A Forced Descent

Chapter One

Chapter One

Katya & Melanie

On the North East coast of Scotland on an isolated property accessed by inhospitable roads and tracks, a conversation was taking place between two women that was, unbeknownst to either of the women holding it – and especially for the husband of one of them who was not present - about to change the life of all of them in the most amazing, if sexually perverse and inhumane, way.

“What do you think?” Katya Lubanski asked her older friend in the fluent English that remained heavily accented despite having been in the country for over three years and counting; question posed after she had given the housewife from London a tour of her facilities.

Melanie Kennedy took a sip of her coffee and nodded approvingly, knowing the Polish expatriate valued the opinion of her closest friend in the UK and, in truth, she was impressed with the progress she had made in so short a time – and in so isolated a place.

“If I’m honest, I can’t believe how much you’ve achieved - and so quickly,” she confessed. “But…”

“Go on,” Katya prompted her when she hesitated. “You are my closest friend in the whole world and I love you. There is nothing you cannot say to me.”

This brought another smile from Melanie who, in contradiction of the younger woman’s rather severe features, always felt relaxed and safe in her presence.

“It’s not a criticism, Katya, but why choose so isolated a place for your business? I mean, I know it’s beautiful in a kind of wild way but you surely could have found somewhere a bit more… accessible to breed and train your dogs?”

The Eastern European, originally christened “Katya Lubanski”, smiled:

“You know how I value my privacy after my experiences in Poland, Melanie. If you had been as used by people as I have you would understand my desire to have as few of them around me as possible.”

“Living in London when Gerald was alive must have been hell for you then.”

Katya nodded to herself at this truism.

“In that you would be correct. Though it had its compensations. Had I not accepted Gerald’s offer of marriage I would not have met you.”

Melanie smiled, grateful herself for the meeting with the sturdy Polish woman whose austere features masked a soft and nurturing nature.

When she felt a person had earned her revealing of it, that is – to others she could be as unforgiving and unbending as granite.

She knew Katya had only married the sixty-year-old Gerald to escape the affections of an equally as old Polish gang-boss who had been infatuated with the womanly curves that could sometimes be overlooked by the severe features overlooking them. The same gang-boss who had bullied her into ending her veterinary studies and had used her shamelessly when he tired of her; powerlessness that was, for the proud Katya, sickening and explained her delight a year or so ago when she heard her persecutor had met his end in her homeland both violently and humiliatingly at the hands of a man and his thugs even more ruthless and unforgiving.

Hence her own control issues that found sublimation via the dogs she bred and trained, farming the female element of any litter out to buyers immediately and training only the males; something she was completely open about with her friend:

“It pleases me to be in total control of the male – even if that male happens to be only a dog.”

The wealthy Gerald, however, had been a different kind of man. Pimped by her Polish gang-boss, she had been ordered to escort the aging English businessman during his stay in Krakow and, by the time came for him to return to England, he had been smitten enough with her severe Polish charm to propose she accompany him back to England as his wife.

He had even paid the gang-boss a handsome fee for the privilege of being allowed to take one of his “girls” away with him.

It had not been Katya’s course of choice, but she had not much in the way of family in Poland and Gerald at least appeared to have genuine feelings for her; also, it allowed her to complete her veterinary studies and become qualified in what had always been a passion for her.

That and the psychology degree she took afterwards.

Gerald’s death had saddened her as much as the death of a member of the male s*x could sadden a woman with her experience of men, but his financial legacy had freed her for the first time in her thirty-two years to do exactly as she pleased.

Hence, also, her presence on a remote coastline of the Scottish Highlands.

“It is busy enough for me,” Katya went on as Melanie backtracked over the recent history that had led her friend to such an isolated spot. “Buyers come to me on a regular basis and I am even in something of a demand as a trainer of the more unruly canines. Though, as you know, I insist on training only males.”

“I wonder why?” Melanie laughed, the older woman by some ten years and one of the only – possibly the only – person able to joke with the Polish woman on such a subject, and even then only after a limited fashion.

Katya smiled tightly, acknowledging the simple truth behind Melanie’s irony but not willing to jest on the subject further – mastery of men, even if it was only that of human female over male canine, both a subject and a need closest to her heart.

“As I have told you before, Melanie, given the presence of even the most rudimentary form of human intelligence in a person, the training of a dog is probably more difficult to achieve than the training of a man. It would simply take more in the way of patience on behalf of the handler.”

As she had before when her friend had brought up the subject most dear to her, Melanie shook her head with a smile that was both indulgent and disbelieving.

“You really do believe that, don’t you?” she asked, the inflexibility of her friend’s features as she returned her gaze sending a shiver down her spine despite the warmth of the crackling wood-burner that allowed them both to relax bare-legged in only their nightshirts during Scotland’s late winter cold.

“It is more a case of knowing it,” the Polish woman with the forbidding face and powerful body stated, expression below the black and somewhat short and schoolboy haircut giving Melanie no cause to doubt the truth of her sincerity at least.

“So, you think you can take a man and make him obedient to you the way you make their dogs obedient to their owners? I mean, really?”

Katya nodded, eyes alive with excitement simply from discussing such a prospect.

“What, any man?”

Again, Katya nodded.

“Some would take longer than others to… break… But yes. Any man. And I do not simply mean training him to obey simple commands.

A puzzled Melanie’s eyes narrowed, as fond as she was of her younger Polish friend there were times when she could only put some of her wilder beliefs down to her experiences at the hands and other appendages of the men in her homeland.

“I don’t follow you,” she said.

“I am simply saying that if I were given unlimited access and time to a man – any man – I could not only make him obedient in the same way I would a dog but I would eventually have him in a position where he would actually behaved as one if it were my wish.”

Melanie’s mouth dropped open at Katya’s assertion, more so because she could see her friend was completely sincere.

“Trust me, Melanie, men are simple creatures whose control centres reside between the legs rather than between the eyes and it is relatively easy to use that knowledge to condition both their behaviour and mindset. Once the correct triggers have been put in place over a period of time the man in question would obey the requests of his female owner to behave in any fashion she chose.”

Katya paused, but when she continued the set line of her jaw and unblinking gaze of her cobalt blue eyes left no doubt she believed what she was saying:

“I promise you, even though he may despise himself for acting at her behest, he would find himself compelled to do so in ways that totally overrode his free will.”

Shifting position on the sofa, Melanie realised she was wet at the prospect her friend described.

Being a woman of more intelligence than her own overbearing husband gave her credit for, she knew it was the lack of any real power or influence in her own life that induced such a powerful reaction to the outlandish, but sexy, prospect being outlined to her.

Sensing the effect her words had on the older woman, knowing her friend as a typical home-making housewife and sensing she was uncomfortable with the subject, though unable to divine the real reason for her discomfort, Katya returned to their earlier subject:

“Anyway, Stonehaven is but a seven mile drive south along the coast and I am not as ‘isolated’ here as you would like to make out. We will visit town tomorrow to pick up provisions and you will see for yourself. It has a population of almost ten-thousand souls and that is more than ample in my opinion.”

Her eyes narrowed now, her turn to be puzzled:

“Knowing how Tim likes to keep you on a tight leash and dislikes me I am surprised you went to all the effort I assume was required to persuade him to allow you to visit here - especially if it is not to your taste.”

Melanie was immediately defensive, thinking she had unintentionally insulted her friend and her choice of location:

“I’m sorry, Katya,” I wasn’t saying I didn’t like your home or the area – I think what you’ve done is marvellous and it certainly is to my taste.”

“Then I hope your visit is enjoyable enough to make the effort it must have took to persuade your husband to allow you to come worthwhile,” Katya told her.

“I’d visit a brick shithouse minus bog paper in Timbuktu right now if it meant escaping the bastard for a while.”

Katya started. It was unlike her friend to use such language and with such venom. At least though, she told herself, it might indicate she was prepared to remove the pig from her life finally.

“Well, at least he allowed you to come and see me,” she said, laughing at her fiend’s outburst just the same. “I know he keeps a tight rein on you.”

“Only because he wants me at home to clean and cook and do his laundry for him,” Melanie sneered, eyes tearing up a little and making Katya even more resentful of the husband who could make her feel such a way. “Besides, me being up here with you for a week means he can screw whoever he’s screwing at the moment without inventing excuses. Probably at it with the latest in our bed as we speak.”

The pause that followed and Katya was at a loss as to how to console her friend; especially as her inclination was to savage the faithless bastard herself.

Unusually, for her, being of a type who took confrontation head on, she chose a subject change by way of an ice-breaker:

“As well as Stonehaven,” she began, “there is a village not four miles inland should I feel the unlikely need to mix with others. Also, the area is rich in history, as well as being beautiful in an uncultivated and rugged way I find… soothing.”

The subject change went unnoticed as Melanie continued to visualise her husband and his latest squeeze in the marital bed.

“Did you know,” Katya persisted, “the first battle between the Covenanters and their opponents was fought not five miles distant from here?”

“Strangely enough… no,” Melanie replied, rolling her eyes, something of her spirit returning. “But I feel a more rounded individual for you having told me.”

Katya tutted at the forty-year-old housewife and friend who would have looked both younger and sexier were she to be persuaded of her own buxom good looks and dress accordingly:

“Really, Melanie,” she began, referring to the first time they had met when walking their dogs upon London’s Primrose Hill, “I sometimes wonder what it is apart from our love of animals that makes us so fond of one another.”

She smiled:

“Apart, of course, from the fact you are one of the nicest people I know.”

The older woman actually blushed.

“I still remember your Boxer trying to mount my Beagle,” Katya continued, recalling the incident that brought them together.

“Yes,” Melanie mused with a wistful look; “it was something of a mismatch.”

“Do you still miss Ollie?” Katya asked, mentally kicking herself for opening an old wound, knowing how distraught her friend had been when, Tim, her control-freak – not to mention, cheating pig - of a husband, had decided the dog was taking too much of her attention and demanded she farm it out. The loss displayed by her friend’s expression did nothing to lessen the severity of Katya’s self-rebuke for the insensitivity of her question.

“I am sorry to ask such a risible question,” she apologised. “Of course you miss him. I only wish I had been here at the time and could have taken him for you. At least then you would have got to see him at decent intervals.”

Though both women were unaware of it at the time, the next words to fall from Melanie’s lips were about to change the lives of them both.

And, in particular, one man.

The housewife from London snorted, about to utter the sentence that would change her life and that of her young Polish friend forever:

“Would have been better for me if you had taken Tim and left me with Ollie.”