Bound and Initiated (10 page)

“Any questions for me?”

What?
A trick, of course. Or perhaps not really a trick but a reminder. “How may I serve you, doctor?” she said, and bit her lip, thinking about how she would feel if Dr. Adams told her that he would now fuck her, taking for himself what they had destined for Pater Robert, because he couldn’t resist the charms of the new Ostia girl whose training he had just commenced. The contraction she felt in her pussy at the tiny fantasy hardly surprised her, now; it began to seem that Sarah simply was the kind of girl who thought about that sort of thing, despite never having known it before today.

The doctor smiled. “Perfect, columba. You may serve me by remembering today’s lesson when you are being enjoyed by your pater. And when we meet again, I believe I will be able to think of other ways, too. Until then, Sarah, I’ll be thinking of how pretty you look right now, open and ready to give pleasure.”

Another blush, another frown of helpless arousal. Dr. Adams turned and left, closing the door behind him.

Again the waiting, bound to the exam table. Had she learned anything really worth knowing? That the doctor would see her again, and at that time he would, it seemed, be in a position to be one of the men who enjoyed Sarah? That the thought had gotten her warm and wet yet again?

She tried to make her mind a blank, to reset her reason and her imagination to some sort of equilibrium, prepared to do what was necessary to get the information for which she had come.

Who was in charge in New York? So—who was Pater Robert? Who were the red-robed men in the video, and how many of them were there, and where? How thoroughly did they manipulate the world economy and the geopolitical landscape, and to what end?

Seth and Joe knew of three members: Cardinal Deriano, an Italian undersecretary of the treasury named Franchese, and Chilton himself. Working from those names and their subtle activities over the past ten years, they had conjectured the possible identities of several other men, who had carried out unusual transactions and traveled to unusual places, but the further they moved from the three known members, the more chimeric the purported conspiracy became. Above all, the secret working group on the League of Mithras—Seth and Joe and Sarah, and, she thought, probably at least one other analyst they hadn’t told her about—needed real names. To this point, Sarah had Claudia, Dr. Adams, and Pater Robert.

Pater Robert above all. Who was he?

The door opened and Claudia walked in. “Hello, columba,” she said. Startled out of her reverie, Sarah looked at her with wide eyes, seeing not the innocuous presence of the woman she had met earlier but the advent of a new trial, a new progression of Ostia’s transformation of her into their possession. “Return my greeting, Sarah,” Claudia said softly.

“Oh… um… Hello, domina?” Sarah said.

“You must always return the greeting of a superior,” Claudia said, now stepping forward to the exam table and beginning to release the cuffs that bound Sarah’s wrists.

“Yes, domina,” Sarah said, reflexively this time. How had Claudia done that—bent her to her will that way? It simply felt right to answer submissively, and Sarah didn’t even know why.

“You may rise and follow me back to my office,” she said, and turned around without waiting to see if Sarah obeyed.

In the office, the coffee table waited. At the sight of it, Sarah’s heart quailed; not only had Claudia obtained from her that submissive response, but she had somehow also made a piece of furniture into something much more: a source of terrible imaginings that would now, it seemed, be fulfilled. Would she have to kiss Claudia between her legs, the way the girl in the video had? Sarah’s breathing sped up, and she couldn’t tell whether it was in fear or in anticipation. Would Claudia punish her? Or torment her with pleasure?

The coffee table now had leather straps affixed to the hooks on its legs that Sarah had noticed at the outset. Had that happened only an hour ago? In Sarah’s head the interview and the whipping; meeting Pater Robert in the hall; the shameful examination from Dr. Adams—they all played back as she looked at the straps someone had now attached to the table, which could have no other purpose but to secure Sarah to its top.

No more than an hour? Or had the timeless silences, when Claudia had left her to read the contract, then later left her to wait for the doctor, lasted for hours themselves, without Sarah having become fully conscious of the passage of time? She felt now as if those silences had perhaps transformed her into the sort of girl whom other women bound to their coffee tables; surely they had consumed more than a few minutes each.

“Lie on the table on your back, Sarah,” Claudia said matter-of-factly.

One strap went around Sarah’s shoulders, above her breasts. Another went around her waist, with her hands at her sides so that they were immobilized, too. Cuffs went around Sarah’s thighs just above the knee, and Claudia placed a bar between them to spread Sarah’s legs wide. Fastenings on the thigh cuffs, attached to the waist strap, raised her knees almost to her breasts and spread her even wider than she had been in the stirrups. Through the whole process, as Claudia simply manipulated her body to place it in the position she desired, Sarah felt completely devoid of will, or of a purpose other than to be arranged upon the table according to the desires of her domina.

Nor did Claudia speak at all, even when she had finished binding Sarah. Instead, she vanished from Sarah’s field of vision to the other side of the office. Soon Sarah heard her typing at a keyboard.

The phone rang. Sarah heard Claudia pick it up. “Hello… Yes, she’s strapped down to my coffee table now… Yes, Hap said the exam went well. The bottom is apparently coming along very nicely already, as is the mouth. The cunt is extremely attractive, and likely to be quite tight… I know, I saw him in the hall… This evening, yes… I don’t think so, actually. I have a lot of work to get through. Sarah’s learning to be a good girl right where she is. I’ll water her and let her relieve herself in an hour, and then it will be nearly time to take her downstairs… Yes, a shame, but at least I can look over and see how pretty she looks spread open on my table.” Then Claudia laughed at something the person at the other end of the line had said. “But I wouldn’t get any work done then. See you soon.” Claudia hung up the phone.

But I wouldn’t get any work done:
if… what? A vision came to Sarah’s mind, lying there, of herself kneeling at Claudia’s feet between her knees as she typed away at her keyboard. Claudia’s dress hiked up around her hips, no panties on, and her pussy framed by a black garter-belt. Claudia’s hand coming down to rest on Sarah’s head, urging it forward, telling her that she must kiss, must lick, must give pleasure to her domina.

Sarah’s own pussy warmed and clenched, but Claudia typed on in silence. The power to keep a girl on your coffee table, spread and ready, and not to put her to any lascivious purpose at all, suddenly seemed to Sarah the greatest power Claudia had yet wielded over her.

Sometime later—how long Sarah thought, rather languidly, she couldn’t begin to tell—Sarah realized that Claudia had begun to unfasten the straps that bound her to the table. She tugged Sarah gently to her feet and steadied her. Sarah saw that she still wore the thigh cuffs, but she noticed this as if those cuffs adorned a different person’s legs.

As Sarah stretched a bit to ease the little aches that had gathered in her limbs, Claudia startled her by suddenly and without warning slipping a leather collar, about half an inch wide, around her neck. Before Sarah could react, Claudia was buckling it.

“You will not always be in leather, columba, as we call it,” she said, “but you will be for the next few weeks at least, so you should try to get used to it. Put out your hands.”

Automatically, Sarah obeyed, noticing that Claudia now had more cuffs in her hands, which she swiftly buckled around Sarah’s wrists. Where had they come from? Sarah wondered idly. The further she went into this alien world, the more dreamlike it seemed; things appeared without having been there a moment before.
Some psychological effect of the bondage, maybe.

Sarah concentrated, and the world came into better focus. She noticed that Claudia had also brought what looked like a broad leather belt, and laid it on the couch; now she had bent to pick it up. The world seemed to return to a normal, waking state. Clearly the time on the table, held open on her back, trying to fight against the hope that Claudia would do something erotic rather than simply typing away at her keyboard, had taken her out of herself somehow, had induced the dreamlike state.

Intentional, on Claudia’s part, of course.
Induce altered consciousness in the initiate. Mystify her, dazzle her. Make sure she doesn’t notice details, or even chronology.

Careful.
Claudia would probably expect Sarah to remain within that dazzled state. Sarah could feel that the muscles of her face had grown tense as she tried to reason out the strange state she had reached on the coffee table; Claudia might well notice that, if she were as sensitive and perceptive an observer as Sarah thought the elegant woman must be. She slackened those muscles, forced her eyes down to look only at the hem of the beautiful gray dress Claudia wore instead of darting them around the room to discover what else she had missed in that dreamlike state.

Now Claudia put the belt around her waist, and Sarah suppressed her reflex to step back and away from the new restraint. In her peripheral vision, she saw that the belt had dull metal rings fastened to it at either side, matching the rings on the wrist cuffs. Claudia linked the rings with a metal clip at each side, the faint clinking of the rings and the clips sounding strange and almost enchanting in the silence of the office.

From the couch now also came ankle cuffs, and as Claudia stooped to fasten them, Sarah felt she had almost attained equilibrium where thought and feeling had reached a sufficient balance that she could both reason and remain fully aware of her surroundings. In this state, though, she had the new worry that her fear of what would now happen—a fear that perhaps Claudia had at least in part been attempting to reduce or remove by dulling Sarah’s awareness—of the way she would soon, it seemed, become a man’s sexual plaything, might reveal that her intentions weren’t those of the usual initiate.

The greater awareness she gained, however, seemed to her to make something about having these leather restraints now girding her at neck, waist, wrists, thighs, and ankles seem paradoxically reassuring. The sight of them, and the feeling of enclosure they gave, inspired visions of what the rings on them might be attached to and why; of how Pater Robert might wish to use them, so that Sarah’s body would assume a posture pleasing to him, and then hold that posture until he had finished enjoying her. If he secured her thus, Sarah need not worry, it suddenly seemed to her, about whether she actually wanted to be deflowered, or to have a cock in her mouth, or to have her anus violated. Pater Robert would simply arrange her, using her collar, cuffs, and belt, and then he would fuck wherever and however he liked, for as long as he liked.

Did that bizarre impression—verging, Sarah realized, on her own enjoyment of the perverse erotic experiences into which she had been forced already, and the anticipation of the ones into which she would now be forced—owe something to the time on the coffee table? To the ‘instructional examination’? To the entry of Kevin and Alex and the whipping Claudia gave her? To the way Pater Robert had winked?

Probably to all of them,
Sarah thought, feeling her mouth compress into a tight line and her brow furrow as yet another image of how she might be spread open by means of the leather she wore floated into her mind’s eye.

Something else came into view, in Claudia’s hands: a leather leash. Sarah felt herself draw a quick breath that flared her nostrils, but she kept her body otherwise quiescent. Claudia held the leash in both her hands, and raised it slightly as if offering—no, of course not, because Sarah’s hands were now restrained at her waist—or, yes, displaying it to her: black and thick, an inch in width and making Sarah wonder immediately if she was going to be whipped with it. Unconsciously, she found herself trying to move her hands to shield her bottom, and failing because of their being attached to the belt around her waist. In that moment, she felt utterly defenseless.

“This is your leash, Columba Sarah,” she said softly. “Even very obedient and mild animals, such as doves, which is what
columba
means, need the restraints humans place upon them, in their wisdom. You are a columba now, a girl-dove and a girl-animal, and as your domina I must make certain you understand what you are, and how thoroughly your body and your soul exist to be restrained, to be bent, to be shaped, to the will of the men who have decided that you shall belong to them.”

Sarah’s heart began to beat wildly. Surely Claudia must expect that: no girl, altered state or no, could keep her composure in the face of that kind of declaration, could she? She heard the breath pant in and out of her mouth as Claudia reached the clip at the end of the leash toward her and fastened it to the ring that Sarah now realized must be there at the front of her collar, though she couldn’t see it.

“I have leashed you, Columba Sarah,” Claudia said, her voice still soft but now also very decisive, declarative, as if the words
did
something to Sarah. As if she had just passed a point of no return.

Then, without another word of explanation, though Sarah thought her mind might burst with all the questions she knew would instantly be called
useless,
Claudia turned and led her from the room.

She led Sarah to a bathroom just down the hall, and forced her to drink two whole big glasses of water. Then she told Sarah to pee, and Sarah had to obey while Claudia watched. They left the bathroom.

Downstairs,
she had said.
In the elevator? Surely, surely not in the elevator, naked but for the leather restraints with even her pubic hair taken from her, so that businessmen in tailored suits would see the little cleft that told of her burning pussy. But Claudia led Sarah, who had to concentrate to stay close enough to her domina that the leash remained slack, straight down the hall and to the door that led to the lobby.