by Emily Tilton
The flush in Beatrice’s face mounted higher, and again she closed her eyes as a little whimper came from her throat.
“But although he will ruin you today, the special kind of treasure you represent to him will only become more valuable, if…”
The blue eyes opened. Beatrice bit her lip. Her arousal receded to 8, as if Sam had engaged higher intellectual faculties, which Diyab supposed constituted exactly his aim.
“…you learn to obey him, to respect him, and to serve him as he deserves from a possession in which he has invested so very much.”
* * *
“You’ve been watching Erin get her ready?” Charlotte asked two hours later, at four p.m., in Diyab’s suite across the hall from the breaking room.
“Of course,” Diyab answered. “How could I not? Work can wait.”
On his handheld in the limo he had watched the girls eat a light lunch of salade nicoise off the coffee table in the living room that adjoined the bedroom of the elegant suite. Erin Metz seemed so comfortable dining in only her red lacy panties that Diyab couldn’t help envying the senator anew. But Beatrice’s shyness in the nearly transparent pink nightgown, as with every bite she seemed to remember that she was a few seconds closer to her owner’s arrival, seemed much the greater prize, and worth every penny he had invested.
Then, and as he watched the two girls together in the big double-headed shower, getting every inch of Beatrice clean for him, Diyab had wondered about whether seeing Erin that way stirred the memories in her that Dr. Franklin had targeted with the post-hypnotic suggestion. Certainly Diyab himself couldn’t very well forget the marvelous taboo sex he and Erin’s husband had had with her before they heard the little cry from the closet.
He asked Charlotte about that, and, as she sat at the table in Diyab’s suite, spreading papers out before her, all of which clearly required Diyab’s signature, she looked thoughtful.
“You’ll probably find this maddening, your highness,” she said, “but you need to think about what it means to stir a memory and, really, what memory is—especially when it intersects so closely with imagination, as it does in Beatrice’s case.”
Diyab frowned. “Is this about her fantasies again?”
“Of course,” Charlotte answered. “All of this is about the girls’ fantasies—all the girls who come to the Institute, not just Beatrice Graham. As I think I told you, it’s quite a while since we suppressed a concubine’s memory, but in the intervening time, when we’ve been picking up girls based on our analysis of their datastreams, the basic idea behind the therapeutic side of our work has remained the same.”
“Helping submissive girls live full, happy lives, right?” Diyab said, glancing down to read from the cover of the brochure in front of him.
“Exactly. It’s not obvious what that has to do with memory…”
Diyab felt the corner of his mouth quirk up as Charlotte broke into what he assumed was the didactic mode she used more with her employees than with her clients.
“…but think about your own memories and your own fantasies, your highness. Think about your dreams—about those few dreams you’ve had in your life that you still remember even today. Think how it felt when you woke up and it took a long time to remember that what had happened in the dream wasn’t real.”
Diyab felt his eyes widen as he began to see her point. “So Beatrice will think it was a dream?”
“She might well think that. Take what I just had you consider, and multiply it by a hundred, for a girl who’s positively tormented by dreams about a kind of pleasure she refuses to admit she wants.”
Diyab sighed as he imagined it from Beatrice’s perspective, and he looked over at the monitor on a nearby counter, which displayed Beatrice, wrapped in a towel with another on her wet hair, looking at the white panties he had chosen for her, as Erin held them out to her. How could he have resisted dressing her like a virgin bride, making a present of her breasts and pussy and bottom according to the Western standard for a pretty girl about to lose her maidenhead?
The look on her face, which seemed to confirm everything Charlotte said, aroused him just as much as the thought of her in the lingerie, though. It seemed to say both that she had never imagined wearing lacy panties with bows in front and back to tell her and her master to whom her charms belonged, and that she had dreamt of it every night since she turned eighteen.
Charlotte, too, regarded the monitor. She gave a frustrated little snort, to Diyab’s surprise. “Erin may have to spank her.”
She turned up the volume.
“Please… couldn’t I wear something else?” Beatrice pleaded.
“No, Beatrice,” Erin said. “A girl’s owner decides how she dresses, especially on her first night with him.”
“But…”
“Beatrice, I have to punish you if you won’t get dressed, instead of getting you ready in a much nicer way. You don’t want another spanking, do you?”
Beatrice shook her head, very slowly. She put her right hand down and back, as if to ward off the threatened bare-bottom discipline. Then she reached out her left hand to take the bra and panties.
“Remember,” Charlotte said to Diyab, “that even when you have to teach her a very stern lesson, it almost certainly corresponds to a fantasy.”
Chapter Thirteen
After Beatrice finally put on the skimpy panties, with the pink nightgown over them, Mrs. Metz kissed her for the first time. “You should call me Erin, now,” she said as she took Beatrice’s hands and leaned toward her, tilting her head a little.
Beatrice made a tiny sound in her throat, like the ghost of a protest, but the burning, lingering discomfort of her bottom from Master Samuel’s spanking reminded her. Erin wouldn’t spank that hard, she hoped, but Beatrice just couldn’t bear to have another punishment.
The other girl’s lips felt so soft, too, as she moved them gently over Beatrice’s, and with her tongue encouraged the opening of Beatrice’s mouth. Their tongues met. Beatrice had to do this: she had no choice. How could it be her fault if it made her tingle all over and especially down there?
“See?” Erin said, breaking the kiss. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
Beatrice bit her lip and looked down at the carpet. She shook her head. She wondered what would happen next—what would Erin make her do? Would she have to lie on the bed with the senator’s wife, now?
“Alright, let’s get your hair done, and your makeup.”
Half an hour later, at 4:55 by the clock on the nightstand, Erin left, having put her clothes back on and saying that she would see Beatrice again soon. “Your owner will probably want me to come back later tonight, and my husband has loaned me to Master Samuel to help with your training until tomorrow.”
Beatrice nodded, biting her lip again. If Erin left, it meant that he…
“Don’t worry, Beatrice,” Erin said. “Just be a good girl. Your owner knows you’ve only just begun your training. A virgin should be innocent, the way you are.”
Beatrice nodded again, as a little sob of anxiety rose in her throat. After Erin had closed the door behind her she looked at the doorknob, wanting to see if the click she had heard did mean they had locked her in, but fearful that they would know she had tried to escape and would whip her again. She forced herself to turn away, and wandered the suite, just looking at things and making herself see those things—magazines, fake flowers, tables—instead of the images of herself on the bed with the beautiful Erin Metz, clad only in her red lacy panties.
Of herself on the bed with the man they said she already knew: the naked man, who would take away the innocence he apparently valued so highly. Who would, Master Samuel had said, ruin it.
She ended up standing in the middle of the bedroom, next to the bed, making herself look at the clock. 4:59 became 5:00.
The lock clicked and the doorknob turned. Beatrice turned wildly to face the door, wondering suddenly whether the pictures in her head—visions of the things happening right no
Then he entered, in a black silk robe, belted at the waist, and the question became much more urgent. How could she have doubted, really, that it would be Sheikh Diyab al-Rashani who had… Her mind still refused to voice the word even inwardly, because if she articulated it—bought, acquired—the images would gain strength; she just knew it.
“Is she for sale?”
Oh, God. Yes, it seemed Beatrice had indeed been for sale. Her knees wobbled under her as she looked at him, tall, with flowing black locks and a neatly trimmed beard, with his hands in the pockets of his robe in a way that somehow conveyed his utter ease with respected to his wealth and power. No Westerner could put his hands in his pockets that way, she thought—no modern Westerner, anyway. Maybe medieval kings would have, if they had pockets.
Now she knew her mind had begun to try to flee from itself, flee from him, but to stop that flight would bring her straight back to the moment in the senator’s office when he had looked at her and joked—joked!—about acquiring her for his harem. When images so much stronger than any with which Beatrice had ever had to contend came flooding in and wouldn’t let her go all day, and when she helped Erin set up for the party, and when she went home even though she didn’t quite remember all that. It had probably all been obscured by the continuing battle against the images.
“Come here, darling,” his highness said. “Kneel down in front of me.”
No. It can’t start yet, can it? My brain isn’t working well enough for it to start. I can’t tell myself that…
She looked at him with wide eyes and parted lips. She knew she couldn’t say no, because she would be whipped. She knew that.
Sheikh Diyab smiled back, and she saw patience in his eyes, and that made it so much worse. Her hands shook, clasped in front of the gauzy pink nightgown through which she knew he could see her breasts, the little nipples atop them, and the panties in which he had dressed her: the panties, different from the ones they had, it seemed, put her in after waxing her down there—more lace in front and a little wider in back, and… the little bows that made her heart quail.
She couldn’t kneel because he was patient. If she did that, it would mean that those terrible images, of the girl having shameful sex not just with the sheikh but with the senator too, had some power over her. Somehow in her wild, wicked imagination she had put Erin in the scene, and Erin was the one undergoing the sex, while Beatrice watched. Beatrice had to learn to do those things, because otherwise her master would punish her. If she knelt before a patient man, wouldn’t it mean that she wanted to learn to please him in those shameful ways?
Beatrice took a step backward. Sheikh Diyab’s smile grew more patient.
Before he came in, when she had thought it might be the sheikh who had bought her, when she had pushed away the memory of his eyes when he saw her blush at his ‘joke’ and the strange imaginings of what he might do with a girl in lacy lingerie, she had told herself that Erin had spoken the truth. Beatrice could be a good girl, and it would all turn out fine; as courtesan-supply operations went, it seemed like this one had huge advantages over ending up on the streets in some third-world country. All she had to do was obey, even if it meant that she had to learn to do shameful things and to let others do shameful things to her.
But the look on his highness’ face seemed to say that he wouldn’t make her. If she knelt, that look seemed to say, it would mean that she wanted him to ruin her innocence, the way he ruined it in her mental pictures, over and over.
She watched him see her recede from him again, and she realized suddenly that she had been looking into his eyes the whole time—exactly the thing for which Master Samuel had spanked her so hard—so very hard that her bottom still ached and burned from his big hand punishing her there.
Then the patient expression disappeared, and everything changed. The sheikh’s face didn’t become cruel, exactly—but it became very, very hard. The smile faded as if it had never occupied his lips, and his brow seemed to set himself against her. He looked the way he had when he had turned his eyes on her in the senator’s office, except somehow much more so: acquisitive, but also… marauding. Beatrice knew it represented a terrible cultural stereotype, especially applied to a man educated at Oxford, but in Sheikh Diyab al-Rashani’s eyes she suddenly saw a man in flowing robes, on a white horse with scimitar upraised, come across the desert to find a young woman whom he would take back to his palace and enjoy there exactly as he pleased.
When he spoke, though, he spoke very softly. For a moment that voice softened the picture of the marauder, but then the meaning of his words made its way into Beatrice’s mind.
“Come kneel before me, darling. I do not wish to use the cane upon you, but if I must, I shall not hesitate. And lower your eyes this instant, or you shall make the acquaintance of true discipline much sooner than you would like.”
She lowered her eyes to his feet, and saw only his black leather slippers, because she fought with fury against the images of the cane. Rattan. Bamboo. True discipline. The discipline of the desert, and of the British public school. They still… They still…
After searching on the net to see if he had a wife and if he had more than one, she had searched to see something else, because to find things out surely made them have less of a hold on you than your ignorant imaginings seemed to. Did sheikhs, did Arab husbands, still practice traditional discipline?
Did Oxford-educated royalty of the Middle East still believe in teaching misbehaving wives a proper lesson, in the ancient way, with the cane? Beatrice had found it impossible to settle the question in the five minutes she allowed herself before she slammed her laptop closed, her face blazing like the sun.
And if he believes in the cane for naughty wives, what does that mean for naughty concubines?
Now she felt absolutely desperate to ask him… to ask him if he spanked his wives, if he caned them. “Do you spank your wives, your highness?” Why did it feel to Beatrice as if she had heard the question asked, and had heard it answered in the affirmative, already? The images: the terrible pictures.
She gave a little sob and moved toward him: one step, two steps. The picture of herself when she reached him, kneeling with downcast eyes and her face only a few inches from the knot in the belt of his silk robe, rose in her brain like an irrepressible tide. She fell to her knees on the carpet. Little whines of fear and shame came through her nose.
“Please don’t cane me,” she whispered. “I couldn’t bear it.”
He took one step forward; three feet now separated her from the black slippers and the muscular calves and the hem of his robe.
“Come. Here. Crawl to me, Beatrice, and you won’t be caned, or even spanked again, tonight.”
Beatrice took a gasping breath, and then another. For the first time since his highness had entered she felt, down below, just how thoroughly her treacherous body responded to him. To its new owner.
She bent and put her palms on the carpet. It meant she now saw only the slippers, and his bare feet, his dark skin, for somehow she knew she must hang her head very low, in respect. She started to crawl toward him.
What would happen when she got there? What would happen? If he… If he unties that knot, or tells me to untie it… If he commands me to untie it, and to look at what I have revealed, and…
She couldn’t: she just couldn’t. When she had thought of giving her boyfriend a blowjob, it hadn’t been like this; it hadn’t brought one of the terrible images to life.
He spoke, though, and his words again moved her body, the way a man who owns a thing can make the thing move, because it belongs to him.
“I am a just man, darling, and a patient one. But I do believe in proper discipline, especially for young women. I hope I never have to cane you, but it is very important that you know that I will cane you, if you disobey me.”
Chapter Fourteen
Steven couldn’t claim to be entirely unhappy about Charlotte’s insistence that he stay in DC monitoring Beatrice’s case and then fly back with them—Charlotte awake and Beatrice asleep under sedation—to the Institute. Though his other work had begun to pile up, he could do some of it in DC, and if he had left before the completion of Beatrice’s breaking he would have had to fly commercial—first class, of course, but still commercial and an hour’s limo ride from the Institute. On the private jet, the limo ride from the nearby civil airfield took five minutes.
He didn’t really have any lingering worries about the case at this point, though: as soon as Beatrice had demonstrated that Sheikh Diyab’s entrance into the breaking room hadn’t broken through the post-hypnotic suggestion, Steven had felt reasonably certain his job was done. He would have to check in on Beatrice once a week and go over her data for signs of trouble, but her arousal pattern in this initial encounter with her owner showed no sign of memories inconsistent with the beginning of faithful service as his concubine.
“Was mentioning the cane the right thing?” Charlotte asked. They sat again in the darkened control room, watching the monitors. Their preoccupations had reversed: now Charlotte watched the scene unfolding in the breaking room closely, while Steven returned mail and reviewed analyses from other girls back at the Institute, only glancing up from time to time to see how far Beatrice’s defloration had proceeded.
“Yes,” he answered. “Absolutely.”
On the screen, Beatrice had crossed the distance to the sheikh, and her apprehensive face hovered perhaps two inches from the still belted front of his black silk robe. Her hands, in front of her breasts, almost touching each other in a pleading grasp but apart from one another as if held ready, trembled; she clearly expected the command to untie the knot. Her expression revealed an ideal mingling of arousal, shame, and apprehension, and the 8 in the upper right of the monitors told the tale of a submissive girl beginning an adventure that would transform her life.
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