"I heard. I don't know if it's real or not."

She thought about that for a minute. "How would I find out?"

"I guess you have to try it for yourself." He thought for a minute. "Try this. Put your finger inside your c.u.n.t. As far as you can reach."

She did.

"Now try squeezing your finger."

She did. She frowned and pursed her lips and concentrated. Her hips twitched and her stomach muscles contracted. After experimenting for a couple of minutes, her eyes grew wide. "I felt it. I felt my c.u.n.t squeezing my finger." She tried again. "It happens when I squeeze myself like I'm trying not to pee." Again. "It's not very strong, but it's definitely happening. I wonder if a man could feel that?"

Barry shook his head. "I'm going to be able to tell you that."

"Of course not." She withdrew her finger. "Do you mind if I ask you something personal?"

"What?" He raised an eyebrow.

"Do you ever get real s.e.x? I mean something besides b.l.o.w.j.o.bs?"

"Feeling sorry for me?"

"No. Just curious."

"I have a wife and two children."

"Oh. I guess you do, then."

He smiled. "I do."

"Good." It made her happy to know that Barry got proper s.e.x when he wanted it. She liked him, probably more than any man that she had ever known.

"So what are you going to do about squeezing things with your c.u.n.t."

"Squeeze things with my c.u.n.t. See how strong I can get with exercise. See how much control I can develop with practice."

"Sounds like a plan."

After three weeks of small dinner parties, Flame was getting a better idea about what Dodge was up to.

At first, she thought that Dodge was mining the highborn for business opportunities. He was a successful businessman and never lost an opportunity to engage a wealthy man in a contract. Soon, though, it was clear that Dodge was looking for more than that.

"May I be blunt?" she asked after their latest post-dinner-party debriefing.

"Of course." He frowned. She knew that he expected her always to be direct with him. If she felt that she needed special permission, she must have something exceptional to say. "I won't cane you for honesty."

Rather than relaxing, she tensed at the mention of the cane. She never wanted to feel its bite and was instantly on guard when she saw that it was on his mind.

She could think of no way to choose her words delicately so she laid it out in bald language. "You want a knighthood."

He nodded. "Yes."

"Sir Drake is helping you by introducing you to society. I'm helping you by telling you and Mrs. Dodge how to be presentable."

"Yes."

"I would like to see you knighted. Not just because you own me but because you would be an a.s.set to society."

He raised an eyebrow. She was right to be concerned for her skin. Any other slave would be beaten for daring to offer an opinion about something so far above her station. But Flame was a special case. t.i.tled ladies were sometimes adjudicated into slavery, but almost all of those were the daughters of knights and other minor aristocrats. The wife of a lord had never been known to fall so far from her station so she was given considerable lat.i.tude. "Thank you."

She was encouraged by his grat.i.tude and continued. "You have a problem. Drake can't knight you. He can introduce you to baronets, but they can't knight you, either. He doesn't have the status in society to introduce you to a lord and that's the lowest rank that can bestow a knighthood."

"I know that."

Flame wasn't sure that he really understood. "You have to understand that, among the ranks of knights, Drake is not highly esteemed. His status is barely higher than Sir Anthony's and Anthony is always only one creditor away from bankruptcy. That Drake managed to introduce you to two baronets surprises me, but I'm not surprised by the ones that he found. Both are at the bottom of the baronets' social cla.s.s. There's a good reason why I only met Grenfeld at a large ball and never met Baronet Lazard at all."

Dodge stared at her in silence.

"I'm not saying that Drake isn't doing you a service. You need to be introduced to society at his level. And you and Mrs. Dodge are getting excellent chances to practice your skills. You would have little difficulty being accepted in society, now." She was exaggerating somewhat. The Dodges' behavior was mediocre at best. They had a lot to learn yet. But they would no longer be an embarra.s.sment, either. "But this is as far as Drake can take you. All you can expect from him is more of the same. From what I have overheard, you may be disadvantaging yourself in your business dealings with Drake in exchange for promises that he can't keep. I caution you from giving away too much for the little that you are receiving in return."

Dodge's face drained white. He slapped Flame hard across the face.

She reeled from the force of his blow.

"Get on the bench!"

She had never heard her owner snarl like an animal. The sound was terrifying.

She fell to her knees. "Please. I didn't mean to offend. Please forgive me."

"The bench!"

She scrambled to obey.

He cuffed her wrists and ankles with sharp, angry movements.

"Please, sir. Please have mercy."

She watched him pull the cane from the hook on the wall. It was a dense black plastic rod, three feet long and a half inch in diameter.

Her stomach knotted with fear. "Please, I'm begging you. I'm so sorry. Plea"

Her pleading was silenced by the first cut of the cane across her b.u.t.tocks.

The rod was made of dense black plastic. When it struck, the thick, dense thud of the blow echoed from the walls.

Agony flared in Flame's a.s.s. Her arms and legs contracted, pulling hard against the chains that restrained her.

She howled in pain.

Dodge did not pause. He raised the cane and brought it down with his full strength a second time.

The rod whistled through the air.

The high-impact plastic snapped a second bright red line into her b.u.t.tocks.

Her howl turned to a mindless scream.

A third stroke laid across the first two broke the skin at the intersections.

Her screams intensified.

A fourth. Fifth. Sixth. n.o.body was counting as stroke after stroke blistered into the woman's suffering flesh.

Her screams drowned out the thud of impact after impact.

As suddenly as he had begun, Dodge stopped. He stared at his slave's abused flesh for a minute.

Blood was flowing from red and black and blue lines that were etched into white skin. Welts and cuts furrowed her b.u.t.tocks like a new-plowed field.

He dropped the cane to the floor and left the room without saying a word.

Flame lay across the bench and sobbed inconsolably.

Dodge did not return to release her.

She lay chained to the bench all night, enduring wave after wave of pain as her muscles twitched and jerked involuntarily.

Barry, the kennelman, found her still chained to the bench at seven the next morning.

"Looks like someone has been a naughty slave," he said, appraising her tortured a.s.s. "Upset our owner, did we?"

She groaned and turned to look at him with red eyes.

He consulted his clipboard and left without saying any more.

A few minutes later, he returned. "Okay. Let's get you off the bench, shall we?"

He unbuckled the cuffs from her wrists and ankles and said, "Now, can you stand up by yourself?"

She could stand only by leaning on him.

"Let's get you to the toilet, first."

She couldn't sit. Barry supported her while she squatted above the bowl and emptied her bladder. Some sprayed on the seat but she didn't notice.

It was one of her most humiliating moments.

Then Barry wiped her v.u.l.v.a dry and she sank into an even deeper pit of humiliation.

She couldn't sit so he helped her shuffle into the kitchen and supported her while she drank two gla.s.ses of water. "You have to stay hydrated when you've suffered a trauma. You lose fluids."

Then he gave her a bowl of porridge that she had to eat standing up.

When she finished, he took her to her cell and laid her facedown on her cot.

He dabbed a salve into her wounds. "This will fight infection and promote healing. Unfortunately, there's no anesthetic in it. That would defeat the purpose of the punishment so kennelmen are always prohibited from using anything that dulls pain."

A fresh sob escaped her lips.

"I know." He finished treating the wounds and then began taping gauze across them. "You're lucky. Mr. Dodge is allowing me to bandage you. A lot of owners don't want the bandages because they like to see the stripes. The bandage helps healing so it's good that he's letting me do this."

She groaned so softly that it came out as a sigh.

"It's not as bad as it feels. You're going to have some minor scarring. A few red lines that will fade to almost nothing in a year or so. I counted nineteen strokes, but only five or six of them are bad enough to scar. A caned b.u.t.t isn't so bad as a caned back. I've seen slave's backs that have been cut down to the ribs from shoulder to waist. Their scars will never fade. Their flesh has been rearranged."

Flame remembered Sapphire's back. Sapphire had suffered like this, over and over. The thought was overwhelming. She wondered if Barry had been Sapphire's kennelman, too. Probably not. A lot of slaves had scarred backs.

"But yours will fade," Barry said. "In a couple of years, all you'll have is a few silvery lines, barely visible. Just enough to prove that you've been perfected. That's what they say you know. That a slave isn't perfect until she's been well and truly caned." He stroked her hair gently. "Now you're a perfect slave."

"Thank you," she muttered softly into her mattress. "If I could move, I'd give you such a sweet b.l.o.w. .j.o.b."

He laughed softly. "You give the best head but I'll take a rain check on that. You just lie there and heal. I'll see you tomorrow."

She stayed on the cot all day.

Mr. Dodge brought her a plate of food at suppertime.

He couldn't meet her eyes.

"I'm sorry," he mumbled.

"It's okay," she said. "you haven't lowered my value too much."

He jerked as though he'd been slapped.

She bit her tongue. She couldn't afford to be sarcastic. If he ordered her back to the bench and caned her again, she feared that the pain alone might kill her. It was her turn to say, "I'm sorry." She meant it. There's nothing like a good caning to make a slave well and truly sorry.

He looked miserable. "I never thought that I could treat another person like that."

"You didn't. I'm not a person. I'm your property and you can do whatever you like to me." She didn't understand his problem. f.u.c.king her every day whether she wanted it or not was okay. Handing her over to a half dozen strangers who formed a line, waiting to violate her a.s.shole, one after another, was all right. Sending her out on errands in pouring rain wearing only a cotton housedress was okay. Letting his wife make her eat table sc.r.a.ps off the bathroom floor every night was okay. Even taking a leather strap to her just to watch her flinch and hear her cry was fine. But beating her with a cane after she had actually insulted him was over the line?

"I'm afraid that you'll never trust me again." He still wasn't meeting her eyes.

"So what? Why would you care if a slave trusts you or not. I'll do what you say, obey any order, regardless."

"You'll obey me because I'll beat you if you don't?"