The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Cassandra Bétancort pushed the lovely young blonde away with a contemptuous toe and disentangled herself from the sweat-soaked sheets. Stalking across the moonlight-stained cypress plank floor, she snatched her cigarettes and lighter from the bureau and held a flame to one, venting smoke from her nostrils with an exasperated snort. She let her gaze wander toward the french doors facing the sea, then stepped through them onto the veranda and leaned against the rail, luxuriating in the relative coolness of the wooden railing against her bare thighs, the soft night air on her sweating breasts, and the faint breeze ruffling her tawny copper-colored hair. She stood lost in thought, listening to the susurrant sounds of the waves as they made whispering love to the sand.

The whole thing smelled.

Stank to high heaven, actually—Mackay must be losing it completely, she thought sourly. It was bad enough that the woman had put the entire Golden Crescent operation in jeopardy out of sheer sentimentalism, but to compound that bit of almost criminal carelessness by sending a total cipher, a complete non-entity deep into the network—well, that was simply stupid. An unknown, untrained little nobody from East Wheresthat, Iowa to try and snatch her irons out of the fire...irons that had doubtless been melted down already, perhaps even been forged into a new weapon, one to be used against themselves.

What can the woman be thinking? She shook her head disgustedly..

She stubbed her cigarette out angrily on the veranda railing, her thoughts as dark as the midnight blue Aegean Sea dancing beneath its frenetic frosting of moonlight. The woman would be arriving in a few hours. Fine. There might not be much that Cassandra Bétancort could do about what had happened to this point in time, but there was quite a bit that she could do about what happened going forward.

Oh yes. Quite a bit indeed.

Cassandra turned back toward the huge carved-cypress four poster bed, and the pretty young girl chained to it. Her frightened eyes were wide and imploring, and her face ashen with dread in the moonlight. Cassandra smiled in the semi-darkness, reaching for the leather quirt on the nightstand.

“Come, and draw the poisons from me, my heart’s desire...”

The walk up the hill from the ramshackle pier where the boat had deposited us had not been a long one. Nonetheless by the time we reached the top of the uneven goat path that served as a road I was sweating like a pig, my clothes glued to me as if I had been run through a carwash. My mood was beginning to match my thoughts, and they were neither of them very cheery.

We crested a small rise, and started down the gently sloping rock-strewn incline toward the compound. My escorts moved closer to me, our bare arms occasionally brushing together now as we picked our way down the rocky slope. I took in the small grouping of low, whitewashed cottages and outbuildings below us in a swift sweeping glance, making mental notes feverishly as I surveyed my surroundings. I might not get many opportunities to familiarize myself with the lay of the land, and I needed to take full advantage of every one that presented itself. Then my eye fell on the Amazonian figure standing at the clearing’s center. I stumbled, catching my toe on a small stone as the verge flattened, and threw out an arm, just catching myself before I pitched face first into the dust. I found myself on my knees, in the classic position of supplicant at the giantess’s booted feet.

“Welcome to Callypygnos,” she said expressionlessly.

I got to my feet warily, brushing off my scratched palms on the front of my shorts, staring rather rudely at this unusual looking woman.

“I understand that I’m to be your guest for a few days at this lovely destination resort,” I said, my eyes darting about the barren compound, a few whitewashed plaster bungalows scattered around the hot, sandy commons. A long, low shed-like building made of corrugated metal ran the length of one side of the dusty clearing, and further up the sloping hillside was a larger, more expansive wood frame house with sweeping verandas surrounding it on every side. A few stunted, hardy junipers struggled vainly to add a touch of green to this otherwise stark, rocky moonscape.

The thought flitted through my mind that this place would be a tough sell for the most sanguine of travel agents.

“I take my breakfast late, and usually in bed,” I went on breezily, watching her closely, waiting for her reaction. No point in putting off taking the measure of the opposition here, I figured.

The six-foot, flame-haired woman smiled faintly at this, tightening the slim, pale scar that transected her sun-bronzed face from just below her left eye to her upper lip and across to her chin. Her dark eyes danced. No other part of this rather ferocious looking visage betrayed any emotion whatsoever.

“If you do well, you may be allowed a pallet of dirty straw after a time, to collapse on at night.” She paused, looking me up and down carefully.

“On those nights in which you are allowed to sleep, that is...”

I returned her gaze with what I hoped was a good deal more self-assurance and righteous indignation than I felt. “Listen,” I fumed. “I’ve been locked in a cabin the size of a closet on a pitching, rolling bucket of a boat for twenty hours. I’m tired, and I’m hot and I’m filthy, and I need a meal, and a bath, and a telephone. I suggest that you procure them all for me immediately, or I’ll give you reason to be very, very sorry that you didn’t.”

I never even saw the bullwhip in her hand until it was wrapped around my throat, having already been employed to deposit me in the dirt on the seat of my none-too-prisitine white shorts. My calves burned where the whip had wrapped around them, pulling my legs from under me. Now, crouching at my side, she shoved its stiff handle beneath my chin, raising my startled eyes to her own. They were the color of the Aegean on a moonless night, and made me feel vertiginous, as if I were looking down into a midnight blue maelstrom. She tightened the whip’s coils slowly about my throat as she spoke.

“You may think that you can provoke me into killing you swiftly with your brainless chattering, but I assure you that you cannot. As for your ‘needs’, they are of less concern to me than this...” she reached down to the ground near her booted foot, and plucked a small wriggling insect from the sand, which she dangled in my face, only inches from my eyes.

I swallowed painfully against the coils of leather constricting my throat, watching the tiny, pale scorpion wriggle and twist between her fingers, a drop of clear venom beading on the barb of the tiny arachnid’s tail. I whimpered softly, aware of the perspiration pouring off of my flushed face, running in torrents beneath my saturated blouse again, soaking me to the skin.

“Speak to me again without my leave, and I’ll have you staked out here and now, and let this one and her little friends feast on your sweat and your panic piss. Do we understand one another?”

She gave another little tug on the supple leather lash wound around my throat for emphasis. I nodded my head almost imperceptibly, too terrified to make a more expansive gesture. As if on cue, I felt a few drops of hot urine squeeze out of my urethra, further dampening my already soaking shorts.

“Very good,” she breathed, loosening the whip from around my throat, and tossing the insect away.

“Now get on your feet, and get undressed.”

I scrambled hurriedly to my feet, the last of my bravado having dissolved like seasalt in the hot wet current of my abject terror. Trembling uncontrollably, I fumbled at the buttons on my sodden blouse with palsied fingers, peeling it off, dropping it with a wet ‘plup’ on the gravelly sand. My shorts, bra and panties quickly followed. I wrapped my arms tightly about my self, shivering violently, though it was broiling in the compound beneath the staring eye of the hot Aegean sun. The woman raked me with her eyes again as I attempted ineffectually to cover myself with my hands and arms. I thought that I might be beginning to understand the true meaning of the word ‘rape’.

She gave a short jerk of her head in my direction, speaking to my escorts. “Get her out of my sight. And get Hekate. I want to begin immediately with her conditioning. We’ve not got much time.”

With a last disdainful look, she turned her back on me, and strode off, leaving me naked and alone under the blazing, merciless eye of that impassive sun.

“That bitch Erica...I swear to God, you let some people play with your ta-ta’s, and they think they own ya. Go around jabbing you with needles and who knows what all else...”

Jolie continued muttering to herself as she ran a comb through her tangled shoulder-length honey colored hair.

And then letting her nod off, and just leaving her to spend the night on Erica’s eight-foot suede leather couch...well, it just burned her tamales, if you wanted to know the truth. She ran warm water in the sink, then slipped her panties down and began gently washing herself.

And how in the WORLD did I get this SORE, she wondered, wincing as she gingerly completed her ablutions below the waist. Must have gone at my self with both hands, and the damned stapling gun, she thought dryly. Pulling her panties back on, she scrubbed more vigorously at her armpits, then splashed more water on her face and toweled off briskly. Slipping into her skirt and t-shirt she stepped back into the Administrative Assistant’s anteroom.

Still no Erica.

Jolie stepped to the door and tried it again... no dice, it was still locked. Security was a bear at this place, she thought for the twentieth time. She sank back down in the plush sofa with a sigh, and began to drift into a sweet recapitulation of her dreams of the night before. A sleepy, satisfied smile spread slowly over her face.

She’d seldom had such vivid dreams before, and certainly never about Vannie. She blushed when she remembered them, how the woman had felt, smelled, and tasted, exactly as Jolie had imagined she would. And the sensations had been so immediate, so real...She sighed, feeling the little somnolent stirrings between her thighs again. She wondered absently if Erica might have a spare pair of panties about.

No, a dream like that was worth a little temporary short term amnesia, no doubt about it.

She was just on the verge of going to the door again and banging on it, setting up a ruckus, maybe getting security’s attention when the latch clicked quietly and Beatrix Mackay swept through, followed closely by Erica Galloway. Bea looked ghastly, her face pale and drawn, a bandage of white gauze swaddling her slender neck. She crossed to one of the chairs arranged around the low glass and chrome coffee table opposite Erica’s couch, and settled into it, flashing Jolie a somewhat distracted smile. Erica put a box of donuts and the carafe of steaming coffee she was carrying down on the table, and took the chair just to the left of Doctor Mackay. She began pouring hot coffee into steaming mugs, and slid the box of donuts toward the girl, a preoccupied smile on those sinful lips of hers.

“Good afternoon, Jolie,” Beatrix Mackay began, stirring a spoonful of sugar into her own mug, then offering the silver bowl to the girl. “How did you sleep, darling?”

“Gogh, I’m hgho hnnghryy...nmmmnn...” Jolie mumbled around the mouthful of bearclaw that she had already bitten off, pushing stray crumbs daintily back in with a pinky finger as she answered. She took a swallow of the hot coffee, wiping her lips demurely with her fingertips and then ladled another heaping spoonful of sugar into the mug.

“What happened to me, anyway?” she asked, taking another nibble on her pastry. “The last thing I remember was...” she shot a quick, watchful glance at Erica Galloway, then changed tacks. “I don’t really remember much of anything, after we got here, in fact. Can someone please fill me in?” She smiled innocently at the pair.

“You fell asleep in the office, dear,” Erica quickly began. “I left you for a few moments, and when I returned you were sacked out on the couch. I tried to wake you, but you were dead to the world.” She smiled nervously again.

Jolie shot a wry look in Erica’s direction. “Yes, I must have been exhausted, mustn’t I, Erica?”

Jolie turned back to Beatrix Mackay. “How did your talk with Vannie go, Bea? Were you able to get her to say ‘orgasm’, without choking?” Jolie laughed merrily.

“As a matter of fact, we had quite an interesting conversation, Jolie. Your friend is a most intriguing, and accomplished woman. I feel that we can do a great deal for each other.”

“You mean she’s joined? You’re kidding! She’s agreed to join WISDOM? I can’t believe it!” Jolie goggled at the woman as if she had just told her that the Martians had landed in Times Square, with Elvis as their ambassador.

“Nevertheless,” Bea spread her hands, smiling enigmatically at the excited, incredulous girl.

“And now, Jolie, darling...Erica tells me that you might be interested in postponing your graduate studies for a while, and coming to work for us, dear.” Beatrix leaned forward, enfolding the girl in the hot green jungle of her gaze.

“How would you like to spend September in the Aegean, Jolie dear?”

Down, and down I went, in a complete and utter eclipse of self.

Now rising slowly, in anticipation, and fear; thighs widespread, sweaty and trembling with exertion, sticky with the sweetness leaking from my sex. Then down again in supplication, the fine, hot sand filling my mouth, the shaft filling my loins, my lower body rising concupiscently toward its tormentor, welcoming it, begging it to know me, possess me. Up again, more slowly still, a cry knocking against the back of my teeth now, my hips lifting on the hard rubber root buried within me, knees raised nearly clear of the sandy ground, my body possessed of it, and its pain—and its knowledge, which I was being filled with as well.

My body was learning...

I was learning.

Cassandra was training me herself this evening. I was never certain of her motivations for this, and therefore never completely comfortable with her. Thus I was seldom able to make that deep descent, that self-abandoning plunge into the pure animal sexuality of my nature that I could when Hekate and Sabrina worked me. Always with Cassandra there was that small seed of doubt, that thin membrane of resistance interposed between myself and my body, interfering with the fusion within me that transported me beyond mere self, into something other, something richer, something more fulfilling, more power full...

That first afternoon, as my guards had led me broken, stumbling, and naked across the hot sand to one of the tiny bungalows, I firmly believed that my life was finished; that nothing could be done to me that could possibly matter any longer. I was convinced that I would be dead soon, and all that intervened between now and then would simply be filler for my obituary, if it were ever written; nothing more.

I could never have imagined how much I had still to learn.

My ‘escorts’ led me into the low-ceilinged, whitewashed room, sparsely furnished with a bed made of raw pine posts, a small nighttable with a glass-chimnied kerosene lamp upon it, and several ladderbacked wooden chairs with woven straw seats. They guided me to the bed, and pushed me down not ungently onto the pale blue cotton coverlet on my back, then tied my wrists and ankles to the four low corner posts of the bed with brightly colored silk scarves. One of them lit the small oil lamp, and then they left, closing the heavy wooden door behind them, leaving me alone, with my bleak thoughts. I stared morosely at the ceiling watching the light fail, thinking of my husband, and my babies; wondering what they were thinking, if they imagined I was dead, if they had given up hope already, as I had. I began to cry quietly, but soon the soothing sounds of the Aegean, fretting against the rocky shore at the foot of the cliff beneath my window, lulled me into a restless, exhausted sleep, filled with dreams of monsters, and evil slithering things that pursued me, and wrapped their wet tentacles around my body.

I awoke with a start, literally paralyzed by fear, and nearly afraid to breath. At first I thought that the creatures from my dream had pursued me into wakefulness, or that I dreamed still. The room was dark now, except for the imbricate patterns thrown upon the ceiling by the fitfully flickering orange glow of the lamp. I was still bound spread eagled to the bed, and plump wet things were moving on me; things that were warm, and alive, and sentient. I lowered my eyes, and in the dim light beheld two pale, lovely succubi attached to me like young coral polyps on a tropical reef. Their long silken hair trailed over my thighs, and my belly; and their skin was like warm velvet, brushing over me; their lips soft, dewy hothouse orchids on my feverish skin, sucking and nipping at me lightly, almost playfully. The one nearest my face lifted her fair head, eyes glowing like golden embers in the lamplight, and smiled at me; then she lowered her hungry mouth to my right breast and clamped her lips on its nipple, and began to lave it with her hot, well-schooled tongue. It felt slightly rough, like a young kittens, and sent jolts of sensation through me which converged at my groin. At the same instant I felt the other wraith, lower down on my body and obscured by her playmate, bury her own clever tongue deeply into my buzzing folds.

I gasped and moaned with pleasure, pleasure such as I had not believed could exist in this world, for me at any event. I was transported by my overloaded senses; the feel of their eager mouths on my body, and their soft skin sliding over mine; the sounds of their pleasure, as they giggled occasionally, and sighed like young girls in the throes of love’s first arousal, sucking and slurping at me as if I were a sweet gelato on a hot summer’s afternoon. The mingling scents of our bodies, theirs clean and sweet, smelling of the ocean, and soft pine breezes; mine hot, and rank with the strong animal odors of my sweat, and my fear, and my passion as they slowly drew it forth from my very pores with their cunning hands and lips. My orgasm was like the sea below my window; crashing, seemingly endless, as I screamed my body’s joy and my soul’s despair mindlessly into the indifferent darkness...

I screamed once more, the sound torn from my throat, ripped past my clenched teeth, as Cassandra hurt me gratuitously again.

This too, was different. Hekate and Sabrina had taken no great pleasure in inflicting pain upon me. This one did. I could feel it in her touch, hear it in her voice, smell it on her body, sense it in her soul. Pain was her lodestone, her polestar, her religion. I knew by now that it was a necessary adjunct of my training, that it was needed to draw my body’s attentions, to focus it more completely in preparation for the fusion. Still, there was a subtle difference in the way Cassandra employed it, as if it were an end in itself rather than simply one of many means to that end. And there was no mistaking the satisfaction, the sheer joy she derived from her cruelty toward me.

How the power of your own sexuality can literally transform reality...not only your own, but that of those around you as well...

I grunted like an animal as she lowered me to the ground again, drawing the thick rubber shaft strapped around her hips slowly out of my dripping sex. I lowered my face to the sand beneath it, now moist with my sweat, and my tears, panting dreadfully, my mind a desolation of pain, and degradation.

Tap the river of your essential nature, your elemental power, and bend it to your will...

“You’re nothing but a cheap whore,” Cassandra hissed into my ear as she slid the tip of the fat black monster along my swollen cuntlips, toying with me now. She wrapped her strong fingers in my soaking wet hair, and jerked my head up and back violently. I rolled my eyes in terror toward that sound, filled with a venom, a hatred such as I had never heard before in a human voice.

Make your own body answer to your will, its pleasure serve your own ends, and others will follow, as night follows day...

“I’ve seen your true nature...and before I’m finished with you, everyone else will see it, too. Then Mackay will give you to me, and I’ll sell you to the Libyans, with instructions that you are to be chained to a metal-frame cot in the Suluq barracks, and used by the soldiers until there is nothing left of you to use.”

She laughed then, a bitter, hateful sound, as she suddenly plunged the slippery horror into my bleeding rectum, impaling me on its dreadful girth again, lifting me from the ground on it.

Startled birds flew into the black night from their perches in the cypress and scrub pines above the compound, frightened from their roosts by my screaming, which echoed off the rocky slopes endlessly...

The overpowering smells of the city had changed very little in over three millennia.

The yeasty scent of bread baking in clay ovens, mixing with the fetid smell of dog feces; the sharp tang of freshly made hummus blending with the pungent scent of goat, and fermenting wheat beer. The clean bite of wood smoke from a thousand cooking fires in a thousand mud walled kitchens; the heavy odor of drying dates sweetening and ameliorating the rank smell of unwashed human bodies. The weedy aroma of the harbor in the morning, of salt, and kelp and mussels wafting up through the streets. Then in the evening the clean, purifying blast of heat from the desert, pouring back down those same hot, dusty avenues, like the judgments of the old gods—Wesir, and Bastet, and Aset herself, the Mistress of Magic, the Soul of the Great River. City of Cleopatra and Antony, Julius Caesar and Alexander, Imhotep and Tutenkamen, of Manning, and of Durrell.

Into this torrent of sights, sounds and smells is dropped another innocent offering, to be swept along on its currents, for good, or ill.

Jolie struggled up the steep sloping avenue from the harbor, the strap of her carryall digging into her shoulder and her calf muscles threatening at every step to throw the mother of all cramps, and drop her right into some pile of dog crap here in the street, for God’s sake. So far, her ‘exotic Mediterranean idyll’ had been anything but idyllic.

“We’re sending you to Alexandria first, Jolie,” Erica Galloway had said, keying in the reservation codes. “Bea wants you to get your feet wet at our facility there first, get a feel for the flavor of the region, and our operations in that part of the world.” She gave a last tap on the ‘enter’ key, and the printer began humming quietly, spitting out the girl’s itinerary.

“Then, in a few weeks, we’ll send you on to our bureau in Delos, dear.” Erica slipped her reading glasses off, and twirled them playfully in her left hand as she smiled at Jolie.

“Don’t forget to take your bikinis, darling...or monokinis, I guess I should say. You won’t be needing the tops in Delos.” She smiled suggestively at the young woman across the desk. “Makes my mouth water,” she added, letting her eyes wander down to Jolie’s shirt front again. “Wish I was coming with.”

Yeah, right, Jolie fumed, as the dusty, baking street got, incredibly, even steeper. I wish you’d come, too...you could tote this friggin’ bag for me...

She glanced again at the slip of damp, crumpled paper in her fist, with the address of WISDOM’s Alexandria office printed on it. Only trouble with that was, someone had forgotten to tell the Egyptians to put numbers on the Gee-dee buildings. Jolie swore softly under her breath as she let the bag slip from her aching shoulder, and put both palms to the small of her back, arching, and stretching the stiff muscles there. This place had damned well better have a shower, she fumed, as she felt the perspiration running in torrents beneath her blouse, darkening the waistband of her tan skirt, even trickling down her thighs. She plucked at the soaked front of her shirt, wishing she had heeded Erica’s admonitions about dress standards in a predominately Islamic culture. But it had been too hot on the boat to wear much of anything, let alone foundation garments. She was regretting that decision already, as she looked down at her sodden blouse, with her nipples looking as though they were painted on it. She sighed, and shouldered her bag again, this time the left one, hoping that by balancing the agony, one pain might cancel out the other.

She trudged stubbornly on up the never-ending avenue.

“She’s given you nothing? Nothing at all?”

“Aside from a few pointed witticisms regarding the ancestry of my debriefer, and some useless names, obviously decoys and expendables, no, nothing. Absolutely bugger all. She is enormously strong.” There was a long pause, and then she continued.

“It’s obvious that the information we are seeking is planted far too deeply for us to get at through ‘conventional’ methods, without breaching her conditioning...” The woman let that hang on the ether between them as well, giving the other time to chew on it, to consider all of the possible implications.

The voice on the other end came back at last.

“No. Not yet. It’s too dangerous; there are too many unknowns in that particular equation.” The voice paused again. The woman could almost hear the wheels turning at the other end of the connection.

“But there may be another way...There’s a girl coming your way, she should be there by now in fact. She’ll be staying at the Hotel Mercuré, but she’s been told to check in first at WISDOM’s offices. Now here’s what I want you to do...”

The room was washed in the pale golds and soft sepia shadows of the Aegean twilight, and the lamp’s glow was not yet visible on the ceiling above the bed.

I rolled my head languorously to one side, brushing my lips against the silky warmth of the girl’s skin, nuzzling at the hollow between her neck and shoulder, drinking in her scent, her taste, her essence.

But it was Jolie I was thinking of.

Sabrina was sleeping, her arm thrown carelessly across my breasts, her breath warm against my ear. My desire for her was a lance piercing my loins, sharp and exquisite; but my wrists and ankles were bound once more to the four corners of the bed. I tugged uselessly at the scarves holding them every now and again, and whimpered like a small child who has been deprived of a favorite toy.

My need was like a living thing in the room, a beast hovering above us in the steamy miasma that we had created with our smells, our sounds, our heat; enveloping us like a womb. I gave a little strangled sob, and sank my teeth gently into the suddenly irresistibl erotic swell of her trapezius muscle. I felt her eyelashes flutter against my cheek, and heard the low murmuring of her sleepy laugh as she buried her tongue in my ear.

I nearly exploded.

I had never experienced my body in this way before; never touched excitements so powerful, so transforming, so close to the core of my being. It was as if the scales had suddenly dropped from my eyes, allowing me to look into myself, into aspects of my being that I had been all but unaware existed. Some of these places aroused me beyond imagining. Others terrified me, in a way that I could never have explained. Some of them I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to visit again.

Others I was afraid I would never want to leave.

I moaned pathetically as Sabrina’s wet tongue slithered slowly out of my ear. She swung her right leg over me, bringing her knee down next to my left ear, and then positioned the other one beside my right, pinning my shoulders to the bed. My nose began to twitch like a bunny rabbit’s as she lowered her aromatic folds to just beyond the range of my tongue. I cursed its stunted nature and moaned again, more wretchedly this time.

Smiling angelically down into my hectic, flushed face, Sabrina slid a hand down my stomach, then slipped two of her extraordinarily talented fingers into my sticky honeypot, already beginning to ripple with those long, slow undulations that I was learning to associate with the beginning of the end of my sanity. As she leaned back to fondle me, her hips slipped lower, and forward, closer to my panting lips. I nearly dislocated my shoulders diving for her sex, burying my tongue in her fragrant crease. She drove her pussy at me, forcing my head back down onto the coverlet, arching her back, and digging the nails of one hand into my breast while she continued playing me like a concert pianist with the other. Sabrina was a truly gifted arsonist; I now willingly handed her the matches as she set about burning me down.

Given our state, it was really not very remarkable that neither of us heard the door opening.

“Subordinating the life of the intellect to the more urgent needs of the inner animal, are we?”

Cassandra Bétancort smiled coldly as she stepped across the threshold, closing the door quietly behind her.

Jolie rapped out an annoyed percussion solo on the receptionist’s desk with her chewed-to-the-quick nails as she waited for the woman to return. Her patience, and her nerves, were a frayed string perilously close to snapping. At last the door through which the woman had disappeared nearly fifteen minutes earlier opened, and she stepped through, smiling that insincere smile which seemed to be standard equipment for so many women in her line of work.

“So sorry to keep you waiting Ms...Ms...” she glanced quickly down at the slip of paper in her hand, then back at Jolie, her smile never dimming, nor warming a watt. “Ms Bennett.”

“Yeah, right...so what’s the deal here? I mean, I’m hot, and I’m tired, and I’d LIKE to get a shower, and change, and get something to eat before the second coming if it’s at all possible...” Jolie tossed her damp hair irritably, fist poised on an outthrust hip. She was spoiling for a fight with anyone at this point, even this frost-free freezer of a blonde corporate roadblock. Just looking at this woman’s flawlessly made up face, and perfectly coiffed hair made Jolie feel sweaty, and dirty, and just subtly inferior in general.

“I understand entirely, Ms Bennett,” the blonde replied, her glossy, immaculately outlined vermillion lips making a theatrically insincere moue of commiseration with Jolie’s plight. “But unfortunately, Ms Yenadou is out of the office at the moment, and the director is tied up in a rather important teleconference just now. But she instructed me to do anything I can for you, and make certain that you have everything that you require.” She paused, and scribbled something on a sheet of paper, tearing it from the pad and handing it to Jolie.

“Here is the address of the Hotel Mercuré. They’re holding a suite for you there. I’ve called a taxi, and Ms Yenadou will send a car for you this evening at seven sharp. In the meantime, if you need anything at all, please don’t hesitate to call me at once; I’ve written this number down as well...” she indicated with her pen the bottom of the sheet now in Jolie’s hand, her glittering smile now one of dismissal.

“Thanks a bunch,” Jolie muttered, crumpling the sheet of paper and thrusting it into the pocket of her skirt. She shouldered her bag onto her now-numbed shoulder, and retreated down the steps and through the door back into the blast furnace of the street, her eyes scanning it for the taxi.

Two hours later, Jolie was immersed to her nostrils in a steaming tub filled with bath salts and fragrant oils, letting the water draw the aches and the frustrations of the day from her exhausted body. She gazed lazily around the tiled bath, all sold-brass fixtures and gold-veined marble, and nearly as large as her entire apartment back home.

This is the life, alright, she said drowsily to herself, reaching a languid arm out of the tub and bringing the champagne flute to her lips. These people know how to travel; I’ll give ‘em that. If Vannie could see me now...

The thought of her friend brought her back to earth a bit. She thought back to her last visit to Van’s house, just before she had caught her plane for Athens. She had gone to say goodbye to her friend, maybe gloat just a teensy bit about her autumn sabbatical in the Mediterranean. Show Vannie that she wasn’t the only jet setter in this friendship. Instead, Van’s pale, tight-lipped and unshaven husband had answered the door.

“Where’s Vannie, Brian?” she asked, taken somewhat aback at finding Van’s bond-trader husband at home on a weekday morning.

The man just looked at her, with a rather nasty smirk on his drawn face. “Why don’t you tell me, Jolie? Your crowd would be more apt to know the answer to that question than me, don’t you think?” He turned away from the door dismissively, but left it open behind him. Jolie trailed him into the foyer.

“What do you mean, ‘my crowd’? And where IS she, anyway?” Jolie craned her neck, looking into the sunken living room, then toward the archway that led through the dining room into the kitchen. “And where are the kids?”

Brian made no reply, but gestured toward the escritoire along the foyer wall and a sheet of paper on it, as he retreated across the blue slate entry hall into the dining room. Jolie moved to the desk, and picked up the sheet of paper.

‘Dear Brian,

Everything is just getting too hard, too complicated...I feel that I simply have to get away by myself for a while, and sort things out if we’re to have any chance at all of working out our problems. I’ve taken the kids to Sarah’s; she’s agreed to look after them while I’m gone.

I’ll call you when I feel that I can talk about all this rationally. Please don’t be angry, and please don’t try and locate me. I just need some time, and some space darling.

I’ll talk to you soon.

Love,

Van’

Jolie looked up in consternation, staring at the man slumped in a chair at the dining room table.

“I don’t get it, Brian...where would she have gone? I mean, I just saw her yesterday afternoon, and she never dropped the faintest hint about leaving or anything. I don’t understand...”

Brian looked up with a bitter smile. “You don’t understand, eh? What about me? Sure she isn’t shacking at your place, Jolie, or with one of your lesbian girlfriends?” His tone dripped with sarcasm, wounded pride, and frustrated anger.

“I’m not even going to dignify a remark like that with an answer, you incredible jerk. If Vannie needs some space, you oughta just give it to her, an’ be glad that she hasn’t left your sorry, self-pitying ass long ago, like she ought to have.” Jolie spun on her heel, and stormed from the house, slamming the front door furiously for good measure, halfway hoping that the Noritake china serving platter in the hutch over Brian’s head might fall on it.

Nah, she thought on reflection. That’s Vannie’s favorite piece...

The phone in the suite burred insistently, jolting her out of her reverie. Damn, she swore softly to herself. Seven already? She dragged herself reluctantly from the tub, wrapped a thick Egyptian cotton bathsheet around herself, and headed for the phone, dripping across the expensive Caucasian rug.

She never knew what caused the sudden power failure that plunged the room, and her, into total darkness...

I had been depressed, and disappointed with my body following the birth of my second child. It was as if the subtle changes my babies had wrought in my body had distanced me somehow from it; the milk-leaking breasts, the soft curve of my abdomen, the faint spider’s web delta of stretch marks along my thighs, and the sides of my breasts. And with all of this, I felt a corresponding estrangement from my emotions as well. I was displeased with these changes that motherhood had made in me, and eager to try and recapture some of my lost youthful firmness, my ‘elasticity’, as it were, both physically and emotionally. For sensual, as well as purely vainglorious cosmetic reasons. I enrolled at a gym, and drove myself mercilessly three or four times a week, until I collapsed in a sweaty ball. I also began taking Kundalini yoga classes, and joined a workshop for new mothers interested in regaining their muscle tone in somewhat more intimate areas of their bodies.

This last had involved, along with the usual exercises for the muscles of the pelvic girdle and pubococcygeal band (Thank you, Dr Kegel), practicing certain forms of mild self-denial; i.e., using those muscles surrounding the vagina and anus to bring oneself to a state of sexual tension, then stopping, and waiting until the feelings of arousal began to subside, then starting in all over again. Having experimented in a tangential sort of way with benwa balls at school (all the rage in the post-Reagan era New England small-college atmosphere I found myself in; trickle down, indeed), I fancied myself rather adept at this particular form of ‘exercise’.

But nothing could possibly have prepared me for this.

Macabre shadows danced like demons across the rippling corrugated metal walls of the dimly lit shed. I hung panting, my dripping hair draped in wet ropes across my face, obscuring my vision almost entirely. My arms were bound together behind me at the wrists, and again just above the elbows, and raised until I was nearly doubled over at the waist, my upper body almost parallel to the dirt floor. My shoulders howled in protest, and my back ached mercilessly. My legs were spread so widely that I felt as if I were being split in two, and bound to them, between my thighs was Sabrina, her long, silken honey-blonde hair tied about my waist like a belt, welding her mouth to my sex. Sweat trickled down my breasts, and dripped slowly from their tips, falling onto Sabrina’s back, joining the little rivers that ran down her body, glistening in the golden lamplight. I drew a shuddering breath as her tongue explored the folds and convolutions of my vulva, eliciting breathy little moans of unalloyed pleasure from my lips.

I stared unfocusedly from behind the black curtain of my hair at the shadowy form behind Sabrina, another woman, her long dark brunette hair cascading about her shoulders. She was naked as well, and shimmering in the lamplight with the perspiration of her own exertions. In her left hand she held a small remote control unit, and in her right, a braided leather cat-o-nine tails. Something wet, and sticky looking was dripping slowly from the tips of the cat, forming a small dark stain on the sand beside her feet. At the moment the woman’s attentions were focused on the device in her left hand, however.

It was Hekate, Sabrina’s helpmeet and sometime lover.

I sensed, more than heard Sabrina sob; felt the soft pulsing hum telescoping through her body where it was tied to my calves, and thighs. I had not seen the vibrator when it was inserted in her, but I could tell by the vibrations running through her flesh, and the soft audible buzzing that it must be a monster.

I felt her tongue become suddenly rigid, and nearly epileptic in its ministrations to my dripping quim, and her head begin to twitch between my thighs like a palsied marionette’s. Her breath began to come in hitching gasps; I knew she was on the verge of climaxing. Just thinking of it, of her impending orgasm, had me on the edge as well. I felt my whole body flush, blood rushing to the surface capillaries of my skin as if seeking a better view of the show. My hips began to jerk in time with Sabrina’s bobbing head. I clenched my teeth to keep my groans of pure animal pleasure from being heard; as if that would have mattered. It was like trying to hide blood in the water from sharks.

Hekate’s fingers skimmed along the face of the tiny remote, and the thrumming in Sabrina’s body ceased suddenly. I felt her go still between my legs, scarcely even breathing. She knew, too. In the next instant, Hekate brought the cat, still slick with her blood, down viciously across Sabrina’s proffered buttocks. She screamed, into my rippling pussy. My knees buckled, inviting me to drop to the floor, and wrench my arms from their sockets. Only the face of the woman between my thighs kept me upright.

I came at precisely the moment that Sabrina screamed, and Cassandra Bétancort’s bullwhip simultaneously carved a six-inch laceration across my own bare bottom. I was too involved in my orgasm to scream, simply sobbing, and gasping over and over:

“Make me come...make me come...make me COMMMMMME...”

Their whips kept up a samba-esque counterpoint on our dancing bodies, until we both fainted.

If there was a curtain call for us, I missed it...

Paper or plastic, Ma’am?

Jolie struggled to come up with a satisfactory answer to this absurdly simple question, but found herself completely unequal to the task.

Her head was in fact already in a bag, but the bag was far too small. Her aching brain felt too big for her skull, as well, which throbbed as if it were about to split the material of the pillowcase cinched snugly around her neck with clothesline cord. She groaned softly, and attempted to roll over onto her side. She succeeded only in nearly garroting herself with the clothesline. She quickly gave up on this activity, rolling back onto her stomach, and went about taking stock of her new accommodations instead.

She was naked, of that much she was certain. The fuzzy, acrylic fiber carpeting scraping maddeningly against her breasts and belly confirmed this. She thought briefly again about shifting positions, trying to minimize the chafing rug burns that were developing on her nipples, but thought better of it. The clothesline around her neck evidently was connected to more binding her wrists together, and they in turn were linked to her ankles, drawn up to her buttocks. She’d seen cute little calves in this sort of position before, when she had gone to a rodeo with an old boyfriend. It had not interested her much then, and she had quickly lost the guy. It interested her even less now.

To make matters worse, the carpet was moving. Or more precisely, the vehicle in which the carpet, and she herself were, was moving. It was dark, and sweltering in the enclosed, nearly airless space. Her body was sticky with perspiration, and she felt as if she might vomit at any moment. This was going to prove to be a very dicey proposition should she do so, as her mouth was filled with a vile tasting rag of some sort, also held in place with the ubiquitous vinyl-coated clothesline cord.

‘Honors student chokes to death on own barf in car trunk in Egypt,’ she could see the obit in her local paper. ‘Girl voted “most likely to go all the way any time she can” mourned by several.’

I don’t deserve this, she thought to herself as she tried to maintain her equilibrium over another series of very nasty potholes. She swore again as her body was tossed about and bruised like a ripe peach in a tumble dryer. The vehicle had evidently left the ‘improved’ road for more adventurous terrain. Jolie fought with something like real terror now as she struggled to keep her ankles and her wrists stationary, trying to keep from strangling herself. At each jolt of the vehicle, the cord bit into her neck again, bruising her larynx painfully.

Someone’s going to suffer for this, she thought blackly.

The car slowed to a crawl, then rolled crunchingly to a stop as the engine was shut off. After the pounding vibration, and the ceaseless growl of the motor, the sudden stillness seemed to press in physically on her eardrums. She turned her head carefully as she heard the rattle of a key in the trunk’s lock. The lid was lifted, and hands reached for her, pawing at her like a bag of groceries. Someone gripped her wrists, and carefully severed the cord connecting them to her ankles. Then she was lifted from the trunk, and set her on her unsteady feet, a pair of the hands still on her, helping to hold her upright. One of them wandered to her right breast, cupping and fondling it, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for it to do.

“Get your fucking hands off of me,” she hissed into the pillowcase still shrouding her head.

This was greeted with the raucous sound of male laughter, and some rather coarse sounding remarks in an unintelligible tongue. Jolie couldn’t understand what was being said, but she could tell that it wasn’t very complimentary. The man squeezed her tit again, this time more crudely. Suddenly she lashed out blindly with her bare foot, bringing her heel back and up sharply in the general vicinity of the groin of the man holding her. Her marksmanship was rewarded with a sharp intake of breath from behind her, and a grunted curse, followed by a pile-driver fist being driven into her solar plexus. She sagged, and slipped from the grasp of the man behind her, slumping to her knees, her chest hitching spasmodically as she tried to regain her breath.

“Get her up, and inside,” someone said in English. “And watch your hands, lest you lose your jewels entirely.” Other voices guffawed, as hands wrapped around her biceps again, and hauled her unceremoniously to her feet. Jolie was half dragged, half carried across the rocky ground. She heard a squealing of unoiled hinges, and a shaft of yellowish light fell across her caul. The hands shoved her suddenly, propelling her into the room. She stumbled, falling forward onto her knees. She rolled onto her side, and lay still.

“Remove the hood.”

Fingers fumbled at the knot around Jolie’s neck, and jerked the sacking off. She blinked rapidly, trying to accustom her eyes to the dimly lit room as other thick fingers jerked the foul tasting rag from her mouth. She gasped, sucking air into her lungs, and spitting the residual vileness the gag had left in her mouth out onto the floor beneath her face.

“Good evening, Ms Bennett.”

Jolie turned her head in the general direction of the voice. It was a woman’s voice, of that she was nearly certain. She squinted into the gloom, her cheek pressed against the filthy wooden flooring, and saw military boots and rolled socks, attached to a pair of the most breathtaking calves she had ever seen. She let her eyes travel slowly up them to the woman’s knees, and higher, past her khaki shorts, and military cut khaki shirt, to a lean, bronzed, impassive face set in a short, boyish bob of jet black hair. Her eye was the same impenetrable ebony as her hair, and glittered in the dim light like obsidian set in milky quartz and gold. Eye singular. The other, her left, was obscured by a black leather eyepatch.

“I trust you had a pleasant journey,” the woman said, her thin, pale lips barely moving in her deeply tanned face. Her voice was soft, and faintly hoarse-sounding, almost hypnotic.

“Travel can be so problematic these days in Egypt, I’m afraid.”

Jolie took a deep breath, trying to regain her composure, and bite back the anger that was bubbling to the surface within her. Since she had set foot in Egypt a scant twelve hours earlier she had been stood up on the docks in Alexandria, forced to hoof several miles in the broiling Egyptian sun as it slowly cooked her, barely given the time of day at her new place of employment, knocked over the head, stripped naked, hogtied, and bounced around in a car trunk over roads that would give a donkey fallen arches. Now here she was dumped nude on the floor of some shack in God knows where with the Dragon Lady. She was pretty much aching to tell someone just what they could do with her internship at WISDOM.

“Have we met?” she asked archly instead, keeping as frosty an edge to her voice as the circumstances would allow. “I hope this isn’t part of my job description, because if it IS, I think that we’re going to have to renegotiate my employment con...”

A well-aimed boot toe to her kidney cut short Jolie’s speculations as to her duties as a WISDOM intern. The woman rose from her chair in a fluid motion, and walked to the girl writhing in pain on the floor. She squatted down next to her and spoke very softly, and very clearly in faintly accented English.

“There are a great many things we are going to discuss together, Ms Bennett. A great many indeed. I look forward to hearing what you have to say on a number of subjects. But just now, I think it might be better if you were to give your undivided attention to me for a moment or two.”

The woman ran her eyes swiftly over Jolie’s body, expertly assessing and estimating its strengths, and its weaknesses, rather the way an experienced horse trader might evaluate a potential purchase.

“But I think that before we chat, Ms Bennett, I should introduce you to a colleague of yours...”

The woman snapped her fingers, and gestured at the now thoroughly perplexed, and completely terrified girl on the floor. Her abductors laid hands on her again, dragging her to her feet abruptly, and steering her stumblingly toward an iron banded wooden doorway. The woman pushed the door open, swinging it back on protesting hinges. The room was dark, save for a single halogen spot shining down from the ceiling, creating a pool of stark white brilliance in the center of the room.

Jolie blinked, gaping uncomprehendingly at what she saw at the center of that cone of harsh light.

Then she screamed, and fainted dead away.

Beatrix Mackay closed her eyes and tried to slip into pure nothingness. But sometimes nothing was the most elusive commodity in the whole world.

The nearly hypnotic whisper of the powerful jets of her Gulfstream IV provided the perfect backdrop of white noise for her meditations, but her mind kept slipping its leash and racing ahead, down the labyrinthine twistings and turnings that her affairs had taken in the last seventy-two hours, plunging her orderly world into chaos.

This can’t be happening, was the mantra that her mind kept returning to and grasping at desperately, over and over again.

“Excuse me, Doctor Mackay.” The cabin attendant leaned solicitously toward Beatrix Mackay, shattering what little remained of her meditative mood.

“Yes, Kalin?”

“We’ve just received a satlink transmission, 256k encryption, eyes only, Doctor.” The impeccably tailored young woman handed her a Visor, and walked smartly back toward the state-of-the-art comshack just aft of the pilot’s cabin. Beatrix Mackay sighed, and pushed back into the soft leather seat, her lips tightening grimly.

Now what, she thought.

She punched a button, and the device’s LCD screen came to glowing life. She rapidly keyed in her security code and password, then entered other codes on several subsequent screens before a list of files popped up. She selected the transmission marked ‘OracleofDelos’ and clicked on it. She read for several minutes, her expression becoming blacker by the moment. Furiously, she tapped out a terse reply, encrypting it and saving it for transmission.

“Kalin!” She nearly shouted, as the woman came striding hurriedly down the cabin toward her. “Send this immediately, same security, same encryption. And get me a landline. What is our ETA in Athens?”

“Sixteen forty-five, Doctor,” she replied briskly, taking the proffered device, and turning to fetch the required phone handset.

Doctor Beatrix Mackay gripped the plush leather armrests of her seat convulsively. She felt like a trapped beast, in a pressurized cage five miles above the earth. She needed to be on the ground again. Urgently.

Before anything else blew up in her face.

The Voice told me what I was, and I knew it to be so. The Voice told only truths.

“Whore.”

My nipples began to tingle softly again. I didn’t know whether the clamps and electrical leads were still attached to them or not. It hardly seemed to matter any longer. Only the sensations coursing through my titflesh mattered. The Voice had told me that as well.

“Worthless hole.”

The tingling took on a deeper, richer undercurrent, and slithered seductively through my abdomen, beginning beneath my navel, and moving lower still, setting up its urgent rhythms in my sluttish body. I felt myself warming, moistening, my nerve endings afire, every sensation around me now amplified, enhanced. Colors, sounds, smells, all blended into a swirling collage of raw physical stimulation, a kind of pastiche which was absorbed through my pores, as though I were a sponge of carnality.

“Fucktart ...”

I began to cream, my worthless body’s exudates dampening my tramp’s thighs, creating the rich stink of pheromones and bodily odors that would summon them, all the animals that would use me. Should use me. I existed only to be used. The Voice had told me that, too.

“Cum bucket...”

Nothing mattered now; nothing existed in the universe but that burning, tingling ache at the juncture of my thighs. I felt as though my vulva were moving, physically reaching, questing about in the void between my legs for someone, something, anything to fill itself with. Anything to assuage the wretched emptiness inside of me.

I was scarcely aware that I was speaking aloud.

“Fuck me...use me...hurt me...fuck me... fuckmeusemehurtmefuckmefuckme...”

There may still have been some vestige of the woman that had been Van Worth buried somewhere within this wriggling mass of blistering need, and it may have been responsible for the slight blush coloring my cheeks. But it was more likely my raging lust to be taken, taken and used in the crudest ways imaginable that reddened my face. After all, hadn’t the Voice told me that Van Worth was dead? That there was no more Van Worth?

Only fucktoy.

The door slammed open just as I climaxed for the first time, my teeth clenched, tendons standing out rigidly in my neck, as I made noises like rutting beast in heat. Beads of sweat popped out on my forehead, and between my breasts, and under my arms. My own heady scent enveloped me, making me want to come again almost before this first cataclysm had receded.

“Cassandra!”

I nearly swallowed my tongue. I knew that voice, too. I began to shiver, this time not with sexual heat, but with raw, primal terror. My body seemed to literally draw up, to fold in upon itself. I could not stop trembling. I peed myself, hot urine splashing on the plank floor beneath me, spattering my thighs, and calves. I moaned in an agony of dread.

Mistress.

I hung my head in a daze, staring vacantly at the wet floor beneath me, at the slender dark-green plastic coated wires spiraling from my nipples and my clitoris like the tendrils of some exotic tropical plant, snaking across the floor into the shadows. Tiny pulses of current still licked and tickled at me, but they no longer elicited those heated, syrupy sexual responses from my quivering body.

Now I felt only terror.

That voice.

Mistress.

I vomited on the sodden planks beneath me, and pitched face forward into my own mess.

“Her resistance was extremely strong,” Cassandra Bétancort was saying. “Given the time constraints placed upon me, I felt that extraordinary methods were called for, techniques quite outside of our normal conditioning routines. After all, Bea,” the woman smiled pointedly at Doctor Mackay. “You yourself set the time frame and parameters for this little ‘experiment’. It hardly seems constructive now to cavil at the methodology employed in order to achieve the results you required.”

Beatrix Mackay nodded slowly, her penetrating green gaze riveted on the copper-haired woman seated calmly across from her. Cassandra Bétancort had been doing final training and jump off operational inserts in the Balkan and Near and Middle Eastern spheres of influence for six years now, nearly as long as they had been operational. Bea had known her for almost eight years, going back to their first meeting at a behavioral psyche symposium in Bern. The two women had gravitated to each other at once, sharing not only professional interests, but surprisingly similar and strongly held world views.

They had also become lovers in Switzerland, beginning an on-again, off-again affair that had lasted nearly as long as their professional association. Beatrix had finally broken it off for good a little over a year ago. She gave as an explanation that their duties and responsibilities, as well as the physical distance between them, really did not allow for such intimate contact any longer. The true reason for her disengagement from her erstwhile lover and chief operational lieutenant for the Golden Crescent were a bit darker, and more disturbing, for her at any rate.

Beatrix Mackay had in fact begun to fear Cassandra Bétancort, just a bit.

“Anyway, she’s ready. We can begin any time you’d like.”

Yes, she supposed that was true. If what Cassandra had told her was accurate, the subliminal cues and deep pattern programming could be implanted at any time now. But Beatrix Mackay hated it, hated this quick, dirty wiping and reprogramming. It had been done only twice before, with decidedly mixed results. It was sloppy, and unreliable at best. At worst it was a form of psychic butchery, rendering the operative unfit for anything ultimately but a short, unhappy life in one of the brothels they operated as fronts for their operations in Bangkok or Istanbul. She said as much to Cassandra Bétancort now.

The woman shrugged indifferently. “It was that, or insert a totally unprepared, unreliable operative; one who still retained her old life, her old mindsets and ethos, all her old values and inhibitions. Even more dangerous, in my opinion. At least this way, if she melts down, she’ll have nothing to reveal, nothing to share with the opposition to compromise us.” She stared challengingly at Beatrix Mackay, stopping just short of adding ‘like Brie Analeiou, for instance.’

Beatrix Mackay put a finger to her lips, pursing them slightly, lost in thought for several moments. Abruptly, she rose from her chair.

“All right then, let’s get started. Where is she?”

I had heard the low murmur of voices in the adjacent room, but hadn’t been able to make out any of their conversation. I heard the words all right, but I was incapable of putting them together in anything resembling meaningful sentences. My mind cast this way and that, frenetically, bolting down first one avenue of thought, then turning and scampering down another, completely unrelated one. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate, but bright flashes of colored light played upon the inside of my eyelids, as if strobe lights were going off in the room. I wondered if this was what madness felt like.

I wondered if I cared any more.

The door swung back on its hinges, and I heard footsteps crossing the raw cedar plank floor, and stop near my cot. I opened my eyes listlessly, and found myself staring up into the beautiful, intent face of Dr. Beatrix Mackay.

She smiled at me, and stroked my forehead gently, smoothing a strand of damp hair away from my brow.

“How is Van?” she inquired affectionately, as if I was a long lost niece, or much-beloved second cousin happened upon by chance at the mall. I stared dully at her, too confused and disturbed to speak. Beneath my thin silk dressing gown, I felt my skin beginning to burn with that slow fire that I had come to recognize so well. I wanted to scream at her, dredge up the vilest obscenities I could imagine, hurl them like feces at that immaculately coiffed head, that flawlessly glossed mouth, to splatter upon her, and befoul her, as I had been befouled, and debased. My lips twitched and quivered uncontrollably. They formed a word at last. I spit it out.

“Mistress.”

She smiled, and slipped a cool hand beneath my robe, caressing my hot, dry skin, sliding her fingers down across my thatch to my entrance. She slipped a finger between my swollen folds, and I closed my eyes again in horrified shame. I was soaked already, literally sopping at her barest touch. A tear squeezed out of my left eye, and tracked down my flushed cheek, filling my ear with warm salt.

“Magnificent,” she breathed. Taking me gently by the shoulders, she helped me into a sitting position, and swung my legs over the edge of the bed. She slowly drew me to my feet, her eyes fixed relentlessly on my own, her face an inscrutable mask of concentration and...something else...could it have been desire? Or regret? I moaned softly, feeling my faithless body betraying me even as I fought against her. She slipped those cool hands beneath the lapels of my wrap, and slid them aside, exposing me to her gaze. Her eyes wandered over my body in a detached, almost clinical sort of way, and I felt my sex pulse and spasm as they came to rest upon it, as if she were physically touching me. I gave another little whimper of shame at my body’s all too evident need.

“Van, darling,” she said, her eyes still studying my body intently, as if the answers to every question in existence were somehow engraved upon it. “You have been an exceptionally strong, and brave woman up till now. But now I must ask even more of you, more willingness, more determination, more sacrifice. Are you willing to make such a commitment to me now?”

I wanted to spit in her face. I wanted to tear myself from her loathsome grasp, bury my nails in her throat, knock her to the floor and flee, screaming, as fast as my rubbery legs would carry me. My breath caught in my throat. My heart literally missed a beat.

“Mistress,” I heard myself whisper.

“Yes,” I breathed, barely a word at all; more like a prayer.

I felt her fingers wandering over my body, touching me lightly everywhere, drawing my desire forth from me like strands of silk from a spider’s spinneret. My breath came in little catches, my nostrils flaring with my wretched need, and my wanton’s lust. I trembled uncontrollably.

“I own you, Van, for I know your names...”

She turned her eyes on me then, those glittering orbs of soft, verdant colors; as filled with the complexity of beauty and danger as a rain forest, and equally as deadly. I felt as if I were falling into them from a great height; fathomless green pools that I knew would drown me, and yet dear God how I longed to plunge beneath their surface, to swim in them for eternity. She whispered to me rapidly, urgently, words that I could not quite make out, could not comprehend, words about darkness, and pain, and fulfillment, in a strange tongue that I should not have been able to understand.

But I could.

‘I’m lost,’ was my last conscious thought, as she slipped the thin silk wrap from my shivering shoulders, dropping it in a whispering pool of silk at my feet. Then her hands were at me like starlings stripping a ripe stalk of corn. All the while she whispered in my ear, turning my body to flame, and my tainted soul to ice.

Then she touched me again, and I knew no more...