of flour. The pain must have been awful, but when their eyes met, Kristen saw only resignation.

And the room. Where was it? Dim, with a pair of paschal candles providing the only points of light. They stood, in brass sticks, on each side of sister’s nude body. Her chains were slung over a black pipe that seemed to run from nowhere to nowhere. Above the pipe was only darkness.

Sure. They were in the convent basement. But how did she get here? Maybe she’d walked without remembering it. Or she’d been carried. But Auggie couldn’t have done that alone. It would have taken both of them.

Auugie laid her whip on a table beside the cross and picked up a couple of gadgets. She held one up to Kristen’s face — a copper clamp with ridged rubber tips, like something you’d get in a hardware store. She poked the other against Kristen’s titty. The spring was so tight it resisted her fingers: to bend it, she had to squeeze the levers in her fist. Then, just as the jaws widened to their fullest extent, she let go, and the thing snapped shut on Kristen’s nipple.

“Aghhh!”

“Oh, does that hurt?”

“Ugnh!”

“Yes it does.” She pulled the clamp off, but not before stretching Kristen’s nipple as far as it would go.

“But these aren’t for you. They’re for your girlfriend.”

She limped back and, slipping the clamps up from below, placed one behind each of Patty’s creamy pink areolas. The pressure puffed them up like balloons and turned their tiny papillae to garnets. Auggie gave Patty’s tits a wobble, testing the grip, and Patty moaned through her gag — with pleasure, Kristen thought.

“And now your other end,” Auggie said.

She chose another gadget from the table. Kristen’s couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be. It was shaped kind of like the ace of spades, with a round base and a tapering head, but it was bright green. Auggie squeezed goo all over it from a tube she also kept on the table.

“You see, everything must be done just so,” she said as she smeared the gel over the plastic. “Nadab and Abihu were consumed with fire because they didn’t follow our Lord’s instructions to the letter. It’s a painstaking process, but I’m sure the good Lord will be pleased with our sacrifice.”

God, Kristen thought, you are such a sick cunt.

“I’m not as bad as I seem,” Auggie said, as if reading Kristen’s mand asked. “My servants are always happy when they leave. They feel pure and — shriven.”

She swiveled Patty around on her tiptoes. Kristen understood now what was happening. Sister Patrice had such a full, shapely ass, and Auggie was about to violate it. She angled the blunt end of the green plug into the shadow-line between the hemispheres. “Relax, dear,” she said, and pushed. The lube did its work: when she took her hand away, the green base was clinging to Patty’s open buttocks. Patty moaned again, and this time there was no mistaking what it meant.