“We brought him here to test you, if you must know,” Landon drawled, his eyes wicked as they darted between Alexander and myself. “You will watch from the gallery as we put slave Davenport through her testing, and you will not intervene in anyway. Will you, Thornton?”
Alexander stood mutely for a moment, but despite his quiet stillness, it was evident he was struggling internally with a cyclone of emotion.
My Master might have been a cruel one, but he had never hurt me, not irreparably, not more than my body could stand or my mind couldn’t translate into pleasure.
The other men of the Order, I knew, would have no such boundaries.
My skin went suddenly very cold.
“If we find you’ve developed feelings for the girl,” Sherwood said coldly, peering at Alexander as if he was a turncoat of the highest order. “Not only will the girl be taken from you, but we will have to consider your punishment. You remember what happened to Baron Horst, do you not?”
“Crippled,” a man sitting to Alexander’s right leaned over to sneer quietly at me. “Couldn’t take the whipping like a real man.”
“Of course, you’re familiar with the Order’s punishments. You were only twenty-two when you stood up for the Russian slave, weren’t you?” Sherwood continued.
My mind immediately conjured up the thin white scars dissecting Alexander’s otherwise flawless back. I kept my eyes focused on the ground as they burned with tears.
I didn’t know who I was more sorrowful for. Myself for my upcoming ordeal, or Alexander for being raised and ruled by such a barbarian group of men.
The room hung in animated silence as they waited for Alexander’s verdict, and even though I knew the impossibility of his decision, my heart still turned to ash in my chest when he spoke the words I knew he would say.
“Take her, beat her, flay her, and bring forth her tears. She’s just a slave to me. It’s only her body that brings me pleasure.”
They set up in the gymnasium. It was clear orders had been given before dinner to arrange the space for their intended show because a strange apparatus shaped like a massive X was settled beside a wheeled table filled with sex toys and equipment. They had known Alexander would capitulate to their demands.
Alexander’s cryptic threats about predators more powerful than himself suddenly made blood-curdling sense.
Two men carried me in.
Alexander was not one of them.
They had parted us immediately after he acquiesced to the demonstration, but I caught sight of him on the small set of bleachers, sandwiched between two stocky men who looked ready to rip his head off if he made one wrong move.
I swallowed thickly as the men dragged me over to the huge cross and bound my limbs to each branch of the X, facing away from the gathering crowd and the Master who would test me. The cuffs weren’t leather as they usually were, but cold, sharp metal that bit into my skin too tightly. The man on my left laughed under his breath as I gave my wrists a little jerk and winced.
He liked me in pain.
They all did.
I was the lone masochist in a room full of cruel sadists with no one to temper their lust.
My mind buzzed and whirred as I tried to mentally prepare myself for the coming onslaught.
Then Landon stepped forward in all his finery with a long, thin whip coiled over his knuckles, and I knew no meditation or platitudes would prepare me for what was to come.
Landon had controlled me for years as a girl, flagellating my independent spirit for petty transgressions until I was as mentally submissive to him as I was now to Alexander.
If he was so well trained in Dominant mental warfare, I didn’t want to even imagine how he might be at the physical act.
“This is a black snake,” he explained to me as the two men attending to me melted away, their job done. “It’s my preferred whip for punishing unruly subs. It makes this sound, you see, this slash through the air and then a cutting crack as it bites into the arse. Then the sound of the sub as they scream and beg through their tears for me to stop… well, it gets me so hard.”
I wanted to rally against him. To spit in his face and tell him he was a coward, not a Master. A real Master shared trust with their slave. They promised to braid pleasure with the pain as it whipped against their skin, to reward them with praise or orgasms if they followed the rules of their game. I knew without having to know the particulars that Landon did no such things. He was a pathetic excuse of a man who hid behind BDSM to make him feel more of a man, to falsely prove his thesis that men were the better gender.