The Hellwind blew strong this night. Baroness Graveek could hear its angry scream rattling against her shuttered windows. She liked the sound. It well suited her current mood as she paced around her spacious bedroom. The whip in her gloved hand coiled and twisted across the floor with every restless flick of her wrist.
Layers of skirt whispered across the floor around her restless, stocking-clad legs. Stiletto heeled, thigh-high black leather boots clicked against the wood with every step.
“First Chort, and now Seralla,” she muttered. “Where are my missing demons?”
Her whip snapped out. The man tied face down at his wrists and ankles cried out in joyous agony as it bit at his exposed skin. A thin trail of mist wafted from the wound up to the canopy over the massive four-post bed.
“Perhaps they…” the man struggled to catch his breath. “…they are merely delayed by the weather, Mistress.”
Graveek scowled and let the whip reply for her. De Sade wailed again as pain blazed across the naked swell of his ass.
“How is that relevant, my pet? How does that fill my pens with new souls for the slave markets?”
The man flinched as the whip snapped again but the blow did not land on him. Bound face down as he was, he never knew when the next stinging blow would blaze across his naked flesh. The anticipation was almost as sweet as the pain. He preferred to be the one giving but that choice was not his to make. Hell had robbed him of the authority and prestige he had enjoyed in life.
“My clients expect results and timely delivery of a quality product. How am I to meet deadlines with two of my hunters missing?” Graveek stopped pacing and stared at the shutters as if hoping to see beyond the howling winds clawing at her castle walls.
“Could they have… is it possible…,” he did not dare to say the words but the implications hung in the air between them.
“That they have betrayed me for another Master? Started their own harem with my newly acquired slaves?”
He shivered at the soft, silken hiss of violence in her tone.
“Chort is not clever enough and Seralla… that Succubus knows better than to court my displeasure. No, this is something more than a mere delay. She should have returned by now with Chort in tow or news of his fate. I suspect someone is making a move against me and that cannot be allowed.”
She strolled over to the bed and began releasing him from the leather straps holding him down. It hurt to move as he sat up, not that De Sade minded. Pain was his greatest pleasure, especially on those rare occasions when his mistress allowed him to wield the whip. The evidence of his excitement stood out at a prominent angle from between his legs.
He reached down to fondle himself. “Please, Mistress, will you let me…” He yelped as the whip bit at his hand.
“You have earned no reward, worm,” she sneered. “Please me and I shall consider it.”
“Of course, Mistress,” he fell to his knees and started crawling across the floor toward her. “Whatever my mistress desires.”
She watched him approach with hooded, malevolent eyes. “Bring me the paddle, my pet.” Her smile was slow and hungry. “You know the one.”
De Sade swallowed against the spike of sweet fear that rolled across his flesh and changed direction to crawl over to the special cabinet. The double doors swung open to reveal the wide range of toys his Mistress referred to as her “symphony of suffering”. Pain, in all its colors and flavors, was on loving display.
He had his favorites among her collection. Many were of his own design, as were many of the games he and the Baroness liked to play with new arrivals. Those times were best. Pain given was ever more pleasurable than pain received on those few occasions when she allowed him the privilege of wielding the instruments of his art form.
This, unfortunately, was not one of those times. The loss of two of her hunters had sharpened Graveek’s anger to a surgical, and possibly murderous, edge. Terror and anticipation sent delicious shivers through his flesh as he reached for her instrument of choice, a three-foot-long leather paddle. One side was smooth. The other side was covered in small, sharp spikes of metal.
De Sade crawled back toward her with it clamped in his teeth like a trained dog. The Baroness claimed it without a word. Her silver eyes danced with malice and wanton desire as she sat back against the edge of the bed and spread her long legs.
“Pleasure me, pet.”
He crawled between her legs and began raining soft kisses along the inside of her thighs. The flat of her paddle smacked against his upturned ass cheek with a sharp crack. Pain blossomed across his flesh and made him even harder.
“Get to it,” she commanded.
“Yes, Mistress,” he moaned against her skin and moved up to brush the tip of his tongue between the folds of her hairless sex. Slowly, he slid his tongue into the wet depths of her desire, teasing and touching in all the places he knew she liked.
The flat cracked harder against his other cheek. “Faster.”
De Sade found her clitoris and swirled his tongue around it.
Pain exploded across his cheek as the paddle crashed down. “Harder.”
His teeth closed around her clit. The Baroness hissed her pleasure as he gently gnawed at it.
“Harder.”
He braced for it, knowing what was coming. It made no difference. The spiked side of the paddle bit into his tender ass cheek with a sharp stab of impact. It was agony and it was bliss. De Sade chewed and licked, bit and kissed, in a frantic effort to find her elusive orgasm. Her juices dribbled down his chin even as his muscles coiled against the anticipation of the next cruel blow.
“Harder.” Spikes bit into his ass cheek. “Harder!”
Pain and pleasure lost all separate meanings. Blows rained down ever faster as he brought her closer to climax. One of her clawed hands seized him by a fistful of hair and pulled him in. De Sade fought to breathe as he struggled to please. The agony of the paddle continued to bloom across his ass like a bloody rose.
“Yes!” the baroness cried as tremors of pleasure rippled across her perfect body. De Sade felt it as well. His seed spilled out across the floor even as blackness closed in around his vision and threatened to drag him into darkness.
At the last moment, she released him to fall, boneless and gasping, onto the floorboards. The Baroness made a sound of disgust. “No one said you could cum, worm!”
He somehow found the strength to crawl over and bent over to kiss her boots. Graveek lifted her foot and placed the stiletto heel down on his skull, forcing his face onto the wooden floor and into the mixed sexual fluids pooled on the floor. Then she began to apply pressure.
De Sade moaned in pain. His hands fluttered about at his sides and his feet drummed against the floor.
“Clean up the mess you made… with your tongue. When that is done, I have a larger task for you to attend. A shipment of slaves is scheduled to be loaded for delivery tomorrow. Your mistress desires that you escort the cargo to ensure prompt delivery. Once that is done, you will present a message and a bag of coins for me at a certain shop where you will negotiate hiring his services. I believe it is time to call in a specialist.”
“Yes, Mistress,” he mumbled against the floorboards.
Graveek removed her boot from his head and walked over to a silk rope hanging from the ceiling. A pull on the rope rang a bell on a lower level. Moments later someone knocked on her bedroom door.
“Enter.”
A human female, dressed only in a leather collar and thick, mahogany-colored hair, entered. Without a word, she knelt on the floor and bowed her head.
“When he is finished, bathe him and make him look presentable for departure in the morning.” Baroness Graveek grinned with sudden inspiration as she looked at the many lash marks and wounds she had left across his naked body. “Make it a salt bath.”
The man groaned at the thought. It only made him start to get hard again.
“Yes, Mistress,” the girl whispered to the floor.
“Pull yourself together,” Graveek warned him. “You will be representing me which means I need you to be the man you were rather than the deviant worm you have become. I need the Marquis de Sade. Do not fail me.”
