Caught: Punished by Her Boss (11 page)

The unmistakable whoosh of a cane slicing the air near her made her clench the legs of the horse with her hands. She was one hundred percent certain this amateur wannabe-Dom bastard hadn't a clue how to use a cane properly, and in the wrong hands it could be lethal.

Yet she’d also learned enough in the short while she’d been Eric’s prisoner to know that to question his skill or motives was sure to result in things going all the worse for her. She bit her lip, aware her body was shaking, though he hadn't yet touched her.

“Now, J., it’s time for your punishment for coming before I did. I always wondered if the welts on the asses of those girls on the porn sites were real. Now we’re going to find out.”

The first stroke landed like fire across both cheeks, made all the more painful by her position. No warm up, no warning, just the flash of pain and the scream pulled from her lips. She felt his fingers, rough and blunt, moving in a line over the welt he’d surely raised with the cane.

“Yeah,” he said softly, wonder in his voice. “They’re real.” He stepped away and a moment later another slicing cut of the cane caught her high up on her ass, the tip making painful contact with her lower back. She screamed again, gripping the legs of the horse so tightly they cut into her palms.

He began to move all around her, striking at random, whipping her thighs and her ass in a flurry of whistling rattan. Sweat dripped along her inner arms and beaded on her upper lip as the searing pain continued. She was crying and begging him to stop, but her pleas fell on deaf ears.

Mercifully, after a while her skin began to numb beneath the constant barrage and her mind began to drift, retreating into some dark, secret place where she could wait and hide until the ordeal ended.

Eventually Jessie became aware the caning had stopped. She could feel Eric’s fingers again, moving over the abraded, burning skin on her ass and thighs. “Jesus,” he breathed. “Fuckin’ A.
I
did that.” He was speaking in an undertone to himself, the awe and pride evident in his voice. It was almost as if he’d forgotten she was there, or rather, that he didn’t realize she was a real person, not just some toy who existed solely for his twisted amusement.

He stayed behind her, just out of her line of vision. She could hear his breathing, which was getting faster and more labored. She felt his legs touching the side of her body and all of a sudden she realized what he was doing. His hand dropped to her ass, cupping the left cheek as he pumped his cock over her.

He began to grunt and his grip tightened on her ass. He jerked against her and she felt the warm splatter of his come on her ass and back. She closed her eyes and pressed lips together to keep from screaming, hatred rising in her throat like bile.

Eric knelt beside her and released her cuffs. She didn’t move but remained stretched out along the back of the horse, her arms dangling on each side. Pulling her upright, Eric lifted her, this time flipping her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, one hand on her lower back, the other arm wrapped around her thighs, which throbbed from the welts she knew for certain were there.

He’d left the cage open, and now he set her down beside it and pushed her shoulders until she fell into a kind of crouch at his feet. “Thank me for your punishment. Thank me for training you to be a proper slave.”

You are training me to hate your fucking guts,
she thought with bitter humor, but she forced herself to say, “Thank you, sir,” praying he would go away and leave her alone at last.

“Get back in your cage, slave girl. I’m tired of playing with you.”

He didn’t have to ask twice. As the bars clanged into place and the padlock was clicked shut, she almost smiled with relief.

Those bars kept her in, but they also kept him out.

Chapter 7

Jessie lay still for a long time. She was on her stomach, her head cradled in her arms, her face to the wall. He’d left the light on, for which she was grateful. She needed to pee, but didn’t have the energy it required to use the plastic urinal.

Gingerly she reached back to touch the welts along her ass and thighs. She could feel the ridged, hot skin, which was tender to the touch. There was one welt just where her thigh met her ass that was especially sore. She felt something wet and brought her hand up to her face to see. Her finger was smeared with blood. The fucking bastard had broken the skin.

He’d pushed a bottle of water into the cage with her before he’d left. No telling when she’d get more. Did she dare waste it to clean the wound?

She decided to use just a little bit, pouring a few drops onto the corner of her sheet. Carefully, she reached back to dab at the sore spot, not sure she was doing any good. Was this just the beginning? Was Eric going to plunge deeper and deeper into this terrifying game? How far would he go and where would it end?

As her mind drifted, she thought about the one class in high school she’d enjoyed. It was a history class taught by Mr. Ulmer, who was actually excited about his subject matter and explained things in a way that had made Jessie listen, for a change. He’d quoted some famous dude or other who’d said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

She thought about that now. She’d had plenty of clients who had dark, strange sexual fantasies, including the fervent desire to be roasted alive over a barbeque pit, or to be whipped until they were covered in blood, or to be someone’s personal toilet, crouched beneath a toilet throne, mouth open.

The operative word in all that, of course, was
fantasy
. While she could give them an approximation of what they thought they wanted in a controlled and safe environment, it wasn’t
real
. It never went so far as to be dangerous or life-threatening, not counting the freak accident with Frankie.

Jessie shuddered, thinking back on that terrifying day, the camera recording while Frankie seemed to be dying in front of her eyes. Eric knew about that, and had lorded it over her, which made his use of breath play with her all the more frightening. He seemed to take special sadistic delight in choking her—letting her know in no uncertain terms that her life was literally in his hands.

He had absolute power over her, and this was a terrifying realization. The Eric Chapman she’d thought she knew at the office was just a cover, a flimsy front for the evil man who lurked just beneath the civilized surface. With no limits and no witnesses, how far would he go? What would stop him from bringing every sick and twisted secret fantasy of his to life?

He couldn’t let her go. No way he could trust her silence. She was his prisoner until death did them part. Her death. She was thirty-three years old. Would she live to see thirty-four? Tears trickled down Jessie’s cheeks. She felt a bleak despair moving over her like black, thick ink, blotting out any hope.

You have to get out. You have to get out. You have to get out.

The voice was quiet but persistent.

You’re Jessie Ramos, the girl who kicks ass, the girl who got out of a dead end situation in El Fucking Paso and made yourself a good life without help from anybody. You got out of a bad marriage to the wrong man. You don’t give up and you don’t give in. You don’t have to just lie down and take whatever this asshole dishes out. You find a way, Jess. You figure out a plan. You get the fuck out, and you get revenge.

The words rose from a place deep inside her, from the secret place she rarely visited, where Carlos rested in peace. Her brother had been four years younger than she, but he’d always stuck up for her when their father, drunk and out of control, would come at her, screaming that the food wasn’t on the table, that she was a worthless piece of shit, that he ought to put her on the streets so she could earn a few bucks instead of just spending his hard-earned wages. His favorite rant when she was a teenager trying to keep the household together, go to school and work a job at the local supermarket was that she couldn’t hold a candle to his blessed wife, the wife he’d beaten and berated regularly until she’d died of ovarian cancer, at which time he’d consecrated her as a saint.

It was Carlos who had talked Jessie into getting out when she’d graduated high school, encouraging her to head to a big city as far away from El Paso as she could get and start fresh, even though it meant leaving him alone with their father. “Don’t worry about me, Jess. He’s a bully,” Carlos had said. “Bullies only attack people who are weaker than they are. He tries that shit with me, I’ll punch his lights out.” He’d been barely fourteen at the time, but already taller than their father, and muscular from participating in school sports. Most importantly, he was fearless.

If only she’d taken him with her! But he’d still been in school, with friends and a social network. He actually enjoyed going to school, and made good grades, unlike Jessie, who barely managed to scrape by with a D average. She made Carlos promise that as soon as he graduated he would let her send for him, and they could share an apartment. Maybe he could even go to college, the first in their family to do so.

When she got the news his junior year of high school that he’d been killed in a car accident, the passenger of a drunk teenage driver who crashed head-on into an eighteen-wheeler, Jessie had been more crushed even than when their mother had died. At least her mother had had some kind of life. Carlos had been all of sixteen.

Jessie didn’t know if she believed in any kind of afterlife, but she liked to imagine that her mother and Carlos were somewhere out there, watching over her. Though at this point, they were clearly slacking on the job.

With a deep sigh, Jessie rolled to her side and hugged herself. Just then the glint of something caught the corner of her eye and set her heart tumbling in her chest. It was in the narrow space between the sleep cage and the wall. She scooted closer, pressing her face against the bars to get a better look.

It was the pair of barber scissors Eric had used when he’d humiliated her that morning, snipping her pubic hair and then shaving her until she was bald. Jessie was well aware of the current trend on the all the porn sites—it seemed you couldn’t get a gig as a porn star if you didn’t have huge, fake plastic breasts and a shaven pussy. Since she ran her own site, and never appeared nude before the camera anyway, this hadn’t been an issue. For Eric, she guessed, it was as much about exerting his power and will over her as any personal taste.

But he’d been careless, she now saw. He’d let the scissors fall when he was shaving her. Maybe it was when the
pendejo
had slipped with the razor, nicking her tender flesh and making her jerk from the sudden sting. Whenever it had happened, he obviously hadn’t noticed.

As Jessie stared at the glinting silver, the black despair of a moment before parted before a sudden, burning hope. If she could get those scissors she would have a fighting chance. She would have a weapon, and the advantage of surprise.

She lay still as a cornered animal for several long minutes, her fingers itching with the desire to reach through the bars and snag the weapon. She made no move, however, aware that Eric might be watching her through his security cameras. She would have to wait until he turned out the lights.

Instead she memorized their location, just between the fourth and fifth bars. Closing her eyes, she let bloody, violent fantasies of plunging the sharp points of those little scissors into Eric’s eyes, into his heart, into his balls, wash over her in a haze of red until, somehow, she drifted into uneasy sleep.

~*~

It was eight o’clock in the evening. Eric sat in his study dressed only in a pair of black cotton lounge pants. He had stopped even pretending to do any real work several hours before. How could he work when there was a naked woman in a cage in his basement? How could he think of anything but her and what he planned to do to her next?

He’d never felt so alive, so vital and powerful. In a way it felt as if he’s been freed from the confines of self-imposed constraints—like he’d unzipped an outer skin of civilized behavior and stepped out of it, revealing his true nature.

He, and he alone, held the fate of another human being in his hands. He could do with her as he wished. He could let loose all the dark, secret fantasies that had lurked in the deeper recesses of his imagination, bringing them to life in a way he never would have dreamed possible. The prospect was at once thrilling and frightening. It was as if he’d opened a Pandora’s box of evil lust and desire, and there was no shutting that lid—no going back.

If he were brutally honest, he didn’t want to go back. He’d been handed a secret, priceless diamond of opportunity and Eric Chapman was not a man to let opportunity pass him by.

J. wasn’t submissive, but she could be tamed. She could be controlled through fear, but also through conditioning and training. He would teach her that she would be rewarded with food and with sexual gratification when she behaved as he wished, and severely punished when she did not. Her entire reason for being would become to please him at any and all costs. Maybe he’d get her so conditioned that he wouldn’t even have to keep her in a cage. She would become his willing, eager slave girl, desperate to please her lord and master. She would forget she’d ever lived another life or ever been able to exercise her own free will. She would find no greater joy than in submitting to whatever pleased Eric, no matter how perverse. She would, quite literally, live for him, and him alone.