Chapter Thirty

Delila buried herself in the leather rooms and orgy pits of Outer Island, determined to think of nothing but her body’s pleasure. No matter how abject and spiritless that pleasure might be, she wouldn’t speak of her trials to anyone, except to tell Degas in a haughty tone that she loved her husband more than she did her life. Some three weeks back into the hands of her depravity, Fier pulled her away from fucking three whores and three men in one of the loneliest of Outer Island’s many chambers.

“Where are you taking me?” she snapped.

“Where I’ve been ordered,” he snapped back, as his leather strap hit her ass hard.

“You hit me again, I’ll scratch your eyes out!” she seethed at him.

“Then I would vent on you with a whip and cane, and you’d love that,” he retorted.

“So you’ll do it anyway?”

“No.”

He refused to tell her where he was taking her, but then it didn’t matter, since they’d reached their destination: Lexia’s boudoir.

“Tie her to the post,” Lexia ordered the valet, when she saw the two standing at her door.

Delila didn’t comprehend the words, though her eyes did record astonishment when Fier strung her up to a marble post, her wristbands fixed to an eyehook. The valet left Delila in Lexia’s hands, and though he was curious to know the Madam’s complaint against this whore, he said nothing.

“So, my dark beauty,” Lexia began. There was a cane baton in her hand, and as she moved behind the strung up woman, she ran the tip against Delila’s skin. “You’ve been whipped rather severely, I see. Are you planning to permanently mark yourself, so that only the most desperate and corrupt will have you?”

Delila kept her feelings to herself.

“Suppose you tell me what excessive fires burn in you that make you so bereft of any joy at all?” Lexia tapped the cane on Delila’s buttocks. When she didn’t answer her, Lexia let the baton rap harshly across Delila’s upper ass, and an impassioned groan replied.

“Tell me,” she insisted again.

The young woman was silent still.

“You will not bury yourself in this place, Delila Armand. I will not let you. If I have to beat the truth from you, I shall!” The woman let the baton speak for her, delivering a dozen stinging shots until Delila was sobbing and Lexia stopped again, coming to Delila’s naked side and whispering into her ear. “Tell me.”

There were tears streaming down the young woman’s cheeks. “I’m here forever, doesn’t that say enough,” she answered.

“No, you lie,” Lexia replied, and rapped her again where it hurt the most.

“How can you say that? How can you, who live here and love it, not know that I can’t go back. You couldn’t.”

“I’m not you.” The timbre of Lexia dark rusty voice purred in her ear, like a big cat’s purr, like that of a mother panther. “I said you were going to triumph, bitch, and I mean that.”

“How can I? You and Mira both knew you couldn’t go back there and survive for a second?” She was pleading, with tears and wailing, a proverbial floodgate unleashed.

“There are other ways!” she roared. “And you will find them!” Lexia swept out of the room, as if on a broomstick, her long dress trailing savagely behind her, only confirming Delila’s suspicions that the woman was a sorceress.

Delila: The last thing Lexia told me when she returned to cut me down was not to submerge myself in this place. I could almost hear her voice begging. If she hadn’t been so tough and harsh and steadfast, I might have heard sorrow where I’d never heard it before. She gave me courage, at least for a few days, to accept her simple thesis on trust alone, since there was nothing else in my experience that was changing my feelings about my life.