by Emily Tilton
The emotional risk for the girl, however, occupied Greg’s mind as he climbed out of the car behind Goshawk and Oriole. He didn’t worry about her psychological well-being any more than he worried about harm coming to her body: with his help Cynthia would soon become a submissive who could enjoy her submission and could negotiate for what she wanted and needed. She would possess the true power all self-aware submissives possessed at least in the erotic realm, when they needed to exercise it.
No, the emotional problem—of Cynthia falling in love with Herrier in reciprocation for his strange, obsessive, and notably unhealthy infatuation for her—stood at the center of Greg’s concerns. Worse, he had no choice but to do everything in his power to bring it about, even if the consequences to Cynthia’s heart would be devastating. They would get her out from the ruins of the Groupe Synergistique if they could convince her to come, but though in that case she could well prove an asset to the Order of Ostia, Cynthia Hall might never find true happiness.
It seemed on the one hand a small price to pay for the gain the Guard would make toward the salvation of civilization. Watching Herrier lead the lovely girl into his chateau, though, Greg couldn’t rip his mind away from the other hand: Cynthia Hall deserved much better than a desperate, doomed love for the man who had subjugated her.
“We’re going to lose you inside the chateau,” Holly said in his ear, sounding very tinny indeed. “She’s at seven right now, and everything’s nominal. Good luck.”
Greg took a deep breath, such as might be suitable for any man entering such an extraordinary home, and walked through the grand door held open by a tall person who could only be a footman, though his uniform was an understated suit rather than gilt livery.
“You must be hungry, ma fille,” Herrier was saying up ahead, and Greg could hear in his voice that he intended to move off the tenderness he had shown in the limousine and back to a harsher way of dealing with his new bed girl. He might indeed be falling in love with her, but the love of this man involved very few rose petals. As Cynthia looked to him with happy expectation of a tasty repast, he said in a supercilious tone, “You will eat in the kitchen until you learn to obey me completely.” He turned mid-stride to call into the dark recesses of the grand foyer. “Madame du Gare?”
A woman who could only be the housekeeper stepped from a shadow. The effect struck Greg as truly remarkable, and he wondered whether the woman with the iron-gray hair in the traditional black dress waited there always, or only when the limousine pulled up—or perhaps only when she knew a fucking piece had just arrived.
“Oui, monsieur?”
Greg watched Cynthia start back from this apparition of dark severity. Madame du Gare’s voice sounded like the creak of a dungeon door. Herrier spoke in French for the clear benefit of his concubine.
“Take this slut to the kitchen and feed her some leftovers, if you please. After that she is to be brought to my bedchamber for her first fucking, front and rear. She sucked the penis well in the car, and you’ll see she’s being prepared for the cock in her bottom, though her trainer had to whip her to get her to show me her anus.”
Cynthia’s face crumpled as she took in these words. Herrier had just drawn an extreme contrast for her, between the treasured status of a fallen princess, should she show herself grateful to him for subjugating her fully, and the degraded station of slut who ate leftovers in the kitchen, if she maintained her protests against her anal training. Greg had no doubt what she would choose tonight, but she herself wasn’t yet sure, her troubled blue eyes told him as they searched backwards for her trainer’s reaction.
“Very good, monsieur,” said the housekeeper. “Come wiz me, girl.”
Greg spoke up, then. “I will go with your slut, and bring her to you later.”
Herrier gave him a rather dangerous look, but his agreement with the Institute allowed him no leeway: if Greg decided to accompany Cynthia to the kitchen, he would do so. Madame du Gare also looked the trainer up and down, clearly trying to determine whether Greg were a person of importance—or even a threat.
“I’m the girl’s trainer,” he said, giving no further explanation in hope of cowing the woman a bit.
She only nodded, however, and said, “Zees way.”
She led the way through the hidden door that gave way to the servants’ stairs briskly, with Cynthia struggling to keep up.
“Zey ‘ave taught you to kiss a con, girl?” Madame du Gare asked, descending the steps without looking behind her.
“What?” Cynthia asked in a panicked voice.
“A cunt, girl. Do you kiss cunts?”
Greg’s cock leapt in his pants: something about this woman’s manner indicated a deep knowledge of the same affairs in which Greg himself had his expertise. Nothing in his mission briefing concerned a housekeeper, let alone one who functioned it appeared as herself a trainer of submissive concubines: this could make things difficult.
He knew he had no choice, though, but to try to assert himself, if only to keep control of the situation.
“Cynthia is well trained in cunnilingus, madame. Will you avail yourself frequently of her skills?”
Cynthia gave a little cry at that, for the housekeeper had stopped abruptly at the foot of the stairs and turned to regard Greg with an appraising eye.
“Oui, monsieur le maître,” she said. Now she looked into his eyes coldly. In his peripheral vision Greg could see the toll this had begun to take on Cynthia: she had cowered back into the newel post.
Damn. To lose control of Cynthia now would be disastrous. Why hadn’t Madame du Gare popped onto the Guard’s radar? Was Goshawk playing them, somehow, and using this woman as his cat’s paw?
She fixed Cynthia with her penetrating gaze. “You will spend a good deal of time in my bed, ma fille, when your master is not using you.”
Greg would have given a very great deal of money for a comm link, and Heather’s voice calmly reading Cynthia’s arousal numbers. In a situation like this one, only the perineal sensor could truly tell whether Madame du Gare’s frank expression of Sapphic lust had aroused her or sent her into the wrong sort of conflict, steering her mind away from what had happened between her and Herrier in the limousine. Damn the woman.
He did the only thing he could, by way of intervention. “Say, oui, madame, sweetheart,” he said.
Cynthia looked up at him, two steps above, with gratitude in her eyes that seemed to indicate that too much ground had not been lost. She turned back to the housekeeper.
“Oui, madame.”
“Eh, bon,” said Madame du Gare, evidently slightly mollified. “You are a pretty little zing, and no mistake.”
She led them to the big table in the kitchen, as Herrier had promised, a much cheerier sort of place than Greg had anticipated from the housekeeper’s forbidding aspect. The three housemaids came and went under her watchful eye, while a scullery maid worked under the supervision of the cook, a Monsieur Alland.
Greg sat next to Cynthia as she ate a soup clearly made from a two-day-old roast chicken. He thought they must have made it specially for her, because its thinness, and the hardness of the day-old baguette soaked in it, seemed to be meant as an indication of her status as a servant until she yielded to the civilizing process. Herrier clearly had indeed planned for his bed girl’s arrival more extensively than Operation Relegate had foreseen. With luck, it would only enhance the efficacy of the operation in its deep involvement of Goshawk himself in the subjugation of Oriole, but Greg didn’t feel particularly comfortable with all the new elements being added into his theatre of operation.
They offered him food, but he declined it politely, wishing above all to keep Cynthia in awe of him even as she trusted that he would keep her safe. When they ascended the servants’ stairs and then, still behind Madame du Gare, the grand staircase that led to the state apartments, her nervous glances at him behind her reflected that half-fear, half-trust.
For her benefit, as well as that of the housekeeper, he s
aid, just as they reached the grand landing at the top, “Don’t dawdle, girl. Your master is waiting to fuck you.”
Chapter Twenty
To her surprise, Cynthia didn’t feel afraid, as much as she felt, well, destined. Her fate awaited her in the enormous, sumptuous bedroom to which the horrible Madame du Gare led her, still dressed only in the nightgown and the anal harness, still smarting from the painful welts Master Greg had left on her bottom and thighs. Sitting on the hard wood bench at the long kitchen table had hurt so much she had almost cried.
She expected him to be awaiting her, standing next to the crimson-covered bed in the high-ceilinged chamber. It seemed fated for Monsieur Herrier to appear there: she counted on seeing him, the man who had stirred such unexpected and strange feelings in her, whose face hadn’t left Cynthia’s head since the housekeeper had led her away into the below-stairs world of the servants.
But the bedchamber seemed empty, though a fire warmed it and fur rugs made it feel cozy. The room’s dimensions should have had the opposite effect and given an impression of coldness, but something about the two armchairs before the hearth seemed to shrink it in her perception. Madame du Gare led her all the way to the bed, with Master Greg trailing a step behind. Cynthia found she couldn’t forgive him for saying the thing about Monsieur Herrier waiting to fuck her, though she had heard such things, and things so much worse, daily at the Institute—and of course her owner himself had said them, and shouldn’t that end in her all these bizarre feelings of… of gratitude? of affection, even?
But Master Greg had come there to take care of her, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he promised all the way back in Brooklyn that if she obeyed, no harm would come to her? Wasn’t she obeying? Wasn’t she destined to obey the owner to whom Master Greg had delivered her?
Yes, she had trouble with anal, she admitted to herself as she caught a glimpse of something white laid out on the bed, with notecard next to it. But she wanted to obey, otherwise, and now… now, after what Monsieur Herrier had said in the car, about being a fallen princess who had to give her bottom to her captor lord… wasn’t she destined to obey about that, too?
So how could Master Greg act so cruelly and brusquely with her, when her arrogant, powerful owner would soon deflower her both in front and behind, and Cynthia knew she could do nothing about it except weep over her lost virginities and her lost dreams of love.
That thought startled her. What lost dreams of love did her heart mean, sending that wayward thought into her distracted, wandering mind, as she recognized that the white thing on the bed was another nightgown, but one much more luxurious than the Institute’s standard-issue bed girl wore? It was longer, and lacier—indeed it seemed almost entirely made of lace—and the close-fitting satin connecting the lace would show her master all the curves of Cynthia’s body before he even removed it from her. It was the most elegant piece of clothing Cynthia had ever seen close up—much more elegant than her prom dress, which had come from an expensive boutique and cost a thousand dollars.
The notecard said,
Maître G, please get the girl out of her harness and dress her in this. She is to wait by the fire until I come. H.
Cynthia looked wildly at Master Greg to see whether he had read the card. Again she didn’t know why her feelings should be so stirred by these simple preparations when she had already undergone so much erotic degradation over the past few weeks. Something concerning those lost dreams seemed involved, something about the feeling of destiny that had come upon her as she climbed the stairs behind Madame du Gare.
David. It should be David.
She hadn’t thought of him for days and days, it seemed, but now his handsome face seemed to swim before her eyes, and the mist of tears there seemed not just for her loss of him but for her failure to see that Vermont would have been wonderful. Perfect, even, if she could only have confessed… what? That she wanted to lose her virginity roughly? That she needed a spanking? That she rode her pillow every night and she wished she were thinking of him when she did?
That look on his face, when she had moved his hand from between her thighs… it had told her everything she had needed to know, that she should have known she needed to know.
Oh, David. Master Greg’s betrayal… or what had felt like a betrayal… it became clear to Cynthia now: he had taken her away from that, from the unlivable Brooklyn life where she could never admit to needing the kind of sex into which he had delivered her. He had done that, and Cynthia had without even realizing it invested him with the care of her destiny. For Master Greg to treat her brusquely, when he had taken her away from Brooklyn, and David, felt much crueler than anything Monsieur Herrier could do.
“Zere is a seat in the corner for you, Maître,” Madame du Gare was saying. “You are fine?”
“Oui, madame,” Master Greg replied. “I am fine.” His decisive tone, in the face of the housekeeper’s clear disapproval, her obvious expectation that she should be the one to prepare the bed girl for her defloration, won back to him much of Cynthia’s good will. She stole a glance at him, biting her lip, and then turned back to the silken nightgown on the bed.
“Look at me, ma fille,” said the awful woman who it seemed Cynthia would soon have to pleasure in that terribly embarrassing way she had learned at the Institute.
With furrowed brow, Cynthia obeyed.
“You exist for the seigneur’s pleasure, tonight and for as long as he chooses to keep you. Do not forget it.”
Cynthia heard a little sob come from her chest. “No, madame,” she said.
I exist for the seigneur’s pleasure.
But the seigneur had said… those things about the captive princess.
The captive anal princess.
The housekeeper’s footsteps receded over the marble floor that separated the cozy, fur-covered part of the bedchamber from its grand double doors.
“Let’s get you into your nightgown,” she heard Master Greg say from behind her.
It took only a few moments, though Master Greg was gentle with her whipped bottom this time, as he had not been on the jet. Cynthia gave a forlorn cry as she pushed out the plug and the harness left her at last, at least for the moment, as she knelt upon her elbows on what could only be a polar-bearskin rug before the fire, bottom raised high and face in the soft, tickly fur.
“There we go, good girl,” Master Greg said softly. “You’ll have a cock in there soon enough now.”
“Oh, please,” Cynthia whispered, to the rug, softly enough that the words remained only for her: a plea whose nature she still did not truly know.
He raised her up and stripped off the pink nightgown, and then he helped her into the satiny, lacy one, which could not truly be meant for sleeping since it fit her so closely. Nightwear, she thought, but not for bed.
Not for bed, to sleep in. Or for a naughty girl to ride her pillow in.
A gilt chair stood before the fire: in this Cynthia sat in the silken nightgown, perched on the edge because of the way the fabric clung to the bruises from her terrible whipping. Master Greg had taken the harness and the plug, taken the pink nightgown, and vanished into the shadows, a spectral vision like something out of a nightmare.
Nightmare or dream come true? Lewd, wanton, wicked dream that Cynthia had known would never come true.
Oh, David.
The double doors opened, and Cynthia’s owner stepped through, wearing a black silk dressing gown. As he approached the fireplace, Cynthia kept her eyes down at his black leather slippers, unable to keep herself from wondering whether he would ever punish her with one. The English sometimes used slippers, didn’t they, for naughty girls’ lessons?
“Stand up, ma fille,” came his voice, very calm—dispassionate, really, would be the word, Cynthia thought, her mind starting to go a little wild now that he stood so near, had given her his first command here in his bedchamber.
First of many, she thought, panic starting to take hold and to make her… Oh, no. Just as that first night, j
ust as when a master at the Institute had made a threat he would surely fulfill—that bodily fear made her wet between her thighs even as she felt her limbs twitch toward the door, urging her to flee.
On wobbling knees she stood.
“Thank you,” said Monsieur Herrier.
Dispassionate. How could he be dispassionate about what he meant to do to her, how he meant to use her? Her mind screamed at her about the wrongness of it, but the arousal between her legs, the warmth and the wetness grew at the terrible idea that he would take her virginities without even caring about them, without a thought for what it meant to her, to be fucked for the first time here in his chateau tonight.
“I am going to take you now,” he said slowly, “and if you obey me, and please me, I will consider you just what we spoke of in the car.”
What he had spoken of, Cynthia thought, but realized that her body had answered him then, as she knew, to her distress, it would answer him now.
“Would you like to be my anal princess, ma fille? Would you like to give up your modern ideas of how you should act, and dress, and think of your body? Would you like to be my treasure, and come to Paris with me, so I may display you first in satin and lace, then bound naked in leather as a girl of your sort should be bound?”
Oh, please. Please… no.
Please, yes.
The silence grew long, enhanced by the crackling of logs in the blazing hearth. When Cynthia’s voice finally returned to her, it quavered terribly, but the whispered words carried the terrible sense nonetheless.
“Oui, monsieur.”
Things happened with terrible speed, then, and the struggling of her body, its attempts to get away from him as he grabbed her, turned her, and ripped the nightgown from neck to hem, top to bottom as he forced her back down to the rug on her knees, made the shameful heat down where he claimed her with his big hand all the more mortifying. The beautiful nightgown lay utterly ruined under her as he bent her over before the fire with his left hand on her neck and his right upon the small of her back to make her arch there and present her bottom.