Shattered (6 page)

Nathan
groaned at the words he wished not to hear, the words that taunted him with a truth he couldn’t deny.  His mind cursed at his body for how willingly it wanted to submit itself to some crazed gypsy and her twisted sense of revenge, for how it wanted to submit even now.

She lifted something off the table beside him. 
He felt the cold, smoothed end of whatever she had selected as she dragged it down across his arm and up to his shoulder, over his back and down further as she moved back near his ass.  Nathan grunted as she forced the object into him.  The burn and sting he felt as his bruised sphincter swallowed around it was nothing next to what he had just endured.  He squeezed against the plug and appreciated it for its mild, tolerable discomfort and he listened as Robin left the room.

**

His handlers came in almost immediately and
freed him from his bonds.  Someone wiped the mess of his orgasm from his thighs, and Nathan just stood there and let them.  He had no fight left in him and no sense of dignity left to hold on to.  He wasn’t ashamed of it, for right now he felt nothing at all.

They led him from the room after another quick wash down. 
Their destination was Robin’s room, as he knew it would be, and they pushed his back up against the far wall.  The stone was a little less smooth against his back than the floor had been beneath his knees or the table beneath his chest.  Hands raised his and tied his wrists outward, but not so tight that his arms were extended fully.  A little kink remained in his elbows as his arms sagged against the rope.

His breath was humid inside the sack.  He kept his eyes down, to the halo of light that shone up from beneath, and that was a little better than darkness.  It was less lonely when he could stare down at himself, though the body he stared at didn’t feel like his own.

He was exhausted, yet every time he began to doze some part of his body fell forward and the sudden movement shocked him with enough adrenaline to fully wake him.  Nathan wanted to cry in frustration, but he was simply too tired.

It had been over a day since he had been allowed to sleep.  Food and drink came just as irregularly. 
And it was all just as Robin said it would be.  He hurt in all the same places, he was hungry and he was thirsty, and death was looking more and more merciful.

Nathan
shook his head to banish away that last thought.  He couldn’t afford such despair, but he did wonder what lay at the end of the tunnel he saw through darkness around him now.  Delirium and madness, most likely.  He wondered if that fate was any better.  He knew he didn’t have much left to give her.

He hung there
until the hours seemed to stretch into days.  But Nathan kept his sanity enough to know Robin slept here.  He would have heard her go to bed.  The hours were long enough for his arms to run wild with needles and finally fall numb, for all the other muscles in his body to slowly coil tighter and tighter as stiffness settled in.  The plug in his ass throbbed beneath the bruises that had formed there.

Robin came back eventually and Nathan tracked her with his ears.
  His despair had vanished with the first click of her heels and he found energy he didn’t know he had.  He was elated to know she had returned, for if nothing else he was no longer alone.

  She moved around the room, placing things here and the
re before stopping before him.  Her boots peeked into his sliver of sight between his feet.  He tensed, strained, tried to predict the blow that hid in the darkness.  She was delaying and the anticipation slowly eroded away at his empty stomach.

“
I think I like it when you sweat for me,” she said at last. A smile played on her voice, invisible to him beyond the sack.  Robin touched him low, just below his navel, and Nathan flinched at the caress.

His naked skin gleamed with
moisture.  Her hands cupped his hips and she leaned forward, pressing her body to his and her lips to his shoulder.  She drew a long, slow line with her tongue across and up.

“Are you ready to hurt again prince?”

Nathan whimpered and his body responded in a shiver.  His cock stirred against the lower curve of her stomach.

She
ran both hands up his center and over the flat muscles of his abdomen.  There was only a dull sting this time as she passed over his lashed front.  Her hands diverged just before she reached his shoulders and followed the curve of his collar bone back down, until her gloved fingers rested over his chest.

She pinched do
wn suddenly on his left nipple, taking it between thumb and finger and twisting around before he could register the motion.  Nathan yelped and tried to jerk away, but the wall and the rope prevented his retreat.  He couldn’t twist around enough to get free of her. 

“
So sensitive…,” she taunted, twisting harder.  He was getting hard, even as a sharp groan escaped his lips.

Nathan knew better than to ple
ad with her.  He took the pain, the taunts, the provocations.  His obedience must have pleased her for when she went onto her toes again it was to free his sight.

“
It’s not as fun if I can’t look at your eyes,” Robin explained.  Warm leather rested against his cheek and dull-grey bounced back and forth between his, reading the depths of his emotion in his face.

She stepped back and lifted a clasp from the iron loop at the wall.  It opened then and his left arm fell to his waist.
  He swayed where he stood, as though the collision of his arm with his body might knock him off balance, and he looked down at his errant limb in irritation for its assault.

His eyes passed over the knots at his wrist and stayed there, and slowly his mind worked over that instead. 
His handlers had wrapped the rope over the leather guards and tied it off there.  It formed a looped knot at his wrist and it was that loop that linked with the iron ring on the wall.

Robin had to move a bit further from his center to free his right arm.  She favored her right as well and reach
ed across her body to release that second ring.  Nathan looked down at her left arm as she held it close to her body, her fingers curled loosely around a long, thin rod.  She stepped back then, opening up a space between them.

“Eyes up here prince,” Robin reminded him as she saw his attention slipping.  Nathan complied, but not before registering that he was completely mobile.
  The voice that had been dead since this morning roared to life.  He took a step towards her.

Nathan’s
foot found the ground but he had no strength left to stand.  In a single, fluid motion he dropped to one knee.  It happened so quick he didn’t even register the fall.  Robin didn’t seem surprised that he had dared to step towards her though.  On the contrary, she looked disappointed that he hadn’t made it further.

She pushed the thin rod beneath his chin and lifted it upward.  He felt the strength there and the flexible give of the smooth wood.

“This is bamboo,” she explained.  “I’ve never used it before, but I’ve heard it’s possible to hit someone with this hard enough that a single blow sends them into shock.  I wonder if that’s true.”  She shrugged and looked down at him before nodding off to the side.  “Get up and go bend over the back of that chair.  I want to test this out.”

The voice inside Nathan’s head was going mad.  It threw a fit as he lifted himself off the ground and threatened him with everything
imaginable as he hobbled towards the chair.  It resorted to pleading as his hands went down against the wooden back and finally it fell silent as he bent over.

Robin sounded
more subdued as well.  “Can you get off from the pain alone?”

“I don’t know.”  N
athan’s voice cracked, raw in his throat.  He knew in a few minutes he’d be screaming again and it would only get worse.

“Your hands are free.  I don’t care where they go as long as you stay
in that position.”

The air whistled in warning and the first blow landed with surprising speed.  Nathan didn’t even try to contain his shouts this time. 
He shot upward and screamed at the ceiling.  This was worse than the lash.  So much worse.

Whistling again, but this time it was
from Robin.  “This thing sure leaves a pretty little mark,” she said, prodding at the spot with the end of her cane. “I bet that hurt like hell.”

Nathan chuckled softly, madly, as he leaned forward again.  Tear
s fell free from his eyes and wet the seat.  His hand found his cock, but he hurt too much to even stroke it.  All he could do was cup the tip and rub it with his thumb as fire radiated up his back and down his legs.

The next few came
a little lighter and never atop one another.  He noticed too that the pain was entirely different than it had been from the lash.  While that stung and cut in just one spot, this rippled up his entire body.

Every time the rod connected he swore he wouldn’t survive another
, that if she hit him again he’d break down and beg for her to stop. But Robin delayed until he found his breath.  The pain was just barely manageable by the time another came.  The initial shocks stilled his hand for only a second before the rippling pain – pain that had been his entire world a moment earlier, receded from his center and left an emptiness that quickly filled with a sense of triumph for enduring such a blow.  And that triumph brought pleasure.

As he moved his hand faster and faster along
his shaft the muscles around the plug pulsed more furiously.  That pain too he internalized, and it too was different.  It was dull, steady, like a finger being pressed in upon a bruise, but there was sweetness underneath it as well.

The pain was incredible
, but he understood where to find the pleasure in that now.  It built up from his toes, coiled in his thighs, his stomach, until he couldn’t hold back any longer.  He was hardly able to hold himself over the chair as the ecstasy of that final release swallowed him whole.  The orgasm he milked out seemed to last forever.  It was slow and powerful, equal to the pain he submitted to.  Nathan let out a guttural cry that mingled the relief of his climax with that of his despair.

He was so consumed by it he lost track of himself, and Robin, and the whole of the room, until her hand came down up
on his shoulder.  She guided him to the floor beside the chair and he slumped there, his head propped up against the seat.

Robin returned with food and water and Nathan took his meal from her hand again.  She
stroked his sweat matted hair away from his face as he leaned against her leg and chewed slowly.  Again he could smell how deeply aroused she was, but if not for the scent and his proximity to it he would never have known.  She was all patience and control as she fed him those few precious morsels.

When he was done she stood and placed on
e hand upon his shoulder, pushing down until he was flat on the ground.  He curled up on his side and she took the loops of rope around his wrists, laid them together and slipped them under the leg of the chair.  It was completely symbolic.  Just as easily as she had done it he could have undone it, in theory.  But his mind had stopped fighting his body, and right now his body wanted nothing more than to simply lay here.

“Ta
ke a deep breath and exhale,” Robin said, and as he complied she pulled the plug from his ass.  The relief was bliss and he shut his eyes at last.

Robin left the room and Nat
han knew exactly where she went.  He was glad when two sets of footsteps re-entered.  He was glad she’d find relief tonight too.

***

Nathan awoke to muffled voices.  He hurt everywhere still, but his despair was gone.  He had expelled it all yesterday and it hadn’t returned.  He was content here, on the floor.  He was at peace with this.

Sometime in the night Robin had draped a blanket over him and he was wrapped
up in it so tight now that he was reluctant to move.  Why rush to start a day that would only hurt.  He’d stay right here, curled up against the leg of the chair like it was something to be cuddled with until Robin told him otherwise.

His restfulness was making him bold th
ough.  He peeked up from the floor to the source of those voices and found Robin there with another.  The person seated was writing something and after a few minutes Nathan realized she was dictating a letter.  That surprised him.  Peasants and gypsies, as a general rule, were illiterate, but somehow he didn’t imagine she was too.

Nathan averted his attention back to the ground after that. 
He knew he had seen something he shouldn’t have.  It cracked the calm he’d been feeling since waking.  The thought that Robin was illiterate bothered him more than it ought.  And the more he thought on it the more it weighed on him.

Robin and her scribe left the room together.  Nathan was aware of his relative freedom right now, that he could so easily lift the chair and stand, but he found no incentive t
o do so.  The welts her cane had left along his backside made even the thought of moving unpleasant.  Actual movement would be so much worse.

But he was forced to when
she finally returned.  She carried with her food and drink, and that she wanted him to rise was all the motivation he needed.  Pain or not his subconscious demanded survival.  Nathan very carefully, very slowly, lifted himself to his knees when she sat down.  His wrists were still looped to the chair leg and a low rung prevented him from doing any more than letting his hands rest against his thighs.  Not that he needed to do more.  Robin brought the cup to his lips and fed him scraps of meat leftover from whatever meal she had enjoyed.