Introduction

 

The torches cast a flickering red-yellow light on her bare skin. They were fake of course -- the NYC fire code did not allow open flame in a high-rise building -- but the illusion was convincing.

The scene was all about illusion; the touches, the semi-darkness, the rack, the horse, the wall of whips, the dungeon itself were all designed to get the viewer to suspend his disbelief. He knew that the girl was a $10,000-a-night escort; that the dungeon was a room in his apartment; that the dungeon's implements had never been used for real, but it didn't matter. All that mattered was that the fantasy seemed real.

"Stand here by the ring," he said quietly.

There was no need to intimidate her; despite her consent, she was already terrified. Most of her clients compromised their BDSM fantasy by becoming timid, adding humor, or by disassociating themselves. Max was different -- he demanded authenticity. He had a ferocious determination to make it real or at least as real as possible.

She looked up at him with her seductive eyes, eyes that had never failed her before and obeyed. He stared back, turned on but still determined to execute his script. She looked down at the ring between her bare feet and trembled. It was too late to back out now; in this business, common sense was a liability. She had to stay...had to stay.

It was a lie, and she knew it. Backing away when things got too intense or too weird was always an option, one that every client understood. No, something else was holding her back. Curiosity...maybe, but she had a sense that she was more than simply curious. This was real, as real as it gets, and she wanted to see where it go...how she would react. At least, this was the explanation that her mind accepted. The reason why she obeyed him with almost instinctual eagerness, she left unanswered. All she knew was that when he gave an order, she obeyed...with unthinking alacrity. It was almost as if he had drugged or hypnotized her.

He smiled warmly then knelt and strapped leather shackles on her well-turned ankles. He didn't hurry, just the opposite, he took his time running his hand up the inside of her leg and savoring her delicious tremble and the goosebumps on her skin. The chains from the shackles to the floor ring were short, just long enough to allow her to stand on her toes...en pointe, she thought, remembering her time as a dancer.

"It's been a while since you danced, Meryl," he whispered in the room's silence. "Don't worry, muscles don't forget as quickly as the mind does. I've been looking forward to watching you dance."

She knew he was using the word "dance" as a substitute for "writhe." Men like him enjoyed the evidence of pain -- the sounds, the facial expressions, the muscle lines, the thrashing. She wanted to say something, to make a cogent and convincing argument for moderation, but he had forbidden her to speak, and again she felt compelled to obey. Would she make a convincing argument for moderation, she wondered, or did she want to see this play out? She didn't know the answer, but thought it interesting that she was asking herself the question,

He moved to her rear, running his hand over her ass that she spent hours sculpting in the gym. Her ass cheeks were hard and round, flattening out at the top where they formed a flat shelf that met the small of her back. The shelf was a natural extension of the seductive curve in her back.

"Too sexy [for dance]," one of her ballet masters had told her. He was right, her sexy curves would distract the ballet audience, especially the men, upstaging the art. She left the dance company soon after and started her much more lucrative escort practice. The decision to specialize in BDSM was strictly financial. At least it had been, tonight's session was making her question that reason.

"Give me your arm."

She moved her arm behind her back a few inches, and he strapped on another leather shackle.

"...And the other."

She moved her other arm back to receive the leather. She zoned out for a moment from the stress; when she focused again, a ceiling hook was slowly lifting her wrist shackles, placing her into a strappado position. Slowly...he was doing everything slowly, purposely stoking her anxiety, building her terror. She shook her head determined to resist but...

Ahh...ahh...

The pain in her shoulders reminded her that he was in charge. She bent her head forward and moaned as the rope lifted her arms higher. He paused for a moment savoring her pain, then he continued to lift her until she was on her toes, her feet were extended to their full limit.

He had been right, her muscles remembered -- her toes quickly adjusted to the familiar en pointe pain, her calves and thigh muscles stretched creating luscious muscle shadows in her legs, and the muscles around her ribs and stomach tightened. Her skin hurt with the stress and her large nipples ached from the push of her taut breasts.

She tried to breathe through the pain, a technique she had learned on the dance floor, but the strappado position was compressing her lungs. The best she could manage was a pathetic panting. He watched and listened for a minute then tied a skin-tight blindfold over eyes and used it to pull her head back with a cord, which he tied to her wrist shackles.

Once again, she considered advising moderation and once again, she held back. This was what he was buying, she told herself, but she knew this wasn't the reason. She wanted to see where this went...where he went and how she responded. She had been toying with BDSM for too long. This was an opportunity to see it, to feel it for real.

As for him, he wanted to see her face, she thought miserably! He wanted to see the pain on her face! He stepped back and she could feel his eyes on her, feel him watching her twist in the strappado's pain.

Ahh...ahh...

The sounds slipped out. They were coming from her gut now as the pain in her shoulders and feet intensified. He pushed a thin plastic disk about an inch in diameter against the side of her breast. She could feel a hole in the middle, feel the hole widening and narrowing as he squeezed the side. Slowly, enjoying her confusion and terror, he positioned the disk's hole over her nipple and squeezed its sides. When the hole was big enough, he pushed it in, flat against her areola and released the pressure on the sides. The hole returned to its original shape pinching her nipple.

Aieee...noooo...

He smiled in the darkness.

"I found these large plastic washers in an appliance-parts store. Technically, they are called spacers, but they have a much more interesting purpose as nipple clamps, don't you think?"

Noooo, p...please.

The intensity of the pain made her think about "red," her safe word for stop, but she didn't use it. She also thought about "yellow," her safe word for "mercy," but again she held back. She knew that either of them would damage the fantasy and ruin it for him...and for her. Incredibly, the money was irrelevant. They had agreed that if she used "red," she would leave with nothing but cab fare, but it didn't matter. All that mattered was...him, and his will. Every movement was excruciating; her only relief was in the type of pain she chose to endure and its location, but she was no longer in control, which was a disaster for an escort.

After a time, she began to pant hard like an animal caught in a trap, and he knew it was time.

The implement they had selected together during their amicable negotiation was a two-foot-long paddle which she had stared at wide-eyed. It had a layer of bamboo wood sandwiched between two layers of thin ash wood. A quick snap of the wrist made the implement bend like rubber. Soft lambskin covered its business end, which gave it the ability to deliver an absurd amount of pain without abrading a girl's delicate skin.

He laid a test stroke across her ass.

Aiyee...

The sound of her pain-filled scream sent a shiver of pleasure up his spine, but he held back on the next stroke drawing every ounce of agony out of the first. Used sparingly, the paddle could bring her to the apogee of suffering, to the very edge of consciousness. This was his goal -- the ultimate volume of pain that could be attained without permanent injury or unconsciousness, the elusive point where pain and pleasure were indistinguishable.

It took a long 20 minutes. Years of dancing had made her strong and tough, too tough to give in quickly. At exactly the right moment, he released her arms and legs and laid her quivering on her back on the floor. He mounted her and felt her hands reaching for his cock; she guided him inside with a desperate intensity. Her long legs circled his waist and held on in a ferocious death grip, pulling him even higher inside.

Their coitus was quick and violent as both were near climax. He snorted like a bull during the last seconds then rammed himself far inside her in a series of devastating thrusts. She screamed as the contractions wrung out her entire body then held on with her legs as one convulsive aftershock after another washed over.

It was an extraordinary climax, he thought as he lay exhausted, effectively paralyzed. The experience was well worth the $10,000, and definitely worth repeating...if she was willing. As he discovered later, she just wasn't willing to return, she was enthusiastic about it.

Still, he knew that BDSM sex with Meryl, and escort, was only a taste, a sampling of what the "real thing" would be like. Beautiful whores and ambitious gold-diggers were fine to satiate his ongoing appetite for dominant sex, but he knew there was another level of mastery that he could never reach with such partners. He needed someone who was not a voluntary participant, but rather someone who was truly compelled to be subjugated.

Unfortunately, in the 21^st Century, arrangements like this didn't exist even for someone like him, who could afford almost anything he wanted, or so he thought.

 

Chapter 1 - Max

 

They called him "the wizard."

It was a reference to Merlin, the 12^th Century wizard who served King Arthur. Marvin A. (Max) Xenos, however, was nothing like the mythical Merlin. The only magic he performed was to move money from their pockets to his.

In the zero-sum game of stock market trading, every dollar he won was a dollar someone else lost, and Max won a lot. So much so that many of the more superstitious traders truly believed he had the power to see into the future. This also was not true. Max Xenos had no more insight into the future than anyone else; what he did have were two rare and extraordinary talents -- he could sift through mountains of data and find the tiny nuggets of truth that made a difference in the marketplace, and he could read people like a human lie detector.

These unique skills made him a small fortune as a bond trader for Goldberg Brothers, but he had little interest in the money itself. It was the power the money gave him that he craved. The more he succeeded, the more influence the more power he had over the market.

It was this lust for power that drove him from bond trading to stocks and then to the arcane world of derivatives, specifically equity derivatives. Each change allowed him more leverage and thereby, more influence. It wasn't that he skirted the risk-reward realities of the market -- he lost frequently -- but he was fearless in taking risks when he felt he was right, which made him a winner most of the time.

Max would spend weeks even months sometimes pouring over a company's books, working by himself in monk-like isolation 20 hours a day. When he had a detailed understanding of what the company was about and how it made its money, he would meet with its executives and stockholders. By the time he was done, he knew more about the company than the insiders did, and he would exercise these insights by making highly-leveraged bets with puts and calls. This trading often made him and the Goldbergs a truly shocking amount of money. Options were all about timing, and Max seemed to have the uncanny, almost magical ability to see into the future and to get in and out at just the right moment.

Ergo, the appellation...the wizard.

But his need for power didn't stop with options trading, it extended to BDSM. After a long series of bland and uninteresting vanilla romances, he began to hire escorts who specialized in "alternative stimulation" as he put it. The sexual excitement he felt having total power over a woman was a disturbing personality trait, but it was also a thrill that he didn't deny or reject. Rather, he embraced it as "his reality."

It wasn't long before he invested in his first dungeon. It was a rudimentary starter facility with just the bare necessities, but it showed him that the more realistic he made the fantasy, the more pleasure he derived. It also showed him that no matter how real the fantasy it would never feel like the real thing. He accepted this with the same sangfroid he accepted his occasional losses in the market.

As his reputation as a trader grew, the Goldman brothers offered him a full partnership and an embarrassingly lucrative compensation package to stay with the firm, but the draw of being his own boss was too powerful. He had always been a loaner; his time at Goldman had been an excellent learning experience but working with OPM (other people's money) had built-in restrictions and ceilings. The profits he could earn by trading for himself using his own money were limitless...if he did it right.

Marshalling his $150 million dollar savings, Max set $75 million aside for trading and used the rest to buy what he needed to operate independently. His first purchase was space in the new Stradivarius Residence Tower, more commonly known as the Needle. The building -- the tallest residence building in the Western Hemisphere and the skinniest skyscraper in Manhattan -- was at 115 East 57^th Street. The idea that he would be hovering figuratively over the City appealed to him.

He kept the 8,750 square-foot penthouse for himself and bought two more apartments on the floor below. One he kept for office space for his research staff and the other he kept for his domestic help. With most of the money that was left, he bought a private jet, a Bombardier Global 7500, which allowed him to travel at an astonishing 700 mph for 8,861 miles. The penthouse gave him the privacy he needed, and the jet allowed him to meet with corporate decision-makers anywhere in the world in a few hours.

"The wizard" was now poised to make even more killings in the market, which he did on a regular basis, continuing to build his reputation as a seer. This extraordinary success sparked a huge demand to know which company he was investigating now. It also prompted enormous interest in him personally, as if by knowing the man people could know what he was about to buy and sell.

The mere rumor the wizard was sniffing around a company caused the markets to roil as other stock and derivatives traders tried to follow or predict his next move. This copycat behavior was mostly wrong, but sometimes it was right, which eliminated Max's advantage. He became just part of the crowd. He addressed this by becoming even more reclusive and private, personal attributes that were self-fulfilling -- the more isolated he became, the more people wanted to know what he was doing, and the more he avoided everyone.

But it was unavoidable, the market upset caused by copycatting the wizard got so bad that the SEC finally stepped in and took the unprecedented step of granting Max the right to trade anonymously under its "Institutions Rule." This rule, which had previously applied only to high-volume institutional traders, allowed Max to buy and sell by using a random number identifier known only to the SEC. This helped quiet the market, but many wizard-watchers persisted in their attempts to copycat by trying to find Max's signature in the institutional trading. As the head of the SEC said, "this is nuts."

As Max became more reclusive, his behavior became even weirder. For example, whenever he left the Needle, he would be in disguise. He also stopped making appointments with corporate executives; he would just get in his jet and fly to their headquarters. No one ever dared to refuse to meet with him, even on an ad hoc basis, as they knew that a single word from him could lead to the panicked selling of their stock. It was during the peak of this wizard-hysteria that the Wall Street Journal did a famous caricature of him dressed in Merlin's long robes descending the steps of his private jet like an avenging prophet.

Max had officially become a living Wall Street legend at 34.

Despite their best efforts, no one knew much about him personally other than he was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts of wealthy parents, business folks; that he was educated at the exclusive Ashley Boynton School for Boys and at Williams College; and that he had had a passion for rowing and economics. As far as anyone knew, he was unmarried and unattached.