Her Master's Hand Page 16

  “It hurts,” she sniffled miserably. “Please…”

  “Shh. I know, darling. Shush, now. I know what to do,” Ashcroft soothed, pulling from his bag what looked to be a jar of white cream. He dug his fingers into it and collected a good few fingerfuls of the white lard-like substance before he reached for her arm.

  Reflexively, she pulled the arm away from him.

  He gave her a chiding look. “It won’t hurt,” he promised.

  She doubted that. Her arm was even shaking with pain; it hurt just to look at it, let alone touch it! He reached for it again, and when she pulled away again he became stern and rounded his shoulders. She half expected to be scolded by him again, but then he just reached out, grabbed her arm, and as he held her by the fingers with one hand, he rubbed the lotion on her with the other.

  Fortunately, he was right; the medicine didn’t hurt. It tingled and pricked slightly, but not too much. It didn’t help the pain, either. She whimpered unhappily, but then he grabbed the middle of her arm with both hands and she found she couldn’t feel his hands at all.

  Distantly, Maili was certain that this was merely part of the dream, since feeling and sensations tend to come and go in dreams, but then she was certain she could feel his breath up against her wrist as he began to chant in a low, deep tone that seemed to rumble more within her gut than in her ear.

  The horrible, sharp, throbbing feeling that had seeped into her arm was dissipating in the strangest of ways—instead of ebbing away gradually, it somewhat felt as if her pain was circling some sort of drain located just under Ashcroft’s lips.

  She could see her color already returning to her upper arm and gave a sigh of relief. It seemed like her arm wasn’t going to fall off, after all!

  Ashcroft finally pulled away, and his servant stuck a towel right into his hands when Ashcroft gestured for one.

  Maili looked down and opened and closed her fingers, rotating her forearm around to look at it from all angles. “How’d you do that?” The pain was gone—completely and utterly gone. If it wasn’t for her destroyed sleeve, no one would ever suspect anything had gone awry at all.

  “I’m an old wizard,” he replied tersely, drying the salve from his hands, as if that would explain everything. Possibly it did. “That’s why you should really do what I say more often. I have the experience that you do not. Advanced potion-making is not a high-school chemistry project you can just do from reading a book or two. You need instruction and supervision! For the life of me, Charlotte Grimm, I don’t know how to get through to you. You’re lucky that Moriarty was there.”

  The perfectly groomed servant crossed his arms over his chest and proceeded to go ahead and try to make things worse for her. “I wasn’t there,” Moriarty informed crisply. “I came running when I heard a very loud ‘bang’ coming from the basement. The least you can do, you little ass, is go outside to commence your suicide attempts. One of these days you’re going to burn the whole tower down! It’s bad enough down there. You’ve made a huge mess that I’m going to have to deal with, and I simply don’t have time for cleaning up after your shenanigans right now!”

  At that moment, a plump, elderly maid suddenly popped her head in, opening the door behind her. Behind her, a woman’s shrill screams echoed through the dark, stone hallway. “Moriarty, you have to come. That nymph of yours is in the middle of another fit!”

  Moriarty swore under his breath and pointed to Maili. “Exactly my point! I’m a little distracted at the moment so try to grow up, be a big girl, and learn to behave for two bloody moments put together!” With that, he spun on his heel and stormed out of the room, slamming the oak door behind him.

  Well, if Moriarty was a servant like she had surmised, then he wasn’t very obsequious! She watched him leave, feeling a little abashed for having been told off. Something in the back of her mind assured her that Moriarty probably had a very good reason for being in such a foul mood.

  Ashcroft still didn’t look happy when she diverted her attention away from the slammed door and toward him. She decided to try to get herself out of any punishments he looked like he was trying to think up. “You know,” she said, slowly moving her foot to his pant leg and brushing her ankle sensually across his calf. “You look so delicious right now. How about we go up to your room and take a break?”

  Maili had no control over this dream, but was quite surprised at herself for being an apparent hussy in it. Was she trying to seduce her way out of trouble? Maili felt a trill of excitement about the display and waited eagerly to see the fantasy unfold.

  Ashcroft’s expression, unfortunately, did not change. He was still looking pensively at her. She tried reaching across, apparently reaching for his belt buckle, but then he grabbed her hands, saying, “You don’t want to take that off. It won’t go the way you think it will, Charlotte.”

  With a cry, Maili’s dream-self demanded, “Why not? Aren’t I sexy enough?”

  He raised the eyebrow on the scarred part of his face, but then smirked. “You know you’re sexy enough for me to tup day or night, and my manhood would no doubt agree with that assessment since your beauty has certainly been hogging more than its fair share of blood flow since you’ve become my apprentice.” It looked like his little rascally smirk had to be forced back down. “What did we learn from this little incident?”

  She crossed her arms. “Wear a lower-cut dress,” she huffed bitterly.

  He looked toward the ceiling, sighing, “No. I mean, what did you learn from nearly burning off your arm?”

  “Wear… gloves?” she squeaked with much uncertainty. “Wear… a protective apron?”

  “Well, safety gear’s always a good measure,” he allowed, even patting her knee. “But I was looking for something else…”

  She thought about it, then looked down to stare at Ashcroft’s callused hands digging into her dress. Eventually she looked up, knowing he’d see how clueless she was.

  He furrowed his brow. His voice dripping with exasperation, he said, “Just trust what I tell you to do and not to do. That’s really what I’m looking for. I’m not looking for answers that pertain to you disobeying me better the next time. You see, I really don’t want you to disobey me at all. Ever.”

  “Because you want me to be a thoughtless automaton!” she snapped, her shoulders slumping in a defiant sort of way, like a petulant child’s might. “I’m just trying to find something that would help the screaming nymph upstairs, you know. All the caterwauling is distracting to say the least, as is your inability to do anything about it.”

  He reached forward and grasped her chin in his strong fingers. “Listen here, Charlotte—you need to understand this: I’m not standing aside to be cruel. This is the nature of the poison surging through that nymph’s body. There is nothing any wizard has been able to do about it, and I don’t want you to accidentally blow yourself up trying to cook up a cure. Potion accidents are how a lot of our kind die, you know, and I will absolutely not have you die, nor will I let you use that poor creature upstairs as your guinea pig.”

  Maili tried to pull her face away from Ashcroft’s hand, and eventually he let go before his grip began to hurt her.

  “I’m looking for some sign of comprehension, Charlotte,” he informed her with a low, demanding voice. He was putting his face very close to her own, trying to get her eye contact. Eye contact that he wasn’t going to get! Maili felt like whenever they called her ‘Charlotte’ she became unbearably stubborn. “Charlotte?” he droned, his tone holding an unspoken warning.

  Maili realized she actually used to be this stubborn. She used to refuse Hoel and Anwen’s wishes at every turn and did exactly what she wanted whenever she wanted to do it. She wouldn’t even give them peace of mind by making promises to them that she didn’t plan at all to keep. If Hoel had any delusions about Maili becoming a servant when he had saved her, that’s surely when those ideas had become dashed. So as Maili had dug in her heels, set on defiance, Hoel had dug in his heels, set on for
cing her to obey him.

  Hoel had bigger heels than Maili did, obviously. She was never perfect, but their struggles about who was in charge ended when she hadn’t come when they called for her one evening. Apparently, not coming when called was an offense that had annoyed both her foster parents more than anything else, because when he’d found her, he did make her regret having not come when she was told to.

  Papa had cut a switch, stripped it, and then had her strip down right in the garden so that she was naked from the waist down before he lit into her bottom, thighs, and even calves until she was blubbering as if her world had come to an end. Afterwards, she couldn’t sit down for a week straight. Somewhere in all that, she had learned not to push Hoel too far, because she would risk biting far more off of Hoel’s retribution than she could chew.

  Here, as ‘Charlotte,’ it looked like Ashcroft hadn’t yet inspired that sort of trepidation.

  Ashcroft reached forward, grabbed her upper arm, then yanked her out of the chair. He wheeled her around behind him, striding toward his desk. “Alright, that’s it. You’re writing lines.”

  Lines? Maili wanted to snort. Lines were the least intimidating punishment in the world. It was barely even humiliating. Some people wrote lines as a memory device.

  One side of the room was a giant chalkboard, and this one was covered with elemental and numeric scrawlings. He went to the corner nearest to the window, erased a huge panel, and then wrote at the top with perfect handwriting:

  I will listen to and obey Master Ashcroft.

  This time, Maili really did snort, and he heard it, whipping his head toward the sound. “Did I say or do something humorous, Missus Grimm?” he demanded. He looked like he was getting more and more frustrated with her, and Maili understood that. As soon as she couldn’t help from snorting, she found herself gritting, “Why, Charlotte? Why, why, why?”

  Ashcroft probably felt he was losing control… and losing his mind, too, if he thought that he could discipline her with lines.

  He took her wrist until her hand was held up to him, and he dropped the long piece of white chalk into it. “I want you to write that sentence until you run out of board.” He pointed down the long, long, long chalkboard. “If we’re both very lucky, by the time you’re done, you should actually understand that sentence.”

  “No way!” she refused firmly. “No way, this would take me hours!”

  Without sympathy, he agreed. “Try to be done by supper.”

  “I’m not doing it!” ‘Charlotte’ decided, and Maili was aghast. She was getting off so very easily! Why was she insisting on making things worse?

  “You’re doing it,” he assured her. He didn’t even look angry; he was still frustrated, but he was obviously in control, as if he was used to her being difficult. “But if you need a sore bottom to do it, I’d be happy to give you one.”

  Well, apparently she was equally as happy to throw the chalk into his eye. It was childish, but threats weren’t landing on her as well as Ashcroft had probably hoped.

  There was a blur of motion and contact. It was a struggle, but in the end Ashcroft had her pinned to the nearby desk and was literally ripping off her skirts as easily as if the fabric had been sewn together by thin sheets of paper. She knew Ashcroft looked strong for a wizard, but she had no idea that he was that strong.

  “Fuck you,” Maili wheezed, trying to push back against the polished oak and get some space between herself and the flat surface.

  Maili was soon completely void of all clothing from the small of her waist on down. Ashcroft had his body close enough that she felt she had no room to struggle or even kick with any force.

  “Enough, Charlotte!” Ashcroft hissed in her ear. “When that experiment went wrong, you had to have regretted it. And not because you knew you’d get punished. You had to have worried that you had really made an unfixable mistake. You’re still mortal. If your arm fell off, I can’t make it grow back. There are things I cannot fix, lots of things. I’m frightened that you’re going to make a mistake that’s going to get you killed, and then I’ll blame myself that I wasn’t firm enough with you to protect you from yourself.”

  A hot tear escaped the side of her eye and slowly trickled down the side of her nose until it hit the desk.

  “I’m going to punish you to teach you, and you’re going to let me because you want to learn this lesson. You won’t force me like this.” Finally, she felt his weight on the back of her disperse and the coldness to the back of her thighs and bottom that signaled that he had stepped away from her.

  She slowly began to lift herself from the desk, but she heard him say, “Stay right there, Charlotte.” He wasn’t far from her, she realized, he was only another foot away. And then she heard the belt get pulled out from his loops.

  She clasped her naked bottom cheeks in her hands, distantly humiliated that he had destroyed her dress completely. “No, Ash. Don’t!”

  “You’ll be alright, Charlotte, just like you were the last time. Personally, I would like to see your bottom completely pale one day, but it seems before one punishment has completely faded, you’re cooking up an excuse to get yourself another. Don’t worry—I’ve seen some very promising changes come out of you since I’ve started to actually discipline you.”

  “This isn’t fair! We’re gonna get married! You can’t spank me forever!”

  Ashcroft, instead of disputing the idea of future marriage like Maili thought he might, gave her words credence, as if they had been engaged for some time already. “That’s funny, because I was just hoping that you won’t stay this embarrassingly naughty forever, but if you can keep it up, so can I!”

  She felt the warmth of his hand on the small of her back, and then she heard a small ‘whoosh’ in the air just before the loud, thunderous ‘crack!’ of the belt.

  She gasped and tried to stand up, but Ashcroft’s hand pressed her into the table so that he could deliver a solid second blow, and then a third.

  Maili had often been strapped during her tenure under Hoel, but this seemed so real for a dream. She could feel the deep, unforgiving stripe of pain, followed by stinging burn and then with a prickly sort of pain, only to be replaced again by the second stroke. She moved her bottom side to side, which didn’t help the pain at all; it merely helped the pain to focus more on one cheek than another. She forced her own feet into place after the side of the belt hit her hip from her moving about, which made her intake a sharp, scream-like cry.

  Ashcroft wasn’t counting, which was something Hoel would often do—most times there was a small trial where she was told her exact punishment before any of the proper implements were even gathered. There were times that she wished Hoel wouldn’t count, admittedly, because if he was going to ‘thirty’ and she felt she’d had quite enough by ‘five,’ then she would begin to panic.

  Though now, she was panicking because she had no idea how long Ashcroft planned to spank her. Obviously, she had worried him, frustrated him, fought and undermined him. Ashcroft might spank her the rest of the day, for all she knew.

  And thus, the begging commenced, and it was pathetic. “I’m sorry!” she began, which immediately melted into, “I’ll do so much better next time, you have no idea how good I can be!” and then eventually to, “Please! Dear lord, you’re killing me! I’m dying!”

  Finally, he argued, his voice nearly defensive, “You’re not dying, and you’re going to take your punishment like a good girl until that bottom is exactly the shade that it seemingly needs to be before you allow yourself to be obedient!”

  She pulled her hands back behind her to protect her bottom, and he swore. Apparently, she had messed up his swing. He took a moment to collect her hands to the small of her back, which made her feel like she was being folded sideways. “Charlotte! I don’t want you to make me hurt your hands! This naughty bottom of yours can take it, I assure you.”

  She began to sob into the desk, pressing her cheek against the cold oak, and tried to think of anything el
se that might distract her from her punishment. Of course, there was nothing. In fact, her legs were now shaking from tensing, anticipating the blows.

  Finally, he stopped and his belt was replaced with his hand, which gripped her flesh hard and then released it, making the pain pulse. She continued to cry; despite her relief that the punishment had finally come to an end, she couldn’t seem to collect herself at all.

  Eventually, he pried her from the desk and turned her to face him. He didn’t say anything to her, even though she had expected more scolding, but he just put his arms around her and eventually he kissed the top of her head gently. “I love you, Charlotte. Damn it all, don’t fight me so often, it breaks my heart. You can’t keep going behind my back—give me a chance to spoil you, eh?”

  She hugged her arms around his waist and held desperately onto him for a very long moment. “I’m sorry,” she eventually said. “I’m trying to be better. I just—”

  “Have an overwhelming opposition toward authority.” He combed his fingers through her hair. “I know, my darling. You’re a witch, after all, but you have to learn to control yourself.”

  She nodded.

  He pulled away and gave her a handkerchief; she immediately started to clean the tears off her face. “Alright. Tell me when you’re ready to start writing,” he told her.

  “What?” she pouted.

  “Oh, you’re still writing your lines, you know. You’re not getting out of it,” he assured her, almost playfully. He took her by the hand and pulled her back to the chalkboard.

  “But I’m… I don’t have skirts! This is—”

  “Exactly how a very disobedient women should look. Bare, well-punished bottom on display and doing lines for the next three, four hours.” He found a new piece of chalk and put it into her hand. He patted her bottom and kissed the top of her head again. “Go on, now.” He sat on the edge of his desk and, hands crossed, he watched her like a gargoyle as she reached up and wrote the first of a thousand lines: