The Apartment - Part 11

[Carl Bradford]

Greetings all! Sorry for the delay, life has been eating me alive recently. The part below was originally the first half of a much longer chapter, but I wanted to get something posted so I made it a separate chapter. No sex in this one - that's coming next! - but more character development.

Don't worry everyone, I WILL finish this story! It's just taking longer than I anticipated.

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Sunday morning. Normally a time for Jane to sleep in late, catch up on laundry, and clean their home while eating junk food and half-watching dumb TV shows.

Instead here she was back at HCI, seven-thirty in the freakin’ a-m, wearing sweat pants and a hoodie and her Chuck Taylors, sitting on a bench outside the big gymnasium, the same bench where she’d shown Cassie and Wanda her cage video.

She’d managed to slip in to the Buyer’s Lounge - it was deserted - and score some free coffee, so she at least had that going for her. While she sat and drank and finished waking up (she barely remembered the drive over), she thought about her meeting with Leighton.

Well, she thought. That was certainly an interesting afternoon. On the one hand I sure as hell wouldn’t want to end up like Victoria - “Sassy” my white ass - but on the other hand there certainly is something about Leighton and how confident and self-assured she is, sort of like Domino, that I would like to learn more about…

But confident can also be overbearing and bossy, and Leighton certainly showed that too, she thought. I still don’t know why I agreed to this.
Jane finished her coffee, stood up and tossed the empty cup in a nearby trash can. Before they show up, she thought, I have one more thing I really need to do.

Jane returned to the employee-only portion of HCI, waving her contractor card at the door. Skirting around the busy loading zone, she didn’t see anyone she recognized (in or out of a collar) and made her way into the maze-like pens. Jane concentrated, remembering her only other trip here with Cassie, and retraced their steps.

“Um,” Jane said, “Hi.”

6645, the feral, muscular slave was on the floor of her cage, doing pushups like a triphammer. She glanced over at Jane.

“Good morning, mistress,” the slave replied evenly.

Jane stepped closer to the cage, putting a hand on the wire. “I wanted to talk to you, about last time, if that’s alright.”

“Mistress can talk to this slave about anything she wishes,” 6645 said, resuming her pushups. “This slave is required to answer, no matter how dumb the question might be.”

“Look at me!” Jane said, a little louder and more high-pitched than she wanted. 6645 stopped in mid-push, leaving her on the ground. She turned her head toward Jane, eyebrows raised in surprise.

“Please stop it with the ‘mistress’ and ‘this slave’ stuff,” Jane continued. “Just talk to me normally."

Jane took a deep breath and exhaled. "I came here to apologize for what Cassie did to you. I’m sorry she did that, and I wish I had spoken up and put a stop to it. I failed you, I failed myself, and I’m sorry. Please accept my apology, I promise I won’t ever stand by while something like that happens again.”

6645 continued looking at Jane, her eyebrows still raised.

“I went online and found out about you,” Jane said. “You’re Roxanne Armstrong, and you are - or were? - a rising star in the combat sports world. I saw a video of you beating Eileen Fernandez for the finals in FemOctagon 31 and you were amazing - that big, scary bald-headed woman didn’t stand a chance.”

6645 didn’t move. Neither did she look away.

“I also looked through your social media - so many photos of you at the gym, it’s like you lived there, which I guess pro athletes do? One thing I noticed was that whenever you took a break for the cameras, you had an Optimordial PowerPlus Chocolate Caffeine bar in your hand.” Jane took her hand out of her hoodie pocket, revealing a short, blocky bar wrapped in brightly-printed foil. Placing it on the floor, she gently pushed it under the cage door.

“I’m not trying to bribe you, and I don’t think giving you a candy bar makes things square between us,” Jane said, moving back from the door. “But I know that if I had spent as much time as you have in a slave pen eating nothing but kibble, I’d really, really want something with flavor, and especially chocolate.”

“Anyway,” Jane said, taking a step back from the cage door, “Consider it a token of my respect.”

6645 stood up; Jane noticed now that she moved a bit stiffly. She reached for the ceiling and stretched her fit, nude body, bending slightly backwards, her body as taught as a longbow. Jane couldn’t help but admire it, smooth and strong, her nipples a bit erect from resting on the cold floor; she also couldn’t help but notice the bruises and abrasions that weren’t there the last time Jane had seen her.

The slave shook her head, and Jane realized that her long dreadlocks were loose, hanging down her back, and they were wet. She walked over to the drain in the center of the cage and bent over so that her dreads hung straight down, then squeezed them so that a trickle of water splashed into the drain grill.

“I have to keep doing this or mildew will set in to my locks,” 6645 said over her shoulder. “The guards wouldn’t let me dry off after my shower this morning.”

“Why would they do that?” Jane asked, her voice rising a bit. “Isn’t that illegal?”

6645 laughed. “They think they’re punishing me.” She stood up and turned back toward Jane. “It’s not illegal, though it may be against corporate policy. I’ll see if I can file a complaint,” she chuckled. “Threaten to give them a bad Yelp review.”

The slave padded over to the door and squatted down in front of the candy bar. Jane could see every millimeter of 6645’s shaved vagina, and she started to blush; I wish I was that comfortable in my own body, she thought.

6645 picked up the bar and turned it over in her hands, scrutinizing it.

“Wrapper intact, no puncture marks, recent date,” she mumbled to herself, then broke the seal and sniffed the bar.

She looked up at Jane’s face. “Ah, fuck it,” she said, and took a bite.

A look of pure bliss appeared on the woman’s face as she savored the bar.

6645 sat on the ground, crossing her legs, and took her time eating. Jane sat down on the ground in the hallway, her legs off to one side, and watched the woman eat.

The slave chewed the last bite, swallowed, and pushed the empty wrapper under the door to Jane. “You’re gonna want to take that with you. If they find it here, they might revoke your access.”

“Oh, thanks,” Jane said, putting the wrapper in her pocket. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

The slave shrugged.

“Why do you act so aggressively here?” Jane asked. “Why do you attack handlers and snarl at everyone? What’s the point?”

The muscular woman leaned to one side, rested an elbow on her knee and rested her chin on the hand. “You’re not in the slave business at all, are you?”

“Why do you ask?” Jane replied.

“Anyone who knows anything, which means none of the dumbass flunkies with the prods, can see what I’m up to.” The slave smiled; Jane liked this smile better than the fierce, unsettling grin from when she’d seen her last. “I’m stalling.”

“'Stalling’?”

“I’m deliberately avoiding being purchased so that my friends on the outside have time to arrange for me to be bought by one of the MMA networks,” the woman said. “If I’m bought by some labor corporation, they won’t want to sell me until my sentence is up and I’ve been worked almost to death, and if they do want to sell me it will be at a huge markup that no one can or will want to pay. So I’m making sure that when they look at me, all they see is liability.”

“How long can you keep this up?” Jane asked quietly.  “Not just the punishment, but living here like this?”

6645 laughed. “Oh, I’ve had worse beatings in the ring, and these conditions don’t bother me at all - I’ve lived in shittier places than this. There’s no cockroaches here, so it’s actually a step up from my first apartment.”

“So the constant humiliation and forced sex - you’re okay with that?” Jane asked, astonished.

“Of course not,” the slave replied. “I hate it. But I can take it, if it means I end up in a better place - and beat the bastards at their own game. Besides, nobody has tried to have sex with me - they’re all afraid I’ll bite their dicks off,” she laughed.

Jane chuckled in spite of herself. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think about that aspect. What I meant was, um, I just assumed that you were–”

“A lesbian?” 6645 smiled again. “Because I’m strong and tattooed I must be a dyke?”

“Oh, no, not that at all,” Jane said, holding up a hand. “I think it’s more that you remind me of someone I’m close to - she’s fit and strong and knows how to fight, and she’s gay.”

“No worries, I’m not offended,” 6645 said, still smiling. “But I’m into guys, believe me. Me and Paul, my boyfriend, have a pretty great sex life - at least we did until my arrest. Although…” She looked at Jane for a moment, thinking.

Jane held up a hand again. “I’m on Team Guys too,” she tittered, a little nervously.

“How well do you know your partner?” 6645 asked.

“Who, Cassie? Pretty well, I guess,” Jane replied. “She’s the wife of my best friend. Why?”

The slave leaned back onto her arms, showing off her abdominal muscles and causing the large nipples on her small, flat breasts to point toward the ceiling. “Do you trust her?”

“I don’t have any reason not to,” Jane said, “At least none that I know of. Why?”

“After you two left the first time you were here, and after I’d completed my public ‘punishment’…”

————————————————————————

6645 lay on the thin foam mattress and stared at the concrete walls. She couldn’t look at the ceiling because her back was still stinging from the combination of the severe whipping and the coagulant sprayed on it afterwards, so belly-down it was.

She thought she’d given a pretty good accounting of herself during the “punishment”: she did not cry out during the whipping or the numerous cattle prod shocks before and after, but she did grit her teeth and thrash around and put on a show to make them think she’d been hurt much worse than she really was.

Assholes, she thought.

After patching her up they’d thrown her into a “cooler,” a soundproof concrete room with no windows and no furniture that was otherwise no different than the cage she’d left. No idea why they consider spending the night in here punishment, she thought, shaking her head. It’s nice and quiet, I should be able to get some good sleep.

The only thing in the room besides herself and the glorified yoga mat they called a “mattress” was a camera recessed into one wall, which incorporated a call button, a water nozzle and a small chute for dispensing kibble. She expected to be fed and watered in a few hours, so nothing to do but wait.

What she did not expect was the metal door to swing open and a woman to walk in, closing the door behind her.

More unexpected: it wasn’t a handler but a civilian, and not just any civilian but the blonde-haired woman who had gotten her punished!

Cassie, that was the name the shorter one had used. She stood next to the door, looking at 6645 with a smile on her face, clutching a big hippie purse to her side.

“We meet again, Wolverine,” she said.

6645 just stared up at her.

“Oh come on, I know that’s the name of Hugh Jackman’s character in those dumb comic book movies," Cassie said, sounding annoyed.

6645 continued to stare.

Cassie sighed. "Fine,” she continued, “I am sorry I had to see you punished but it was for a good cause, I assure you. Besides, if anyone could take a beating it’d be you, right?”

6645 stared some more.

“Strong silent type, eh?” Cassie laughed. “Well, I have something for you, something I think you’ll like.”

She reached into her purse and pulled out a pair of shiny steel handcuffs. She held them up so that 6645 could see them, then tossed them onto the concrete floor.

6645 arched an eyebrow at her. “Mistress,” she said, “this slave will not assist you in restraining itself.”

“I haven’t ask you to do anything yet,” Cassie said.

Cassie propped her purse against the door, kicked off her sandals, and swept the bandana off of her head, stuffing it into the purse along with her necklace and bracelets. Grabbing the bottom hem of her slip dress, Cassie pulled it over her head and draped it over her purse.

6645 sat up. “Mistress, this slave does not understand what mistress wants–”

Cassie pulled off her t-shirt and her panties, dropping them on top of the dress.

–“but know that this slave will not have sex with mistress,” she finished.

Cassie stood before 6645, completely nude and yet fully poised, watching the slave’s reaction.

“Is mistress aware that there is a camera in this cell?” 6645 said, nodding toward it.

“Mistress is aware of a lot of things,” Cassie said, a sad smile appearing on her face. She walked toward 6645, her hands on her hips.

“For example, I know that I’ve shut off the camera to this cell for the next hour.”

6645 knitted her brow and shook her head slowly.

Cassie stooped down and picked up the handcuffs. Turning around, in one swift motion she fastened them to her wrists, locking her hands behind her own back.

She turned back around and sank to her knees in front of 6645.

“What I have for you,” Cassie said, her voice low and husky, “Is the chance to get a little payback.”

6645 raised both eyebrows in surprise. This day is certainly not going the direction I expected it to, she thought.

She stood and reached down to Cassie, taking her by her shoulders and raising her gently to her feet. The two women looked at each other for several seconds.

Then 6645 punched Cassie in the stomach.

Cassie fell to the floor, gasping for air, but with effort restored her breathing before she hyperventilated.

6645 stood impassively, switching her gaze from the camera to the door and back. After a moment, she looked down at Cassie.

“I guess you were telling the truth about the camera being off,” she said. She waited a few more moments, nodded, and squatted down next to Cassie.

“What the hell is the matter with you?” 6645 whispered. Cassie said nothing (could be she was still out of breath) but returned her stare.

“I guessed you were lesbian or bi,” 6645 continued in a low voice, “but your gaydar must be out of whack because I am not. So if you were hoping for some kind of sexual thrill, I’m going to disappoint you.”

Cassie remained silent, but her angelic face took on a hard expression, as if it had turned to stone.

6645 raised a hand to slap Cassie in the face; Cassie closed her eyes and gritted her teeth, but neither flinched nor tried to avoid the blow. The slave lowered her hand.

“That was my next guess,” she said. “You’re one of those people who get off on pain, right? What are they called…” 6645 drummed her fingers against one thigh.

“Masochists?” Cassie croaked.

6645 snapped her fingers. “That’s it, masochists. Well, I have more bad news for you: unlike you, I don’t use violence to get off or to get others off. Tell the truth I don’t use it at all unless I have a really good reason, which this ain’t.”

Cassie groaned. 6645 picked her up in her arms like a rag doll and carried her to the “mattress.” She arranged the woman on her side to ease her breathing, and then sat (gingerly) against the wall.

“I’m not a masochist,” Cassie said, her breathing starting to return to normal. “I don’t like being hurt–”

“Then what do you like?” 6645 interrupted. “You’ve given yourself an hour to enlighten me.”

Cassie sighed then fell silent.

After a short period of silence, Cassie spoke again: “You’re not at all what I thought you were.”

6645 laughed. “I get that a lot.”

The two women sat together in silence for a time. Cassie rolled over and raised up on her knees.

“Is there anything I can do,” she said, “to make up for my behavior?”

6645 looked over at her. She contemplated the slim, beautiful blonde woman kneeling before her. Cassie is beautiful, 6645 thought. If I were into girls I would certainly be in to her. I’m a sucker for long, glossy hair - so of course I picked a boyfriend who’s totally bald. She seems so fragile, so delicate, but there’s obviously something harder underneath. I wonder what it must be like to have such a creature under your complete control?

Almost as if she could sense 6645’s thoughts, Cassie dropped her gaze, then bowed her head in submission.

The slave exhaled loudly, then crooked her finger at Cassie. “C’mere,” she said.

Cassie shuffled over on her knees. When she got within arms reach, 6645 grabbed the back of her neck and dragged the woman over her lap.

“You’re a real piece of work, you know that?” 6645 said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Cassie replied, “I get that a lot.”

The muscular woman stifled a chuckle. “And you deserve anything I do to you, don’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

6645 studied the nude, handcuffed woman lying across her lap. She ran her fingers down Cassie starting at the heights of her rear cleavage, down through the valley of her ass cheeks, over the sensitive plains between her sphincter and her sex, until she reached the quivering folds of her vagina.

“You’ve been permanently depilated, haven’t you?” 6645 asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Cassie whispered, squirming gently.

“And what it this?” 6645 ran her hand over the raised scar on the woman’s lovely buttock.

“Circle-star brand," she observed. "How long were you collared?”

“Two years, ma’am.”

6645 nodded. “Yeah,” she said, and sighed. “I didn’t get branded because I was convicted in federal court. For whatever reason the feds don’t brand. Honestly I’m as surprised as anyone that I haven’t been burned yet.”

The woman gave Cassie’s right butt cheek a hard smack with the flat of her calloused hand.

“Thank you, ma’am,” Cassie said.

“When spoken to, slave girl,” 6645 said, and smacked her left cheek.

The muscular woman continued to spank Cassie, who writhed and whined and flailed her cuffed arms until 6645 wrapped her long hair around her fist and pulled on it, hard. Cassie took the hint.

6645 continued to spank her narrow bottom until it glowed a cherry red. She could feel Cassie stifling sobs, trying to remain still and quiet. Eventually the slave stopped.

“I hope you liked that enough to get good and wet,” 6645 said, “because what I’m about to do to you is gonna take a lot of lube.” She held her fist in front of Cassie’s face, flexing her fingers open and closed.

She felt Cassie shudder on her lap. The slave watched her silently, and just as she had decided that Cassie was steeling herself for whatever came next, Cassie spread out her legs and raised up her ass.

“Oh, relax,” 6645 said, “I’m just fuckin’ with you.” She rolled Cassie off of her lap and laid her back down on the “mattress.”

She gazed at Cassie’s face: she’s even more beautiful when she’s been crying, 6645 thought, a**nd she seems so sad, even when she’s trying to seem casual.

6645 held her hand up in front of her own face, flexing it. Hm, it was kind of nice to have her over my lap. Not in a sexual way, but in a… human contact sort of way. Maybe in a protective way too? Like holding a kitten…

The muscular woman frowned briefly. I really miss Paul, she thought.

“Look, I spanked you because after you were such a bitch to me earlier today I felt like you had it coming,” 6645 said, her head turned to look at Cassie. “But that’s it, no more hitting.”

Cassie sniffled, her face wet with tears, and gazed back.

“Come here,” the 6645 said, and pulled Cassie close to her. The larger woman wrapped an arm around the smaller woman’s shoulders, then placed a hand on Cassie’s head, stroking it gently.

“Do you, um…" 6645 trailed off.

She felt Cassie shudder.

"Do you want to talk about it?”

[Carl Bradford]

This author never ceases to impress. He began with an apparently simple plot about a young woman who becomes fascinated with slavery until she's trapped (I'm still waiting for that shoe to fall), then introduces another character who, having been a slave for real and survived, apparently still has such submissive tendencies that she risks being collared again--well done, as always!

[imreadonly2]

A wonderful and surprising continuation to an amazing story. Great job!

[Belinda]

Thank you so much for for this gift of your talent. A wonderful continuation to a great story. I know you are tremendously busy. This is a true gift. Again, thank you so much.

[gentlemanmariner]

Carl, iamreadonly2, Belinda, I thank you most sincerely for your kind words, they mean a lot to me. I hope I continue to live up to your praise!