There was the sound of a few quiet steps coming closer, and then she could hear his breathing as he stood at her side. She was so frightened she found herself involuntarily babbling for mercy. Naturally, the gag stifled her words, converting them into a quiet, meaningless series of "uh, uh, uh."

She felt two little metal prongs poke into the soft hollow under shoulder. An instant later, there was a terrible flash, a blast of white hot agony, somewhat resembling the deputy's shock sticks, but far worse. Her body twisted madly under the attack, her neck bending in one direction, her hips and waist in another, the muscles in her abdomen cording up, her fingers and toes clenching. She screamed with all her might, but the only sound she produced was a thin "Ehhhh!"

Her body writhed uncontrollably for perhaps half a minute, before the insupportable anguish finally began to fade. As soon as Erika's body relaxed a little, however, she felt the metal prongs on her nipple.

"No!" she screamed, making a low sound like that of a half-drowned kitten, before another fireball of pain blistered the tip of her breast. If her suspension had not been so tight, the violence of her writhing might have caused a serious dislocation. As it was, the bondage limited her movements too much to allow her to do much damage to herself, although she did suffer rope burns on her ankles and wrists.

Caine shocked her three more times, until Erika was only semi-conscious and hung limp in the restraints, with her head down and her body twitching. Finally, he spoke.

"Generally, when I buy a female slave, I want to get some use out of her," he said. "I am willing to spend top crown to get the finest girls, and I believe my collection is second to none. But I do want my money's worth, so that when the slave is fully trained, she will still be in prime physical condition..." He paused, and then slapped Erika on the cheek. "...do I have your undivided attention, Mrs. Nordling, or will I need to give you a few more shocks?"

Erika was having some difficulty concentrating on Caine's words. The electric torture had left her foggy and disoriented, and there was a loud, persistent buzzing in her ears. However, when Caine mentioned the possibility of resuming the shocks, she instantly snapped out of her confusion.

"Yyyy!" Erika mumbled, nodding her head. "Nnnnnn!"

"I'll take that to mean you are listening," Caine said. "Where was I? Ah, yes... at the completion of their training, want my slaves to be as beautiful as they were when I bought them, for obvious reasons. I have spent hundreds of thousands of crowns on my collection of female slaves, and I can assure you that I have gotten every farthing's worth back in pleasure."

Caine admired the smooth curves of Erica's haunch, and then ran an appreciative hand over her soft, fair skin dislodging glittering beads of perspiration. Erika shivered at his touch.

"So, you might be reassured by the fact that I spent perhaps three-quarters of a million crowns to obtain you, more than the cost of all my other slaves combined," he continued. "And in addition, you may possibly be the most beautiful woman I have ever owned. Under the circumstances..." here he cupped the golden-furred mound between Erika's legs in the palm of his hand for a moment, then pulled his hand away, "...you would think that I would take even more care than usual to make sure nothing happened to you."

It seemed as if Caine's voice became fainter, then louder again, as if he had faced away from her for a moment then returned.

"But you would be wrong," he said. "Because, you are a special case, Mrs. Nordling." She heard a crack!, a soft whistling noise, and then a line of fire tore across her left breast and the soft curve of her belly just above her pubic delta. She made another muffled scream and again squirmed helplessly.

The pain was very different from the electric shocks. To Erika, it was as if a strip of flesh had been ripped from her body. What was more, the burning sensation in her raw flesh lingered horribly for a long time, much longer than the shocks had.

"In your case, I did not purchase you primarily as a pleasure slave," Caine continued as she writhed in agony before him. "I went to considerable trouble and expense to obtain you so that I could punish you for your unprovoked attacks on me and my business. My primary reason for going to the trouble of acquiring you was to satisfy my need for revenge."

There was another snap, and the whip cut into the softness of Erika's inner thigh, also catching the pink lips of her vulva. Again the tormented patrician flung her body violently about, at the same time making a high, keening sound.

"So, although you are, as I have said, remarkably lovely," Caine went on, "I am far from certain that I will need to preserve you in perfect condition, or any condition at all, for that matter, since I may not wish to keep you on as a servant. I may just keep you until I feel that you have been sufficiently punished, and after that, why, I suppose I might just dispense altogether with whatever remained."

Even in her extremity, these cold, pitiless words penetrated through Erika's haze of pain. She knew intellectually that slaves had no rights of any kind, and that they could be disposed of by their owners at will, even put down like diseased cattle, but she had not until this moment considered the possibility that Caine had purchased her merely to torture and ultimately kill her in some slow and ingeniously painful way.

"Don't kill me, please! I'll do anything you want!" Erika begged in desperate fear. "I don't want to die!" Her pleas, as before, emerged from behind the tape covering her mouth as a muted, nonsensical jumble.

Caine began to lash her methodically with the big bullwhip. Each stroke left a sinuous raised welt behind on Erika's delicate pale flesh. Caine concentrated at first on her full, round breasts, savoring the way they jumped under the impact of the whip. Soon, her formerly perfect globes were marked with a network of angry red lines on the upper summits, the lower curves and across the pink nipples and areolas. Where the lines intersected, drops of blood formed, to be dislodged each time a new stroke sliced into them.

All thought fled from Erika's mind as her breasts were whipped. She mewled mindlessly in pain, turning this way and that as her suffering body instinctively sought to escape. A long time passed after Caine stopped whipping her before she realized it.

"There is a man I know," Caine said conversationally, as he stood running the lash through his fingers, "a fellow hobbyist, who likes to take the girls he buys and turn them into furniture. He sets them up in frames and uses them as bases for tables, chairs, whatever. I have never seriously considered doing such a thing with one of my slaves. But then, I cannot remember the last time I was as angry with someone as I am now. So perhaps you will be my first piece of animated furniture."

He stroked her cheek, then his hand glided down her neck and shoulder to cup one breast. "Would you like to be the cushion of a lounge chair, or perhaps an ottoman for me to rest my feet on at the end of the day, my dear?" he asked. "I'd make sure you were fed and cleaned every day. Why, you could probably live forty or fifty years that way."

"Nnnn! Nnnnn!" the terrified beauty squealed.

Caine tossed the whip aside. "Well, I think we've had enough of that for today," he said. "Let's try something else."

He released her hands from the overhead tie and then untied her wrists, re-securing them behind her back. He knelt and freed her ankles as well. He led the still-blindfolded woman across the room, where he hooked the cuffs that confined her wrists to a loop at the end of a cable that hung down from a series of pulleys. At the base of her ribcage Erika felt the edge of a cold metal object, a basin, perhaps. It was in fact a steel sink set on metal legs.

"Even if I do eventually decide to put an end to you," he told Erika, "there is certainly no reason not to get some other use out of you first. And who knows? If you please me well enough, I might allow you to become a sex slave. Would you like that, Mrs. Nordling, would you like to become an obedient sex slave?"

Erika did not weigh the alternatives very long. "Yyyy! Plllllsss!" she said immediately, nodding enthusiastically at the same time.

Caine began hauling on the free end of the cable, drawing Erika's arms higher and higher, and obliging her to bend forward at the waist to avoid having her arms pulled from their sockets. She squealed in distress.

"Then let's see how you handle a few basic tasks," Caine said, pausing when he saw that she was now bent over the metal basin with her face a few inches from the water. He locked the cable in place, then put his hand palm-upwards over her sex, spreading her lower lips with his fingers and probing inside. "First, get yourself nice and wet for me. You're going to need all the lubrication you can make."

He began to fondle her womanhood, beginning with long strokes inside her inner lips with the edge of his hand, then using the hand to rub higher, enticing the pink button of her clitoris out from under its hood.

Erika did not believe that she was capable of sexual arousal in her situation, and feared that an even angrier Caine would carry out one of his blood-curdling threats if she failed to perform as he demanded. She discovered to her dismay, that his handling was somehow exciting her. By the way his fingers slid freely through her slot, she knew that she was wet indeed, and in any case, she could feel the heat of arousal rising through her body. What she did not know was that Caine was applying a salve that heightened sexual sensation. She had no choice but to respond.

Within a few minutes, Erika was rolling her hips with abandon, matching every motion of Caine's expert fingers which now gripped her love button. She made a low moaning sound of desire.

"You want to be fucked, is that it?" he asked.

"Mmmmmm! Plllsss!" Erika moaned, turning her blindfolded face back toward him and nodding her head.

"You need to present a better position than that before I would grant you a favor like that," Caine said. She cried out as he slammed a thick wooden paddle into her protruding bottom. "Open your legs like the cheap whore you are. Show me how much you want it." He twirled the slippery pink knob between his fingers until Erika thought her head would explode.

She set her legs wide apart and arched her back to present an unimpeded view of her engorged nether lips and the tiny brown star of her bottomhole.

"I hope for your sake that's not the best you can do," Caine said. He struck her sharply twice more with the wooden paddle, leaving round red marks on Erika's bottom cheeks, and causing her to jump in the air with each sharp impact. "Higher, slut," he ordered.

Erika whined in pain, but obeyed to the best of her ability, going up on her toes. Her effort was rewarded when she felt the head of Caine's rod pushing up between her eager lower lips. She wriggled her hips side to side in her need for his cock.

Caine thrust himself halfway into her. "Did you ever take it up the ass, Mrs. Nordling?" he enquired.

"Nnnn," she replied, shaking her head. She thrust her hips down, trying to envelop his rod in her slippery passage, but Caine moved back, slipping out of her before she could climax. Erika moaned in frustration.

"Well, I can't think of a better time for you to learn a new skill," Caine said. He took his stiff organ in hand and pushed the head up against the undersized entrance to Erika's rear passage.

"Nnnn! Pllss!" she begged, edging forward, away from the pressing invader. Even now, when the threat of a painful death hung over her if she failed to please him, Erika could not bring herself to voluntarily permit this outrage.

"I see you need encouragement," he said. "You will breathe again after I have come in your ass." He pulled the cable higher, forcing Erika's arms straight over her head, and compelling her to bend forward even further, until her face was submerged: the sink she was bent over was filled with water. She desperately raised her head clear of the water, but Caine pulled the cable higher, forcing her back under, and said, "You'll breathe again after I come in your tight ass, bitch."

This time, when she felt the fat head of his shaft nudge up against her back door, she did not hesitate. Erika Bylund (for she had always thought of herself this way, no matter what her married name was), flower of one of the oldest, proudest and most aristocratic families in the Western Provinces, jammed her ass onto Caine's cock, spindling herself as fervently and unreservedly as a fifty-farthing streetwalker. It required all her will, but she suppressed the urge to cry out as his thick pole plunged its full length into her in a single stroke.

Caine plunged his fat pole in and out of the distressed blonde beauty, pummeling her with the paddle as he sodomized her. As the buggering proceeded, blackness closed around Erika's brain and the hand of suffocation tightened horribly around her chest like a band of iron. Just as she was about to pass out and drown in the basin, she felt Caine's cock pulse inside her abused bottom when he exploded in orgasm. The next thing she knew, his hand was gripping her mane of golden hair, and he was pulling her head roughly from the sink, his organ still lodged inside her anus.

"Did you enjoy that, cunt?" he asked, yanking her hair viciously. Erika was incapable of any response. Her nostrils flared as she struggled to draw in fresh air to her burning lungs.

For the next hour, Caine played cruelly with his beautiful slave. He stimulated her with his hand until she was on the edge of a colossal orgasm, while ordering her to remain in position, with her legs locked and spread apart. When she moved her body in response to his touch, as she could not help doing, he punished her with the paddle, smiling as he watched her lively, bouncing jig of agony. He varied this amusement by drawing up the cable controlling her wrists to re-submerge her head, then either paddling her bottom and the backs of her thighs, or caressing her until she was close to climaxing and on the edge of asphyxiation. On two occasions, he did not pull her up until after she had inhaled water, and she emerged flinging herself about madly, spouting like a breaching whale, the water spraying from her distended nostrils, desperately clearing the liquid from her lungs.

After what seemed to Erika like an eternity of this hell, Caine ripped the patches of tape from her eyes and mouth and pulled out the saliva-soaked rubber ball. He held her head up by a handful of her dripping hair, and demanded, "Well, cunt? What do you have to say?"

Erika's sea-gray eyes met Caine's icy black ones. She was broken, all pride vanished. All she could do was offer her complete surrender and hope that he would accept it. "I'm... I'm sorry, Mr. Caine... please... please don't hurt me... any more... I'll b... be good..." she begged pathetically, gasping out the words. "Just let... me show... you."

He made no reply, but to the tormented woman, his gaze looked as cold and empty of mercy as the vacuum of outer space. She made a soft broken sound, like that of a trapped animal that has given up all hope.

"If you're lucky, I mean very, very lucky," he said, "you might get a chance to do that."