The Shame Gambit Read online

  David had learned early on that because this framework provided such clarity, he could ask for, and receive, Cynthia’s opinion with genuine frankness: she knew the decision rested with him, and so she felt comfortable advising him honestly. It worked the same way at home, a beautiful thing to which he hoped he would never quite get used. To know that even when Cynthia acted up, the way all submissives did from time to time in his experience, her husband’s firm hand or his stout belt on her bare bottom would remind her of their relative responsibilities, made life seem, very often, a dream of wedded bliss despite their pesky duty to save the world.

  Thus he had no qualms about asking Who is it going to be? because he knew Cynthia understood that David wasn’t asking her to make the choice, but to help him make it.

  “Barbara Edwards? We know he has a weakness for Americans.”

  Cynthia’s smile at her allusion to her own past with Herrier told David that his own confidence had infused her at least a little, despite the crisis that confronted them.

  How did Jessica Logan end up inside that chateau? Where the hell is her husband?

  David and Cynthia hadn’t even received a courtesy notification about Kevin and Jessica Logan’s presence in their region. In fact, even now after the conference call they didn’t know for sure that the couple, who served as the principal liaison between the Guard on the one hand and Selecta and the Institute on the other, had been in France, or what the fuck they had been up to, wherever they were.

  He trusted the Guard’s highest echelons—and Sarah Bennett in particular—enough to think that the organization’s leadership at least felt sure the Logans’ mission didn’t have anything to do with the Groupe. Or, David reflected darkly, maybe that mission had been so sensitive that even the two operatives most concerned with trying to stamp out the Groupe once and for all couldn’t know it, for fear that David and Cynthia might fall into Herrier’s hands themselves.

  Now that the Groupe had apparently survived the CIA roll-up the Guard had precipitated the previous year, that kind of secrecy probably only constituted the prudent approach, after all. The reason David couldn’t infiltrate the chateau himself lay in his cover having been thoroughly blown at that stage of Operation Raptor, when they had all thought they had gotten the job done, and they could trust the CIA to take care of the Groupe. David and Cynthia, moles inside the Groupe for a year, had escaped from the chateau with the other Guard operatives just as American intelligence had literally broken down the doors.

  But then they had observed, almost entirely helpless, as a single member of the Groupe had gone to prison for fixing a single regional energy market. The Guard hadn’t thought Herrier had enough money or influence to buy the CIA—especially with Andrew Metz in the White House—but they had clearly miscalculated. The various members of the Groupe hadn’t stopped impeding Guard efforts to regulate energy markets and regional administrations in the service of the soft landing, and the situation had only grown more dire for the future of civilization in the past year.

  Most galling of all to David and Cynthia, Jules Herrier had remained in his technological fortress southeast of Paris, but with his actions now entirely invisible to the Guard. Worse, although his Groupe still had no accurate idea what the Guard, the Institute, and Selecta had to do with one another or what they intended, no member of the Groupe would ever avail himself of the Institute’s services again. Even if Herrier couldn’t be certain that Cynthia had become an intelligence asset at the world’s premiere training facility for submissive concubines, he could keep his dominant libido in good enough check to acquire his girls elsewhere.

  Somewhere, David now had to make sure, the French magnate would find Barbara Edwards, or a girl like her.

  He turned to his monitors, on the big worktable he shared with Cynthia in the Operation Raptor control room deep beneath the Ile de la Cite. The Guard’s pretorium and mithraeum dated to the earliest days of Lutetia, but with the revival of the organization in the twentieth century they had expanded far downward, especially during the construction of the Metro lines underneath the Seine.

  On a subterranean level three floors deeper even than David and Cynthia, blonde, blue-eyed Barbara lay upon a shelf bed cut from the bedrock and adorned with a goose-down mattress and silken sheets. Her leo had just entered, to enjoy her for the third night of her initiation.

  Barbara’s eighteen-year-old body had on its slender limbs, pert chest, and trim hips only the leather by which her master would restrain her for his pleasure—by which he had indeed already restrained her, in order to enjoy her mouth on her first night and her vagina on her second. Tonight he would use the collar, cuffs, and belt to secure her in place as he used her anus for the first time.

  Jean Mercator, the leo assigned to train the Guard’s new columba, stood six feet, two inches tall. He wore his hair close cropped, and a neat black beard trimmed in an elegant French style complemented his broad, well-muscled frame so that he looked at the same time like a handsome businessman one might see on the Metro and a menacing, aggression-prone spy from a Euro spy thriller.

  David hit the mute button in the corner of the window that showed him the scene in Barbara’s cell. She had risen to a sitting position on the stone bed, pulling the covers up to her neck.

  “You know you aren’t permitted to hide your body, columba,” Jean said in lightly accented English. “Drop those covers right now, or you know what will happen.”

  Barbara’s eyes went wide. She did know, because she had received a whipping from Jean at her recruitment interview, when Cynthia had called him in to deal with Barbara’s rebelliousness.

  Like most Ostia girls, Barbara had answered an advertisement for aspiring models who were curious about kinky fashion and willing to travel outside their comfort zone. Cynthia, as her recruitment officer, had made the girl aware very quickly that what Barbara supposed was a modeling agency with a bit of escort service on the side would demand a journey well outside her comfort zone, and Barbara, rising to the challenge, had signed the astonishingly broad release form that gave the Ostia Agency the right to demand her naked service.

  The Ostia recruitment process didn’t actually rely on the permission given by the release. Barbara Edwards had seen the ad because an artificially intelligent cyber-agent developed by the Institute had seen her tickets from Baltimore to Paris, her age, and her gender, and had begun to scrape her social media feed. Finding certain important indicators that Barbara harbored hitherto-repressed submissive desires, it had passed the girl’s growing dossier on to the Guard’s Paris pretorium.

  There Cynthia had given the cyber-agent the go-ahead to serve the ad to Barbara, whose response—not merely her tapping it but also the very speed at which she had moved the cursor, since the cyber-agent had also installed tracking software on her phone—had told Cynthia how to proceed. Not every approach worked with every submissive girl, but Barbara, the data said, like many other such girls, would rise to a challenge. She would sign the release if Cynthia made her feel like her adventurous spirit had come into question.

  The release itself, as a legal document, didn’t matter at all. What mattered was Barbara knowing she had signed it. It gave her mind and heart and pussy the room her Ostia recruiter and her Guard trainer needed, to begin her initiation.

  “Do I have to get the mastix, Barbara?” Jean asked softly.

  The girl gave a little cry. Her hands clutched convulsively at the red silk sheet.

  “Please...” she whispered, and then remembered the beginning of her training. “Please, leo.”

  She lowered the sheet, past her nipples, her blue eyes fixed on Jean’s chocolate-brown ones.

  “Further, columba,” he said. “I want to see the cunt I fucked yesterday.”

  Barbara shuddered. Her eyes darted to the wooden stand, prominently placed in her initiation cell, next to the posts where her trainer had tied her, to take her virginities on the previous two nights. There hung the mastix, the Guard’s most t
raditional means of correction: a nine-tailed whip with braided and knotted leather lashes attached to a polished wooden handle.

  Jean had dangled the tails of the mastix over her bottom, her pussy, and her breasts, so Barbara could feel them, on the first night of her initiation. When he had punished her in Cynthia’s office, a much more conventional place of business on the third floor of the Second Empire building far under which Barbara now had to display her already well-fucked pussy, her trainer had used a punishment strap. Never having felt the mastix used in correction, Barbara feared it terribly, just as she should.

  “She’s not perfect,” Cynthia said, drawing her husband’s eyes away from the arresting scene in the initiation cell, “but she’s definitely the best we have on hand. And we need to get moving.”

  David nodded. “Agreed.” He tapped a key. “Jean?”

  On his screen, Jean tapped his chin to indicate he heard David through his implanted comm device. He had advanced a step toward Barbara, and at the same time he acknowledged David’s voice he reached down with his other hand to rip the sheet smoothly away from the girl’s grasp.

  “You’re prepping Barbara for immediate placement. I know it’s not ideal, but try to get that started tonight.”

  He toggled off the comm, and turned back to Cynthia.

  “We need something else, I think. Both to help Barbara and in case she gets into trouble.”

  Cynthia nodded, her brow creasing. “What about Jenny Granby?”

  David felt his eyebrows go up. He couldn’t suppress a thrill of pride at Cynthia’s astute suggestion, and a fleeting glimpse of possibly foolish hope that maybe they could get this done after all. He could see a great many obstacles in the way, though, so he tried to look more pessimistic than he felt as he nodded back at his wife.

  “Possibly. Get in touch with Sarah and ask?”

  “Of course,” Cynthia responded.

  On David’s screen, Jean had taken out his leash and begun to move with it toward Barbara, who again cowered back against the stone wall of her cell.

  Chapter Three

  Barbara didn’t think she could ever get used to seeing a man hold a leash, and knowing she had to let him clip it to her collar and lead her wherever he wanted her to go.

  Then do with her body whatever he wanted to do with it.

  Yes, it had happened for the first time only two days before: Barbara supposed she should give herself time to adjust to her new life, as Cynthia had called it right before she had summoned Jean to whip her for the first time. It already seemed to Barbara, though, that part of why she had ended up here, as the still innocent but no-longer-virgin fuck toy of a handsome, muscular man in a black robe, lay in how she couldn’t get used to the way her body responded, when she saw an ad for a modeling agency that specialized in the kind of fantasy image Barbara was now living.

  Are you an adventurous young woman? Do you need more? The caption, alongside a close-up image of a girl’s neck and back, a leather collar visible because a masculine hand had pulled the blonde hair aside as if to show the viewer that his girl wore his leather.

  Barbara’s body had tapped the picture, and her mind, it seemed, had to live the consequences. Her mind had signed the release, though, hadn’t it? And the release, it seemed, let Cynthia summon Jean, the neatly bearded man who had bent Barbara over the coffee table, pulled down her jeans and panties to her knees, and whipped her because Barbara had disobeyed Cynthia’s command to take off her clothes right then and there in her elegant office.

  Now Jean, her leo, which apparently really meant for Barbara, for all intents and purposes, her master, wearing not his well-tailored suit but a black robe, reached the shiny clip at the end of the black leather leash out and fastened it to the ring on Barbara’s collar. She let out a fearful cry, just as she had done on first entering this subterranean chamber, led by Jean, and seeing the posts, with their own leather straps, and the bed, fitted, too, with all the restraints necessary to ensure a master’s pleasure, and the stand with the implements for correcting and enjoying young women hanging upon it.

  “You know what’s going to happen now, columba,” Jean said in the soft voice that had astonished her from the first moment in Cynthia’s office.

  How can he speak so gently, and yet whip me so hard? Barbara’s hand went down unconsciously behind her, to touch her bottom, cover herself as Jean tugged her toward him, made her scoot off the bed and onto her feet, utterly naked but for the leather that marked her as belonging to this crazy organization that pretended to be an escort service pretending to be a modeling agency.

  You knew about the escort service part, her brain told her. Even though you were a virgin. You thought it would be fun, and would make you a lot of money even if you didn’t care about money.

  You are an adventurous young woman. You do need more.

  But it seemed now that Barbara would never reach the end of more, though her body would keep telling her that, yes, it still needed more.

  “Get your hand away from your bottom, Barbara,” Jean said, his voice rising to a slightly higher volume and the steel in it, which she always heard when she disobeyed, making her tremble and yank her hand from behind her. Just before she pulled her fingers away, she couldn’t help giving a tiny squeeze, though, to see if she could still feel the sting from the strap Jean had laid across her poor little bottom, to enforce her obedience in taking off all her clothes for Cynthia.

  The soreness had still been there, of course, that same night, when Jean had made her kneel between the posts, then clipped her wrists to her waist and her collar to the cross-ties, and she had been made to suck a man’s penis for the first time. As Jean had held her head still and taught her to accept his hardness deep in her mouth, for as long as he pleased, Barbara’s hips had bucked needily, the desire growing greater as she felt the ache the whipping had bestowed as a reminder of the necessity to obey her master.

  It had been there last night, in the bottom-cheeks he had pounded with his hips as he looked into her eyes, spreading her knees wide and deflowering her more thoroughly with each thrust of his massive cock. Barbara’s submissive cries as she lost her virginity to a man who it seemed would train her as a sexual plaything and some kind of secret agent had come in part from the way her first fucking awakened the lingering smart from Jean’s punishment strap.

  The little motion of her fingers, now, though, disclosed no soreness: her bottom had healed.

  “Hands by your sides,” Jean said.

  Barbara knew by now precisely what that meant: her leo meant to clip her wrists to her belt, just as he had done the two previous nights of this initiation. Cynthia had told her, the very first time Barbara had undergone that special form of restraint, when the glamorous blonde fellow American had done the clipping herself, of what it meant.

  “Your hands don’t belong to you anymore, Barbara,” Cynthia had said, while the younger woman’s bottom still hurt atrociously from the strapping Jean had bestowed, the punishment that had made her, sobbing, take off her jeans and panties and top—no bra, for Barbara never wore one. Jean had left the office, and Cynthia had fastened the leathers around Barbara’s limbs, and then she had used the sturdy chrome clips on the cuffs to bind Barbara’s hands helplessly to her sides.

  The tears of pain and shame had run down Barbara’s cheeks as she moved her hands to see what it felt like, cheeks burning at the knowing look on Cynthia’s face.

  “Bend over the table,” Cynthia had said.

  “No, please!” Barbara had begged. “I’ll... I’ll do what you tell me...”

  “I’m not going to whip you, columba,” the older woman had said gently. “I’m going to show you what it means that your hands aren’t yours, in the same way they used to be.”

  Cynthia’s own collar—which Barbara hadn’t even really realized until now was a collar—ran like a slender ribbon of black leather around her shapely neck, above a glamorous red dress that must have cost more than Barbara had made a
t the grocery store in her whole work life. Fascinated by it, Barbara had found herself turning to obey, while Cynthia had put her little hand on the younger girl’s elbow to help urge her around, then help her bend over.

  “I used to be a lot like you, honey,” Cynthia said. “I knew I needed more, but I didn’t understand what that meant, really. Spread your feet a little. That’s it.”

  For the first time, then, another woman had touched her down there. Really, it had represented only the third time anyone had touched Barbara down there, other than herself and the doctor.

  “We’re going to have this shaved for Jean, in a little while,” Cynthia had said into Barbara’s ear. “Ostia girls are bare for their masters.”

  Barbara had cried out at the other girl’s skillful touch, and her wrists had struggled against the restraint of the belt. Then, suddenly, she had indeed discovered what it meant that her hands no longer belonged to her. The realization had made her try to stand up again, but Cynthia had pressed her down with a surprisingly strong hand upon the small of Barbara’s back.

  All the while her other hand, between the younger woman’s thighs, had caressed, probed, and explored, until Barbara had sobbed with a need and a pleasure she had never felt before. The welts from Jean’s punishment strap, with their burning ache, had somehow become flaming marks of pleasure, and an orgasm had ripped through her body, as her mind contemplated, helpless to think of anything else, the shameful idea of being shaved for her master’s pleasure.

  Now, in her initiation cell, she looked down across her taut tummy to see the bareness Cynthia had made with her razor before bringing Barbara down to what she had called the mithraeum and leaving her lying on the mosaic for Jean to come and fetch and bring to the little room where he had already enjoyed her along two of the three paths by which a master possessed his girl.