Pam-Ann (18 page)

Familiar and unwelcome sounds
greeted Pam as Persephone led the slaves across the lobby – the
crack and thud of a heavy cane on bare flesh, accompanied by
half-stifled cries of pain and anguish. To the right of the hotel’s
reception desk stood three tall, chromed-metal posts. A naked girl
was bound to the central one, her arms stretched above her head
while a man lashed a thick cane across her helpless buttocks. A
half-dozen people had stopped to watch but others passed by as if
it were a regular occurrence. Pam shivered as the cane struck again
and the rounded jut of the girl’s buttocks distorted under the
wicked impact. In this place it
was
a regular
occurrence.

While Persephone registered, the
almost nude girl behind the desk rang a bell and handed a key to
the slave who instantly answered the summons.

“Miss Peake’s usual penthouse,”
the desk clerk said, pretending she was unaware of Persephone
looking back and forth between her coral-pink-rouged lips and
nipples and smiling lustfully. The bellhop led them to an elevator
where another girl operated the controls and, with steam swirling
around everyone’s ankles, it began to rise. The slaves wore little
round hats held by a strap under the chin and narrow loincloths
with a line of brass buttons at each side, in what to Pam were
grotesque caricatures of the usual bellhop’s uniform. As with the
desk clerks, they each had a maroon leather collar around their
necks bearing the hotel’s name in gold letters. Their bottoms were
bare. As the elevator continued upwards, Persephone closed one hand
over the left buttock of the girl operating the controls. It bore
several darkly pink lines. The girl grunted softly.

“Have you been a bad girl?”

“Yes, Mistress.”

The blonde’s fingers sank deeper
into the yielding flesh. “Mm, I like bad girls.”

“Let her be,” Drake said
quietly, almost the first words he had spoken since they had left
the railroad
station.

Persephone released her grip and
pouted. “Oh, Rafael, I hope you haven’t come just to spoil the
fun!”

He smiled broadly and glanced at
Pam. “I mean to have some fun of my own while I’m here. But first I
have business to attend to. I’ll drop off my case and see you this
evening.”

He was in and out of the
luxurious penthouse suite in two minutes. For no reason she could
understand, Pam felt suddenly lonely. Maybe if he had stayed he
might have saved her from Persephone’s worst excesses… or maybe
not. He had manhandled her, hit her and sexually abused her. He was
a hard, unfeeling man in a hard, unfeeling world. All she wanted to
do was escape both of them. Her left breast stung. Pam yelped and
saw Persephone scowling at her, a slim, ebony wand in her hand.

“Never mind standing there
juicing over your future Master. You’re under my control while
we’re here so pay attention to me, not those dirty thoughts running
around in your head.”

Pam rubbed her stinging tit.
Perhaps it was not so much Drake’s absence as Persephone’s presence
that was the cause of her loneliness. She recalled the look he had
given her in the elevator. Future Master? Hell would freeze over
first.

For no obvious reason, the
blonde mistress smacked her wand on the generously curved right
breast of the hotel slave. “Name,” she demanded, and when the girl
told her, she added, “I want my luggage sent up the moment it
arrives, Ellen.”

“Of course, Mistress.”

“When were you last caned?”

The
slave
paled. “Not for over a week, Mistress.”

“Well, take good care of me and
it will stay that way.” Persephone took a two hundred dollar bill
from her purse and Ellen’s eyes widened. “I expect you like fucking
girls.”

“No, Mistress. It’s
forbidden.”

“Of course it is, but
I
still do it.” She gave a knowing smile and held out the money. “You
do too, eh? Down in the slave pens after hours, playing pussy-touch
with your lover?”

The girl looked towards the
door. When it remained closed, she nodded. The bill changed
hands.

“Good girl. If you please me
there’ll be more of the same when I leave.” Persephone smiled
again. “Bring your lover here sometime and show me what you can do
and I’ll give you both another.”

“M… Mistress, we’d be publicly
flogged.”

“Oh, no one will tell. I’ve come
close myself and so has Eve, and the slaves know better than to say
anything.” She drew a circle around the girl’s rouged nipple with a
fingertip. “Now bring us lunch, darling, and I want champagne.”

The food was far better than the
Company provided on the airship. While Persephone and Eve sat on a
sofa, the slave girls knelt on the floor to eat, but the hotel even
provided napkins for them and Ellen did all the serving. Persephone
groped the slave shamelessly every time she came within reach. As
she bent to pour coffee the blonde trailed a finger down the cleft
in Ellen’s rear.

“You have a beautiful bottom,
darling.” She giggled. The champagne bottle was more than half
empty and no one but Persephone had drunk any.

The slave girl stiffened, still
bent over, and Pam guessed where the blonde had inserted her
finger. A knock at the door made her withdraw it quickly. The
luggage had arrived.

Persephone rose to her feet.
“Time we went shopping. Tania, fetch that clip I’m returning to
Tiffany’s, and bring the jewel case here.”

“Oh, Mistress!” The girl swapped
a dismayed look with Milly.

“Fetch it, or I’ll decorate your
tits with some stripes as well.”

With the slave girls’
nervousness sounding alarm bells in her head, Pam watched
Persephone open the square leather case Tania handed her. Her
stomach turned over.

“You first, Ann.” The blonde
tutted when Pam backed away from the three-inch long, jewel headed
pin she held
in her hand. “Now be a good girl. I
don’t want to flog your luscious tits. It will only upset Rafael
when he sees the stripes.” She giggled and raised the pin. “These
will hardly show at all after they’re removed.”

“You….” Pam swallowed. She had
been about to say ‘you can’t’, but Persephone could. She stepped
forward, gut hollow.

“You’d better hold her,”
Persephone told the other two girls and looking distinctly unhappy,
they gripped Pam’s arms as the blonde reached out.

Pam had known from the moment
she had seen it where the pin was intended to go. Hardly believing
the wicked bitch was really going to do it, she gritted her teeth
as Persephone took her right nipple in a firm pinch and pushed the
point of the shaft downwards into its resilient flesh. Her breath
escaped in a long rush as pain and pressure combined into horrid
and intense discomfort. A stab and stinging sensation in the
underside of her nipple told her the point had emerged there, but
Persephone continued forcing it through her flesh until the
sapphire-set head rested on the base of her breast’s tip.

The blonde mistress wiped a
smear of blood from the protruding shaft,
added a
tiny, rubber-lined, gold cap over its point, and turned her
attention to Pam’s left nipple. By the time she had forced the
shiny steel through the point of the tit, beads of sweat clung to
the American girl’s brow. Pam did not relax when Persephone capped
the slim shaft’s point
and d
rew
back. There were six more jewelled pins lying in the cushioned,
black velvet tray where the first two had come from and three more
identical trays in the case. Where were they meant to go?

Persephone took three of them in
her hand. “Hold her tight,” she told the slaves, and giggled. “It’s
just a little prick, darling. I’m sure you’ve had much bigger ones
before.” Her green eyes were bright, her right nipple dark and
erect beneath the emerald clip it still bore.

The shafts of the new pins were
only about two inches long. It made no discernible difference to
the pain as the slender blonde pressed the first one into the soft
skin of Pam’s breast above her smarting and aching nipple and
forced it into the tender flesh beneath. She added the others at
either side so the three were arranged in an arc above the pierced
point. Even as she struggled to imagine how anyone could be so
cruelly unfeeling as to force the sharp pins into her breasts
merely for the sake of decoration, Pam knew it would not be out of
the ordinary in this awful world. Thank God they had antiseptics.
Jaw clenched, she summoned the self-discipline and control that had
carried her through the last two years as Persephone added the
other three pins to her left breast and took something else from
the case.

Its purpose was plain but how it
was supposed to be fitted in place Pam could not imagine.
The narrow sheet of beaten gold was formed into
the shape of a vulva, complete with a groove along its centre. At
one end it was joined to a small dome of gold and at the other to a
short, slightly curved bar of the same metal that ended in a shiny
ball about three inches across. Persephone went behind her and
Milly and Tania bent Pam at the
waist. She hurriedly relaxed
as a tug on her butt-plug pulled it free and something else pressed
against her rear entrance. Already lubricated, her sphincter
yielded with a twinge of discomfort and Pam gasped as the golden
ball pushed past her little knot and the muscle closed around the
bar to which the ball was joined. Persephone faced her, reached
between Pam’s legs and pressed the beaten gold against her
sex-lips. A ridge of something inside separated her labia and
increased their contact with the narrow sheet of gold cupping them.
She looked down to see the blonde pinch the two halves of the domed
part at the front. They separated, revealing a set of small,
rubber-lined jaws, which she closed over the protrusion of the
American girl’s clitoral hood.

“Ow!” The clip nipped Pam’s
delicate flesh, though not as tightly as she had feared it would.
Nevertheless, it was uncomfortable. By the time Milly and Tania had
been adorned in the same ways she had, it was also making Pam much
too conscious of another sensation that was stirring between her
legs. She concentrated on the sting and pulse of her nipples,
though the hurt was less than when it had first been done.

Persephone stepped back and eyed
the slave girls with a satisfied smile. “Delicious, darlings.
Ready, Eve?”

The bodyguard had added a
police-style nightstick to a loop on the left side of her waist
belt while the girls were being decorated. She drew her big,
clumsy-looking revolver from its holster, deftly checked its load
and then replaced it. “Yes, Ma’am.”

Clipping the leashes to the
girls’ collars once more, Persephone led them to the door where she
stopped to cup one of Ellen’s firm tits in one hand. “You’ll be
here when I return?”

“Until seven, Mistress. Barbara
takes over then.”

“Your lover?”

The girl nodded.

“I’ll tell them at the desk I
need you both this evening.”

Persephone led the way to the
street and into a steam-taxi. As in the train, the slaves knelt
gripping a bar while the Freewomen had seats. Pam did not mind. Her
buttocks were still ravaged and aching from the caning and flogging
Christine had given them. As the taxi chuffed into motion she saw
Lord and Taylor’s
department store through the window in
exactly the same place it was in her world.

The journey was brief. The taxi
dropped them in Midtown Manhattan just past Forty Ninth Street. As
Persephone strolled along Fifth Avenue, towing the leashed girls
behind her, Pam began feeling just a little less self-conscious
about her embarrassing nudity. Well over half the people on the
crowded sidewalks were accompanied by one or more slaves, all near
naked and all female
. She had not seen a single
male slave since her arrival and had a feeling it would remain that
way. Everything Pam had witnessed told her that men had the upper
hand here and the women, even the free ones, were not just
expected, but required to be subservient. Lone men and couples far
outnumbered the single
women leading slave girls and Pam saw
no children at all.

Persephone took her time,
occasionally lingering at the windows of the prestigious shops that
lined the avenue as far as Sixtieth Street, just as they did back
in the real world. Next door to
Gucci
, Pam saw a booking
office for the
Empire Star Line
and right beside it another
for the
American Airship Corporation
. A short way past
Barney’s
was one for
Austrian Imperial Airways
.
Austrian? That one was beyond her ability to figure out.

The clothes on display in
Versace’s
windows showed that a bare right breast and a
nipple clip was the height of female fashion, as the
number of women
on the street dressed that way
confirmed. Persephone walked almost as far as Central Park before
returning the way they had come, window shopping but not stopping
to buy. Many of the store’s names were familiar, at least in part.
Pam saw a
Bergdorf’s
and almost directly across the avenue
from it a
Goodman’s
, apparently competing with each other.
She had seen
Saks
,
Armani
,
Prada
, and
De
Beers
, as well as unfamiliar names like
Gustavson
,
Wilks
and
Vienna Elite
by the time they arrived at
Tiffany’s
, but no
Chanel
or
Cartier
or any of
the other French shops so prominent where she came from. She had
also realised that Persephone’s promenade was more a display of her
wealth and importance by ostentatiously flaunting her expensively
decorated slaves than it was a shopping expedition. Plenty of other
people were doing exactly the same.