Judgment II: Mercy (18 page)

Master Hutch was given the third set, and the buckles and straps creaked and groaned as the Elite writhed upon the block, sobbing and howling, unable to hold still. Despite his amiable nature, his were not gentle or pitying blows, and pain must have been the whole of her conscious world.

A collective sigh, like a summer breeze, swept through the Assembly Hall when she was given a moment's reprieve between the third and last dose. Master Wilhite was called down to deliver the final twelve, but not before Mahogany's 162

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face was bathed with cool water and smelling salts were waved beneath her nose to revive her.

Cobb tensed and tightened beneath her as he rocked Mercy's hips, forcing her to ride him in short, slow strokes, keeping time with the sound of each diabolical cut. They fell with dreadful sound. The harshness reverberating through the closed room, echoed by hoarse, and growing ever hoarser, cries from Mahogany. The jerks of the impacts made it sound as though her contortions shook the block.

"Meeeeeerrrciiiiieeeee-ooooough!"

Cobb found her clit between his fingers, and Mercy came, hard, silent, the convulsions of her cunt milking along the length of his shaft until he, with a soft expulsion of breath, joined her in the throes of pleasure.

The final stroke fell, and Mahogany was almost gone. She panted, making raw grunting sounds. "No more," she called weakly. "No more, Master, I beg you ... Ooh!"

Mercy shuddered, wave after wave of sensual pleasure rolled through her, gradually dying away as Cobb whispered,

"Good girl. Good girl. He looks ready to kill me."

He slid out of her with a slickness that seemed betrayingly loud, and Mercy turned her face away from his kiss.

"Master Deaton," Tane said. "The martinet, if you would."

"No, please!" Mahogany sobbed.

Mercy shivered, curling back against Cobb as Mahogany rasped her pleas, and the frozen stillness of the room carried her sobs with the same chilling clarity as Tane's response.

"Remember this the next time you dare think yourself master enough to pass punishment onto another."

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Cobb squeezed his hand one final time over her still clenching sex, then began to fasten himself back into his pants.

"Fifteen strokes," Tane announced. "Take your time, Master Deaton, and let each one be felt."

Mercy whimpered, but the sound was lost in the frantically renewed sobs coughed out by the Elite on the block.

"They're untying her legs," Cobb whispered in her ear.

"They'll be fastened straight behind her. Deaton likes to stand far enough away that the ends of the whip separate with each stroke. He'll catch her entire bottom with the first blow, and rip her legs all the way down to her knees with the second."

Two Demerit sessions with Master Deaton had shown Mercy that the brother of the Mountain Lord had many loves, the majority of which were best expressed with an implement held firmly in the palm of his hand. With the martinet, he was a veritable artist, and Cobb's admiration shone in his voice as he described the unfolding punishment.

From the moment Deaton combed his fingers through the knotted strands, to the swing of his arm as the many strips whooshing through the air around his head, Mercy listened with every muscle as tense as Mahogany's must have been.

That beastly whip cracked down with a thick sound across what must have been by that time thoroughly martyred flesh.

Fifteen times Mercy heard that sound from the cradle of Cobb's restraining arms, as well as the most dreadful gargling wail as, without any voice left with which to scream, Mahogany still made the valiant effort to try.

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When at last it was all over, only the sound of mucusy gasps and voiceless sobs could be heard underlying Tane's voice as he again lectured the room. "The Drone is off limits.

You do not talk to her. You do not touch her. And not even an Elite may presume to be a master and discipline her. Parade her through the room. I want everyone to take a good look at what her fate will be if this rule is ever again disobeyed."

"She's bowed over," Cobb murmured, hot against Mercy's ear. "The guards have to support her almost entirely; she can barely move. There is nothing of her bottom left but marks of purple and deep, dark red. Her thighs will likely be blue-black by evening. If your eyes weren't so swollen, I would let you see it. It's the same condition your bottom will soon be in for daring to lie to a master."

"I'm sorry," Mercy trembled.

"You should be." His hand between her thighs patted her mons twice. "You will be. But not for a day or two yet."

Mercy swallowed hard. She felt Master Cobb move beside her. "Over here," he called out and stumbling shuffle of feet approached their spot at the back of the room.

"Beg forgiveness of the one you wronged," Cobb said.

A wet drop splashed across Mercy's bare foot and she jumped, turning her head and listening intently.

A whispered, "I'm sorry," rasped from a throat screamed raw an instant before the kiss of warm, wet lips tremblingly touched her toes.

Even knowing she would be punished for it, Mercy grabbed at her blindfold, yanking up high enough so that she could peer through her lashes at Mahogany. The Elite was held 165

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bowed on the floor before her, her arms held by the two guards that had paraded her through the room. She was covered in sweat. Her nose was running, her face was red, and her eyes, when she raised her head to glare at Mercy, burned into her with a hatred that made her shake.

"Try again," Cobb commanded. "Beg her forgiveness, and this time mean it."

The hatred flared in Mahogany's red-rimmed eyes an instant before she lowered them to stare at the floor.

What she rasped, Mercy could barely distinguish as words, but she hastily blurted, "You're forgiven," and yanked her foot back lest the vindictive Elite be made to kiss it again.

The guards lifted Mahogany and helped her, stumbling and continuously making that horrible, gargling groan, her legs barely able to move one foot in front of the other, from the room. Mercy got more than a passing glimpse of the proud woman's cruelly whipped backside and legs. She was all purple, streaked with near black-colored blood welts. It would be weeks before her skin was white again, and in the places where the birch and martinet had cut her, there might possibly be even scars.

Shaken, when Mahogany finally disappeared out the door, Mercy snapped her head back around to seek out Shipe upon the dais, but she froze when she saw every Lesser in the room staring back at her. Not merely ostracized anymore; now she was despised.

"Eyes forward," Master Deaton boomed from the front of the room, and as obedient as puppets, they put their backs to her.

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"You're being naughty, Mercy," Cobb said, as he took the blindfold from her fingers. He tugged it firmly back down over her aching eyes.

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Master Cobb didn't have the same spacious quarters as Shipe did. His were more cluttered and the closet too full to empty into a room for Mercy. Instead, a makeshift barrack-for-one was created for her in the cleaning closet directly across the hall and right next to the entrance of the Pit. She got a real bed, though. A nice cot beneath her that was certainly softer than a mattress on the floor.

The extra comfort went a long way towards making up for the spilled-cleanser smell of her new room, although there wasn't a lot that it could do for the dreadful loneliness of having to sleep alone. Cobb made nightly appearances, but even that felt different. The pleasure was muted somehow. It felt more like a job and less like the privilege that it had been with Shipe. And when he was done, Cobb always went back to his room, leaving Mercy to lie awake in the dark for a long time, just listening to the sounds of a hundred women sleeping in the resonating Pit next door.

It didn't take very long at all for her sleepless nights to begin affecting her days. Always tired, she found herself sitting down more when she should have been putting the previous day's books away, or cleaning the tables, or cataloguing the volumes gathering dust on all sides of her. It was her third week anniversary with Cobb when she gave up all pretenses of trying to work at all. Sitting down at her desk, tired in both mind as well as body, Mercy folded her arms 168

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over the top and lay her head upon them. Sleep didn't come easily then either, so she got up and turned out the light.

She completely missed the bell that announced the mid-morning break, although the one that signaled the end of it did start her awake long enough for her to raise her head, blink sleepily around the brightly lit room as the Lessers filed out back out to their skill classes. There were two white Demerit slips for Laziness lying on the desk beside her arms.

She crinkled them up and threw them in the fireplace.

Shutting out the light again, she stretched out on one of the sofas and went back to sleep.

She never saw the light come back on. Instead, what she heard was a gruffly barked out, "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

Mercy reared her head as a hand hooked the back of her corset, and she was unceremoniously yanked into wakefulness. She cried out as her knees hit the floor and she barely got her feet under her before Shipe dragged her across the room to her desk.

"This isn't a Motel Six," he snarled, shoving her over her desktop. He clamped one hand across the back of her neck to keep her bent, while in his other, he held a lithesome switch.

Every part of her contracted when she saw it; every part of her came tinglingly to life, for the first time in three long weeks.

He grabbed the back of her tunic, flipping it up and tucking it into the back of her corset to keep it well out of his way, and then raised that switch high. Mercy shrieked as it 169

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snapped across her bare thighs. She grabbed the desk, and then she got mad.

"Get off me!" Swinging her arm, she elbowed him in the side as he brought that switch cracking furiously down all over her bucking and kicking flanks. She raked the desk with her fingernails, screaming not with pain but with outrage.

Her hand knocked into a short stack of books, knocking most to the floor, but one she managed to grab. Rolling half onto her side, she swung it at him and the book struck his shoulder and neck. When he stumbled back a step, Mercy fell off the desk. Her hands and knees both stinging, her bottom smarting where the switch had raised marks on her skin, she glared at him, panting and shaking with anger.

Shipe stared first at the book, and then at her. His black eyes narrowed and his face darkened. Dropping the switch on the floor, he reached for his belt instead.

"No!" She flung herself at him, kicking, hitting and screaming. "You left me! You have no right!"

Shipe grabbed her arms, lifting her clean up off the floor and shoving her back on the desk. He fell on top of her and, while she screamed and bucked, struggled to get her kicking legs apart and himself safely between them. She punched him, cracking all four of her knuckles on his hard jaw and knocking his head back before he caught her wrists and pinned them to the desk above her.

Pinned beneath him, without the leverage to keep fighting, Mercy stopped struggling. She seethed in silence. Her hair had fallen across her face and, with each ragged pant, wisps of blonde puffed and billowed around her mouth.

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"You done?" he growled. When she didn't move, he reached up with his free hand and brushed her hair back from her face.

Her eyes flashed, her flanks smarted where her buttocks were pressed to the desk beneath his slender hips, and she could hardly breathe under his heavier weight. "Get off me,"

she snarled.

He glared, his head cocking slightly to one side. Then he laughed, a hard and bitter sound. "You have to be so damn different, don't you?"

He got up, but he pulled her up as well. In one fluid jerk, he yanked her around and shoved her face-down back over the edge.

She shouted as her arms were wrenched up behind her and pinned between her shoulders. "Ow! Let go of me!"

She kicked back at him, but caught the wrong leg and he fell on top of her, crushing her beneath him again. In the struggle, her tunic skirt had fallen back down and she both felt and heard it tear when he ripped it out of the way. The corner of the desk jabbed into her thigh, and with every renewed attempt to struggle, he wrenched her wrists ever higher until it felt as though her arms would be snapped from her shoulder sockets. Unable to move without hurting, Mercy gave in with an angry sob as he leaned his weight into her back. He tried to kiss her, but she bit at his mouth.

"Go to hell!" she wept when he reached for his belt again.

But he didn't beat her, as she thought he would.

"We'll go together," he said, over her angry shout as he thrust between her legs and deep inside her.

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He conquered her with brutality, yanking her back to meet his thrusts by her imprisoned wrists and fistful of her pale hair, and yet he felt so good inside her. She was so angry that she'd rather have hurt him than to submit, but he still felt good, the vigor of him pushing inside her evoking all the wrong sensations. He forced her head back to kiss her mouth, and she even forgot to bite. It was a devastating betrayal to be so hurt and yet so absolutely lost to his touch.

Shipe was completely unrepentant. "You're mine!" he told her furiously. He made her repeat it as she came, not once, but many times, until she lay beneath him, unable to move, feeling raw and yet so brittle that all she could feel inside her was him moving.