A Gentlemen's Agreement (13 page)

“How old were you when you were
first sold?”

“Fifteen. A slave can’t be sold
until she’s fifteen. The law is a little squeamish about making children
service gentlemen. It’s not squeamish about much, but it’s squeamish about
that. It’s not because of the slaves. It’s because it would make the gentlemen
look bad.”

“So the first man who bought you
took your virginity?”

Peach looked shocked and angry.
“Hell no. Don’t you know anything? It’s illegal to sell a virgin, even in a
private sale. It would be barbaric to auction off someone’s virginity. When I
was taken to the auction house, they tattooed me, vaccinated me, and deflowered
me. One stop service, all needs satisfied. The doctor’s needs, especially. I
think he got into the auction business because he really liked the deflowering
part of his job.”

“So when you were sold… “

“I wasn’t a virgin. By about three
hours.”

“I never dreamed that people could
be treated that way.”

Peach snorted. “I’m not a person.
I’m property.
Always have been
,
always
will be
. I knew that as soon as I was old enough to know anything.”

“I don’t think that it’s right. If
a person gets pressed into slavery or adjudicated, that’s fair enough. They did
something wrong. Committed a crime or spent too much money. It’s
their own
fault.
But not children.
Not babies. Babies should be born free.”

Peach barked. “Yeah, how would
that work?
A piece of property giving birth to a person?
The baby is a free soul but has to be suckled by a piece of property? And what
happens when the five year old throws a tantrum and tells her mother to go jump
of a cliff? Be a lot of dead breeders at the bottom of our cliffs because a
slave has to obey a free person’s orders.”

Actually, that last wasn’t true. A
slave has to obey only her owner’s orders. An owner orders his slaves to obey
kennelmen
,
whiphands
, and invited
guests but he wouldn’t order a mother to obey her child. But Irene understood
Peach’s point. It would be unnatural for a child to have a parent who was so
much lower status than her. If an owner could give orders to the mother but not
to the child, a number of unfortunate situations could arise.

Irene had heard enough for now.
She could only take so much horror in one sitting.

But Peach wasn’t done, yet.

“I can tell you one thing for
sure. Getting sold at that first auction was a big step up. Being a pleasure
slave was is far superior to being the child of a breeding slave. Lord Snow can
take his strap to my ass every morning before breakfast and I’ll still be
happier than I was when I was growing up.”

Irene didn’t ask why. She changed
the subject. “Do you think that Nickel is satisfied with making me eat her out
on my knees every day or do you think that she’s going to try to do something
else to me.”

Peach glanced toward the door to
make sure that Nickel was nowhere in sight, then lowered her voice to a
whisper. “I think that you better never take your eyes off that bitch. She’s
never going to be satisfied as long as you’re Lord Snow’s favorite little
suck-up. She was top bitch in the kennel before you arrived and now she’s
second tier. She’s got to be careful. She can’t take you on, face-to-face
because she can’t risk Lord Snow taking your side against her. But she’ll stab
you in the back, first chance she gets – especially if she thinks
that you won’t find out that it was
her
. Or if you do
anything, and I mean any little thing, that she can claim is disobedience of a
direct order then she’ll wale on your cunt so bad, you’ll be waddling like a
duck for a month.”

“You think that she’d cause me
permanent injury?”

“She’d sure as hell like to, but
she can’t risk lowering your value at auction. If you can’t fuck a man any
more, you’ll only be fit for labor. She might try to hurt you bad enough that
you can still get fucked but so that it’ll hurt like hell every time you do. I
knew a slave once who had some kind of nerve damage down there and that was
what it was like for her. Her owner got tired of hearing her scream her head
off every time he fucked her so he sold her to a brothel to get fucked all day
long, every day, for the rest of her life. She brought him a good price. There’s
certain kind of man who enjoys feeling a slave suffer at the end of his cock
and will pay a premium for that kind of fun.”

Another horror
story.
Peach was fountain of joy.

“I hope I never get sold to a
brothel,” Irene said. “Even if the alternative is getting sold directly into
labor.”

“A brothel’s not the worst. It’s
bad, but it’s not as bad as the professor.”

“Someone else told me about the
professor. They said that he’s a sadist who loves to torture slaves.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Why does everyone around here
keep talking about him?”

“Don’t you know? He’s one of Lord
Snow’s favorite guests. He gets invited over a couple of times a month.”

Irene was shocked. “You mean that
we’ve been entertaining him?”

“Not you. He doesn’t come to the
after-dinner entertainments. He comes over for private game nights. He loves
games even more than Lord Snow. Cards. Dice. He’s a fiend about backgammon. Of
all those gentlemen who spend so much time in that billiard room, I think he’s
the only one who ever actually played billiards.”

“So you’ve seen him?”

“Often. I’ve never known him to
want to be serviced by a slave, but he loves looking at us so Lord Snow brings
us in for decoration. It makes your skin crawl when he looks at you. You know
that he’s thinking about what you’d look like if you were suffering some
terrible torture. Every time I’m in the room I’m terrified that he’s going to
offer to buy me from Lord Snow. I heard that he gets all of his slaves in
private transactions. He never goes to the auction house.”

Now Irene had something else to
worry about. If the professor never took sexual services from Lord Snow’s
slaves, then he could order her to attend their game nights without worrying
about her celibacy.

“There’s another thing about the
professor.”

“What’s that?”

“He sells his torture devices.
We’re all scared that Lord Snow will see one that he likes and put it in the
pleasure room.” Peach frowned. “Lord Hoffman bought one. It was a crucifixion
frame. A slave is suspended with her arms stretched wide and only her toes
touching the floor. It’s supposed to be one of the most painful punishments
that a slave will ever feel.”

Irene nodded. “I believe it is. I
was lent to the Hoffman’s for an entertainment once, and lost a game. The
penalty was a half hour suspension in the frame. I still cringe every time I
think about it. Every minute was a new kind of hell.”

Peach’s eyes narrowed. “You aren’t
thinking about borrowing it for one of your entertainment nights, are you?”

“I hadn’t thought about that, but
I guess I could.”

Peach didn’t reply, just stared.

Irene laughed. “Don’t worry. I
couldn’t bring myself to do that to you. Not when I know from experience how
horrible it is.”

Peach brightened. “You know, we
wouldn’t mind if you borrowed it as long as you fixed the game so that Nickel
was the one who lost. The rest of us would like seeing that.”

“No. I wouldn’t crucify even
Nickel.”

“Why not? She wouldn’t hesitate to
crucify you if she could. And for a lot longer than half an hour.”

Irene knew that was true. And that
was a good reason for never bringing the crucifixion frame within a mile of
Nickel.

She retired to her cell to plan
the next entertainment. It had to be something different. But also, something
that would allow a couple of ladies to be smuggled in but still remain
anonymous.

She didn’t want to do masks again.
That was too obvious. She needed something subtle.

Maybe she could find a way to
satisfy the gentlemen, the ladies, the slaves, and do something good for
herself at the same time.

Slowly, bit-by-bit, an idea began
to gel. If she could work out the bugs, it would be fantastic.

* * *

Fifteen men stared at Irene. She didn’t know all of them,
but the handful of faces that she recognized were lords or earls; and she was
pretty certain that the man with the goatee was Marquette Kelly. She doubted
that there was a lowly knight or baronet in the crowd.

She looked splendid in a black
catsuit
. It looked like patent leather but was an elastic
fabric that she could wriggle into without needing zippers or other closures.
It helped that, like the previous gold
catsuit
, it
had a scoop neck and low cut back.

Where the gold
lamé
outfit had camouflaged the gold collar that proclaimed her the slave with a
lady’s name, the black outfit highlighted it. The gentlemen looking at her
couldn’t tell if she was reveling in her humiliation or taking pride in rising
above it.

The truth was that, because she
couldn’t remove it, she had decided that there was no
sense
in letting it restrict
her. She was resolved to ignore it and wear what
she wanted.

 
Once that decision was made, it was a simple matter for her
to submit a requisition for a second
catsuit
for Lord
Snow’s approval.

And, judging by the way he was
staring at her body now, he was silently approving her purchase all over again.

She wondered if he would like her
to wear a different outfit for every entertainment.

She looked at the crowd for a long
moment, letting anticipation build.

The room was empty but for the
men. There was no furniture or fixtures on the walls. Even the billiard table
had been removed.
The expansive, empty floor was covered from
wall to wall by thick mats
– uncertain footing that forced the men
keep shifting their balance. That contributed to their impatient appearance.

They knew that something
extraordinary must be planned if such an extensive modification of the room
were required.

“Gentlemen,” she said, “you are so
esteemed that even the stars will drift down from the heavens to serve you.”

As she spoke, the room lights
dimmed until only a single spotlight was focused on her.

“The stars come out only at night.
So we must look for them in the dark.”

The spotlight contracted until
only her face was illuminated.

“You have been given wristbands so
that you, too will shine like the stars.”

The gentlemen had been fitted with
gold bracelets when they entered the room. As their eyes adapted to the dark,
they could see that a tiny light in each bracelet was glowing with a faint
white light.

“This is a silent night. The stars
have no voices. But soon you will be part of heavenly constellations.”

The spot on her face faded and the
room was left in total darkness. The faint lights on the gentlemen’s wrists
were not bright enough to illuminate anything.

Those lights danced as the men fidgeted
in anticipation.

Then another, slightly brighter
light appeared at the front of the room. This one was blue and bounced, at
shoulder level towards the men.
It was followed by a green
light, then an orange, then purple, and more
.

A gentleman near the front gasped
softly and a female voice giggled.

The colored lights dispersed among
the white ones and the room became agitated with flickering sparks. The effect
was more like fireflies on a warm summer night than stars in the sky, but the
gentlemen weren’t overly particular about the metaphor.

One of the men whispered in
excitement, “Irene?”

Another man whispered back, “No,
she’s with me.”

A third voice whispered, “Damn. I
though this was her.”

The gentlemen were discovering
that every slave in the room was wearing a collar. That is where their
star-lights
were located.

One of the men tried to illuminate
a face with the light on his wristband, but it only threw enough light to cast
a pale glow on a cheek. A cheek that was bulging from the cock that was filling
the slave’s mouth.

It didn’t take long for the
gentlemen to stop caring if it was Irene who was servicing him or another
slave. All cats look the same in the dark.

Irene had requisitioned additional
slaves so that there would be almost one for every man. A dozen slaves for
fifteen gentlemen was an extravagance but Lord Snow made it clear that he
wanted the best for these guests. Once they were dispersed, it was hard to
count them.
Some gentlemen were being serviced by two slaves
at once while other gentlemen were already resting in post-coital contentment.

The exceptionally high ratio of
slaves to gentlemen meant that the slaves had time to relax and enjoy
themselves, too. It wasn’t only the male throats that breathed orgasmic moans
and gasps of ecstasy.

Everyone moved slowly. In the
dark, no one wanted to step on the bodies that were writhing on the floor.

As soon as all the slaves were in
the room, Irene stepped back into the tunnel to the slave kennels, closed the
door, and lit a dim electric lantern. She rushed through the kennels and
stepped out into the driveway. She waved the lantern and a car drove forward to
stop beside her. It disgorged two excited and nervous ladies.

She took them into the kennel and
prepared them in the pleasure room: stripping them naked, letting their hair
down, and encircling their necks with collars that shone with pinpoint yellow
lights. She was careful to check that they had both shaved their crotches bald.