Savages Recruit (7 page)

She began blubbering for forgiveness, promising that she would never do such a thing again. She said everything she could think of to stop the spanking, but none of it did any good. He must not have a soul, not the slightest bit of sympathy anywhere in his body. He must hate her, really hate her, she reasoned in her pain addled state. Eventually she simply became limp over his lap, the hard ridges of his muscled thighs pressing against her stomach and hips as she sobbed.

When he finally stopped many, many lashes later, cessation of the spanking was of small consolation. The fire of pain he'd built was still burning, and though she heard him say something, she couldn't make it out through her tears. When he tried to stand her up, her legs failed her and she crumpled to the ground crying as if her heart was breaking. Her freedom, her autonomy, all the good in her world had been taken away, and it had been replaced by a heartless regime and a man who didn't care how much he hurt her as long as she did as she was told.

She curled up into the fetal position, crying so hard that it was difficult to breathe. He was still saying something, but she could not comprehend it. When his arms reached for her again she squealed and cowered away, afraid that he would beat her more. He did not hit her again though, he picked her up and placed her on his lap where he held her, gently stroking her hair.

“Come on Zora, it wasn't that bad,” he murmured, shifting her slightly in his arms. His voice was softer than she'd heard it before, he almost sounded like a different man altogether. She looked up between the wisps of tear wet hair that had stuck across her face and saw him looking down at her with genuine concern on his stern features. She sniffed then coughed as her tears threatened to half choke her. He was wrong, it was that bad. Her face crumpled as tears began to fall once more.

“Hey, come on little lady,” Savage said, brushing the hair out of her eyes gently. “Tell me why you are so upset. I know it hurts, but it doesn't hurt that bad.”

Caught off guard by what almost sounded like a term of endearment, Zora stopped crying enough to explain herself. “You hit me and you liked it. You hate me,” she said, her lower lip trembling as the tears threatened to overwhelm her again.

Savage frowned, and for a moment she was afraid she had angered him. “You think I spanked you because I hate you? What did we say at the beginning?”

“Nothing,” she said, entirely forgetting everything that had happened before she was spanked.

Savage persisted in the face of her discipline induced insomnia. “What did you tell me when I asked you why you were going to be spanked?”

“Because I got drunk and wouldn't tell you how,” Zora mumbled.

“That's right,” Savage said. “Because you did something you knew you were absolutely not allowed to do. This spanking was the consequence. Don't you dare take it into your head that this is some beating you received because I don't like you. This is not personal, it is what you get when you break the rules. Understand?”

She nodded as his eyes bored into her. “Yessir,” she whispered.

“Good,” he said firmly, standing her up. This time she found her feet without any trouble at all. “Pants up, Ms Matthews,” he ordered. Quickly she bent down and pulled her pants up, blushing as she realized how many times Savage had seen the most intimate areas of her body. He probably knew her body almost as well as some of her ex boyfriends did.

Savage stood up from the bed and walked around her whilst she rubbed her bottom, his hands clasped behind his back. “I am a firm believer in discipline, Ms Matthews. Discipline is something you've clearly lacked in your life. You should know that it is never done out of anger, or out of a personal desire for revenge. It is done to provide swift and memorable consequences.” He stopped and looked at her with just a hint of a smile playing around his lips. “Would you say that your little encounter with the tawse just now was memorable, Ms Matthews?”

Zora nodded, her hands still stuck down the back of her pants. She didn't know how she would sit with her bottom so sore. “Very memorable, Captain Savage,” she said softly.

“Do I have your word that you will not imbibe any more alcohol without my permission?”

Zora hesitated, but when his expression  hardened, she nodded quickly. “Okay, I won't. It's not fair, but I won't.”

He nodded. “It is not about what is fair, but what is good for you.”

As her misery faded, some of her self possession began to return. “And presumably, what is not good for the Bulgarians.”

Savage stopped short. “Who told you about the Bulgarians?” Zora did not reply, but she did not need to. It was clear from the expression on Savage's face that he was making sense of the situation. “Ethan mentioned them, didn't he?”

“Yeah,” Zora nodded. “He did.”

“And he gave you the alcohol too.”

“No.”

“Are you going to lie to me?” Savage asked the question in dangerously soft tones.

“I stole it from him,” Zora explained. It was close enough to the truth, there was only a fine line between theft and what she'd done to Ethan.

“I see,” he said. She needn't have worried about him buying that story. Clearly he had no trouble believing that she was a thief.

“So what about these Bulgarians?” Zora prompted.

Savage looked at her, but she saw from the closed expression on his face that she was not going to get an answer. He stepped towards the door and she knew that it was going to be another one of those many lingering questions that surrounded her stay. She was quickly growing tired of the mysteries. Apparently he thought she didn't deserve answers, all she deserved was pain and recrimination. “Fine, just go,” she said bitterly. “See you the next time you want to hit me.”

He stopped by the door and looked over his shoulder at her. “You'll get your answers when you're ready for them.”

“And in the meantime? What am I supposed to do?”

“Behave yourself.” He left quickly, closing the door behind him and bolting it too. Yet again Zora was locked away by herself, confused and hurt. Frustration overwhelmed her and she hurled herself against the sheet metal door, kicking and punching and swearing up a storm of rage. She battered her frail flesh against the solid door until she was so tired she could no longer lift her arms, then she collapsed onto the bed, feeling more miserable and alone than before.

Chapter Five

Savage paced back and forth in his office, his brow furrowed. Zora was proving more complicated and difficult to deal with than he'd imagined. He'd counted on discipline as a means of taming her, but every time he spanked her he seemed to make things worse. Her sobbing cries still echoed in his head from the last time he'd been forced to take her in hand and in his mind's eye he could see the look of disappointment on her face as he left her alone afterward. His plan to get her to a point where she'd trust him and be receptive to learning the full truth about her situation was quickly unraveling. Her stubborn resistance made it difficult to get through to her and he did not like the idea of resorting to ever more extreme measures.

“Dammit,” he swore to himself. This was not supposed to happen. He wasn't supposed to care, wasn't supposed to get attached, but he was starting to do both. For all her negative traits, Zora was brighter and braver than most. She'd been wrenched out of her comfort zone and subjected to what she considered harsh discipline and it had not cowed her in the slightest.

Savage was usually a man of honor, a man who did what he thought was right. He didn't like what he was doing with Zora. She'd never asked for what was happening to her, she'd never asked to be used as a tool in a war that was almost impossible to win. She deserved to know what was really going on. As he paced he admitted to himself that he wasn't keeping the truth from her because she wasn't ready to know, he was keeping the truth from her because he was loathing the prospect of dealing with the fallout when she realized what was really going on. For some bizarre reason, he cared about what she thought about him. When she knew the truth and realized the full ramifications of what he'd done, he would become a monster in her eyes.

“This is not the time to get sentimental, Brett,” he lectured himself. It was time to do what he should have done days ago. The window of opportunity for the mission was closing by the day. It was time to get Zora on board - one way or another.

Steeling himself, he sat down at his desk and sent for her. She turned up fairly quickly in the company of a soldier. Since her bout of illicit drinking she'd been confined to detox as a precaution. As a result she was once more wearing the white scrubs that made her look shapeless and left her rear end so very vulnerable.

“Ms Matthews,” he greeted her cordially.

“Captain Savage,” she replied, looking around his office with curious eyes. She had not been here before, but she was already looking for something of use to her. He knew the way her mind worked. She was an opportunist. No matter the situation, the intelligent look never left her eyes. She knew something was up and sooner or later she was going to figure it out. Better that she was told today than left to work things out on her own.

He took a moment to look her over. As a result of being unable to imbibe alcohol as she saw fit she'd lost some weight and her skin and hair both looked a great deal healthier and more attractive. As his gaze traveled over her body, he was aware that she was staring straight back at him, sizing him up in return. It was an interesting response. He was used to his subordinates avoiding his gaze in confrontational situations like this. Zora only resorted to that behavior when her pants were around her ankles.

“Ms Matthews, we will be taking a trip for a couple of weeks. It's clear that you're mentally more than able to handle the rigors of the job, but you need some physical training.”

Zora screwed her face up. “Physical training? Why?”

“It's standard procedure,” he said, brushing the question off.

That was all it took for her to launch into a tirade. “Standard procedure? There's a standard procedure for kidnapping people and forcing them to work for you? Good to know. I'd  hate to think anything that's been going on has been non standard. That would make shit really fucked up.”

Savage looked at her, somewhat stunned at her nerve. This was a woman who was in all probability still nursing welts on her backside. When would she learn a sense of respect?

“It is also,” he said as he stood up and walked around the table towards her, “a chance to instill further discipline.” She stood in place, looking defiant and he took the opportunity to deliver a hard slap to her backside. “That's for the foul language.”

“Ow fuck!” Zora squealed and turned away from him, protecting her bottom with her hands. “Don't hit me!” Savage watched as if in slow motion as she lifted her right leg off the ground, swung it behind her and brought the pointed tip of her shoe crashing into his shin.

The shoes were soft and she'd managed to kick him with the part of her foot least likely to inflict damage, so it didn't hurt terribly, but the fact that she'd had the nerve to do it at all was astounding. Without another word he grasped the fabric at the back of her shirt and lifted her over his desk. The nearest thing to hand with any real punitive power was a rubber backed slipper used for martial arts training. He brought it down across her clothed cheeks with a mighty wallop and was promptly forced to dodge a powerful kick directed at his groin.

“Girl, what do you think you are doing?” He growled, tightening his hold on her shirt. It wasn't a question she needed to answer, she wasn't squirming the way she usually did when she was spanked, as ludicrous as it seemed, she was actually fighting him.

“Get the hell off me!” She screamed. “Don't fucking hit me again!”

It would have been amusing, the idea that she could intimidate him into doing what she wanted, if it wasn't so dangerous and disrespectful. He redoubled his efforts with the slipper, but not before taking her pants down and baring her bottom. As he'd surmised, it still showed signs of welts, but he couldn't afford to take pity on her. She'd challenged him and he had to meet that challenge head on. What had started off as a cordial briefing turned into a thrashing in mere moments. He brought the slipper down hard across both her cheeks, aiming low to catch the fullest part. She shrieked as it made contact and scissored her legs, treating Savage to a display of her feminine nether regions.

He was a red blooded male and the sight was distracting, but as on previous occasions, he did not allow himself to become side tracked. It would not do at all to start seeing her in that desirable light. He brought the slipper down several more times, slapping her bottom until she stopped trying to resist and fell into a tearfully submissive state. In the time it took to physically convince her of the folly of her ways, her bottom had turned an angry red color with some darker patches that he feared would probably bruise.

“Get up,” he snapped curtly. She pushed off the table, her hair tangled around her face and matted in tears. He took her by the chin and forced her to look at him.“Don't you ever try to hit me, you understand?” He spoke in a low, threatening growl. “You do that again and you won't sit again for a long time.”

She nodded, but that wasn't enough for him. “Speak,” he snapped at her.

“I won't do it again,” she promised, her voice cracking with tears.

“No you won't. You're not done paying for that little stunt either,” he informed her. “Go get packed up.”

Zora didn't need telling twice, she yanked up her pants and rushed out of the room as quickly as her legs would carry her.

***

“Fucking asshole,” Zora muttered to herself as she packed some things into the black bag she'd been given for the purpose. Savage's threat of making it so she couldn't sit had been made a reality. That damn slipper hurt even more than the tawse thing. It wasn't just her bottom that was bruised either, her ego had taken a pounding over Savage’s desk too. She'd been so sure she'd found a way out of his punishments, but her plan for avoiding more spankings by fighting back when he tried giving her one had failed miserably.