Sadistic Startup

She knew her threats were hollow. How could she ever hurt him? She got out of bed and went to her office computer to get her mind off Nate. She Googled "lesbian canings" and watched some women rip apart the butts of other women with their canes and crops.

But the red marks spreading across their asses, the purple bruises, the bits of blood and the screams and tears did not distract her like they usually did. She didn't want to see women suffering tonight. She wanted to see Nate suffering. Would she ever get that chance?

On a whim, she Googled "women caning men" and began watching the videos that turned up. They didn't arouse her, but the more she watched them, the more they calmed her down. Even though most of the men were fat, old or ugly, she imagined they were Nate.

Her nerves settled, she went back to bed and slept soundly. She forgot about Nate until the next afternoon. She was in the middle of writing a carefully worded reprimand letter to a female employee for using the lunchroom container to dispose of smelly garbage from her apartment.

What she was working on started to get fuzzy and out of focus. Slowing coming into focus in its place was a crystal clear idea of how she would get her revenge. She analyzed it and tried to find a weakness that would make it impossible, but she couldn't. She relaxed. Her frustration was over. It was going to happen, because Nate himself would give her the opportunity. All she had to do was prepare for it.

***************

Within days after her epiphany, everyone at work noticed a change in Frankie. She had always been overly friendly and upbeat. Everyone knew it was an act.

Now she stopped trying to smooth things over and avoid unpleasantness. Instead of disciplining them and mouthing platitudes, she loved problem workers to death until they gave up, stopped causing trouble and quit complaining.

It was different at home. She was just as upbeat and positive, but Dolores didn't like to hear why. When they had words, Frankie was nonplussed. She patiently endured the verbal attacks from Dolores and then responded the same way.

"Honey, I don't want to upset you. I'm only sharing my progress reports because you told me you wanted to know everything I was doing. If you tell me you don't want to hear any more, I won't mention it again."

"I want you to drop this crazy plan," Dolores would say, or words to that effect.

"That's not going to happen. I know I'm selfish, but this is a gift I want so badly that I'm going to give it to myself even if you don't want me to have it.

"You don't care how much you'll hurt me."

"I promised you when I started that I would find a way to do it without hurting you. And I won't break that promise."

"How are you going to do that?"

"I'll tell you after I finish working it out."

That's how the discussion usually ended. The final punctuation was usually a long sigh from Dolores.

Frankie's idea was to make a video of Nate receiving a caning and put it on the Internet to humiliate him forever. She felt it was just a matter of time. Despite what Nate had told Dolores about Tinsley Bennington, Frankie was sure that he would continue to run out of money.

The next time he approached her, when he would get eighty-five per cent of what he needed, Frankie would explain exactly to him how he could earn the rest of the money. She would describe to him in detail how a woman would humiliate him and savage his bare ass, how the whole world would enjoy his degradation, how he'd have to hide his butt from women he wanted to fuck because of the deep stripes and bruises that would take months to disappear. She hoped he wouldn't realize she was exaggerating.

Maybe her gleeful description would frighten him a little, but she didn't expect him to agree right away. What she hoped was that the image she created in his mind would torment him the next time he came to her for money.

Each time she saw him, he'd get less of the money he needed and be more desperate, and each time, she'd remind him of how he could work off his debt. The worse his situation, the more her proposal would haunt him.

She was confident the day would come when he would be more scared of financial disaster than being whipped. Then she would finally get her satisfaction.

While she was waiting for that day, she worked on setting up a smooth process so that once Nate agreed, it could be done quickly, before he backed out -- maybe even the next day.

The first person she approached to help her was Thornton Berry, an Internet porn mogul. She noticed that a good number of the BDSM websites on the Internet were owned by his company. She visited some of his free sites and watched the trailers and promotional videos designed to get viewers to sign up for the really good stuff on the pay sites.

He had a couple of sites featuring women doing things to men, everything from caning, paddling, cropping, whipping and spanking to torturing genitals. She sent an email with questions to one of his site's contact addresses, asking that it be forwarded to him.

It took a month for the email to reach him. He responded immediately and said he was impressed by what she wrote and wondered why she was asking those questions.

All Frankie wanted to know was how much Berry would pay Nate for a caning video and how to set it up. Instead of giving her the information, he started a dialogue. He was intrigued that a woman who sounded bright and witty was representing a model who wanted to do spanking porn. She was amazed that a sleazy purveyor of online filth sounded like a cultured gentleman.

The more they wrote back and forth, the closer they got. She began calling him Thorny affectionately. Dolores, who also read all his emails, was amused, except when they were discussing Nate.

At Berry's prodding, Frankie told him all about Nate and Dolores and her plan. He loved her idea and said he would do what he could to help.

He asked Frankie if she wanted to cane Nate herself. Frankie said she'd love to but she didn't have any experience. She wanted to make sure the strokes were as painful as possible, so the caner needed to be a professional. Berry suggested she contact a business acquaintance of his named Severa.

"She's the most amazing woman," he said. "She's a mechanical engineer by profession. and Severa is her domme name. She's not just an expert at male discipline, but she invents some amazing devices that are more painful than you could imagine. She's deadly accurate with crops, canes, whips and every spanking implement ever invented. She knows how to position the victims for maximum effect, both in terms of suffering and exciting videos.

"Despite how she acts on my videos, she's the nicest person you'd ever hope to meet."

He sent her links to some of Severa's caning videos.

Frankie was taken aback. She had never thought about talking to a domme, but what Berry said made sense to her. She began a dialogue with Severa. They soon became email friends, too.

Severa was interested in Frankie's work and asked her a lot of questions about it. She said that in her day job, she occasionally had dealings with her company's head of HR. She had never realized how much of the job involved using psychology -- just like a domme.

Frankie didn't know Severa and Thorny also spoke to each other about Frankie and Dolores until she got an email from each of them telling her they were flying in to meet with her. They asked her to cancel everything on her calendar the weekend after next, starting Friday evening.

Frankie was surprised, but Dolores was stunned. They didn't even know where Severa and Berry lived. Were they a couple? Why did they need to meet in person? What kind of people were they?

The next day Berry wrote explaining that he had come up with a business idea for Frankie, Severa and himself. The visit was to present his startup concept in person. He wanted feedback to help him decide whether it was viable.

"You are not going into business with a smut peddler and a sadist!" Dolores said.

"I have no idea what he's got in mind," Frankie replied. "No matter what happens, it should be wild. Their emails aren't strange, but who knows what they'll be like in person? They probably dress flashy and talk like crazy showbiz people. I've met a few. I'm not going into business with flakes, but the weekend will be fun."

Berry apparently did some research on their city, because he wrote that he had made reservations for Alberto's, the most expensive restaurant in town, for Friday, the night he and Severa were flying in. He said Dolores was included for dinner.

Dolores didn't want to join them, but she was afraid of not being there to prevent Frankie from doing anything crazy. They changed at work and went straight to the restaurant. They were twenty minutes early for the reservation and told the host that there must be some mistake, because there would be only four of them.

"It says here, 'Berry, party of six.' If it's a mistake, we can always move you to a smaller table."

Frankie and Dolores speculated about who the two others might be if there was no mistake. They watched people coming in, paying particular attention to the odd-looking ones. None of them were in a group of four.

A nicely dressed businessman-type approached the host station with three beautiful women in elegant cocktail dresses. The women looked at least ten years younger than him, and Frankie's raunchy speculation about what they'd be doing later in the evening made Dolores laugh.

The host was taking the foursome to a table near them. Frankie and Dolores tried not to stare as the group walked by their table.

"Ahem!"

They looked up. The man with three women had stopped at their table. The maitre'd was gone.

"Hello! I'm Thornton, but I don't mind Thorny. This is my wife, Blossom, and this is Severa and her wife, Hadley."

"Since I'm not performing, please call me Janet," said the tallest woman of the three.

Frankie and Dolores sat dumbfounded for a second. Then they stood up and introduced themselves. If Berry, Blossom, Janet and Hadley were amused by their reception, they didn't show it, and there were no hiccups the rest of the evening.

As dinner progressed, the conversation seemed to break naturally into two parts. Berry, Janet and Frankie talked about career experiences, and the two wives and Dolores talked about family and children.

Dolores found out Berry and Blossom had two pre-teen daughters that were being raised strict Catholic. Janet and Hadley were in the process of adopting a little boy and had lined up a good friend of theirs who was a divorced father with two boys to become involved with their child as a father figure.

The more Dolores spoke to the women, the more she liked them. She opened up and shared her dreams of becoming a mother. Blossom told her how wonderful the experience of bearing your own child was. Hadley explained that she and Janet were overjoyed to give an unwanted child the love and security of a happy home.

By the end of the evening, Dolores was undecided between the two paths but feeling positive about both. Blossom, on the other hand, listened raptly to Hadley and announced before the group broke up that she had been thinking about having a third child but now was going to talk to Thornton about adopting.

The discussions continued at Dolores and Frankie's home. Once again the two groups split up. Berry, Frankie and Janet went into the kitchen with laptops, tablets and coffee while the other women sat in the living room sipping wine.

In the kitchen, Berry laid out his business plan and what he thought it would cost to get the startup launched. He said that if Frankie and Janet went in with him, he wanted each one to own one-third, but he knew that he had a lot more money available, so they would invest whatever they could and gradually buy some of his stock at the original valuation.

When he had finished explaining and showing his PowerPoint presentation, he said to them, "I'm counting on both of you to pick holes in this and attack every detail that bothers you. I've put a lot of thought into it, but I didn't have any outside feedback, so there are bound to be things that I overlooked. I'm especially counting on your expertise in personnel, Frankie."

That started an intense give-and-take that was interrupted by the wives and Dolores at nearly midnight. It was decided that the guests would come back to the house the next morning and bring a gourmet breakfast spread.

The next day and a half, Berry, Frankie and Janet never stopped talking and left the house only long enough to take walks in the park. None of them noticed the scenery because they were talking every step of the way.

Dolores showed the wives around the city, took them shopping and picked up dinner for everyone that they ate at home. Dolores insisted on no business discussion during dinner. The moment it was over, the two groups split again, and the kitchen crew worked late into the night.

Berry and Blossom went to early mass at the local parish Sunday morning and then joined the rest of them for breakfast. After two more hours of intense kitchen work, the guests left to go back to their hotel and pack for their return flights.

Dolores and Frankie closed the door and sank into chairs in the living room in exhaustion. After a while, they got up and began cleaning up but spoke little of their guests until they were in bed and nearly asleep.

Frankie sighed and said, "That was intense! I'll tell you about it tomorrow."

Breakfast was quiet, but at dinner they each talked about how much they liked their visitors. After dinner, Frankie took out her notes and explained the business. She said Dolores and the wives would be equal partners in everything even though all that was expected of them was support, not participation.

"Thorny has been looking for a way to get out of hard-core sex for a while. He thinks this is it. That's why he wants this to be separate from his other companies, which he plans to sell once this is successful."

Dolores started to say something, but Frankie held up her hand.

"Yes, I agreed to do it, with one catch. If you show me good reasons not to do it, I'll back out. I also told them that we would never get involved in anything illegal or any business that didn't benefit everyone involved and fill a need in society. I told them that in your entire sales career, you never sold a product you didn't believe in.

"They said they and their wives felt the same way. We agreed that we wouldn't start the business without all six of us being on board."

"But..."

"Relax, Dolores. Please hear me out."

"All right. Go ahead."

"Thanks. The hardest part for you to accept will be that the idea for this business came from you and me and Nate."

"What? Nate?"

"Thorny related to our story. He told me if anyone had treated Blossom the way Nate treated you, he doubted that he'd have my patience and self-control. He probably would take revenge recklessly, ended up behind bars and hurt Blossom by leaving her alone.

"It got him to thinking about all the selfish, cruel and disgusting things men and women do to those they have power over, even if it's only psychological. Why shouldn't the victims be able to get revenge. He told me that I was your surrogate victim, because I feel your pain as much as you do. He said that gives me the right to be your avenging angel.

"He didn't feel as strongly about men getting revenge on women who wronged them. I told him that was sexist. Women were every bit as evil as men. He said I was probably right, but men hurting women wasn't something he'd get into, no matter the reason or justification. His business idea was limited to women hurting men."

"No!"

"Sit down, Dolores. That's an oversimplification. It's like saying opera is about a bunch of overweight people screaming at each other. The nuances are what make it special. Let me explain."

Dolores sat down, crossed her arms and glared at Frankie.

"The startup is called XGF Revenge. There are tons of websites and blogs about ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends. There's advice about getting them back or moving on. And there's a lot of stuff about getting back at them. Some of the revenge advice is pure evil and even illegal -- like hacking into their Facebook accounts, phones, computers and bank accounts and totally messing up their lives.

"To give you an example, I've seen this one a lot: If you are a good enough hacker or find one, it wouldn't be hard for you to get Nate listed as a sex offender. He would have to spend time and money to remove his name from the list. Even then, some search engines would still bring it up. If a girl or prospective employer saw it, they might not give him a chance to explain.

"As much as I hate Nate, I just want to get revenge, not destroy the rest of his life. But a lot of ex-girlfriends want blood. We will give them blood, but only a few specks. All our ex-girlfriends are going to do is cane their ex-boyfriends' bare asses until they're throbbing hunks of raw flesh.

"We adapted the idea from a Hungarian website where they audition girls for caning videos. The auditions get more clicks than the regular caning videos, because they're unpredictable.

"Sometimes the girl auditioning has some experience, but usually she's a first-timer. She's seen the caning videos, knows what she's in for and thinks she can handle it. Sometimes the pain is more than she expected. She quits in the middle of the audition. I'm sure she gets some money for letting the site show the audition video.

"The girls who are caned are naked, and the woman who is doing it is dressed. Before the caning, the woman from the site interviews the girls and asks them about their sex lives. Often they joke with each other. The girls are all smiles.

"That's what makes the caning interesting. The viewers get to know the girls, even though they may be lying about everything in the interview. The girl who minutes before was smiling and making jokes gradually breaks down as cane rips into her until she's screaming and crying and jerking uncontrollably with each stroke.

"There are lots of videos of women caning men, but Thorny thinks our site will outperform all of them because of our business plan. First of all, each man will be getting caned for the first time unless he's such a good liar that he fools Janet and me in the preliminary interview. He won't be a professional or a breathless amateur masochist who is obviously enjoying every stroke.

"Some of the boyfriends will not make it all the way through, so the audience will be in suspense. The ones who give up will be the most interesting, because before they tell the ex-girlfriend to stop, they'll probably lose it in front of the cameras. It will be like a reality show.

"Thorny thinks what will really set the site apart from the competition will be Janet and me."

"You're going to be on the website?"

"Would you like to watch me caning Nate?"

She laughed.

"No, no. Don't worry. I'm only kidding. I'll be off-camera, behind the scenes. My job is HR. I'll be helping Severa interview job applicants. Ha ha ha!

"The interviews will be an important part of the revenge videos. Severa will be on camera with both the girl and the ex-boyfriend. I'll be supplying a lot of the questions. Thorny thought it would be great to have my voice interrupting from nowhere whenever I come up with a good question, but Severa will probably wear an earbud and I'll prompt her whenever I have an idea.

"The interviews will last about an hour. They'll be edited down to the best parts to heighten the drama, just like on a reality TV show. Thorny's idea is amazing. He's a genius."

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about the interviews. They may try to bullshit us, so we'll have to work to get what we're looking for. But I'm used to that."