by Emily Tilton
“I think he has to defend the home square,” Barbara said.
Jessica had received, as an upgrade on the previous turn, a gold bracelet that apparently let Purple’s pieces move an extra square. Now Monsieur Herrier came to a1 to drape a red robe over Jenny’s shoulders as she and Barbara looked at the other two girls, two squares away.
Jenny looked at Barbara, alarmed. “Why me? Why not you?”
Barbara’s eyebrows went up half an inch and she shrugged with her shoulders and the arm not linked to Jenny’s. “Maybe it’s important to defend a piece you captured? Maybe he just doesn’t know how to play?”
That made Jenny laugh, and suddenly her heart felt light, there in the semi-darkness of the corner square while the opposing team stood in the pool of light from the side torches, obviously ready to come at them for the final contest.
Monsieur Herrier also had something that he put at the corner of the square that faced the center of the board on the diagonal. Jenny looked down at the little structure, about a foot high. It resembled the sort of fence she remembered playing with as a girl in the preschool division of the Corporate Educational Facility where she had grown up—the kind you could use to divide your playhouse’s lawn from that of your neighbor.
“Some kind of defense?” she asked Barbara, who shrugged again.
“Probably?”
As Monsieur Herrier went back to the pavilion to get the next moves, Jenny became conscious again of the possibility something else was going on, beyond this kinkiest of games. Naked girls on leashes and bound together, being fucked over blocks and benches, apparently—she felt sure of this now—didn’t constitute enough of a challenge for the universe to throw at Jenny Granby tonight.
No, the looks on the faces of all three of her nearly naked companions, her fellow submissives, told her that some secret of which Jenny had no knowledge also lay in the background of tonight’s unique, shamefully erotic circumstances.
The business deal? But what did any of the girls, really, have to do with that part of the men’s discussion? Jenny certainly didn’t talk at the country club about Relicorp and Selecta and the other companies that ran the world these days, despite her and her friends’ husbands nearly all having some important role in one corporation or another.
Barbara fixed Cynthia with a look that seemed to ask an urgent question—something that went way beyond a reunion with a former lover. Cynthia looked at Jessica, clearly referring Barbara’s silent query to the other girl, the mysterious Mrs. Logan. Jenny felt her eyes go wide and a shiver go down her spine.
She suddenly felt very small. Jenny Granby might not talk about world affairs at the country club, but she realized that despite their nakedness and their submissiveness—not to mention the beauty that so many people might take as a sign of vapidity—these young women had some urgent mission that she would probably find impossible to understand.
Jessica called in a light tone that even Jenny, her hearing now closely attuned to any falseness, could tell covered over something very serious indeed, “Not long now.”
“Is it worth it?” Barbara asked, and now Jenny heard her companion doing a poor job of covering anxiety with an air of gaiety.
Cynthia answered her, raising her voice and doing, Jenny thought, a much more creditable job of imitating a girl without a care in the world beyond having sex with men not her husband.
“It could be. Just follow your instincts, honey.”
Jenny’s lips parted. She almost asked, What’s going on? But the feeling that the real meaning of this game lay in some secret realm beyond her comprehension had grown so great now that she stopped the sound before it emerged.
“Contest, Red versus Purple,” said Monsieur Herrier from behind Jenny. He had come to the side of the board, rather than going to its center, clearly because this contest represented the end of the game. “Follow me, girls.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Barbara turned, awkwardly guiding Jenny around as well with the chain that bound their wrists together. She wanted to look back, to fix her eyes on Jessica again, so that maybe she could tell from the other girl’s expression if Jessica really did know what the fuck she was doing. At this point, it probably wouldn’t matter what kind of surveillance Monsieur Herrier had on her—or in her. She could tell that the endgame of Discipline coincided a great deal too well, for the comfort of human civilization, with the endgame of the world.
“You’re the head of the Ostia Agency in Paris, right?” Jessica asked Cynthia, as the two Purple pieces came up behind Barbara and Jenny. “And Barbara was a model there, if I’m not mistaken?”
Barbara’s feet nearly stumbled, then, but she forced them to keep going. What was Jessica playing at now?
“That’s right,” Cynthia confirmed. Her voice didn’t sound as reluctant to confirm the information as Barbara might have expected, or as resentful of being questioned under the circumstances. Maybe the station chief understood that Jessica meant to deliver important information?
“So you girls won’t mind being on Kevin’s video, I imagine. Good publicity, right?”
Barbara felt her eyes go wide.
“What’s the Ostia Agency?” Jenny whispered beside her. They had almost rounded the corner of the tent into the pool of torchlight that illuminated the contest area.
“It’s... um...” Barbara started, then couldn’t think of how to tell the prim young Mrs. Granby that her cover had been as a kinky model and high-class submissive courtesan.
“It’s a very special kind of event planning business,” Cynthia said from behind them, having evidently overheard Jenny’s whisper. “Very special. The kind that might plan an evening like tonight, actually, under the right circumstances.”
They could see Jean and Kevin waiting for them on either side of the fucking blocks and the bench where Barbara had lain to have her pussy whipped and then kissed by the enticingly innocent Jenny. If any information that might save them from whatever fate awaited those trapped between Monsieur Herrier’s Groupe and the might of the Pretorian Guard were going to be delivered, she supposed, it would have to be delivered now.
Jessica spoke again.
“If the video is good,” she said softly, “we all win.”
“Mr. Logan,” said Monsieur Herrier, “you may be rather surprised to hear about Mr. Mercator’s last upgrade. He is a young economist...”
Had Herrier put a little too much emphasis on economist—as if he knew that Jean weren’t really one at all?
“...who continues to surprise with his apparently latent dominance.”
The magnate had turned to Jean, now, and he made an invitational gesture with his perfectly manicured right hand. Jean smiled, nearly turning Barbara’s insides to jelly, and she realized in a rush that he had all the dominance she needed. Hadn’t he just whipped her pitilessly between her legs, after all? A very late aftershock from the cataclysmic orgasm little Jenny had given her set her hips and knees trembling, just as she looked at her leo’s smiling face.
“I believe it’s pronounced palarium?” Jean said.
Kevin let out a guffaw. “Ha! Yes, that’s the correct pronunciation, and I wasn’t expecting it, either. Nicely played, though we’ll have to see whether you can make use of the all the possibilities it offers.”
“In any case,” Monsieur Herrier said, “it gives you the first two contest turns, Red, and it provides for a very interesting beginning to the contest. I believe it’s only occurred once before in the games I’ve played since Mr. Logan came to stay with me.”
Jessica and Cynthia had come to stand next to Barbara and Jenny. Barbara leaned forward and turned to look across Cynthia, hoping to see the expression on Jessica’s face. What did this palarium thing mean, for the game or for the world?
Jessica looked worried, but Barbara didn’t sense anything from the expression other than the same ignorance she herself felt of what would happen now.
“That’s right. We’re told that the Romans h
ad a special piece of furniture they used for this, taken from their actual battlefield equipment, where a palarium is a row of stakes meant to stop the enemy and trap him on your fortifications, but we used the torches and the vaulting horses. It will be the perfect setup for the video, too, I think.”
“What?” Jenny whispered urgently. “What setup?”
“Don’t worry,” Jessica murmured. “We’re the ones who got trapped.”
Mr. Granby and Mr. Fredricks came to assist in moving two long vaulting horses into position, next to one another and in front of four of the iron posts that held the blazing torches that lit the contest area. Meanwhile Jean had taken the leashes Kevin offered him, and unfastened the wrists of Jessica and Cynthia in order to leash them and draw them forward toward the vaulting horses.
Then Barbara understood what Monsieur Herrier had been doing as he had busied himself, at a level just above his head, with the torch posts. She saw that each post now had cuffs affixed to it, so that Jean could raise first Jessica’s hands and then Cynthia’s to bind them, bent over the vaulting horse and stretched out almost on tiptoe, their bottoms protruding in such a distracting way that Barbara heard a tiny whimper rise in her throat just to see it.
“Oh, no,” Jenny whispered. Barbara turned a little to see that the young wife’s eyes had fixed on the other horse and the other sets of cuffs. “Why are there four of them?”
“Red,” said Monsieur Herrier, then. “Two turns.”
“Mr. Logan,” Jean said, “since I am a new player, perhaps it’s alright for me to ask you about the move I’m considering?”
Kevin chuckled. “By all means. I’m all about the game—not winning.”
“I was reading the list of moves, and it struck me that in a situation like this one, where I seem to have an advantage that isn’t really decisive—that is, when as a neophyte I could overplay my hand and ruin everything...”
Barbara felt her eyes go wide. She could tell that Jean had begun to perform for some invisible audience. He must believe the Guard could hear and maybe see what happened in the chateau’s torch-lit gardens.
And he must believe that the Guard is about to do something drastic.
Kevin’s eyes flicked to Cynthia for a moment—such a brief motion that Barbara couldn’t really feel sure she had seen it. Barbara thought it could only mean that he had just realized Jean, too, was a Guardsman.
“Go ahead,” Kevin said.
“Would a gambit make sense here?”
The American’s eyes lit up. “It might,” he said, elongating might in the tone of one who wants a beginner to reach his own conclusion, in hope it might be the correct one.
Jean smiled. “I’ll go ahead with it, then.” He turned to Monsieur Herrier. “I equalize,” he said. The Frenchman’s eyes narrowed, but Jean had already turned to Barbara and Jenny. “Come here, girls,” he said. “You’re going to go on the palarium, too.”
“No, please,” Jenny cried, turning to her husband. “Please, Henry.”
“Do as you’re told, sweetheart,” the American executive said sternly. “Kevin, I’m guessing you’ll want to take your video from behind, with an angle on your wife?”
“That’s right,” Kevin said, nodding, as Barbara watched the two men converse out of the corner of her eye, even as she led Jenny forward.
“You can go ahead and shoot. I don’t mind Jenny’s pretty bottom being a part of it all.”
“Oh,” Jenny said beside Barbara, just the little monosyllable, imbued with the feeling of mingled shame and need that Barbara herself knew so well. What submissive girl doesn’t want her husband and master to show off her sweet young bottom to the world, if her face remains hidden?
“This is a gambit, girls,” Jean explained as he bound their wrists to the iron posts, “because I’m offering you up to my opponent on his turn. But even though I have to take the robe from you, Jenny, I also get to take down Cynthia’s panties. You’re all equal now, and I get to do my best to master all of you.”
Barbara’s arms, back, and legs all felt a tension that seemed to tune her body to a higher pitch. Jean ran his hand down her flanks, fondled her bottom, so that she gave a sob of need and helpless pleasure at his fleeting touch. Stretched from the wrists he had bound to the post over her head, to the balls of her feet in the grass, with her hips over the padded black leather top of the old-fashioned horse, she heard him give the same caress to each of the four girls he had now under his command. He took down Cynthia’s green panties and left them in a tangle around her ankles, and he took the red robe from Jenny’s shoulders, dropping it to the grass, and he used his hands to teach them about the right man’s subtle erotic power over girls like them.
It turned her face red as she twisted her chin from side to side, trying to get a look at what her leo did behind the girls he had bound for mastering, to see that equality, the way Jean held each young bottom briefly in both hands, and drew a little whimper or a moan from each one with the teasing fingers Barbara knew so well. He had a way of pressing his fingertips just far enough down and in, parting the roundness of her bottom only a little, but sufficiently to remind her that a dominant man likes to open a girl there with his hard cock, and brooks no refusal of his right to have her there. As Barbara thought about innocent Jenny Granby feeling that caress, her pussy, its needy center pressed against the leather top of the horse, gave a clench that made her buck her hips as a whine came from the depths of her chest.
Sharing: the transgressive height of dominance and the dark depth of submission. Barbara wanted all three of the other girls to feel her leo’s mastery, to have his hardness inside all their anuses, if he decided they should all get it that way. As long as... as long as she was still special.
Just as Jean had made her special, claiming Barbara as his piece at the start of the game—the girl he had taken as his own, and the one he had deemed worthy of sharing with his opponents, when they contested mastery over her. If Kevin Logan, when his turn came, decided to fuck all four girls... if Kevin and Jean took turns, and then they invited Henry and Sebastian Fredricks and Monsieur Herrier, the cruel trillionaire who had shared Barbara as his whore, to take their turns, too, all of them behind the bound girls, cocks thrusting and hips pounding as they sampled pussies and bottoms, compared their pieces’ tightness, filled every girl with their hot seed...
Her breath came raggedly between her lips as the fantasies spun through her mind. It took her a moment to process what Jean said, once he had fondled each of the four proffered backsides.
“I share.”
“Quoi?” said Monsieur Herrier, clearly startled back into his native tongue.
But Kevin, whom Barbara could just see over her shoulder on the edge of her vision, laughed and nodded. “That’s how you make the gambit work. You give me my turn and you count on your advantage to finish the job. I punish.”
Barbara watched him move to the rack of disciplinary implements and select a cane. She felt her whole body tremble: Monsieur Herrier had taught her to fear the cane, with which he corrected her for failure to show him respect, if Barbara neglected for example to spread her bottom-cheeks when told to present herself for use over the arm of his chair.
Jenny, at the far end of the line, cried out at the sight of Kevin whipping his wife three times, quickly, as Jessica too cried out, though not as loud as Jenny had.
“Push your bottom out, Cynthia,” Kevin said sternly. “Three stripes to make it pretty for the camera.”
The station chief yelped as the Purple player caned her, too, and then came Barbara’s turn, and the logic of the game took hold of her in some way she couldn’t have described, because she suddenly wanted to show Jean that she could learn to be shared. She pushed out her bottom without being told, so that Kevin could make her cry out with the whippy, stinging bamboo, and she let the pleasurable memory of Jean’s fingers fade into the pain of another man’s correction for all her naughty, needy thoughts of sharing.
Jenny’s
turn came. “No, please,” the young wife whimpered, twisting her face to look at Kevin.
“Jenny, honey,” he said, tapping her backside with the bamboo, “push this out for me. Your husband has decided you’re to be mastered this way. Be a good girl.”
With a sob of need, Jenny obeyed, and then she gave little whimpering cries as she learned, perhaps, that though the cane hurts, it doesn’t hurt quite as much as a girl usually thinks it’s going to—especially when wielded by an expert hand.
Silence except for the ragged breathing of four young women and the snapping of the blazing torches, reigned in the gardens for a moment. Barbara, her lower lip between her teeth as the mingled sting and erotic need seemed to race around the wanton places, front and back, between her waist and her knees, looked only at the iron post before her. She heard the rustle of the things on the rack as Kevin replaced the cane.
Then, to her surprise, Jean spoke.
“Kevin, do you want me to shoot the video, while you take your turn? If I understand your plan correctly, it will have a greater chance to succeed if the video comes from my phone, so there’s corroboration.”
Barbara’s mind raced as she tried to figure it out. If Jean made the video, it would tell the Guard that he had thrown in his lot with Kevin, wouldn’t it?
Cynthia’s voice cut in then, even more surprisingly. “Please, Monsieur... my husband... please don’t... I don’t want him to see me like this.”
Barbara felt a frown cross her forehead. It wasn’t true: David would of course understand completely.
“Your husband,” Monsieur Herrier said, “will see you in any way I want him to see you, whore. Mr. Mercator, here is your phone. Please do make a video of what we’re about to see, and publish it immediately on one of the less reputable social sites for such things.”
It had all started to happen too fast: it seemed to Barbara that Cynthia must have interrupted to distract Monsieur Herrier into letting Jean shoot the video, but why did Jean want to do that?