by Emily Tilton
Each player had a board in front of his chair, on a little table, the size of a chessboard but marked only with gridlines and not with the familiar black and white coloring of the boards Henry knew. On it the maker had inscribed in each square the algebraic designation of the space, and a little box of tokens sat by it on the table, including several pieces for each color and four red Xs that Henry knew must correspond to the ones Herrier had carried out to put on the game board.
The table had the unusual feature of its surface being sunk within wooden walls six inches or so high, so that Henry could not see Kevin’s board, nor Kevin Henry’s. As instructed by his fellow American, Henry had moved one of his blue pieces from a8 to b8, and written the move down on the notepad he had found in a little compartment attached to the arm of his chair, then done likewise for the diagonal move from b8 to c7. He had torn off the top sheet of the pad and given it to Herrier before the Frenchman had gone to the game board to instruct the girls how to move.
Now it seemed that Fredricks had moved Cynthia onto one of the red Xs.
“Jules put the penalty Xs where each girl could hit one on her player’s second turn,” Kevin said. “It’s a way of bringing some randomness in early, and now things will get interesting.”
Herrier reappeared, followed by Cynthia, who wore a panicky expression on her face as the gamemaster—her former master, Henry remembered, but the sort of dominant who would give his bed girl to another man for fucking, in order to enjoy her shame and his ownership—pointed to one of the blocks that stood in front of the players. That space, Kevin had told Henry, was the contest area.
Fredricks had stood up, and he strode forward now to meet Cynthia. He had the leash in his hand, and he clipped it to her green collar, then led her to the block Herrier had indicated. The expression in the brown-haired Englishman’s hazel eyes took Henry rather by surprise: Fredricks manifested an arrogance in his face as he looked down at the trembling girl, another man’s wife but claimed as his game piece with her consent tonight. Henry couldn’t say he understood it, and he couldn’t imagine subjecting Jenny to anything similar, but he also couldn’t deny that he found it darkly arousing—or that it stirred in him the desire to demonstrate his own mastery, in his own way, over his pretty naked bride.
The green player started to lead his piece to the block, holding her leash taut in his left hand and guiding her with his right hand on her elbow. Cynthia gave a little cry and she stumbled a bit, but she followed the Englishman and went to her knees on the block’s padded kneeler. Swiftly Fredricks urged her downward until she lay stretched over the wooden slats that formed its surface, and then he began to buckle her wrists into the cuffs attached at either side to keep her in place.
As Henry watched, wondering with a frankly swelling cock what would happen now, Kevin provided a partial explanation that only increased the Relicorp CEO’s fascination with this strange game.
“As gamemaster, Jules will decide at various times which player has demonstrated more dominance over his piece and sometimes those of other players too. A penalty square is a sort of warm-up for that, so Fredricks is going to do his best to show he knows how to control Cynthia.”
Henry frowned as Cynthia looked over her shoulder with apprehension at her player, while he fastened the block’s stout leather belt over her waist. Kevin must have seen the expression on his face, for he continued, “You’ll notice—and I’m sure this will be true for Jenny as well—that the girls respond in the moment with reluctance, even though they consented. That’s a big part of the charm of the game—for me, at least. The player’s job, if he wants to win the gamemaster’s favor, is to make sure his piece looks like she needs the discipline he can give.”
Henry’s eyes went over to his fellow American for a moment, and he saw a satisfied smile on Kevin’s face as the man watched Fredricks handle Cynthia. The question of the motivation behind Kevin Logan’s presence here, and his apparent introduction to Herrier of this game, seemed to have several different answers, but one of them certainly lay in the man’s evident pleasure in Discipline’s unique transformation of the rituals of masculine dominance.
Henry could certainly see how a man could grow attached to the game. He turned back to the fucking block to see that Fredricks had shed his robe as he stood over Cynthia, who still looked back at him over her shoulder, her lower lip between her teeth.
“Eyes front, girl,” Fredricks said, slowly pumping his hard cock in his right hand. “If I’m not going to get any gold for this turn, you’ve got a penalty to pay.”
But Cynthia didn’t obey him at once. She kept regarding him with an expression of alarm that made Henry’s own hardness grow in the folds of his blue robe.
Standing a little behind Fredricks, Herrier said, “Thirty seconds to second penalty.”
Henry’s eyebrows went up, and he turned to Kevin, who explained, under his breath, “Then he’ll have to cane her as well as fuck her, and they’ll lose a turn.”
“I said eyes front,” Fredricks repeated. He took a step forward and put his left hand on Cynthia’s head, turning her face forward as she gave a startled little cry. Her body writhed against the restraints that bound her to the block.
Henry, despite his hardness, cleared his throat to object: he wouldn’t be a party to any nonconsensual sex no matter how powerful his host or how attractive a deal he might receive. But Fredricks, still holding Cynthia’s head, used his right hand now between her legs, and the movements of her body changed, her hips riding the caressing fingers.
“Do you accept the penalty, cunt?” Fredricks asked.
“Yes, sir,” Cynthia sobbed.
The Englishman shifted his position and with one hand still in her hair and the other firmly on her hip, he drove into her pussy as she cried out so loudly Henry couldn’t help thinking of what it must sound like to Jenny on the other side of the tent’s shielding side.
Would he have to fuck Jenny this way? So hard that the block creaked loud with each driving thrust of Fredricks’ hardness into the girl’s bare vagina? So forcefully and deeply that the cock must feel like an implement of discipline inside Cynthia Mancini’s lovely body?
“Take a look in your chair for the card that tells you about the classes,” Kevin said, then.
Torn between curiosity about what the card would say and aroused interest in the penalty fucking in front of him, Henry felt in the little compartment and drew out a laminated reference card that had three sections. It was in French, but, turning it over, Henry found an English version on the back.
Warrior. Lord. Assassin. Henry scanned the Warrior section and saw that Warriors apparently got two contest turns in a row in contests in which they attacked, and could claim an opponent’s home space by fortifying it for a single game turn. Henry couldn’t make much sense of it, but Kevin said, just as Henry’s attention was diverted by a particularly loud moan from Cynthia, “You and Jean are playing as Warriors since it’s your first game. I’m an Assassin, and Fredricks is a Lord. Don’t worry about most of that stuff, but look at the list on the right.”
Fredricks had stopped fucking his piece, and held himself deep inside her for a long moment, now, before withdrawing his glistening cock. Cynthia’s body shook with what seemed to Henry like aching, unsatisfied need. As the Englishman unfastened her bonds, Henry returned his attention to the reference card and found the list to which Kevin had referred, on the right side of the section about the Warrior.
Upgrades: panties (cost a contest turn to pull down) (1d), sword (lets Warrior master opponent’s piece) (2d), medallion (piece may not be commanded by an opponent to perform fellatio) (2d), robe (piece may not be fucked before stripping and whipping [two contest turns]) (3d)
There were several more upgrades listed, but Henry felt like he had gotten the point.
Fredricks had helped Cynthia up, and now he led the girl, the young wife he had just fucked so hard, by her leash back to Herrier.
“You may return to your s
quare, girl,” the French magnate said, and Cynthia, on visibly trembling knees, walked around the side of the pavilion. Herrier turned to the players. “Moves and upgrades, gentlemen,” he said. “Mr. Fredricks, you will assist Mr. Mercator, perhaps? And Mr. Logan will do the same for Mr. Granby?”
Henry looked over at Kevin again, who already had a sheet of notepaper folded and ready to give to Herrier.
“What does d stand for?” Henry asked.
“Denarius,” Kevin said. “Ancient Roman money. Most players call them gold. You have two of them right now. Just go ahead and choose something. Advanced players have all sorts of strategies for this, but the real point is just to make things interesting.”
The man’s dark eyes glittered in the torchlight, and Henry couldn’t help wondering if Kevin’s last words described his and his wife’s purpose here at Herrier’s chateau. Henry glanced again at the reference card, then picked up the pencil next to the notepad and wrote, Move to d5, buy medallion. If had to choose something for Jenny’s benefit, maybe keeping her from having to suck another player’s cock represented a choice worth making.
Herrier went down the line of the players and took their folded papers. Kevin narrated the gamemaster’s next actions as Henry watched the billionaire go through them.
“Now the gamemaster looks at the upgrades. He’s got a chest full of the clothes and jewelry and weapons over there, just on the other side of the wall—that’s what the closed side of the pavilion is called—and he’ll get them now and give them to the girls.”
Just as Kevin had said, Herrier now went around to the other side of the pavilion. Henry’s eye fell again on the list of upgrades, looking at the more expensive ones: scouting (see where nearby opponents are on the board) (5d), palarium trap (catch an attacker and gain first contest turn) (5d), fortress (establish zone of control) (8d). His mind did a rough calculation.
“Do we get more income per turn as the game progresses?” he asked Kevin.
“Yup,” Kevin responded, nodding. “Every three turns, income goes up by two. Then, after the first contest, when the midgame starts, it goes up by five per turn. The Romans, if it was them who invented the game, wanted to balance the strategy of a wargame with the sex and psychology element of mastering the girls.”
“Upgrades, girls,” Herrier announced from the other side of the tent wall. Henry imagined Jenny receiving the medallion, wondering what it meant. How would she react, when the time for a contest came, to be told she didn’t have to suck another man’s penis, because her husband had purchased a necklace for her? But, it seemed, because Henry hadn’t saved up for a robe, perhaps another player would be able to fuck her with ease, in the way Fredricks had done with Cynthia on the penalty square?
He turned to Kevin again. “And that’s why you enjoy it? That combination?”
“That’s definitely part of it. Another part is how it seems to lay bare the true natures of the players and of the pieces. Selecta uses it to foster a culture of realism about sex and power.”
Henry frowned. “And you want to bring that to the Groupe—and to Relicorp?”
“I want to bring that to the world, my friend,” Kevin said. “Who knows how far-reaching the effects would be?”
Chapter Twenty-One
The hardest part for Cynthia lay in quieting her contempt for Fredricks’ ideas about economics and letting her body respond to his undoubted physical attractions. When the Englishman opened his mouth to give her a command in his arrogant, beautifully-accented, high-cheek-boned tone, she could let her libido go, remembering how well and honestly she and David had always communicated not only about the possibility that their duties would call on them to have sex with other people but the necessity of putting aside their reflexive guilt about it and enjoying the realization of their darkest fantasies.
In their days with Herrier, Cynthia and David had watched other submissive wives shared by their wealthy, dominant husbands, made to suck the cocks of every man in the magnate’s salon, or bound with her bottom upraised in the center of the room for anal submission to whatever man wished to enjoy a tight ride in a girl’s backside. Indeed, before David had arrived to reinforce her and protect her in the course of that mission—not to mention marry her—Cynthia herself had undergone the same sort of sharing. Herrier had given her mouth, her pussy, and her anus to other wealthy men several times, just as he had awarded her body to Fredricks tonight for this game.
Even that hadn’t been as degrading or as hot, though, Cynthia admitted to herself as she self-consciously donned the green panties Herrier gave her, as taking cultured Sebastian Fredricks’ hardness in each of her holes, when he had claimed her—let alone the penalty fucking she had just received in front of all the players. The darkness of the marital violation involved, the way Fredricks seemed urgently aroused by the idea that he violated David’s rights over her body with every thrust of his sizable cock, had made her wetter for the pounding he had given her atop the block than she could remember being. The frustration of his obvious intention to allow her as little pleasure as possible had made her struggle against the leather straps that held her down, and that struggle had made her whole body quiver all the more with need.
Thinking about David, about talking it all over with David, she felt herself flow into the lacy thong in which it seemed Fredricks had decided to dress her, as poor Jenny Granby, clearly an Institute girl but also the only civilian, really, among the four girls claimed over the fucking blocks in the chateau, had received her medallion. Jean and Kevin, it seemed, had elected to save their gold—or so Cynthia assumed, if she remembered the rules from the briefing the Paris pretorium had received about the game; Barbara and Jessica remained naked except for their collars.
David wouldn’t care about Fredricks’ contemptible, self-centered views on the deregulation of energy markets. He would hold her tight, and then, without Cynthia having to beg for it, he would bind her just as tightly to the spanking bench in a cell deep beneath the Ile de la Cite and whip her with a mastix until her bottom blazed and became an agony to her. Then he would fuck her along every path by which a husband can possess a wife, and a Guardsman his Ostia girl.
There would be no talk of forgiveness, because both of them had known—and discussed, long before their meeting with Robert and Sarah Bennett—that traditional fidelity did not and could not apply to their marriage. Cynthia had wickedly craved the act of sharing by her master with his friends since her days of humping her pillow in her Brooklyn studio. She even thought sometimes about sharing David and watching him enjoy another girl, though not of course as much as he enjoyed his wife: that represented a good deal of the point, really, though the other girl should find Cynthia’s husband’s cock the most pleasurable she had ever experienced.
Having Fredricks’ hardness driving into her body—and, it seemed, even being shared by the Englishman with still other players, just as Herrier had given Cynthia to him—required no apology and no forgiveness, even for the dark pleasure it brought to Cynthia’s body. But it would certainly require retribution, because what she craved now, more than anything else, was the reassertion of David’s mastery over her, his authentic dominance to supervene over Herrier’s attempt to take her back into his control and to punish her for a betrayal whose depth he didn’t understand.
The elegant kidnapping from the Faubourg Saint-Germain hadn’t surprised Cynthia very much. She had known the henchman of Herrier who had invited her to step into the limousine in whose back he rode, or to receive a bullet from the gun he displayed. The ride to the chateau had passed in silence, and since she had obeyed the man’s commands to take off her clothes and to lay herself over the block in the room adjoining the gardens she had suffered in no way until she had felt Madame du Gare’s punishment strap for the first time in almost a year.
Herrier’s reason for kidnapping her remained quite opaque, however. He certainly hadn’t simply decided he needed a fourth girl to play Discipline, and therefore sent his m
inion to take her from the street at gunpoint—although on reflection Cynthia might have said it lay within the realm of megalomaniacal action for the man.
She looked at Jessica, now, as Herrier announced the moves the girls were to make, and she felt sure that the Logans lay behind the Frenchman’s peremptory summons to his traitorous former concubine, his having her whipped over the block, and his awarding her to a billionaire Englishman. The expression in Jessica’s eyes as she returned Cynthia’s gaze gave the Ostia station chief no more to work with than she had had before.
“Green to h4,” Herrier said.
Cynthia turned to him, her mind requiring a second to process the words because of the depth of her reverie in the needy aftershocks from Fredricks’ hardness between her legs and in the contemplation of Jessica Logan’s motives.
“Do I need to have you whipped again, cunt?” Herrier asked. “Go to h4.”
His voice could still take hold of her, Cynthia realized—or perhaps the fault lay with the game. In any case, the threat, and his cool gray stare, had reawakened the fire between her legs.
No forgiveness.
But, then: David, forgive me.
On shaky legs and with a submissive’s properly furrowed brow, she walked one square toward Jessica’s corner, looking down at the grass in the flickering torchlight.
Kevin and Jessica knew that Cynthia was the Paris station chief for the Order of Ostia. They had apparently not told Herrier, because Herrier still seemed unaware that his opponent in securing a controlling piece of the global energy markets was the hidden Pretorian Guard, rather than the extremely visible Selecta.
Cynthia turned her head to look at Barbara, on the other side of the board. Surely Herrier’s decision to take the head of Ostia’s Paris office from the street and bring her to his chateau must bear some relation to the billionaire’s relationship with the young American economics student. With Jean a captive, too, and all of them playing this game against their will, it seemed unlikely to the point of risibility that Herrier would still think Ostia an innocent escort service and Jean Mercator a beta-male economics fellow.