by Emily Tilton
“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,” she said, her voice carrying as clear as a bell in the big room that could hold three times as many people. A very slight echo provided an element of grandeur to the scene, which Johann knew from experience would only grow when the sound carried back became the smack of leather on tender feminine flesh. “Thank you for coming today to try your fortune at winning the Institute’s most precious offering ever, if I do say so myself.”
A ripple of laughter went through the audience, and Johann found himself chuckling, too, simply at the charm of Miss Charlotte: the way she conveyed the thrill of dominance in the most refined language, so that a man felt he was acquiring not simply a pretty cunt and a pert ass to fuck as hard as he liked, whenever he liked, but a treasure—an objet d’art.
“As most of you probably know from the livestream of the girls’ transition from Oak Street over here to the manor house, Mary bratted a little, and received just punishment for it from her daddy. I assure you that our assessors have no doubt at all, however, of her future compliance with her owner’s desires—or of her need to comply.”
Johann nodded to himself. He hadn’t had any qualms as he watched Mary get the belt from the impressive Fred Wood, despite the severity of the punishment. It would mean that the girl could only be spanked lightly tonight by whomever bought her and Frankie, but if Johann won the bidding he looked forward to making Frankie’s bottom a good match for Mary’s, when he had them look in the mirror, standing side by side.
In fact, Mary’s rebellion had provided a very good pretext for punishing the older Wood girl, because she bore a certain responsibility for keeping her younger friend in line. Johann felt certain that he had seen on Frankie’s face the expectation—even the shameful yearning—for a whipping of her own. He would be more than happy to provide that for her, should he win the bidding. If the girls did come to live in Caroline’s old rooms in his various houses, Frankie would have to expect to be held accountable for Mary’s behavior: starting her off tonight with a soundly whipped backside, before he deflowered both girls, would certainly serve a good purpose at least as Johann saw matters.
“I know your thoughts are getting ahead of your wallets, ladies and gentlemen,” Charlotte said then. Johann’s throat wasn’t the only one cleared at that point—Miss Charlotte simply had too much skill at exciting dominant desire for a billionaire’s complete comfort. “But don’t hold back on my account.”
Another wave of good-natured laughter. Johann glanced over at Chip Dupont, whom he regarded as his only true competition, though the lady news anchor represented a dark horse element he didn’t much like. Chip had his usual half-smile glued to his face, which seemed to Johann to confirm that he would go at least to seven million; the man never held his emotions that tightly in check unless he was entirely serious about a purchase—Johann assumed he would behave the same way here at the Institute as he did at the horse auctions and art auctions where Johann had done battle with him previously.
This live auction for the Oak Street girls, a departure from the Institute’s practice of online private sale, certainly made matters a good deal more interesting. Johann felt sure Charlotte had decided on it as a key part of the branding of the Oak Street experience, rather than as a way to raise purchase prices, since she, following in the footsteps of Anne-Marie Ney and Abigail Podret, had never had trouble getting her price in the darkness of clandestine communications like the ones that had induced Johann to pay his entire year’s profit for Caroline. Nevertheless, from the bidder’s perspective it turned the chess game into a blitz match rather than a leisurely online contest, with the additional element of the chess pieces being highly fuckable young women who could distract a player’s attention at any moment.
“Let’s welcome Frankie and Mary Wood, then,” Charlotte said in a slightly more theatrical voice. She began to applaud lightly, and the bidders followed suit, as the side door opened again and Frankie and Mary were led out each by a concubine in a blue nightgown—meaning, Johann knew very well, that they had been fucked that day. The concubines, both brunettes to contrast he supposed with the golden heads of the Wood girls, held short leads that they had hooked to the rope binding the girls wrists together in front of them.
Nice touch, Johann thought admiringly. The contrast of the bound wrists and the pretty Sunday dresses that gave such a nostalgic impression stirred him in that deep way that went beyond a simple hardening of the cock. Innocent Frankie’s and Mary’s bowed heads as the naughtily attired Institute concubines led them to the dais called to his very soul.
I have to have them. I have no choice. He reconsidered his bank statement in his mind’s eye, and—perhaps thanks to the whiskey and perhaps thanks to the rope around the girls’ wrists—he added another million to the pot.
Chapter Six
Mary’s eyes were dazzled at first by the brightness of the room, after the dim light of the side room in which she and Frankie had waited with Martha and Jessa, the girls who had helped prepare them, if only a little, for the auction. No important questions had received answers other than, “You’ll find out soon” or, worse, “We’re not allowed to tell you that,” or, worst of all, “That’s just the way it is here.” To see two other girls smiling at her, though, despite the naughty nightgowns they apparently had to wear with nothing under them, did a little to calm Mary down.
Martha and Jessa had taken them to the bathroom to go pee and to freshen up. The two porcelain seats for girls to answer the call of nature, in that very grand marble-and-white-tiled room adorned curiously with two low leather benches, had no stalls around them.
“We have to watch you on the toilet,” Martha had said apologetically.
“Why?” Mary had asked in a whisper that nevertheless echoed off the tile.
“That’s just the way it is here,” Jessa had said.
Mary had looked at Frankie and seen in the older girl’s eyes a kind of uncertainty she had not observed there before, today, despite their knowledge of why the van had brought them to this beautiful house. Mommy had always taken great care to instill modesty about the bathroom in her girls; the door closed tight so that the embarrassing rushing sound of a girl’s pee streaming into the bowl might never be heard. The thought that these other girls, whom Mary had only just met, would watch and listen now, had made her tummy flutter.
Martha had provided a little more information, then, though it only made matters worse. “Your master will watch you pee, too, so you should get used to it.”
Again Mary and Frankie had exchanged a glance. Mary’s bladder had gotten quite full over the past few hours; Martha and Jessa had started by giving them bottles of water to drink. The sight of the toilet had now made her need rather urgent, and she had been able to see that Frankie felt the same way. Still, their modesty had gotten in the way.
Jessa had spoken sympathetically, but with a decision that had made the butterflies in Mary’s tummy worse, given what she said.
“You have to, or we have to call a trainer in here to punish you until you do. If he does that, he’ll put you over the benches and paddle you until you pee right there. Then you’ll have to clean it up.”
“Oh… no,” Frankie had whispered. “Please. You… it’s not true, right? You’re joking?”
Mary had bit her lip as she looked from Jessa to Martha for some sign of the joke. But both Institute girls had shaken their heads, their mouths set in identical tight lines.
Mary had held her bound wrists up, then, to Jessa, acquiescing despite the humiliation, but Jessa had shook her head at that, too.
“Your hands will stay tied,” she said.
“But—” Mary had protested.
“We’ll get you ready, and wipe you afterward.”
So, with a whimper, Mary had followed Frankie to the toilets, and after pulling down the girls’ panties for them, Martha and Jessa had stood right there, holding the skirts of their Sunday dresses and slips up so they could see the golden streams
and hear their hissing spurt into the bowls. Mary’s face had gotten hotter than the sun, but then it had been over, even the terrible, ambiguous feeling of having Jessa wipe her between her legs with toilet paper, then pull up her panties and pat her bottom in congratulation for Mary’s compliance.
She had felt, to her surprise, a strange sense of accomplishment. She had wondered, then, if that had represented part of the purpose of the exercise, for as Martha and Jessa led them into the room beside the grand salon, where they saw Miss Charlotte again, Mary had felt almost at peace with the Institute. Being in the bathroom with Frankie and Martha and Jessa had been strange and new and embarrassing, but she couldn’t deny that it had warmed her down there where Jessa had spent a little too long drying Mary’s pussy, just as Martha had done with Frankie.
Now, though, walking in with Jessa leading her by her bound wrists, that peace flew away. Part of her wanted to try to look around—not to raise her eyes, though, because she didn’t think she could bear to see the faces of the men whose shoes she glimpsed out of the corner of her eyes. Most of Mary, however, had to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other so that Jessa didn’t pull her off her feet, although the blue-nightgowned girl walked in a very measured pace, as if to make sure the audience got a good look at the way the Wood girls walked: the gait and posture taught them by their mommy, and by Mrs. Kimball in her old-fashioned deportment lessons.
Sure enough, Miss Charlotte said from the podium, “Walk them around the room, please, girls. Ladies and gentlemen, you may touch the merchandise, but please don’t put any of their clothing out of order. You’ll get to see everything and to handle them fully soon enough. Frankie and Mary, I hope I don’t need to remind you to keep your eyes down.”
So Martha and Jessa had led Frankie and Mary between the two rows of armchairs, with the little tables for the drinks. Mary saw beautiful shoes and beautiful pant-legs. She saw a pair of stunning women’s heels beneath the legs of a gray flannel suit, and it made her heart jump as she thought of special lessons from Mommy. The other heels, under a midnight-blue skirt that must be made of silk, made her swallow hard.
The trained concubines led the untrained virgins before the potential buyers at a slow pace, stopping each girl before each chair, so that the buyer could lean forward and run a hand over their breasts, or even put it up under their skirts to hold their bottoms lightly through their panties.
One man, weighing Mary’s hind-cheeks in his big hand so that she started at the sting that lingered there from Daddy’s belt, murmured, “Very nice. Well whipped, I see.”
One woman, the one in the evening gown, rubbing firmly through beige cotton at her hidden clit so that Mary whimpered with pleasure, said, “Good girl.”
Miss Charlotte kept a narrative going over the soft comments of her audience as they conducted their preliminary evaluation. “Go ahead and get their panties wet, by all means, of course, ladies and gentlemen. You know how much easier that will make this for the girls. Remember that Frankie and Mary were chosen to live on Oak Street because of their suitability for sale to men and women like you; don’t be shy about rousing those desires now, even before the panties come down. That’s it, Frankie. Mr. Dupont just wants to make you feel good. Mary, bend your knees a little for Mr. Yost, now.”
Their progress through the chairs seemed to last forever, with Miss Charlotte saying the most terrible things. Mary’s face burned, but the hands of the men and women moved freely over her outside her Sunday dress and then inside, under her slip, sampling her thighs in their nylon stockings, her bottom and her pussy in their modest panties. She didn’t want it to be true, that it made it easier, and she wasn’t even sure what about this gentle, possessive fondling accomplished that, but Mary did find that she had started to enter a sort of dreamlike state. The degrading inspection, the lewd touches, seemed to happen to someone else, and that someone else loved it, and that let Mary herself, watching herself, love it too.
She did wet her panties with the helpless arousal they called from her. She remembered what Mommy had said about getting wet, how it got a girl ready for fucking, the way Mommy’s pussy got ready for Daddy to fuck her there when Frankie and Mary kissed her down between her thighs. These wealthy men and women wanted to make it easy that way, didn’t they? They wanted to make it easy to fuck Mary and Frankie for the first time, when they had spent their money to buy the girls for their bed.
“I probably don’t need to remind you, ladies and gentlemen,” Miss Charlotte continued, “that Frankie found her daddy’s copy of Best Friends, and shared it with Wendy, and that is how Oak Street moved into phase two—at least where these girls are concerned. Mary here gave us quite a conundrum when she visited her sister after the whipping Frankie got, but if you’re in this room you know by now that it’s the kind of conundrum Institute assessors love to solve. In the end it only made these girls’ special lessons more memorable.”
Mary tried to puzzle out the meaning of the elegant woman’s words. Some of it she had heard before: Daddy had told her that originally Mary was meant to stay at home when Frankie went to the Institute, but that Mary’s special need for rapid sexual advancement had changed those plans.
The last man in the second row said softly, “These panties are very damp, Mary, aren’t they?” as he felt her. The voice sent a shiver up her spine. Should she answer? Her body seemed to make the decision for her.
“Yes, sir,” she whispered.
“I’m Mr. Bonner,” he said. “I’d like to take you home with me.”
None of the others had spoken to her, and it left Mary reeling a bit as Jessa finally led her up onto the dais to stand next to Frankie. She noticed for the first time the strange benches with the straps and the shelf things jutting out from the sides. After a week of special lessons, though, it only took her a moment to understand that she and Frankie would undoubtedly soon be arrayed over them—but for what purpose, Mary didn’t want even to try to imagine. The pictures in her mind’s eye, of what she and Frankie would look like, strapped to those benches, made her heart race and her pussy clench in that way she still didn’t feel used to.
Mommy had told Mary that the feeling was natural, and that it told her she needed what she knew she would soon get, here. Still, so much of what she had learned in Mrs. Kimball’s little Oak Street school, and at home from Mrs. Wood, told Mary that a proper young lady didn’t feel that way when she thought about being strapped naked to a bench designed to display young women, and to offer them for punishment and pleasure.
Not to mention for sale to the highest bidder.
Miss Charlotte had begun speaking again. “Let’s hear from our girls, now. Frankie, you’re older and you’ve lived on Oak Street longer. Tell these nice people how much you’re looking forward to pleasing the one who buys you and Mary.”
Mary felt her eyes go wide. She swallowed hard as she looked at Frankie, who had raised her own eyes to look with fear so great Mary thought it should probably have been called horror. Frankie’s cheeks had gone bright red.
“B-but…” she stammered. “But… I don’t. I mean, I’m… I’m not…”
Mary looked at Miss Charlotte now, and saw that the dean had a reassuring smile on her face. Her words, though, had such a terrible, ambiguous power that Mary’s heart ached for her friend, and she squirmed with humiliation inside almost as bad as if she were the one who had to answer.
“Don’t be shy, Frankie. We all know how wet you got when these nice people touched your cunt through your panties. You don’t think you want to be a concubine, I know. But you know that you’re going to be one whether you like it or not, and so you’re going to have to make the best of it. Tell the men and women who are thinking of buying you how much you like sucking your daddy’s penis and kissing your mommy’s vagina.”
Chapter Seven
Watching from the Oak Street control room, four floors below the manor house, Paul had to admit that Miss Charlotte’s new protocol for the Oak S
treet auction had taken the power of the scene up a notch. She and her marketing team had developed it very quickly based on the audience biometrics and reviews from Wendy’s auction the previous Sunday, and though for example no one had suggested specifically that a girl’s hands be bound, or that Miss Charlotte should question her, those ideas seemed to Paul to represent the confident development of the Oak Street brand, now that the first auction had demonstrated its viability.
“Eight for Frankie, nine for Mary,” he said over the comm link. Paul relished this rare opportunity for a one-on-one connection with the Institute’s dean: other assessors (there were two more in the control room right now) could listen in on the link if they wanted, but they were currently dealing with the normal Oak Street Sunday reflected on five of the six monitors in front of them. Only Paul, as the Wood girls’ lead assessor, gave Charlotte the summary of the data she needed, on the fly, to make sure Frankie and Mary had the submissive experience that would simultaneously further their psychological health and make them the sort of commodities upon which billionaires would spend freely.
His main view on the monitor dedicated to the auction showed Frankie’s red face. A picture-in-picture in the upper left gave him Mary’s as well. The older girl’s full sensor data showed in the main view, while the younger one’s image only gave her overall arousal in the upper right. Paul could glance down at his laptop on the table if he wanted access to the full stream for either girl at any time, of course, as well as the biometrics coming from the chairs, for the potential buyers. All had agreed to allow the Institute to gather data on their preferences; none, Paul felt sure, had any idea how much data the Institute’s sensors and algorithms could gather.
Paul knew for example, and had already told Charlotte, that the serious bidders in the room would be Delia Godfrey, Chip Dupont, and Johann Bonner. He had based his judgment on an algorithm rated at ninety-three percent accuracy, which combined temperature in the seat of the chair (with only slight differences to account for biological sex) with certain key body-language indicators like spine movement from baseline. Most of the data behind the algorithm had come from simulations using Institute trainers and assessors, with an admixture now from Wendy’s auction. It had however already, at that auction the previous Sunday, proven itself, having predicted both the four top bidders and the eventual winner of the auction, Jacob Weaver.