Dirty Hands

They were together in a place of darkness and fire. They were alone.

Others were watching. Listening. Recording. But they were alone. This moment was just for them. This place of iron and stone. This chamber of shadow and flame. It was theirs. It would be theirs forever.

The slave met his gaze unabashed. She smiled. Her body glistened as she moved, pacing the floor, nearly dancing with each step she took. She had never been more beautiful than she was on that night: she'd been perfected by four months of rest, four months of exercise and healing. The scars that remained were ornaments upon her flesh. They spoke of her courage and her submission. They didn't mar her; they made her more complete.

The watchers gave him a vial. It contained opium. They instructed him to have her drink it—said that it would ease her task. He called her to him, and she came. She knelt before him, kissed his bare feet. He brought her to his lips instead and kissed her mouth, and her throat.

"Take this," he said, his voice rough with desire. "Set it on the floor. Shatter it beneath your heel."

"Hear and obey."

Pain glistened in her eyes when she crushed the glass vial beneath her bare heel. Blood coated her footsteps after that, but she didn't cry out. She smiled at Him and thanked Him, her nipples long and hard, her cunt wet and aching for Him.

"I am Yours," she moaned. "Make me Yours forever."

"Choose your last words," he commanded. "Speak them."

"I love you."

"Now, be silent."

She nodded. He saw it in her eyes, though: Hear and obey.

And then he began to beat her.

He beat her with a scourge that he had taken from the devil's own hand. He slashed at her with the heavy, braided leather. He cut at her, tore flesh from her with barbed hooks and flakes of stone. The chamber was soon spattered with her blood. The red curtains that hung the walls were painted crimson.

His slave grunted. She gasped. She could not help the way the pain stole her breath away, but she did not cry out. She swallowed the pain for him, soaring ever-higher on a cocktail of adrenaline, submission, love, and lust, until her limbs trembled and her eyelids drooped, and she could no longer summon the strength needed to get back to her feet when she collapsed on the stone.

Her body had been wrecked by the whip: her breasts were tattered and torn, her cunt flayed, her back laid bare almost to the bone... And yet still her task wasn't done. He looked to the devil, and the devil nodded. Demons took her, and they began to wrap her limbs in barbed wire. They hung her before him, in the shape of a Y with her head down. They stretched her before him, and he watched as blood painted her face and dripped to the floor.

"Continue," said the red demon who had given him the whip. "Do not stop until she's dead."

He read those same words in her eyes: Continue, Master. Do not stop until I am Yours.