THE CASE OF THE SECRET SWITCH: AN EXCERPT FROM ‘THE MISTRESS FILES’
Kingsley Edge, the 8th Circle's King of Kink, has instructed his top dominatrix to write down some "best practices" that he can share with the club's other professional Dominants. Mistress Nora, who also moonlights as an erotic romance writer, turns his request into a series of sexy shorts For His Eyes Only. The Mistress Files collects five of Mistress Nora's favorite client stories—written in typical Nora fashion in the third person—from Kingsley's files….
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The Mistress wouldn’t say he was her favorite client, not to his face anyway. When he showed up, she knew he would be the last person she saw that day. He took more out of her than any of the other men who came to her dungeon at the club. He took the most time, the most effort, and he never made an appointment.
Two weeks ago, he came to her dungeon. It had been about three months since their previous session together. It might have taken three weeks for him to heal completely from it. She’d worked him over thoroughly that night, just the way he liked it. The other nine weeks between that night and this one, he’d been too busy to see her, or simply not in the mood to be destroyed. The mood struck him at the oddest times and for seemingly no reason. She never asked him the reasons why he decided to show up at her feet. He wasn’t there to talk. He wanted pain, and The Mistress wanted to give it to him.
On a Wednesday afternoon at about four, he strolled into her suite without knocking. The Mistress lay stretched out on the bed reading a book. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham. A disappointing book. Well-written but she was two hundred pages in, and no one had even been tied up yet. She looked up from her book as he swept in the door, shutting and locking it behind him. He did this often, came into her dungeon. He had every right to. But locking the door meant only one thing.
Play-time.
She didn’t speak. She shut the book and tossed it onto the nightstand. From the small table she pulled an elegant black mask that covered only the top half of the face. Like the good and well-trained submissive he was playing that day, he kept his eyes on the floor as she approached him. In all the world, she’d only ever met one man she found more attractive than the one standing before her. Night and day, he and the other man were. The submissive masochist in front of her had olive skin, dark eyes, dark as a sin-stained soul, and black hair with a slight roguish wave that fell to right above his shoulders. And at the moment, he had on far too much clothing.
“Lose the shoes. Shirt, too,” she ordered as she slipped the masquerade mask over his eyes. It had eyeholes—she didn’t want to blindfold him, only put him in a mental place where he could become another person…someone other than the one who’d walked in her door and the one who would crawl out of it. Plus, no denying, the man looked fucking hot in the mask. With this particular client, she allowed herself to enjoy her attraction to him.
He shucked off his jacket and she took it from him, tossing it on the floor. The embroidered vest came off next. It too landed on the floor. Then the shirt. Raising her hands to his chest, she caressed his strong broad shoulders, his collarbone, the hollow of his throat. She loved to tease him with pleasure before torturing him with pain. With another client who shared his sort of desires and fetishes, she would have put a collar on him. But no, never with him. He had one hard limit, only one: no collars. He was willing to surrender to a world of pain, but drew the line at such an obvious sign of ownership within the kink community.
That didn’t mean she wasn’t about to treat him like a dog.
“Stay,” she said as she went back to the bedside table. She pulled a thin black rope lead from the drawer and returned to him. God, how he hated the lead. Loathed it. The man had pride.
On his own time, maybe. Not on hers.
She leashed it around his neck and slipped the end of the rope through the hole at the other end. It would tighten around his neck if he resisted her. A choke rope. Holding the end of the lead, she took four steps back to stand three feet from him. She tugged once on the lead and he didn’t move. Good. She loved it when he gave her an excuse to punish him. Raising her hand she wrapped the rope one time...two times...three times around her palm. With every turn of her hand, she pulled him closer to her.
“I know you hate this,” she said.
“You know me well, Maîtresse.”
She yanked him to her so they were eye-to-eye. She wore eight-inch platform stiletto boots that day, otherwise she would have been staring down the center of his chest. Not a bad place to stare. He had a beautiful body, no denying that. Lean and muscular. Riddled with old scars. She wouldn’t add any to his vast collection today. Only cuts, welts, and bruises. All injuries that would heal quickly. If he wanted scars, he’d have to pay extra and make an appointment.
“I do know you…but not well enough,” she said. “I think I want to get to know you better today. Let’s go into my office. Come along.”
She gave the rope another yank and led him into the second room of her suite. The front room was the bedroom, which she rarely used with clients. Sexual favors were granted for female clients and lovers only—not male clients. But the second room, the dungeon, housed all her toys. Including her most favorite toy of all.
“Do you know anything about the story of St. Andrew?” she asked as she dragged him by the lead to the ten-foot tall, X-shaped St. Andrew’s Cross at the back of the room.
“I’m vaguely familiar with him.”
She removed the lead and tossed it aside. “Up,” she ordered and he stepped in front of the cross. “Arms.”
He knew the drill well enough she didn’t even have to give him the orders. She didn’t have to, but she wanted to. She wanted to and he wanted her to. To be brutalized and dominated—that’s what he came for. To be dominated and brutalized—that’s why he came.
But he wasn’t allowed to come yet. He had to earn it first.
She locked his wrists to the bars of the cross and left him standing at the cross while she went to a tiny box and pulled out five silver needle-sharp fingernail extenders. Talons, she called them. How fortuitous that she’d gotten a brand-new set of them this week and sanitized them with fire that very morning.
“So, St. Andrew,” she said. “Fun guy. He was Peter’s brother, supposedly. The Peter—the first pope. They were fishermen, both of them. Brutal profession, catching fish. The rope nets tore up the hands. The work was backbreaking. And imagine how the fish felt—caught in a net, dragged to the surface, drowning in air. They couldn’t get free no matter how hard they struggled.”
He pulled on the bounds that held him to the cross. “I can sympathize,” he said, the lightest hint of amusement in his voice.
“And worse than the net was, of course, the hook.”
With those words she pricked his back with her talons. He flinched and five tiny drops of blood appeared on his shoulder like a red constellation.
“That fucking hook,” she sighed. “Can you imagine how much it would hurt to have a hook in your mouth? And then to get dragged by that hook all the way to the surface...brutal.”
She moved her hand down, and left another five bleeding pinholes in his back.
“We are solitary, poor, nasty, brutish creatures, we humans,” he said between winces. “We deserve all the punishment God has to give us.”
“I suppose that makes me an instrument of God’s wrath, doesn’t it? I kind of like the thought of that. Here’s a little more wrath for you.”
She ran her talons in a straight line down his back, leaving four shallow bleeding rivulets about three inches long. He panted through the pain and she could only smile. With her free hand, she reached around his hip and felt his erection pressing against her hand. Nasty and brutish—his favorite way to play. Luckily, it was hers too.
“Poor St. Andrew…he was crucified too. An X-shaped cross, not T-shaped. He didn’t think he was worthy to die on the same sort of cross as his Lord. His brother Peter had already been crucified upside-down. He couldn’t go that route either. They got very creative with their crucifying. We might have to get creative one of these days…”
The Mistress let that threat hang in the air as she unbuttoned his trousers. While she stroked him with one hand, her other hand continued to prick his back with tiny pinholes. She’d undergone this particular torture herself a time or two. Bee stings hurt worse but only barely. And at least the bee died after stinging you. No such luck with a sadistic Mistress. She wasn’t going anywhere and had nothing but more pain to give him.
“I’ve always wondered about your love of pain.” She ran a finger from the base of his erection to the tip and back down again. “Born masochist? Or made? Nature? Nurture?”
“Who knows? I didn’t know I loved it until someone hurt me the first time. After that I couldn’t get enough. Was I made? Peut-etre? Then again, I didn’t know I loved Cabernet Sauvignon until I had my first glass either. But the taste buds, they were already there...”
“I suppose it doesn’t matter how you got it. It’s here. Drink up.” At that, she stroked him hard as she left four more parallel lines of blood on his back.
She removed her talons and sat them aside before stripping her victim completely naked. As she dragged his pants down his legs, she bit his upper thigh, lower thigh, and calf hard enough to leave three black bruises. She couldn’t help herself—the man did have exquisite legs.
Now that she had his back bared and bleeding, she decided it might be time to give him some real pain. Of course, she’d broken the skin. That meant a few more precautions would be necessary. She opened a case that had a new deerskin flogger in it—never before used. Doing edge-play with a client meant more work for her during and after. Usually, she charged through the nose for even a cut or two. But for him, well, he was a special case. Not that this was a freebie. To quote The Boss: No freebies. Ever.
She stood behind him and examined her handiwork. “You’re bleeding,” she said. “A lot.”
“Merci,” was his sole response, the only one she expected, the only one she wanted.
“But they’re tiny little cuts. If I left them alone, they’d heal up in two days. Where’s the fun in that?”
She raised the flogger and brought it down hard onto his bleeding back. She struck again. And again. She struck high and hard, low and deep. She added welts to the cuts, bruises to the welts. The tips of the flogger tails smeared the blood and soon his entire back had turned a rusty red.
After a good (for her) half-hour of flogging, she dropped the deerskin and let him catch his breath.
“Have you ever safed out with anyone?” she asked as she came to stand at his side again. A few drops of semen had leaked from his cock and she caught them on her fingertip.
“Non, Maîtresse.”
“You like pain that much? Or is it pride?”
“You know the answer to that already. Why did you never safe out with him?”
“I did,” she corrected him. “But only once.”
“Why?”
“Because,” she said as she wrapped her hand around his erection again and squeezed to the point of pain. “He ordered me to marry him.”
“He must be a masochist too,” he said through gritted teeth.
The Mistress could only laugh. “Oh, you’re gonna get it big time for that.”
Big time meant the cane. Not the rattan cane she used to leave the hand-sized bruises on a client’s ass or thighs. No, what she needed was the little cane—white plastic, long as a conductor’s baton. In fact, it had always reminded her of a baton, one she used to conduct a symphony of pain.
She started under his left shoulder-blade and left a two-inch raised welt by flicking the baton against his skin. An unassuming little toy, no one ever dreamed it hurt as much as it did, not until they felt the fiery force of it. Getting cut with a razor hurt less than this little devil.
“Breathe,” she instructed as she flicked it against him again, barely half an inch below the first welt. “Don’t forget to breathe...”
“I’m breathing,” he said, although she’d seen him holding his breath seconds earlier. He’d passed out in their sessions, usually during breath-play scenes. No harm, no foul. Fainting, falling, crying, wailing, being hauled to your breaking point and left there staring into the abyss—that’s what happened behind locked dungeon doors when the vanilla world wasn’t watching and the monsters came out to play. In this room with this man, she had no one to answer to but God, and God wasn’t asking any questions right now.
“Good boy. You pass out on me and it’s game over. We don’t want that, do we? You haven’t even come yet. You take thirty more of these,” she said, flicking him once more and smiling at the searing red line on his back, “and we’ll discuss throwing a little pleasure into this mix.”
“Thirty-three welts?”
“What? I like my biblical numbers. Now shut up and breathe.” She flicked him again, working her way down his entire left side. By the time she was done with him, there would be no part of his body from his neck to his hip that wasn’t either bruised, bleeding, or scoured with welts. He loved his souvenirs, as he called them. Souvenirs from his holidays in Hell.
Up his right side, she decorated him with more welts. To add a little challenge, she made him count the flicks of her baton for the last seventeen strikes.
His “one” sounded strong. The “five” sounded pained. By “ten,” he gasped the number. At “thirteen,” she could barely hear him.
By seventeen, she’d broken him. It took almost a full minute to get him to say the number.
“I’m waiting...” She ran the baton over his back, letting it tickle his savaged skin. “You want a little pleasure, don’t you? If you want a break from the pain, you have to say the number. You know I’ll let you hang here all night until you say it. I’ll get my book and pull up a chair and read. I have all the time in the world...”
He swallowed hard and shuddered. Poor dear. She’d piled on the pain today on only one part of his body—his back. Usually that much pain she’d spread out over a larger area—back, ass, thighs... Those sorts of niceties she reserved for other clients, however. Gentler clients, weaker clients, tamer clients. But this client got her best because he paid for her best. And when someone paid for her best, she did her worst.
“It’s only one more...you can take one more, can’t you?”
His only reply was a nod. She saw that behind the mask, he’d closed his eyes, and she took the opportunity to simply take him in.
Who was he? She’d asked herself that question since the day she’d met him when she’d only been sixteen years old. What secrets did he keep behind those eyes and inside that scarred and beautiful body of his? She could have beaten the secrets out of him, but she knew him well enough to know that, in fact, she didn’t want to know his every one of his secrets.
“Seventeen,” he said in a clear voice, raising up his head.
The seventeenth flick of the baton was the hardest by far. “That was for the ‘He must be a masochist’ crack.”
She kissed his welt before dropping the baton on the floor and breaking it with her foot. She never used a toy on anyone else after she’d used it on him. It was the lone sign of respect she afforded him when he was in submission to her. Once a flogger or cane or blade touched his body, it would never touch another. She either broke it or set it aside to be used in the future on him and only him.
“I deserved that.” He relaxed in the bonds, resting his head against his upper arm.
“You did. And worse. I’m trying to decide how much worse.”
“I will submit to anything you desire, Maîtresse.”
“I know you will. That’s the problem. Too many choices. I could cane your legs. I could pour some scalding candle-wax on your testicles. Hmm...So many ways to make you my bitch. Hard to choose just one.”
“Are you open to suggestion, Maîtresse?”
He turned his head and peered at her through the space between his arm and the cross. Of course, they both knew he shouldn’t be making eye contact with her. This evening, she was in charge, she was the Dominant, and he was nothing but property for her to use and abuse any way she wanted. But she had trouble being angry at him for something as human as looking in her eyes. How would she see his hunger, his need, his humble desperation if she didn’t see his eyes? She’d give him a pass on the eye contact this time. She’d only flog him a little more. Nothing vicious. She’d save the viciousness for the next time he did it.
“And what, pray tell, is your suggestion?”
His only answer was to laugh, and the laugh was all she needed to hear. A low throaty masculine insinuating thigh-melting, knee-shivering panties suddenly disappear and end up hanging off the bedpost sort of laugh. Glad to know he wasn’t the only one in the mood.
“Well, it is a good suggestion.”
“Merci, Maîtresse.”
“If I’m going to do it, you’re going to have to earn it.”
“I understand,” he said, almost solemnly. Nothing like a threat of having to “earn it” could put the fear of God back into a sub. She’d already ripped his back apart in three different ways. Time to give the front side The Mistress treatment.
She unlocked his wrists from the cross and turned him around, slamming his back roughly into the painted wood. He flinched visibly as his back made contact with the cross. He’d be in agony for a week at least after today. Maybe two.
As she buckled his wrists to the cross, she felt his erection pressing against her stomach. Nothing got him harder than pain. Not threesomes, not orgies, not dominating, not submitting, not anything. She knew his need for release was so strong now it had become yet another form of torture. Good.
“You’re dying to come, aren’t you?” she asked as she pushed her hip into him, sending him into shudders.
“Death would be a relief right now.”
“I won’t let you die. That would be too merciful. I’m not really in the mood to be merciful today. I am, however, in the mood to redecorate. You know I love your scars, the bullet wounds, all of them...but I think you could use some new designs here.” She ran her hand all over his chest. “Nothing permanent. Wait here.” With a light and insulting slap-tap on his cheek, she sauntered off. She returned with a Wartenberg wheel and her violet wand.
“Now I know you don’t play with violet wands, and that’s fine. But I do. And the reason I do is because they can make such wonderful patterns on skin when used the right way. Or the wrong way. However you want to think of it.”
“You’re a sadist,” he said, his head leaning back against the cross. He looked up as if to seek help from the heavens. Help, unsurprisingly, did not come.
“Flattery will get you everywhere.”
She plugged in the wand and held the contact in one hand and the Wartenberg pinwheel in the other. The electricity didn’t affect her as she’d made herself merely a conduit. Sparks buzzed from the sharp tips of the wheel, and with a slow and steady pace, she rolled it in a straight line down the center of his chest. He inhaled sharply as the electrified wheel left a thin raised line on his skin. She’d been on the receiving end of this technique before. The wheel never broke the skin, but the combination of electricity and sharp edges made the recipient feel like he was being sliced open.
“Only five lines, I think,” she said. “Count them for me. That was...”
“One...” he panted.
She ran the wheel down his chest a second time, then a third. She ran it over the old scars, over his nipples, across the sensitive skin of his lower stomach. When she touched his hipbone with it, he coughed from the pain. He had to say the “five” twice because of how labored his breathing had become.
“Was that five already? Very good.”
He exhaled heavily in noticeable relief.
“But let’s do one more set. In French. Say ‘un,’” she ordered and ran the wheel once more down his chest.
The sound that escaped his throat was more animal than human. Exactly what she wanted to hear.
By the time they reached cinq, he had ten criss-crossing lines on his chest, thin and red as a brand. The welts would fade fairly quickly. The ones produced by the wheel and the wand wouldn’t last more than a day or two. Amazing that something that felt like one’s chest being cut open by a knife could cause no lasting harm at all.
“On a scale of one to ten,” she asked him as she put the wand away and tossed the wheel into the trash can, “what was that?”
“Onze,” he said, his eyes closed tight as his whole body shivered from the last aftershocks of the pain.
“Onze? I hurt you all the way to eleven? I’m pretty damn proud of myself right now, I have to say.” She brought her lips to his chest and licked one of the lines from tip to tip. Her hot mouth against his seared skin must have felt like salt in an open wound. And yet he’d only grown more aroused from this latest round of agony.
Perhaps it was time to put him out of his misery.
* * *