Part 53
Longing
Ana stood once again at the threshold of Abyss, the scent of latex and velvet drifting out through the half-shuttered entrance like incense from a temple, cloying and familiar. The wind whipped gently through her coat, but she didn’t feel the cold. Not really. It was heat she lived in now - not fire, not warmth, but the deep internal friction of a body denied, restrained, relentlessly aware of itself.
She stepped inside, and the hush of the club swallowed her whole. The soft lighting, the whisper of movement through distant hallways, the glint of candlelight on black marble - it all felt inevitable. As if she had never left.
She moved without being guided, her boots echoing softly as she made her way to Evelyn’s private chamber. She didn’t glance toward the stage, nor at the alcoves where figures lingered in shadow. She kept her eyes forward.
Evelyn sat in her high-backed chair as though she had always been there, draped in obsidian latex, a single gloved finger idly circling the rim of a wineglass. Her hair was pinned up in the severe style she wore when particularly focused, and her gaze was sharp - too sharp.
Ana stopped three paces from her and bowed her head, the gesture half-pride, half-admission.
Evelyn did not rise. "I told myself you wouldn’t come back."
"I told myself the same."
Evelyn's smile was slight, unreadable. "And yet here you are."
Ana forced herself to meet her gaze. "I want another night in the Sanctum. With the attendants. No release. Just… the edging."
Evelyn studied her, saying nothing for a long, brittle moment. "So. You’ve returned for denial. Not pleasure."
Ana nodded. "Yes."
The hostess set down her glass and rose. She circled Ana with slow steps, the click of her heels like a clock ticking. "Still afraid of a third chaste year. And yet, the needle frame did not stop you."
"It hurt," Ana admitted. "But it ended. The longing doesn’t."
"And so, we return to this cycle." Evelyn stopped beside her, voice velvet-smooth. "You reject climax, but beg for the torture that brushes against it."
Ana’s throat worked to form words. "I just want just one more night. The tongues. The edges. I’ll wager pain again. But I won’t risk more time in the belt."
"Why now? You are so close to finishing your contract. Two more months of chastity and you can have all the sex you want."
Ana didn’t respond at first. She stood by the low alcove window, hands folded stiffly in front of her. The outline of her metal belt was visible beneath her latex skirt, a faint but unmissable symbol of her commitment.
"I thought I was strong enough to wait," Ana murmured. "But I was wrong. It’s not just need anymore - it’s not even about orgasm, not exactly. It’s about them. The attendants. When my belt comes off, masturbating to orgasm won’t be the same as a night of those impossible highs. The belt off, it means satisfaction. But the attendants, they mean bliss. That night… what they did to me - it didn’t just leave me hungry. It left me marked." She turned her head slowly toward Evelyn. "I feel like I was touched by something beyond human. Like my soul opened and hasn’t closed since. And I can’t pretend I didn’t love it. It felt like worship - of me and from me. I crave it like monks crave silence, like zealots crave pain."
Evelyn’s expression didn’t change, but her eyes sharpened.
Evelyn moved across the room with slow deliberation, her heels echoing off stone. "Then you shall have a challenge. But do not think it will be the same as before. That was an introduction. This will be a rite."
She pressed her hand to a hidden panel in the wall. With a whisper of pneumatics, it opened, revealing a device neither as elegant nor as ambiguous as the needle frame. It was raw. Angular. Direct.
A bench, tilted just so, padded in black latex. Arm and leg restraints. Knee rests to elevate and spread the thighs. Two mechanical arms beneath, each fitted with motion-sensing pads and retractable spikes.
"This is the Obedience Bench," Evelyn said. "It doesn’t test your balance. It doesn’t respond to rhythm. It responds to your ability to be utterly still."
Ana stepped closer, swallowing. "And the rules?"
"You will be restrained," Evelyn continued, walking alongside the device like a curator presenting a masterpiece. "Your feet will be locked onto insoles that press blunt needles upward with every twitch. The arms beneath you will stimulate small pulses beneath the thighs and lower back - just enough to provoke reaction. You must not flinch."
Ana’s breath caught. "How long?"
"Four hours." Evelyn turned to face her. "You may faint. If you do, the clock stops. Your time resumes when you recover."
Ana’s brow furrowed. "So what defines failure?"
"If you cry out, you fail," Evelyn said simply. "One cry loud enough over the threshold. One scream of surrender. That is your rule."
Ana stared at the bench. Her limbs trembled faintly at the memory of her last wager.
"And if I succeed?"
"You will visit to the Inner Sanctum. The attendants will see to you. Edges, Ana. Only that. Hours of it, should you endure."
Ana nodded slowly. Her eyes burned. She felt a gush of wetness, as the recognized that the tongues were actually in range now, if she accepted.
"And if I fail?"
Evelyn smiled, and this one had teeth. "Then you return to the needle frame."
Ana's heart stopped. "I thought - "
"This time," Evelyn continued, stepping closer, her voice a breath against Ana’s skin, "with both toe and finger pads installed. For twenty-four hours. You will be restrained fully. Arms forward. Toes and fingertips exposed to the articulated arms. Every digit, touched. No piercing. No blood. Just exquisite, calculated agony - short of injury."
Ana couldn’t speak. Twenty-four hours was insane. Three times as long as she had suffered last time. And her finger nails in addition to her toe nails. Only few club patrons had to endure that.
Evelyn’s voice dropped lower. "To experience the highest lust just short of orgasm, you must wager the highest pain just short of your mind fraying. That is the deal. You can accept or refuse it."
Ana looked away. "But this is so much worse than what I suffered through last time," she whispered.
It was obscene. It was manipulative. It was cruel. And it was utterly fair. Evelyn knowingly smiled, she’d have so much energy if Ana failed. She would try more than once at the Seventh Circle while Ana’s mind was fracturing and she’d be drained to the brink.
"Absolutely. More than three times the agony. That is my final offer, yes," Evelyn knew she had her hooked on the otherworldly tongues. Like a drug, Ana had trouble to ignore the temptation. Evelyn would drain her again, suck her dry, in chastity or in pain, it didn’t matter, she’d feast on her energy, her screams or her dripping desire when she finally caved into an extension.
Ana tried to focus - tried to breathe - but the thought of the Sanctum bloomed behind her eyes like heat. She remembered the tongues. The way they had circled her, hovered just shy of satisfaction. The way she had screamed in her the mask, riding the razors edge of orgasm, shaking and sobbing and never allowed to fall.
It wasn’t even pleasure - it was something more precise, more haunting. They had dissected her arousal, teased it into ribbons, sculpted it into madness. She had never been touched so fully. Never denied so deliberately. She had been made art. And now that memory was part of her. It lived beneath her skin. It twitched in her nerves. The thought of failing twisted her stomach. The idea of being silenced not by discipline but by reflex - one cry, one broken scream - and then finding herself again in the frame, this time with finger nails added to the torment…
She imagined it. The tiny needles under her nails. The steady torment of her fingertips, usually so protected. The weight of the belt at her hips, still unmoved, still locked, while her body convulsed in pain far worse than before.
But then - the alternative.
The Sanctum. The mouths. The slow, endless ride along the ridge of climax, never quite reaching, never quite ending. She wanted it. No, she needed it, regardless the cost. She was hooked. A torment of beauty. A ritual of exquisite restraint. She wanted it more than she wanted to breathe.She wanted to be lost in it again, helpless and blind and vibrating with ache. And she was willing - truly willing - to suffer for it.
Everything inside of her screamed no. "I accept," she whispered. Like a moth, she crashed into the flame.
Evelyn stepped back, serene again. "Then you return next weekend. Bring nothing. We will provide what you need."
Ana turned slowly toward the door. She didn’t trust herself to say more. She knew the cost.
She also knew she would keep crawling through fire again for the echo of their tongues.
The club had fallen into that strange, ritual quiet that only came before a true challenge. Ana stood at the center of the stage, surrounded by velvet shadows and expectant silence. Her body was already glistening with a sheen of nervous sweat beneath the slick contours of her latex, her eyes focused not on Evelyn, but on the ominous structure being wheeled into position beside her. The Obedience Bench was not a thing of grace; it was blunt, brutal, functional. A black padded bench tilted to expose the thighs, arms, and feet, flanked by mechanized arms tipped with retractable pads. Beneath the bench, twin insoles waited, dotted with blunt pressure needles calibrated to detect the tiniest movement. It was a test not of endurance, but of stillness.
Evelyn had explained it to the crowd with the ceremonial cadence of a priestess unveiling an ancient relic. The challenge was simple: Ana would be restrained by her wrists pulled above her head. Her feet standing onto insoles that would punish every twitch with blunt agony. She must not flinch. Her only task was silence. Not stillness, though it helped, but the ability to keep from crying out. The attendants placed a microphone an a tripod in front of her, waiting to capture a scream. Just one scream, one sound above the threshold, and the wager was lost. Four hours of torment without a word.
Ana accepted it with a nod, more solemn than proud. The room watched as she was secured into the Obedience Bench. Arms high, legs spread, feet on the insoles. She inhaled once, deeply, embracing her stillness. She though of the Sanctum and the Tongues. It took an half an hour before the he muscles started twitching from the demanding position. The tension building beneath her skin. The insoles didn’t stab. They pushed, rising up and down in response to her trembles, into her tender arches, blunt but unyielding, reminding her that stillness was merely the baseline. Three hours to go, she understood she had no chance as hope left her. She understood that Evelyn had set her up in an impossible challenge. A tear escaped her eye, not from pain, but from the knowledge that she would not enter the Sanctum tonight and that a hell of needles is already waiting in the basement. Her thighs twitched again and she held her breath, jaw locked, eyes wet. It was not a pain that surged or screamed; it was a pain that waited, that watched her with quiet patience and would not be hurried. And she endured, well into the second hour. Then her back spasmed. The insoles needles surged and she tried to instinctively move her legs. The needles jabbed up higher.
The cry was loud. It was short, raw, unintentional. But it was enough. The moment it escaped her lips, the Obedience Bench stilled, needles retracted. Other needles would take over soon. A light blinked red above the stage. Evelyn, unmoving, inclined her head. The silence in the club turned from reverent to resigned. Ana had failed.
She didn’t protest. As the restraints were loosened and her limbs lowered, she didn’t cry or bargain. She knew what she had wagered. She knew what it meant. She was taken below, to the chamber that held the needle frame, and the world closed around her again.
The ritual was swift. Latex peeled away, her body laid bare. The attendants took her to the basement, where the frame shimmered in the dim light. Suspended in perfect alignment, her arms drawn forward, her legs back, spine arched. The frame enveloped her, a machine of pain with the gentleness of an undertaker. The special needle pads per installed upon her feet and hands. Each fingertip, each toe, was the site of intricate torture. Needles slid with surgical precision beneath each nail, hair-thin and relentless, short of the point of actual punctures. Abyss was delicate, never raw torture. Her shrieks began not with surprise, but inevitability. The agony was refined, precise—a thousand years of cruelty coded into algorithm.
For twenty-four hours, Ana remained there. Her screams echoed in that chamber like prayers in a stone temple. She wept until no tears remained. She shook until her muscles spasmed. And through it, Evelyn danced.
Above, in her private chambers, Evelyn once again donned the Stilettos of the Languished Soles. She needed to finally beat her own personal challenge. She moved with grace sharpened by hunger. The dance of the Seventh Circle had begun. Every misstep pressed spikes into her own aching soles, and yet she glided, fed by the rich current of Ana’s torment below. Not that it mattered much; she had learned most of the song by heart, when to expect which note and how to dance. Rarely, she even felt a spike under her feet. Ana’s screams lifted her. The conduit of energy was open, and Evelyn was drinking. The pain was an offering, and Evelyn, shedding years off her appearance by the hour, consumed Ana’s suffering, drank it deep.
The first attempt lasted over two hours. Evelyn soared through the patterns, the fire in her joints pushed back by Ana’s suffering. But as the final segment began, the part requiring unbroken motion atop the highest tempo, Ana had slumped into the needles and held motionless. The intense pain replaced by a dull carpet of suffering. Ana sobbed, shallow breaths, trying to still her fingers and toes. The energy faltered. Evelyn's strength waned. Her heel caught, her rhythm cracked. She stumbled, breath ragged, and the dance ended not in triumph, but in silence.
Three hours later, she tried again. Ana had revived, barely, her body quivering in the frame, her eyes glassy with pain. Every twitch of a toe extracted a scream. The pain resumed. So did the feeding. Evelyn rose, danced, drank. From zero again. This time, she moved carefully, more deliberately. But the second hour marked her. Her calves, tight with exhaustion, began to burn. Just into the third hour saw her steps grow rigid, her calfs trembling. She made it through the spiral section. She faltered in the turn. Her body dropped to one knee, the stilettos pressing spikes deeper into her soles than she could endure. No scream escaped her, but neither did victory. She knelt there, breathless.
Below, Ana lay broken, her fingers twitching, her toes spasming under the persistent kiss of the needles. Her body convulsed, then quieted. There was no climax for her, no tongues; just a moth that burned in the flame. Only the sharp, echoing sting of her own failure.