Chapter 30

Isolation, and Valerie’s own fearful imagination, broke her before any action of Lucca’s.

She opened her mouth to speak, not knowing if Lucca was even still present in the room; or in the house, for that matter. They might have left her there for Dana to discover when she returned the following evening. A full twenty-four hours in the sort of bondage she was in would be uncomfortable, and maddening, but not dangerous.

Her tongue darted out quickly to wet her lips, and she tried and failed again to shift in her bonds.

“Please—” she began, but a shuddering gasp left her unable to finish.

As soon as the first sound had left her, Lucca squeezed and twisted one of her nipples. It hurt only a little, but the sensation, its quickness, and the surprise of it stunned her into silence. She didn’t think it a punishment for speaking— Lucca would have hurt her much more, if that had been their goal; and she had specifically given her permission. As quickly as they had squeezed, they released her nipple, and she whimpered softly.

With that, Lucca began to work. While she was still capable of analytic thought, she reasoned that Lucca must have been poised, waiting for her to crack and beg before they even started. The timing was far too coincidental, and the response too swift, for any other explanation.

Lucca focused their attention on her nipples; gentle flicks, strokes, and squeezes that varied from almost imperceptible to intensely, if very briefly, painful. She moaned, gasped, and whimpered according to Lucca’s ministrations. She felt less like a human and more like an instrument in their hands.

The teasing and stimulation very effectively fanned the flames of her arousal, washing out any trace of the fear and anticipation she had been feeling; the only thoughts left in her head were of lust and desire. She was sure she was as hard as she had ever been before, but she had no way to stimulate any part of herself, and Lucca paid no attention whatsoever to anything other than her breasts. Valerie felt sure that a single stroke- a single touch- would send her over the edge.

Lucca intensified their efforts. Valerie felt what surely must have been a tongue, flicking with a measured beat across one nipple while Lucca’s fingers duplicated the same motion on her other. She moaned, and strained against her bonds, trying to arch a back that was held rigidly in place by the steel around her waist and neck. She jerked against the uncompromising bands that bound her arms and legs; her limbs would have been thrashing uncontrollably if they had the freedom to.

“Please, Mx,” she begged, barely comprehensible between gasps and moans. “Please let me cum..”

She could only barely find the breath to speak; she nearly couldn’t find the space to simply breathe.

Lucca stopped their ministrations; Valerie’s nipples ached from all the teasing, and ached equally from its absence; ached to be touched again. Her mind shattered against the brick wall of the denial, and she whimpered pleadingly. As desperately as she wanted Lucca’s hands back on her body, she was grateful, too, for the moment to rest and catch her breath; she was panting.

When she felt Lucca’s hands on her again, she was nearly calm- she had almost pieced back together some semblance of a train of thought from scattered fragments of her mind.

They touched her randomly, with none of the focused intensity of before. A few seconds of a thumb circling one nipple, and then nothing; or a sudden onslaught, instead, a squeeze and twist of a nipple that would’ve been painful if her brain was not so melted that everything registered as pleasure. At one point, Lucca shoved two fingers into her mouth, down her throat; nearly but not quite gagging her, and strangling even her desperate moans. Their other hand slid down the front of her body, teasing her pubic mound and just barely brushing the base of her straining dick. She whined as much as she could around their fingers, and begged incoherently.

Nothing, again, for two breaths, and then the weight and relentless squeezing and tugging of clamps attached to both of her nipples. Each tremor of her restrained and tormented body was echoed in painful tugs.

Lucca dragged their fingernails, or something sharper, across her flanks, and her arousal was so high that the pain did not — indeed, could not — diminish it. They bit down on the tender skin over her collarbones, bruising the delicate flesh there if not drawing blood. Valerie had no way to know, in her darkness- she only moaned, whimpered, and gasped in pain. She begged for mercy, for grace, when she could draw breath for it, and Lucca showed no sign that they even heard her.

Her ability to speak comprehensible words was diminishing rapidly.

The pain never rivaled the blinding agony of Lucca’s whip, but it was relentless, random, inescapable, and expertly calibrated.

If time had been uncountable before, in her silent isolation, it no longer existed at all in her torment. It might have been minutes, or hours, of Lucca’s attentions.

As rest, they hurt her, between agonizing bouts of teasing, and the two states blurred together. Valerie feared the pleasure — the sisyphean climb toward an orgasm that she would not be allowed — as much as she dreaded the pain and the switch back toward sadism.

She had no memory, no consciousness or awareness, of ever being anything other than a creature that writhed, moaned, whimpered, screamed, and begged; and was denied any pause or release.

A final torment, they loosed the clamps from her nipples; the blood rushing back into them hurt as much as anything else they had done to her. She screamed raggedly.

With as much suddenness as Lucca had started, they stopped, completely. Again. Valerie continued to twist within her bonds, and emit soft noises of need and desire.

Minutes passed, and her ragged breathing steadied. She felt like a steel guitar string stretched much too tight, strands beginning to fray, and she prayed for another twist of the screw, whether to release the tension or break her entirely. Her heart thudded behind her ribs and she felt light-headed.

“Drink.”

Lucca’s voice spoke to her through the headphones, over the roar of white noise that Valerie had long since stopped noticing. She thought the order a figment of her desperate imagination until the first splash of water poured into her mouth. She sputtered, and swallowed; her throat was parched and aching, and the cool water hitting it was as pleasurable as any of the teasing Lucca had inflicted on her. She moaned, and opened her mouth again, a silent plea for more.

She swallowed mouthful after mouthful, stopping only when Lucca stopped pouring, having apparently decided that she had had enough.

And then they began again, as they had originally, with soft, almost gentle teasing on Valerie’s nipples. Her body was hypersensitive; Lucca had been careful not to overwhelm any part of her, and had not used anything vibrating that might deaden her nerves. She was almost instantly moaning and straining against her bonds once again, her desperation unabated and undiminished.

Lucca repeated the entire cycle. They varied the stimuli, but Valerie had no reference point to even know what they were doing to her body. She thought there was impact, but minor— stinging slaps on her inner thighs that might have been a hand, a belt, or a paddle.

She recognized — maybe — the impossible buzzing sensations of an e-stim, a rising and falling tingle of current, her muscles twitching in response to the peak. Lucca eventually slid a well-lubricated plug home inside her, which — very rarely — buzzed teasingly against her prostate; mostly she only felt full, an unyielding mass for her muscles to clench and strain against.

Her memories of the details were confused, fragmentary, and she didn’t even trust that half of them were not pure hallucination.

She couldn’t count the number of times Lucca worked her up to the brink, and then stopped. They nearly brought her to orgasm simply by biting, scratching, and striking her.

An isolated corner of her mind that was still capable of rational thought was frightened that they were training her body to be unable to distinguish between pain and pleasure.

The truly terrifying part was that, in that moment, she wanted it to happen.

Eventually, Lucca spoke to her once more. Valerie felt as though she had lived an entire life, died, and been reincarnated all bound to the wall within Lucca’s steel; she existed only as a canvas for Lucca’s art.

“You choose— reward or punishment.”

Valerie twisted her head side to side, looking for the source of the voice, before she returned to the moment enough to remember the earbuds in her ears.

“Reward, and you can cum tonight, but you’ll still be due a punishment. If you pick punishment, then that’s it. I’ll leave you here until morning to cool down, and you’ll have your reward tomorrow.”

Valerie whimpered wordlessly, her tone pleading, desolate. She wanted to cum, to be brought up to that edge and pushed over it into oblivion. She wanted it more than life itself. No punishment Lucca could mete out seemed more important.

Simultaneously, her blood ran cold with terror. For all the sadism Lucca had performed on her body, none of it was the burning white agony they had wrought with their whip. There was pain, but it was stimulation; not punishment. To ask for that— to beg for it— would prove to Lucca that she was the pain slut they had thought her to be originally.

“If you don’t pick, I’m going to leave you here, and punish you tomorrow, and there will be no reward.”