way. Terry will mix it for you. Don’t dawdle.'
She was half way to the door when he added an afterthought. 'Escape if you want. I’ll hunt you down in an hour. The penalty will be my initials branded on your thigh. I don’t mind a bit. A slave girl should be branded with her master’s symbol.'
Dorinda fled.
'Is he being beastly to you, darling?' Terry was unashamedly quivering with curiosity. She listened intently as a shamed Dorinda gave details.
'I expect it could be worse, dear,' she consoled musingly as she mixed the drink. 'He’s made me do all those things, y’know. He thinks of the darndest things… I say, darling. Why didn’t you escape?'
'Thanks, I don’t want to be branded… Terry? Would he really do it?'
For answer the younger girl lifted her very short skirt and bared a thigh and a hip. Three letters were burned deep and clean.
'M.A.E. Mark Atherton Esmond,' Terry declaimed proudly as though displaying an Olympic trophy. 'He did it to me a couple of years ago when I got angry over something and stayed overnight with a girlfriend.'
'You let him?'
'Didn’t have anything to say about it,' the owner of the brand said complacently. 'The dear boy tied me so I couldn’t even twitch. He’ll do the same for you. Saves a lot of fuss.'
The incredulous initiate lifted the brimming glass and returned to her training and her master.
It was a long litany of order and compliance. It covered many acts and many attributes. It even embraced a demand that she recite a long speech extemporaneously extolling the virtues of her master and her own abasement’s as a slave. Dorinda felt sure she rated at least a ninety mark on that one. But Mark, throughout all her ordeal, kept a poker face – refusing to show either approval or displeasure. When it was done he said: 'Stand up. Back a few paces. Then stand stiff at attention, facing me. Hands on your side. Head up. Breasts well out.'
Dorinda obeyed. She had caught his emphasis on the word breasts instead of chest. She displayed her twin treasures as provocatively as possible.
It was a male pose. Thus strangely shaming to a girl. She exposed too much! Dorinda hoped he would not make her hold it long. It was also tiring. But she was doubly thankful for the brief covering, her master had allowed her to wear. She knew herself hungering for a word of praise. She felt she had earned it.
'You think you have been doing rather well and deserve a pat on the back, aren’t you?' Marked asked discerningly.
Dorinda flushed. Was she that obvious? 'I did hope I’d please you,' she admitted.
'Sort of puts you one up on me, eh?' His voice was thoughtful.
She saw the strap. 'No! Please! I tried hard.'
'Feel any different?'
'Just soiled.'
He nodded understandingly. Still expressionless.
'Kneel before me. Hold out your arms. Ask to be handcuffed.'
Dorinda suspected she had not won, or even emerged with honours. But slaves don’t win. They are not supposed to. Tears stung her eyes. Her future loomed less than rosy. The laughing boy had gone. The man before whome she stood so shamingly was implacably male. But there was no use resisting now. Hastily she knelt. 'Please master, lock the handcuffs on my wrists. Obediently she proffered her hands and watched dejectedly as the were ironed.
'Over to the pulley!'
There was an inevitability about it. Dorinda stood, stretched taut, and wondered why they had not done whatever they had to do when she had been similarly strung up that morning. In spite of determination she shivered. She knew a leg was trembling and wondered if he could see. It was a terrible way to be fastened before a man.
'You know you are going to be whipped, don’t you?'
He was very serious.
'Yes.' Now that the awful moment had come she was too weary of it all to plead. So she asked: 'Why?'
'We have done what we have just done because it’s a sort of preamble we have to wade through. For your benefit, really. Didn’t actually change a thing, did it?'
'You mean it didn’t change me?' She saw his point and wished otherwise. She knew herself the same girl she had been yesterday or the day before. Her own words had summed up the total effect of what he had made her do. ‘just soiled.’ That was all. But she was desperately afraid. 'You think that if you whip me enough I’ll become a slave in spirit as well as fact?' She knew her question held all the dubiety she felt.
'Any other suggestions?' He sounded quite willing to listen.
'That’s not fair. ' Dorinda exclaimed. 'I’ve never been whipped. I don’t know what that does to a girl, except cut her skin. I’m scared stiff right now. I have to wonder why you can’t be satisfied by the way I worked at what you wanted. I honestly tried to please. And I’ll keep on trying as long as you want to keep me a prisoner. I know I can’t escape. I think that knowledge is the most potent thing with me. It’s pretty final when you think of it. But it makes me a prisoner, not a slave.' She peaked at him earnestly from between her strained arms. 'I suppose you wouldn’t consider becoming your slave because I like you… Sort of like Terry?'
'I’m not looking for another sister.'
'I’d shrug my shoulders if I could,' Dorinda affirmed passionately. 'I’m marooned on an island and held captive by a fantasy. I have no place to go except where you take me. I have to accept and understand that you will work your fantasy out on me. Whether I like it or not I have to play Galatea to your Pygmalion. If that calls for me to be whipped, then whipped I’ll be. You’d better get on with it…' She looked him in the eye and added the single word: 'Darling…'
Mark nodded soberly. His gaze was riveted on the taut loveliness he was about to whip. Dorinda’s last word and her lucid rationale disconcerted him. He would have preferred her to plead or weep, or even to be some other girl who would spit at him and curse. Dorinda had matched her own logic with his. Mark found himself warming to the idea of discussion, a battle of wits and will, with his guest somewhat more comfortably circumstanced than she was now. Whatever that errant thought may have led to will never be known, for in the midst of it young Terry’s voice decided the issue.
'What an absolutely glum pair you are.' She eyed her brother discerningly, then turned to the quaking captive. 'I bet poor old Mark’s funked out. You look gorgeous enough to eat…'
'We’ve been talking,' Dorinda vouschafed lamely.
Terry’s laughter pealed through the bare room transforming it into a place of gaiety. Without wasting words she snatched the whip from her brother’s hand. She turned a radiant and consoling smile on the quailing captive. 'Frightfully sorry, old girl. But this job has to be done. Absolutely must get it out of the dear boy’s system.' She winked broadly. And out of little Terry’s too…'
Dorinda froze in shock. The limber with had crossed her back and curled over her ribs. There could not be all this pain in the whole world. She knew there could not be! No one had ever borne it or could ever bear it. She was sliced and bleeding. She was sure she was!
Then a scream. Her cry of outrage split the room. It held all the desolation of a girl who knows herself lost, delivered to a force no girl deserved. Terry’s second lash had been neatly beneath the first, but delivered from the other side. Dorinda’s white nudity was circled by a band of fire. All resolution dissolved. In frantic panic she leaped at her bonds. She kicked and twisted, sobbing in the frustration of her helplessness. For moments at a time she bent her knees and lifted both feet from the floor as though seeking surcease in foetal shape. Her slender wrists were cut by the rigid bite of the metal cuffs that circled them so snugly. But that pain was unnoticed under the all consuming agony of the two welts Terry had bestowed so lovingly and with consummate skill.
'Now let’s talk for a minute, darlings,' Terry suggested with enchanting insouciance.
Brother and sister watched raptly as Dorinda panted and sobbed her way back into the world from which she had been reft. The chained girl had no coherent thought. She was dazed and smarting from something more awful than her wildest fears had envisioned. She squirmed on suspenseful vulnerability, every nerve screaming in expectation of the next stroke. It was perhaps two minutes before her wild eyes focused on Terry’s gamin grin. Her breasts were still heaving under both the pain and the strain of her suspension. A small trickle of blood found it’s way down one wrist.
