The Shame Gambit

by Emily Tilton

  David Mancini had anticipated Jean’s misgivings when the perses station chief had told the leo operative about the Granbys.

  “Gordon and Maia kept them completely innocent. There’s no danger to them, or to Barbara, and from a business perspective this meeting only helps the Guard.”

  “But,” Jean had argued, “it makes an already unpredictable situation more difficult, doesn’t it? If we have to extract Barbara, we’ll have to make sure neither of the Granbys sees what we’re doing. Unless I’ve just somehow forgotten everything I ever learned about the soft landing, we can’t have the CEO of Relicorp knowing about the Guard.”

  David had frowned, and then said, finally, “That’s on you, leo, yes. I understand your misgivings. But New York and Rome both want everything we have thrown at this. Whatever is going on at that chateau, and whatever’s happened to Jessica and Kevin Logan, we need to get in there and disrupt it at all costs.”

  Jean had nodded. Another video had appeared the previous week, this one of Jessica sucking two anonymous cocks, neither one her husband’s. She had three painful-looking red stripes across her backside, evidently from a caning. A story had surfaced on a crowdsourced news site, wondering why no one in the mainstream media was interested in the twisted games these tycoons were playing at the home of one of the most important industrialists in Europe. The story strongly implied, without actually stating, that a little investigation would discover the identity of the beautiful young woman sucking the cocks, and having her ass fucked in the first video—and that she would turn out to be an American of some importance.

  Erin Metz, Jean had heard, had told Sarah Bennett the White House didn’t care if the Guard had a hundred field agents blown in the effort, and the Groupe gained the ascendancy in the energy markets as a result: Jessica had to be gotten out of that chateau, and her connection to whatever kinky game this Discipline thing might be had to be rooted out and broken.

  Thus, Jenny Granby, in her blue collar and cloak, watching Jessica help Kevin enjoy Barbara Edwards’ mouth with his rigid, thrusting penis.

  Thus, Jules Herrier standing up to shake Henry Granby’s hand, and saying, “Mr. Granby, surely you will let us see your wife properly. You too, Mr. Logan: uncover Mrs. Logan for us. These girls will soon have to shed their cloaks entirely, after all, if we are to have our game this evening.”

  Thus, Jenny looking fearfully at her husband as Henry Granby, his dominant blood clearly up and his cock beyond question swelling in his exquisitely tailored trousers, strode to his young bride and quickly pulled the silken cloak away, to fall in a tangle along her shoulder, her hip, her kneeling thigh and calf. And Kevin, drawing Barbara’s mouth away from his cock, standing so that the two girls at his knee moved back, looking up at him in alarm, as he performed the same uncovering movement upon Jessica’s purple cloak as Henry had upon Jenny’s blue one.

  “Ah,” Herrier said with satisfaction. “Lovely.” He turned to Henry. “I suspect you have heard of the game I have recently begun to play here, in my gardens.”

  “Discipline?” Henry asked. “Yes, we’ve heard of it, though I’ve never played it, or seen it played.”

  Jean, watching, had to suppress the urge to say out loud to his phone, Ask him why he’s started playing a game the Guard thought had disappeared outside Selecta and the Pretorian Guard!

  “Ah,” Herrier responded. “Mr. Fredricks, does not Mr. Granby have a treat in store, as you anglophones like to put it?”

  “Certainly,” responded the one man still seated, who now rose to shake Henry’s hand. Fredricks headed up the largest British energy-trading firm, and had teased both Selecta and Herrier Industries from time to time by taking positions in the markets that seemed at one moment to favor one mega-corp and at another to assist its rival. “I’ve rarely had more fun as, shall we say, an alpha male than I’ve had here on Monsieur Herrier’s game board.”

  “If I’m not mistaken,” Henry said to Herrier once he had shaken the proffered hand of the Englishman, “the game hasn’t been played with girls as the pieces—”

  “Please, Mr. Granby,” Herrier interrupted. “Let me correct you slightly. The pieces are known as cunts, as is only fitting. Or, if you prefer, the Latin is cunnus in the singular and cunni in the plural. The Romans had a way with words.”

  From where she knelt at Henry’s feet, Jenny gave an ambiguous little cry. Her husband looked down at her, and ran his fingers over her hair gently. “Hush, sweetheart,” he said. “You know what I told you.” He returned his attention to Herrier and continued. “As I was saying, Discipline hasn’t been played with girls as cunni in at least a hundred years...”

  As he watched and listened, Jean did his best to think through the exchange in the salon on the fly, though implications had begun to spin out of control. Herrier’s allusion to the Romans could very well be a reference to the Guard, who traced their roots back to the cult of Mithras in the Roman legions.

  To Jean’s shocked astonishment, Kevin Logan spoke next. “That’s not the case, Mr. Granby. Selecta Corporation revived it a few years ago, and they play it at one of the gilded age mansions where the robber barons of America played it, so long ago.”

  Jean tried to think through Kevin’s making this traitorous disclosure, which had sent a shard of ice through his heart. Had the Logans turned? It seemed impossible. Jean’s heart pounded in his chest as he watched Kevin extend his hand to Henry Granby, and he strained to hear every syllable over the feed.

  When he heard the voice from right behind him, it took a full second for Jean to understand he had been caught, and the whole operation compromised.

  “Monsieur Mercator, would you come with us, please?” said a man’s voice in Parisian French.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Cunnus. Cunt. Jenny had to serve as Henry’s cunt.

  It was as if the designers of this unusual game, as Maia and Gordon had put it, had taken the c-word and turned it into a white-hot ray of shame that beamed from Henry’s mouth in a twin spike of flame: one that shot into her cheeks and another that went lower down, as she fixed her eyes on the huge Persian rug that must have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and thought about the men looking at the naked body her husband had just uncovered before their eyes.

  “I shall serve as gamemaster,” Herrier said, “and thus we stand in need now only of a player and a cunt. Mr. Fredricks, I would forgive you for thinking my little Barbara here will be yours to claim, when we proceed outside, but I’m afraid the strange circumstances that brought about tonight’s game have dictated that you will have a different cunt to claim, in a few moments. She has already been secured over a fucking block for your inspection and claiming, and I can assure you her charms will not displease you.”

  Jenny managed to glance upward for a moment, now that she didn’t feel herself so much the center of the men’s attention. Herrier now turned, though, to look again at her, at Jessica, and at Barbara.

  “These cunts will go with my housekeeper, Madame du Gare, to join her, now. You may as well remove their cloaks, gentlemen. It is a warm night and they will not need them for the game.”

  “Girls,” said an imperious female voice from behind them, in a heavy French accent that made Jenny turn her head in alarm. She saw a middle-aged woman in a black dress step from the shadows at the side of the salon. “You will follow me, once your masters have taken your cloaks.”

  Jenny felt Henry bending over her, and then his fingers at the little silver chain that closed the cloak about her neck. She trembled, as always, at the very touch of his strong hands. She remembered the strange moment, so humiliating and so arousing, when she had prostrated herself in the little dressing room, bending away from him upon her knees, to offer her husband the parts of her where he took his daily pleasure with his hard manhood, and where he punished her with his belt when she needed it. She remembered how she had whimpered as Henry stroked her there, as if to make certain she had shaved herself well, just as Max had t
aught her so that she could present her private parts submissively to their owner.

  Maia had said the game would be unusual, but that other girls would play it, too, and that that would make it easier. It did—to see out of the corner of her eye, while Henry removed Jenny’s cloak, that Kevin was removing Jessica’s, and Herrier Barbara’s, did make the strange, lewd scene seem bearable.

  Henry’s whispered “I love you,” though, worked even better. Jenny’s mind couldn’t grasp, fully, how the husband who loved her could want to subject her to such degradation, but the rest of her understood it without need of rational explanation: Jenny Granby needed this, because of the kind of girl she was. She should be a cunnus, like these other girls—like the girl who already lay, it seemed, over something called a fucking block, in another room. If these other girls were to be inspected and claimed by their players, Jenny belonged with them, because of the way the need flared up between her thighs at the very thought of it.

  “I shall take the cloaks,” the housekeeper said, as Jenny stole furtive glances at Barbara and Jessica. They looked back at her with expressions of what she thought could be sympathy, and Jenny wished she could ask them what it felt like to suck the penis of another girl’s husband, and what it felt like to watch another girl please your own spouse that way. Jenny almost felt like, if there were rules that said something like, This much and no more, she might want to experience it for herself.

  She watched Madame du Gare gather the three silken cloaks over her arm, then turn back to the girls, now naked except for their collars. The iron-haired woman fixed her steely gray eyes briefly on each of the girls’ faces in turn. Jenny quailed back a little, feeling that this woman must have a dangerous power here in Monsieur Herrier’s chateau.

  “You may rise and follow me,” the woman said, her voice conveying a note of disapproval that sent heat to Jenny’s cheeks, as if Madame du Gare, by virtue of being allowed clothing, had the right to look down on the fuck toys her employer brought into the house.

  As she got unsteadily to her feet for the first time in a quarter of an hour, Jenny heard Mr. Fredricks ask behind her, “And who shall have your little whore, Jules?”

  To Jenny’s left, Barbara started a bit, as if she had difficulty in keeping her attention upon Madame du Gare as she too rose to a standing position.

  “The perfect player for her has just arrived,” said Herrier. “We shall see him in the players’ dressing room, where you gentlemen will put on your robes and pants. This way.”

  Now Jenny, too, had to turn, to see Henry moving toward her to give her a final kiss, which she received timidly. Kevin kissed Jessica, too, and Herrier kissed Barbara, though in a way that made Jenny, seeing it in her peripheral vision, shiver: the French tycoon put his hands between the girl’s legs as he brushed her lips with his, as if to tell her where his true possession lay.

  Herrier led the men toward one of the salon’s many doors, away from the girls with Madame du Gare. Jenny bit her lip as she watched Henry go, somehow both wishing that Maia had told her more about the game and grateful that she hadn’t.

  “Girls, follow me this instant,” the housekeeper said sharply, making Jenny whirl about. “Jessica and Barbara...” Madame du Gare spoke the names with an undefinable disdain that sent a tingle up Jenny’s spine, “...know very well what happens to disobedient young women here, Jenny. I do not think you wish to know.”

  Jenny’s mouth opened and she took a gasping little breath, taken aback not only by the woman’s words and tone but by her knowledge of Jenny’s first name and her apparent lack of compunction in using it. Her eyes widened as Madame du Gare held them with her own for an instant, and then turned to walk toward a door on the opposite side of the salon to the one through which the men had exited.

  Jenny, thoroughly alarmed and always one to follow the rules and play the good girl, looked at the other two naked young women beside her: Jessica in the purple collar and Barbara in the red one. Jenny had already started to take a step forward, but she saw that Jessica and Barbara, whom the terrifying housekeeper had just said should know better, had not moved.

  “She’s whipped you?” Jessica asked quietly but most certainly not meekly. Jenny’s eyes widened at the tone of the young wife she thought must be only a few years older than she. Jessica seemed, well, a little bratty—and definitely rather daring.

  Barbara’s eyebrows rose a little, and her mouth quirked into an ironic smile, as if she wouldn’t have defied Madame du Gare on her own but she didn’t mind rebelling a little if she had a companion in it.

  “Yes!” the girl in the red collar whispered. “You too?”

  Jenny couldn’t restrain her fear, then. “I don’t want her to whip me,” she hissed, and she started to follow the housekeeper’s receding back. She couldn’t help walking slowly, though, because she found the interaction between the other two girls both fascinating and shamefully thrilling, though it made her feel like she should go over her husband’s knee just for listening to it.

  Jessica clearly had a great deal of experience in her submission to the degrading things her husband demanded of her. Barbara’s service to Monsieur Herrier obviously was of a terribly humiliating kind, where the pretty girl, seemingly about Jenny’s own age, found her most private parts freely shared with her master’s friends. Just thinking about what she had seen, Jessica pressing Barbara’s mouth down over Jessica’s own husband’s huge, hard penis, made Jenny feel faint. She didn’t even want to imagine what it would be like to be whipped by a housekeeper, for being a naughty girl in an ancient French chateau.

  “Where are you from?” Jessica asked, rather to Jenny’s surprise and almost—she tried to deny it, to herself, but without success—to her disappointment.

  “New Jersey,” Barbara said. The two had begun to follow Jenny now.

  Jenny frowned. Something about both Jessica’s question and Barbara’s answer seemed to her... forced? artificial?

  “How long have you been here?” Barbara asked.

  “Three months, more or less,” Jessica answered. “The old bitch has whipped me twice. Kevin says it’s good for me.”

  Yes, Jenny thought, it was almost as if the two women meant to feel each other out—as if they didn’t know whether they were on the same side.

  “Is it?” Barbara inquired. That made Jenny turn around quickly, to see that the girl in the red collar had a tense expression on her face: the question seemed partly ironic, but also serious. Jessica’s eyes had become intense, her brows knitting slightly and her gaze searching Barbara’s face. As Jenny watched, though, the young wife’s expression changed to a much lighter one.

  “Oh, you know,” she said with a laugh. “I guess.”

  Madame du Gare turned, then, with a quiet look of icy satisfaction, to gaze at the naked young women now six paces behind her. “All three of you are dawdling, and you shall all be whipped in a moment. Do not make me summon your masters, or I promise you that game or no game you will not sit down comfortably tomorrow.”

  Jenny gave a little cry of panic, and hastened to catch up. She heard the other two girls behind her, walking more quickly now. Another quick glance over her shoulder showed both Barbara and Jessica with tense looks on their faces, though whether as a result of their mutual interaction or of the housekeeper’s frightening words Jenny could not say.

  Through the door was a short corridor, and at the end of the corridor a room with three tall French doors at its opposite, through which Jenny glimpsed a shadowy but thrilling—and alarming—scene, lit by torches, some of them close to the doors and others, it appeared, a hundred yards away or more. She saw a slope, she thought, descending thirty feet or so, to a flat area, where an open tent stood, fitted it seemed with furniture, some of it of a sort Jenny remembered, with a blush, she had seen in Rome.

  Between Madame du Gare and the French doors, however, lay another sight. Jenny hadn’t focused upon it immediately since the torches had at first distracted her attention.
Now, as she fully grasped what she could see in the room that opened out onto the magnificent gardens, however, Jenny could look only at what lay closest.

  Four wooden structures, each on a little pedestal, spaced about a yard apart. The three unoccupied ones showing a place to kneel and a sort of bench to lay oneself over, to have the leather restraints fastened about one’s wrists, knees, and waist.

  Just as those restraints had been fastened about the body of the naked girl who, facing away from the three newcomers, lay over the fourth fucking block, for how could these things be anything else?

  “Jenny,” the housekeeper said, stressing the second syllable in way that through its very Frenchness made her shiver and bite her lip. “Come here and lie over the block next to Cynthia, here. She will also be whipped, because she has been a very bad girl.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Henry felt both rather odd and thoroughly liberated in the unique apparel of a Discipline player. He hadn’t been surprised by the robe, in the same color blue as Jenny’s collar, really, though it did seem rather informal. The black pants, with the open crotch that left his cock and balls rather arousingly free, covered only by the loose folds of the robe, did surprise him.

  “The outfit is based on the one the Romans wore,” Kevin Logan told Henry as he looked around the dressing room with its four wooden cubbies where the different colored robes hung alongside the remarkable pants, and its four leather-upholstered chairs. “Or, really, on what the Victorians thought the Romans wore, when they revived the game. Romans didn’t wear anything like pants—but the connection of the game to the cult of Mithras...”