Total pages in book: 63
Estimated words: 57296 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 286(@200wpm)___ 229(@250wpm)___ 191(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 57296 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 286(@200wpm)___ 229(@250wpm)___ 191(@300wpm)
Anya paused in her tirade and in her delivery of my undeserved punishment. For an instant I actually supposed—though I knew much better—that she had finished. I understood at the same moment as I heard the spoon raised, I felt certain all the way to the height of the horrid woman’s shoulder, beginning what I hoped without much conviction would be its final descent.
No: Anya spanked me not one but three more times, without any further words of humiliation. Undoubtedly the head cook wanted to concentrate fully on making me scream louder than I had to that point. She succeeded all too well. I truly didn’t think I had ever in my young life felt as much pain as that third stroke of the back of the wooden bowl delivered. I seemed to leave my body entirely. I could hear a girl screaming and I knew the girl was me, and I felt the pain, but it all also seemed to come apart, so that whatever I—Heather Foster, American spy who had become the submissive bed girl of a Slavic warlord—might represent, I couldn’t put that idea together with the horrible agony in my bottom, or the helpless, wanton need between the fuck toy’s thighs, or the terrible shame of how close the two things lay together.
Or the feeling that they all knew, Anya and the cooks and the maids—they all knew that Ivan had bought me because he liked to whip girls before he fucked them, and I was the kind of girl best suited to the pursuit of that particular form of dominant masculine pleasure.
She took her arm away and left me bent over the sink. She didn’t even tell me to start washing the pots.
Part of me felt desperate to see what the other girls’ faces looked like, as if maybe they wouldn’t all be turned away in horror and embarrassment. I didn’t. I told myself that if I seemed completely crushed by Anya’s horrible ‘lesson’ they would be more likely to forget I was there and to talk about what they knew of Ivan’s movements. Really I couldn’t bear to see their reactions.
Sobbing quietly, with my left hand behind me desperately and mortifyingly trying to rub away some of the pain from my butt and my thighs, I reached out my right and turned on the hot water. I filled the sink halfway, then turned it off and started on the pots. I made as much noise as I could, to convince any observers I had absorbed myself in the task, while I listened hard during the silences.
Two of the junior cooks, arriving with more pots for washing, rewarded my efforts almost immediately. I felt a thrill of anxious hope and then of sudden fear as I heard them discussing Ivan and me in rapid Russian, as if I hadn’t even been standing there.
“He told Pyotr not to expect him back tonight. I heard him.”
I kept my attention on the pots, not daring to look up for fear of alerting them that I understood. I felt sure that the other girl had looked at me, though—maybe was still looking—when she spoke in reply.
“Did he give her to Pyotr, then? Will he fuck her tonight? Does Pyotr have the wand thing?”
The first girl made a very Slavic sound with her lips, an exhalation that meant she had no idea and she didn’t care. Then she spoke the dreadful words that I had in the back of my mind, trying to keep them from taking me over completely and sending me into a useless panic.
“He’s tired of her, anyway. He didn’t fuck her last night, did he?”
They all knew, of course. I hadn’t really had any illusions on that score: in a house like this one, all the servants knew everything. Still, the fact of it, the way the girl had just casually said it as if it couldn’t be more obvious, sent a blade of ice into my chest. I stared down at my hands, at the redness of them in the hot water as I used the steel wool to try to get dried egg off a sauté pan.
The second girl didn’t let it go. I could hear in her voice the kind of reluctant and embarrassing, but also inescapable, fascination I knew so well from my own involuntary thoughts and feelings. Every bit of compassion I might have had for her was driven away, though, by her words, as the two walked away toward the door to the dining room.
“I think Pyotr will whip her and fuck her tonight. You saw his face when he told Anya to be strict. Do you think he’ll make us watch?”
He did make them watch when, at the end of the day, he fulfilled the server’s prediction.
I had managed to stay out of the butler’s way for most of the day, sometimes hiding in my room, sometimes helping the maids tidy a room, conveying to them with gestures that despite my enforced nudity and my lack of Russian I could help with the dusting. One of the nicer ones even brought me two rolls to eat, sneaking them to me under her apron.