Labyrinth, An Erotic b**m Novel

Chapter Two-2

It has become clear to me that whoever creates the labyrinth in its many incarnations ensures its secrecy and has protected its activities from intruders, and even the long arm of law, with more than several vicious dogs that ward away the indigent and the curious that might happen on the scene.

How all this works is just mere speculation on my part. I know that Alec West has something to do with it, and a man named Mr. D’Lancy, though for the life of me I don’t ever recall meeting him. It makes me wonder if he exists at all.

Any attempts to wring facts from my husband have failed. He either ignores my inquisitive probing, or shrugs as if he doesn’t have a clue how these events are pulled off. Knowing Thayer, he knows plenty, at least enough to feel safe himself and sure that I will be safe as well. I sometimes wonder, however, if other women who find themselves in this offbeat world feel as safe from harm as I do. I have Thayer. Who do they have protecting them?

On a more upbeat note, I like to imagine that somewhere there’s a magician stirring a pot and casting a spell, one that weaves its way like an insidious fog through the minds and bodies of the labyrinth’s players, drawing them to assemble for a night of riotous perversion and returning them to their lives with that significant piece of them that the real world leaves longing finally feeling some degree of satisfaction. Conjured through the careful manipulation of shadows and mirrors, I sense the labyrinth as a dangerous inebriation, even though I’m sure it’s no more perilous than a couple of cocktails or a relaxing joint on a Friday night.

On this occasion I found myself in a converted warehouse, although it was not clear exactly how the large space was being remade—subsidized apartments, upscale condos, an office building? No clue as I crawled across its wood floors, although the shining surfaces looked as if they’d been thoroughly refurbished, which led me to believe that this was not some slapdash renovation. The walls were enormous, the partitioned rooms quite large, sound hit my ears in strange ways coming from all directions. Some conversations I heard distinctly, while much of the din was just a constant roar of noise. After a time the surrounding atmosphere became so chaotic inside my head that I let my mind check out and my body lead. I had done that before with good results.

But wasn’t that exactly what I wanted—a place, a time, a circumstance where Kathryn could quit being Kathryn, quit being the stock broker, the wife, the self-made woman, the dynamic force in a power-oriented world? That would make me the labyrinth’s cliché female: assertive working woman by day, harlot by night. A cliché I frankly don’t mind.

I know that many of the other females there didn’t share my situation. Did I know this because I’d spent time with them talking ‘labyrinth’ over coffee and donuts? Did we lunch together every Tuesday noon and share ‘labyrinth’ gossip?

Of course not.

I know what I know by instinct. Seeing women baring their bodies is seeing them bare their souls, their lives, their warts and subtleties. Seeing them beaten, crying, pining for more, begging for the soul deep satisfaction that comes from playing amongst the damned and the extreme, tells me volumes about who they are. All the facts about them read like the pages of an instruction manual. I know them; they are my sisters, my fellow slaves to unspoken lusts, even though we’d never speak to one another should we meet on a city street.

Jewel was there that night with Billy. By the time we arrived at their scene, she was already on her knees, weeping, her head in her hands as Billy berated her for some supposed crime. My opinion? Lots of made-up stories arise to give the heavy stuff a decent rationale. Like the burned dinner, the overdrawn checking account, or being caught running around on her husband—that would be a laugh, since Billy is not Jewel’s husband. I know this because I listen carefully to the innocuous conversation, the ones I’m not supposed to hear but I do anyway. I pay attention. The entire scene intrigues me, plus there are the dead hours of these long nights when I recoup from one scene of exhausting s*x play and must regroup for the next. As demanding as the constant action sometimes is, even I need a break, even Thayer can appreciate that.

Dead hours can get boring without some way to spend my time.

I think. I listen. I form opinions that will never be voiced. I even make up stories for my sister s*x slaves, only to learn, if I’m lucky to stumble on real facts, that I’m not far off the mark about these women.

One important opinion: regardless of the events that might damn a labyrinth property to a hard night of s****l abuse, the stated ‘criminal’ acts of which they are accused are just excuses, what sadists and masochists do to justify their need to give and receive the extremes of pain. There should be no need for excuses, but I know for some that heightens the experience. They are living out their dreams, their secret fantasies in ways the real world never allows. At its heart, this is simply a wonderfully creative, deviously deceptive, but in the end basically transparent game of pretend.

Jewel wept with great emotion—and that was real. As always, she suffers true pain. I imagine her life is a miserable one; something was murmured once about a drunken husband. Which causes me to wonder, is her masochistic play at the labyrinth an act of revenge for her? Or the way she eases the pain in her life? Does she need this sort of night to soothe away the ache that her real life gives her? I believe so, in part, though I believe there is something deeper, too. She is possessed by this. I see that truth on her emotive face, and all the make-up and all the pretty smiles cannot mask that fact. When the make-up and the pretty smiles fade her screams remain, her tortured face turns savage, her eyes grow wild, and she begs like a dog to feel another lashing stroke of the whip tear into her body.

It’s good that Billy loves her—which is something that is quite clear to all. But like every other man who belongs in this crowd, Billy is a sadistic bastard. I watch Billy and Jewel with fear and awe of something so shockingly brutal and tenderly moving that I’m prone to clutch my throat, the anxiety in me grabs hard as I breathlessly watch their startling interaction.

In the warehouse he repeated what I’ve seen from him before. He stalked her first, a slap to the face followed, then derisive remark.

“Look at you, slut! Yeah, look at you, weeping like a baby.” Another slap and her sobbing grew richer and more self-absorbed. “You deserve your tears,” he mocked her. “You like them, you need them. Tell me that’s so.”

She hesitated, preferring the bath of tears to a glance at his face. But that is not what Billy wanted and he used the tip of a riding crop to raise her chin so she would look him in the eye.

Finally, after constant balking, there was an anguished: “Yes, yes I need them, Billy!”

She sobbed more, tears streamed from her upturned face as Billy refused to lower the crop.

There are no safe places in the labyrinth, no place to hide. Everything is exposed.

“You want it hard?” I asked.

Sobbing still, she said: “Yes, Billy. Yes, sir, I want it hard.”

“You want me to beat you?” He always makes her be specific.

“No-No!” She shook her head and closed her eyes, but he was right there with her, denying her denial.

“Look at me!” he snapped like an angry terrier.

“Yes, sir.” Like the true supplicant her hands were in praying position.

“And what is your crime tonight?”

“I’m a lousy wife and a miserable mother. I steal stuff. Money. I’ve taken his money.” Her anguished face was filled with guilt.

Taking her husband’s money because he wouldn’t give it to her otherwise—this little tidbit of information came to me a year ago when I heard Billy talking to Thayer as Jewel was coming down from a subspace high.

“You disgust me,” Billy sounded angry.

He slapped her face several times, then jerked her chain and forced her to her feet. She rose to stand teetering on a pair of ridiculously high spike heels that no woman could master—a f*****g sadist’s dream. With her collar shackled to a hanging hook, she was forced to her tiptoes, forced to stay steady, even when Billy smacked her big breasts back and forth with the palm and back of his hand until both were bouncing madly and gloriously red.

“You just don’t know how to behave, do you?” The question just rhetorical.

He started smacking her p***y, making her dance on precarious tiptoes, wobbling, wavering, reeling from side to side while he barked an ill-tempered, “Stand still!” Then he continued the abuse in the same vicious way, knocking her off balance again. Finally, he moved in close and grabbed her by the collar, the two going eye to eye. “I said, stand still.”

“But I can’t, Billy!” she cried.

“Well then, maybe you need some help.” He turned his head and called out to someone off stage in this little drama. “Lower the yoke!”

From above them both, the crude confinement yoke descended, swaying much like the hook that held Jewel up by the collar. Trading the hook for the yoke, Billy enclosed his sub’s neck between the wooden slats and secured her wrists to either side of her head, well out of the way of further punishment.

“A spreader bar!” Billy called out next and one appeared like magic from the cloaking shadows of the room. While her feet were secured widely apart, Jewel was mercifully lowered enough so that she didn’t choke. But that was small consolation, as the beating began in earnest; blows laid against her p***y as if—being the most offense part of her body—it deserved the vile punishment.

I was so in tune with her torture that I could feel each striking lash as if it were striking me. I could feel the tears that flooded from my eyes and imagine myself in her place—I’d been yoked and whipped once. But Jewel was special, so capable of turning pain into pleasure that I had no doubt that within minutes, her being would skyrocket beyond the building to places unknown, to a realm the world can’t see or feel in any other way but through the lashing of a whip expertly laid against defenseless flesh. The unity of vision between Jewel and Billy held a sizable crowd enthralled, until the transformation began. Before it was over, there would be a euphoric look on Jewel’s face; her heart would come shining through and someone in the crowd would utter the obvious truth, “What a goddam angel!”

Damned by God! But still an angel, that’s Jewel.

If I could have known that feeling myself, I might have gone through the same rough machinations. But that was not me, that was not my labyrinth.

I’m basically just a slut, who loves s*x and being f****d into oblivion.

I saw the arriving couple before anyone else gazed in that direction. Thayer and I just happened to be near the front entrance when the new girl walked in on Alec West’s arm.

First, though, I should tell you about Alec West. The man’s a real rake—not the garden tool—but as in lecher, libertine, womanizer, a basically profligate male slut. Inside the labyrinth the man demonstrates a beguiling charm that is difficult to resist. His blue eyes crackle with amusement in the company of women he’s trying to impress…or woo…or manipulate, and his smile is so evocative of a man with obvious motives. He’s the kind that starts with subtleties then moves on with force as necessary. He’d rather bring a woman to her knees because she wants to be there, although he has no problem getting her there with the back of his hand against her face—if that’s what it takes.

You don’t want to cross him for any reason. He’s ruthless about everything from wooing women to business transactions, something I’m an expert about myself, and why I happen to know the man outside the labyrinth. I’ve crawled on my knees to suck his c**k and he’s gotten off with a sigh of supreme satisfaction. But that first time in the labyrinth, I nearly panicked and ran from the Spanish hacienda when my eyes came to rest on a face that was all too familiar—although we’d not yet had any business dealings amongst ourselves. As soon as Thayer saw the horrified look on my face, he had to jerk me back to reality, sensing why what I’d seen was so disturbing. “If this is to work at all, Kathryn,” he said, “you can’t panic when you see someone you recognize. Trust me, he will never mention what happens here outside these walls.” Thayer was right. Two days after our first labyrinth weekend was over, I found myself in a corporate boardroom with Alec West. Not one expression of recognition appeared on his lips, in his eyes, or across his brow. Although if there had been an acknowledgement of our past association – with me on my knees and his c**k in my mouth – I think I would have had the upper hand. Why? s*x is power. And I consider myself pretty damned powerful when on my knees. I may give satisfaction on demand, but it remains mine to give or take, and you can’t tell me that a man given to subtleties like Alec West won’t be able to tell what kind of mood I’m in by the subtleties of my blowjob. If anything, it was a positive experience to face him two days after my first wild weekend of illicit s*x. I could feel the power rising up in me as we sat staring eye to eye, negotiating a deal with far-reaching ramifications that had nothing to do with where or why we first met. But oh, what a shrewd bargaining chip my weekend’s experience had given me! I certainly wasn’t going to be turned into a spineless ninny taking orders from horny sadists. Neither he nor any man who frequents the labyrinth could slay me.