Into The Arena (5 page)

Chapter
4

The next thing she was aware of was a deep vibrating that seemed to be all around her and even inside her. And while her fuddled brain tried to come to terms with everything which had happened to her in the hectic hours leading up to her abduction, she registered it as familiar somehow. And when at last she opened her eyes she realised why. She was on a ship. Groggily she struggled to her feet and looked around her; if it was a ship then it was a prison ship and its cargo was naked women.

Naked women in chains.

In the semi darkness of the huge room with its bare plates of riveted steel were two rows of cells constructed from thick steel bars. In each cell stood a girl, round their wrists were thick leather restraints, and chains, passed through the loops on the restraints and then padlocked to the bars on each side of her cell, kept their arms raised and spread.

She flicked her hair back and stared around her. She counted twelve cells in all arranged in two rows with a wide gangway between them. Over on her left there was only gloom where the light from the single neon tube failed to penetrate.

"You okay?"

Tara started at the sudden voice which echoed in the steel chamber of what she could only assume was the hold of whatever ship it was they were on. She looked over her raised shoulder and into the next cell to her left where a slender redhead was imprisoned and nodded. "Where the hell is this?" she asked.

"Dunno," a strong looking black girl, almost as tall as Tara, in one of the opposite cells answered. "We all got here the same way you did. You're the last."

At that moment the vibrations of the engines suddenly increased, there were shouts and bangs from up above and beneath their feet they felt movement. Whatever ship they were on was under way.

Suddenly a door set in the bulkhead at the far end of the hold crashed open and three men entered, turning on more lights as they did so. As one, the girls gasped as they took in the array of chains, trestles, posts and frames which the light revealed. The shackles and straps which adorned them left none of them in any doubt as to their purpose. Tara suddenly recalled the club Conor had taken her to. For a second she felt a knot of fear in her stomach and then it was replaced with a strange mixture of anger and excitement as she recalled the events of that evening and Conor's subsequent betrayal.

"Right! Listen up my lovely bitches!" the leader of the three men said and Tara's attention was jerked away from thoughts of Conor. The speaker was a stocky, dark haired man with swarthy skin - Italian or somewhere Mediterranean Tara thought - he was no taller than she was herself but he was powerfully built and as he was stripped to the waist, she could fully appreciate the corded muscles of his torso and arms and the depth of his chest which was covered in a mat of hair.

"You're going on a long sea cruise and you're going to learn a lot. The first thing you're going to learn is that from now on you don't say a word. We'll tell you when we want you to open your mouths," he grinned broadly and indicated his crotch. Tara's eyes followed his gesture and she noticed that he and his henchmen all carried whips at their belts. With a shock she realised again that only a few hours before she had been lamenting the lack of masterful men in her life.

"Any disobedience will be punished immediately," the man carried on in his accented but clear English. "Some of you are already pretty used to the whip, some not. It doesn't matter - by the time this little cruise is over you will all know the value of real discipline. You have all been chosen very carefully and soon you will understand why you have been chosen."

Tara's mind fastened on the words, "some of you are already pretty used to the whip," and while the man continued to speak she glanced around her at her fellow captives. The redhead in the next cell was blushing, she was certain of it! And so was the black haired girl in the opposite cell who dropped her eyes when she saw Tara stare at her. Were some of these girls like those strange creatures she had seen fight at the club? And if so, what was
she
doing here? She wasn't a sub, or whatever they were called!

She looked back at the man who was coming to the end of his speech and was standing with his legs braced apart and his hands on his hips.

"......So, your training begins now. You will be taken from your cells one by one and whipped."

Tara could only gape at him. This was a complete nightmare. She was going to be whipped! Her body still held a fading memory of the stinging in her buttocks from her first beating but it also held a memory of the sex which had preceded it and somehow the two wouldn't disentangle. To her dismay, while her mind reeled before what was about to be done to her, her lower belly began to heat and tingle. Grimly she steeled herself, she was not some weird, perverted sub.

And if she had to fight her own body as well as these awful men to prove it, then so be it.

While the man had been speaking, more of his henchmen had entered the hold and at his gesture two of them entered the black girl's cell and began to release her. She fought like a demon, her powerful body twisting and her legs kicking. The rest of the girls screamed encouragement but once she had been dragged from the cell the two men overpowered her with almost contemptuous ease and the screams died as she was led towards the far end of the hold.

The restraints at her wrists were fastened to two of the chains which hung down about four feet apart and her arms were wrenched up and out. She glanced back over her shoulder fearfully at the two men who stood behind and slightly to either side of her. They unclipped their whips and shook the lashes out.

"You will all receive twenty lashes," announced the man who had addressed them earlier. "Call it a little welcome present from me; Carlo." He grinned again and then snapped, "Begin!"

Tara started as the first lash smacked across the girl's back and she gave a yell of shock and pain. Both sounds echoed in the huge steel chamber and overlapped with the sound of the second lash landing and the second yelp from the girl. And from then on until the full twenty lashes had been laid on from left and right - the whips' many tongues fanning out across the girl's dark skin as they impacted - the sounds of the beating rolled round and hammered on the other girls' ears.

It went on and on. As each girl was taken down and led back to her cell, two more men were fastening the next girl in place so that the floggers worked in relays and each girl got the benefit of fresh whip arms. Meanwhile Carlo strutted up and down ensuring that the girls in the cells were watching the punishments. And Tara found that she couldn't tear her eyes away from the savage spectacle. The redhead in the next cell was sobbing in terror but Tara was caught in horrified fascination at the erotic sight the naked female bodies presented as they swayed, twisted and arched under the whips, like agonised puppets. At one point she did glance away and found Carlo's dark eyes fixed on her, regarding her with cool interest. She hurriedly looked back to where a brunette, slim and sinuous was moaning and writhing her way through the last of her lashes. And that was another thing that struck her; each girl shrieked and screamed under the initial lashes but slowly subsided into groans as the beating progressed. At first she assumed it was through exhaustion but as time went on, she wondered if it was due to something quite different. Could these girls be experiencing some sort of twisted pleasure in amongst the pain? She decided that she would take whatever these brutes could dish out in complete silence; she had no experience of the whip but remembered the pain of broken ribs from a skiing accident a few years back. She could take this.

Tara was taken out last. She made no attempt to struggle and let herself be led towards the chains with her head held high. She had seen how the position in which they were chained had given the girls full leeway to twist and turn, thus presenting the whips with tender targets on the breasts and stomach. Immobile and silent, she thought proudly. That was the way to handle this. But her mouth was dry and her pulse racing as her arms were raised and shackled. She had always set herself challenges - pushed herself to her limits - and got a huge sexual charge out of it. But here, others were doing the pushing, it was as if she were stepping out of a plane without a parachute, dependent entirely on these brutal men as to how far she would fall.

She could plainly see and feel the lust her naked body was inspiring in them. They had fondled her breasts and sex as they had been preparing her and although she had tried to ignore them as haughtily as she could, a part of her took its usual pride in her body and as the men stood back and unclipped their whips, she could feel the first stirrings of heat between her legs.

Carlo came to stand in front of her and she gritted her teeth, preparing for her greatest challenge yet as he reached out and carefully pulled her thick hair forward off her shoulders, but as his fingers trailed down the strands lying now on her chest, he gripped her nipples and squeezed them hard. She gasped and screwed her eyes tight shut as he ordered the men to start.

As a result the first lash caught her completely by surprise. It spread a swathe of scalding, stinging heat across the skin of her left upper back, the force of the impact making her cry out and open her eyes in shock. Carlo had released her nipples and was standing in front of her, watching her closely. The second lash caught her across the right upper back but this time she was more prepared and although she jerked forward, she kept her silence and returned his stare.

She had got the measure of the pain and as she had suspected it was no worse than anything else she had put herself through; certainly not the dislocated shoulder she had got from coming off a motorbike on a race track once. She settled herself, and even as she heard the whips swishing in behind her and scalding her skin with each impact as they worked down her body and started making her buttocks glow and sting, she realised that the tingling in her belly which accompanied all her adventures was growing. Furiously she tried to deny it and concentrated on biting her lip to silence the yelps which tried to leap up her throat and burst from her lips. She held Carlo's eyes with her own and let nothing more than hisses and grunts escape her lips. And then it was over. She relaxed the grip her fingers had taken on the chains holding her wrist restraints, let her breath out and proudly shook her hair back. Carlo made no move and just stood impassively.

"Repeat the punishment," he said quietly.

"Wha......?" Tara managed a disbelieving croak before the whips started in on her again. This time she had no mental defences and the whips stormed into her like an invading army taking a citadel. The heat from flesh already pounding from its first beating seemed to burst into bright flame inside her body. It was so intense that it was no longer pain somehow, though she had no name for what it was. She twisted and spun in her chains, going this way and that as she inadvertently exposed a breast or her stomach to one whip or the other. She screamed just as the other girls had, her hair flying and tossing around her head.

She never heard the second count of twenty being completed and it took a second or two before she stopped crying out and twisting, then she hung motionless, her breathing ragged and loud in her ears. No one approached her for a while and as her head cleared Tara became aware that her entire body pulsed and burned both inside and out like it never had before. Slowly she got her feet under her again and stood up properly. She knew she should feel outraged and furious at what had been inflicted on her but instead she felt as she did whenever she accomplished something she had set herself to do. There was an inner calm and at the same time an aching need between her legs. She glanced down and saw that her nipples were hard, red little bullets sticking out proudly and unmistakably from their swollen areolae.

Carlo stepped forward and with no warning reached between her unprotesting thighs. She gasped and winced as his fingers entered her, but really there was no need. They slid in quite easily and as he twisted them inside her she felt herself begin to melt. She groaned in dismay at her sluttish reaction and her shame was complete when Carlo laughed and withdrew his fingers.

In a scarlet daze of pain and confusion she staggered back to her cell, half supported by Carlo himself. Vaguely she was aware that the men were now chaining the girls to their beds which stood at the rear of the cells, and it was obvious that they were taking full advantage of them at the same time. Suddenly the hold, which up until then had resounded to female screams and sobs, began instead to echo to female moans and cries of an entirely different nature as hands strayed over breasts, tweaking and pulling at nipples or dived between legs to explore the split peaches of soft feminine sex flesh.

Carlo steered Tara straight to the back of her cell and clipped her restraints directly to a steel loop mounted about eighteen inches above the narrow bunk and then pushed her down onto it. She contrived to go down face-first to save her ravaged back and buttocks from contact with the rough fabric on the bed, but Carlo turned her over anyway and she gasped as the fibres made contact with her skin. From between her upraised arms she looked up at him. He was cruel and pitiless she knew. She gave an involuntary shudder as she recalled the utter calmness with which he had condemned her to twice the other girls' punishment. But she had taken it, she thought proudly..........and now she realised she was waiting to see what he would do next. For a moment he did nothing and Tara became more aware of what was going on around her. Down by her feet where they lay on the bunk, in the next cell she could hear the redhead grunting rhythmically as one of the guards pounded into her. Just behind her head another guard's boots were pressed against the bars as he braced himself to better penetrate the girl he was riding. All around her were the slaps of flesh on flesh, the hoarse moans of approaching female orgasms becoming urgent as the climaxes came nearer and nearer, and superimposed on those were the occasional roars of satisfaction as one or other of the men reached their own pinnacles. After such a confusing time as Tara had had of the last day....two days....she didn't know, she finally succumbed. It was the most blatantly orgiastic scene she could ever have imagined, and after the trauma of being whipped it was all too much. Without looking away from Carlo, she let her right leg slip from the bed and drew her left foot up so that the leg was bent at the knee. He gave his white-toothed grin as she opened herself for him.