The Fine Art of Torture (Slave of the Aristocracy Book 3) Read online

  He took a bite of eggs with hollandaise sauce and she followed his lead. It was delicious. For a minute, she felt like a lady again. Then she remembered that she would never be a lady again. Was that the professor’s cruel trick? To make her think about what she had lost when she became a slave?

  A sadist could enjoy inflicting psychological pain as much as from physical pain. This was a new revelation to her.

  And he was inflicting severe psychological pain. It hurt her to think about what she had lost, possibly more than the actual loss itself.

  To counter the pain of remembered loss, she recalled the downside of being a lady. The numbing boredom. The endless days all the same. Night after night alone in her bed for months on end, her husband too sated from fucking slaves to give her cunt any attention.

  Some parts of being a lady were better lost. And some parts of being a slave were not so bad.

  During her six months of slavery, she had been fucked more times than in all her years of marriage, including her honeymoon. More times even though her previous owner had kept her celibate for more than two months.

  Her greatest fear, now, was that this avowed sadist would torture her to death on a whim. Her second greatest fear was that she would never get fucked again. He had a reputation for never having carnal relations with slaves.

  “I beg your pardon?” she asked when she realized that the professor had said something and she had been too preoccupied with her own thoughts to hear it.

  He raised a hairy white eyebrow and said, gently, “I asked, my dear, if it is true that you sold yourself into slavery?”

  “Yes. Six months ago I was the wife of Lord Fortson. I accompanied him to a slave auction and, on a whim, I climbed up onto the block and told the auctioneer to sell me to the highest bidder.”

  “How extraordinary. Didn’t you know that slaves are treated rather … callously?”

  “I knew that slaves were property and had no rights. I knew that pleasure slaves were offered to many men for sexual use. I knew that they were punished, sometimes for no other reason but that is was their owner’s wish. I did not know that pleasure slaves were sold off as labor slaves before the age of forty and were worked to death before they were forty-five.”

  He gazed at her impassively while he ate another bite of egg, ham, and muffin dripping with hollandaise sauce. When his mouth was clear, he said, “Would that knowledge have inhibited you from offering yourself for sale?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe not. The life of a lady was so boring, you can’t imagine. I might well have chosen a dozen years of slavery over half a century of living death in my husband’s manor.” The dozen years was not a random figure. She was twenty-eight. In twelve years she would be forty – too old to be sold as a pleasure slave again.

  He ate another bite. “Living death seems to be rather a hyperbole. Surely being a member of the aristocracy wasn’t that bad.”

  “It was more than I could stand. I have little patience for boredom.”

  He chuckled. “Yet I can’t imagine a more boring life than that of a pleasure slave. Don’t you spend most of your time waiting for your owner to come to the kennel and make use of you before he returns to his manor?”

  “Waiting is easy when you know that something exciting is going to happen soon. Waiting for nothing to happen is the real torture. I don’t know what you intend to do to me this afternoon but I’m consumed by dreadful thoughts about it. I am not bored right now. Sitting here in a state of terror is not boring.”

  He laughed softly. “I’ll have to make sure that I don’t disappoint you, then. We will see if I can disabuse you of the notion that boredom is the worst possible torture.”

  She spent a minute contemplating the wisdom of challenging a sadist to impress her with his skill. Her stomach churned with fear. She ate more of the eggs Benedict in hope that the weight of food would settle it.

  “I’m a fortunate man,” he said. “I’ve been privileged to spend my life in academic pursuits and have never been bored. Nothing excites the mind like a brilliant idea.”

  “Does whipping a woman and hearing her scream excite your mind?”

  “It certainly does.” His eyes twinkled at her. “But it’s not nearly as exciting as making a woman suffer in some novel way that may never have been done before. You will certainly endure your share of beatings at my hand with all manner of implements, but there are so many other possibilities that the mind boggles. You may find that you wish you were suffering only a traditional whipping when I’m doing my best work in some more creative way.”

  She believed him. Once, she had spent a half hour in a crucifixion frame that this man had built and sold to a lord. The pain had been excruciating. She would have preferred a whipping.

  She put more egg Benedict into her mouth to stop it up before she talked herself into some torture that was even more hideous than whatever the professor had already planned.

  When his plate was empty, he laid his knife and fork down. “If you will excuse me, I will be working in my office for the rest of the morning. It’s the door on the main floor in the middle. Please don’t disturb me unless it’s absolutely necessary. I’ll leave the dishes and cleaning the kitchen to you. I have no radio so you’ll have to amuse yourself with the books in the study.” He smiled cheerfully. “I do hope you find something to keep you from being too bored.”

  * * *

  “Wake up, my dear. Wake up.”

  Irene’s eyes felt gummy as she forced them open.

  She was lying on the bed in her bedroom, still wearing the blue dress. After spending a sleepless night on the bed of nails, she had been so tired that she’d barely had the energy to kick her shoes off before flopping down.

  The professor’s cheerful face was beaming at her. “It’s one o’clock. Your presence is required in the studio.”

  Irene knew what that meant. It was time for her to be tortured. Her stomach twisted into a knot.

  “Brush your hair and wash your face. No need for cosmetics. I’ll expect you in five minutes. Don’t be late.” He left the room.

  He had said nothing about the dress but she was certain that he’d need her nude to torture her properly. She shed the dress, camisole, and panties. It felt right. Nude was the normal attire for a pleasure slave. Even though her pain, not sex, would be his pleasure.

  It only took a couple of minutes to splash some water on her face and brush out her hair. As soon as she was ready, she hurried down to the studio. She didn’t want to be late.

  The professor wasn’t alone. Two other men stood next to him.

  One was in his early thirties, dark-haired with chiseled, matinee-idol features. He was tall with broad shoulders and a narrow waist. Irene was sure that, if he shed his shirt, his muscles would be as well defined as if they had been chiseled out of marble.

  The other man was intermediate in age, maybe fifty. His head was as bald as an egg and about as round. Sparkling blue eyes were topped by bushy grey eyebrows. He had a potbelly and weak chin. He was the picture of an ordinary middle-aged man.

  All three men stopped chatting and turned to watch the nude slave walk across the studio toward them.

  The professor did not introduce his companions. He gestured to an elevated padded surface, reclined from the vertical by a few degrees, with a step on the bottom.

  Irene understood what she was to do. She turned her back to the surface, stepped up and reclined against it. This put her chest at the height of the men’s shoulders.

  The professor strapped her down at the ankles, knees, hips, wrists, elbows, and shoulders. Her body was held completely immobile but her head was free to move.

  Her heart was beating hard. She feared that her tender breasts, vulnerable belly, and muscular thighs would be whipped. She didn’t guess how soon she would come to wish that she were being only whipped.

  “Are you comfortable, my dear?” The professor asked.

  She nodded.

  He turned to address
his companions. “The question of the day is how much pain can be administered to a single nipple.” He reached out and gently caressed Irene’s left nipple. The room was slightly chill and her nipple was erect. It protruded prominently.

  She cringed at the prospect of having her nipple destroyed but she was powerless to move it even an inch from his fingers.

  “I choose the nipple because it is a part of the body that, like the fingertips, lips, earlobes and, of course, the clitoris, is densely populated by nerve endings. Furthermore, if we include the areola, it gives us a relatively large area to work on.”

  He ran his finger around her areola and watched it crinkle in response.

  “We could burn it, cut it, or crush it, but it would be a pity to damage such a lovely bit of flesh. Worse, if we damage it too severely, we could render it incapable of suffering additional pain. Nerve damage would be counterproductive if we want the pain to continue for some hours today. And, of course, we want to leave the nipple intact so that we can make it suffer again in the future.”

  He looked up into Irene’s eyes.

  She looked deep into his, trying to see the insanity behind his logic. It was a relief to hear that he did not intend to cause permanent damage. She hoped that he was deluding himself about how much pain he could cause. After all, it was just a nipple. Surely she could ignore what he was doing to such a small part of her anatomy. She could let her mind drift away for a few hours.

  She remembered the bed of nails. It had looked fearsome but had been tolerable, even when lying on it all night. The biggest problem had been that it had caused just enough pain to keep her from sleeping. The second problem had been than she hadn’t been able to move much because she didn’t want to scrape herself raw by sliding over the sharp tips.

  This so-called nipple torture was likely to be the same. Fearsome sounding, but in the end, more likely to cause severe discomfort than serious pain.

  She was beginning to suspect that the professor’s bark was worse than his bite.

  He addressed his companions again. “Pain is the body’s way of telling the person that damage is occurring. If we don’t want to cause irreversible damage, then we have to trick the body into thinking that it is being damaged more than it actually is. One elegant solution is to stimulate directly the body’s pain receptors. Modern technology gives us the means.”

  He rolled a cart covered with electrical equipment next to Irene. “Dr. Alfredson will be joining us soon. He has a class until one-thirty. The setup will take a while, though, so he should have ample time to arrive before the main show.” The professor used a pair of rubber-tipped tweezers to pick up a wire and hold the end aloft. “This is a pair of tiny electrodes. They are four millimeters long and separated by a one millimeter gap. We have eight dozen pairs, so inserting them into the nipple will take some time.”

  Eight dozen pairs. Ninety-six pairs. A hundred and eighty-two individual needles would soon be inserted into a single nipple. Irene had a premonition that her afternoon was not going to be a walk in the park.

  A large magnifying glass was attached to the edge of the cart by a flexible arm. The professor positioned it over Irene’s left nipple. Then he picked up a pair of tiny electrodes with the tweezers and sank them slowly and deeply into the center of her erect nipple.

  “How does that feel?” he asked her.

  “It hurt going in,” she said. “About as much as a vaccination needle. Maybe slightly less.”

  “That’s to be expected,” he replied. “They’re a lot smaller, but there are two of them going in at a time and they’re being inserted into a much more sensitive part of your body than an arm or buttock.”

  He inserted another pair close to the first pair. Then another and another.

  She looked down. Four fine wires were protruding from her nipple. Her eye followed them back to a grey metal box that was sitting on the bench. The box was adorned with assorted switches, knobs, dials, and levers. A great many more fine wires connected the box to a piece of foam that was studded with tiny electrodes.

  The pain was already noticeable and that was from only four pairs. She began to appreciate that the pain from ninety-six pairs, a hundred and eighty-two separate needles, no matter how small, was going to be severe. And that was before electricity was flowing through them.

  The professor started inserting electrodes into the side of her nipple, beginning at the top rim. He did not push them straight across but angled them down toward her body. “The trick is to make sure that the electrodes don’t touch each other under the skin,” he said. “Chances are that some of them will short out no matter how careful I am, but it should be only a few. This nipple is large enough that I can fit four ranks of six electrodes down the sides. That plus the four in the tip makes a full thirty pairs of electrodes on the nipple itself. There will be plenty of room on the areola for the remaining sixty-six pairs.”

  He continued to insert the electrodes as he chatted with his companions.

  The pain in Irene’s nipple had increased from moderate to severe before he reached the base. Sweat was trickling down her ribs and she was breathing fast and deep.

  The professor had to steady her breast with a tight grip as he proceeded to place electrodes into her areola. The wires were fine, but their accumulated weight was dragging her nipple downward, putting pressure on the needles and increasing her pain.

  As he approached the outer edge of her areola, tears began to trickle down her cheeks and she began to moan softly. What had she thought before? That it was only a little nipple and that she would be able to ignore the pain and let her mind drift away?

  She had been a fool to imagine that.

  By the time the professor was down to the last few pairs of electrodes, her whole world was a single nipple. She barely noticed when another man came in the front door.

  “Al,” the professor said. “You’re just in time. I’m inserting the final electrodes.”

  The new arrival, a tall, middle-aged man with a tangle of Nordic blond hair and beard strode over to Irene and inspected her nipple. “Excellent. Have you lit her up yet?”

  “Not yet.” The professor pushed the magnifying glass out of the way. “Would you explain your electrical apparatus to our guests?”

  He shrugged. “There’s not much to explain. It’s a constant current source. That means that the voltage will rise as high as necessary to keep the current flowing constantly through the electrodes. Because the electrode pairs are slightly less than a millimeter apart, and because they make excellent contact with the wet flesh in which they are immersed, neither the current nor the voltage need be very high to stimulate the nerves. This is important because we don’t want to apply so much power that we damage the nerves. We will have to experiment for a while to find the minimal current necessary to create the maximal sensation.”

  Maximal sensation? Irene was already feeling more sensation than she could stand and they hadn’t even turned on the juice yet.

  She wanted to grab the bundle of wires and rip all the electrodes out of her nipple right now. But thick leather straps held her immobile. She could do nothing but suffer and endure.

  Al flipped a black switch on the box and the machine began to hum.

  He turned a large knob and a needle began to move across a scale.

  Irene’s nipple began to burn. She screamed and looked down, expecting to see smoke and flames boiling from her chest. All she could see was her passive nipple looking like some kind of miniature porcupine.

  Al flipped a silver switch and the pain dropped back to a tolerable level.

  “That got a reaction,” he said. “And not with much current at all. I think she can take more than that without damage.”

  “No!” she screamed. “Please, no more! I can’t take any more.”

  “Oh, sure you can,” the professor said. “You can take a lot more. We’ve barely begun.”

  Al watched the dial carefully as he turned the knob higher. “Let’s s
ee what this does.” He flipped the silver switch and Irene’s nipple lit up again.

  She shrieked at the sudden onset of agony in her sensitive flesh.

  The four men watched her contorted face with fascination.

  “She’s really hurting now,” the younger, dark-haired man said.

  “That’s the idea,” Al replied.

  “It’s just a nipple,” the other man said. “Imagine if we did this to her clit.”

  “Some day we will,” the professor replied. “Some day we will.”

  Irene continued to scream mindlessly.

  The dark haired man pushed his fingers between her legs and felt her damp slit. “I’d sure like to see that.”

  “You’ll be invited. That’s a promise.”

  “We aren’t applying a constant signal,” Al said. “After a nerve cell is excited, it takes about a thousandth of a second to reset before it can be excited again. So we’re actually applying a square wave with a frequency of two hundred hertz and a duty cycle of twenty percent.”

  The dark-haired man laughed. “She sure looks like she’s feeling two hundred hurts per second.”

  “Actually, she’s feeling constant pain.” The engineer preferred a literal view of the world.

  The men had to speak loudly because Irene was screaming constantly. She tried to thrash against the leather straps but they were snug enough that they didn’t allow her any play.

  “I wish that we could let her free,” the professor said. “She’d be dancing like a dervish. But we can’t. The electrodes are too fragile. She’d break the wires off.”

  She’d yank them right out of her flesh in an instant, if she could.

  The professor flipped the silver switch and the current ceased to flow.

  Irene slumped in her bonds. Her head lolled forward. Her nipple still hurt, not just from the two-hundred tiny needles but from residual activity in the over-stimulated nerves. Every couple of seconds, little lightning bolts of pain shot through her breast from her nipple. She jerked and moaned piteously.