by Emily Tilton
The US government, more or less controlled by Selecta at the moment, would have to seize a share of the energy markets so large that the rest of the world’s response would create the collapse. It would take ten years or more for the first troubling signs to appear, but the merest suggestion that Selecta might lose its grip on America, as a result of a video from this game tonight, combined with the deal about to be struck, would make it inevitable.
The Guard had two choices: obliterate everyone here tonight and hope Selecta could hold on, or let the Logans’ plan unfold and do their best, in accordance with the plans they had begun laying decades ago, to bring about their desired outcome—the slowing of disintegration and the reemergence of civilization after a dark age.
Now Jean’s task seemed reassuringly clear: make certain the video Kevin took would do the job properly. Just as the subtleties he had begun to grasp in the game of Discipline involved the intangible flow of dominant-and-submissive dynamics, so, Jean knew from his Guard training, did cultural moments like the one Kevin clearly meant this third video to create. The fiery destruction of Herrier’s chateau via space-laser would certainly detract from the indefinable quality of dirtiness and dark kink that the previous two videos had captured, Jean reflected—but so would an inadequate performance on his and Barbara’s part.
Kevin loosed Jessica from the fucking block, as Fredricks sat back down in his player’s seat next to Jean.
“He owns both those cunts, now,” the Englishman told Jean amiably, as he fished out a package of wipes from the recesses of his chair’s storage compartment.
Indeed, Kevin had raised Cynthia up, too, from the other block, and Herrier handed him a complicated object that gave out the sound of metal against metal, though Jean saw black leather, too. His mind sorted it out into a pair of wrist cuffs linked by a short chain just as Kevin began to put the first cuff around Cynthia’s left wrist.
“Lords and Warriors,” Herrier said, as he watched the two girls being bound together, “have the characteristic of taking opponents’ pieces captive. You’ll see that it makes Mr. Logan’s next contest even more interesting: it will give him more options—but it will also give whichever of you he faces, Mr. Granby and Mr. Mercator, a greater range of action from which to choose.”
Now Kevin turned to address the neophytes as well, a wry smile on his face as his hands lingered one on each well-fucked bottom.
“The choices of this game are some of the most interesting any of us will ever face,” he said, winking as he let the smile broaden. “Girls, I know it looks very different from your perspective, but wouldn’t you agree?”
Both girls blushed, and they looked at one another. Jessica looked very much at ease, as she smiled at Cynthia, then turned to meet her husband’s eyes over her shoulder.
“Yes, sir.”
Cynthia’s brow was troubled, and her upper lip moved as in sympathy with an inner conflict. She turned her chin to the left, as if to acknowledge Kevin’s words, and then she cast her eyes down to the grass with a little nod. She put her right hand back, to rub her bottom self-consciously, the mastered submissive whose backside has just received what it needs the most, despite the shame involved.
Jean felt his cock swell in appreciation at the sight of his station chief’s lovely body, clad only in the pretty green panties that Fredricks hadn’t even pulled down to fuck her. Cynthia, he felt certain, well trained both as a submissive Ostia girl and as an operative, had allowed her erotic needs free rein, while at the same time she thought through the same set of circumstances on which Jean’s mind had worked. Had she come to the same conclusion, he wondered?
“You want to go up against Kevin, don’t you?” the Englishman said. “Both those girls are fun to fuck.”
Jean laughed. His response to the sight would be the same from the jilted boyfriend of a billionaire’s bed girl as it would from a secret agent who needed to save the world by properly mastering beautiful, naked young women.
“I’m here for Barbara,” he said as Herrier led the bound girls back around the side of the pavilion, to whatever square the contest had taken place on.
Jean studied the board in front of him. He had changed his mind early on, since he hadn’t understood much about the rules of the game, and diverted Barbara from her path toward the center and back toward the Blue corner on a8. The rules reference he had found in his chair’s storage compartment had made it clear that to take another player’s home square represented a possible path to victory. With Barbara on a4, he now stood two spaces away.
Herrier returned just as Jean began to write his move on the notepad.
“The midgame begins now, gentlemen,” he said. He addressed Jean and Henry with further explanation. “You may move two spaces on each turn, and you have a zone of control that extends one square around your piece—it will alert you to the presence of another player’s piece two squares away. I recommend you decide on your upgrades accordingly.”
Jean pulled out the list of upgrades again, his heart beating faster. He had seven denarii now. Yes, enough for that interesting fortification that now made sense to him: wall (extend zone of control one extra square, allow movement to zone edge). If the Logans’ plan were to work, Barbara and Jenny Granby needed to become more closely acquainted.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Contest,” Monsieur Herrier announced. “Red versus Blue.”
The last few moments in the game had made Barbara wish she had paid closer attention in the first game, because she felt she didn’t understand anything at all about what the blocky anklet Monsieur Herrier had fastened around her leg meant, or why on the following turn Jean had suddenly sent her straight toward Jenny, covering four squares on a single turn.
She tried to relax into the idea that she, as a piece, a cunt for the players to enjoy and to master, didn’t need to know the rules at all: as an Ostia operative, she remembered Cynthia telling her, she needed to walk a line between enjoying her submission and her focus on her mission. As she confronted Jenny’s frightened eyes, now that it seemed Jean had moved her right into a square next to the young wife, Barbara let her mind return to the arousal she had felt while watching Jenny peer through the peephole at the shameful mastering of Cynthia and Jessica by two huge, hard cocks.
Jessica had shown her the slit in the tent, in the last game, and she had shown it to pretty Jenny, whose New Modesty innocence and modesty had the lovely quality of self-renewal: no matter how many times her stern husband might master her with wicked acts of fellatio and sodomy such as those undergone by the two girls in the pavilion, no matter how wet her pussy got as she served Henry’s lusts and at the memory of her erotic degradation, Jenny would still consider herself a good girl—would indeed still blush, the way Barbara had seen her do even in the dim torchlight that filtered through the peephole.
Barbara had hoped, then, that Jean would find a way to make Jenny and Barbara meet on the game board, and then be told to follow Monsieur Herrier around the side of the tent, to find Jean and Henry standing to welcome them with their leashes ready to clip onto their collars.
Jenny whimpered, and Barbara felt herself clench between her thighs at the innocent, submissive sound. She watched Henry turn his young wife to the side and put his big hand on her bottom, leaning down to whisper in her ear as at the same time he pressed the leather handle of Jenny’s leash gently against her smooth, hairless pussy.
Was he saying that she must obey, or receive the consequences on the little bottom her husband fondled? Or that he meant to fuck the sweet young pussy as soon as he could? Something about the game, about being placed opposite Jenny here, about to undergo the competitive dominance of two good men, put Barbara in a strange sort of erotic relationship with Jenny. Barbara’s whole body seem to burn with need to see the girl learn a shameful lesson about men’s sexual power, and to ensure that the first time Jenny kissed another girl’s pussy, she would kiss Barbara’s.
“Mr. Mercator has the first tu
rn, as the attacker,” said Monsieur Herrier. “Your first important choice is whether to begin by mastering your own piece, or your opponent’s. Both tactics have their advantages and their disadvantages.”
“And the medallion around Jenny’s neck,” Jean asked, “means that I can’t have her suck my cock?”
Barbara turned her eyes to the young wife’s face. Henry had moved her around so that the two girls stood directly across the contest area, with its two fucking blocks, from one another. The executive still had his hand on his wife’s bottom, and the sight of that little gesture of marital possession made Jenny’s round eyes, at her discovery of what the necklace meant, all the more moving.
“That’s correct,” said Kevin from the player’s area behind Barbara. “But you can still put her on her knees in front of you, and your own bodily actions are always free.”
He has two pieces now, Barbara thought, trying to figure out what that would mean, if Jean won this contest—or, she supposed, if Henry did. Hadn’t Monsieur Herrier said that warriors captured one another’s pieces? That meant that whatever happened, she and Jenny would be bound together the way Cynthia and Jessica had been when they reemerged onto the board, following the gamemaster, a few seconds after Jenny and Barbara had gotten back to their own squares.
And the final contest would involve the four American girls, in any case. Barbara swallowed hard, thinking about it.
“Ah,” Jean said, as if he had understood something more in Kevin’s words—something that had escaped Barbara, some suggested course of action. “And what should I say if I want Jenny here to kneel?”
Monsieur Herrier answered from the side of the contest area. “Say, I lower. It’s an interesting move.”
Barbara frowned, looking from the French magnate whose little American whore she had taken such dark pleasure in being to the amazing leo whom her new duty had made her desert. Her confusion only added to the urgent cravings that ran through her body, the need to see the men’s will done upon pretty Jenny Granby—with Barbara herself as a companion in degradation and an instrument of their mastery.
“I lower,” Jean said.
“Now give your cunt’s leash to Mr. Mercator,” Monsieur Herrier said to Henry Granby. The executive, frowning, his big right hand still on Jenny’s little backside, led her forward. Jean, too, stepped forward a pace, bringing Barbara with him. He looked down for a moment at the fucking block just to his right, as if searching for something, and he found the hook placed there to hold a girl’s leash. There he fastened Barbara, and she couldn’t suppress her little whimper as he took Jenny’s leash in the hand that had held hers.
Henry stepped back, and Jean said to Jenny, “Kneel down, now, honey. I want you to get a good look at my cock.”
He tugged at the leash firmly but without any violence, while with his other hand on Jenny’s naked shoulder he urged her to the ground.
With a tiny sob the girl got to her knees, a little awkwardly, while almost at the same moment, shifting the leash deftly from one hand to the other to let the sleeves fall away, Jean shrugged off the blood-red robe. Barbara sobbed with need, now, herself, at the sight of him standing before the kneeling wife with his hard penis and tight balls revealed and set in high relief by the special player’s pants of this strange game.
Jean must have sensed how very moving the little scene would be, or he would not have chosen the ‘interesting move,’ but the wave of arousal that radiated from her clit to her nipples and then through her whole body took Barbara almost entirely by surprise.
The look in Jenny’s eyes—the mingled fear, shame, and helpless need visible in those pretty blue orbs—made the sight so affecting for Barbara that she found her fingers had gone shamelessly to her left nipple and her teeth had begun to chew on her lower lip. The game’s restraint on Jean’s action, imposed on him by the blue medallion that dangled lewdly between the young wife’s little breasts, meant that instead of thrusting himself inside Jenny’s prim little mouth he merely pumped his enormous erection gently in his hand before her eyes.
That condition, though, heightened the erotic effect so greatly that Barbara felt a little faint. She had to put her other hand on the top of the fucking block where Jean had fastened her like a mount he had tied up—somewhere out west, sometime long ago—while he went to see about some men’s business in a bordello.
Men’s business. Showing a hard cock to an innocent young wife. Moving a big, hairy, masculine hand up and down its smooth, throbbing length the same way it would move inside her mouth, or her pussy, or even her little bottom, in search of a man’s arrogant pleasure. Putting gentle fingers on her chin like a promise that she will have that hard shaft inside her soon, one way or another.
Henry Granby, too, seemed taken aback by how hot he found it to watch his innocent bride made to look at another man’s rigid penis. Barbara remembered that the contest turn had passed to Blue before he did, but now Monsieur Herrier reminded, “It is your turn, Mr. Granby.”
The Relicorp executive’s eyes showed that his mind had traveled far away from the rules of the game as he watched Jenny’s shameful little ordeal, her subjection to the cock of another man, if only in vision, her eyes helpless to look away because of the wanton arousal her husband knew so well and cherished so deeply.
Henry blinked, and for a moment Barbara thought she saw in the man’s eyes something unrelated to the game, a momentary frown that she thought might represent his remembering that this evening held for him the prospect also of some business deal that Barbara had tried in vain to puzzle out.
She felt fairly sure that whatever the details might be, it couldn’t be good for the Guard, because the Guard and Selecta worked together very closely. If Barbara understood what she had overheard, Monsieur Herrier and Sebastian Fredricks wanted Henry to do business with them rather than with Selecta—and the business they meant seemed, from what they had said, to be very big business indeed.
Now Barbara felt the line between mission and submission turn into a metaphorical tightrope beneath her feet, because even as her body quaked from watching Jenny look at Jean’s hard cock, her mind fit another piece into place. Jean and Cynthia had told her only what she needed to know, of course, about the grand purpose of the Pretorian Guard and the Order of Ostia—and maybe they hadn’t even told her that. Nevertheless, she suddenly thought she knew who Kevin and Jessica Logan must be, and why the Guard had sent her to serve as Monsieur Herrier’s little whore.
Part of her mind kept trying to say, It’s not the end of the world.
The problem was that it was the end of the world, as far as she had understood from Jean’s soft words of explanation in the initiation cell far below Paris. Not immediately, in a fiery cataclysm, but over decades and all the more inevitable for the slow weight of human affairs’ inexorable obedience to the basest human instinct—not sex, let alone the wonderful kinky sex to which the Guard had introduced Barbara, but material greed.
Kevin and Jessica were Guard and Ostia themselves. That seemed undeniable. They had come, though, to bring on the circumstances the Guard had tried to push back. Barbara didn’t have to know anything about the psychological, cultural, or economic mechanisms involved to know that this game was in a very real sense about the fate of civilization.
And so she had to trust those who knew more: Jean, and Cynthia, and perhaps even the Logans themselves. What Barbara had seen of Monsieur Herrier, though, and undergone at his hands as she trembled with helpless, shameful need for his brutal degradations and his harsh, capricious punishments, made her want to shout to her leo, “Watch out! He’s dangerous!”
Jean knew that, though. Of course he did, and yet he brandished his hardness at the wife of the CEO of an American mega-corp as if enjoying the eternal game of dominance and submission was the only thing of which he could think.
Henry cleared his throat. “If I want my piece to suck my cock, what should I say? I enjoy?”
Jenny gave a little whimper, and h
er eyes went from the penis in front of her to the face of her husband. The tightrope beneath Barbara’s feet seemed to quiver, and her heart raced as the balance of sex and duty suddenly seemed to reinforce the desperate ache between her thighs.
“That’s right,” Kevin called. “It’s a pretty good move in this situation.”
Henry stepped forward, and Jean offered him Jenny’s leash. The tall, dark-haired executive shrugged his own blue robe off and took his wife’s leash in his right hand, while he put his left to her cheek, the thumb against her lips, pressing in to command her, wordlessly, to open her mouth for his pleasure taking.
“I enjoy,” he said, looking down into her eyes and softening his voice as if he meant the words only for Jenny.
Chapter Twenty-Six
David studied the video feed from the camera in the tree. He could see that Cynthia and Jessica were talking, but the mic on the drone in the tree couldn’t pick up more than the softest murmur of the conversation. It nearly maddened him: if he knew what his wife and the rogue agent were discussing, the fate of human civilization might change in a moment.
They might well be engaged in a discussion of Kantian philosophy, or of nail polish. Probably they were both hyper-conscious of the distinct possibility, if not the certainty, that Herrier had planted nano-mics somewhere on their bodies; really the young women could be talking Kant as a code for what truly mattered right now.
The television to David’s right, its sound muted, showed the prime minister of Spain announcing what might well be the end of the world, though only a very few people knew or comprehended it. If Jessica and Kevin had an endgame for this gambit of luring Herrier into striking a deal with Sebastian Fredricks—and perhaps also, as an accelerant to the collapse like lighter fluid on a bonfire, with Relicorp—to underwrite Europe’s move to the New Modesty, the erstwhile Selecta/Guard liaisons had better make it clear. David didn’t think Jessica could stand in any doubt of what the Guard would do, if Kevin started to shoot another video.