Installment 29 { In which Tanya shares a story}
View attachment 474099
Chapter XI Elemental Passions
Colonel Chao escorted the two men to the door, and then returned to the "Game Room", where he let his eyes wander briefly over Tanya's honey-gold flesh, once again marveling at the evenness of her tan, at the subtle curvature of her thighs, at the fleecy tendrils of pubic hair that made a pretense of guarding her girlish treasure. And at her magnificent breasts, still proud-thrusting despite the half-dozen whip-weals that marred their otherwise unblemished perfection.
And at her face. That face that glared at him with a mixture of fear and fury. At her eyes, those exotic, dark-irised orbs that had haunted him all day.
"Miss Spencer," he began, "perhaps you heard me make reference to a certain film a few moment ago?"
Tanya nodded uncertainly, finding it difficult to believe that her predicament could possibly get any worse.
"I am going to remove the tape and the gag now, so that you will be able to speak. I would urge you not to cry out, until you listen to what I have to say. Because as long as you bound as you are, it would be child's play for me to replace the gag in an instant. And if you force me to do that," he added, as he draped the tails of the whip across her naked thighs, "I assure you that you will come to regret your wilfullness. Do you understand?"
Tanya, having little choice, nodded her head in agreement.
"Let's see. Where were we?" the colonel went on, as he ripped away the first of the adhesive strips that held Tanya's gag in place. "Ah, yes. The film. Not long ago my friends and I had the good fortune to look in on you while you were in, shall we say, a compromising position."
.
As she pondered the colonel's latest statement, Tanya noticed that his voice had changed since his conspirators in rapacity had left. While it was certainly more stern than friendly, the hostility that had permeated it since she had arrived late at his door, had all but disappeared.
Tanya looked up at him, half in fear, half in surprise. When he finished peeling off the tape, and pulled her panties out of her mouth, a flood of words, bottled up for many minutes, poured out of her in a torrent.
"My affairs are none of your business," Tanya hissed angrily. "Besides, why were you bastards spying on me?"
"So that my friends could enjoy you as they have without fear of your turning to Don Roberto and demanding satisfaction."
"And what's to stop me, once you set me free?" Tanya snapped, tugging futilely at her bonds.
"You are a beautiful young woman, Miss Spencer. But you have much to learn. And knowledge, I assure you, is power."
"Stop speaking in riddles!" Tanya fumed. What are you talking about?"
"I will tell you in a moment. But first …. " Colonel Chao trained his bespectacled eyes on Tanya Spencer's luscious breasts and reached deep into a pocket. A moment later he removed an expensive-looking jewel box.
Tanya stared at her mysterious captor, utterly perplexed.
David Chao popped the box open with his good hand and placed it on the table while he removed a glittering object. "Again, I remind you not to cry out," he murmured as he strummed Tanya's right nipple gently until it blossomed under his touch. When her dark nugget was pleasingly stiff, he whispered, "I cannot tell you how long I have waited to do this." Then, using the back of his almost lifeless right hand to prop up her plump breast, he screwed one of a pair of diamond-studded clamps onto Tanya's tender nipple.
Tanya gasped in pain, but when Colonel Chao placed a silencing finger across her soft lips and gestured meaningfully toward the knotted whip, Tanya bit her lower lip with stoic determination.
Moving with almost sacrificial reverence, the colonel fingered Tanya's left nipple until it too swelled to his touch, and then he removed the second clamp from the box and affixed it as he had the first.
"It is a sight even more beautiful than I imagined," Chao whispered and stepped back to drink in the sight of Tanya Spencer with her arms bound high over her head, her impossibly beautiful breasts languishing in the grip of the fiendishly tight clamps.
As Tanya squirmed enticingly in her bonds, David Chao's thoughts went back to that long ago Saturday morning in the book store when that grainy ninety seconds of film had awakened in him the dark obsession that had led him to this moment. And to that unforgettable night in Malibu, several months later, when he had watched furtively as "Big Tony" Cannizzaro had applied a pair of glittering clamps to the tempting nipples of Amalie Desjardins.
With the air of an artist who has just completed the masterpiece of a lifetime, David Chao lit an unfiltered cigarette, and collapsed into the chair. He exhaled leisurely as he studied Tanya's tawny body through a wispy veil of smoke.
“You'll never get away with this!" Tanya seethed, grimacing and turning her shoulders gently in hopes of easing the stinging bite of the clamps, but her movements merely served to make her jewel-tipped breasts dance deliciously from side to side. "When Don Roberto hears how the three of you have treated a girl with a golden bracelet…"
"But he will never hear of any such thing," David Chao answered, placing the cigarette in an ashtray and once again taking up the six-thonged whip.
"And why not?" Tanya asked tremulously, her eyes fixed apprehensively on the knotted strands of leather that David Chao was slapping crisply against his thigh.
"Foolish girl. A plaything of Don Roberto's really should be more careful about her choice of lovers." He shook the whip gently, separating the strands so that each one would be free to leave its own bitter sting.
"What do you know of my… my lovers?"
David Chao moved closer to the girl in the swing, his fingers clenching on the stock of the whip. "I know that she …."
"She?" Tanya said flushing. She had had no idea that anyone knew of her afternoon liaisons with the dark-eyed Letitia.
"That she," David continued, draping the wicked thongs across the tops of Tanya's breasts and then letting the knotted ends of the whip slide into her splendid cleavage, "was only eighteen."
Tanya swallowed nervously, as she felt the strands of leather slither across the soft flesh of her breasts. Trying to retain her poise, she stammered, "Le …" she began, and then caught herself. "My … friend is only eighteen?"
David moved his hand slightly, so that the tails of the whip meandered lazily across Tanya's mouthwatering lust-globes, catching briefly on the nipple clamps, causing Tanya to wince in pain.
"Not only that, Miss Spencer," David Chao murmured softly has he swept the tails of the whip lightly across Tanya's outthrust breasts. "Has your lovely, sweet-tongued Leticia bothered to inform you that she is the daughter of Don Roberto?"
Tanya's body went rigid in the swing, and the color drained from her face. "You're crazy!" she gasped. "It's impossible. Don Roberto never mentioned having a daughter!"
"Oh, every family has its secrets, you know," David whispered as he slapped the thongs against Tanya's firm young breasts again, a little harder this time. The leather strips struck the sparkling clamps quite sharply, but he had fastened the clips very securely on Tanya's delectable nubbins and while the blow jarred them, it did not dislodge them. "I'm surprised that you never noticed the resemblance – the lean body, her dark wavy hair, her flashing eyes."
A mysterious smile formed on David Chao's face as he retreated and took another long puff on his cigarette as he let his eyes leisurely explore the curves and hollows of Tanya Spencer's nude body.
“Family resemblances can be quite remarkable," he said as he removed his glasses, cleaned them and replaced them. He sank back down in the chair and stared intently at Tanya again. But this time, Tanya realized, it was with unseeing eyes; it was as if the intense glare of Colonel Chao was fixed on a vision that he had conjured from the shadows of the Sala de Juegos.
David Chao was silent for a long moment and then he lifted the cigarette to his lips and inhaled deeply. "Your resemblance to her is quite striking you know?" he whispered as he exhaled a curling column of cigarette smoke.
“To her? To whom?” a dazed Tanya Spencer responded, once again confused by the colonel's enigmatic words.
“That golden hair, the soft, lovely skin, even the scent of your body. I would have recognized you anywhere, even through these.” He tapped his thick, steel-rimmed glasses meaningfully.
“What are you talking about?” Tanya replied, grimacing under the claw-like grip of the nipple clamps.
“Your mother.”
“My mother?!” Tanya repeated in shocked disbelief, as she tugged, tugging frantically at the straps which held her. “Who are you? What do you know of my mother?”
“I know this!” the David Chao whispered fiercely, extending his khaki-sleeved right arm, the arm that had hung so limply for so long at his side, its gray kid glove concealing the unused hand beneath. Using his good left hand, he stripped away the glove on his right hand, revealing a mangled knob of flesh and bone that had once been a human hand. “I have your mother to thank for this!”
Tanya turned her head away from the colonel's grotesque injury. “I don’t believe you; my mother is a good woman!”
“She betrayed me – and she ruined my life. She took from me everything -- education, career, a chance at love, marriage, children. What woman would spend her life with a man with … with this?” he exclaimed angrily, shaking his deformed fist.”
“My mother would never do such a thing!”
“Ah, but she did," David Chao seethed with righteous indignation. She and your ignorant bully of a father!”
“My father?!?”
“Yes, your father!”
“You must mean Tony Cannizzaro. My mother told me he was a brute. No better than you and your friends. He began cheating on her and abusing her during their honeymoon, she told me once, and he never stopped until the day he died.”
“He came to an untimely end, your father, as I recall,” David Chao continued pensively. “In a sleazy motel in a crime-infested area in South Los Angeles.” He exhaled another spiral of cigarette smoke. “The authorities seemed to believe that he must have gotten rough with a hooker who was under the protection of a very nasty pimp."
David Chao paused and puffed at his cigarette silently before exhaling another acrid column of smoke. "It was quite an unusual case as I recall. It's not often, I don't suppose, that a murder victim is found with a pool-cue shoved down his throat.”
David Chao's face was wreathed in an enigmatic, almost omniscient smile. He tilted his chair back leisurely and tapped his left hand gently against the ashtray as he neatly deposited a long cylinder of ash.
“I don't know," Tanya responded uncaringly as she tried once again to free her upraised wrists. "If you ask me, the bastard probably deserved it. But he wasn’t my father.”
David Chao’s tilted-back chair crashed to the floor. He glared at Tanya angrily. “What do you mean Tony Cannizzaro wasn't your father? Ah, I see. It's just like your mother to fill you with you such lies!”
“I’m sorry if it upsets you, although I don’t see why it should. Did you arrange for your disgusting friends to rape me merely because you thought I was HIS daughter?"
“But it’s impossible,” David Chao repeated, but now without quite the air of certainty that had enshrouded his every prior action. He reached for the same pocket computer he had used in the plaza to verify the date and time of his cronies’ bout with Carmelita. He punched angrily at the buttons. “Aghh! Where is it? This stupid thing,!” he growled, as he continued to punch little buttons. “Yes, yes, here it is," he said finally breathing an audible sigh of relief. "Tanya Cannizzaro, born February 24, 1984, Cedar Sinai Hospital, Los Angeles, Ca. Daughter of Anthony and Amalie Cannizzaro. 21 inches. 6 pounds and 7 ounces. Social Security Number …"
“Your precious computer is wrong. I was born in 1983, not 1984. Not that it matters. But the rest is right. Except for one thing – Tony Cannizzaro was not my father.”
“Of course he was your father. I have made inquiries with everyone who knew your mother in those years; she was terrified of Tony Cannizzaro. She was much too afraid of him to cheat on him.”
“Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but Tony Cannizzaro was infertile. My mother told me once that Tony berated her for years for not giving him a son. But shortly before he died, they learned that it was his sperm count, not her fertility, that was the problem."
David Chao felt his head begin to spin at this revelation. “But if Tony Cannizzaro was not your father, then who …”
“I don’t know,” said Tanya Spencer. Nor did she know why this strange conversation had begun to drain the vindictiveness from her erstwhile tormentor. But since it had, she decided that, like Scheherazade, her best chance at survival was to keep talking.
“But I can tell you this," she went on. My mother told me once, with tears in her eyes, that aside from Tony, she had only slept with one other man before she met Tom Spencer, my step-father. That she had been with him only once. And that she had made a mistake for which she could never forgive herself. Just thinking about him seemed to upset her greatly. She never spoke of him again.”
As she spoke those words Tanya noticed that the mastermind of her subjugation had turned deathly pale. “Are … are you… are you all right?”
David Chao had pressed his hands to his face, knocking his glasses to the floor, where they lay at his feet. He rocked slowly back and forth in the chair, his chest heaving silently as if he were suffocating in an airless world. His right hand, his maimed hand, shook uncontrollably.
Mystified by the colonel's agitation, and comforted by the fact that his thin-lipped ferocity had spent itself, Tanya continued to search her memory. “I remember … it was a Thanksgiving morning when I was about twelve or thirteen when she told me about my father. She was sitting at the kitchen table chopping celery and onions for the stuffing while she told me -- I can still see the tears from the onions streaming down her face. And … it was the strangest thing: when she had finished telling me that Tony was not my father, she began whispering the names of the elements. You know, in chemistry. She …"
Tanya was interrupted by a muffled moan coming from her tormentor that seemed to rise up from the very depths of his soul.
"…she had begun to teach them to me when I was eight or nine, reciting them to me as if they were a second set of ABC’s. Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, Beryllium, Boron …”
“Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen …” David Chao's hushed, half-strangled voice joined Tanya's in an eerily-echoing harmony.
Tanya Spencer glanced up quizzically at David Chao who had begun to move toward her with an anguished expression on his face. “Oh, you know them too?” she murmured.
David Chao bent and retrieved his glasses. His good hand shook as he glared at them, blaming his folly in part on the weakness of his vision. He slowly put the glasses back on, adjusting them with minute care, as if by straightening them perfectly, he might make sense of a world suddenly gone mad. There was a ghastly soullessness to his eyes as he crossed, ashen-faced, to Tanya, his movements those of an automaton.
As his hands moved toward her breasts, Tanya Spencer inhaled fearfully, bracing herself for a fresh round of torment. But this time Colonel Chao's hands were gentle as he unscrewed the first of the fiendish clamps. Tanya bit her lip to stifle a gasp of pain. When the colonel undid the screw-clamp, it felt as if electricity, rather than blood, was surging back into her tender buds.
Although he seemed to move quickly it seemed to Tanya that her strange captor had aged ten years during the minute or two it took him to free her from her bonds.
oh, well.
