The Shame Gambit

by Emily Tilton

  A grunt of pleasure from Sebastian Fredricks rewarded this lewd effort. “She has a way with a chap’s balls that tells you she’s a true whore.”

  “May I have a go?” Brown-haired Kevin Logan spoke now to Herrier, who sat in an armchair nearby, observing the performance of the girl he, too, often called whore.

  She had come to the chateau twice since the first night Herrier had whipped and used her in his impossibly arousing and ethically indefensible way. Most of the time, in the three weeks of their relationship, he had come to her apartment on the Left Bank, his driver waiting outside on the street while he, a titan of industry, climbed the three flights that brought him to her little studio, having instructed her via text message beforehand how he wished to find her.

  He had had his own copy of her key made, of course, so that when he said via text, Panties down over the side of your bed, Barbara had to assume that position and lower the white lace panties in which he made her dress every day. Thus Herrier would find her, across the big room from the door so that anyone on the landing could see the magnate’s young whore waiting to receive what such girls get from their masters.

  She had seen Jean only once in that time, and hadn’t seen Cynthia at all. Herrier had instructed her to stop her work at the Ostia Agency. Cynthia had predicted he would issue that command, and had told Barbara that the Guard would maintain constant surveillance. She had seen Jean to break up with him, also on Herrier’s instructions. Because of the distinct possibility, also foreseen by Cynthia, that Herrier had planted a microphone on Barbara’s body, her conversation with her beloved leo had to follow the script her new master had given her. Herrier had designed it to inflict the maximum possible humiliation on both of them.

  “Why?” Jean had asked.

  “You didn’t take charge of me the way you should have, Jean,” Barbara had replied. Her face had burned hotter than the sun, then, and she didn’t even know if she could say what her master had told her she must say, despite knowing, and knowing that Jean knew too, it was all a charade. She whispered, finally, “My master knows how to fuck my young cunt.”

  She had clenched down there as she said it, despite all the shame involved, and the wounded look on Jean’s face, she had thought, hadn’t been entirely attributable to the possibility Herrier’s cameras had eyes on them.

  She had had one more thing Herrier had told her she must say, or have the strap across her backside. She hadn’t even been able to look at Jean as she said it.

  “He punishes me, too, on my bare bottom. He’s very strict with me. It’s what I’ve always needed and you couldn’t give me.”

  The absolute fiction of the statement made it easier to bear, and the memories of belonging to Jean in the initiation chamber and then in her little apartment, but to Barbara’s crushing shame she knew she also spoke an absolute truth. Herrier’s arrogant way with Barbara, his failure to care for her the way Jean did, aroused her in a way she had not been aroused even when wearing his leathers deep below the ground, when he had tied her between the posts and possessed her bottom for his pleasure.

  The first time Herrier had fucked Barbara in the ass had been after her whipping in his bedroom. He had kept her restrained over his discipline block, her bottom on fire with the severe strapping he had bestowed. He had lubricated her little ring with a probe in a businesslike manner that made her moan with need, and then driven in at full length as she cried out in discomfort and unsatisfied arousal. When he used her anus at her own apartment, he usually tied her over a stool she had in her tiny kitchen.

  His manner of tying her up for use by his hard penis seemed so different from Jean’s that it made Barbara doubt her sanity as well, to her terror and shame, her love for her leo. In the initiation cell, Jean had restrained her for her own learning, and even for her own pleasure. For her own good. Herrier only secured her in place for his enjoyment, his elegantly manicured hands awakening such forbidden need in her that electricity seemed to dance across her skin as she felt her limbs restrained for her master to take his pleasure.

  Both men said, You need this. Whether explicitly or implicitly, though, Jean said, You need this, darling, and Herrier said, You need this, whore.

  How could she bear the knowledge that the act she had learned, from Jean, to put on, of the whore who had never gotten the kind of fucking and whipping she truly needed, had turned out to be true?

  Now, in Herrier’s salon, at the second party to which he had invited her, Barbara behaved as he had taught her to do at the first party, when she had sucked the cocks of four other industrialists before serving as the game piece for one of them in the strange, kinky, shameful game she supposed they would also play tonight, in Herrier’s grand gardens.

  The two Americans, the Logans, were it seemed permanent guests of Herrier in his chateau. They had seen Barbara serve the men to whom her aristocratic master had loaned her that night, just as they watched her serve Mr. Fredricks now. Jessica Logan, though she too was naked under the same kind of silken cloak Barbara wore, and knelt on the floor just as the younger girl had to, did not it seemed have to suck any cocks, even her own husband’s hard penis; Barbara would be made to do it as Jessica looked on. Her heart beat faster as she saw Kevin Logan’s long, hard shaft out of the corner of her eye even as she had to take Mr. Fredricks manhood at full length again, her head worked up and down along the penis by the Englishman’s hand in her hair while his muscular thighs thrust the cock up into the softness of her mouth.

  Barbara couldn’t figure out the first thing about the Logans’ story. Jessica clearly had some New Modesty thing going on, because she blushed and tried to adjust her cloak to cover her nakedness every time she crawled to the table with the bottles to pour Kevin a new glass of whiskey. But when the time had come to play the torch-lit game in the gardens, and her husband had removed the cloak, Jessica—blushing, still—had obeyed Herrier’s commands as the gamemaster and like Barbara had gone through the lewd, shameful motions apparently demanded by the rules.

  Her master had paired Barbara with a French tycoon that time, and she had done her best to keep her mind focused on retaining as much of the conversation among the industrialists of the Groupe as she could. She thought she had gathered some intelligence that might be of use to the Guard, but she couldn’t help worrying that she had missed nearly as much—the game simply demanded her full attention, though she functioned almost entirely as a passive piece in her player’s hands. She supposed she would serve as Mr. Fredricks’ piece tonight, and perhaps it would help that he spoke English: she had already gleaned one piece of intelligence from his conversation with Kevin Logan that she felt certain Jean would praise her for delivering.

  If I ever get to deliver it, she thought, her brow furrowing as she heard Herrier clear his throat to respond to Mr. Logan’s request.

  “By all means, Mr. Logan. Barbara here is for all my guests.”

  Mr. Fredricks raised her head again and turned her toward the other man’s cock, standing up hard and proud from his trousers. Jessica Logan knelt just beyond, sitting back upon her heels, her eyes fixed on the floor and her hands in her lap.

  She tried to fix her mind upon the intelligence she had gathered. The men at the chateau, the last time she had come to suck their penises and play the game in which they did to her so much more, had spoken of a version of the New Modesty that would spread from Europe and challenge Selecta’s control. The professor who seemed to give the Groupe, as they called themselves, their theoretical underpinning had expressed excitement over his discovery that the New Modesty actually had to do with energy markets.

  Jessica Logan raised her eyes as Barbara crawled toward the position she must assume, in front of Mr. Logan, to perform as Herrier had taught her. No, her mind insisted even as her eyes met the other woman’s, as Jean taught me.

  Barbara blushed deeply at the coming together of the command to render shameful service to another girl’s husband and the memory of her leo, who had handed her
on to the man who had made her available as a fuck toy to anyone who visited his chateau. Barbara hadn’t ever gotten to speak to Jessica, let alone get to know her at all, but the expression on the woman’s lovely face now made her wish she could. Jessica couldn’t be more than twenty-five, but she had a sort of wisdom in her blue eyes that Barbara felt she desperately needed.

  Most of all, although Jessica clearly wouldn’t have chosen to share her husband’s rigid manhood with another girl, one she hardly knew, the pretty wife nevertheless said to Barbara with her eyes that the younger woman should feel welcome to give the pleasure required of her. The tiny smile on Jessica’s lips seemed to speak of a power in her submission: a hidden capability that came through some special knowledge.

  What was it? Barbara felt her eyes widen as she moved across the thick Persian carpet, her mouth feeling a little numb, the way that always seemed to happen after she had given head for a few minutes. What did Jessica know?

  A gorgeous, powerful, dominant man like her brown-haired husband, Jessica’s eyes seemed to say, would naturally want to satisfy his curiosity about a girl like Barbara’s skill. He would want to sample Herrier’s hospitality by enjoying the mouth of Herrier’s plaything. A wife naturally hesitated, especially if she were a New Modesty girl, brought up to blush at such things, but—said Jessica’s smile—she only gained by laying her head upon her husband’s knee, as she did now, and flicking her eyes toward his hardness in invitation to the other girl to do as they both knew she must.

  To Barbara’s surprise, just as she had reached the place on the carpet right in front of Mr. Logan, and had turned her eyes upon his cock, brandished in his slowly pumping hand, Jessica spoke to her. Barbara didn’t remember the other American girl having said anything at all before, whether to her or to anyone else except her husband.

  “Let’s put on a little show for them,” Jessica said softly, and then she put her hand on Barbara’s head and urged her face toward Kevin Logan’s hard penis. Louder, so the rest of the room could hear, she said, “Open your mouth, girl. You’re going to take Mr. Logan nice and deep, now.”

  Mr. Fredricks chuckled, and Herrier laughed, as Jessica drove Barbara’s face onto her husband’s manhood. The shame of the moment drew a sob of need from deep in the younger woman’s chest, and she felt her hips move with a jerk of longing. Jessica, once she had seated Barbara’s mouth firmly on Mr. Logan’s cock, ran her hand down her back, to the little bottom Herrier had whipped two days before at Barbara’s apartment, without a reason except, he had said, that he wanted her neighbors to know she was disciplined by her wealthy lover.

  Jessica squeezed her there, gently at first and then harder, as Barbara worked to pleasure Mr. Logan. He had his hand lightly in her hair, and his hips moved rhythmically in response to the motions of her mouth.

  “Where did you get her?” he asked Herrier, his voice a little thick with the pleasure Barbara gave. “She’s very good.”

  “Actually,” Herrier said, just as Barbara heard the door of the salon open behind her, “I’m fairly sure she’s one of yours.” Then, before Barbara could even process what the magnate might mean, since of course he knew she was American, he said, “Ah, Mr. and Mrs. Granby. Welcome. You look lovely, Mrs. Granby. Why don’t you join the other girls. They are sucking the cock of the spy over there.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Jean watched the scene in the salon from a secluded corner of the chateau’s garden. Reaching his current location had required a level of risk the Guard had never asked of him before.

  “Frankly,” David Mancini had said, “I’m not sure the Guard has ever asked an initiate to put himself in this much danger, but we’ll do our best to keep you alive and free.”

  It certainly had made Jean scrutinize very closely his ideas about the theoretical prospects for world civilization and the necessity of bringing about the soft landing. Did he believe in the Guard’s central tenets enough to take a ride in an experimental comms-dark, nearly silent helicopter and descend a rope a hundred feet in the dark to get inside Herrier’s security barrier?

  In the end, the theory hadn’t mattered at all: Jean did it for Barbara, though he knew she was a great deal safer, physically, than he would be. It didn’t help much that, because the only recourse he would have should Herrier catch him would lie in the ridiculous cover of a jealous ex-boyfriend who had somehow managed to get into the garden, all the tech he could bring lay in his phone.

  At least he could carry on the handheld device specialized Guard software, programmed to delete itself if the phone was tampered with, that tapped into Herrier’s extensive surveillance system. Herrier recorded everything that passed in his chateau on high-quality video and audio, whether with the intent of enjoying his homemade voyeuristic pornography later or the aim of blackmailing his guests—or, more probably, both.

  Within fifty feet of a wired node, Jean’s phone could pick up that video, and thus he saw the Granbys enter, and watched Jenny crawl, her voluminous blue cloak still covering her almost completely, toward the sofa where Jessica Logan had just forced Barbara’s mouth down over her husband’s cock. Herrier obviously liked to look at the faces of the girls he enjoyed, and so an ingenious algorithm, not dissimilar from one in use by the Institute and the Guard, caused the surveillance cameras to zoom in at regular intervals on any feminine face it detected, as well, it appeared, as any feminine backside, and any erect penis. Jean got to see the troubled look on Jenny Granby’s face, and then a close-up of Barbara’s mouth going up and down rhythmically on Kevin’s rigid cock.

  So many thoughts went through Jean’s head now that he found himself needing to organize them under individual headings—once he had taken a Guardsman’s ritual three deep breaths to remove his emotions as much as possible from any analysis he made of the situation.

  In: I am a leo of the Pretorian Guard: a lion.

  Out: a Guardsman feels emotions.

  In: I am a leo of the Pretorian Guard: a lion of Mithras.

  Out: a Guardsman sees his emotions.

  In: I am a leo of the Pretorian Guard: a lion of civilization.

  Out: a Guardsman masters his emotions just as he masters his bed girl.

  Jean closed his eyes for a moment, and held in his mind a picture of Barbara as she had looked at him in the morning after the third night of her initiation, when she had woken up in his arms after her long night of anal lovemaking. He saw in his beautiful young bed girl’s eyes the awakening he had brought about in her, to the dark needs she had never acknowledged and to the certainty that by pursuing them she could also pursue her dream of making the world a better place for those who came afterward.

  Then, gradually but still in less time than it took for a second to tick by in Herrier’s gardens, he let in the image of Barbara as she had appeared on the day she had broken up with him, the charade that had to it a piercing reality.

  “You didn’t take charge of me the way you should have, Jean.”

  “My master knows how to fuck my young cunt.”

  “He punishes me, too, on my bare bottom. He’s very strict with me. It’s what I’ve always needed and you couldn’t give me.”

  Words self-evidently scripted by Herrier, and delivered with the certainty that Herrier had a microphone on her body. False words that nevertheless told a truth that Jean felt sure had started to gnaw at Barbara’s inexperienced emotional control.

  She had loved Jean, yes, but he knew too well from ten years’ experience as a Guardsman that Barbara could very well come to resent the position into which Jean had placed her, where she must discover day by day Herrier’s skill at exploiting her submissive needs. She would never, Jean thought, blame him consciously. But when this demanding sexual mission, undertaken well before Barbara had the skills a more experienced Ostia initiate developed over at least the year preceding this kind of deep cover assignment, came to an end, she might well have no desire to see him. She would be able to choose a new leo—or, rather, to request r
eassignment and let the available leos fight for her.

  He opened his eyes. None of that mattered: the mission mattered, and finishing the mission would make Barbara safe.

  A Guardsman masters his emotions just as he masters his bed girl.

  Now: his thoughts, under their analytical headings.

  Heading one: the Logans, or, to put it another way, the point of this mission.

  Barbara didn’t know she had gone into Herrier’s sexual service to find Kevin and Jessica Logan, so she wouldn’t have especially noted their appearance, either tonight or the other times she had visited the chateau. Jean couldn’t help, with this hindsight, regretting David’s decision not to brief Barbara on the Logans: if she had known about their importance, she might have used the dead-drop near her apartment to let Jean know she had seen them.

  She might also have given herself away, and, quite possibly, be dead. The Groupe doesn’t mess around.

  She might have given herself away, above all, if the Logans had turned. Jean could easily imagine Kevin Logan, a legendary covert agent, entrapping Barbara. It probably wouldn’t have taken him more than five minutes to pierce her cover.

  He might already have figured out she’s an Ostia agent, frankly.

  Well, they had found the Logans, anyway, and they were alive and, apparently, extended-stay guests of Jules Herrier. Jessica Logan had on a colored collar that indicated she, like Barbara, would play Discipline tonight as her husband’s game piece.

  And so did Jenny Granby. The Thoroughly Trained bride, a product like Jessica of the New Modesty in her own way, wore an expression of profound conflict between her submissive needs and her shame at being so close to the performance of fellatio by one girl on another girl’s husband. As Jessica’s and Kevin’s hands met in Barbara’s hair, holding her mouth in place now so the American could thrust upward from the sofa to enjoy her oral service as deeply as he liked, Jenny bit her lip, and Jean even thought the sound on the feed was good enough that he caught a tiny sob from the young wife.