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 “one” sounded strong. The “five” sounded pained. By “ten” he gasped the number. At “thirteen” she could barely hear him. By “seventeen” she’d broken him. It took almost a full minute to get him to say the number.

“I’m waiting....” She ran the baton over his back, letting it tickle his savaged skin. “You want a little pleasure, don’t you? If you want a break from the pain, you have to say the number. You know I’ll let you hang here all night until you say it. I’ll get my book and pull up a chair and read. I have all the time in the world....”

He swallowed hard and shuddered. Poor dear. She’d piled on the pain today on only one part of his body—his back. Usually that much pain she’d spread out over a larger area—back, ass, thighs... Those sorts of niceties she reserved for other clients, however. Gentler clients, weaker clients, tamer clients. But this client got her best, because he paid for her best. And when someone paid for her best, she did her worst.

“It’s only one more...you can take one more, can’t you?”