Page 55 of The Boss' Pet

She has me on the ropes, but of course it does not matter what she says. She will be punished.

“Yes, whip me, fuck me, turn me into an object of pity. None of this is about me, Marcus. It’s all about you.”

“You might want this, old boy,” Jeremy says, walking by with a rubber gag in his hand.

“I believe I do. The young lady has more than enough to say.”

“I don’t care,” she says.

Those are her last words before I slip the rubber between her teeth. It is a slim line gag, which will be relatively comfortable to wear, but will not allow her to keep talking.

Charlie

I’ll do whatever you want, including betray you, if that’s what you need.

He can’t hear my words, but I think he can read the sentiment in my eyes. He is looking at me with an expression that is probably supposed to be inscrutable, but touches me in my core. I feel him. His dominance, and his agony. I feel the wound at the very center of him. He tries to hide it, but at the same time, he cannot staunch the bleeding.

He is so twisted. He found someone who would hurt him, so he could be the monster and play out some protection fantasy. He wants to play out make-believe in which whoever betrayed him originally suffers and is subjugated.

He is quite literally one of the most desirable men on the planet, and yet he has to orchestrate his own romantic downfalls over and over again because there’s something inside him that not only cannot believe in love, it demands to be fed with pain.

“You’ve been a bad girl,” he says, taking a cane from someone in the crowd. I can see how this is going to go. The perverse appetites of his ilk will be satisfied by seeing me, the sacrificial lamb from the streets, beaten and forced into submission, punished for the unspeakable and unforgivable crime of being born normal, and not worshipping at the altar of their wealth.

I give a little shrug. If he wants me to play the villain, I’ll do it. I’ll give him the performance of a lifetime. It’s going to be a little harder given the gag between my teeth, but you can say a lot without words.

I lift my middle fingers and hold them aloft, turning slowly so that each and every person here gets to appreciate my little birdies.

Whip!

I hear the cane slicing through the air. It lands square across my cheeks, above the tail, finding the very center of my ass in a brutal stroke that makes a cold shock rush through me. It’s not pain at first, but it’s not first for long.

It quickly becomes second and third and fourth and oh my God. There are tears in my eyes. I drop my fingers, and my hands go back to cover my ass. That’s a mistake. Touching the aftermath of the hard cane stroke makes it hurt even more.

“Goddamnit,” I curse against the gag. It’s an indecipherable sound, but everybody knows what I mean.

“On your knees,” Marcus demands.

I drop to my knees, keeping my back and thighs straight so I don’t have to bend at the place that hurts so badly. I know there’s no real avoiding pain tonight, or shame. He’s going to make sure I experience both as deeply as he is capable of making me feel them.

I am going to have my comeuppance, such as he sees it, inflicted upon me.

“You are my pet,” he lectures me. “And there is nothing you can do to change that. You are starting to understand that now, I think, but you will understand it entirely by the time I am done with you. Hands and knees. Now.”

I do as I am told again, even though I absolutely do not want to. Bending forward makes my skin feel as though it might very well tear along the cane-perforated line. I know I am being dramatic, but that damn implement is all too effective.

I don’t want to cry properly. I don’t want to break. I want to stay rebellious even if I have tears in my eyes. I want to put on a show that neither Marcus nor any of his Embassy mates will forget any time soon.

“Wag that tail, pet,” he says, tapping my flank with the tip of the cane.

I sway my hips back and forward, making the tail move. He is forcing me to display myself, and giving me no merciful quarter. If I resist, I will get another one of those harsh strokes—and I do not want another one.

“That’s a good girl,” he says. The note of approval is not quite there in his voice. It’s a perfunctory bit of praise, perhaps because he doesn’t want to be praising me at all.

He wants to be punishing me.

“You took the bait,” he says. “And the bait was to ruin my life, and yours, for some silly little notion of righteousness and freedom. Let me tell you, pet. Both of those things are illusions. Freedom doesn’t exist. We’re all in shackles on this planet. And righteousness? That’s an even more dangerous set of assumptions.”

This is a very philosophical lecture, but my body is responding even more than my brain. I don’t really care what he is saying. I care about what he is making me feel.

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