One Day Ago

Hundreds of male guards, thirteen awakened slaves, and one traitorous half-brother had died this morning, yet Xerxes the Seventh only mourned one of them.

Lexia had never been the prettiest of his slaves — that honor belonged to Roxanne — yet she had been pure in a way he didn’t understand. In a way that, now, he would never understand.

He didn’t want to understand anymore.

All he wanted was revenge.

How much revenge could he wring out of this woman in front of him?

She was stripped naked, tied up so she could barely move, tormented by the mere passage of time.

The wooden horse pressed roughly into her vagina each time she twitched a single muscle the wrong way, causing a moan that had long since had the pleasure sucked out of it.

“When you were my father’s bitch, you used to love this thing. What’s different now, I wonder?”

He asked, but he didn’t expect her to reply. She was ball-gagged, the one his father had loved to use on her, and he knew the answer anyways. The longer she spent on there the more painful it got. She’d loved the anticipation, the teasing, the reassurance that at the end his father would rescue her before the pain got too bad…

But his father was dead now, and she’d backed his half-brother’s bid for the throne. The half-brother was her child, and Xerxes wasn’t, so it made sense, but that didn’t lessen his rage.

He’d taken care to tie her up just like his father had. The wooden horse was a large triangular instrument whose bottom was raised a foot and a half off the ground. It had a slightly rounded edge where her vagina sat, where the pressure grew and grew and grew the longer she was on there. Then her legs were tied to themselves, ankle to thigh, so she had no contact with the ground. Her arms were bound behind her at the wrists and elbows, then yanked up to the ceiling so her torso was forced down and forward, almost touching the wooden edge but never actually reaching it, never able to give her tortured pussy any relief. She could only move by slivers of an inch, shifting the pain from one overly sensitive lobe to another, then her clit, then shifting back long before any of them had time to recover.

Slobber dribbled past the gag, falling onto the sloped wood and sliding down to the floor. Xerxes caught a drop of it and wiped it on the woman’s face. “Disgusting.”

She moaned something incomprehensible.

“What was that?” he asked? “You’re sorry? Well it’s too late now. You tried to kill me. You tried to kill me, and yet I survived. Now, I know you’ve been here for over an hour, but I had some affairs of state to tend to. I still have those, you know. Your son… well, he doesn’t.”

She shook her arms in protest, a futile gesture which impressed no one. It only upset the delicate balance she’d achieved and set off garbled screams of pain as new parts of her pussy were crushed under her weight. He’d considered tying stones to her legs, to speed the torture, but his father had never done that, and changing a single thing except the time spent mounted on the torture device would defeat the purpose.

He wanted to take any pleasurable moments she might have ever experienced and turn them into abject misery. She was a pain slut, the most masochistic in his father’s extensive collection of slaves, so it was easy to simply extend her old games until they became unbearable.

And it was working. She was protesting, she was screaming, and he was rock hard at the sight of her anguish.

He almost, for a moment, forgotten the pain of losing Lexia. The memory of watching her die made his dick go limp, but it redoubled his desire to make this woman pay.

“I’ll be taking his slaves. You might call yourselves soldiers, or awakened, or empowered, or whatever the current fad is. You might try to to give yourselves dignity. But I know what it is. And deep down, you know it too.”

She was silent.

“Wear the collar long enough, and you feel a connection with even the worst of Masters.” He lied, but she had no way of knowing that. She’d only ever worn the collar for a man she loved. “What does that tell you about yourself? About your position?”

He pulled out a collar. It had the power to control an awakened, to multiply their power, and to even provide a psychic connection if the affection grew strong enough. The stronger the bond of love, the more effective it was.

Yet even with no love, even with hatred, it would make her obey his direct commands. He should have put it on her the moment his father had died. Then Lexia would still be alive.

Better late than never.

It was poor recompense, but at least this would be a continual torment to the woman who’d killed his love, to be forced to serve the man she’d tried to overthrow, the man who’d killed her son.

When she saw the collar she screamed through the gag and thrashed pitifully away from Xerxes, ignoring the horrendous pain her actions must have caused her, yet moving barely an inch through all her struggle.

It clicked shut around her neck and he spoke the words: “I bind you to myself.”

Blue light shone out from the collar’s center-line and he could feel her psychic energy. Distant, embroiled with hatred, yet she was there.

He reached behind her head and undid the gag. “Speak freely, slave.”

She gasped for breath and cursed him. “You will bring this kingdom to ruin,” she hissed.

“And you’ll help.”

“You’re a cold, heartless man.”

“I had a heart,” he said. He pulled a cane from where it hung on the wall and swung it at her legs. She squealed, and through the psychic link he could feel the terror and pain that overwhelmed her. The impact was already causing bruising on her leg, but the real pain would come from the flinch, the momentary loss of balance that would redouble all the other agonies of the wooden horse. He didn’t care whether his father had performed this added torment or not — he wanted her to hurt for daring to pretend he had never loved. He slammed the cane against her leg again, and then her back. He put his mouth next to her ear and breathed on it menacingly before whispering: “I had a heart, and you killed her.”

He backed up and surveyed the woman he tortured. She cried openly now, sobs coming freely now that the gag was removed. Or because he’d just doubled her pain. Women were impossible to understand.

A cough from the hallway interrupted his thoughts. Next to Lexia, Roxanne was the slave he’d built the strongest connection with, and he could tell that she had a message for him. “Report.”

She stepped into the room, averting her eyes from the greusome scene. A surprising number of women were into pain, at least a little bit, but Roxanne was not one of them; she could barely stand a light spanking. “Master, we have received word that three newly awakened women disappeared during the fight this morning.”

“Disappeared?”

“They were part of the new training cohort, since they just turned eighteen and discovered their power.”

“Whose slaves were they?”

“None, sir. That was the problem. They’d awakened only recently, and hadn’t been assigned yet.”

He cursed. Such inefficiencies were going to be the death of him. The tortured laughter from behind him only confirmed how dire the situation was.

“Silence!” he Commanded. She was compelled to obey. He turned back to Roxanne. “Do we know what they looked like?”

“It was a neko, a Devonion, a northerner. The northerner was sent to us by our allies as tribute, the neko was captured in a border skirmish, and the Devonian was from a distant village near the eastern border.”

“So they will have no local connections.”

“Correct, sir.”

“Then they should be easy to capture. Why have you bothered me with such a trivial thing?”

“Well, sir, the neko… she has claws, and she mauled one of the caretakers. That itself is a minor thing, I know, but it says that she’s dangerous. And it isn’t just the awakened that have disappeared… we are still cataloguing the job spheres, sorting through the ones that had been embezzled for use in the coup attempt, but it appears that…” She looked off to the side nervously.

“Did the runaways steal them?”

Roxanne glanced at the woman impaled on the wooden horse and her face turned ashen. She was afraid of being punished, even though he hadn’t laid hands on her for years.

“Tell me,” he Commanded.

“Yes,” she said, collapsing into tears. “I’m sorry, but we think they stole some.”

Xerxes put his arms around her gently, pulling her into his chest. “It’s okay, it’s okay. This is bad for the kingdom, but it’s not your fault.”

“I’m sorry, it’s just that today has been so…” she sobbed, and for a while they said nothing. Her tears subsided, and then it was just her, wrapped in his arms. Like things should be. Or at least as good as things could be, with Lexia gone.

“I thought I was going to lose you,” she whispered. “I don’t know what I would have done.”

He pulled her chin up and kissed her on the lips, a soft gesture that set her to crying again.

“I’m so sorry, I know I need to be strong, now that I’m your right hand woman. I—”

“You fought well today. You defended me. You destroyed the traitors… and now this report, it just means that there are a couple more traitors we need to destroy. We’ve done it before, and we’ll do it again. It’ll be easier this time.”

She nodded, and this time she raised her own chin and kissed him back.

He tried not to think of Lexia. Roxanne knew that girl was special, but there was no reason to rub it in her face, and her kiss was exhilarating like a spring wind.

When they released they both breathed hard.

There would be time for this later. For now, he needed to respond.

“I want you to take a message to our search teams. I want them out there, looking for these runaways. Alive, if possible, and in slave collars. With a Master assigned for safekeeping. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Deliver that message and leave me with two guards, then report back to your chambers, where we—” he grabbed the ring on her collar and pulled her close, kissing her briefly before continuing, “—may pursue our pleasure without this unsightly traitor interrupting.”

She laughed giddily. “Yes, sir.”

Xerxes waited until she’d left before going back to the traitorous wench on the wooden horse. She had been dutifully silent the entire time, without so much as a moan or a whimper, compelled by his command.

He revoked the command and basked in her agonized howl.

“You’re going to have three neighbors here soon,” he said triumphantly. “They’re all going to be wearing my collar, just like you, and suffering at my command as an example.”

“You’re never going to—”

He slapped her, pushing her just enough to the side that her labia was crushed under her weight, and setting off another desperate whine as she struggled to find a position that was even a tiny bit less agonizing than where he’d knocked her.

He put the gag back on, forcing it into her mouth before she could recover, fastening it tight. He whispered in her ear a soft threat, one barely audible above her moans: “You are under my dominion now. And I will break you.”