He was not some loathsome rapist, some thug who'd killed for the sake of money or some addled addict thieving for a fix. Neither was he insane or slow witted. She made sure of that. He was her social equal, at least by background, and his crimes were political and symbolic.

Of course they'd tortured him, so he arrived with a bruised body, cuts and punctures on his bare limbs and torso. He had a slice under one eye, and the men who’d made it told he’d flinched when they were threatening to kill him but otherwise kept his cool.

Now he was kneeling on the tile, just as still as when they'd worked him over  in the dungeon. His only motion was to twist his hooded head, listening for what he could not see. Just shy of six feet, with a body earned from living well, but not the ridiculously sculpted physique of a gym junkie. His hands were chained together in front of him, mitts locked over his fingers to keep him clumsy.

She put her hand on his shoulder approaching him from behind. “Adam.” She decided out loud.

The prisoner swiveled his head again, trying to see her through the thick weave of the sack. At her touch, his posture got even more stiff. “If you’re kill me, do so. You won’t get anything from me.”

“We have already seen what you have to offer, Adam,” she withdrew her hand, placing it on her hip.

“My name’s not Adam. I am Phillip Joeshi, proud to be son of General  Joeshi.”

“The Joeshi family is dead. The sooner you learn this, the easier it will be, Adam.”

Hearing this, the prisoner became silent again.

“Please remove his hood,” she gestured to the waiting guard. “I want to see if that cut they left is infected.”

Vision roughly restored as the large guardsman yanked the bag from his head, Phillip saw the woman for the first time. He’d heard her voice before as a visitor to his cell in the prison after his arrest, but he needed to see her face to identify her. “Annette Harrington.”

“Once you could have called me that, Adam. Do not call me that again.” the woman said sternly. The guard held him by both shoulders while Annette turned his head to examine the freshly closed scab under his left eye. Her grip was firm, but not painful. “This will scar.”

Annette was exactly half way between five and six feet tall, with a long straight nose and grey-green eyes. She was more familiarly found on the arm of her much older husband, Councilman Harrington, but Phillip had attended several of the same social events with her. As typical to her tastes, she wore a modest dress of deep indigo blue and her dyed and decorated hair was swept back so only a few white and multi-coloured strands fell in her face. Fashionable, discreet, well placed.

“Adam, look at me, and listen to me.” 

His mouth tightened into a sneer of dislike, but his brown eyes met hers. “I am not Adam.”

He doubled up. She’d kicked him very hard between the legs, with enough force he felt like he’d throw up.

They’d given him a prison jumpsuit again, one piece washed out grey, and the bag went back on his head.  Now his hands were cuffed with heavier transport irons, as was his legs. His balls ached.  He guessed, as they moved him, that he went up an elevator out of the prison, with a guard holding each of his arms.

The car they fed him into sat low, with large comfortable leather seats. He could hear Annette talking to the guard on either side of him as they fed him into the car. Once inside another male arm clamped onto one of his. He guessed it was a man servant or a bodyguard. The car door slammed shut.

“Home, please,” Annette said, her voice coming across from him.

The car took off. Phillip shifted in his seat, wondering what particular relationship Annette had to his arrest.  She wasn’t, to his knowledge, involved in anything but charitable organization and the plethora of social events ruling class ladies devoted their time to.

“When will you kill me?”

“Shut up, thank you,” she said calmly. “Adam, you are my slave. You will do as you’re told and perhaps you will survive.  But remember, there is no Joeshi family any longer. They were traitors and Philip Joeshi cemented that fact when he broke the pact.  You have no family, no rights, no wealth and no friends.”

“I would rather die than betray my name. My father is a hero.” But beneath the hood he wondered if they killed his uncle for the political crimes of his nephew, despite the man’s long term loyalty to king and council. It was not unheard of, but Philip had no pity. By swearing fealty to the regime he had betrayed the name of Joeshi and deserved to be caught in the backlash.

“Adam,” she said softly. “There are fates much worse than a bullet in the back of the head.”

“Try me.”

“Believe me Adam, I will,” though he could not see it, Annette shook her head chidingly. “You will learn to obey, and in time it will become your very nature.”

Sullen in his hood, Phillip stayed silent for the rest of the hour long drive. Point made, Annette kept herself busy with a book.

When they reached the house, and navigated the check points that assured for the security of the property, she watched dispassionately as her new property was dragged from the car and thrown onto the ground. She heard the man’s grunt of pain- with his wrists manacled he wasn’t able to catch himself and fell heavily on the flagstone walk way.

“Crawl on your belly.”

Phillip tried to rise and her body guard gave him a sharp kick in the ribs. Phillip grunted again. “Bitch.”

“Crawl. People walk, but Adam, you haven’t earned the right to be a person yet.”

It took several more kicks to get him moving towards the house, dragging himself with his elbows. The hood gave him near perfect darkness and the foot against his side was the only guide. He inched his way along, still wondering what Annette was planning. He hadn’t broken under torture yet, but then again he hadn’t known much worth learning.

The stone was hard and rough, though the thick fabriced prisoner’s uniform protected him from the worst of it. He could hear birds and dogs barking. He imagined this must be the Harrington country property. Before her death, when he was a little boy, his mother had attended parties here.

Inside, naked and shivering somewhere in the large building’s cellar, he was blasted with cold water and held down and shaved with electric trimmers, both of the heavy stubble that he’d grown in his week in prison and the thick dark hair on his head. Annette stood off to the side, holding her cotton gloves in one hand.

She licked her lips, excited to see him stripped and forcibly bathed. The loose, wavy mop of his hair had been quite handsome, but if she wished she could allow him to grow it back. The next step was most crucial to her plan. She had her new property spread eagled on his back, limbs bound to a clean table. The lights were bright and a man in an ugly green coat with a black bag waited to the side of the table, accompanied by a woman dressed in a similar fashion.

When Phillip was properly secured, the woman and the man laid out medical tools.  He felt them swab down his scrotum with something wet and cold, numbing. The woman who did the swabbing declared it was lidocaine.

“What the fuck are you doing to me?” Phillip lifted his head up, just in time to see the man tap a needle with one gloved finger.

“Shhhh. I had considered an orchidectomy, but Dr. Martlet assures me this is better and safer,” Annette took Phillip’s head in both hands, holding it to the table. “This is a non-scalpel vasectomy. I’m told it was a Chinese idea originally. It’s supposed to have fewer side effects.”

“Jesus Christ!” Numbed from pain killers, Phillip couldn’t feel as the doctor and her assistant manipulated his balls skillfully, using hemostats to penetrate the skin.  Annette stroked his face, but held him down to the table.

“Shhh, honey, shhhh…”

~~~~~~

Groin tingling and oddly insensitive from the pain killers, but still distantly aware of the wrongness, Phillip knelt with his forehead pressed to the cool, rough but clean cement floor wearing nothing but a medical scrotal support. The doctor had long since left, leaving pills and instructions for Annette and not even a backwards glance for her patient.

He would have rather defied his captor, and the weight of Annette’s foot on the back of his neck was light enough he could have shrugged her off, but she was backed up by her ever present body guards, and a long prod held in her right hand. She’d shown him how it worked once, on a lower setting, pain of the shock still leaving a hard cramp in his calf.

Maybe if he could catch her off guard, he thought, he could take the prod from her and hold it to her neck, or maybe find some weapon and force her guards to back down.  So he listened, quietly as she spoke.

“Adam, you will obey me. You will refer to me with propriety, as Lady and let no foul word or curse escape your lips. You will not speak unless spoken to, and until I say otherwise, you will crawl on your hands and knees. Tell me that you understand.”

Phillip waited a moment before grudgingly answering her pause. “Yeah.”

He screamed as she held the long prod to his thigh.

“I don’t want to put you through intense training for the next forty-eight hours, as the doctor advised, but you will learn this simple thing. Do not forget your manners. Adam, you will say ‘Yes, my Lady’ or ‘No, my Lady.’ Anything else is not acceptable.”

Phillip grunted, wishing he could massage his calf. It wasn’t much worse than being roughed up, and less frightening than when he’d held fast as a jail guard had held a knife less than an inch from his eye, but the electric prod was hard to ignore. He wanted her out of his face while he figured out what she’d done to him and he was still loopy from the surgery  “Yes, my Lady”

“Good boy, Adam.”

The Harrington country home was palatial, huge by necessity to house the support staff needed by such an old family. He’d never been inside it before, having no interest in assuming his late mother’s social habits, but all great houses tended to be built the same. The room that Annette escorted him to was stripped bare except for a foam pad placed in front of an old white painted wrought iron radiator. One of the guards provided a heavy, padded manacle, a psychiatric restraint cuff, and Annette personally locked his right wrists and tested it by tugging and pulling. Steel chain and a heavy lock held him to the radiator with enough slack that he could move to a sitting up position on his mat, but not stand.

Annette left him without a backward glance or further instructions. He guessed he was in a cramped, undecorated room in the servants’ quarters on the third floor, and he could see the slight angle of the ceiling suggested he was under the roof. The location suggested upper floor, the sort of miserly quarters   made available for a maid or footman who was needed to be close by even when they slept.

The light was on, under a cheap smoked glass shade and an unmoving camera was perched in the corner, red LED blinking an insistent, steady pulse. If he sat up he could see the window, set slight dipped into the sloping roof. That gave him a sense of time though not much in the way. That and three visits each day to see him given a plastic bottle of water and a breakfast shake still in its package, and to briefly give him the use of a blue plastic bucket. Checking his crotch showed healing, and simple stitches, as well as the lingering stain of the numbing solution they’d washed him in.

As Annette promised, two full days passed, without a word being spoken to him. Pills were swallowed, ordinary gel capsule ibuprofen and an unidentifiable orange pill that took several gulps of water to pass.  Boredom made him memorize the uneven plastering on the ceiling and guess at the age of a wallpapering repair, where it looked like a stain or a rip in the paper had been replaced with a carefully cut piece of paper pasted on top. The view from the window gave him nothing to watch but clouds. As far as calories went, he was running a deficit. He’d lost weight in prison and now, reading the labels on the meal replacement bottles, even though they were well fortified with nutrients, he was consuming exactly half the amount he needed.

At noon on the third day, as far as Phillip could guess by the window, the same guards that had been feeding and looking after him unlocked his wrist and hauled him out of the room. Downstairs again in the basement, where Annette was waiting with her long orange prod in her hand. He could see she’d changed her hair again, new colours to satisfy ever shifting fashion, but her clothes were the same conservative blue from neck to mid calf.

“Adam, how are you healing?” Annette’s face seemed to show genuine concern, though he knew that ladies were masters of feigned sympathy as they represented one charitable project or another in an endless quest for self promotion.

Phillip watched her, sourly. “Fuck you, you mutilated me, bitch.”

Pain in the large muscles of his thighs left him badly cramped and she kept pulling back and retouching him in the naked buttocks and backs of his legs, while three guards stood on his legs and arms. Phillip screamed.

“I’m pleased to see that Officer Dairedo told me the truth,” commented Annette dispassionately. “This picana is well designed. Would you like some more, Adam?”

Philip snorted from the floor, feeling the heavy boots of the guards grind his joints into the floor. His eyes were watery and his breathing snuffly and moist.

“You do, Adam?” Annette approached him again, prod held out.

“No, my Lady,” Phillip managed. “Please…”

The pressure on his limbs eased up. He’d have fresh bruises now.

“Now Adam, the sooner you learn to obey, the less damage you will take. Perhaps you hope if I find you defiant enough I’ll have you shot, but there will be no escape through death. I have decided to make you my pet project.”

Neither mercy nor imagination defined the next week. He saw Annette once a day for about three hours, when she would painfully and painstakingly go over his behavior. She described it as ‘pulling teeth’, because every bit of obedience she beat into him was hard won.

She kept her instructions clear and simple, training Phillip to eat from a bowl on the floor, face down with his mouth in the bland mush she served up and licking the bottom of the bowl like an animal, to keep his defiance bottled up, and to wait as he listened to her, sitting on his heels with his hands on the back of his head. Despite the simplicity he would lose control and back slide, shouting out his real name and his hatred for her and everything she represented, and then she would punish him again, with more pain and hooding, and denial of his one meal a day to soften him further.

Now food was a few feet away from him, chunks of beige and red just out of reach. His arms were tied behind his back, winched so they were pulled up uncomfortably behind him. He’d missed yesterday’s dinner for his defiance, getting nothing but water. His weight was still dropping, though he figured out the daily orange pill was a multivitamin. Phillip looked at the meal in front of him. He was hungry and even with the limited flavour he was drooling at the thought of pressing his face into the bowl. But the restraints were holding him back and Annette held him in place, her hand on the release for the rope.

“You want it? Learn gratitude, Adam.”

He bit his lip. She didn’t punish him for silence, so far. He imagined taking the prod and holding it to her, just holding it down until she stopped breathing.

“No? Well, Semikovic, clear it away, he’s  not hungry today either…” Annette gestured, hearing no response.

Phillip’s resolve wavered again. “Please, my Lady?”

“Louder, Adam.”

“Please!”

“Please, what?” Annette raised the prod, pointed at his exposed flank.

“Please, my Lady!”

“Better. But be clear about what you’re asking for.”

“Please, my Lady! Don’t take the food. Let me eat!”

Hot with shame, as soon as Annette gave him some slack he buried his face in his meal. Make a man hungry enough and he started acting as pliant as gutter trash in a slum.

“From now on, before you eat, remember your manners.” Looking down at her charge, Annette let her usual impassive expression crack, and permitted herself a lopsided smile. She was deeply afraid she’d fail, feeling responsible if she had to return her ‘Adam’ back to the cells and the killing yard at the back of the prison as surely as if she’d been the one to sentence him to death. But as far as she could tell he was starting to melt, a thaw of necessity. For all his bravado, Phillip didn’t want to die. That was good, if he was suicidal he’d die and there was nothing she could do about it. But instead he was brave and honourable, and if she broke through those two aspects she’d have him.

Phillip knew enough of nutrition to guess his skimpy meals were a starvation diet, even without the constant ache in his belly.  He nosed the bowl, trying to lap at it with his tongue. Annette had asked no further questions about fellow rebels or new crimes to confess and he was starting to think this was not some lengthy ploy to make him give the regime new targets.  What, if anything his captor intended was incomprehensible.

A human face wasn’t meant to eat face down without hands, and with no hands to help the bowl scraped along the floor. There were a few more mouthfuls of mush within reach, and he was so hungry it made him tired, so tired that moving the dish into range was almost insurmountable.

With the monotonous boredom, neglect and hunger, Phillip began to be eager to see Annette and her daily lessons. Only when she was there, they took him out of his room and he began to associate her with food, salivating at the pok-pok of her shoes on the cement floor.  She had begun to teach him a ritual. When she entered the room he would kow-tow on the floor, and when she clapped her hands, he would leap to attention with his hands behind his back. Then some stupid task, awkward limbed lumbering to bring back a ball to her in his mouth on all fours or placing marbles into a cup with his lips, then finally begging for food, and a bowl of mush he’d bury his face in and then thank her profusely.

Then one day, maybe a week later, the guards left him in the room, chained to the radiator, past the usual meal time. As he got hungrier and hungrier, he strained to hear her footsteps and the key in the lock, and nothing came. He didn’t remember her assigning a punishment and he began to genuinely panic. What had he done wrong?

He hadn’t said or done anything to offend her. Maybe she was delayed? As the light in the window faded this explanation felt less and less likely and he became certain that there would be no dinner or respite.

Morning came, thirsty, ignoring a slight pressure on his bladder.  He woke up to the door opening and there she was. He slid into a fearful kowtow as best he could with one wrist locked up.

She lifted his chin up with the toe of her leather pump, looking at his face for a moment before she crouched and slid something around his neck, snapping her fingers for the guards to come. Unchained, they didn’t go their usual route down to the basement, but down a different hall and a set of unfamiliar stairs. Progress was slow on all fours, and Annette patiently led him on a lead to her quarters.

The plush carpet felt good under his perpetually bruised knees, soft pinks and cream floral wallpaper  giving the private study a luminous effect. There was an unconcerned maid watering a spider plant in the corner, standing on an upholstered chair in stocking feet so she could reach it with one hand pressed to the wall for balance.

“Maya, tell Hesta she’ll need to bring breakfast in an hour.”

The girl curtsied and hopped down, slipping into her shoes and silently sprinting out.

There was a steaming bath tub, almost large enough to swim in, flanked by decorative marble swans and an enormous urn holding an overflowing bunch of lilies. He slowly eased into the water, his first bath in a month, nervous even to be hesitating at one of Annette’s orders, though she seemed unruffled.  She was rolling up the sleeves of her navy blouse, up to her forearms, smiling her small smile. He saw that as she periodically did her hair colour had changed, though this time only a few tendrils of green and chocolate brown escaped the neat confines of a charcoal grey and black scarf.

Hot water soaking in, he didn’t resist as she took his head in her hands, gently sloshing water over his scalp. He felt her palm laden with something cool and viscous, a shampoo that she worked into the short regrowth of his hair. She soaped and rinsed him, using a rough white wash cloth to scrub his shoulders and down his back and belly, massaging and rubbing.

At her instruction he stood up, and she did the same to his buttocks and legs, turning him so she could reach. Splashes of water stained the front of her dress, turning the indigo darker in splotch patterns over her breasts. She left his crotch alone, but the washcloth found its way into the split between his buttocks before Annette told him to sit down again.

A heavy lather patted into his face with a brush was followed by the soft rasp of a razor as she took off his beard stubble.

“You know, I’ve shaved my father often enough, when he was dying,” Annette said to him. “I remember when I was so scared to do this, that the straight razor would slip and cut him, but he said he trusted me better than a servant.”

Phillip tried to remember which of the numerous, highly intermarried families had sired her. Sagrova, or was it Penning? The times he’d seen her it was always “Lady Harrington”, the afterthought to her heavy featured and loud presence husband, tucked back with other dignified married ladies and too young yet to have a daughter to be pushing on people.

Annette was washing the stubble and soap from him, stroking the smooth skin she’d revealed.  “Haven’t lost my skill, I guess. No hair missed. Up you get!”

Other grooming followed, tooth brush, trimming his nails to the square, short shape with a file, though he’d bitten most of them off, and his cuticles too. She clucked at this, and the maid, Maya, brought her a bottle of lotion she massaged into his hands, a fruity scent that made him want to lick his fingers.

Mystified, and wrapped up in an enormous bath towel, his bare feet on warmed  tile, Phillip waited and was rewarded by a neat stack of clothing, delivered in the arms of busy Maya.  Gentleman’s socks, shorts, trousers that were a tad loose and a shirt that was a tad too tight. She did the buttons up on it, smoothed  it out and tied a deep blue tie around his neck. Lastly there was a silk vest and shoes, that she pulled tight on his feet and deftly double knotted the laces.

“You may stand” Annette surveyed her handiwork. Her guards stood out of the way, and Maya off to the side. The 16 year old maid with a large bouffant of bubblegum pink hair was the only one who acted  remotely cautious around him.

“Now we shall go to breakfast.” There was a pause and Annette coughed pointedly. By habit, Philip had his arms behind his back.

“Manners, Adam.”

“My Lady?” The bottom fell out of Phillip’s stomach. What had he done wrong?

“Arm, Adam.”

With less confidence then he’d ever made the gesture before, Phillip extended his elbow out, so that she could loop her arm through his. Then, though protocol usually demanded the reverse, she led him into the next room again.

There was a cloth covered table laid, now, fussily covered in ornate china and cutlery and three beverage glasses to a place setting. Another maid stood waiting with a cart laden with good things, tureens and a teapot, breakfast liquor in a cut crystal decanter, juice, and silver domed dish covers. There were two seats, embroidered cushions and hard backed cherry wood on spindly legs. Annette gently steered him to seat her, and then he stood awkwardly by the table, not sure what to do next.

“Sit down, Adam. It’s good that you are waiting for my signal.”

Phillip took his seat carefully, trying not to drag his chair too much. The smell of the food was making it hard for him to sit still.

The older maid served up a small plate of fine ground oatmeal, garnishing it with a brown sprinkle of cinnamon and a drizzle of golden treacle, finally followed by a thick cream. First there was a bowl for her, and then one set down for him. He leaned forward in his chair, debating if he should put his face into it or pick up his spoon.

Annette coughed again.

“My lady?”

“Wait until I begin eating. You know that.”

Only after the first delicious spoonful had passed Annette’s lips did he risk picking up his spoon and starting eating. In no time what so ever, he’d finished the porridge and scraped the bowl clean of even the least little bit left. Annette was still leisurely taking little spoonfuls. There was tea as well, which he finished in two gulps, a small gilt teacup with strong tea he gulped down in a few mouthfuls, and a water glass he drained in one long gulp.

His appetite only whetted by the starter, he watched each mouthful of food pass into Annette’s moth, knowing that she had to finish before he’d get anything else. Her lips were small but pump, her teeth marred by a slight space in the front. Annette noticed him watching and put down her spoon.

“It’s not polite to stare.”

“Sorry my Lady!”

“I know mornings are very trying, but you could at least make an attempt at conversation.” Annette’s voice was tinged with teasing.

“Ah…” Phillip’s face took on a deer in the headlights expression.

“The weather is a popular starting place, I’m told.”

Phillip bit his lip. Being chained to a radiator below the line of the window gave him no idea of the temperature or much else about the world outside the room, for that matter.

“Or maybe you could ask after my night’s rest.”

Phillip cleared his throat. “Did you sleep well… my Lady?”

“Excellently, despite last night’s soiree. I had intended to spend another night in town, but of course there was the unexpected engagement party for Dekovic’s youngest.”

Phillip was reasonably well versed in gentle conversation, but never with someone who’d just last week held a cattle prod to his scrotum. “Really, my Lady?”

“Yes, it’s not the usual sort of schedule, but I suppose one must call it young love and put a good face on. Dear Agatha, she’s managing as best she can in the household, given that her eldest stepdaughter is the same age as she is, and I think that she’s been very discreet in tying up loose ends in regards to any hint of scandal.”

Annette finally finished up with the bowl, and the maid cleared up their places and revealed steaming hot plates of sausages and pancakes, garnished with fresh fruit in decorative shapes. A heavy country breakfast, about the amount of calories Phillip had eaten in a day for the past few weeks.

Phillip ate so fast the glutinous, syrup soaked pancake stuck in a mass in his throat and he had to gulp the fresh squeezed orange juice to clear it.

“So tell me, do you enjoy walking?”

Phillip thumped his chest lightly, voice more of a croak than he intended. “Yes, my Lady?”

"Good then, I've needed a walking companion for a while."

It was a better meal than he’d had on a long time, though eating too fast gave him indigestion. After the second course he’d tucked away a large bunch of grapes, three strawberries and an apple, the latter of which Annette neatly segmented for him with a little knife. Finally there was the breakfast liquor, a thick and pungent beverage quaffed from tiny glasses, fermented with the after taste of metals. Most women drank it for their health, more men abstained, but under Annette’s watchful eye he took it down with one swallow.

“Adam…”

Phillip shifted in his chair, belly distended with all the food he’d gobbled.  The maid was clearing up the dishes from the table. All this time the ever present body guards had lingered in the background, one of them holding the threatening alarm-orange picana.

“I don’t think the cut under your eye left a trace,” Annette said, standing  up. She gave Phillip another pointed look. He leapt up from his chair and offered her his arm, which she waved away. “Come here, over by the desk.”

“Yes, my lady.” The delicious meal was slowly digesting, nobody was hitting him and he wasn’t alone in a room with only a view of the sky and a foam mat. Standing, he swayed a little, knees sagging underneath his immaculately pressed trousers.

The cherrywood desk she sat behind was clear, covered only in a padded blotter of deep burgundy and a small jar of pens in the shape of a sterling silver and topaz peacock. Annette posture was ramrod straight and her hands were placed on the blotter, right over the left.  “Adam, you have been here for several weeks.”

Phillip had his hands behind his back, ever anxious. “Yes, my Lady?”

“You have probably realized that it is my intent to train you. I had despaired of your progress initially, but you seem to be showing some compliance. You will be what I want you to be.”

He could not tell if it was an order or a prediction.

“I will conditionally allow you some privileges. Understand that if you fail me, your punishment will be all the harder.” She left a long pause, cuing him to respond again. He saw her expression was cool detachment as usual, with the smallest hint of a threat behind her little smile.

“Yes, my Lady?”

“Say it, Adam, say you will obey.” She enunciated every word clearly.

ay it, Adam, say you will obey.” She enunciated every word clearly.

“I will obey.”

Her next moves were completely unexpected. She dismissed the maid with a wave of her hand and took a scarf from around her neck, a long piece of navy and green striped silk. Taking both his wrists in her hands she backed him into a plumply upholstered sitting chair chair, shoving him lightly so he was forced to sit. She placed him so he sat straight and upright with his forearms resting on the arms of the chair. Then she fastened the scarf over his eyes, letting the excess fabric drape to seal out light gaps and winding its length twice around his head.

“Stay.”

Blinded but not deaf, he heard her ask for rope, and felt her loop it around his chest and arms, securing it to the chair. Then she began to rub his thighs, massaging from his knees to his hips and playing with the waist of his pants. Her fingers found the buttons of his trousers, loosened, then pulled and tugged his underwear. A warm, feminine and soft skinned hand on his penis made him gasp.

She wasn’t precisely deft of experienced, but she gave the right mix of gentle and firm, gripping and jerking him to an erection. He squirmed in the seat and mumbled. “What…?”

“Enjoy it; I’m not going to make a habit of this.” Annette was teasing again, and friendly. “Just relax, Adam.”

Hot and sticky, viscous ejaculate followed after another few minutes of her massage and he gasped again, and bucked his hips. He felt the lip of something plastic scrape the head of his cock.

“There, I missed a drop. Now stay put Adam.”

She told him outright that the sample of semen was to test his sperm count, and the first of his new privileges was a bed with a mattress. As yet, no pillow or bedding, the narrow wooden bed frame his only piece of furniture. He stretched out in comparative luxury, over stuffed and drained in more ways than one. She’d taken his clothes back, but the mattress was the right mix of firm and soft and his belly was full. Now he had time to wonder what she wanted again.

The hood was padded cloth, and went over his head, lacing up tight so that light was blocked out and he was warmed by his own breath. Muffled claustrophobia made him struggle.

“Why are you doing this!?” Masculine panic, with the tinge of a whine , tainted his voice as the ropes bit into his wrists. “My lady, what did I do?”

Annette had him rigged between two posts, arms over his head and stretched so he had to lift his heels off the ground. He was naked, his clothes thrown over a low tree branch.  As she’d spoken of, they’d gone for daily walks for the past two weeks. Sometimes she’d spend the full time with him making small talk, and sometimes she gave him twenty minutes before a bodyguard produced a hood and he completed the rest of his daily exercise, blind and helpless.

Sometimes he had a weird sixth sense feeling she was watching him during these periods. Once he’d very clearly heard her give him a direction: “A little to the left!”

Unfortunately he hadn’t listened to her, especially since her voice had come from his right side; instead, he’d gotten to his feet and plowed into a sapling. But otherwise it was a routine of isolation, except in the presence of Annette, with daily walks and long periods of boredom and solitude in his Spartan room.

But today instead of small talk of the hood, they’d walked into an overgrown English garden to where two thick, tall posts had been driven deep into the turf. At her order he’d stripped and let himself be rigged up, and now she was coming after him with a length of bamboo switch, thick enough to give visceral, gorge rising thuds.

“I will tell you when you fail me, Adam.” She took aim a second time, striping his bare, pale buttocks.

Phillip shifted again,  grunting.

Big hot welts, with double pain, all falling in a diagonal pattern of his ass. He tried not to vomit, afraid he’d splash up inside his hood and smother himself. This was a new sort of pain. The picana on flesh left horrible muscle cramps, but a cane gave abrupt instant pain followed by a hot ache.

Annette was hitting as hard as she could, admiring the way the marks rose up after impact. It was hard on her hands, but much harder on his skin. Fifteen hits and he was sagging in the rope, and she was behind him, arms around his torso, breathing heavily.

Phillip felt her press against him, her hands wandering and lightly pinching a nipple and then reaching down to cup his flaccid crotch. She thrust with her hips, groaning and making small noises of pleasure. Pulling the hood off, she walked around him and stood on the very tips of her toes to kiss his mouth.

She bit his lip, savoring his bare chest against her breasts, even if they were separated by fabric. Phillip watched her, pain drunk and confused by her flushed face and bold smile as she pulled the knots free from his wrists. He sagged and clutched the cheeks of his injured ass, Annette helping him collapse onto his side in the grass. On the ground she carried on her fierce assault of kisses, a barrage of light pecks on the face and neck followed by long lingering licks with her lips pressed to his.

“Good boy, sweet boy.” She crooned “Lovely boy. Yes, Adam, yes.”

Sweet nonsense soothed him . Presently Annette regained her composure and fixed her hair, smoothing out her skirts and resuming her customary blank expression. Only half dressed, out of charity for his bruised state, Annette helped him back to the house and into his room. Only after seeing he had a cool compress for his buttocks did she leave for her room so she could masturbate in privacy, three orgasms one after the other, mouth muffled by the back of her hand.

~~

Phillip lay face down on his bed, lying on a new feather pillow with his battered ass still throbbing. There’d been light pain killers with his meal, and the ache was bearable afterwards.  He’d taken a worse beating in the hands of the guards back in prison, with their fists and boots, but this was another novelty that was still threatening, but rather than giving him pride in his conviction it made him ashamed and awkward.

Capital city prostitutes that catered to the jaded tastes of metropolitan clients would offer flogging and binding as a novelty service. He’d been exposed to that once, mid way through university when he went out whoring with his friends and a plump woman with two bow decorated braids had tried claiming to be a bad little girl in need of a spanking. He’d passed her over in favour of a less creative red head with more straight forward services and put it out of his mind as a weird perversion some men paid for, but now he wondered if he should have learned more about the perversion.

How many straight laced society wives had a picana hidden away? The household acted as if this were perfectly normal.  Certainly Annette’s behaviour seemed to have no trace of remorse. Some days she treated him like a close friend and told him about the little details of her life, and some days something horrible would happen.

The next morning, after a breakfast in his room, a bodyguard came and got him. It was the bald one with no hair and a flat nose like a thumbprint, who communicated mostly in grunts.  Instead of their usual walk they went to Annette’s quarters and into a room he’d never been into before, her bedroom.

The bed was a huge four-poster with a canopy, much bigger than it needed to be to sleep one person, the curtains pulled back neatly but the bedding askew. Annette was seated in the bed, propped up by a stack of pillows. She was in a dressing gown, her hair loose and unstyled, spilling in parti-coloured waves down to her waist and her face without a trace of pigment. It occurred to him that he’d never seen her without makeup, in fact never saw any woman of the upper class without a mask of paint, including his mother.

“Come here, Adam. Here on the foot of the bed.”

He inched over. At her prodding he’d still kept up his habit of holding his arms behind his back, and he waited at a loose sort of attention by the right side bed post.

“On the bed.” She pointed impatiently.

Phillip noted that the ever present guards were no longer in the room. He gingerly put his weight on the foot of the bed. A soft mattress under a down duvet, but with a firm support somewhere beneath it.

Annette kicked a little, freeing her legs from the blankets. “I’m ill today and I want a distraction. I have a headache and I won’t be visiting or going to the committee meeting.”

“Yes, my lady?”

“Begin as instructed. Kiss my feet.”

She had pale, clean feet with unpainted toenails, a little cold when he pressed his lips to them.

Annette sighed as she felt him kiss her.  She didn’t detect defiance in her captive, just wary puzzlement, where he never met her gaze but every movement caused him to react a little. Now at her instruction, the kissed her soles and massaged her feet, letting his hands slide from her thin ankles, up her smooth bare thighs and past her knees. The dressing gown she wore was a filmy little satin thing, with a lace hem that only came to mid thigh.

Phillip was tentative as he past under the hem of the gown, hands slipping up the outside of her legs until the skirt was hiked up level with her crotch and his hands rested on her hips.

“Use your mouth.” Annette said, softly. Her hand found the back of his head, stroking his hair and guiding him so his lips were touching her skin. Ivory-white, lightly blue veined thigh met the warm full lips of a young man, and she tilted her head back, sighing with satisfaction as he kissed all over her lap.

“Use your teeth. Gently”

Phillip nibbled has way along the inside of her thigh where she’d lifted her leg up. He could see the dark curl of her pubic hair and the pink intimate folds of her vulva, and smell the clean female musk that emanated.

His erection was pulling taut in his pants. Annette had pulled the lacy front of her bodice down to expose one breast, and she was massaging the base and gripping the other tightly. Her nipples were small and pointed, rose pink areolas with jutting tips surrounded by unmarred cream. Without undergarments he guessed the size midway between a B and C.

“Come here!” She practically growled, and Phillip left off his nuzzling to kneel on the bed next to her.

A silk scarf around the wrists made an easy tie, a bit tighter than Phillip would have preferred, but a manageable way to have his hands held behind his back. Annette, with one breast still liberated from her top, thrust her hands down his pants and found his penis.

With the right kind of stimulation, it was the unerring talent possessed by most ypounger men, to be able to stand to attention even in the most bizarre and frightening of circumstances. Annette found little resistance when she freed him of his pants and lined him up, and no difficulty at all getting him inside her.

He did take ages to come, a gift of performance anxiety that wasn’t without reasonable motivation, but she enjoyed the long, steady pounding until he was all sweaty and dripping on her. His cock was just the right sort of size, not some monster favoured by pornography or a finger like stub from the other end of the spectrum, comfortable, warm and as obedient as any penis becomes when it’s inside a woman and conforming to her inner curves.

She always liked this part best, the ejaculation where suddenly the thrusting got very deep and very rapid. Maybe it was her imagination, but a spurting penis almost seemed to pulse hard enough to trigger the delightful, massage friendly nerves of the vagina.

“Well, that was worth doing.” Annette gently shoved her victim off her and wiped a stray drop of his sweat from her cheek. “You sweat like a pig when you…” she lingered on the right word. Make love? Have sex? Fuck? “Work.”

He hadn’t made her come. Ever nervous, even Annette’s bemused grin wasn’t enough proof he wasn’t going to get punished. Still, as his penis softened she remained unperturbed. She stretched and sat up.

“I needed that.” Some semen seeped, wasted and infertile despite biology’s valiant attempt to place it as far up inside her body as possible. Annette yawned. “Two years, more or less. I believe I’m going to like having you around.”

“My lady?”

“Two years since I have had the touch of a man, pets.” She ruffled his hair. “Hence why I decided to make you mine.”

The bathroom was already familiar, but this time they bathed together.

“I won’t summon a servant, Adam. You’ll be all the service I’ll need.”

Naked again at her instruction, she admired his soft cock with the tip modestly hidden in the cowl of his foreskin, but still wet from inside her. She always thought an uncut man looked shy and coy, for all that literature called the penis a source of potency.

At her instruction he washed clean in the shower, before drawing a bath and testing the temperature with his wrist.

Naked in the bath, Phillip saw her whole body uncovered for the first time. She’d pinned her hair up in a pile on her head, exposing the nape of her neck and her bare, slender shoulders. Her stomach was the ruin brought on by child bearing, all too typical on a pale woman of her age, but the rest of her body was supple and smooth, marked only by the faint blue of her veins and a few flat freckle-moles.

There was both an intimacy and a dehumanization seeing her like this. She was sighing in the hot, almost steaming water, casual and secure in a way that one only ever was with a lover or a servant. She was telling him about how she was due to do an overhaul of the inventory of the family properties, and gossip from her social life while he held a large towel and stood at attention.

Her hand idly reached out and brushed his thigh, beckoning him closer. She gave him a smile and caressed his ass, cupping his balls with her other hand, and leaning over the rim of the bath to reach him.

“Ah..!” she started engulfing his soft penis in her mouth and bobbing her head back and forth.  Phillip held the towel close to his body and sagged at the knees a little.