by Emily Tilton
His hands left her for an instant, and she heard above her little whimpers into the rug his dressing gown falling to the floor. Then his right hand seized her pussy, so that she cried out and tried to crawl away, but his left again held her at the neck, so that he found out her arousal, enhanced it, made her suddenly cry out again into a shameful orgasm, hips bucking against her master’s fingers as once she had ridden her pillow.
“Maître Gregoire,” Monsieur Herrier called then, “lube, if you please. I’m going to have her backside first after all.”
Then, as Master Greg’s footsteps approached, Cynthia’s owner addressed her.
“Spread your buttocks, ma fille. Show me what you need.”
Where my cock goes, he had said before. Now, much worse, what you need.
Moaning, she obeyed, reaching back so that her face rested in the white fur, taking refuge in the soreness that lingered from the whipping as a reassurance that she had honored herself and refused, before, though she could not refuse now. She gave a little sob as she felt Monsieur Herrier anoint her little flower, press a finger in, while Master Greg returned to his seat in the shadows.
Then the head of her master’s cock was presented to the too-small place he had decided she must have it, where he had decided she must be trained for his penis’ pleasure. And, though the very knowledge shamed her, Cynthia knew how to open to him because of her training.
He gave a little grunt, and she felt him filling her most private, most hidden passage. She moaned in discomfort, because the cock was so thick and her anus so narrow.
“Oh, so tight, ma fille. Such a sweet derriere,” he said above her, behind her, and then he began to fuck, and Cynthia to cry out as he rode his bed girl, tamed her like a beast of the field. He crouched over her, his feet on either side of her thighs as she held her bottom open, and he pistoned in and out, seeking the depths of her little bottom though Cynthia sobbed with each deep thrust.
“There,” he said, his voice no longer dispassionate. “There. Hold still and take it, ma fille. It’s a lovely little anus. I shall… I am…”
Cynthia didn’t think she could bear any more of the terrible thrusting inside her, the terrible fullness, the terrible invasion, but Monsieur Herrier held himself in at full length, and she felt his penis jerk in her bottom, and felt the seed spurt.
“Oh, there, ma fille, my girl, my princess,” he said softly. “There you go, good girl.”
“Oui, monsieur,” Cynthia sobbed to the rug. “Merci.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Sarah spoke directly over Greg’s comm link as Goshawk’s car finally crossed into territory covered by the many cell towers of suburban Paris.
“Black Bear, Arno here. We read you headed toward the fifth or the sixth,” she said into her headset mic, referring to the Left Bank arrondissements that contained some of the oldest architecture in Paris. “Do you know where you’re going?”
Over the comm link came three taps, sounding like hollow booms over the air, as Greg indicated with a finger under his ear that he did not in fact know where Herrier’s limousine was going.
“Alright. We’ll track and then do our best to get our Heatsink asset wherever you end up. Oriole reads as nominal, with an arousal of six. Is she alright?”
Two taps for yes.
“Great,” Sarah said, concealing her relief in a gruff operational tone. “We’re getting the full upload from her perineal now, and we’ll let you know if we see anything. It looks like she’s been penetrated anally several times a day, and vaginally slightly fewer. Is that correct?”
Two taps. Sarah kept scanning the data that now streamed down her screen as the Institute’s computers processed what they had received.
“Several orgasms a day, it seems like, with what looks like a multi-orgasmic episode last night.”
Two taps.
“And…” Sarah looked in another part of the screen. The algorithms had isolated three places on the chart that showed the cycling of Cynthia’s temperature, oxygenation, vaginal humidity, and blood flow. “Two spankings? And something more severe?”
Greg affirmed that, as well.
“Cane?”
Three taps.
“Strap?”
Three taps, after a pause, presumably because someone had his or her eyes on Greg. Tapping one’s chin-line didn’t generally attract attention, but an operative had to exercise caution.
Sarah frowned. It wasn’t essential to know, really, what the instrument of discipline had been that had created the spiking lines on Cynthia’s chart, but it might prove useful.
“Birch?” she hazarded.
Greg tapped twice.
Interesting. Sarah wondered if the recourse to the ancient implement of the schoolroom—and also, she reflected, corporal punishment in an agricultural setting—meant anything in particular, or if Herrier just liked variety.
Then she had her focus pulled by an alert from Heather, on duty in California and watching the totality of the new data with an experienced eye.
She’s infatuated. Ninety percent.
“Black Bear,” she said, “is Oriole infatuated with Goshawk?”
Two booms sounded in Sarah’s ear, and she felt her stomach twist inside her. The news made Relegate more likely to succeed, but put Heatsink in serious jeopardy. Infatuations could pass quickly, especially in the right circumstances, but neither operation had been designed with Cynthia Hall’s romantic preferences involved.
“Alright,” she said into her mic. “Stand by for advice on a possible incoming asset. Black Bear out.”
There could be no doubt that Herrier was headed with Cynthia toward a meeting of the Groupe Synergistique. Yves Joubert and Leo Derian were also incoming, also apparently bound for the Left Bank. Those two magnates of nuclear power and natural gas imports respectively were closer to the center of Paris than Herrier, so it might be possible to fix a location before Cynthia arrived, but so many things had already broken against Sarah—Greg not knowing the destination, Cynthia being infatuated, the site of the meeting not taking place on the Right Bank as she had felt sure it would—that she had little confidence in any of the risky ideas that bubbled to the surface of her mind now.
Still, doing nothing carried an ironclad guarantee of getting nothing. She patched herself into the Order of Ostia’s Paris office, disguised as a very high-end modeling agency not far from Addie’s luxurious hotel. That office had two operatives standing by, on orders from Rome, to assist in Relegate and/or Heatsink as Sarah might request.
“Tiber, Arno here,” she said, making contact with Lisette, the capta in charge of the liaison and the first of the operatives on call.
“Tiber here,” Lisette responded immediately. “What do you need?”
“Where’s Sparrow now?” Because of the complexity of the operations, Sarah had delegated minute-by-minute surveillance of Addie to Paris.
“Checking.” A pause ensued, then, “She’s shopping in the Rue Saint-Honore.”
“How quickly could you get someone there?”
“Five minutes.”
Sarah suppressed a sigh of relief: being able to make contact with Addie didn’t mean they could get her where they needed her, especially when Sarah didn’t even know where that was yet.
“I need her headed toward the Pantheon as soon as possible,” she said, following her gut despite knowing how wrong her gut had been before and also how stupid it was to trust your gut. She had just bet everything that the Groupe Synergistique would meet in the Quartier Latin, in a place convenient for its fourth member, Jean Redac, a professor at the Sorbonne.
“Reason doesn’t matter?” Lisette asked.
“Short of abduction, no.”
“Understood. I’ll go myself. On my way. Tiber out.”
Sarah had no fear that Lisette would fail to persuade Addie that the American girl should accompany her to one of the most storied parts of Paris: Addie’s profile showed an adventurous girl. Sarah presumed that Lise
tte would promise drugs, but she supposed clothing might be almost as effective. To an offer coming from a girl as glamorous as the model Lisette, even Addie’s distrust of consumer culture would yield to the fascination of Paris fashion.
The more difficult problem lay in what would happen when Lisette and Addie reached the Latin Quarter. Joubert’s and Derian’s cars, according to the drone trace from high above the city, had now converged and were making a turtle-paced journey straight toward the Pantheon. The car with Herrier, Greg, and Cynthia in it was on the same road now, the Boulevard Saint-Michel, a mile behind.
Sarah pulled up a list of possible destinations: restaurants, private clubs, private residences. The professor’s flat, though luxurious, was also quite small and seemed an unlikely place for the Groupe to meet. The Guard’s database had records of Professor Redac having been seen at three restaurants just off the Boulevard Saint-Michel, though in different directions. She focused on them. A few keystrokes got her floor plans from the ministry of the interior: two of the restaurants had upstairs rooms for private meetings.
One was by the Odeon, the other near the Pantheon: much too far apart to be able to get Addie on site in time by trying to split them. She would have to add another guess on top of the ones she’d already made. She tried to remember the Paris geography in Story of O, which she had learned while reading the book, just to know it. She failed, desperate though she felt to have something to point to as the reasoning behind her guess when she told Robert about her undoubted fuck-up of Heatsink.
She settled on the chances of success being greater if the restaurant near the Odeon proved to be the choice, because Lisette could get Addie there faster.
“Tiber, Arno here.”
Two taps of affirmation: Lisette must be with Addie now.
“Restaurant Les Garrues, near the Odeon.”
Two more taps.
Sarah felt an urge to confess to Lisette just how foolish the chances she had just taken were, but she suppressed it. Heatsink would get off the ground now, or it wouldn’t. Sarah would probably pay the price over the spanking bench in the playroom either way, and if the whole thing failed at least she would be able to expiate the sin there.
Robert would have told her to let it go: not to give into the fallacy of sunk costs and send good resources after bad, wasting Lisette’s precious time and possibly endangering other Guard assets simply by operating in the open where unknown foes might detect an ongoing operation. Robert would certainly tell her that when she reported, and he would be right.
Sarah shouldn’t feel this obligation to do everything in her power, even at grave risk, to help Cynthia Hall find happiness. Here at this fulcrum of the mission, the Ostia capta admitted to herself that though the intelligence produced by Heatsink in a best-case scenario might be extremely valuable, that fact hadn’t motivated her. No, Sarah hadn’t followed her guesses out on this slender limb of Restaurant Les Garrues, from which she would soon she felt sure plunge to an ignominious downfall, for the intelligence. She had committed Lisette and Addie in the hope of helping Cynthia get through whatever infatuation she had for Herrier and find a truly rewarding life on the other side.
In for a penny, in for a pound. She tasked a drone to Les Garrues. Millions of dollars lost in this disruption to the orderly flow of Guard surveillance? Probably not—probably only a few hundred thousand, Sarah reflected. That’s if I don’t notice anything, she thought, wincing.
But she did. Sarah’s back straightened in her desk chair.
“Black Bear, Arno.”
Tap, tap.
“Vulture is entering a restaurant called Les Garrues near the Odeon. I’m presuming that’s where you’re going, too. There’s an upstairs room there, and…”
Sarah threw caution to the winds and brought the drone much further down than she could keep it for longer than a few seconds, to get a precious look in at the window of Les Garrues’ upstairs dining room.
Then she had to keep the triumph from her voice. “And there’s a kind of old-fashioned spanking bench and a massage table in the room.”
She sent the drone soaring back upward and re-tasked it to its regular duties. She could get it back quickly if necessary.
“Our Tiber and Oriole’s friend Sparrow are en route. I think I can have them in the street when you pull up, but if you don’t see them, you’ll need to find some way to delay. I’ll keep you—”
Greg’s voice came over the comm link, then, clearly speaking to Cynthia.
“You’re going to have to do as Monsieur Herrier says, whatever it is, sweetheart. You understand that, don’t you?”
Sarah glanced over at Cynthia’s data feed, wishing she had some visual. She knew that as an analyst, like the Institute’s assessors who often said they found video a distraction from the data, she should be able to get all the information she needed from the numbers crawling across the window title ‘Oriole.’ It still disoriented her, though, not to be able to see some referent for tale the numbers told.
The overall arousal figure still appeared in the upper right of the completely black window, though. It read five. Cynthia was undergoing a dip, perhaps as a result of something Herrier had just told her about what would happen when they reached their destination. Had Herrier just asked Greg to confirm that the girl would have to serve in some difficult or terribly shameful capacity?
“Black Bear, please acknowledge last instruction. Create a delay in the street if you don’t see Tiber and Sparrow.”
But Greg clearly had to focus on his agent, Oriole, and her needs.
“Yes, Cynthia. I’ve approved of everything that’s going to happen.”
The five became a four. The horrifying possibility that even an infatuated Cynthia might refuse a command in such a way that intervention became necessary before Relegate could reach its goal suddenly presented itself to Sarah’s mind.
Then, two booms on Sarah’s headset: Greg finding a moment to acknowledge Sarah’s instruction. It hardly seemed relevant now. Heatsink would be utterly meaningless unless Relegate succeeded.
The four stayed a four. Herrier must be talking to Cynthia or, worse, letting her stew in silence thinking about what awaited her in the upper room of the restaurant.
The cars of Joubert and Derian drove up the Rue Corneille, past the gorgeous old theater, one after the other.
“Tiber, Arno.”
Two taps.
“Can you get Sparrow to the Rue Racine in ten? There’s a bookstore there you might use as the excuse: it’s just next to the restaurant where they’re taking Oriole. “
Two taps.
Sarah sucked her lips into a tight line between her teeth. She watched dots on a live map, one for each car. No dot for Sparrow, much less any good reason to think even if she could make Sparrow converge with Oriole that the chain of events envisioned in Heatsink would in fact occur.
She stared at the four, willing it to rise.
Chapter Twenty-Two
She couldn’t. How could she? How could Monsieur Herrier even say those things? He had treated Cynthia like his captive princess, just as he had promised, but surely no princess, even a captive one, could submit to that. Let alone the captive princess who was still also an independent, modern young woman.
Master Greg would stop it: no matter what he said about Cynthia having to do exactly as Monsieur Herrier instructed, he couldn’t mean that when it came to what her owner had just intimated about what would happen at the restaurant. Surely she hadn’t become so much a sexual plaything, a fucking piece, as… as that.
Yes, she had been spanked over her owner’s knee, on what seemed to her flimsy pretexts involving failure to treat Madame du Gare with the proper respect and slowness to lift the hem of her dress in order to show him her pussy. Those spankings, though they had left her bottom warm and smarting, had not changed the tenor of the unique relationship that had taken shape in Monsieur Herrier’s bedchamber the night of her defloration.
She had fallen in
… in something with him. She could tell it wasn’t love, or not exactly. But the way he touched her, the way he spoke to her, the way he captured her. Somehow it told her at one and the same time that, yes, she was still the hipster girl from Brooklyn—for why else would this titan of old-world, ancien-regime industry want to go on subjugating her with his hands and his cock? And, no, she had also become something else, something more, something that made her face go hot even to name in her thoughts, upon the little bed in the little room to which Madame du Gare led her after her master had finished fucking her each night.
The seigneur’s anal princess.
Even the whipping she had gotten for playing with herself on her second night in the chateau hadn’t changed her new longing for her master’s touch, her hope that he would keep her in his bed, to sleep next to him, rather than sending for the housekeeper to take her to her own room. In need only of a little climax to top herself off after Monsieur Herrier had kissed her goodnight and bid her have pleasant dreams, she had put her pillow between her legs, sure she could be as stealthy about it here as she had been in Brooklyn.
But they must have her monitored somehow—just like all the girls at the Institute thought. The door had been flung open just as she had come near to orgasm. Madame du Gare had stood there, with Master Greg behind her.
“Zat is not allowed, slut,” the housekeeper had said. “You know zat.”
Cynthia had quailed back, but Master Greg had advanced and grabbed her shoulder to haul her out of bed.
“You will be birched like a farm girl,” had said Madame du Gare, and though Cynthia had cried out in fear, Master Greg had hauled her to a room she hadn’t seen before. Monsieur Herrier had awaited her there.
“This is the room of discipline, ma fille,” he had said sternly. He had showed her the device that stood in the center of the room: not a padded spanking bench like the ones at the Institute but a wooden frame to which Master Greg had strapped Cynthia naked, her knees parted, her wrists cuffed, her waist pinioned.