Bound and Initiated (4 page)

Sarah pretended to be seeing the metal hooks there for the first time. “Wh-what…” she stammered.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what those fixtures are for, Sarah.” Something about the nearly continuous use of her first name seemed hypnotic, as if Claudia were claiming her that way. Her mind went off the rails yet again, fantasies piling up inside it like bricks in a wall to enclose her.
Kiss my pussy, Sarah. Sarah, do it better. Put your tongue inside, Sarah. No, Sarah, if you cannot do better I must punish you.

“In this room, Sarah, if I choose, your training will begin. I think if you look into your soul, you will find that you understand.”

“Understand what?” Sarah squeaked.

Claudia smiled. “That now that you are here, you will learn to do as I say, because if you do as I say, I shall reward you upon this coffee table, and if you do not, I shall punish you upon it.”

“B-but… but I thought…” Sarah’s heart pounded wildly in her chest.

“Oh, please don’t pretend that you’re considering trying to walk out that door, Sarah.” Claudia’s smile seemed to turn sardonic, even mischievous. “Yes, if you did manage to stand up, and make your way over there, I would let you go. But we both know that’s not going to happen.”

If I weren’t trying to unmask a global conspiracy that seeks to undermine the rule of law,
Sarah thought,
I most certainly would get up and leave.
She shuddered, wondering suddenly if they really would let her depart like that. Or if she tried to go would they block her path, and her ‘training’ would begin in some much harsher way?

“H-how do you…? I mean, I didn’t tell you anything like that in my email. I didn’t say anything about stuff…” Sarah tried to find a more concise way to refer to the
stuff,
almost desperately, for a few seconds. Claudia raised her eyebrows in an obvious refusal to help with the words her new recruit needed. At last, very lamely, Sarah finished, “…like …that.”

“Did you say you would like to apply?” Claudia inquired, as if she spoke of a job in insurance, or fast-food service.

“Yes, but—”

“What is it you thought you would like to apply for?” Claudia interrupted, not raising her voice but cutting off Sarah’s as if she had.

“You know, the stuff from the books and things, and—”

“I thought I knew, Sarah.” A very slight hint of impatience seemed to creep into Claudia’s tone. “But it seems as if perhaps I don’t. Let me tell you about what we do, and perhaps that will resolve your foolish doubts. I have done my job for a long time, and I know that girls who sit in your position need what I and my associates have to offer. As I said, it’s normal to feel strange. But I don’t want to leave you under any illusion, Sarah, that you can resist your need for the even stranger things that await you today, and in your near future.” Sarah felt her eyes widen at the absolute assurance in Claudia’s voice, and she felt her nipples tingle against the lace of her bra. “You can’t, and you will have a much better time today if you don’t try to deny it.”

Sarah knew that her expression must present a mask of dismay, for the vision of herself on the coffee table, looking up at Claudia’s wet pussy as she lowered it onto her virgin trainee’s face and made the new girl do the shameful thing for the very first time, had filled her mind again so thoroughly that she began to wonder if the older woman spoke the truth. Sarah couldn’t resist because she must infiltrate this organization: that constituted the true reason she must keep sitting here in Claudia’s office with her heart pounding and her stomach churning. Did that helplessness in the face of the way it appeared Claudia and the men who must wait behind the various doors in the hallway here, and in the various places Ostia would take her, would master Sarah’s body conceal another sort of need?

Should she nod? Affirm to this woman that her
Forever Girl
writer cover did acknowledge her terrible need for submissive training—for the coffee table with its rewards and punishments?

Thankfully it appeared that Claudia would concede enough to Sarah’s normal but strange state of mind to go on without demanding assent. She began to speak, slowly and evenly, making it clear by the change in the pace of her words, which she accompanied with an occasional pause in which she looked at Sarah to make sure the recruit understood all the director said.

“The Ostia Agency handles a very special kind of model, Sarah. We employ pretty girls who can, in images and, occasionally, in person, show our clients, who are some of the wealthiest people in the world, a very special side of their femininity—a side not all girls have. Do you think you know what I mean, Sarah?”

Sarah pursed her lips, sucked them briefly between her teeth, then said softly, “Submission.”

“Exactly.” Claudia smiled. “Our submissive models are in very high demand. Certain wealthy individuals have an insatiable desire, it would appear, for fresh faces and new images. If we should accept you as an Ostia model, you would have a week of training, which we would document to give you your first opportunity to make money and gain admirers. After that, you would quickly find yourself involved in high-end photo-shoots and videos for private consumption. Then we would start sending you to some of the most exclusive parties the world has to offer.”

The images came back to push reasonable thoughts from Sarah’s mind: a video, for private consumption, of her training—a strong man pushing her down on a bed, with her face to the covers, and deflowering her from behind. Sarah herself in the place of the blond girl in the video, fucked by the cardinal while she had to kiss Claudia between her thighs. Sarah chained to a dungeon wall and savagely whipped while an elegant cocktail party went on around her in the ancient cells of the dungeon.

Claudia had paused. Sarah looked up from where she had been staring down at her hands, folded in her lap. When the elegant woman in the gray dress had gazed into her eyes for a moment, with the same frankness that had made Sarah blush in the lobby and made her color again now just as fiercely, she continued.

“Let us have no illusions, Sarah. If we choose to employ you, you will submit to us, and to our clients, in every way. You will do exactly as we tell you, or we will punish you. I don’t wish to become tedious, but it’s necessary that you have no illusions at all on this score. You will wear what we give you to wear, and if we give you nothing to wear, you will be naked. You will often be naked at times and in places where others are clothed, for that represents a very important part of submission. Why don’t you go ahead and strip down to your underwear for me now, Sarah?”

“B-but…” This time Claudia didn’t interrupt her, but Sarah had no idea what objection to make. She could say that she hadn’t agreed to anything, signed anything, yet. But Claudia had just been over that with her, hadn’t she? Sarah’s cover, the yearning writer of
Forever Girl,
had to recognize the erotic need that lay upon her.

“But you can’t,” Claudia said. “I understand. If you don’t do as I’ve said, however, Sarah, I’m afraid I shall have to punish you.”

“How will you punish me?” The words seemed to come from her mouth against Sarah’s will. Somehow she could tell that it was exactly what Sara Jane would have said to the billionaire in
Meeting Steven,
if he had said something so outlandish.

“I shall whip your bare bottom with a punishment strap I have in my desk. Would you like to see it?”

Sarah’s mind whirled. What adequate answer existed for Sara Jane, or for Sarah James, fake author, let alone for the real Sarah?

“Yes,” she whispered.

Claudia smiled the most enigmatic smile Sarah thought she had ever seen. She rose and walked deliberately to her desk, where she pulled open the top right drawer and reached in. From the drawer, held in Claudia’s right hand by what seemed its slightly narrower handle section, came a thick, black length of leather stitched from several thicknesses. Sarah couldn’t suppress a gasp at the sight—at the reality of the object with which this woman proposed to whip her, if she didn’t remove her skirt and top and then, Sarah felt sure, her lingerie soon after.

Claudia turned slowly, now resting the slightly broader part of the strap on the palm of her left hand. She moved toward Sarah, apparently not intending to sit down again, or at least not immediately. Sarah watched in anxious fascination as the woman tapped the strap against her hand three times. The third time, she struck hard enough that a sharp slapping sound rang out, and to her shame Sarah couldn’t suppress a tiny whimper at the sound, as she imagined what the strap would feel like, delivered with force across her pale, tender bottom cheeks.

Sarah had never been spanked in her life. She had never known anyone who was, growing up. Though she knew, as she thought any intelligent person must these days, that some people found such things arousing, she hadn’t imagined until she saw the Ostia video in the briefing room at Langley that she could feel anything but a sort of tolerant disgust about them:
if everyone’s consenting, go ahead. Just don’t ask me to bare my bottom, or to watch you bare someone else’s.

When Claudia spoke again, still tapping the strap on her palm from time to time though not again as sharply as she had at first, Sarah’s eyes couldn’t seem to stay on the elegant woman’s face, but had to keep going back to strap in her hands. It almost seemed as if the strap itself addressed her.

“You may be thinking, Sarah, that you had assumed your work for us would be a kind of play—the sort of thing they go in for at BDSM clubs. I rather suspect that you don’t really know enough yet to have supposed that, but in any case you probably thought that you would have a safeword, or some ability to set limits and negotiate. Unfortunately, if you thought that, you were wrong. Take your clothes off, Sarah, or I will have them taken off for you, and then I will whip you.”

Now Sarah could break her gaze at the strap, because she stared at Claudia with honest fear—fear felt by every one of what seemed her multiple selves. “F-for me?” she stammered.

“I have no desire to engage in a physical struggle with you, Sarah, especially in view of my having two strong men at my disposal, who aren’t doing anything better with their time right now.”

“Oh, God.” Sarah’s voice had never sounded so tremulous to her.

Claudia sighed. “Don’t feel bad, Sarah. This part has its very normal side as well. Many girls need time to adjust to the idea that although everything that happens to them, and all the things they must do because their masters and mistresses require their obedience, are what they agreed to, and in fact what they secretly want, when the time comes they find they need compulsion. The only question for you now, Sarah, is how much compulsion you will need. Will the mere idea of two men removing your clothing and holding you down while I whip you for disobedience cause you to obey me, or must I actually demonstrate, with my strap upon your young rear end, how completely you must change your thinking on these matters now that you are here?”

“Oh, God,” Sarah said again, even more softly.

Then Claudia turned and began to move back to her desk. Sarah wanted to say
Alright! I’ll take off my clothes!
but her mouth had gone so dry that her voice made no noise at all. Or… did she really want to speak? Surely if she really wanted to speak, and say she would obey, she could?

Claudia put down the strap, picked up the handset of the phone on her desk, pushed a button, spoke. “Please send Alex and Kevin in.” She replaced the handset and turned around, picking up the strap again, and tapping it once more on her palm as she gazed levelly at Sarah.

Sarah found her voice at last, as she struggled to her feet from the awkward couch. “Please…” she said, fumbling with the button at the neck of her top.

“Yes,” Claudia said. “That’s how much compulsion you needed. Quite standard. I’m afraid, though, that it would harm your training significantly if I failed to make good on my threat.”

Sarah had the top over her face when she heard the door open. “Ma’am?” said a deep voice.

Caught within the translucent fabric, Sarah wailed, “Please… no…” Suddenly the thought of the thick black strap made her contemplate trying somehow to escape—run past the men, out the door, down the fire stairs, and into the arms of some savior.

“Strip her and put her over the arm of the sofa, please, gentlemen,” Claudia’s voice said in a matter-of-fact tone.

Sarah got herself free of her top at last and tossed it to the floor. Standing just inside the door of the office stood two tall muscular men in striped business shirts and black pants. They were in the process of rolling up their sleeves.

“Look,” she said weakly, searching with her hands for the hook at the waist of her skirt. “I’m… I’m…”

“That’s not how this works,” said one of the men. His face, framed by dark brown hair was not particularly handsome, but he had, in the set of his chin, an air of quiet competence that simultaneously reassured Sarah and made her heart quail at the way he advanced toward her. Behind him came the second man, his hair black as coal and his chiseled jaw similarly set.

“H-how does it work?” Sarah asked, glancing from them to Claudia, trying, she supposed, to play for time.

“Like this,” the brown-haired man said, reaching out to take hold of her right wrist and, at nearly the same instant, effortlessly turning her around while pinning her arm behind her. Now he spoke in her ear, as Sarah felt her breath coming more and more quickly. “We take your clothes off, and you get your whipping, and learn to be a good girl from now on.”

Sarah gave a little sob of fear and frustration. Behind her, Claudia said, “I understand that you thought this interview would go quite differently, Sarah. But if you recall, I told you that I would tell you about what we do here, and that I would find out a little more about you. You’re surprised by my method of doing that, I’m sure, but I do want to promise that before you sign the non-disclosure agreement, and then the contract I’ll offer you, you’ll have the chance to ask questions, just as I said you would.”