The strain on Angela’s body was growing, and she was beginning to notice it - and this before her paralysis had even worn off.

The tingling that had accompanied Lucia’s enchanting kiss was gone, and instead she could feel the mild ache in her calves as her legs were stretched high by the rope between her thighs, perfectly positioned to grind against her lower lips if she moved - or if Enna, her handmaiden, moved.

Their captor was nowhere Angela could see, but as she couldn’t turn her head this was probably not surprising. She tested her fingers and found that one of them could curl and uncurl, and knew that the spell, whatever it was, would be going away soon.

She couldn’t wait to spit out her gag, but she was wondering whether or not to shout for help. It seemed unlikely something that had obviously been planned so carefully hadn’t made allowances for her other guards, and if so, shouting would only be something Lucia could mock her for.

A sound came, the sound of a window clasp opening. Moments later she heard commotion from outside the window; collaborators in the courtyard?

Angela vowed internally to make a mental note of the identity of every one of them. When this farce was over, she promised herself, justice would visit each and every one of them.

There was a short period of quiet before she heard a man’s delighted “Hah!” Someone clapped their hands together. “You have a creative soul, my dear.”

“Thank you, my Prince.” The emotion, the contented desire, in Lucia’s voice made Angela’s skin crawl even before the man who had spoken walked into view. They’d never met in person, but art travelled widely, and this was definitely Prince Xan, who now saw her all but naked and trussed up for some kind of pleasure torture.

He looked her in the eye and smiled. “Pardon my intrusion,” he said. “I’m here to accept your formal invitation that I and my consort rule this realm in your stead.”

His eyes were twinkling; she found that she could move both hands in their entirety. The spell of paralysis, having begun to face, was failing faster and faster. Emboldened, she attempted a protest, and some small amount of sound made it past the improvised gag she held.

“Oh, don’t worry,” he assured her. “I’m quite aware you haven’t made one yet. But you will.” He nodded, smiling wider. “You will. It’s the least you can do. After all, you tried to kill me.”

Angela’s heart was pounding so hard it was difficult for her to process most of this. The mounting fear in the implication that Lucia had not only renounced her but sworn loyalty to another was thick around her. She blinked, twice, and her head lolled for a moment before she recovered to hold it upright once again. She knew she was starting to move properly again. She tried to spit out the basque that had been crammed into her mouth, and found it was too bulky, too firmly placed, for her to be rid of it.

Xan was beckoning someone. “Not only did you try to kill me,” he continued, evidently warming to his theme, “you were perfectly happy for one of yours to die for it.”

Lucia stepped back into view. She had divested herself of the rest of her armour, and instead she had helped herself to another of Angela’s dresses, one of the very few that didn’t require assistance from her handmaiden to finish putting on. It was strange to see a woman who’d so firmly ignored her femininity all of her life so deeply enveloped in it now; Angela wasn’t at all sure how to respond.

Then the rope she was straddling suddenly bounced and shifted and she felt the coarse fibres run up and down her pussy lips, with only her linen panties in the way, and her eyes went wide with the startling, delicious shock of it. Across the way from her, Enna’s paralysis had ended, and before she’d been able to stop herself she’d dropped from tiptoes to standing flat, drawing the rope tight against the Queen.

The sound that made it past her muffling gag was a squeak that anyone who heard it might have thought was one of delight, though Angela told herself firmly there was no trace in it of anything but shock.

Prince Xan, watching it happen, clapped his hands and laughed again. “Oh, this is too much! This was inspired, my dear.”

“Thank you, my Prince.”

“Arrange for some food and drink. I don’t think I need to soften her up; I think I want to watch this do it for me.”

“Yes, my Prince,” Lucia said, and smiled. She dropped a quick curtsey before leaving the room; Prince Xan, meanwhile, retired across the room to a chair.

Angela turned her head to glare at him, but any dignity she might have recovered through it was lost when freedom of movement returned to her ankles, which promptly dropped her from tip-toes, grinding her even more firmly against the rope, and the sudden shivering excitement disrupted any attempt to control her own expression.

She looked back to Enna, a silent plea in her eyes as she bobbed back up onto her toes; hoping that her servant would hold still, as she did, so that they didn’t embarrass themselves as Lucia had designed.

This uneasy, effortful balancing act lasted for the longest fifteen minutes of Angela’s life, but neither of them had either the strength or the endurance to stay on tiptoes without moving from side to side for terribly long - especially with their wrists bound behind them.

It couldn’t be kept up forever, and to her embarrassment it was her whose ankles gave out first - she dropped hard enough that if it hadn’t been for the rope she might have fallen to her knees, and she was only barely able to right herself.

The whumph of the grunt Enna gave out as the two of them bounced and ground along the thickly-corded rope was somewhere between protest and something else, and Angela stared at her. She couldn’t actually be enjoying this, could she?

Their eyes met and she was sure her handmaiden wasn’t, except insofar as her body was responding. There was a frustration there that seemed to be teetering on the brink of fury. As Angela watched her, Enna jerked her hips from side to side in something resembling a vicious shimmy that set the rope bouncing between them.

She would have bitten her lip if her mouth wasn’t already full. It hit her in just the right way and she squirmed so hard she nearly fell - and then, in turn, her leg outflung to catch herself had its own effect on the rope.

Angela didn’t want this to feel as good as it did, hated the way her body was betraying her, and hated how many minor frantic adjustments she and Enna had to make to slowly still the rope again. She also wasn’t happy about the quiet laughter coming from their watcher.

She turned to face him again and her eyes widened when she saw that he’d settled down on one of her chairs, had taken his cock out, and was stroking it as he watched them. “Oh, don’t stop on my account, your Highness,” he purred. “You’re putting on a wonderful show.”

She shuddered, which turned out to be either a mistake or a blessed accident, depending on whether she assessed the results rationally or with the building, distracting, quivering need that was starting to fill her. An attempt was made at a growl.

Xan chuckled, and beyond him she saw the door to her chamber open and Lucia re-entered, carrying a small tray on which sat a carafe of wine and a number of sweet pastries clearly scrounged from the kitchen. Infuriating that they hadn’t looked at the dress she was wearing and defied her, but she could understand not wanting to cross a member of the Royal Guard.

…Provided she could be reasonable, which was harder and harder the longer she stayed tethered to these ropes, her body and her lusts on display to a man she considered an enemy.

Lucia set the tray beside Xan, smiled down on him as he smiled on her, stroked at his hair affectionately. As the Prince selected the first pastry he wanted, she went to her knees and nuzzled at the hand stroking his cock until he moved it aside so her mouth could take its place.

“I should probably explain,” he said after a few moments. “That is, not why we’re here, but why this is happening to you. It might help you to understand. And my apologies to you,” and here he was visibly addressing Enna, “as from what I can see you’re simply someone my little soldier girl here knew could be trouble, being kept out of trouble in the simplest way available to her.”

He let that hang in the air for a few moments, knowing neither of his captives could speak; indeed, at that moment he was the only person in the room whose mouth wasn’t full.

“So,” he said simply. “I’m here to break you, Highness. I’m here to push you to the point where you will willingly surrender your crown and rulership of this realm to me. As you tried to sabotage or kill both of us, I rather think I’m not being as cruel to you as you were to us.

“It starts with enough pleasure that I can begin my work. By the time we cut you down, you’ll be spent, you’ll be drained, you’ll be vulnerable. You’ll also be exhausted. And then I’ll begin my work.”

Throughout that explanation, Lucia had been making louder and louder noises of satisfaction and delight. Angela didn’t think (as much as she could still think, as worked up as she was feeling) that this was just the effect of sucking on the Prince’s cock.

Which meant that this was her revenge, really and truly, and she was taking such pleasure in it.

She was prepared to resist as long as she could, even stewing resentfully on his words and her own deductions, but Prince Xan wasn’t done.

“As for you, my dear,” he continued, and the Queen could see Enna paying a very focused attention, “as I say, you’re unfortunately an innocent caught in this. But this part of the experience, you can get through very quickly - if your former Queen is overwhelmed by sensation quickly enough.”

His meaning was more than clear. If Angela could speak, she would have retorted Enna is a loyal subject. She’ll never listen to you. She would have meant it as much as a message to the weary and beleaguered Enna, a reminder that she would be rewarded for defending her Queen, to keep her spine straight and not give in to the honeyed words of this invader.

Being gagged and unable to speak, she instead looked directly at her handmaiden, and tried to say everything that had to be said with her eyes.

Enna looked steadily back at her, her own gaze steely, and slowly, deliberately, she started to roll her hips over the rope, setting it moving and shifting and grinding against the Queen, who bit down on her gag and tried not to be affected.

It wasn’t working. Betrayed by one of her most loyal soldiers and abandoned by her handmaiden, Angela was shaken and uncomfortable but she was also, inevitably, more and more stimulated and aroused the more the rope ground against her.

Prince Xan finished a second pastry and licked his fingers clean delicately, then picked up his goblet of wine. Looking at him was supposed to inspire anger, but her vision was swimming so much that didn’t really seem to be true anymore, and Enna’s determination, accompanied by muffled groans that mingled drive with her own arousal, meant that she could barely stand, barely balance.

“I’m prepared to do this for as long as it takes,” Xan said, and suddenly Angela had a clear image of how long she might be riding the rope, how close to exhaustion she might get.

She would always wonder afterwards why it was at that moment that the first orgasm took her, driven by a particularly vengeful motion from Enna that saw the rope slither through the slick folds the wet cotton now barely shielded, connecting somehow while Angela’s defences had briefly dropped in despair.

Even through the gag she could be heard yowling her excitement, and a rush of a strange satisfaction thudded through her.

Xan rose, suddenly, leaving Lucia gazing adoringly at him, licking her lips and wiping her chin clean. He’d produced a long black baton and as he strode toward Enna, both the women suspended above the rope watched him and wondered what was coming, as nothing they’d seen so far had made any sense.

He plucked the gag from Enna’s mouth then, almost casually, tapped the baton against her thigh, hard enough that Angela could hear the impact, not quite hard enough for Angela to wince in sympathy.

Except that Enna didn’t wince, didn’t cry out in pain, but there was a half-choked, ululating cry of bliss. She was shuddering, full-body shivers of pleasure rolling up and down her physique, and as a direct result the rope between Angela’s thighs was rocking up and down like the sea during a storm, making it hard for her to keep her own balance as her thighs, already exhausted, were quivering not just from tiredness but from the arousal that her wet, eager pussy was already facing again.

She wanted to bite her own lip, wanted to do more than clench her fists but there was nothing more she could do about the sensation. Xan stopped doing whatever he’d been doing to Enna, which didn’t keep the rope from shaking and see-sawing, stuck now against the wet linen over her cunt, moving and twitching and sending excitement and arousal jolting through her with every twitch.

He was fiddling with something on the baton as he approached.

“If you cry out now,” he said, loudly enough that everyone in the room could hear, “and by some miracle my men, let in and possessing the element of surprise, haven’t subdued the few guards you have in the building, I want you to ask yourself how humiliated you’ll feel when they burst in to see you like this.”

He was smiling like he thought nothing of this, like all of this was still a game, and perhaps to him - horrifying idea - it still was. “So,” he continued, “it’s about to be your choice.” And he plucked the gag from her mouth and let it drop.

She took a breath to give him a piece of her mind, but before she could speak he brought the baton down hard across the buttock nearest him, the sound of it cracking like a cane.

It stung, but - she felt on an almost instinctive level - it stung far more than a simple caning would have. The pain that shot through her was agonising but, worse, it was all but omnipresent.

Her breath went out in a weak but heartfelt scream of pain; with her hands trussed behind her, she lost her balance as that leg buckled, and only Xan catching her stopped her from falling and potentially landing badly.

He propped her up with his own shoulder - knowing how little she could do to respond - and lifted the baton, bringing it down in a vertical stripe across the other buttock, and the stinging was even worse, but somehow, as she bounced and thrashed on the rope, the pain met with the pleasure she’d been feeling. A shriek of pain quickly tailed into an excited, aroused, and overwhelmed whimper.

Xan made another adjustment, this time with a hand on her sternum to support her, just below her throat, where she knew he could reach up with ease and take her by the windpipe if he wanted. He did something to the baton, and as it bit across both buttocks the painful sting of the cane-like impact came wrapped in a sprawling haze of pleasure, and following so closely on the heels of the other, Lucia came again, crying out loudly.

A silent prayer begged the gods that her guards not burst in, not see her like this, though the prayer was barely a sentence; certainly it was far less coherent.

*

Somewhere along the way, Angela discovered as she regained consciousness, consciousness had been lost; the barrage of pleasure and pain had progressed until she stopped being aware of the world around her.

Doubtless she had collapsed, or tried to (the memories of him manhandling her helpless body as he caned her with his baton were all too eager to bubble back up to the surface of her mind), and she found herself kneeling now, her wrists still tied behind her back, her face buried in the ornately-embroidered footstool kept in her quarters, her feet together and her ass up in the air.

As the second crack sounded, a jolt of unstoppable, irresistible lust and pleasure flooding through her, she realised she had been woken when the caning began again.

Angela tried to lift herself from the footstool, but she felt a hand take hold of her hair and press her firmly down again. “Now, now,” she heard Lucia say, and there was a satisfied taunt in her tone, “you don’t say when this stops. My Prince says when this stops.”

She found her voice, her throat seeming impossibly dry but nonetheless she made herself say “Pl-ple-EEEE!” the last part of which was occasioned by a third strike of the baton. Her vision was swimming.

She was worryingly, troublesomely aware that she was wiggling her ass as if inviting another stroke. It was like her body didn’t care about the humiliation, didn’t care about the political consequences; it only wanted pleasure.

She found her voice again. “Lucia. Please. You can make him stop. I know you can make him stop.” And then she cried out, again, a call of supreme and instinctive bliss that her body craved even as her mind fought to reject it, as he brought the baton down hard again.

Lucia giggled. “I don’t think she understands yet, my Prince. Please show her.”

There was a slightly longer pause between strokes, and as Angela struggled for the right thing to say, Lucia spoke again. “The problem, Highness, is that you don’t understand the value of your subjects. You stunt them. Cut them off. You think of them as tools.

“I am my Prince’s tool, but I choose to be my Prince’s tool. I’m proud to be.”

“And I reward my little soldier girl,” Xan’s voice chimed in. He chuckled. “In point of fact, I intend to take her as my consort. And we have you to thank for that.”

“Wh… what do you mean?”

“Well, after you hand me the rulership of your land, I hardly need marry for power, do I?” He chuckled. “She’s a beautiful woman, but having met her I know how little we have in common.

“I certainly have no wish for that to be my future. With a fighter at my side…”

Angela squealed again; the latest stroke of the baton had been blissful, head-turning pleasure.

“…I’ll enjoy myself much more.”

“And I’ll enjoy myself, too,” Lucia chimed in. “In a way you never let me.”

The woman’s voice was heavy with betrayal, which Angela found outrageous - she was the one betrayed!

“I’ll never…” whack and another jolt of unbelievable pleasure, and Angela couldn’t remember what the rest of the sentence had been. “I… uh…”

“Just give in, Highness,” Lucia said, her voice a purr. “You don’t have the heart or the power to end this.”

“N… never…”

Xan chuckled again. “The thing about giving in,” he said, “is that once you give in the first time, the second is so much easier, even if the stakes are higher.”

And whack, and she was moaning incoherently with the lust and the pleasure the baton filled her with, and it was several seconds before she could even start thinking again and whack and…

Xan said something, asked something, and what he was asking for didn’t penetrate her mind. Her aching buttocks had her on cloud nine, and thoughts really weren’t happening for her at all.

The next stroke of the baton was shocking, yowling pain. Xan asked whatever he was asking again, and Angela drifted, the pain not offering her enough clarity that she could think.

She was whimpering, not speaking.

Xan’s baton tip traced her spine, and halfway up her spine the sensations flooding her changed from excruciating pain to uncanny, impossible pleasure. They seemed to change in a heartbeat, leaving only the memory of the pain behind, with none of it still echoing through her body save for the aches of the impact cuts of his earlier strikes.

He said something, asked something. She was nodding. “Yes,” she said, gasping just to have a moment’s stability. “Yes. Please. Any - anythingggg…”

The baton lifted from her spine. Someone - it had to be Lucia - slipped an arm under her breasts and lifted her head with a handful of hair in the other hand, moving her off the stool she’d been propped against and turning her to face in a new direction.

Angela found herself face to face with a cock, already hard, glistening as if it had been used not long ago. She had the strange, dim sensation that this was what she’d agreed to.

She wanted to take it in both hands and guide it into her mouth, to swallow him deep, and to worship him, whoever he was. But her hands were tied, her wrists had been bound by Lucia, and she could feel that same restraint.

She had to rely on Lucia’s own hands to guide her eager, open mouth to the cock before her, and then to steady her for the first few uncertain movements as she bobbed up and down on him. Before long, though, Angela was supporting herself, coaxing the exhausted muscles of her thighs and her belly to hold her upright, using the arms that jutted out behind her as a balance, turning her binding into an advantage.

She had started to feel the twitching and the shifts that often presaged eruption, to taste (and savour) the precum emerging drip by drip onto her coaxing tongue, before she realised whose cock this was.

The thing about giving in is that once you give in the first time, the second is so much easier, even if the stakes are higher.

His words echoed in her head, not mocking, almost sympathetic, but certain; as if he had just been stating a rule of the universe. And to judge by how her mouth was behaving, he’d been right. There was no energy in her, no agency, that was for spiting him, attacking him, even for abandoning the act of worship she was engaged in.

When he was already, he placed his baton tip just on her sternum and he slowly pushed her backwards off his cock, a boiling heat and pleasure flooding out from her chest until the dams broke and everything about her was swamped, and a few moments after that, he came, painting her chin, her cheeks, her lips and her breasts with his seed.

She knelt where she was, flushing, basking in happiness, the enchantment on the baton at her breast throbbing through her, keeping thoughts unable to form.

Only then did she notice that her hands had moved during her experience; that, holding them straight out behind her, she had separated them.

She moved her wrists experimentally, and wondered when her restraints had been cut, and why she’d been so unable to notice.

She should lunge forward. Should wrap her hands around his throat. Should, at the least, attempt to slay him. He’d already told her what he intended. She couldn’t accept it, so rejecting it should be simple.

Her hands slowly crept around her sides and forward, shaking, as physically drained by the tests of pleasure and endurance Prince Xan had put her through as the rest of her, joints aching from how long they’d remained together (or ‘together’).

He twitched his batontip against her, just for a moment, the laziest motion he could make if he was to move at all. Any thought of lunging, of surging forward, vanished along with all other thought.

Whatever her hands had been going to do she would now never know. They found her nipples, began to toy and to tease, and Angela felt a long rope of drool finally descend far enough to touch her bare chest.

Lucia laughed, a triumphant sound, and Angela didn’t think about it, didn’t protest, didn’t listen.

The baton left her skin and she whimpered but did not move. Prince Xan smiled down on her. “How does she look, my dear?” he asked.

“Desperate,” Lucia answered. “Needy. And ripe, I’d say.”

“Ripe?”

“Oh yes, my Prince.”

He stooped slightly and took Angela’s chin in his hand, lifting it to force her eyes to meet his. She looked up into his smile, mind still reeling, helpless to speak or think or to object in any way.

“I think you might be right, my dear,” he said. “And you,” he turned his focus entirely back to Angela, “you don’t think at all, do you?”

Angela tried to answer, but what came out wasn’t really words, just need.

She wanted either to be fucked good and hard or to be left alone in a corner of the room until she’d had a chance to recover.

Instead, Xan and Lucia lifted her, between them, and carried her over to the bed, where they set her down and Xan laid his baton across her bare belly.

The enchantment of the baton filled her body, a constant wave of pleasure that became so commonplace that it was soon all she noticed, all she processed. Whatever the others were doing, she couldn’t answer.

Lucia and Enna started to dress her, pulling one of her more expensive, more complex, more regal dresses over her body. It always took someone who was not her to get her into one of these outfit, and her limp, exhausted, out-of-it state seemed to be well balanced by the fact there were two of them, who deftly moved her around until Xan had to lift his baton free for them to continue dressing her.

In due time she was lifted bodily to her feet and held just long enough to find her feet.

Prince Xan smiled. “I’ve made arrangements for people to listen outside,” he said. “Now, if you want more pleasure…?”

The fact it was a question was obvious in the way he looked at her. She opened her mouth to beg, but words failed her, and she ended up just nodding helplessly, eyes wide.

He gestured to the balcony, from which the crowned head of the Empire could, if they wished, address any of their subjects who happened to live locally, though this was a thing that happened perhaps once a year.

“You know what I want in return?” he asked.

Lucia and Enna helped her out onto the balcony, moving with a shared purpose that made Queen Angela wonder when exactly Enna had been completely won over to the side of the two scoundrels.

She should rebel, she thought. Steadied by a woman who was dressed not as her Guard but in the finery of a lady at court and by a handmaiden, she was at least not as obviously shameable as if she’d managed to cry for help when the Prince first started working on her will.

She could cry out. Explain. Appeal for her Royal Guard to storm the Palace for her. Prince Xan’s head would end up on a pike; it would be war with Marisal, but that was all but inevitable at this point anyway. And she would be safe.

She should cry out.

There were many gathered in the square below the cliff on which the Palace had been built. She looked out into a throng, a sea of faces.

She opened her mouth, and the tip of Xan’s baton touched the bare back of her neck.

Queen Angela moaned loudly and orgasmically in front of her subjects, her eyes crossing for a moment, rolling back behind fluttering eyelids.

She fought, not for control of the situation, but simply for composure.

“My loyal subjects,” she managed, then cleared her throat and straightened slightly and tried again. “My loyal subjects.

“You’ve served me faithfully throughout my reign, as you served my father before me. And I hope I have done the same for you. But these things must change; the needs of a nation are always evolving.

“It is as a result of this change that I have offered the Crown of Erethnis to Prince Xan of Marisal.”

She turned her head to see him, and also to hide her embarrassed flush from anyone looking below. Xan stepped up to the balcony and waved.

“The Queen yet lives,” Lucia called out, suddenly, her voice powerful and proud. “But long live the King!”

She heard “Long live the King!” echo up toward her like a thunder, and the shame of it mixed with the enchanted pleasure that enfolded her almost entirely.