She looked back down at the tray of canes. “What made your scars?”

“A bull whip.”

“W-which one is that?”

Leo pointed to a large, single-tailed whip on the wall.

“I want to change my list. Make that one the worst one, and then the canes underneath it.”

He chuckled but scribbled in his book. “Noted.”

“What kind of whip is this?” she asked, pointing to a smaller whip that had several strips of leather instead of one. Amazingly, talking about the things in the dungeon took the edge off her fear, though she knew that wouldn’t be the case when she was tied down somewhere and he had one of these things in his hand.

“That’s not a whip. It’s called a flogger.”

“How bad is it?”

“I usually start a sub off with that. Floggers can be very pleasurable, even on someone who doesn’t consider themselves much of a masochist.”

Faith wrinkled her nose. “How can it be pleasurable?”

“It’s hard to explain, but I’ll show you. It can be made to hurt, of course. Any implement with enough force behind it can hurt. I could hit you with a vibrator and it would hurt. Though I wouldn’t do that. Pleasure toys are for pleasure.”

He looked her over when he said that last part, in the way sexually hungry men do. Faith was sure she wasn’t imagining a double entendre when he’d used the phrase pleasure toy. No doubt that was how he saw her, now that she’d signed the last shred of her life over to him.

He could have taken anything from her at any moment, but her verbal agreement had removed any remnant of guilt that may have otherwise held him back.

Faith stared at the flogger for a good thirty seconds and said, “Make that the least bad one.” She caught the ghost of a smile on his face as he wrote it down.

“What’s this?” She pointed to a leather strap that was split down the middle about halfway so that one end formed a fork.

“That’s a tawse. They were used in Scotland for corporal punishment in schools. Only, they rapped a student’s palm with it. I can’t promise I would limit it to that. They sting quite a bit.”

Faith filed that away and looked back over the wall. There were several whips with one tail that were smaller than the bull whip. And there were a few floggers and paddles, and the tawse, and a belt. She quickly rated everything ending up with bullwhip as worst, followed by canes, the belt, clamps, then the smaller whips, then the tawse, paddle, and the flogger.

He seemed surprised by the belt ranking so high on her list. She held her breath, waiting for him to demand an explanation on why a belt should be so terrifying, but he simply noted it in the leather journal.

The flogger, she was going to try to trust Leo on. If he was lying, she would never make the mistake of trusting him again. Not that trusting or not trusting him mattered, but it was one thing she could still control. The clamps made it pretty high on the list mostly because of the uncertainty. She’d had a difficult time deciding whether the smaller whips or the clamps would be worse, but the clamps were so foreign that it made little sense to put them low on the list.