Chapter 57

Valerie was shaking, trapped against a cold concrete wall by unyielding steel wrapped around her wrists and ankles. Chains rattled dully against the concrete; in time with the shuddering of Valerie’s breath. She worried she was hyperventilating, but the fear was already too much to control.

Lucca turned the corner, whip in hand.

“One punishment,” Lucca said aloud, but Valerie had a feeling they were speaking to themselves, or narrating for some unseen observer; not speaking directly to her. They did not seem to see her, at least not as a person.

“Then if it’s been a good little pet, maybe some rest.”

The chains held her arms outstretched, raised slightly above shoulder level. The back of her body pressed against rough concrete.

The chains were taut, the cuffs already digging into her wrists. It only took a single experimental tug to discover that, not only was there no slack, but the hard steel of the cuffs, their sharp right angles, bit into her hands and wrists just for the attempt, painful in their own right.

Similar chains and cuffs attached to her ankles held her legs spread, and the fear that her bare feet would slip on the smooth concrete floor was a distinct terror layered on top of everything else.

Her legs trembled, and the balls of her feet ached already from standing on bare waxed concrete with no padding. Any attempt to shift her weight just transferred more to her wrists.

If she failed to hold herself up under her own power, the wrist cuffs and their brutal chains would do it for her. She already knew how much that would hurt, and she feared that wicked cuffs would damage the nerves and tendons that ran close to the surface there.

Valerie’s back, pressed against the wall, still hurt from Lucca’s first whipping. She could not tell if the pain was real or imagined, if the whipping felt like it had been hours before or weeks before. The memory of it was muddled, hazy, and dreamlike.

The concrete was cool against her back, even soothing, but her front side was exposed, instead, and whatever miniscule comfort the soothing chill brought to her back was more than outweighed by the immense pain she knew to be her future.

She did not think she would survive another whipping at Lucca’s hand, but she intended to last as long as she could. If Lucca meant to break her, they would have to work for it. She still feared the pain, however, as much as she feared proving too weak to survive it.

She considered begging; pleading with Lucca to be gentle, to be merciful. She could use a safe word, she knew; but she asked for this, didn’t she? The chance to prove she was strong enough. Regardless, she found she could not recall the safe words Lucca had told her. They’re simple, she thought, her terror mounting, why can’t I remember them?

She opened her mouth to speak and found herself unable; a dozen conflicting thoughts all tried to make themself heard first. She knew Lucca would, anyway, punish her further if she spoke. They had not given her permission, not even to beg as they sometimes did. A plea for mercy would have only the opposite effect, earning her more punishment.

Lucca warmed up their arm and shoulder dispassionately. The first touches of the whip against Valerie’s inner thighs were gentle caresses; Lucca feeling out the distance, perhaps showing off their control and precision. Their expression was cold and clinical.

Valerie flinched away reflexively from each gentle touch of the whip; they were painless whispers across her skin, but she knew the next fall, or the one after that, would sear pain across her skin at full volume. As it was, the only real pain was from the steel of the shackles around her wrists and ankles as she pulled against them in reflex.

She squeezed her eyes shut as Lucca drew their arm back again; she could not watch. The hot tears streaming down her cheeks blurred her vision enough that she could not really see, anyway, and she had no means to wipe them away.

Her breath, still on the verge of hyperventilating, was loud in her own ears, and the shaking of her arms and legs still rattled the chains.

Lucca struck her first across her thighs, just above her knees. Lucca’s aim was infallible; the first searing line on one thigh was, a moment later, matched by another on the opposite thigh.

She gasped and whimpered at the first two true whip strikes; not for how much they hurt, which was tolerable at first. She whimpered with dread and knowledge that much worse was to come. The anticipation much more agonizing than the pain of those first two strikes.

The pain built on itself slowly, each strike of the whip a lingering burn that turned her thighs into fields of fire. The delicate skin of her hip creases suffered worst, forcing audible yelps, sobs, and moans from her; and whimpers that threatened to become screams.

Her legs were already shaking trying to hold her weight, and sweat dripped down her body, leaving the floor beneath her feat treacherously slick. Occasionally a rivulet would trace across the fresh whip marks, and burn broken skin.

The floor between between her feet was a pinkish puddle of sweat, tears, and a little blood that already oozed from a few of the deeper strikes, swirling into the darkness of a floor drain.

Even as the pain grew, so did her arousal, days of Dana’s hormone concoction proving more powerful than Lucca’s whip; the pain and the need mixed in her sex-starved and endorphin-flooded mind until her anticipation for each next strike was as much fear of the pain as thirst for it.

Lucca had so far avoided landing the whip against her most sensitive parts, which were humiliatingly hard despite…

No, she thought to herself, with an audible sob. Because of the pain. The bondage.

She felt broken by the realization; and by the awareness that even in the midst of her dissolution, she prayed silently for Lucca to continue long enough for the pain to push her over the edge into orgasm.

Her flowing tears turned into uncontrolled sobs, born not of pain, but of the shame she felt at how her body and mind responded to the pain; shame at the eagerness she felt.

Lucca began anew, two whip strikes landing across her collarbones, breaking the delicate skin there. The lines of fire marched downward like clockwork, precisely placed in time and on her body.

She tried to stay still under the rhythmic strikes, but it was proving difficult. Her mind anticipated each strike despite her efforts, and any thrashing in response only became pain from steel cuffs dug into her wrists; and there was no defense and no escape.

She begged incoherently as the whip landed across the tops of her breasts, the sides, the bottom, sketching out a spiraling cross-hatch that closed inexorably in toward her pierced nipples.

She tried to open her eyes, to seek out Lucca’s face and plead for mercy. She remained blinded by tears, the dim basement only an indistinct blur. Lucca was a smudge moving around in her vision, and if they even looked at her face, she could not tell.

If Lucca could make any sense of the sounds she made, which did not even sound like speech to her own ears, they gave no sign of it.

She screamed raggedly as each nipple was struck by the whip, one after the other in rapid succession. The twin strikes hurt more than everything that had come between; erasing a faint hope that Lucca would show some iota of kindness considering the sensitivity of her flesh there.

The whipping continued, horizontal strikes on left and right that slowly grew closer together, drawing a vee shape that marched down her abdomen. Each whip blow landed rhythmically, closing in on her twitching and dripping cock.

She could not speak coherently, and even forming thoughts was a fragmented experience. A primal part of her was desperate for Lucca to continue; each fall of the whip brought her closer to climax, and the pain was becoming so intense she could not tell it apart from pleasure.

A more rational but increasingly inaudible voice begged for mercy, scrabbled for safe words that she could not recall, and offered a silent promise for anything Lucca might want, just for the smallest respite from the pain.

It did not matter: she could not form words; and it was too late to stop the inevitable.

She screamed again with the first sideways slash across the soft flesh of her pubic mound. The thin scattering of hair there provided no protection.

Another stroke of the whip and her throat was too raw to scream. She was having trouble drawing breath, her sinuses blocked by mucus from her sobs.

Lucca struck her body again, keeping to the rhythm like a precision machine. This third stroke landed just barely across the base of her cock, and she thrashed in her bonds, too short of breath to scream or beg, and headless of the bite of the cuffs.

Her fear was like a pulsing, grating sound in her ears, drowning out every thought.

She felt more than heard the whistle of Lucca drawing back the whip and unleashing it again.

She awoke with a gasp that was half strangled scream. It was Sunday morning, and dawn was just breaking outside the window of the guest room that was temporarily hers.

Her phone alarm was blaring, pulsing and grating, from where it charged atop her makeshift bed-side table.

Valerie sobbed and gasped for breath. She was hard, cripplingly aroused, straining against the cheap cotton underwear that Lucca had purchased for her a week ago. There was a small damp spot, which was a new development. She had not leaked like that since long before she started hormones.

One of her wrists was wedged painfully in a gap in the headboard, and she extracted it carefully. It ached slightly, but she did not think it would even bruise.

It was just a dream, she slowly realized, consciousness assembling itself piece by piece from the scattered fragments of dream-scape.

Her body was in no real pain, aside from a desperation for sexual relief that might have been easier to take if it had been physical pain. Her heart hammered in her chest and she was breathing heavily, like she had just finished a hard run, albeit without any of the runner’s high she had grown to enjoy.

She pushed the sheets and blankets, slick with sweat, off of her body, and lay flat on her back, staring at the ceiling as it slowly brightened in the morning light. Tears of frustration, sexual and existential both, burned at the corners of her eyes.

Twelve more days, she thought, trembling in despair. No, no, no. No fucking way.