In the Garden of Sin (24 page)

“It was our first time,” Lili told Doug.

“Our first time at Tethers,” Elic said. “We’ve been to similar events in other clubs. There are some good ones in Paris and Amsterdam, and of course, Bangkok.”

“Bangkok?” Doug said. “Cool. But I’m surprised you haven’t been to Tethers before, if you’re into that scene.”

Elic shrugged. “Like I said, we only make it to New York a couple of times a year, at most.”

“Tethers’s theme nights are the best,” said Doug, absently stroking Nicky’s hair as she drank her milk. “Masters and Slaves Night is always the first Thursday of the month. We never miss it. And I don’t know what you folks are into, but Tethers pretty much covers all the bases. They have Rope Bondage Night, Boot Night, Whip Night, Leather Night, Doctor and Nurse Night… That’s a good one. I like to dress Nicky up as a nurse and make her give people enemas. She hates it, but she does it with a smile on her face, ’cause all she wants in life is to please me. Isn’t that right, Nick?”

“Yes, master.”

Elic said, “So, um, how long have you two been, er…?”

“I’ve owned Nicky for almost six months,” Doug said. “She’d solicited online for a commanding, powerful master who could train the willfulness out of her. We met at a coffee shop. She walks up to the booth where I’m sitting and sticks out her hand and says, ‘Hi, I’m Barb. You must be Doug.’”

“Barb?” Elic said.

“I changed her name when I took ownership of her,” Doug said. “I told her to sit down next to me and put that hand under her skirt and get busy. I told her she had one minute to
make herself come, and if she didn’t, then I was going to get up and leave, and that would be that. She looked at me like I was crazy. I told her that, as her master, I would demand complete control over her sexual responses. If I ordered her to refrain from orgasm, no matter what the circumstances, she would need to refrain. If I ordered her to come, she’d have to come, and quickly.”

“And these were the first words out of your mouth when you met her?” Elic asked as he raised his wineglass to his mouth. “Smooth.”

“It wasn’t a date,” Doug said. “She wasn’t looking for a boyfriend, she was looking for a master, and a strong one.”

“She didn’t balk?” Lili asked.

“No, she did. She said, ‘I can’t. This place is packed.’ I looked at my watch and said, ‘You’ve got fifty-two seconds.’ She wasted a couple more seconds chewing that over while she looked around, and then she sat down and slipped that hand up under her skirt and into her panties and started diddling away. Wasn’t long before she was quivering and turning red in the face. Took her just forty-one seconds.”

“That’s pretty quick,” Lili said, “especially for a woman.”

“How do you know she really came, and didn’t just fake it?” Elic asked.

“I shoved a finger up inside her so I’d feel the spasms. It was real, all right, but I did help her along a little. I leaned in close and whispered the things I was going to do to her after we finished our coffee and I took her back to my place. I told her she needed to be disciplined for having been slow to obey me. I said I was going to make her strip and shave her own head with the electric clippers I use on my dog—she had real long hair at the time. Then I was going to lay her facedown on a rubber sheet in the middle of my living room floor, handcuff her wrists to her ankles, and shove an inflatable cock gag in
her mouth, and she’d have to stay like that as long as I felt like keeping her that way. Every half hour, I’d rub her cunt and fuck her with a big double dildo till she was squirming and right on the edge, but I wouldn’t let her come. Instead, I’d paddle her till her ass was crimson and tears were streaming down her cheeks. And if that got me hot, I might jerk off onto her face, but she wouldn’t get any cock, any real cock, till I felt like she’d had enough. Then I’d get behind her and lift her hips and tease her cunt with my cock till she was wet and writhing, and then I’d take the gag out and ask her if she was ready to apologize. If she seemed sincerely sorry, and promised to be a good girl and cooperate with her training, I’d slam it to her, fuck her like a pile driver. I’d make her come so many times, she’d be hoarse from screaming. And then I’d bathe her and leash her and let her sleep at the foot of my bed. And that’s just how it went down, and she’s been with me ever since. Isn’t that right, Nicky?”

“Yes, master.”

“She comes on command, too,” he added proudly. “In as little as thirty seconds. Show them, Nick.”

Nicky turned to look at him, wide-eyed, as he set his glass down and stood.

“On your feet, and lose the skirt and panties,” he said, tugging on the leash to force her up off the floor.

Standing with her hands fisted in her plaid skirt, she glanced at Lili and Elic before lowering her gaze.

Elic said, “She doesn’t have to—”

“No, I’d like to see it.” Lili gave him a knowing little smile as she slid her gaze back to Nicky. The little blonde’s eyes glittered just a bit too brightly as she studied the carpet, her lower lip caught between her teeth.

Elic smiled.

So did Turek. It was that hackneyed gesture of reluctance,
the biting of the lip, that was most telling. Their little master-slave melodrama had an author, and although Doug no doubt saw himself in that “commanding and powerful” role, it would appear that Nicky maintained a fair amount of control over the script.

“Do it,”
Doug demanded, slapping her face for emphasis.

She made a show of raising the skirt up just a bit while casting a pleading look in his direction. The pink-stained cheeks were a nice touch, Turek thought.

“Willful little slut.” Doug scanned the room. “Do you folks have, like a stool, or an ottoman, or…?” His gaze lit on something outside of Turek’s field of vision. “Can I use that?” he asked, pointing.

“Be our guest,” replied Elic, fully with the program now.

Dragging Nicky with him by her leash, Doug stalked over to where Turek couldn’t see him for a moment, returning with one of those squat, old-fashioned library step stools. Crafted of dark, varnished wood, it was comprised of three well-worn treads connected by two roughly triangular side pieces carved to look like curled-up griffins. Like the rest of the furniture here, it was probably as old as the house itself, if not older.

On Doug’s instructions, Nicky knelt on the bottom tread and bent over the top one, gripping the griffins’ claw feet for support. Dropping the leash, Doug pressed down on the nape of her neck with his handsomely shod foot, her bottom tilting up as her head dipped almost to the floor.

He took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, taking his time about it. “Skirt up, panties down to your knees,” he said as he unbuckled his belt.

“Nice belt,” Lili said.

It
was
nice, in a vintage-but-not-too-vintage way; looked to be some kind of snakeskin.

Doug thanked her, saying “I picked it up on a business trip
to India a couple of years ago. Can’t get anything like it here. The leather is king cobra.”

“Isn’t that on the endangered list?” Elic asked.

“I think so,” Doug said as he folded the belt in half. “Ten strokes, Nicky, and count each one. You know the drill.”

ICKY FLIPPED THE LITTLE plaid skirt up, revealing white cotton briefs—of course— which she hesitantly lowered. The slowness with which she pushed them down, revealing her upthrust, deliciously pale little ass inch by inch, only amped up the erotic voltage of the partial striptease. Turek’s position afforded him a slightly skewed side view, so that he could just make out the blonde’s clean-waxed pussy lips at the juncture of her half-parted thighs.

Elic shifted slightly, as if angling for a better view. Lili smiled and rested her hand on the crotch of his black jeans. Turek felt an absurd little sting of jealousy, like a hot wire burrowing inside him, searing a path from his heart to his stomach. He imagined it was his cock she was stroking, his body she was curled up against… her breasts, perfumed with jasmine,
pressing heavily against his arm… her silken hair brushing his face as she turned to smile into his eyes…

Dummkopf
. He’d had his chance to possess her, to turn her, and he’d blown it. His desperate longing for her had made him foolish, impatient. How could he have expected her to yield to him so quickly, especially given her loathing for him, her disgust with his hunger for human blood? It was only natural for her to feel that way; nonbloodsuckers almost always did. Had he himself not felt sick to his stomach when Galiana first revealed to him what she was? He’d been so appalled that he didn’t even believe her at first.

Turek had been a virgin when she’d first seduced him in January of 1348, initiating a sexual liaison of dark, feral intensity. She was mercurial, brilliant, breathtaking. He was the idealistic nineteen-year-old bastard son of a Bohemian baron who’d chosen medical studies at the University of Bologna over the priesthood, and who used to wonder what a magnificent creature like Galiana Solsa could possibly see in him.

He had been consumed by her, utterly ensnared, until the night he’d found her writhing atop that street cleaner in the alley behind the boardinghouse in which he lived, her face buried in his neck, her mouth dripping blood. He’d fled upstairs to his rented room, and she followed him there, holding his head while he knelt in the rushes, vomiting into his chamber pot.

She told him that she’d been born more than a thousand years before the birth of Christ in Tarchna, now known as Tarquinia, a coastal city northwest of Rome. A priest had converted her into a bloodsucker with the promise that she would live forever as a lasa, which was a type of goddess. Instead, she became feared and loathed as a demoness of death, a role she grew to embrace. Parents would tell their children that if they didn’t behave, the dreaded Thanchvil—depicted in a mural in
a still-standing Etruscan necropolis with swirling black hair and hawklike wings, the former fairly accurate and the latter somewhat less so—would snatch them at night and suck all the blood from their insubordinate little bodies. She’d been called by many names, she told him. To Italians, she was known as a striga, but in fact, the correct term for her vampiric subrace was Upír.

As an Upír, she told him, she enjoyed all the sensual pleasures in which humans indulged, such as bedsport, food, and wine, but without the “gloomy inevitability” of death hanging over her head. And there was no sensual indulgence available to humans that equaled or even approached the thrill of feasting on blood.

Turek didn’t believe her; it was very like her to make up something so outlandish, just to get a rise out of him. He dismissed her claim even after she revealed her fangs.

“They’re just rotten teeth,” he told her, desperately rationalizing. “They’ve rotted into pointed stumps.”

“A bit long and sharp to be ‘stumps,’ are they not, Anton?” She showed him how they retracted when not in use, folding back into grooves in the roof of her mouth like the erectile fangs of certain species of vipers, the gaps to be concealed by false teeth crafted from mother-of-pearl secured to gold bridgework.

Yet still he denied the truth of what she claimed to be. The human mind, as he had since come to realize, was pathetically weak and conservative, clinging to its comfortably orthodox notions about what was real and possible long after logic should have swayed it.

Galiana tried to convince him to become what she was by drinking her blood after she had drunk his. It had to be voluntary, she told him; he had to know what he was getting into
and to want it for the conversion to take place. He refused as calmly as he could while trying to maneuver her out the door. She knew he thought she was mad; she laughed at his small-mindedness, his all-too-human timidity. Eventually she did leave, telling him she would give him time to think about it.

There was little to think about. She
was
mad. He had fallen in love—for so he’d interpreted her sexual power over him— with a lunatic. He needed to figure out how to break off their affair without enraging her. He’d seen how she abused her servants for even the smallest infractions—whippings, stonings, and even brandings by her own hand, with the subject of her wrath chained hand and foot. When he’d asked her if such punishments were really necessary, she had laughed and called him a little girl. Once he had arrived at her villa outside the city walls to find the bloodied corpse of a young man being dragged away for burial in the woods. She told Turek there had been an accident involving a scythe. Not wanting to know the truth, he had never questioned her about the incident, nor about the whispers on so many lips about a former lover of Galiana’s who had simply vanished one day after he was seen boating with another woman.