Chapter 65

Valerie stepped unsteadily through the kitchen door. She held Dana’s letter in both trembling hands, with a grip that threatened to tear the crinkled sheet in half. The sky was just starting to brighten with dawn light.

Lucca,

Thanks for keeping an eye on Valerie. I hope she wasn’t too much trouble. Please find the instructions below for her return, though I imagine you could figure it all out yourself.

She crossed the distance to the hangar, running shoes squeaking on the asphalt pavement between it and the house. The inside was dimly lit by secondary motion-activated lights, which provided barely enough light to see and navigate.

There were large overhead floods, but she ignored the bank of switches that controlled them. She did not want a better view of her task.

Her movements were mechanical, almost trance-like. She wished she could be anywhere other than where she was, preparing to do what she was about to do; and her conscious mind was retreating to the corners and crevices in her head rather than engage fully with the bondage she was about to apply to her body.

A thin layer of desert dust already coated the outside of the box, muting the gloss of its shiny black panels. After she wiped away the layer that had settled on the top, she could make out the faint raised lines in the shape of a padlock. She pressed her thumb against it, and as the letter promised, the box made a quick series of clicking noises, and she was able to raise the lid.

Hold the button for thirty seconds and it will re-secure the latches. Once re-locked, you won’t be able to open it again.

She saw darkness and the glint of steel inside the box, and staggered back with an involuntary whimper. The lid fell shut with a solid thunk. Her heart rate seemed to have doubled in an instant.

She knew from the letter what to expect, but she was not prepared to see the interior of the box in person. She desperately wanted to run, and her eyes burned already with the promise of tears. Her hands shaking, she reopened the lid as far as it would go.

The walls, ceiling, and floor inside the box were a deep matte black material that Valerie didn’t recognize, like a neoprene that was utterly non-reflective and blacker than night. A few loose items were inside, which Valerie removed one at a time. Compared to the lining of the box, the black silicone butt plug resting in it was a dull grey.

Please pack my toy without any of the clothing I sent with her. You can return those separately, at your convenience, to be put away in storage; she won’t be needing them.

The instructions were precise and clinical, but as she disrobed, she felt anything but: lost, and confused and angry at her own actions. She replayed the last evening’s conversation with Lucca in her head as she folded and neatly stacked her clothing.

The clothes had been a gift, of sorts, and it seemed disrespectful to simply throw them off in a pile.

The morning air was chilly, and she began to shiver as her skin puckered with goosebumps. The air would warm quickly, but according to the scheduled pick up time in the letter, she would be gone before she had a chance to feel that warmth.

Apply the gag, cage, and plug first. Ensure each item is powered on. Secure her ankles to the lower cuffs, and then her collar to the hardpoint using the rigid strut. The cuffs will lock automatically, just squeeze them.

The plug was on the larger side. She lubricated it as best she could with a small bottle of hand lotion, but despite trying to ease it in slowly, the largest part of it stretched her painfully before sliding fully in, and left her feeling uncomfortably full.

Lucca surely had lube more appropriate to the purpose, but they had not spoken since the car ride the night before, not even exchanged a final goodbye, and she felt too small and hurt to break the silence to ask, again, for their assistance.

Their refusal to help her already felt like a betrayal; she knew there were instructions in the letter that she would not be able to complete on her own, and she felt sure that Dana would hold her responsible. Lucca might be making a moral decision from their perspective, but Valerie knew she was the one that would suffer for it.

The revelation about what Lucca intended their compound to be was a greater pain than their refusal. Rationally, she understood the mechanics of Lucca’s situation and why they could not let her stay. Still, she could not shake the belief that if she had been prettier or smarter or if Lucca simply liked her more, the story would have been different.

She supposed both hurts were the same, Valerie suffering for Lucca’s choices. They did not owe her anything, but she had come to see them as a friend; and they had turned away when they could have just as easily helped her.

She felt the rejection keenly, concrete evidence of her lack of worth. Fitting that she should be packaged and shipped back to Dana.

The chastity cage was next. Between the cold air and her mental state, she had no trouble working the base ring on and then securing the cage after it. It was the same custom device that Dana had been using on her for months.

The familiarity was not comforting. The letter was explicit about turning the device on, though it gave no indication as to why. As far as Valerie knew the only powered function of the device was the punishing shocks it could deliver.

Finally, albeit with some difficulty, she worked the gag into her mouth. It was strangely shaped, not a simple sphere, and it seemed designed to fill every crevice in her mouth and to hold her tongue immobile. It emitted a high-pitched chirp when it was powered on.

Once the main bulk of the gag was past her teeth, it popped into place, and her jaw relaxed minutely around it. She could not push it out with her tongue, and trying only seemed to stretch her already-aching jaw even more.

A latex panel built in to the gag’s harness covered her mouth and nose, and forced her to breathe through the gag’s air hole; trying to draw breath in otherwise only pulled the latex tight against any gaps. She could breathe easily through the tube that dangled from the gag, which was a small blessing.

She rubbed her arms in a vain attempt to warm herself up, or perhaps just to delay the inevitable. She stepped into the box, and kneeled on the surface.

Steel cuffs near the corners were easy to secure around her ankles; they forced her to stay kneeling. Beneath what felt like a very, very thin layer of foam, the bottom surface of the crate was textured with small bumps about the size of grains of rice.

The rice-shaped nubs pressed painfully against her knees and shins, and the ankle cuffs stopped her from adjusting her position in any meaningful way to relieve the pain. The foam lining of the crate was too thin and compressible to offer any protection.

It took several minutes of blind fiddling to properly secure her collar; a short length of rigid steel held it securely in place close to the bottom of the box, but the mechanism was difficult to figure out when out of sight.

She had to twist her body to maneuver under the arm cuffs mounted closer to the top of the box, and every movement ground her shins into the floor, hurting her even more.

The final position forced her to fold her body down over her legs, which seemed to move more weight onto her kneecaps; driving them still more painfully into the textured base plate.

She whimpered, and the first of what she expected to be many tears slid down her cheeks.

Connect the breathing tube to the fresh air port. Once closed, the container is otherwise airtight. Secure the upper arm cuffs and wrist cuffs last.

Valerie closed the lid, trapping herself in darkness, and muting the already quiet desert soundscape. The blood rushing through her ears was suddenly very loud.

She had no way to squeeze closed the upper arm cuffs; they were mounted on telescoping struts that could be used to force her elbows together, but without Lucca’s help she could not manage to get the cuffs properly locked.

Working by feel, she slid her hands through the wrist cuffs, a split metal figure-eight that was fixed to the back wall of her dark little hell. The cuffs clicked precisely shut, and Valerie sobbed involuntarily, her gag absorbing the sound and rendering it all but silent.

There was no mechanism to activate the lid latches from inside the box; but from the moment the first ankle cuff clicked shut, she was trapped regardless. Locking closed the final cuff seemed merely symbolically, the last choice she had left to make.

The darkness and the quiet, on their own, were not troubling, but they heightened all of the other sensations she was feeling. Her shoulders ached from holding her arms back, and her neck was beginning to hurt from the position the collar forced her into. Her hips were starting to complain as well; she was desperate, but completely unable, to stretch her legs.

Worst of all was the pain from her knees and shins, as all her weight rested, through them, on the hard plastic nubs covering the bottom of the crate. Each one felt like a spike driven through her skin into her bones, and minute by minute the pain grew worse.

Tears streamed uselessly down her cheeks. Lucca was still out there, of course, no more than a hundred yards away. They might not have keys for the restraints, but they had the tools and the knowledge to get her out anyway, if they so chose. She hated the little flicker of hope that they might yet choose to.

Time stretched out like a nightmare. The bondage, on its own, might have been pleasant, but Valerie had not expected as much pain as she was already being forced to endure. So much, simply from kneeling on what was little more than textured plastic.

In desperation, she tried to throw her weight to the side, hoping to knock the entire crate over. Anything, she thought, would be worth getting her weight off of her shins.

She had too little leverage to generate much inertia, and the box was heavy and stubbornly stable. The only thing she accomplished was momentarily transferring all of her weight onto one shin, which hurt enough that she was unable to think for the fraction of a second it took her other shin to crash back down, plastic nubs digging in anew.

The last crash hurt enough that she screamed, or tried to; the gag made any kind of discernible speech impossible, and the scream came out as a nasal, high pitched keening before she was able to, shakily, re-assert some measure of control over herself.

From somewhere in the darkness, a series of three beeps sounded, followed by a tinny synthesized voice, which reported Volume limit exceeded. Level 1.

Valerie spent only a moment in confusion before fresh pain washed through her, several seconds of burning, pulsating current from her plug and cage.

She was trembling and sweating by the time it ended, and lucky that the gag absorbed her whimpering vocalizations. Her chest was tight; icy with the knowledge that if the pain got the better of her, it would become a runaway feedback loop.

According to the letter, she had an hour before she would even be collected by the transport company; and then four hours of driving, if traffic was kind.

Minute by minute, the pain in her shins and knees grew worse.