by Aya DeAniege
Books By Aya DeAniege
Contracted
Contract Taken
Coming Soon:
Contract Broken
Contract Renewed
Coming Next Year:
Masked Intentions
Prototype*
Contract Taken
Aya DeAniege
Copyright 2016 Aya DeAniege
Front Cover Design by Christina Quinn
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
For all the readers, over all the years, who have put up with my insane ramblings.
...I promise the next one won't take as long.
Introduction / Preface
(Or whatever it is these things are called these days)
My name is Isabella Domme, though I was born Isabella Martin. I changed my name in the twenties when we all started coming out of the playroom. The community as a whole was hesitantly accepted, but I was a well-known face. The public knew about me long before the community came out, but it was like they looked away and thought I simply stopped.
See, in the late tens (teens?) and early twenties, I was an advocate for the rights of poor folk. I was the one who organized the marches. I was the one who stood in the parliamentary building until they allowed poor folk to run for government positions.
Yes, the rumours of that are blown out of proportion. I did not do anything untoward to anyone. I simply attended every meeting, every vote, completely naked. At first they thought it amusing to eye a woman, but eventually, I won them over.
Of course, that all was before my name change.
I've been asked by my editor to write this introduction for my first-hand account of a contract in the Program. The whole thing will be included in the national archives along with the accounts of several others who took part in the Program, from both sides of the contracts.
My account was first published in the early twenties, though it was then done through the community as an example of what not to do. In the early days of the community, the founders patched together what they could find from historical records. They had the right idea, but it was wrong in several important ways.
It has had a few updates here and there over the years, to clarify some points.
When the national archives began, the community—which was founded firmly in both sides of the debt and had access to nearly anything within the borders of our country—began a new sort of growth. Our information before the archives was based mainly on literature that had survived. These consisted of a few classics from the middle of the C.E. and a plethora of electronically stored books from shortly before the end of the Common Era.
Basically what I'm trying to say here is: Don't take this as the way to approach BDSM safely. If you want to dabble, go to the local event on Sunday and remember: always practice safe, sane, and consensual sex.
With that being said, don't read this expecting a whirlwind romance. For some damned reason the editors insisted on a romantic genre, but I'm pretty certain it would count as erotica, not romance. In the BDSM community? Sure, I could see this as being a romance of some sort, but to the rest of the world, the world that doesn't understand what it is to surrender will and body, it's...
It's kind of creepy.
It's probably abusive.
And I don't want to hear any more complaints from vanilla readers who went into this thinking there wasn't going to be pain involved. I'm not going to list out ahead of time everything that happens. While that might help some readers avoid what they don't want to read, this is a first-hand account of a Program contract. It's meant to be educational on some level.
I've also had a great deal more people beg me not to include such a list because they found it enticing not to know ahead of time what they would end up encountering. The unknown can be very, very arousing.
Trust me; I'd know.
Over the years I have received several questions as to how this could be so detailed if it was written nearly a decade after the fact. The answer is simple. When my contract began, I was given a journal to record every little thing. The first days I didn't do so much detailing as I did listing a few things here and there. As the years went on the details became more and more.
I also have pictures and videos. Everything was recorded then, in and out of the slums, so I could go back and view the outside details. If some things appear as if written by an outside observer, it's because I cannot recall the event at all and have used these videos to fill holes in my memory.
Nathaniel helped a great deal, he also kept a journal and wrote his account of events, which will be submitted to the archives with mine.
Some things were lifted directly from my journal and placed in the book as is, though with a few grammatical and spelling errors corrected. These lines are italicized. I know that in the romance genre, at least in the fiction areas, italicized words are usually the heroine's inner thought, or inner goddess, or something of that sort.
While the book was written with the journals as the main outline, there will not be dates on any of the chapters. This is not laid out to look like a journal. It is laid out in chapters. It is meant to be past tense, though some of what was lifted straight from the journals have remained in the same tense as when they were written.
As I write this, my editor is sitting down the hall arguing with my agent and publicist as to whether or not the book should be published the final time as one volume, or whether it should be broken up into three. Like most formatting debates, no one stops to ask the author what she thinks.
I suppose the only other thing for me to say is this:
Mother, if you're reading this, put it down. Nothing is more terrifying to me—and I've done some strange and dangerous things in my life—than my mother reading this and then coming for one of her fabled visits. There is no age that I know of wherein a parent learns of the details of their child's sexual proclivities, and both parties don't end up embarrassed to no end.
Chapter One
How do these things go again?
This story began when I was twenty-five. Before that point I lived as any poor person did, I had been educated, to a point. I might have even been able to go to university to learn to be a teacher, but much of that had been about connections. I lost all influence when I called my teacher a cunt. She was wrong in her facts. Even the textbooks said as much, but she would not back down.
While living in the slums, I dated boys and young men. I had sex and did what young women in the slums were known to do.
Sex was very much about having children at the time, but until one was married, birth control was free and available to all. My slum offered drug based birth control, and lessons for the girls on giving oral.
No one wanted a child out of wedlock because then unplanned debt might have been taken on. All poor folk—history remembers them as debtees—carried on the debt of their parents and grandparents. This debt could be traced to before the collapse and is given as the very reason for the collapse.
We saw the world as poor folk, rich folk, and the governing body. Then the Program opened and was a mix of both sides of the debt line. In reality, there were many tiers to our country's hierarchy. There were the debtee
s, which were any and all poor folk living in slums. Then there were the common folk, those the poor folk referred to as rich folk, who made up the governing body and had various amounts of money.
There was also the military, which was made up of orphans and a few volunteers from the common folk who were borderline debtees and needed a helping hand from the government.
I was never the type of girl who wore dresses and sewed. Jobs for women like that were popular and could earn good money. Not just any back could perform those jobs, but I took after my brothers and father.
Having no sisters, perhaps, is why I ended up a tomboy. I played with the boys and wrestled with them. When I hit puberty, they liked wrestling with me all the more.
I had several partners before I was seventeen.
Seventeen was the youngest age a woman can be engaged, twenty the age of marriage. This was to keep young women from being pushed into marriage by their parents, as well as to keep them from being pressured into having children at a young age to take on the debt. The more children one had, the further the debt spread and the less each child would have to pay off. At the same time, too many children too fast could add to one's debt and was the opposite of what poor folk wanted.
We wanted to pay off debt as quickly as we could. To manage this, we were taught about our jobs and the skills necessary to be promoted to better-paying positions. My brothers were introduced to women with slightly more debt than my brothers, which was what made a man marriage material back then. As a young woman, my parents sought out young men with less debt than myself for me to marry.
At sixteen I met a boy who I liked a great deal. He wasn't great in bed but his debt and my family's debt went hand-in-hand, and he was cute. He had a job as a foreman at sixteen and was bound for places, places that paid off debt a great deal faster than my job.
Basically? He was a catch.
He made me laugh. We had things in common outside of our debt. He was a good guy. We got engaged on my seventeenth birthday. The ring wasn't present. His older brother was using it for the woman he was about to marry. Engagement rings were passed around back then or forgone entirely.
When I was nineteen, I was run over by a mobile cart. It cracked my hip, and I spent six months in the hospital and another six months doing physical therapy before I was finally released.
Some medical was covered, not all. If I had been in the hospital—for example—because I was having a difficult pregnancy, my way would have been paid. I would have even been covered if I had been clocked into my job, but I had been on my way to work, and work medical doesn't cover your damned supervisor running you over for kneeing him in the groin.
He deserved it.
I returned to work for a while, but my position required long hours on my feet and my hip and leg just wouldn't work like that any longer. They let me go due to low production. I didn't blame them, or the next three jobs that let me go because I was incapable of keeping up.
At the fourth job, I pushed myself. It was three years later, and I had learned to hide the pain and get the leg to move in a better way. My supervisor at that job was stealing, however. When I tried to report it, he claimed I was the one stealing, and his seniority gave him the upper hand in the she said, he said that happened. I was disciplined, and carry the scars to this day.
After that, finding work was even more difficult. No one in the labour industry wanted to hire a thief. My mother got me a job at her work, moving about a few things, doing things for the older ladies.
It turns out I didn't have much patience for oldsters, and I lost the job after only a week.
By the time I was twenty-four, I was unemployable. The Program had just started up, but all the contracts were for maids and the like. I didn't think they'd take a thief, and in the early days, those were the rules. I would not have been accepted.
Oh, and that boy? The one who proposed to me?
He was engaged to someone else before I left the hospital back when I was just about twenty. Because my parents went further into debt paying my medical bills, I was no longer an eligible bachelorette to him and his family. I was 'useless' in their words.
A burden, a debtor—worse than a debtee, a debtor only brought more debt to their family and thus shame—useless, worthless, meant to die sad and alone because of things outside of my control.
It wasn't just them saying that either. It was my family when they thought I was asleep. It was the oldsters and neighbours and everyone who would whisper until they caught sight of me and then turn away and go silent until I had passed.
At some point, it just became too much. I recall sitting someplace—though I don't remember where—and it just came to me.
I was a burden on my family. All that would happen throughout my life was more debt being accumulated to keep me alive. The only rational option was to kill myself. I thought I was doing the right thing. Death wasn't about escaping for me. It was about saving my family more harm that I believed my being alive caused them.
My oldest brother found me, left arm split open, right halfway cut. I couldn't get my left hand to grasp the knife well enough to make the second cut. He heard me crying in desperation because I couldn't even finish the job.
I really was useless.
He patched up my wrists. Nearly everyone knew how to bandage cuts to prevent going to the hospital and going further into debt. He even covered for me while I recovered, but only because he wouldn't allow me to die without paying off the debt.
He knew about the Program, had kept a close eye on the changes to the rules as most poor folks did. I stopped paying attention after discovering that those who were labeled as thieves couldn't participate. He had heard about a rule change.
It took another six months for me to be healthy once more. I tried several more jobs, losing each. My brother, upon finding me alone with another knife, dragged me to the Program building.
“I don't want to,” I said to him sternly as he pulled me through the large glass doors and into the air conditioned entrance.
Everything was done up in whites and greys, neutral colours on the walls, the floor, and the ceiling. The only colour in the lobby was from the flowers sitting in vases, and the bright blue eyes and blonde hair of the woman who greeted us. Even her clothing was grey, white, and black. A dress of some sort that went all the way up to her throat, but had no sleeves.
The woman behind the desk stared at us with wide eyes, looking first at my brother, then at me, then back to my brother.
“All who sign contracts must be willing,” she said, trying to sound perky as she smiled hesitantly at my brother.
The perkiness had a hollow ring to it, though. As if she wished she had a silent panic button she could set off each time a poor person entered the building.
Two security guards drifted closer, suddenly appearing from behind a pillar and a large potted tree. Program officers wore a shade of grey darker than the general workers. They each had their names emblazoned on their uniforms, just underneath the P.P.O. initials.
The two guards in the lobby that day were manly men. Broad in the shoulders and relatively tall, their main duty was to be present and look scary for anyone who started trouble in the Program's lobby. There was no one else in the lobby, despite the poor folk gathered about the doors outside.
The Program was well known then, but no poor person wanted to seem so desperate for work that they'd go to a government funded building for help.
“She tried to commit suicide, was going to again," my brother said. "You people have death contracts now, and anyone can apply."
I stopped struggling and stared at the woman as she stared back at me wide eyed. The colour ever so slowly drained from her face as I yanked my arm out of my brother's hand.
“Why didn't you tell me that?” I demanded, spinning on my brother.
“Because then you'd want to say goodbye to everyone and Ma would know what was up,” he countered, jabbing a finger at me sternly. “Then she'd never let y
ou do it, and it'd be the bushel incident all over again.”
“You had the entire way here to tell me!” I shouted back at him.
He shrugged in response and turned to the woman behind the desk.
“I know there are still rules to who can and cannot. She wants to die. You have death contracts, and my family is in need of paying off debt. I've tried talking her out of it. I've tried finding her another job. This way she can have the death she wants, and you can fulfill a contract."
“Okay,” she said, tapping her computer monitor. “Name?”
“Isabella Martin,” my brother said quickly.
There was a lot of clacking as the guards drifted just a little closer. My brother adjusted uneasily as I leaned on the counter and peered at the woman. She seemed to be honestly doing her job, not taking her time to let the guards get close enough to stop us.
“Isabella ... Martin ... ah, there you are,” the woman peered at the screen for a moment, then to me. “Brown hair, brown eyes, right height and build, though—”
As it wasn't the first time I had been stopped because someone couldn't make a positive identification based on my breast size, I knew what the hesitance was. There were pictures of everyone in the file, and at the end of the day, a genetic profile would prove who was who. But some, especially family members would claim to be one another to prevent a job from being lost.
“I'm not wearing a bra," I said. "For that, I was wearing a binding to keep them out of the way for my job."
“And that job was?” she asked.
“Framing a highrise for the tourism district,” I responded.
“No, the company you worked for,” she countered, finally looking away from the monitor to meet my eyes.
“I don't know, it was a job, I was a contractor. Only the supervisor would have known what the company's name was.”
