Chapter 24

Lucca led — practically dragged — Valerie up to Dana’s bedroom. One of the room’s walls was decorated with a sculptural panel about eight feet long, of dark walnut slats. The slats ran floor to ceiling, and were mounted to the wall on their narrow edge and spaced evenly apart. Each slat was carved into an organic series of curves and arches, reinforced with black steel edge-work. Each arch was a potential attachment point, and a hidden panel opened to a neatly organized set of locks and other hardware. Restraints, rope, or chain could be attached almost anywhere across the surface, and Dana regularly bound Valerie against the wall for whatever teasing or torture she had in mind; or merely as an objet d’art to admire. Valerie was very familiar with this section of wall.

Lucca hauled straight upward on the chain leash until it was taut, forcing Valerie up onto the balls of her feet. They locked the leash to the wall in that position and stepped back, leaving Valerie stretched vertically, pressed against the wall, and already shaking with the effort of holding herself up. She wished Dana had locked her into heels, that morning.

Valerie shifted her feet around trying to find a position that most eased the tension on her neck, whimpering as the pain and discomfort built. The chain was long enough that she couldn’t even reach the simple snap hook Lucca had used to secure it to the wall, though the much taller enby had barely even needed to stretch to lock it in place. The best Valerie could do was to press the front of her body against the sculpture, head craned up as far as she could; and even in that position, the collar pulled against the back of her neck and pressed uncomfortably against her jaw.

Lucca watched her silently for a moment, frowning.

“Where does Dana put you at night?”

Valerie stilled her fidgeting, and turned her head to face Lucca, as much as she could. She swallowed nervously, and winced minutely at how the pull on her collar made the act painful.

“Most- most nights- uhm- in bed with her.. or, in my— in the cell..”

“In bed with her..” Lucca’s tone darkened.

Valerie didn’t understand the mix of emotions that rolled off of Lucca, anger and disdain and.. sadness, or fear, she thought, or something like it. Their emotions felt dangerous, and it fed the fear crawling around in the pit of her stomach.

“And: that’s two,” Lucca continued, presenting her index and middle finger in a vee. “You will address me as Mx, when you are allowed to speak. You know your safe words?”

Valerie swallowed. She knew them; and struggled to imagine any situation that might induce her to use them. The words were an ever-present exit into a world that would, mercilessly, devour her entirely— but, oh yes, she knew them.

“Y— yes, Mx.”

“Good.”

Lucca regarded Valerie for several long minutes. Effectively suspended by the neck, Valerie could not escape their perception, or even make herself small. She could only just see Lucca out of the corner of her eye, unless she wanted to cut off her own air in service to turning her head further. The discomfort of her bondage, the emotions clamoring within her, and Lucca’s withering gaze all seemed to form a vicious cycle, each building on the next to make her feel smaller and smaller, until she turned her head away completely and pressed her face against the sculptured wall, eyes closed. She was trembling.

After what seemed like an eternity, she was surprised by Lucca’s hands grasping the latex at the neck of the catsuit she wore. It was a neck-entry garment, with no zippers or other releases to ease the process of getting in or out of it. Valerie had worn the catsuit for almost twelve hours that day already; the dressing aid had long single mingled with the salt from her sweat to become something more like glue than the lubricant it was meant to be.

Dana would have usually used a warm, gentle shower to rinse her off, inside the latex and out, easing it off of her skin in a careful, caring ritual. Valerie had started to look forward those evenings. Lucca exhibited no such care; they stretched the neck down over Valerie’s shoulders, the force of it pulling painfully against her chained collar.

The latex didn’t hurt as it pulled away from her skin, but every place where it might have slid against lubricated skin felt instead like trying to drag a strip of duck tape across bare flesh, pulling against her with a burning sensation. Valerie gasped and whimpered at the feeling of it, but tried to orient her limbs and body to make the removal as easy as possible.

Lucca finally dropped the tangled bundle of latex to the ground, and stepped back. They didn’t offer any explanation, but simply disappeared into the bathroom; and a few moments later, Valerie heard the shower turn on. She had a fleeting moment of hope that Lucca would return, release her, and walk her to the shower, but it became quickly evident that they were seeing to their own comfort, instead- and luxuriating in it, at that, as long minutes passed.

As warm as the bedroom air was, Valerie’s skin chilled without the layer of latex, and she shivered with the temperature change as much as with the continued strain of pressing herself tall against the uncompromising chain locked to her and to the wall.

The shower was still running, the white noise patter covering up the incidental sounds Lucca must have made in getting into position; and they moved quietly, anyway, for someone built the way they were. The first lash of the whip against Valerie’s back took her completely by surprise; she gave a strangled yelp as the strike drew a line of fire across her shoulders, and she barely managed to retain her footing.

“Count each impact out loud, or I’ll start over.”

“O- one, Mx.” Valerie’s voice was shaky, and her chest heaved, pressed so hard against the wall sculpture that she was sure the edges of the slats would leave their own marks on her skin.

“Each time you disobey, you will be punished.”

The whip slashed against her right butt cheek, and she thrashed against the wall, trying and falling to find some kind of relief.

“Two.. Mx..”

The first lash had been a complete surprise, and while it was not, in isolation, the most painful thing she had ever experienced, the shock of it left her mind scrambling to reckon with what was happening.

Valerie managed to count out thirteen more lashes between increasingly involuntary yelps. She knew better than to beg for mercy; she knew it would only bring more punishment. At fifteen, she was barely strong enough to hold herself against the wall, and the collar was pressing harder than ever against her jaw, her breathing was labored, and shadows were starting to creep in at the edges of her vision.

At twenty lashes, she was openly sobbing, and she didn’t think her attempts to count were comprehensible as spoken English, but still she tried.

She wasn’t sure what the final count was when Lucca stopped; her conscious mind was entirely subsumed by pain and the thought-shattering anticipation of the next blow. When, finally, a strike didn’t land on rhythm, she had become so used to the pattern that the absence didn’t register as any kind of relief.

“That was one punishment,” Lucca informed her flatly. They reached over Valerie’s head and unclipped the chain; Valerie collapsed to the ground in a tangle of arms and legs. She wasn’t unconscious, but she couldn’t make her limbs work to hold her up on their own.

Lucca dumped Valerie from the shoulder carry, onto the thin mattress on the cell floor. They made sure the girl’s head didn’t strike the concrete, but showed no other consideration for her comfort. They stepped back and regarded, nonplussed, the whimpering mess that was the girl. Steel cuffs wrapped snugly around both her wrists; they were locked together in front of her with a padlock. Valerie didn’t recognize the cuffs as Dana’s style, or part of her collection.

Before carrying her down the stairs, Lucca had snapped them shut around her wrists, each closing with a series of clicks that belied some hidden mechanism; they were nearly seamless. Similar cuffs held her ankles together. They seemed to share some design elements in common with her collar, and as her addled mind slowly processed these observations, an icy fear started to sneak in that they were just as permanent.

“Who knew you were such a little slut for pain?” Lucca said. Her voice mostly carried scorn and pity, but there was almost something like respect in it, too.

They turned toward the door to leave.

“I- I’m not,” Valerie isaid, eventually, her voice unsteady.

Lucca was halfway out the door. She had hesitated in uncertainty of whether the question was rhetorical or if it counted as ‘direct’.

“..Mx,” she hastened to add, before Lucca counted another error.

Her voice, though quiet, was a plea as much as a protest.

“What?” Lucca snapped, turning back.

“I don’t— I’m not a—” She couldn’t bring herself to say pain slut. “I don’t like it, Mx.”

Tears streamed down her cheeks and she struggled to keep the sob out of her voice.

Lucca turned back and fully faced the girl where she lay on the mattress. They stared at her with something Valerie could only identify as skepticism. She stayed silent, not willing to extend her promised punishments any further.

“Not many people endure a session like that, unless they like it.”

Valerie gave no reply; she hugged her legs to her chest. The tears flowed freely and it was hard not to sob aloud, but she wasn’t sure if that would count as speaking.

“Why didn’t you use your safe word, then?”

They sounded… accusatory, and angry; and more that Valerie was too dysregulated to untangle.

“I—” she tried to get an explanation out in between the tears, but the words got tangled up on the way from her mind to her tongue. She couldn’t figure out how to explain that in her heart, using her safe word was equivalent to suicide. The punishment, and now the anger in Lucca’s voice, were too much; if she had not been chained hand and foot, she might have tried to run. As it was, all she could do was pull tighter into herself, trembling.

“Spit it out.”

“I can’t, Mx.” An audible sob broke through, and it was like a dam bursting. “I don’t— I don’t have a choice. I can’t.”