Once again the whip falls on Melissa's skin. The sound of the lashes is as bad as the pain itself, if only she could deafen herself, it would not be so real. She whispers a prayer, so as not to cry out.

She is going to bear her ordeal with as much self-suffering as possible.  

This is a penance, nothing more than that. It is a way of paying for her sinful acts, thoughts, hidden desires.

But this is not a penance to Red Feline. She is aware of the injustice.  

She is sure the nun could never have done something so awful to deserve this. The pain, the humiliation, the touch of those thick, sweaty, horrible hands.

She thinks of her own "crime" and knows it must be so with the nun. She must be a scapegoat, a lesson to others, but not guilty.

She cannot not keep her eyes from the punished nun. Her bald head and bare back are both attractive and repulsive. She is at once repelled by the sight and mesmerized by it.

She wonders how the nun keeps her cries so soft, she knows that in her place she would be screaming bloody murder. She knows that she would not kneel peacefully while this man ravaged her back. She would jump up and fight, chains or no chains.

The torturer has a method of striking which became more and more obvious.

Some lashes are teasers, one, two, three, four...lashes at once are steady, rhythmic, but suddenly the fifth or sixth is harder, louder and makes the nun scream out loud, overpowering her will to resist in near silence.

Red Feline counts the lashes, and then tries not to count. It becomes a struggle of her will to not count the lashes.

Red Feline no longer feels sorry for herself. She doesn't really care at that point what her fate will be.  

She struggles with an inner desire to watch in silence and the more tenacious tendency to scream out the appropriate curses...even if uttering those words will surely make her fate even more disastrous.