Bound and Initiated (3 page)

No. Not a chance. All Sarah could think, at this point, was that something about the cult of Mithras delivered to those red-robed men a real, material benefit. Her current theory posited that one or more of them had control of some resource the others needed—money, influence over some specific political field, or perhaps even an actual resource like a vast reserve of oil or copper—and that man or men was/were unbalanced enough to think that Mithraism held some sort of power. According to that theory, the sane men like Chilton and Cardinal Deriano (unless the cardinal was the lunatic, which Sarah found unlikely given his reputation as the only actual intellect in Vatican City) went along with the charade in order to secure the resource.

She wished she could research Mithraism more deeply. All she knew about the cult was half-remembered from her Western Civilization course. But Joe had forbidden it, saying, unfortunately very reasonably, “You’ll give yourself away if you know too much.”

If Sarah had information about the ancient cult, she might be able to spot differences in this modern version that might tell her where its true aim lay. But Joe was right: even the slightest slip-up, showing that she knew more about Mithraism than a writer of romance novels with submissive fantasies should know, could cause the mission to fail and put Sarah herself in grave danger.

“You have to be ready for them to hack your life in an instant. They may well do that the moment you send them an email.” That was the last thing Joe said to her before he sent her home with the new, old-looking laptop perfectly prepared to illustrate her previous year spent writing
Forever Girl
.

Are you yearning to try playing out your submissive fantasies in the exciting world of BDSM fashion photography?
the Ostia Agency webpage read.
Would you like to earn some good money while you do it? We’re looking for attractive eighteen-year-old girls with no prior experience. Email us at [email protected] for more information. Include a picture of yourself.

Sarah had written, to accompany a winsome image of herself outside her college dorm, dressed up for a semi-formal but looking—she thought—very innocent in a blue party dress that complemented her sea-blue eyes, shoulder-length golden hair, and fair complexion,

To whom it may concern,

Hi! I don’t really know what to write, except that I’m eighteen and I think I’d like to apply?

She thought the question mark at the end a particularly good touch, especially since before her recruitment to the agency and the entrance into her adult life that had gone with it, she probably would have put that question mark there instinctively and girlishly.

Five minutes later the reply had come back.

Can you fly to NYC tomorrow, departing Dulles 6 a.m.?

She hadn’t said anything about her location, of course. That made her swallow hard.

Yes?

The renewed question mark helped her recover her composure a bit.

650 Fifth Avenue, 9:15. Ticket booked in your name. We look forward to meeting you, Sarah.

The door behind the receptionist opened, and a tall woman in an elegant gray dress emerged. It took a long moment of panicked thinking that she had seen the woman somewhere before Sarah realized that the woman who now came toward her across the little lobby had played the part of the erotic priestess in the video. She bit her lip to conceal her involuntary, slightly wide-eyed reaction in the in-character gesture of slightly aroused apprehension.

Sarah couldn’t suppress the thought that flashed through her mind at that point.
Am I going to have to put my face between her legs? Is she going to ‘audition’ me that way, right here in this New York office building? What the hell is waiting for me on the other side of that door the ‘priestess’ just came through?

“Sarah,” the woman said, extending a hand. Her dark, wavy hair fell loose down her back and her olive skin, accentuated lightly but with extraordinary grace by exactly the right shade of lip gloss and exactly the right color of eye shadow, made Sarah wonder whether the priestess actually had a career as a supermodel. “I’m Claudia Monti, the director of US operations for Ostia. So nice to meet you.” A very elusive, faintly Italian accent, as if Claudia had grown up in three different European countries that spoke romance languages, then attended English boarding school and university.

Sarah shook the proffered hand, not needing to feign intimidation in any way. She felt the atavistic fear and, much more strongly, envy of the girl who knows her standard-issue fresh-faced prettiness will never measure up to the allure of the woman in front of her. “It’s nice to meet you,” she said hesitantly, trying to get control of her thoughts by weakening the utterance even further than the uncertainty she already felt would have weakened it.

Without releasing her hand, Claudia looked into Sarah’s eyes for a moment so long it became uncomfortable. The dark brown pools of the woman’s pupils didn’t bore into Sarah’s soul as much as they caressed it, and her body, in a frankly inappropriate way. Involuntarily, Sarah swallowed hard. Suddenly she felt that the chances of her having to kneel in front of Claudia Monti very soon, and perform cunnilingus for the first time, had become great indeed. She recoiled from the image, but it wouldn’t depart from her.

What would it be like, to see a pussy close up—so much closer up than she had ever even seen her own vagina? To hear a command that she must touch that pussy, kiss it, give it pleasure? That even though she considered herself straight, and looked forward to the sacred moment when a man would finally claim her as his own, with his thrusting cock, she must now give pleasure to another girl’s pussy: she must serve the lusts of the beautiful woman who had lifted her dress to reveal the cleft of her sex, and ordered her to please the woman with her mouth?

To her mortified astonishment, Sarah felt her own pussy contract, and realized she had begun to dampen the black lace panties she had put on more self-consciously than ever before that morning. She liked lacy underwear, and she always wore it when on one of the few dates she’d had, generally with guys she’d known in her one year of college (having graduated from high school at seventeen) and friends of female friends from high school. But putting on the black lace bra and panties that morning, with the prospect that someone in New York might be looking at her—evaluating her—in them later that day, had made their latent sexiness seem so real that the delicate fabric almost seemed alive, somehow; like its mesh, whispering over her private places, contracted to hold those places more tightly. As if the underwear
reserved
her, somehow, for the use of the Ostia Agency, whatever they turned out to be.

A hot blush came to her cheeks, and Claudia released Sarah’s hand at last, smiling. Had she smiled at the blush, specifically? The thought seemed to make her face even hotter.

“We’re going to go back to my office, Sarah,” Claudia said. “We’ll talk for a little while about what it is we do here at Ostia, and I’ll find out a little more about you. I’ll answer any basic questions you’ve got, at that point. If I think you’re a good fit for us, I’ll ask you if you’d like to sign a standard non-disclosure agreement and learn more about Ostia, and what you would be doing in your training course and as a member of our team. Sound alright?”

Sarah noted the very corporate tone, and wondered how long it would continue. Despite the way Claudia had looked at her just a few moments before, she almost began to think that she had come to the wrong place, or that Ostia must simply be a regular sort of modeling agency, so perfectly did the woman deliver this veneer.

“Sure,” Sarah said. “Thanks very much for interviewing me.”

“It’s our pleasure,” Claudia responded with a smile. “We’re always on the lookout for girls with your interests.”

Sarah decided not to notice this apparent confirmation that the five minutes between her mail to Ostia and their response had included some sort of thorough profiling of her life, perhaps including a hack of her computer. She smiled as if uncertain what to do next, and Claudia smiled back as if to reassure her that despite Sarah’s untoward desires, her future would be very bright, should she happen to secure a position with Ostia.

“Go ahead and give your purse, with your phone in it, to Lisa here,” Claudia said. “You won’t be needing it.”

Sarah felt her eyes widen, and she instinctively clutched at the fashionable leather handbag that hung from her shoulder, practically her most valuable possession. “Really? I mean…”

“Really,” Claudia said, in a tone of voice that made Sarah’s heart flutter.

The phone didn’t have anything incriminating on it; when Sarah managed to contact the working group, it would be by old-fashioned methods. Still, the idea of parting with such an easy means of calling for help made her anxious even as the command to do so seemed to excite the part of her that Claudia’s long look into her eyes had aroused. To her dismay, her hands trembled as she surrendered the purse to the receptionist’s outstretched hands.

Claudia led the way through the door behind the receptionist, into a long hallway lined with what must be office doors. “Ostia’s main office is in Rome,” she said, “but we keep a few people on salary here in New York, and also in Los Angeles, mostly to deal with recruiting girls like you, and scheduling their appointments.”

Sarah felt a question at this point might demonstrate interest. “Where does the… training happen?” she asked, her hesitation again coming from the heart.

Claudia laughed. “Some of it here. Some in other places, and all of them are lovely, I can promise you.”

They walked to the end of the hall, and Claudia opened the final door to reveal a huge corner office with a stunning view of Manhattan. At one end stood a nearly bare desk with only a laptop upon it; at the other lay a sitting area with a leather-covered couch and a similarly upholstered chair. A large coffee table that Sarah could see at a glance seemed to have, on its legs, some strange metal fixtures, occupied much of the space between them. She wouldn’t have noticed the fixtures, she felt sure, if she hadn’t been looking from the moment she entered for any signs of sex-related equipment, but now her mind filled instantly with images of herself tied naked to the table, undergoing the strangest interview of her life.

Claudia’s back was still to Sarah as the woman in the gray dress made her way toward that sitting area. Sarah thanked the heavens that she didn’t have to decide whether she should or shouldn’t let Claudia see her note the possible dual purpose of the coffee table.

Now Claudia turned to her and made an elegant gesture toward the couch. “Have a seat there, Sarah, please,” she said. Her tone surprised Sarah slightly: in a normal interview, she could imagine a person inviting the interviewee to have a seat, in words like,
Why don’t you have a seat?
and the slight variation
Have a seat
shouldn’t really give pause. But the way Claudia had said it seemed… well, it seemed like if she didn’t have a seat on the couch, she might suffer some sort of consequences. It sounded like Claudia knew herself to be in charge of Sarah, and knew Sarah to be the sort of girl who needed commanding that way.

Sarah sat on the couch, sinking back into the very comfortable leather cushions that in their softness instantly made it difficult to adopt a businesslike posture. With a little effort, she managed to perch on the edge by the time Claudia had sat in the chair, which seemed from appearances a much easier piece of furniture in which to sit up; nevertheless, Sarah felt herself in danger of falling back into a nearly supine position at any moment.

How could that be anything other than intentional,
she wondered. It couldn’t: everything about this interview had clearly been arranged to create certain important effects in the girl being recruited for Ostia, and the couch itself provided a subtle, exploitable reminder that the girl’s body could be configured and appropriated as necessary, when a woman like Claudia, or, presumably, men like her masters, chose to take control. Suddenly Sarah pictured a man—no, not just any man, but distinguished, tall, patrician David Chilton—striding swiftly into the room and pushing her back into the cushions of the couch, raising her skirt, ripping her lace panties off and pushing her legs apart so he could put his cock where he wanted to put it—where it must go…

Why couldn’t she control these tiny spurts of fantasy? Was it something about this romance-novelist cover she had adopted that had taken her over in some bizarre parody of method acting?

Claudia looked at her intently, and again Sarah blushed. Now the sudden fantasy was of Sarah on her back on the coffee table, and the beautiful director of US operations moving to bestride her face: no command necessary, because Claudia Monti would simply ride Sarah’s nose and mouth until she felt satisfied.

Am I going crazy?
Sarah suddenly wondered, feeling herself blush again.

“Sarah,” Claudia said gently, “it’s normal for a girl like you to feel very strange right now.”

The need to act brought Sarah’s thoughts back in line, a little. She knew exactly what Claudia meant, but she said, “Wh-what do you mean?”

“Come now,” replied the gorgeous woman, in the same voice with which she had told Sarah to sit on the couch. Sarah felt her eyes widen at the way that voice seemed effortlessly to have taken control of her body. Her blush increased until her face felt hotter than the sun. “We both know why you are here, Sarah.”

“Why… I mean… I’m not sure…” As soon as the acting had begun, it seemed to be over: Sarah knew that her reaction probably tracked with what would be expected of a non-spy, but it came from her heart, or perhaps somewhere else—somewhere lower, which now grew increasingly warm.

“Have you come to us for training, or not?” Claudia asked softly. The commanding tone had disappeared, but the confiding one that replaced it almost seemed worse, where Sarah’s state of mind was concerned. “Have a look at the legs of the coffee table, Sarah.”