Shameful Surrender Read online

  With the advent of the New Modesty reality channel and its companion channel New Modesty Blue, the identification of men with whom to place Institute concubines trained especially for their desires became almost trivial. No one knew that Selecta controlled the channels, but all their subscriber data, decrypted and carefully guarded, lay at the Guard’s disposal.

  Including, of course, Maia North’s.

  Maia, who had patented a widget that would soon make it impossible for the Guard to surveille and if necessary to control the networked computers they had worked so hard to infiltrate. One of the greatest ironies of a situation that had many was that Maia’s encrypted laptop couldn’t, because of its outdated system architecture, run her security widget. If she had thought to get a new laptop, the Guard and the Institute wouldn’t have been able to see her watching Catherine’s Story.

  “How was the meeting?” Kevin asked. “Is she still buying the Selecta line?”

  “Yes,” Gordon answered. “Frankly I don’t think she even knows about the existence of GS.”

  GS: the Groupe Synergistique—the European consortium of energy companies currently trying to identify and to root out the Guard. Trying to figure out what Maia did and didn’t know of the secret world within which the Guard and the Groupe fought their battle tended to be a maddening experience, since some of her devices were now invisible to Selecta and thus to the Guard.

  As of a month ago, Maia had begun to look as deeply as any ordinary citizen could into the workings of Selecta’s government liaisons. The Guard had placed Gordon on Confidelia’s board through a massive infusion of cash six months prior to the rest of the world, including the Groupe, learning about the new security standard created by Maia’s widget and the Confidelia patent on it. A crucial period in which the widget hadn’t yet rolled out ensued, and in that time the Groupe had, according to the Guard’s sources inside the secret consortium, become aware of the threat posed to it by the new standard: even more reliant than the Guard on information gathered from remotely hacked devices, the Europeans would be effectively blind as they tried to manipulate the energy markets. They would be unable to preserve their profits in the face of the Guard’s efforts to redistribute supply and consumption.

  If the Guard could get control of Confidelia. If not, both organizations would fail, and the second inflection point, when first supply and then demand would crash, might well turn into the complete collapse feared by the Guard, with all the attendant violence and suffering. Rather than the painful but survivable attenuation of civilization to a few vital communities, which constituted the Guard’s hope for the outcome of the collapse if it should occur in a hundred years’ time, a collapse at the second inflection point would mean at best a dark age of several thousand years and at worst a nuclear conflict and the possible extinction of the human species.

  All because of genius software engineer and trillionaire Maia North, currently masturbating frantically to the sight, on her ‘special’ laptop, of a girl having her ass fucked in her adorable, demure, pink-furnished bedroom.

  Genius, submissive, beautiful Miss North, light of my life, Gordon thought ruefully. Then, Light of my life: where the fuck did that come from?

  As he always did when he thought of her engaged in her self-pleasuring pursuits, and his cock seemed to rise in sympathy, he told himself firmly, I’m not in love, though. She needs a good spanking for a great many reasons, and it seems that soon I’ll get to give it to her. That will be all, and after I’m done on the Confidelia assignment I’ll start looking for a consort in the Order.

  “Alright,” Kevin said, “is everything go from your end?”

  For a moment Gordon didn’t think he’d heard correctly. “Today?” he asked.

  “New York thinks we can’t delay. I know it’s not ideal, but given the meeting today and the way Maia went straight to NMB, it may be the best opportunity we get in the next few weeks. Can you make it happen on your end?”

  Gordon’s heartrate had gone up, but his Guard training took over. “Absolutely. You’ve got the cameras in the garage?”

  “Yes. We’re ready to substitute old footage as soon as you start the operation.”

  * * *

  “Miss North,” Gordon said, watching her approach from the elevator to this exclusive executive section of the office park’s garage. He stood next to her adorable red electric sports car.

  “Mr. Ernkat?” Maia said, frowning. Gordon could read in her eyes the relaxation and the slight disorientation attendant on an extended session of self-pleasure. “I’m headed home…”

  To play with yourself more in the tub, yes, Maia, he thought, unable to keep the smile from dancing across his lips at the thought of what would befall her tonight instead. Your pleasure is going to belong to me, Miss North, at least for the next few days—until we can get the matter of the metadata settled.

  “Can I do something for you?” She looked up at him curiously, the brightness of her intelligence and her basic good nature shining up now that she had encountered him outside the boardroom.

  “Yes, Miss North,” Gordon said. “You certainly can. I’ll be driving you home tonight. Please give me your keys.”

  The intelligence in her eyes turned swiftly scornful as she jumped to the conclusion that he had either lost his mind or was engaged in a ham-handed pickup attempt.

  “What the fuck are you talking about, Gordon?” she asked. “If you need to say something about the metadata matter, shoot me an email. And no one drives my car but me.”

  She hadn’t even looked around to see whether anyone might be nearby to help, so confident was Maia North about the way things worked—perhaps above all, about the way Gordon Ernkat worked.

  They were standing next to the broad cherry-red hood of the roadster now. Maia had backed in, of course, so that she could save time and effort at the start of her trip home, as well as having the wonderful sensation—Gordon could confess to himself especially since he would soon be the one to experience it—of peeling out in a garage in a vehicle whose acceleration seemed to make time flow backward.

  “Last chance, Maia,” he said in a slow, meaningful tone, looking her straight in her lovely green eyes. The billow of dark red hair around her face made her look to him like a fairy princess even in her jeans.

  Her about-to-come-down jeans.

  For the first time in the year he’d known her, he saw uncertainty in Maia North’s eyes. Only a flash of it, but now she did look around, her eyes fixing on the security camera nearly directly overhead.

  “We’ve hacked the cameras,” Gordon said quietly. “No one is going to see me spank you over the hood of your car.”

  Maia’s eyes went wide, and her lips parted. She took a gasping breath, and her fists suddenly clenched. The extensive security measures with which she surrounded herself had prevented the Institute from placing any of its usual sensors on her body or in her work and living spaces, but Gordon felt sure her arousal had just shot up several integers.

  “What?” she breathed. Then, her face shaking side to side as if she both tried to understand and tried to deny, she hissed, “We?”

  Chapter Three

  “You’ll find out who we are soon enough, Maia,” Gordon said. “For now, I’d like you to bend over and put your elbows on the hood. You’ve earned a lesson in obedience.”

  For a fraction of a second Maia wondered whether she would actually obey the insane command. Her body, as if watching Catherine’s spanking on NMB had tuned it to respond to a man’s instructions, seemed to move forward of its own accord, toward the car less than a foot way, toward the red expanse of metal to which Gordon now pointed with his left index finger: There—that’s where I’m going to spank you.

  But she jerked backward instead, turned, began to organize her limbs into a panicked run. Neither physical response seemed actually to come from any decision she had made with a rational mental process: the attempt to run came in horrified, reflexive response to the initial instinct
ual movement toward the hood.

  Maia’s brain, for its part, seemed to have detached itself completely, and somehow to have split into at least two parts: one part trying to figure out what the hell Gordon was doing, whether he had gone crazy, whether he knew about her encrypted laptop and her NMB viewing habits; another part observing her body’s attempt to get away and wondering almost dispassionately whether she had any hope of success.

  It became immediately clear that she had in fact no chance, where escape was concerned, unless Gordon had lied about the camera hack.

  We. Who were they?

  The end of her flight began with one decisive stride of Gordon’s long left leg and a darting movement of his strong right arm to take hold of Maia around her waist. She began to cry out, her observer mind noting that since hers was the last car in the executive section she probably didn’t have the lung power to reach the ears of anyone but Gordon.

  A third part of her mind seemed to break away, then, to ask the question of why she wanted to flee, or to resist at all, when she had just played with herself for an hour watching another girl get a spanking. That wasn’t… this, constituted the only answer her racing thoughts seemed capable of delivering.

  But every shred of reason seemed to flee away, now, with Gordon Ernkat, tall, dark, and admittedly handsome if a little too old for Maia, holding her around her waist, turning her with one hand while he put the other over her mouth. She had thought of him as a middle-aged, middle-management money man, but now with his body nearly on top of hers, in control of hers, she realized that despite the silver at his temples he couldn’t be more than forty-five: his clean-shaven face, now featuring a stern, hard-jawed look, had only a hint of a line around the mouth—and, more important at the moment, his business suit hid a very muscular physique. Before she knew it, despite her instinctual struggles, he had bent her over the hood of her car.

  “No, please,” Maia tried to say, through the big hand over her mouth that smelled, she thought in a wild moment, of sandalwood soap. Surely he would give her another chance.

  He took the hand away from her face, and for a split second Maia thought Gordon had relented, or that it was all a joke, or he had come to his senses. She began to try to rise, already setting her features into the furious look she would give him, the immediate demand she would make that he step down from the board.

  But the left hand that had covered her mouth moved to hold her by the right hip, and kept her down over the hood, her cheek pressed lightly to the cool metal of her expensive present to herself when the money from, yes, Gordon’s firm had come in. For another fraction of a second Maia thought at least he would hesitate, that she could plead with him, tell him that if he let her go, left her now-raised backside untouched, she wouldn’t call the police and he could leave the board quietly.

  Then he started to spank her, and she started to cry out, because though he delivered the first rapid spanks through the seat of her jeans Gordon must be raising his arm very high in order to deliver a real punishment right from the start. His intent to teach an old-fashioned lesson, just the way Mr. Stonehill taught Catherine to behave on NMB, seemed to telegraph itself directly from Maia’s backside to her brain.

  “Stop,” she shouted. “I’ll… I’ll…” She had no idea what she meant to promise, only that she had to get the loud smacks, the raised bottom, the shame and the pain of it, to end—so that she could think, so that she could ask him what the fuck he meant.

  But Gordon just kept spanking her in silence for what seemed like minutes, as she began to sob over her sports car’s hood. She meant to scream, even if no one would come, but somehow the pain and the awful sense that the biggest shareholder on her board after Maia herself had taken it upon himself to discipline her made her merely struggle and squirm under his left arm, and cry out with each new, hard spank to her little bottom—so small that he could spank the whole of it with each smack from his big hand.

  Then, abruptly, he started to talk, slowing the spanking so that he could emphasize his words with smacks that echoed off the concrete and made her let out a wail with each one.

  “You’re going to… take down these jeans… for me now, Maia,” he said in a calm voice, in the pauses between the spanks.

  He stopped. Maia, breathing hard, for a long moment couldn’t figure out whether she had heard correctly. One of her observer minds scoffed at that—hadn’t she paid attention to all those spankings on NMB? She knew exactly what Gordon meant to do—if she had thought the spanking had ended, she had another very serious think coming.

  He spoke again. “You’re going to learn to obey me, Miss North, or your pretty bottom is going to pay a very heavy price, over and over, where you’re going.”

  “What?” Maia hadn’t meant to reply at all, but the word burst from her chest. “Where am I…”

  He spanked her again, very hard, and she cried out. “Take down your jeans, so I can spank your bare bottom. I’ll take care of the panties myself.”

  Where you’re going. What could he possibly mean?

  Maia felt completely frozen in place. How could she obey him? How could she pull her pants down in a garage, so that a man could punish her on her bare backside? So that he could pull down her panties and spank her trim bottom, already warm and red from the lesson he had begun to give.

  The panties I came in, three times, while watching another girl’s naked spanking and anal fucking. The thought that if Gordon touched her silky lace-accented underwear he might find them damp or discolored by her private wetness, came to her and sent the hot blood rushing to her face.

  Another spank landed on her ass, and Maia cried out. “Please!”

  Gordon spanked her again. Her backside already felt like she had sat on a campfire. How could she do it? How could she obey him? Maia North didn’t obey anyone. Stupid NMB didn’t matter—what she did to relax, the shameful things she watched, they didn’t mean anything.

  “Take down these jeans, Maia,” he said in a much softer tone—the words delivered so gently that it startled her. And then… not the spank she had expected, but his hand holding her there; holding both her bottom-cheeks in its grasp, squeezing gently, possessively.

  “Don’t,” she sobbed, because she understood suddenly that NMB did matter, even though she would still never admit she watched it, would never have to because the laptop was encrypted and Gordon couldn’t know about what she used it for. “Don’t.”

  But he did: he held, and he rubbed. He fondled her bottom in her expensive tight jeans, holding her down over the hood of her luxury car though she struggled against the caress as much as she had against the punishment.

  “I can feel how warm you are here, Maia,” Gordon said quietly, bending over her a little. He had adjusted his stance, she could feel, almost as if he… as if he meant to bring his hips against hers, meant to touch her bottom with his lap, so that she could feel his penis there. His hard penis? Maia suddenly wondered with a new flush of heat to her cheeks.

  “I’m not,” she choked out, but his hand moved down, in, and she knew, with a sinking feeling that made her suddenly, to her dismay, arch her back and push out her backside, that he spoke nothing more than the truth. He held her firmly, between her legs, over the denim, and her hips jerked; she couldn’t help it, goddammit, she rode his big hand.

  “Take them down. We’re going to see how wet your panties are, and maybe if you’re a good girl you’re going to get to come when we get to your house. First, though, you need a good deal more spanking.”

  He rubbed, right where the seam of the jeans’ crotch could press against her clit, and she whimpered, knowing that he must understand exactly how the physics of the fabric worked there: the ridge of stiff cotton over the sheer nylon, and the wanton moisture that gushed, down below, the clench of her sensitive inner lips and of the untried sheath they concealed.

  The whimper became a moan but then the hand left her, and came down in another spank, and the moan became a sob.


  “Take. Them. Down.” A hard spank with each word. Then the holding again, the softer voice. “The sooner I get to spank your sweet bare bottom, Miss North, the sooner we can go.”

  With her cheek against the red metal, Maia suddenly pictured his face as she had seen it in the boardroom three hours before. She had thought, then, that his eyes held metaphorical dollar signs. The hunger in them, she had felt certain, must come from profit motive, from the rapacious need to make her sell her soul to Selecta in exchange for Confidelia’s metadata.

  What if… What if the hunger were for something else?

  Your sweet bare bottom.

  Her hands moved of their own accord, while his hand still fondled her terribly warm bottom-cheeks, as if he held two apples and wanted to check them for firmness, for ripeness, for suitability as delicious morsels he would sample, lingeringly, when he had got them home.

  Gordon let her rise a little, though he kept his left arm across her back. As she tried to avoid thinking about it, tried just to make her fingers thrust under her hips now, unfasten the front of the jeans, unzip the fly, tug at the waistband… that strong arm pressed itself into her consciousness, with the control it implied of her body, the way it could keep her there over her hood as long as Gordon wanted to teach her this awful unexpected lesson.

  He could see her panties, now: the narrowness of the back of them, the way they arched with their lace border across the little cheeks that must be so very red. A whine burst from her throat as he seized her there again before she could even get her jeans down to mid-thigh, caressed so firmly that her pussy clenched again and more of her need flowed from her, right into the panties where he would undoubtedly feel it.

  The fingers, now: able to touch, inside the gusset of the panties, able to probe gently, to rub a circle, Gordon made her cry out with what must surely be an expert kind of caress. None of her three brief boyfriends had known how to do that, to make her ride their hands helplessly the way she now did with Gordon’s.