Tender Mercies (16 page)

She’d known that punishments like writing lines and standing in a corner wouldn’t last and she’d done her best not to break rules or disobey or displease him. When she did, the punishment was immediate. But it hadn’t been physical pain, so far.

“Why can’t it just be for punishment?” She was already making vows and promises in her head to never displease him enough to warrant physical punishment. If she could get him to agree to restrict the pain to punishment, maybe she could find some way to be perfect and never mess up, to never have to feel the sting of the whip or anything else ever again.

“Because I like it.” His gaze was level on her when he said it.

Despair at the hopelessness of the situation caused the tears to finally start sliding down her cheeks. “But what about me?”

He pushed himself off the spanking horse and moved a few steps toward her, until he was within touching distance. “What about you? I care for you. I protect you. I provide for you. But never forget that you are mine. The choices I make for you are made with your ultimate well-being in mind, but also with my desires in mind.”

She didn’t say anything, just looked at the stone floor and his bare feet.

“Kitten, what happens in the dreams now?”

She’d told him all this before, why did he want to hear it again? Why was he tormenting her? “He makes me hurt. He hits me.”

“Is that all he does?”

“Yes.”

“And what did he do before in the dreams . . . when you first had them?”

“Please . . . ”

“Tell me,” Asher demanded.

“You already know.”

“And I want to hear it again.”

“He hurt me, and raped me, and let the dog . . . ” she trailed off, unable to complete the sentence.

“But now he just physically hurts you?”

“Yes, Master.”

He sat beside her and pulled her against his chest. She sagged into his warmth, even though she didn’t want to. He’d become as frightening to her again as he’d been the first day when he’d taken her out of Lucas’s dungeon. When she’d thought she’d die at his hands.

“Grace, I don’t think these nightmares are just about Lucas. I think it’s about your lingering fear of what might happen with me. The fear that you aren’t really safe yet. Once we got through the sex, and you started trusting me there, that aspect of the nightmares disappeared. We have to do pain now so we can kill him off completely. Trust me.”

She wanted to, but she couldn’t. It was asking far too much. Even if years passed in his care it would be asking too much. Part of her wanted to do whatever he wanted, but she wasn’t sure if she could make herself willingly accept what was about to happen. And then what? Would it turn into a punishment? Wouldn’t that be worse?

He stood and pulled her to her feet. “Come on, be a good girl for me.”

“What if I have a flashback?”

“We’ll work through it and go slow. Believe me, it will be different. You’ll know exactly who you’re with.”

He had to half drag her to the spanking horse anyway; she just couldn’t make her feet move and was grateful he seemed to understand. “Straddle it, kitten, and lie on your stomach for me.”

She mounted the black, vinyl-padded bench, and Asher adjusted the section her knees would rest on. The part she straddled and lay across was long and not too wide, so that her breasts pressed over the sides. She tensed when he strapped her ankles and wrists to the lower bench.

“Shhhh,” he said, his hand running the length of her back and dipping between the cleft of her ass. “It’s for your safety, so you don’t inadvertently struggle and hurt yourself.”

The bench pressed tight against her mound, quickly warming from her body heat. He pressed a button and vibrations started. She let out a surprised moan. No spanking horse she’d ever been on, before the island and after, had ever vibrated. She pressed harder against the vinyl.

He chuckled. “I have attachments for penetration, but let’s not overwhelm you today.” She shivered. “Is that a good shiver or a bad shiver?”

It made her feel bizarrely safe that he noticed everything about her. Each nuance of expression, each tremble, each goose bump that popped out over her flesh in response to him. At least he was aware of what was going on, which meant anything delivered by him would be deliberate.

“Good shiver, Master,” she said, blushing. Already he was making her forget her anxiety, and she was almost back to thinking maybe she could trust him. Though Asher was demanding and insistent and never treated her like glass or like she was a
special case
to him, she’d somehow been okay.

Perhaps it was the utter helplessness of her situation. With no hope of ever gaining her freedom and a master who didn’t seem intent on harming her, her brain had moved quickly into Stockholm mode and along the path to acceptance. Somehow she was able to tolerate and even love his touch: his hands, tongue, and cock on her and inside her.

Her submissive instincts had answered his every demand, as if the two of them together created a perfectly choreographed dance. Of course he would make this tolerable as well. But then, the hitting hadn’t started yet, so maybe it was a little soon to be making those kinds of judgments.

Her head turned toward the sound of the trunk opening. He seemed to be getting lots of things. Bad shiver. A few tears slipped out along with a little whimper.

“Grace––I haven’t even touched you yet.”

He began methodically placing objects on the table: a flogger, a riding crop, a paddle, a cane. She shut her eyes, unable to deal with a table laid out so much like the one in the dream.

“Please . . . ” She didn’t know what else to put with that sentence, so she just dropped her head back onto the bench. Her begging wouldn’t sway him. The time she’d spent with him had already proven that. If Asher said something was going to happen, it was going to happen. And it was going to happen on his timetable. Very often that certainty brought a measure of comfort and safety. But not this time.

He came to stand beside her, his hand resting on the small of her back. The light pressure and warmth of his skin settled her. Then he moved his hand downward to press across her ass. Her muscles clenched as she waited for him to raise and then drop his hand on her, but his intention wasn’t to spank. He pressed down, causing the vibrations to pound between her legs more strongly.

“Just focus on this. Ignore the rest until you can focus on the rest.”

She nodded, squirming and rubbing herself against the bench.

Then his hand came down on her. She jumped at first at the sensation, but then relaxed again. Instead of calling up memories of Lucas, it made her think of the 24/7 she’d lived in before the island. It had felt like
playing
, but she remembered their sessions. Her master had warmed her up, not just hitting for the sake of it, but gradually coaxing her body to reinterpret sensation according to his whims. It was the same as what Asher was doing.

He went through each of the spanking implements: the paddle, crop, and flogger. But not the cane. The cane sat untouched as he slowly brought her to the tolerance level he wanted her at.

“You have a higher pain threshold than I was led to believe. That fucking idiot,” he muttered.

She knew he was speaking of Lucas. Lucas didn’t warm her up. He’d just thrown pain for the sake of pain at her, randomly delivered at the highest intensity right off the bat. He’d had no reason to care about her experience or her body’s ability to take the pain and turn it into something pleasurable. Her cunt had dripped from it anyway, much like it was doing right now.

As Asher brought the pain level up, he moved the power of the vibrations up as well. She no longer felt tethered to the table. No bonds could hold her right now. She was soaring. She bucked like a wild thing, one moment thrusting her ass up at him, her body begging for more of the pain that had started an opiate-like reaction in her brain. The next second she was pulling away, pushing her pelvis against the vibrations so she could come again and again. Each sensation was equally enticing, and she couldn’t stop the fight to have them both.

The tears came in earnest then, a catharsis. Things she’d held onto and kept buried deep inside, places in her soul where Lucas had touched her, which she’d never been able to get clean. All she’d been able to do was repress, bury. Now it all flowed out of her. The blows Asher was landing weren’t even hurting her; she was too deep in, her brain releasing too many pain-diluting chemicals. But it was permission to cry, to let it out in ways she hadn’t given herself permission to until this moment. Asher was right. Somehow she knew the nightmares would go away. Maybe not forever, but each time he could, and most likely would, bring her back here to the dungeon to purge her demons.

A moment later the vibrations stopped. She thought he was finished with her, but then a sharp crack landed on her ass that made her scream and fight to catch her breath. She turned toward him, the fear back in her eyes, but Asher had already laid the cane back on the table.

“Just a taste of punishment, kitten. I don’t want you to think all pain with me is good pain. I don’t want to encourage misbehavior. If you want good pain, all you have to do is ask. Never misbehave for it. I promise I won’t make punishment pleasurable.”

Grace was offended he thought she’d be a brat. Didn’t he understand how grateful she was to be in his care instead of Lucas’s?

He ran his hand lightly over the welt the cane had left. “Now tilt your hips so I can get inside you.”

He left her strapped to the spanking horse while he fucked her, his hands spanning her waist, making her feel somehow even more vulnerable. He didn’t ask her questions or intrude upon her thoughts as she cried. He must have known the tears weren’t something he needed to ask about. Not pain or hurt . . . relief. For once he let her have the private moment inside her own head.

She didn’t come again, already spent from the spanking horse, and her master didn’t ask her to. He just used her body for his release, no words passing between them. Looking on, a stranger might have thought she was being abused. Unless it was someone like her. Other subs would know; they’d understand a merging was taking place that went far deeper than tab A in slot B.

Grace hadn’t thought she could feel more completely his or that she could love him any more for all he’d done for her, but she’d been wrong. Somehow with Asher, she didn’t feel judged or wrong anymore. Her history was a bad dream and her present wasn’t something she had to feel ashamed for.

After he’d had his fill of her, he unfastened the straps and carried her upstairs to the bedroom. She fell asleep in his arms almost the moment her head touched the pillow and didn’t dream again that night.

Ten

Asher watched through the window of his study as Grace worked in the garden and chattered on his cell phone to her friend. His hand hesitated over the old-fashioned window latch while he considered opening it and calling out to her, but he decided to leave her to her chat.

She was doing remarkably well. She’d had a few more dreams of beatings from Lucas, and each time Asher had taken her to the dungeon to remold and reshape the things running around in his pet’s brain.

The second time she’d had a dream, she didn’t fight him or show fear when he took her downstairs. She seemed grateful and relieved for the catharsis. Each nightmare only strengthened their bond as she came to count on and depend on him more. The nightmares had been gone for weeks now, though he still whipped and fucked her regularly.

Darcy had faded to the background of his mind, her death a bad mistake and bad dream of his own. He still found himself comparing the two women, which only brought on fits of guilt. How could he allow his last pet to shrink even the slightest bit in his memory after what he’d done? It felt wrong to care for Grace so much, as if he was somehow cheating on Darcy.

No matter how long he’d lived on Eleu under its rules, a part of him would always frame things in the old vanilla way, with the old rules of how relationships were supposed to be done. In reality, he wouldn’t have been cheating on Darcy even if he’d had both her and Grace at the same time. That idea made him feel worse, because somehow he knew Grace would have been the favorite. He pressed his fingertips against his temples to block out the thought.

He couldn’t imagine the kind of bratty fits Darcy would have thrown to get his attention off Grace and back onto her. In this alternate reality, he imagined he would have sold Darcy to another man before he would have let her hurt Grace in any way. He would have ensured the new master was good and decent, but she still would have lost if it had come down to it. How could he let himself think this way?

Asher pulled the book out, and the dungeon door creaked open. Grace had come to trust he wouldn’t use the bullwhip on her, though it seemed to confuse her more as to its purpose, since he’d said the cane was for punishment. The symbol of what a foolish decision could cost had become too much to look at.

The whip was the last piece of Darcy that had been left in the open. All of her things had been packed away a little at a time in the months following her death. Most of that time was still a blur as he’d spent the majority of it so drunk the gaps in his memory resembled Swiss cheese.

His hand trailed lightly over the leather. He still couldn’t look very long at the blood on the tip. Every time he saw the weapon hanging on the wall, he thought of Darcy. At times, it took several minutes to get his mind on Grace. The person who was here. The one who actually needed him. The one he loved most even though it made him feel bad to compare. It also scared him. If losing Darcy like that had caused him to spiral so far downward, what would he do if anything ever happened to Grace?

He had to bury Darcy. For good. It was too much having her memory hanging over everything. At first he considered putting the bullwhip in the bottom of the toy box. But every time he went to get something, it would be there, poking its little snake-like body out at inopportune moments as he pawed through the other items in the trunk for a riding crop or paddle or nipple clamps.