Chapter 29

Without instructions to the contrary, Valerie slept in the cell that night. Unbound, still wearing the flannel pajamas, with a blanket, and no cold shower— she found it practically luxurious. She slept well, and, blessedly, dreamed only strange dreams, whose memory dissipated when she awoke.

Dana had been cycling her progesterone up and down for weeks; Valerie didn’t know what dose she was getting at any given time, since the little suppositories all looked the same; but Dana had explained to her that some weeks she’d get none, some weeks she’d get a normal dose, and other weeks she’d be taking a double dose each night. Valerie imagined she was on a double dose phase, but she couldn’t be sure; the effects on her libido were noticeable but subtle. After a good night’s rest and with a little distance from the intensity of Lucca’s punishment, she awoke with her libido definitely in overdrive.

She knew that wasn’t entirely due to the hormones. Dana had weeks ago added a new protocol for her that she wasn’t allowed to get off on her own, at least not without explicit permission. For the week leading up to Lucca’s visit, Dana had refused even that permission, and her reward, the one occasion she had begged for it, had been hours of edging and then refusal, on top of the woman’s constant, regular teasing. Valerie thought she’d go insane.

The whipping at Lucca’s hand and subsequent events of the next day had distracted her, but hours of talking over every kink and fetish they could imagine had ignited her arousal like an angle grinder spraying sparks into a puddle of gasoline.

She awoke to a dark room, that morning, and curled tighter under the blanket. The door would still be locked from this side; a fingerprint was needed to open it, and she knew implicitly that it wouldn’t accept hers. She suspected it would notify Dana if she so much as tried, and she would be punished for it. Through sheer force of will, she stopped her hands from drifting down her body on their own, but she couldn’t help fantasizing.

That same look of surprised respect Lucca had given her the night before, but with their hand wrapped around her throat, and their other holding her wrists above her head, pushing her against a wall, their body pressed against hers…

She whimpered, squeezing her thighs together and drawing her knees up to her chest. She was trying to talk herself into taking an ice cold shower just to clear her head, when the door opened and the lights flickered on. She untangled herself from the blanket and rose to standing, blushing deeply as she realized she was hard, and visible through the soft flannel she wore; Dana had not said anything, but Valerie thought there was tadalafil in the anonymous handful of pills she took each day. After starting HRT years ago, her body had never responded with such vigor; until now.

Lucca chuckled.

“Did I interrupt something?” they asked, the smirk audible in their voice. “I can come back later, give you more time.”

“N— no, Mx.”

Valerie didn’t think she could blush any more deeply, and she turned her face away, embarrassed.

“We’re not playing yet, you don’t have to call me ‘Mx’. Here, I brought you coffee.”

Valerie looked up, blinking and just slightly shocked by the normalcy. Lucca was holding a mug out toward her, steam rising gently from it. She padded forward, took it gingerly, and sipped the piping hot coffee inside.

“Thank you, m— thank you.”

“Once you’re awake, come upstairs to Dana’s room. Leave the pajamas behind.”

Lucca turned with a small laugh, sipped from their own coffee mug, and left, leaving the door open behind them.

Valerie, bleary and wide-eyed, took another shaky sip from the mug of coffee. It was too hot for comfort, but she found the sting of it helped her focus. She worked through her morning hygiene tasks while she finished the coffee, and then followed out of the play room and up the stairs to Dana’s bedroom, leaving the pajamas neatly folded outside the cell. The west-facing windows gave her no hint as to how long Lucca had let her sleep; only that it was before two or three in the afternoon, when the sun would become properly visible through them.

She found the bedroom dim, the windows darkened almost to fully opaque, and the indirect room lighting tuned low enough that she had to wait for her eyes to adjust to make out anything more than vague shapes.

“Normally I’d use a collar to mark the boundaries of a scene.”

Valerie jumped as Lucca spoke from the shadows at the far side of the bed. She had been staring out of the eerily darkened windows while her eyes acclimated to the dimness, and she had not noticed Lucca watching her.

They stepped around the bed and walked up to Valerie. Something metal dangled, glinting, from one of their hands. Valerie recognized the cuffs she had slept in the night before last, once Lucca was close enough.

“I can’t believe she actually put that on you.”

Their voice was a mixture of awe and disapproval. They reached a hand out to run a finger along the collar.

“I can can cut it off, when you want it gone.”

When, Valerie noted, not if. She swallowed, feeling, as ever, the collar around her neck as she did. She stayed silent, apprehensive and uncertain what to say.

“How did you sleep?”

Valerie blinked in surprise at the question, which was jarringly normal given the situation. She was suddenly acutely aware that she was completely naked; Lucca wore dark jeans, a white tank top, and black boots that gave them an extra inch of height that they definitely didn’t need.

“Uhm.. good. Good. Weird dreams, but not… bad. Just weird.”

“How do you feel?”

“I—” Valerie opened her mouth to respond, but there were too many ways to answer that question, and most of the answers conflicted with each other. “I’m.. fine. Uhm.” She scrubbed her hand through the hair at the back of her head.

Lucca shook her head, sad and bemused.

“Forget I asked. Does anything hurt? Any injuries I should be careful of?”

“No,” Valerie shook her head as she answered. “Just..” She untangled her hand from her hair and gestured behind her shoulder. “Just my back.”

“I checked them before I took you downstairs. Bruises and a couple superficial cuts. They’ll hurt for a few days, but nothing to worry about. Do you still want to play?”

Valerie peeked past Lucca toward the bed, but the lighting was too dim for her to make out whatever else Lucca had been arranging there. Her heart felt like it was hammering in her chest; and it still felt strange after so many weeks for someone to ask her what she wanted, and expect an answer.

She nodded.

“Yes.. yes, please, Mx.”

“We’ll use the wrist cuffs instead of a collar. When you wear these, you’re my pet. You will do everything I tell you to do, or you will be punished. Do you understand?”

Valerie nodded quietly, her eyes wide. She felt more afraid than she expected, and some of that fear derived from the knowledge that she had asked Lucca for this. She had begged them for it.

“Repeat it back to me,” Lucca instructed her, mildly.

Valerie swallowed again. The collar felt tighter than usual.

“When I wear the wrist cuffs, I— I’m your pet. I’ll do anything you tell me to, or you’ll punish me.”

“Do I need to remind you of the rules from Monday?”

Valerie shook her head meekly.

“No, Mx.”

“Your safe words are ‘red’ and ‘yellow’. Red means we stop everything, and the scene is over. Maybe we do something else, maybe not. Yellow means you’re at your limit. You will never be punished for using a safe word. Okay?”

“Okay.”

She had no intention of using a safe word, but she knew it would be better than breaking the contract, if it came to that.

Lucca held out the cuffs; they weren’t linked together, just a pair of hinged half-circles of metal. The open edges were machined into a mysterious and complicated latching mechanism, one side a thin curved plate that slid into a matching recess on the other.

Valerie did not need to be instructed to hold her wrists out so that Lucca could close the cuffs around them. She had not noticed, previously, how heavy they were. Valerie watched them close with a rapid mechanical clicking; the sound sent the same shiver down her spine as the small padlocks that Dana preferred.

She looked up at Lucca, who had a hungry and somewhat menacing look in their eye, and her skin puckered with goosebumps even in the warm air.

Without another word, Lucca grabbed the attachment ring on Valerie’s collar and hauled her, once again, over to the sculptural restraining wall, where she had been whipped the two nights before. A number of shiny steel devices that she couldn’t divine the purpose of had been secured to the wall, visible in the dim light only as she was pulled within a few feet of it.

Valerie didn’t consciously resist despite the visceral terror that Lucca was going to whip her again; but they must have noticed an unconscious resistance, or the immediate trembling that started. They made no move to reassure her; simply wrapped their free hand fully around Valerie’s throat, for a better grip, and pushed her back against the wall. They weren’t gentle, but they didn’t push hard enough to aggravate the bruises and welts on her back; and their firm grip didn’t let her head hit the wall.

She felt a heavy click reverberate through the collar, and found very quickly that it was rigidly attached to one of the strange devices secured to the wall. Lucca unceremoniously pushed each of her wrist cuffs against a hard point, as well, and with matching clicks, they too were fixed in place; her arms outstretched, just slightly more relaxed than a full ‘T’ pose. There was no play in the collar or cuffs; she could move only as much as her flesh would compress against the metal, which was very little; the cuffs and collar were well-fitted.

Valerie watched Lucca walk back over to the far side of the bed, where she could just barely discern the inscrutable shapes of more items; she couldn’t tell what they were.

So quickly, and with so little effort, she was helpless— her heart was pounding in her chest and her arousal hurt.

Lucca seemed intent on taking their time; they walked back carrying just one item, and as soon as Valerie could make out that it was a blindfold, her heart started to flutter in panic.

She didn’t dare protest verbally, but she shook her head, eyes wide and pleading. Lucca ignored her, pressed leather pads of the blindfold against her eyes, slipped the band around the back of her head, and tightened it down. Valerie’s world was reduced to darkness, save for a few faint slivers of light where the edges imperfectly fitted the contours of her face.

“You were so helpful last night, I think you deserve a reward,” Lucca’s voice whispered in her ear.

She jerked in surprise, not that it served any purpose; her collar and cuffs quietly and rigidly refused to allow her any movement.

Lucca’s breath was warm against her ear and the side of her face; but their tone was devious and Valerie’s anticipation and anxiety were not at all eased.

“But I still owe you a punishment. I haven’t decided which one it’s going to be, tonight; but we can find out together, you and I.”

There was a pause, and she could hear Lucca breathing, still feel their breath across her skin.

“You have permission to beg.”

Lucca’s words were the last things that Valerie heard; they pressed earplugs of some sort into her ears. A moment later, they flooded her hearing with white noise, drowning out even the rushing of her own blood.

Valerie’s last sensory connection to the world- those useless flecks of light at the corner of her vision— were stripped away, too, when Lucca pulled some kind of hood over her head, and tightened it down in some way that Valerie couldn’t discern. It was snug but not uncomfortably tight, even on top of the blindfold. She felt what might have been the clicking of padlocks. The hood blocked any hint of light from the gaps around the blindfold, and pads over her ears pressed the headphones deeper into her ear canals. Her mouth and nose were left exposed, but Valerie didn’t know if this was for the sake of safety, so that Lucca could hear her begging, or because they intended further torments for those parts of her.

The blindfold was concave, letting her blink behind it, in complete darkness. Dana favored a soft, padded blindfold that held her eyelids gently shut. She found this style much stranger, and more disorienting, especially when even the faint traces around the boundary were taken away. It felt less like she was blindfolded and more like her vision had simply been taken away.

She felt Lucca secure her ankles with cuffs, which she assumed matched the ones around her wrists; they too were then rigidly attached to the wall behind her. In the process, they had slipped something like soft, dense foam under her feat, cushioning them slightly against the hard wood floor. She felt similar bands secured around her thighs and upper arms, and finally her waist.

Valerie was incapable of any thoughts other than spiraling anticipation of what Lucca was about to do to her, what punishment or reward they were going to mete out.

When they pored over the list of kinks the day before, she had indicated only a few sorts of activity as hard boundaries, as ‘red’. Lucca didn’t seem like the sort to ignore those, but in her helplessness, she could hardly stop them if they chose to.

Perhaps they mean to force a safe word out of me, an anxious voice whispered in the back of her mind. Cross a line intentionally and make me prove whether or not it is truly a boundary.

It was an uncomfortable thought that mixed a healthy dose of fear into her anticipation and arousal.

Valerie had no way to mark time. Moments stretched to what surely must have been minutes. She could feel herself breathe, stomach pressing against the band around her waist when she inhaled, and giving back a small amount of space as she breathed out.

For a short time, she tried to count her breaths, but her mind refused to stay on the task, and it wandered to imagined torments Lucca was preparing for her.

Would they whip the front side of her, to prove that she could be broken?

Her bonds were surprisingly comfortable, if she didn’t try to move. The arm and wrist restraints held her arms so that they did not tire. The only pain or discomfort came from her own attempts to shift or move.

She wondered if an hour had gone by yet; or perhaps multiple hours. The white noise rush in her ears soon became a sort of silence, and she wondered if instead it had only been minutes, or seconds, magnified into an aeon by her anxiety.

Her heart beat slowed, as some of the fear left her; but as soon as she relaxed, she would shift and feel the unyielding grip of the steel binding her to the wall, and a new imagined fate would intrude on her thoughts and her heart would hammer again.

She waited, accepting that she had no understanding of how quickly or slowly time was passing.

She waited, increasingly desperate for Lucca to do anything, even punish her; even the touch of their whip seemed a preferable form of stimulation.

She waited, and wondered if this was her punishment; perhaps Lucca meant to leave her this way for… she had no idea how long.

She waited.

Nothing happened.