Bound and Initiated (6 page)

Another stroke, and another cry of pain. “Four!” Sarah said. The initial terror of the unknown had departed, and after those five blows Sarah felt she did understand more than she had: she could bear the punishment, and though the idea of eight more strokes still made her heart quail with the fear with which she had begun, that the pain would be so terrible she would faint or die had gone.

She yelped at the next five lashes, and counted them. Claudia said, “See, Sarah? You can be a good girl for me, can’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Sarah said, the
ma’am
escaping before she even realized she would say it.

“That’s exactly the sort of thing you should call me when I’m punishing you, Sarah. Well done. But here at Ostia, girls in your position say
domina
. Can you say that?”

The condescension in Claudia’s voice reddened Sarah’s face again, but the compulsion of the situation made her say immediately, “Yes, domina.” Her bottom squirmed helplessly then, in the continuing pain of her whipping, which dulled a little after each lash but then seemed to continue. She wondered if she would be able to sit down over the next few hours.

“Shh,” Claudia said, putting her left hand on Sarah’s bottom and rubbing gently. “Shh.” Sarah gave a long whimper at that: it felt so lovely after the strap’s painful visitation that she found her imagination again filling with the terrible erotic visions of what Claudia might demand of her. To her shame, her pussy suddenly clenched and she realized that her arousal was gathering inside. She shifted her thighs, and the sensation the motion gave to her clit made her whimper again.

Of course Sarah knew that a lot of people got off on corporal punishment. She had just never imagined she might be one of them. The writer of
Forever Girl
probably would be such a person, though, when it came to sex; submissive like her heroine, a small-town photographer who probably fantasized between the lines about her billionaire taking her over his knee for some old-fashioned discipline.

But how could Sarah be like that? She didn’t have any desires in the creepy billionaire department. She had come to this perverse place in pursuit of criminals, not in pursuit of pleasure.

Seeming not to notice the way Sarah’s noises had grown so very ambiguous, Claudia said gently, “How many is that, my little columba?” Sarah’s eyes widened at the unfamiliar word, which seemed to be the same one Kevin had used before. Claudia continued casually, “
Columba
is what we call girls who haven’t yet received their first training.”

“If…”

“If you sign, yes. How many, Sarah?” The way Claudia seemed now to skip right over the part where Sarah gave her consent made her heart beat faster, but it undeniably was of a piece with everything else the woman seemed to put forward about consent and desire: Sarah’s desires, it seemed to say, made a mockery of any idea of consent. The burning in Sarah’s pussy that matched the burning stripes across her bottom wouldn’t allow her to escape any more than Kevin and Alex would have allowed it, had Claudia called them in to hold her down.

We stand at the second degree. Nymphobi. Columba.

“Nine, domina,” Sarah whispered.

“We shall count that first stroke after all, I think, since you are being such a good girl now.”

Sarah spoke again without intending it, as if the writer of
Forever Girl
had taken over. “Thank you, dom—” but the strap cut off the word, and she screamed at the unexpected stroke over all the others. Claudia didn’t wait then, but gave her the final lash right away, and now the pain had grown so great that Sarah bounced her bottom up and down, shook it side to side, clenched the cheeks desperately to make it hurt less.

She clenched her hands into fists in front of her so as not to put them back to rub the sting away as she sobbed into the leather cushion, but then Claudia said, “You may rub, Sarah.”

Feeling grateful to Claudia in a way that made her nervous, Sarah put both hands back, letting her cheek fall onto the cushion, and began to rub her poor punished bottom. “Oh!” she said, feeling for the first time the way the strap had made ridged welts that she could run gentle fingers along to soothe them.

“You took that much better than I expected you to, Sarah,” Claudia said, her voice receding toward her desk. Lost in the sensation, and realizing that her arousal had started to make her behave a little irrationally, Sarah kept rubbing. Involuntarily, her hips began to move against the couch, riding it a little as if in hope of gaining more stimulation for her aching clit. The remaining reasoning part of her mind seemed to gaze on in wide-eyed horror at poised, professional Sarah James trying to masturbate in front of the elegant director of a New York firm, no matter the strange nature of that firm, but something about the whipping seemed to have transformed her into her cover story—a cover story of a yearning romance writer who had finally started to get what she had always needed.

Sarah heard the drawer open and close again. Her hips kept moving and now she began to squeeze her thighs to take away the sting in her bottom, as her fingers rubbed and rubbed the marks of punishment there. Surely
rubbing
must mean this kind of thing, too: Claudia must have meant that shameful as it might be, Sarah had permission. She knew the woman in the gray dress must have turned around, and she pictured her watching Sarah’s terrible, shameless attempt at self-pleasure, approving it, allowing it to…

“Stop that this instant, Sarah,” Claudia said sternly, “or I shall have to whip you again.”

“Oh, God,” Sarah moaned, freezing her hands in place on her backside and stilling the very wayward motions of her hips and thighs. “Oh, please…”

“I understand that you have never felt this way before, Sarah, but although I sympathize, I cannot excuse this conduct or condone your pursuit of self-pleasure, since it is expressly forbidden to untrained girls to give themselves that kind of stimulation. Once your training has advanced, if you are progressing well, you will occasionally be permitted to masturbate, but until then you must understand that your pleasure is at the discretion of those who train you. When I told you that you might rub your bottom—let me be very clear—I did not mean you might stimulate yourself in front. Do you know the difference between back and front, Sarah?”

“Yes, domina,” Sarah whispered.

“Louder, please. And take your hands away from your bottom now. Get up on your elbows and look at me. You’ll remain there, like that, for the remainder of our discussion, until it’s time to sign your contract.”

Her face burning to match her bottom, Sarah obeyed, turning her face toward the woman she must now call
domina
. Claudia stood halfway between her desk and the couch. The humiliation implicit in the differences Claudia had placed between them—Sarah nearly naked, with her panties down, positioned for discipline, bottom covered with the marks of that discipline; Claudia elegantly dressed, standing looking down at her with arms folded across her chest—seemed to Sarah literally indescribable. She didn’t feel like she could write an account of it that would do justice to the way she felt possessed and mastered, lying there over the arm of the couch.

“Yes, domina,” she said clearly to Claudia’s patiently waiting figure.

The woman turned back to her desk and picked up a pen and a sheet of paper, then brought them toward Sarah. “This is the non-disclosure agreement,” she said. “You’ll sign it now, positioned just as you are.”

The paper came in front of Sarah’s eyes, slid onto the couch cushion by Claudia’s red-nailed fingertips. It was indeed a brief, standard NDA. Claudia put a fat, gilt-chased pen in Sarah’s right hand, and, knowing it wouldn’t make any sense at all to object, Sarah awkwardly signed it. Pen and paper were removed, and Claudia’s footsteps returned to the desk, then came back toward her.

Sarah gazed down at her hands, wondering whether she would now begin to learn what she needed to know. She had the desperate hope that perhaps she would learn everything she needed right now, and could arrange for extraction immediately. Maybe she wouldn’t have to go through with their
training,
whatever it was.

To her left, Claudia spoke slowly and seriously. “I want your full attention now, Sarah,” she said, and then she waited until Sarah had turned again from the leather upholstery to look her in the eyes. “I have learned what I need to know about you, Sarah, and so you are a columba now. What I told you before you refused to remove your clothing is true, but it’s also only part of the truth. Working for the Ostia Agency represents a much larger change in your life than you have probably ever imagined—a change so large that you’re not yet ready to comprehend it. You must learn by degrees, from this point forward. When you sign your contract, you will be taken down the hall for an instructional medical examination. You will have an IUD contraceptive implanted, and then you will learn a few things there, about yourself and about Ostia. After that, you will return here, I will bind you to the coffee table as I promised, and then you will learn many more things.”

“Wh-what kind of…”

“Don’t ask useless questions, Sarah,” Claudia said in an admonitory tone. “I just told you.”

“B-but—”

“But I said you could ask questions, yes. I didn’t say you could ask useless questions.”

Sarah’s mind whirled. How could it be useless to ask, for example, what exactly the few things she would learn might be?

Claudia remained silent, so Sarah tried again. “What will happen then?” she asked softly.

“Another useless question, Sarah, because you cannot understand the answer yet.”

“What? But… I mean…” Sarah felt tears welling up in her eyes. Claudia looked back patiently, as if at a child slow to learn her times-tables. “What question could I ask that wouldn’t be useless?”

Claudia smiled. “Well done, columba. Only that one, and one other:
How may I serve you, domina?
”

Now Sarah looked back in wide-eyed panic. Her jaw dropped. “But…” she managed to say. Her voice trailed away, though, and she pictured again herself on the coffee table with Claudia’s pussy looming over her face.

How could she say those words?
How may I serve you, domina?
How could Claudia co-opt the phantom of privilege with which she had so thoroughly reassured Sarah at the start? “Don’t worry, you’ll get to ask your questions later,” Claudia had said, and somehow that had calmed Sarah’s anxiety to a manageable level, and then Claudia had managed to show Sarah that something in her stood ready to betray everything she thought she stood for.

If she had really written
Forever Girl—
if she had really meant it, when she searched on
virgin submissive training—
would Sarah have felt less betrayed by her body, and the part of her psyche that seemed so attached to her body’s responses that it begged now to ask Claudia the specified question? Sarah thought not: the romance writer would have thought she had come to New York to play a game. All this talk of a
new life
would undoubtedly have freaked her out as much as it did the real Sarah, trying desperately to hold onto the idea that she had begun this process in order to defend the freedom of her country and of the world.

All these thoughts, Sarah knew, must show on her face in her knit brow and tightly compressed lips; she could tell from the expression on Claudia’s face that the woman found her new plaything’s distress satisfactory, and even amusing. A little smile appeared on her lovely olive-skinned face, showing sympathy, or perhaps a mockery of sympathy.

“It’s time to ask now, Sarah,” she said softly.

So. Not only had her
choice
of questions been constrained, but also her choice of whether to speak. Sarah must ask the question that would demonstrate her subservience. Or…

“I don’t want to have to whip you again so soon, Sarah.”
Sarah.
Her name, over and over and over.
Your name belongs to me. Your bottom belongs to me. Your pussy belongs to me, and your anus, and the mouth that now must form the required question.
The warmth returned between Sarah’s legs, and she couldn’t help just moving her thighs against each other a tiny bit. She couldn’t help it. And she couldn’t help the little whimper that went along with the pleasure that shot through her clit at the movement, or the way that pleasure paired itself with the image of having another whipping so soon, because she had been such a bad girl—a naughty girl who wouldn’t ask the question Claudia told her she must ask.

But another whipping would hurt
so
much. I couldn’t bear it. I just couldn’t.

“How may I serve you, domina?” Sarah whispered.

Claudia’s smile grew. “First,” she said, “you will sign the contract. Then you will go obediently for your instructional examination. After that, you will return here, with the same obedient demeanor, to be bound to my coffee table.” She paused, looking intently into Sarah’s eyes, as if challenging her to ask
And after that?
but Sarah couldn’t even decide whether she even wanted to know the answer. “After that,” Claudia finally continued, “you will not be able to serve me by any willed actions of your own, for a long while.”

Sarah had thought that by that time nothing short of real violence could alarm her, in this bizarre little world that seemed to have swallowed her up. But Claudia’s final words made her gasp, and make the involuntary little movement and whimper again. Claudia meant—could only mean—that once she had bound Sarah to the coffee table, Sarah would be treated as… an object? a thing? She would serve Claudia the way a chair or a window served her, simply by being present for use by those who know what to do with a chair or a window or a girl tied to a coffee table.

Again Claudia reached behind her to her desk. Now she picked up two pieces of paper. This time she put the papers, along with the same beautiful gold-chased ballpoint on the coffee table. “Pull up your panties and come read your contract, Sarah. Then sign it. I’m going to go get things ready for your instructional exam.”