It had started innocently enough. After the kennelman finished inspecting all the slaves, he served porridge, as he did every morning. The slaves sat around the kitchen table to eat, as they did every morning.

Irene asked Peach to pa.s.s the sugar.

"Get your own d.a.m.n sugar," Peach said. "I ain't your servant, Lady Irene."

"I'm no lady," Irene said, "so you don't have to be like that. Nothing says that a slave can't show a little common courtesy to another slave."

"I'll show you common courtesy." Peach grabbed the sugar bowl and upended it over Irene's bowl. "There's some courtesy. Now ain't that sweet? Just let me know if there's anything else that I can do to help your ladyship."

Irene remembered what Nickel said about fighting. Undoubtedly Peach was hoping that Irene would attack her and be confined to her cell for the rest of her life. Escalation would be unwise "Thank you," Irene said softly. She sc.r.a.ped as much of the sugar off her porridge as she could before eating it.

That might have been the end of the incident but the kennelman was not out of earshot. He had come back into the room when he heard Peach snarling at Irene and had seen the whole incident.

He reported it to Nickel.

Nothing happened until after the breakfast dishes were cleared and washed. Then Nickel came into the kitchen and stood in front of Peach. "It seems that you want a little excitement."

Peach shook her head. She looked frightened.

"Maybe you were hoping to start a brawl in here?"

"No, ma'am."

"Oh. I guess I was misinformed. Are you telling me that the kennelman is a liar?"

"No, ma'am."

"Then maybe I misunderstood. Are you telling me that I'm too stupid to understand what the kennelman was saying?"

"No, ma'am."

"Well what is it then? What happened when Irene asked for some sugar?"

"I gave her some."

"Quite a bit?"

"Quite a bit. Maybe a little more than I intended."

"I can see how that can happen. I often give a little more of my strap than I intend. Now you lie down on that table and spread your legs and we'll see how much strap you get."

Peach began quivering. She shook her head violently.

"Are you refusing to obey an order?"

Peach's eyes grew wide. "No, ma'am." She hoisted herself up on the kitchen table and lay down on her back.

"Spread those legs wide."

She spread her legs to open her c.u.n.t.

"Wider."

She spread them wider.

"Hands over your head."

Peach slowly extended her hands over her head.

"Tamarind, Cherry, hold her leg. Apple, Lime, get her other one." The four slaves grabbed her ankles and pulled them apart. "Irene, you hold her hands."

Irene grabbed her wrists and looked down into her face. Peach was gritting her teeth in antic.i.p.ation of the coming pain. Her mouth was drawn into a grim line and her eyes were glaring at Irene in pure hatred.

Irene smiled at her.

Peach refused to look when Nickel unclipped the strap from her corset. She stood beside the table near Peach's chest, raised the strap and brought it down on Peach's c.u.n.t. The leather slapped evenly down the length of her v.u.l.v.a from one end of her slit to the other.

Peach grunted and jerked hard, almost pulling her wrists away from Irene's hands.

"Hold her tight," Nickel said. She struck again and again and again.

The strokes were hard but not delivered with her full strength. Each one stung viciously, but most important, they acc.u.mulated. As Peach's v.u.l.v.a became more bruised, it became more tender. The inner and outer lips filled with blood from innumerable tiny internal bleeds and swelled to more than double their normal size. Her c.l.i.t, normally highly sensitive, became a little nub of pure agony.

Peach fought desperately to hold back her screams, to find some inner reserve of stoicism that would give her strength to endure her agony in silence, but she could not. By the fifteenth stroke, her strength broke under the weight of the acc.u.mulated damage. She began to scream and scream as the strokes kept falling.

Irene quailed at the brutality of the punishment, but she forced herself to keep smiling at Peach. Hating her would help Peach endure.

Finally, Nickel clipped the strap back to her corset.

The slaves did not have to be told to release Peach. She drew her legs together, but could not close them completely without compressing her badly bruised and swollen s.e.x.

She put her hands about her chest and hugged herself while she cried, great wracking sobs.

"There's going to be an entertainment tonight," Nickel said to Peach. "You're going to get the mattress for any gentleman who wants to service in the good old-fashioned missionary position. I'm going to tell them that I tenderized your c.u.n.t just for them. I'll make sure that they understand that a chance to f.u.c.k a freshly-tenderized c.u.n.t is a special delicacy. You can expect a jolly good pounding all night long. Plan on feeling every thrust like you never felt it before. It's going to be a long evening for you."

Peach sobbed.

"You know what you should do while you're getting royally f.u.c.ked by all those men for so many hours?"

Peach didn't respond.

"You should thank every single one of them for helping me punish you properly because if you'd succeeded in goading Irene into a fight, you'd be suffering a lot worse than a c.u.n.t strapping. A h.e.l.l of a lot worse."

Nickel left the room.

The slaves looked at each other. The dominant expression on their faces was relief that it hadn't been them on the kitchen table; and that it wouldn't be them on the mattress tonight servicing man after man with a bruised and swollen c.u.n.t.

"What do ladies do?"

Cherry and Irene were alone in the kitchen.

Lord Snow was enjoying Peach in the pleasure room. She would not be enjoying him as much as he was enjoying her. Nickel had tenderized her c.u.n.t two days ago, but the additional bruising that she had sustained during that evening's entertainment and Lord Snow's interest in using her a couple of times every day since had kept her from healing quickly. It seemed that gentlemen did like the extra moaning and squirming that an acutely sensitive c.u.n.t elicited. They didn't much care if the activity of the slave was a result of horniness or pain.

Irene could only hope that she never gave Nickel cause to inflict the same punishment on her.

The other three slaves were at the house, performing their nominal housekeeping duties. Which meant that Lord and Lady Snow were dining alone tonight. On nights when they hosted dinner guests, they wouldn't trust slave labor, but would hire professional cooks, waiters, and housekeepers. On those nights, the slaves would be left alone to rest and marshal their strength for arduous after-dinner entertainment.

Peach should be grateful that she wouldn't be the center of attention at another entertainment while her c.u.n.t was still tender. It was ordeal enough for Lord Snow alone to find her so desirable.

"Well?" Cherry prompted.

"What was the question?"

"I asked what ladies do."

Irene shrugged. "They do their duty. They're their fathers' daughters and their husbands' wives. In her father's manor, a lady helps her mother keep the house. In her husbands' manor, she bears children and keeps her own house."

"Did you have children?"

"No. If I had children, I never would have sold myself into slavery. That wouldn't have been fair to them."

"Did your husband ask you to sell yourself into slavery?"

Irene barked a short, bitter laugh. "Hardly. He almost stroked out when I climbed up onto that stage. I've never seen a face so red. He was furious. He probably still is." She smiled. "It's one of my more satisfying memories." She had never before done anything that had made her husband pay such close attention to her.

"Did you hate him?" Cherry's eyes grew round.

"No. No, I didn't. I loved him. I thought that I was giving him something special. I was giving him myself as a slave. But he didn't want me. He didn't even bid on me."

"If he was that angry at you, I guess he wouldn't, would he?"

"If I were as wise then as you are now, I never would have sold myself."

Cherry was silent for a minute. "I guess you regret that, now."

It was Irene's turn to think in silence for a bit. Finally, she said, "No. No, I don't regret it at all. There's a lot that I don't like about being a slave. A lot. But there was a lot that I didn't like about being a lady, either. So far, I think I made the better choice. It might be the choice between the frying pan and the fire, but if that was the only choice that I had, then I didn't make a bad one."

"I don't understand that at all."

"No, I don't guess you would. Everyone has asked me the same question and I have never been able to explain it. I'm going to stop trying."

"I guess that I don't understand because I don't understand why being a lady was so bad. Your husband didn't beat you, did he?"

Irene was shocked. "No. I've never heard of a gentleman beating his wife. It would be unthinkable."

"Is that because he has slaves to beat?"

"Maybe. Most gentlemen own at least one slave. But that's not the reason. If a gentleman wanted to hurt his wife, he wouldn't beat his slave; he'd treat the slave better. No wife cries when her husband beats his slave but her heart breaks when she thinks that a slave is having a better life than she is."

Cherry looked at Irene curiously. "When you were a lady, did you cry when your husband went out to his slave kennel?"

"No. That's a hurt that a lady has to hide. She can't admit that she knows that her husband is f.u.c.king his slaves. She always knows, she's not stupid, but she has to pretend that it's not really happening. That her husband is different than everyone else. Otherwise life would be unbearable."

Irene thought for a moment and then smiled sadly.

"Maybe that was my problem. Maybe I couldn't keep pretending that James wasn't f.u.c.king his slaves so my life did become unbearable. Maybe that's why I wanted to be a slave that he f.u.c.ked rather than the wife that he didn't."

"Didn't he f.u.c.k you? I thought that was what husbands and wives do."

"Sometimes. Not as much as gentlemen and slaves."

"Why? You're just as pretty as any slave."

That stopped Irene in her tracks. Why had James only made love to her on rare occasions but visited the slaves in his kennel every day? It didn't take long for her to figure out the answer. "Because husbands don't f.u.c.k their wives. They make love to them. They have to ask their wives for permission. They have to seduce them. Then, they can do only the things that might give the wife pleasure. Treat her with respect. It's completely different than f.u.c.king a slave. They can take a slave any time they want, any way they want, and walk away when they're done. They don't have to give a single thought to the slave's feelings. But when they make love to their wives, they have to put her feelings first."

"If you'd told your husband that he could have s.e.x with you any time he wanted, any way he wanted, do you think that he would have spent more time with you and less time with his slaves?"

"I never considered that. I mean, I literally couldn't have conceived of saying such a thing to James. It would have been ... inconceivable. My mind couldn't have held that thought. I couldn't have forced the words out of my mouth. I was a lady. A lady would never, ever say such a thing. Ask her husband to treat her like a slave in their bedroom? It was easier for me to sell myself and become an actual slave than it would have been to humiliate myself by acting like a slave sometimes."

"Ladies are weird," Cherry said.

For the first time in her life, Irene could see ladies as other people did. Cherry was right. There was a lot about being a lady that was weird. Unnatural.

She didn't want to talk about this any more. "What about you?" she asked Cherry.

"What about me?"

"How did you become a slave?"

"Bankruptcy when I was nineteen. I grew up poor. My father was a laborer and didn't get hired very often. My mother took work as a housekeeper when she could get it. There are a lot of laborers and housekeepers in the world and only so many rich people to hire them. Most of the money that my parents earned went to pay the rent on a two-bedroom apartment. We didn't always have food. We kids scrounged garbage. We got as many clothes from rich people's trash as we bought.

"That changed when I was old enough to get credit. Our landlord offered to lend me a few plaqs. Pay him back when I could. Low interest. Everyone told me not to take it. The poor have a saying: 'Debt is slavery.' I thought that it was just something they said, but it turned out to be a carved-in-stone truth. For a year, I was beautiful. I had three pretty dresses. My hair was done up like a lady's. I could buy makeup. I went out. Sometimes rich boys took me out. Not gentlemen, but boys from better neighborhoods who had jobs. To us, anyone who had a full-time job was rich. Sometimes I went out with the boys that I grew up with. On those nights, I paid the tab with my borrowed money.

"When my landlord offered more money, I took it, too. I kept the IOUs in a cardboard box under our bed. One day, the landlord asked when I was going to pay him back. I was floored. I didn't have a job. I earned no wages. He said that he'd been carrying me for a year and that I couldn't expect him to wait forever.

"I added up the IOUs. I owed almost three thousand plaqs. Three thousand! I couldn't imagine that much money. I couldn't believe that I'd spent that much. I looked for a job but n.o.body was hiring. I begged the landlord to give me some time. He was willing to take s.e.xual favors as payments on the interest but not for the nut. He let me ride for six months that way. By my letting him ride me.

"After six months, a messenger delivered a legal paper that said that I had to pay my debts in full within one month or be found in default. I put the paper in the box with the IOUs and kept letting my landlord f.u.c.k me any time he wanted. I hoped that everything would turn out all right by some magic.

"Early one morning, the deputies came to my house and took me into custody. I was still in my nightgown. I asked to be allowed to get dressed but they said that I wouldn't need even a nightgown where I was going.

"The next day I was tattooed and sold at auction.

"A knight, Sir Cotslake, bought me for twenty-three thousand plaqs. I was astounded. I was worth a fortune. My family could have lived on that for four or five years. But they couldn't sell me. Only my landlord could sell me because he was the one who had lent me enough money to allow him to press me into his ownership."

Irene was appalled. She knew that women were pressed into ownership when they were declared bankrupt but she had never bothered trying to find out exactly how it was done.