The Lady Submits (2 page)

“Yes, milady. I remember how the physician showed me the
last time you had one of your headaches.”

Lucrezia turned to examine her maid. She was dutifully
dressed in
Lucrezia’s
dowdiest nightgown — a
gift from some aging relation somewhere — and preparing to crawl into
Lucrezia’s
vast bed, only to be buried under every blanket
the women could find.

“You trust this footman?” Lucrezia inquired once more. She
did
not
want to suffer the
embarrassment of being apprehended mid-escape. That would be worse than simply
suffering through the Ivy Dance.

“Yes, milady. He’s at pains to impress me,” the maid smiled
slyly.

“Well done, Antonia.” Lucrezia gave an approving glance.
“Now do these straps in the back for me.”

A few minutes of artful cinching later, and the Lady
Lucrezia Grimaldi was tied and bound into the most sexual clothing she owned,
teased to a steady hum of vibrating desire, and ready. It was time. She covered
herself in the dark burgundy cloak of lightweight damask, and hurried down the
servant’s stairs. There at the service entrance waited a nervous footman of
more than average attractiveness, wearing the red and black livery of her
house. She didn’t recognize him, of course, but took the time to appraise him.
Blond, strong jaw, broad shoulders.

“
Very
well done,
Antonia,” Lucrezia whispered, and allowed herself to be helped into a hired
coach.

The ride through the city was almost disappointingly
uneventful. Lucrezia had expected clandestine adventures to be more, well, adventuresome.
But the largest Bacchanal parties for the common people were all taking place
on the other side of the city, around the ruined temples of the old Blood
Canals, and the younger sons and daughters of the rich would be drinking their amberwine
and fucking in the open air amphitheater. The streets were practically empty.
Her coach rattled on, unmolested, all the way to Severille House.

Lucrezia thought she had prepared for everything but she
wasn’t quite prepared to be nervous.
It’s
just Bacchanal
, she told herself.
You’ll
be fine once you’ve had a well-endowed Severille slave or two.
But the
thought didn’t bring her the thrill that it usually did, and she was feeling
altogether disoriented by the time the coach rolled to a halt.

Damn Castellan
,
she thought.

“Milady?” the coachmen asked, though it sounded more like a
demand. He was not what she would call properly deferential, but then she wasn’t
adorned in the full regalia of her title. She had come out the service
entrance, after all.

“Yes, all right,” she said, and rummaged in her small purse
while the coachmen got down and opened her door.

“Stay here until I emerge. I’ll want a coach,” she said, and
gave him the coins.

He grabbed her wrist, hard. Lucrezia was speechless at the
affront, possibly for the first time in her life.

“I know what this place is. You’ll be needing to pay me a
bit more if you expect me to wait for you to be done with it on the last night
of Bacchanal.
Milady
,” he added with
a smile.

“That won’t be necessary,” said a clear, low voice. It was
calm, but there was an edge that would have cut the most awkward silence.
Lucrezia was too humiliated to turn her head, mesmerized by the brutal
coachmen, all but his bearded chin hidden in the night shadows of the coach.
“We will provide for the Lady’s transportation. You will drive that coach away
from here, and count yourself lucky that you get to keep that hand.”

The coachmen took only a moment to weigh his options. In the
end, he decided a quick exit was the wisest path available to him. Which left
Lucrezia with no choice but to turn and face her benefactor.

It was a man with the first grey in his dark hair, tall, and
with angular, severe features that suggested a bird of prey. His eyes were
nearly black, and wore a simple black tunic, wrapped around his lean body in a
complicated pattern. Lucrezia had seen him at Severille events and various
social functions, and vaguely recognized him as an authority within the
Society. She cringed to realize that this man obviously recognized her, as
well.

“Lady Lucrezia,” the man said, bowing his head slightly.
“Tell me, did he hurt you? It would be no trouble to have him followed.”

“No, I’m fine,” Lucrezia said, still a bit dazed. The truth
was she’d already forgotten the coachman. When he’d grabbed her wrist it had
jolted her into memory of Carlo Castellan. The sensation still burned, and for
a moment she had been back in her rooms, half naked and powerless in Castellan’s
rough grip. She shuddered.

“I’m pleased then, my lady. I do not think we have been
formerly introduced, though
I am known to your family
.
My name is Master
Mallisine
, and I am the lord of
this house, if not the realm proper.” He put a firm arm around
Lucrezia’s
waist, and turned her towards a gate set in a
high, thick, white wall. “And I am delighted to welcome you to the House of the
Severille.”

~
 
~
 
~

Lucrezia had always thought of herself as worldly, sexually
adventurous, and beyond shock. She was wrong, at least on that last point.

Master
Mallisine
led her through a
small, calm garden, decorated as much with the sounds of gently falling water
as with the delicate vines that curled about the fountains. A soft light from
low hung lanterns gleamed on beds of smooth white sand. It lulled Lucrezia into
a drowsy sort of peace, which later, she reflected, was probably the point.

And still, her first look at the courtyard of Severille
House took her breath away.

It was a cornucopia of sex. In any given direction there
were couples in various states of copulation, which, by itself, was not unheard
of at a Bacchanal event, but these couples all seemed to test some limit of the
permissible. One woman managed to suck the cock of her master while her arms
were bound to a bar resting behind her shoulders; another cried out as one
masked man fucked her from below while another flogged her from behind. There
was a man bound and blindfolded, flat on his back, and left begging for
release. In the center of it all was a raised platform, furnished with benches
and chairs and sofas, on which many took their pleasure, or simply relaxed and
talked amidst a constant background of sexual exhibition.

Lucrezia watched a large man approach a group of women all
dressed in identical white robes, and seated in demure positions on a row of
benches along one side of the courtyard. He seemed to survey them for a moment,
then
settled his eyes on a petite brunette. He snapped
his fingers, and the brunette shot up from the bench, shed her robe, and
dropped to her hands and knees, arching her back and presenting her pussy for
him. Lucrezia watched with wide eyes as the man leisurely unsheathed his
generous cock and mounted her.

She found she couldn’t look away.

“Ah. Master Philippe and his harem,” Master
Mallisine
said. He had stayed at her side, but the sudden
intrusion still startled her. “The philosophy of the Severille is about
transcending boundaries to find a higher plane,” Master
Mallisine
continued in that voice that seemed to know everything. “Or a better fuck.”

Lucrezia could feel
Mallisine’s
eyes on her, but for the life of her she could not look away from Master
Philippe and his total control of the woman beneath him. The woman’s breasts
jolted forward with every powerful thrust, and her arms had begun to shake.
Lucrezia’s
mind was invaded by the sudden thought of Carlo
Castellan in Philippe’s place – how would he ride? She huffed at the
intrusion, and turned away. Master
Mallisine
seemed
to take note.

“It is our usual practice to ask a client which role they
wish to play on any given night: master, or slave. Do they wish to dominate, or
submit? But you, Lady Lucrezia,”
Mallisine
said,
studying her carefully, “I think that tonight, you cannot bring yourself to say
what it is that you need. I think you need to be told. You wish to submit.”

For the second time in a night, Lucrezia was once again
speechless. She rubbed her wrist where Carlo had grabbed her, and thought of
the sheet being torn away, of her breast exposed, and she looked again at
Master Philippe, riding his slave mercilessly. Her skin burned, and her own
breasts ached, and she felt the absence of cock inside her as a gaping void.
When she finally spoke, she found herself short of breath.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Of course what happens here does not leave these walls, unless
you wish it to. I have taken the liberty of selecting a mask for you.”

“Of course.”
Lucrezia’s
voice
sounded very small. It almost felt as though someone else were speaking.

“You may not end the evening wearing it, but do not let that
trouble you,” he said with a reassuring smile, and offered her a delicate mask.
It was a beautiful, bright red, hardly a mask at all, only enough to cover her
eyes. She reached out and took it as though in a trance.

“And what will be your
safeword
,
Lady Lucrezia?”

“Ivy,” she said, and had no idea why.

“The Masters of the house will be made aware, my lady. Your
Master will find you. You will no longer be the Lady Lucrezia,”
Mallisine
reminded her, taking her burgundy cloak, “unless,
of course, your Master wishes it.”

And with a knowing smile, he pushed scantily clad Lucrezia
Grimaldi out into the courtyard full of Severille Masters.

~
 
~
 
~

Lucrezia had never been one to hide. She’d never felt the
need. Hiding was what one did when one wasn’t sure of one’s place in the world,
and she had always been quite sure of her place at the top.

Suddenly she wasn’t sure of anything.

After a moment of stunned hesitation, Lucrezia had
immediately fled to an unoccupied bench in a relatively secluded corner of the
courtyard, partially obscured by the greenery of several tall, foreign looking
plants. She had thought to collect herself, and find a way to explain her
mistake — she was
not
a slave,
and didn’t know the first thing about submission to anything — but there
was no escape from the sights and sounds of the Severille: on the other side of
the mottled green curtain was a woman having sex with two men at once on a
bench much like the one Lucrezia occupied. One of the men kept slapping the
woman’s reddened buttocks as he drove into her asshole from behind, while the
other took her pussy from below. She was crying unintelligibly with near
constant pleasure.

Once more, Lucrezia could not look away. She turned her back
on the rest of the courtyard and peered through the thick of foliage at the
unsuspecting trio. Her nipples rubbed at the band of leather covering her breasts
as her breathing deepened, intensifying the warm ache that was, again, building
between her legs. She looked down and thought, rather bizarrely, that her
harsh, aggressive ensemble was now wildly inappropriate for her role.

She shook her head, as if to clear the unwelcome truth from
her mind.
No
, she thought,
that is not what I am. I do not submit. I do
not serve.

“How amusing,” a deep voice rumbled behind her. She tried to
turn to face the intruder, but a heavy hand clasped her shoulder and kept her
still while a rougher hand reached between her legs from behind and grabbed her
there. She gasped in shock, but did not move. She did not even speak. The
sudden, bright fire from the hand between her legs seemed to blot out all
words.

“Don’t you know that those who hide in plain sight only wish
to be found?” the voice continued, and she realized it was muffled by a mask.
Still, it was resonant and rich, and with the calm authority of someone who is
rarely disobeyed. She opened her mouth to speak, but whoever had trapped her began
to rub his fingers along the length of her slit through the thin fabric of her
undergarment, and Lucrezia lost her words once more. She felt herself begin to
melt into him, and heard him chuckle softly.

“Do not move. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she heard herself say, and nearly choked on it. But
the growing fire in her core wouldn’t let her say anything else.

The man moved his hand from her shoulder to her breast,
first over the soft, expensive leather, then with impatience reaching under the
tops piece to seize her naked flesh. He kneaded her breast until she leaned
into him, rolling her nipple between his fingers, massaging her pussy
with his other hand. He
pinched her nipple, hard, and laughed as she squealed.

“Yes,” the voice said, “you will do.”

He spun her around to face him. He was wearing a full black
mask of smooth lacquer, his full mouth and
stubbled
chin all that was visible, and he was smiling. His dark eyes shown through the
holes in his mask with a kind of amused certainty, as Lucrezia imagined a cat
might look at a struggling mouse. What’s more, he was powerfully built, with a
broad frame wrapped in thick muscle, and shirtless to the waist. His chest was
dusted with fine dark hair, trailing all the way down to his belt. Just the
sight of him was arousing. He reached out and tipped her chin up to him, taking
a look at her blushing cheeks and wet lips. Then he grabbed her between the
legs again, and drew her close. “
This
is now mine,” he said.

Lucrezia could have uttered her
safeword
.
One word. Only her lips refused to say it. Instead she found herself panting.