The Shame Gambit

by Emily Tilton

  She felt her eyes widen with a sudden, new thought as Jenny changed her square, moving toward the center. So clear and compelling did the idea seem to her that she failed to keep her head from swiveling back to look again at Jessica, and Cynthia had a moment’s anxiety that Herrier would notice the look that passed between the two young women—for Jessica’s eyes went wide, too, as if she could see into Cynthia’s mind.

  Cynthia couldn’t tell if the other American’s expression said, with the blue eyes that instantly narrowed again before assuming their former impassivity, Go ahead, make my day or Don’t you dare. In that moment, though, Cynthia had seen beyond, she thought, the slightest doubt, that Jessica and Kevin Logan had come to France with the intention of saving the world.

  Shifting conceptions whirled through the mind of the Ostia station chief, then, as she tried to reconfigure the events of tonight—and of the past several weeks—into a new form that would yield a crazy sense, yet not without its own strange logic. She had lowered her eyes as soon as she became aware of the significance of the involuntary communication between her gaze and Jessica’s. The grass, and the crossing of the white lines painted onto it, shadowy in the torchlight, occupied her whole vision, and the next few minutes slipped away without Cynthia even noticing their passage.

  How could they think... Her brain didn’t want to travel much farther than that, and indeed her thoughts shied away from the path that followed, because she knew that if she traveled down it her face might well betray her cognitive machinations. How, after all, could Cynthia keep from showing, in her eyes, her incipient knowledge of a plan that the head of the Paris office of an international kinky escort service, for all her exotic allure, shouldn’t have the slightest capacity to understand?

  Herrier had returned to his place at the center of the board. “Upgrades, girls,” he said, calling Cynthia from her reverie.

  There was nothing for her, this turn, it seemed, or for Jenny. Barbara and Jessica received bracelets, though—identical loops of silver chain. Cynthia tried again to remember the details of the briefing she had gotten about the game Selecta executives loved so much, but she couldn’t even recall whether it had gone to a level of granularity that included things like what a silver bracelet would mean. She had spent most of the time wondering whether it made sense for a game invented by the ancient Romans to be known to the Institute and not to the Pretorian Guard.

  Had Kevin said something about that? Something about it being a Victorian hoax?

  “Moves,” the gamemaster said. “Red to a5. Green to g4. Blue to e4. Purple to g4.”

  Still wondering about the origin of the game, trying to use that question as a way to suppress her wild new theory about the Logans, Cynthia turned to look for the square into which she was to step, and realized at the same time that Jessica had begun to move into the same space. The two wives looked into each other’s eyes, and now both of them had blank, impassive expressions on their faces, though Cynthia felt certain that just as many conflicting ideas occupied Jessica’s mind as her own.

  “Contest, Green versus Purple,” Herrier announced, in a voice loud enough to be heard on the other side of the pavilion. “Follow me, cunts.”

  Cynthia strove to keep her eyes on the grass, and the heels of the billionaire’s black shoes, as Herrier led them off the board. She knew if her concentration on the shiny, sinister leather that seemed to tread so easily on the sward of the man’s sumptuous gardens wavered for a moment, she would turn around and look again at Jessica: Cynthia might even hiss, should she give in, trying utterly in vain to keep her voice low enough that their supervillain host wouldn’t hear, “You can’t possibly do it. You just can’t. It won’t work.”

  She managed to watch the rising and falling heels, though, until they had reached the edge of the pavilion’s blank white wall, and she heard Sebastian Fredricks address her in the Oxbridge accent that had come only in the past hour to represent all the dark fantasies of being shared with other men.

  “Come here, Cynthia. I hope your pretty little cunt is still wet. Does your husband get you as excited as I clearly do?”

  Cynthia couldn’t help looking up, then, and into the Englishman’s dark eyes. Her body’s response to the danger the man represented, took over, and she no longer had to worry about betraying her troubling guess at the Logans’ plan. She felt her face crumple.

  Forgive me, David. If there were no need for forgiveness, along with the whipping her husband would give her, there would also be no heat. She loved David with all her heart, and that was all that mattered.

  For her body, though, it was different. Herrier knew he had only given her what she needed, and the Logans had undoubtedly suggested it, because they wanted Cynthia here. They wanted the Paris station chief of the Order of Ostia made to lie over a fucking block for a man not her husband to claim her with his cock.

  The redeeming part of it all lay in the fact that in playing upon Herrier’s arrogance they meant well, if Cynthia had indeed puzzled out the mystery. That kind of redemption didn’t matter now, though, when Cynthia’s pussy had clenched at the Englishman’s words.

  Forgive me, David. And punish me.

  “No, sir,” Cynthia answered in a sob of need.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Kevin looked into Jessica’s eyes and saw that something must have happened on the game board: something that might jeopardize their rogue operation—a look from the Ostia girl Barbara toward the pavilion that demonstrated her evident love for Jean Mercator or perhaps some dawning return of a memory on Jenny Granby’s face that she had overheard something in Rome about Jessica.

  About how the First Lady’s best friend had, six months ago, run out of a Washington DC reception with the Spanish ambassador, not to be heard from again in the society of the United States capital.

  Kevin quieted his anxiety, knowing that the idea made no sense, but the presence of the Granbys had thrown the plan into sudden disarray, just when he and Jessica had thought it on the verge of success. When it seemed that the best minds of the guard—Sarah Bennett and Maia North, in all probability—hadn’t been able to figure out what the Logans had resolved to do, or why, the chance that an intelligent but still very innocent young wife might put it together didn’t really bear thinking about.

  Still, as he tried to come up with reasons for his wife’s evident disquiet as he clipped the leash again to her purple collar, he couldn’t help going over that night, the beginning of it all: following Jessica out of the embassy, mystified, taking her hand and turning her toward him in the street, seeing the distress on her face, hearing her say, “Kevin—sir—we... we have to do something. The European markets... I just heard...”

  His eyes had gone wide for a moment, and then his forehead had creased in concern. The Guard, for whom he and Jessica served as liaisons to the federal government and to the Selecta Corporation, had tracked an interesting and potentially disquieting trend in renewable energy regulation in four Spanish administrative districts. If combined with a movement toward a New-Modesty-style social program, it had the potential to destabilize that part of Spain, with the possibility of the effect spreading more widely.

  “What did you hear, sweetheart?” Kevin asked, folding her in his arms. Jessica had a tendency to take the triumphs and trials of her work with the Guard and Ostia personally, perhaps because of her friendship with Erin Metz—everything the Logans did had an intimate dimension, since it could affect the life of the First Lady much more directly than it affected the lives of the millions of people whose energy needs and use the Pretorian Guard tried to keep from destroying human civilization.

  “Spain is going to propose going to the New Modesty, in parliament. Six months from now. The ambassador didn’t say it flat out, but he’s a little drunk, and he told a Spaniard who said he wanted to find a wife like me that he only had to wait six months.”

  Kevin’s heart had raced. The ambassador belonged to the conservative, nationalist party that had r
ecently swept into power. They could well decide, contrary to the Guard’s expectations, to try a New Modesty model, on a larger and more thoroughgoing scale even than Adanac, the American neighbor who had put the program into nationwide effect.

  The possible domino effect in Europe... and the reaction in America... wild swings in energy prices, growing worse as fossil fuels finally reached their endpoint in a literal blaze of consumption and destruction.

  “It’s the collapse,” Jessica had whispered. “Unless.”

  Kevin had known precisely what his wife had meant. They had talked about it more than once: his certainty that the Pretorian Guard, as vital as he believed their work to be, would never be able actually to implement the soft landing. Like every large organization, even one founded on the dominance of alpha males like Kevin, David Mancini, and Jean Mercator—and the grateful, willing submission of brilliant women like Maia North, Sarah Bennett, and Jessica Logan—the Guard could well find itself paralyzed by debate, when the moment came, as to whether the time foreseen had, in fact, arrived.

  Unless the moment arrived unmistakably, accelerated by a deft operation in the right place, at the right time.

  Unless it arrived in the form, say, of the best friend of the First Lady playing Discipline at the chateau of the man who—as had almost certainly reached the Guard’s ears by now, this very night—stood to hold Europe’s energy in the palm of his hand. Tonight, when the ruling party of Spain announced their legislative agenda.

  “Nothing can stop this, naughty girl,” he told Jessica as he led her toward the contest area with one hand on her sweet naked backside and the other holding the leash lightly taut.

  “Yes, sir,” she sobbed quietly. He thought he heard in the little sound the acknowledgment of his double meaning—that whatever had happened on the game board, the pieces in the much, much larger geopolitical game they played had already gone into motion.

  Herrier turned to face the two teams, players and naked pieces, who now formed into a row in front of him. Kevin was glad he would go up against Fredricks in this first contest, so Jean and Henry could see how this part of the game worked. He allowed himself a glance over at the two other players as they sat in their throne-like seats, attention rapt by the spectacle before them.

  Kevin had to applaud Jean for his performance. He wouldn’t have known the man for a Guardsman—probably Barbara’s leo, if Kevin had to guess—if the girl hadn’t looked at him, a single time, over her shoulder as she waited for his cock, tied over the fucking block, in an unmistakably submissive, unmistakably loving way. Kevin felt certain that Herrier, even if he had noticed the look, hadn’t grasped its import: the magnate had clearly fallen, as any narcissist would, for the idea that his bed girl’s former boyfriend couldn’t have won her submission.

  To Herrier, the idea that Jean would infiltrate his estate in order to stalk Barbara made perfect sense—as did the elegant solution of employing the man as a neophyte player in the evening’s Discipline game. For his part, though Kevin hadn’t expected to have another Guardsman on hand, and he regretted the necessity of putting his, Cynthia’s, and probably David’s lives in grave jeopardy, he had no doubt that when the moment came, Jean would do everything he could to honor his commitment to the Guard: Kevin couldn’t ask any more of the man, or of any man.

  Henry Granby, on the other hand... well, Kevin had no doubt at all that with some practice and some time Henry would make a fine Discipline player, and he liked the Relicorp executive immensely, but to meet under these circumstances, when Henry and his pretty young wife might end up as collateral casualties, didn’t give Kevin much joy.

  Facing Herrier, he told himself what he had just told Jessica: Nothing can stop this.

  “Gentlemen,” the Frenchman said, “since you are both entering the same square, Green’s Assassin class gives neither advantage nor disadvantage. As a Lord, Purple has first contest turn, to be followed by two turns for Green, and two turns for Purple.”

  A glance over at Henry showed Kevin an intent frown on his fellow American’s face, and the accompanying nod showed that Henry had understood the underpinning of the system the Romans or the Victorians had developed—the advantage to the first player was slight but definite. Now, though, Kevin had to introduce the man to what the contest turns actually involved.

  “I shall explain to Mr. Granby and Mr. Mercator what you are doing in each turn,” Herrier said, “so you gentlemen may concentrate on mastering the pieces.”

  Kevin suppressed a smile at the magnate’s narcissism. Herrier had never heard of the game before six months ago, and now he thought he could explain its strategy and tactics. Kevin himself didn’t feel he would be able to provide that sort of color commentary: he had played only a few games at Selecta retreats, where some of the players—who included both dominant men and dominant women in the Selecta executive suite—had elaborate analyses of the theory to share with anyone who would listen.

  Still, Herrier would probably do a competent job, as far as Jean and Henry were concerned. As the billionaire had said, Kevin and Fredricks would be able to get on with it. Kevin pulled Jessica firmly, though not forcefully, around, so that they faced Fredricks and Cynthia, who performed the same pivot.

  For a moment Kevin marveled at the elegance of the game’s complex but in the end astonishingly clear rules, and the way they framed the essence of dominance and submission and distilled it as if into a stained glass window. His cock stirred against the folds of his purple robe as he contemplated the lovely, nubile body of Cynthia Mancini, clad only in her collar and the lacy green thong in which Fredricks had decided to present her pussy and bottom.

  In Cynthia’s eyes he saw the same submissive craving he knew Fredricks saw in Jessica’s. Kevin had met David Mancini—indeed, he had helped train David as a new Guardsman about to fly to France to join the girl he loved but had never known needed the dominance that beat in David’s veins just as it beat in Kevin’s. He knew beyond doubt that David understood, just as Kevin did, that when a dominant shares his bed girl, even—and especially—when she is his wife, too, it answers one of the darkest fantasies she has.

  When Kevin had suggested to Herrier that the magnate kidnap Cynthia to stir the waters and test the response of the shadowy conspiracy Herrier had discerned without understanding it, he had trusted both in David’s dominance and in his professionalism. David knew that Cynthia would handle herself as a trained Ostia agent, and he would follow her here, just as it had to happen, if Kevin’s plan were to succeed.

  Cynthia’s face showed that though Sebastian Fredricks had claimed her, at Herrier’s arrogant invitation, for this game, when Kevin undertook in this contest to master both these beautiful naked pieces together he would be receiving her as the gift of his fellow Guardsman David Mancini, her husband. The set of her brow and the glow in her cheeks owed their cock-stiffening attraction, their evocation of Kevin’s dominance, not to Fredricks’ claim but to David’s, and the arousal Kevin felt sure he would find between her legs came from her knowledge that her husband would soon reclaim her the way only a Guardsman knew how to reclaim a bed girl.

  “Mr. Logan,” Herrier narrated to Henry and Jean, “faces a difficult task here. He has the first contest turn, but because Mr. Fredricks has dressed Cynthia in those lovely panties Mr. Logan cannot fuck either her cunt or her bottom: it takes a contest turn to pull down a piece’s underwear, or even to move the gusset aside to enjoy her between her thighs or her bottom-cheeks.”

  Kevin could see from the emotions that flitted across Cynthia’s face that she either hadn’t received an adequate briefing about the game or hadn’t thought the information worth retaining: like the other neophytes playing this evening’s game she had very little idea how shameful or how arousing a contest of mastery could be. The hidden stakes of this particular session of the ancient (or perhaps the faux-ancient) game might involve the destruction or salvation of world civilization, but the immediate matter on hand, of introducing sev
eral lovely, submissive girls to their role as fuck toy game pieces carried its own nearly irresistible allure.

  He knew he couldn’t allow himself the slightest relaxation now; he had to defeat Fredricks and take Cynthia for his own if the plan’s next stage were to succeed. He reached out and took Cynthia’s leash from the Englishman’s hand, shifting Jessica’s to his left hand.

  To Herrier, he said, “I punish,” the official words for a Lord’s best opening move in this situation, and he began to lead the wide-eyed Cynthia to one of the fucking blocks in the contest area as Jessica followed behind.

  “Mr. Logan is going to whip Cynthia with her own leash, I imagine,” Herrier explained. “Punishments in game contests have a physical dimension, but their symbolism is much more important. I hope that the whipping this cunt who calls herself Mrs. Mancini got from my housekeeper, though, will ensure that these three lashes cause some pain.”

  Kevin took Cynthia’s elbow in the same hand in which he held the looped leather handle of the braided leash, urging her down onto the kneeler of the block. Taking hold of Jessica’s leash halfway to her collar, he positioned her in front of the block, facing Cynthia. He hung the handle of that leash on the hook set on the side of the block for that purpose.

  “Hold her hands while I whip her,” he told his wife. Cynthia gave a little whimper.

  “Ah, a very nice touch from Mr. Logan,” Herrier said. “You’ll notice that the basic actions involved in a contest are standardized, but the true display comes from how the players improvise upon them.”

  “Cynthia,” Kevin said, “you got very wet for Mr. Fredricks, I hear. That was naughty. You need the leather across your backside now.”

  He raised the heavy handle of the leash, which stretched just long enough to give him two feet in which to swing it down hard across her sweet young bottom. He whipped her hard, as she struggled against Jessica’s grip and cried out with each of the three strokes he delivered.