Bound and Initiated (7 page)

Abruptly, Claudia had left, closing the office door behind her. Sarah felt her jaw drop, and the impression that there must be some trick here—that these people wouldn’t actually leave her alone in this office—quickly gave way to the certainty that the only trick lay in how obvious it was that they observed her now. Surveillance cameras had gotten so small and cheap that it didn’t even make sense to attempt to figure out where they were: they might have six of them in this office, covering every angle, and Sarah would never know.

Or they might have none, but be relying on her fear to keep her from rifling through Claudia’s desk and the low filing cabinet fashioned of dark wood, should Sarah James, romance writer, turn out to have prurient or malicious interests. Or perhaps they had researched her background so well that they felt sure Sarah James, romance writer, would never snoop.

Whatever the reason might be, the gesture felt to Sarah like an assumption of yet more power over her: to leave her alone in this office to read her contract seemed to declare that Sarah had fallen so completely under their sway that she could already be regarded as a faithful employee—no, a secured possession, rather—of the Ostia Agency.

She reached back and down to find the waistband of the lacy panties, but realized that Claudia had pulled them down far enough that in this position, over the arm of the couch, Sarah couldn’t reach far enough to get them in her grasp. Biting her lip self-consciously as she thought of Kevin and Alex perhaps watching a video feed, she stood up with a wince at the soreness from the twelve welts on her backside. Instinctively, she put her left hand down to cover her pussy with its sparse golden curls and reached with her right, bending, finally to get the tiny panties and pull them up, thinking as she did so about what Kevin and Alex would see if there were a camera behind Sarah as she bent.

Something about the scene, she realized then, had conspired to make her think of her body through the eyes of others—others who would take an erotic interest in her—in a way she had never thought of it before. She blushed to see through the camera lens how the slit of her pussy would become visible to the lascivious observer, and to consider how he—or she—would want to tie Sarah to the coffee table and explore that slit, and the places adjoining, in a quest to determine what Sarah’s body might be good for, and what delights it might offer.

An instructional medical examination.
That thought rose into her mind as with another wince she settled herself on the edge of the leather couch again. What did it mean? About what would they instruct her? Who would carry out the examination? Who would do the instruction?

Sarah picked up the first page of the contract.

I, the undersigned Sarah James (hereinafter ‘the girl’), currently residing at 15 Houghton Place, Apt. 5A, Alexandria, Virginia, do by my signature subscribed to this form of contract agree with the Ostia Agency (hereinafter ‘Ostia’), currently located at 650 Fifth Ave., New York, New York, under penalty of civil litigation to perform the following, in exchange for compensation to be determined by Ostia.

1. The girl will obey any and all commands issued to her by a superior at Ostia.

2. The girl will not divulge anything she experiences while serving as an employee of Ostia.

3. The girl acknowledges that she has been provided with Confidential Schedule A, detailing her duties and the penalties for failure to perform them. She waives her right to produce or to discover Confidential Schedule A as evidence in any legal proceedings against her. She acknowledges that after reading and subscribing her signature to Confidential Schedule A, she will not be permitted to read it again. She acknowledges that the duties detailed on Confidential Schedule A are not to her knowledge illegal or permanently harmful to her; she also acknowledges that by conventional standards they may be considered extremely shameful.

A space for her signature and the date, and for counter-signature by Claudia, came next. Her heart pounding, Sarah turned to the second piece of paper.

Confidential Schedule A

The duties of an Ostia girl are as follows:

1. An Ostia girl provides her body for the enjoyment of her superiors and their clients.

2. To that end, an Ostia girl’s body, in particular her vulva, her anus, and her mouth, receive thorough preparation and training in order to make them as pleasurable as possible for her superiors and their clients. An Ostia girl submits to this preparation and undertakes this training without hesitation or resistance.

3. An Ostia girl’s superiors and their clients use her sexually whenever and however they wish. The girl’s desires do not factor into any decision as to whether she will undergo sexual use. An Ostia girl submits to sexual use, and then expresses her gratitude for having been granted the opportunity to afford pleasure to those who used her.

4. Similarly, an Ostia girl may be punished corporally with any implement her superiors and their clients choose whenever they decide to punish her. She will certainly be punished if she fails to provide her body for sexual use in a respectful, obedient manner, or if she fails to express her gratitude, but she may also be punished simply for the enjoyment of her superiors and their clients.

Another space for her signature came after that.

For a few moments, as she read the words of the schedule over and over, Sarah thought she might actually have gone mad—not because she thought she had hallucinated the terrible clauses, but because of the way they conspired in her mind with her already punished bottom to produce a kind of horrified fascination. There was no question that she would sign, but she wanted to sign because she had to sign—not because she felt any attraction to the terrible, shameful duties she would agree to perform.

She thought the chances that the contract would hold up in court, if in some alternate universe the issue should ever come before the bench for adjudication, to hover somewhere between zero percent and 0.0001 percent. That clearly wasn’t the point, though, and she imagined that even girls less intelligent than Sarah James, romance writer, could discern that. The point lay in the way the signature formed another stop on this strange journey—the journey on which, apparently, Kevin and Alex stood at the second degree. If they stood there, who stood here? Was signing the contract the first degree? Did Claudia stand at the first degree? Or the doctor?

The number of questions in her head began to make her feel physically ill, and she suddenly felt grateful that unlike the hypothetical romance writer she must represent, no doubt was possible: she must sign, now. She had probably even taken enough time trying to quiet her mind and strengthen her resolve in the face of her body’s betrayal that whoever observed her wouldn’t notice anything too decisive in the way she signed.

Sarah picked up the pen and wrote, in her loopy grade school cursive,
Sarah James.
Then again, on the terrible schedule,
Sarah James.
Now Claudia truly owned her, by means of her name. As she dated the signatures, the door of the office opened again, and Claudia stepped through.

“Follow me, columba,” Claudia said in her authoritative tone. Sarah stood up, still holding the pen, noticed it in her hand, and put it awkwardly back on the coffee table. The irony that apparently she would be tied to the same table soon, where she had just signed away her freedom, struck her so strongly that her hands balled into fists and, as she looked up again from the table to Claudia, she froze.

She expected that Claudia would use more persuasive words on her, or even threaten her, but instead she just walked quickly toward Sarah and took hold of her elbow before Sarah could react. Sarah thought Claudia would simply start to march her out of the office, but instead, in what seemed the blink of an eye, Claudia had bent her at the waist, with left arm around Sarah’s back, and delivered three hard hand spanks to Sarah’s bottom.

Atop the welts from the strap, the spanks were pure agony, and Sarah cried out in anguish.

Claudia said, “Are you ready to follow me, columba?”

“Y-yes,” Sarah stammered.

Three more hard spanks, and Sarah was screaming now. “Yes, what, columba?”

“Oh, God… please… yes, domina,” Sarah wailed.

“Very good,” said Claudia. She released Sarah, then quickly turned and walked back to the door of the office. Sarah followed.

The strangest thing about the experience of walking down the hallway of a New York office suite wearing only lacy black lingerie that exposed Sarah’s punished backside was that it didn’t feel wrong. Shameful, yes: the receding back of Claudia’s gray dress, when compared with Sarah’s near-nakedness ensured that it felt shameful. But the various things that had happened over the last hour, above all including all the degrading things Claudia Monti had said to her, seemed to Sarah to have ensured that she understand herself as being destined, for the foreseeable future, to feel shame.

The examination room lay, apparently, at the end of the hall. As Sarah followed Claudia there, a door on the right opened and a man in a tailored charcoal gray suit stepped out just in front of them, turning as if to walk toward another of the doors Sarah and Claudia had just passed. He appeared in his late thirties, with straight, dark brown hair and blue eyes that seemed to pick up the blue of his Oxford shirt, which he wore under the gray suit without a tie. Sarah couldn’t help thinking him hot, in the way she seemed only to find really well-dressed men hot, and that of course made her blush fiercely as the shame came on again in a terrible wave.

It didn’t make her embarrassment any less intense that the man looked her up and down appraisingly before greeting Claudia. “Domina Claudia!” he said. “So nice to see you—and especially under these circumstances!” To Sarah’s distress, his eyes flitted again to her face, and he winked at her.

“Pater Robert,” Claudia replied in a voice that Sarah hadn’t yet heard from the woman; did she sound
submissive?
“I didn’t know you were in New York.”

Then, even more astonishingly, Claudia went down on one knee in front of the man in the suit, and quickly rose again. She turned to Sarah. “Do as I just did, columba, but remain on one knee until instructed to rise.” She gave the order in a tone that suggested she had given it many, many times before to young women who had just come into her power—and apparently the power of this man in the suit. Kevin and Alex might stand at the second degree, but this Pater Robert clearly stood much… farther? higher? than they did.

Sarah froze for an instant, taken by surprise, looking into the face of Pater Robert.
Pater
. Father? He winked again, and Sarah felt her jaw fall open as she tried to integrate all the various feelings, thoughts, and impulses that seemed to be at war within her.

Claudia’s voice came again, much more severe this time. “Sarah! Do not look Pater Robert in the eye! Kneel and ask his forgiveness with downcast eyes! Do it this instant!”

The sternness of her tone broke through Sarah’s momentary paralysis, and she sank onto her right knee, as Claudia had done. She turned her eyes downward to the polished black wingtips of the man in the charcoal gray suit. “I am sorry,” she said, not at all sure she used the correct words. “Please… please… I’m sorry.”

“Say
Pater, I beg forgiveness, and I ask that you punish me as you see fit,
” Claudia said, a little more gently but with an edge of something that sounded almost like anxiety in her voice, as if she might be punished herself if her new pupil did not behave herself properly. “Otherwise I shall have to whip you here in front of Pater Robert this instant.”

“That’s alright, domina,” Robert said. “Sarah here is nervous, and it’s all new to her of course.” The voice, coming from above her head, seemed so unexpectedly kind that Sarah felt tears welling up, of relief after the renewed fear of punishment, or perhaps just from extremity of her feelings.

“Say
Thank you, pater,
” Claudia said, also above her. Sarah wondered suddenly what looks might be passing between the two of them. In what relation did they stand to one another, exactly?

“Thank you, pater,” Sarah said softly to the man’s beautiful shoes.

“You are welcome, columba. For the good of your training, you had better learn to speak as your domina just commanded you. Go ahead.”

Sarah opened her mouth, trying to remember what Claudia had told her to say. “I… I beg…”

“
I beg your forgiveness, pater,
” Claudia prompted.

“I beg your forgiveness, pater, and I… I ask that you…” Now Sarah’s hesitation stemmed from remembering, rather than from forgetting. Surely he could see, looking down at her backside—as he must surely be doing right now, for his shoes had moved around until they were lost to her sight—how severely Claudia had whipped her just a few minutes ago. His voice sounded kind—could he really want to see her punished again? “…punish me as you see fit,” she whispered at last.

“I shall see fit to punish you very soon, I think,” Robert said, his voice not quite as kind but somehow in its dominant quality conveying just the same the impression that the control he would exercise over Sarah would always flow from his considered judgment of what suited her best, as his possession and his plaything. To her distress, Sarah felt herself grow warm again between her legs.

The beautiful shoes came back around her and into her field of vision again, and stopped in front of her. She felt masculine knuckles brush against her cheek. She closed her eyes. A finger under her chin, lifting her face. A voice saying, “Open your eyes, columba. You may look me in the face.”

She obeyed, dazzled by the angle of his jaw and the blueness of his eyes. He spoke in a low murmur, as if he meant only Sarah to hear his words. “I am lucky enough to be the man who will soon begin your initiation, Sarah, because I am the senior pater here in New York. I will not be gentle with you, I am afraid, because I do not wish to be gentle and in any case my role in your new life is not a gentle one by its very nature.”