The Mistress Files by Tiffany Reisz Page B

decided it might be time to give him some real pain. Of course, she’d broken the skin, which meant a few more precautions would be necessary. She opened a case that had a new deerskin flogger in it—never before used. Doing edge-play with a client meant more work for her during and after. Usually she charged through the nose for even a cut or two, but for him, well, he was a special case. Not that this was a freebie. To quote the boss: “No freebies. Ever.”
    She stood behind him and examined her handiwork.
    “You’re bleeding,” she said. “A lot.”
    “ Merci ” was his sole response, the only one she expected, the only one she wanted.
    “But they’re tiny little cuts. If I left them alone, they’d heal up in two days. Where’s the fun in that?”
    She raised the flogger and brought it down hard onto his bleeding back. She struck again. And again. She struck high and hard, low and deep. She added welts to the cuts, bruises to the welts. The tips of the flogger tails smeared the blood and soon his entire back had turned a rusty red.
    After a good—for her—half hour of flogging she dropped the deerskin and let him catch his breath.
    “Have you ever safed out with anyone?” she asked as she came to stand at his side again. A few drops of semen had leaked from his cock and she caught them on her fingertip.
    “ Non , Maîtresse. ”
    “You like pain that much? Or is it pride?”
    “You know the answer to that already. Why did you never safe out with him?”
    “I did,” she corrected him. “But only once.”
    “Why?”
    “Because,” she said as she wrapped her hand around his erection again and squeezed to the point of pain, “he ordered me to marry him.”
    “He must be a masochist, too,” he said through gritted teeth. The Mistress could only laugh.
    “Oh, you’re gonna get it big-time for that.”
    Big-time meant the cane. Not the rattan cane she used to leave the hand-sized bruises on a client’s ass or thighs. No, what she needed was the little cane—white plastic, long as a conductor’s baton. In fact, it had always reminded her of a baton; one she used to conduct a symphony of pain.
    She started under his left shoulder blade and left a two-inch raised welt by flicking the baton against his skin. An unassuming little toy, no one ever dreamed it hurt as much as it did, not until they felt the fiery force of it. Getting cut with a razor hurt less than this little devil.
    “Breathe,” she instructed as she flicked it against him again, barely half an inch below the first welt. “Don’t forget to breathe....”
    “I’m breathing,” he said although she’d seen him holding his breath seconds earlier. He’d passed out in their sessions, usually during breath-play scenes. No harm, no foul. Fainting, falling, crying, wailing, being hauled to your breaking point and left there staring into the abyss—that’s what happened behind locked dungeon doors when the vanilla world wasn’t watching and the monsters came out to play. In this room with this man, she had no one to answer to but God, and God wasn’t asking any questions right now.
    “Good boy. You pass out on me and game’s over. And we don’t want that, do we? You haven’t even come yet. You take thirty more of these,” she said, flicking him once more and smiling at the searing red line on his back, “and we’ll discuss throwing a little pleasure into this mix.”
    “Thirty-three welts?”
    “What? I like my biblical numbers. Now shut up and breathe.” She flicked him again, working her way down his entire left side. By the time she was done with him, there would be no part of his body from his neck to his hip that wasn’t either bruised or bleeding or scoured with welts. He loved his souvenirs, as he always called them. Souvenirs from his holidays in Hell.
    Up his right side she decorated him with more welts. To add a little challenge she made him count the flicks of her baton for the last seventeen strikes. His