Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 68525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
“I’m sorry!” I screamed.
“One aspect of traditional discipline that you’ll observe quickly, I imagine, is the way it lingers and builds. That’s something the punisher can’t do.”
He stopped. I drew in a gasping breath, sure he would bring his hand down again in just a moment, and then I sobbed in mingled relief and pain, because he had spoken nothing less than the truth: my bottom still hurt so much that to my dismay I felt my cheeks clench and unclench in a vain search for some way to soothe the burning there.
“I’m afraid that’s not even the end of the beginning, my dear,” Agent Delvik said as if he were informing me he would soon offer me a cool drink. He kept his left hand on my back and his right leg across my calves, but I thought I could tell that he had reached for something with his right hand, perhaps inside a pocket of his uniform.
Then I felt him lean across the table, and he showed me what he had fetched. In front of my eyes he held something that seemed to have been made of several thick layers of red leather, stitched together into a shape about fifteen centimeters long and five wide, except that one half of it was narrowed, so that Agent Delvik could brandish the other half. That half, I knew instantly though I had never seen anything like it, was the part that mattered: about the size of a man’s open hand, flat, and stout.
My heart raced. The thing, really, looked like nothing so much as…
“This is my paddle, Chalondra,” said the agent’s horrible voice from behind and above me.
Paddle. Yes, like a sort of miniature leather version of the wooden paddles kayakers used on Kamnos’ rivers and lakes.
Paddle. My cheeks blazed with heat, and I felt my hips jerk against the restraint of the agent’s other hand. I remembered, from one of the pages I had turned most quickly in that novel. The heroine had feared getting paddled at her school. I hadn’t had any idea what it meant, except that it must be humiliating in some way, and it must hurt.
Agent Delvik pulled it away. Fear twisted in my belly, like a dark, fluttering bird that had somehow worked its way inside me.
“No…” I begged, feeling my limbs start to struggle again, feeling my upper body try to rise from the table.
“And this is what it feels like,” the voice said, in a tone of grim satisfaction.
The puff of air felt a little more forceful, as he brought the awful thing down on my upturned bottom. The crack of the leather on my right cheek sounded much louder—so loud I wondered if the village elders doing their business on the ground floor above this terrible basement could hear my punishment.
I screamed at the thought, and I kept screaming as I received my first paddling. My thought about the humiliating possibility that the elders could hear the company agent teaching me an old-fashioned lesson gave way to another: the agony in my backside suddenly turned me against my village and my world. I screamed louder because I wanted them to hear what they—their terrible system—had done to me.
I writhed over the table, becoming something like a wild animal, desperate and irrational, trying to flee but easily prevented from flight by a man’s strong hand.
“When… you… stop… resisting… your… punishment,” Agent Delvik said, each word ending in a terrible blow from the paddle, now in a frightful variation on the left-right-center pattern. He had added my upper thighs, and the strokes of the leather blade there made me scream and sob even more loudly. “We… can… proceed.”
I couldn’t stop, though. My body was so desperate to escape from the agony that no attempt at logical persuasion could keep my limbs from reaching, pushing against the table, seeking wildly for some purchase I could use to twist myself, or just my bottom, away, if only for a moment.
“Bad… girls… like… you,” he continued, still remorselessly bringing the paddle down with each accusing word, “need… to… be… broken.”
I let out a shriek of agony that I knew absolutely must be audible above, and then, like a soap bubble popped by a stick, my spirit and my defiance simply vanished. I couldn’t bear any more of the pain and the shame. My body lay limp over the table. My hands grasped its far edge, and I sobbed from the depths of my chest.
Broken. He had done it. I wept at how easily he had bent me to his horrid will.
I felt the pressure of the agent’s left hand ease a little. The terrible rhythm of the paddle slowed. The next few swats, though, struck so hard that my whole body bucked as their force became an addition to the fiery torment in my bottom and thighs. I didn’t scream, though: I heard myself let out only a low, keening noise that sounded like a profession of repentance. It rose with each sharp, ringing stroke of the leather against my bare, burning backside, and subsided as I breathed and prepared myself for the next swat.