Shameful Influence (Bound for Service Book 7)

by Emily Tilton

  She intertwined her fingers and she closed her eyes, feeling a sob begin to form deep in her chest and willing it to stay down. She tried to concentrate on the texture of her red hair, on its late-night greasiness in its shoulder-length ponytail.

  “Nice,” Master Eric said. “This is going to be a lot of fun. We’ll wax your pussy tomorrow, though. I can’t see it as well as I like to, and it will help you feel submissive even when you’re allowed to wear panties.”

  Chapter Four

  Sally’s body responded to the news about her pussy and her panties with a visible shudder.

  Moving the virtual camera down from her face to get a close-up of the tender cleft covered with its pretty curls, Eric said, “I do like red hair on a pink pussy though. If you’re a good girl I may let you grow some of it back once you’ve learned to give pleasure properly.”

  Sally’s arousal held steady at 8, now, though her galvanics jumped up and down in the pattern indicative of her mental attempts to process what Eric’s dominance had begun to do to her body. He didn’t need any advice from the assessment team to know he should take his time, here: the operation would turn on how thoroughly he could bring out the fundamental conflict in Sally Donaldson between her submissive sexuality and her strong, ambitious personality.

  Eric moved the camera angle around to the rear, to give himself a very nice view of her little bottom, its cheeks pert and just slightly rounded into two perfect, creamy apples of sweet feminine flesh. Watching the yellow line of the galvanics, he waited until he saw a little spike that showed Sally’s resistance starting to rise again, then spoke in a soft voice.

  “I can’t wait to train your backside, sweetheart. It’s just the kind of bottom I like. Nice and tight, and so ready for what makes your master happy.”

  “Oh, God,” Sally said through gritted teeth. Eric switched back to a view of her face, to find her eyes still closed and her forehead deeply furrowed. “I... I don’t know what... What are you talking about?”

  Eric smiled at the 9 that had just appeared in the upper right of his screen. The yellow line trended downward, its jumps growing smaller.

  “You don’t need to know, Sally,” he said, “until I decide it’s time. Kneel down, now.”

  Her eyes opened wide, and the yellow line jumped. Her hands, which had remained quiet for the last few moments, rose off her head, and moved downward as if to cover herself again.

  “What?” she asked.

  A chat message came in from Nora: Perfect.

  You could never know for certain what would work on a given girl. Eric had strongly suspected, though, that having the young governor kneel, naked, on the great seal of her state, would bring this initial session to a point suitable for the real beginning of her training and of Operation Snowbird.

  He looked around his little office in the fortified compound on St. Hillary’s Island, about which Sally had just received such a troubling report. Sally’s reaction to his command to kneel indicated that tomorrow he would indeed have to travel south to Madison City—though city applied so loosely as to seem to most residents almost sarcastic. His quarters at Athena station weren’t as luxurious as a heliodromus of the Pretorian Guard had a right to expect, but he had started to settle in since his arrival six months before and he didn’t relish living out of a suitcase, no matter how well appointed the Guard’s new secret facility in Madison City was.

  The prospect of training Governor Sally Donaldson as a Guard asset and eventually an Ostia agent, however, made the move seem very much worth the effort.

  “You heard me, Sally,” he said, his tone less patient now. “I want you on your knees. And put your hands back on your head—I don’t remember giving you permission to lower them.”

  Sally looked down at the great seal on which she stood. Eric could practically hear her thinking, It’s just a rug. The idea of kneeling there, though; from her file Eric had gleaned that although Sally didn’t practice any religion now, she had gone to Sunday school once upon a time.

  Her hands returned to her head, and, as the motion lifted her ribcage, offering her breasts to Eric’s view in the inimitable way provided by the classic submissive posture, Sally took a gasping, shuddering breath through her mouth. Her eyes remained fixed on the shield and the crest, that new creation along medieval lines, winner of an artists’ contest judged by the adventurous citizens of the newest state in the union.

  Madison was supposed to be a place of liberty, a land of the free, Eric knew she must be thinking. In the annexation of the northern territories the warring parts of the federal government had struck a deal reminiscent of great compromises of the past: one New Modesty state, where traditional gender roles found enshrinement into law, for each free state, where egalitarianism reigned. Madison had come into the union one hour after its New Modesty neighbor to the west, Jefferson.

  In Jefferson, a man occupied the governor’s office, and his first lady went over his knee for a spanking whenever he decided she needed one. In Madison, Sally, with the help of Rhonda Mayfair, had won handily. The terrible irony, as far as Governor Donaldson was concerned, lay in the truth that the sexual fulfillment she craved so deeply would have come to her much more easily in Jefferson, had she had the chance to grow up there and to attend its New Modesty college.

  Lucky girl, Eric thought with a wry smile as he surveyed her distress. By becoming governor you got to have your cake and eat it too, though the eating part will involve a good deal more semen than you might have expected. Again he wished himself there in Sally’s office, so that he could start training her mouth as soon as she obeyed him and got to her knees.

  Soon enough, Eric told himself.

  The geographical accidents that had placed the ideal spot for Project Athena in Madison rather than in Jefferson—indeed, which had drawn the boundary line of the new state to include St. Hillary’s Island at all—had delivered Governor Sally Donaldson into the hands of the master she needed. Eric merely had to make certain he could train her as thoroughly as necessary to ensure the safety of the Athena Project—without alerting the general population of her state or, especially, the enemies of the Guard, as represented in particular by Rhonda Mayfair.

  Sally’s arousal dropped to 8. Eric frowned, then typed in chat.

  Concerned?

  Nora: No. Temp and humidity are still good. Give her another minute, then reemphasize.

  Eric studied Sally’s face, watching emotions flit across it: shame, uppermost, as shown by the almost pulsing red in her cheeks; anxiety, following it closely; then, as her arms wobbled a little and a slight zoom out showed her knees doing the same, need. The yellow line dipped.

  “Go ahead, dirty girl,” Eric said.

  The sob Sally had clearly managed to suppress until this moment burst from her chest and, shakily, with her hands still on her head, she began to lower herself to the carpet.

  “Don’t,” she whispered as she managed to get herself into the submissive posture. “Please... please, don’t call me that.”

  “I’ll call you what I like, dirty girl,” Eric said, grateful to Nora for the suggestion of a reemphasis. Dirty girl represented a primary theme he had chosen for Sally’s training, based on the pictures her former boyfriend had taken, and it clearly had the resonance for which a training master looked. “Even when you’re also a good girl who does as she’s told.”

  At the word good, Sally closed her eyes again. Her arousal had gone back up to 9 when she had knelt. Now it reached ten for the first time. Because Sally had shown such a high degree of repression, of course, 10 didn’t mean a great deal of arousal, but from her perspective, Eric knew, she had gotten as turned on as she had ever been, kneeling naked on the great seal of Madison. Her erotic need now matched what she had felt when she had asked the boyfriend to take the pictures.

  Time to take you further, sweetheart, Eric thought.

  “Tomorrow, Sally, you’re going to go to a new day spa that’s just opened downtown,” he told her.<
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  “What?” she asked, her face growing confused and her eyes darting around the office in another vain attempt to discover the surveillance device. The number in the upper right of Eric’s screen dipped to 9, then 8.

  “The appointment’s made. It’s on your calendar. Your driver will take you there tomorrow morning. It’s a very special spa, just for dirty girls like you.”

  Sally’s lips parted. 9.

  “That’s where you’re going to learn about your new life.”

  10.

  “Oh, God,” Sally whispered. “What... I mean, you... you can’t...”

  Her face showed Eric that she didn’t have any more idea what she meant to say than he did.

  “It’s time to show me you’re still a dirty girl, who needs to go to my spa. Take your hands off your head. Bend over until your nose is on the middle of the seal. Then reach your—”

  “No, please!” Sally interrupted. The 10 on Eric’s screen flashed. Sally had just experienced more arousal than she had ever felt in her life, according to the assessment team’s highly educated guess. Her personal scale in the Institute algorithm had recalibrated.

  A chat came in from Nora. Nice.

  “Don’t interrupt me, Sally,” Eric said sternly. “You’ll be whipped for that tomorrow.”

  “What?” Sally cried, her hands flying from her head and her torso turning wildly as she seemed to plead with every corner of the dark room beyond the floor lamp’s puddled light.

  “You heard me, dirty girl. You will obey me, or you will be punished. Bend over. Reach your left hand back and show me your anus. You don’t even have to put your finger in there, the way you did in this picture I’m looking at.”

  Eric did have the album the assessment team had prepared open in a smaller window on his computer desktop: not only did it help him to be able to refer to details in the photos as necessary, but for pictures taken with a phone Joe Barrila had done a great job, and the slightly younger, chemically disinhibited Sally Donaldson had put on a very sexy show.

  Sally gave a little sob, closing her eyes and stilling her upper body. Her hands, though, remained in motion, first instinctively covering her breasts and her pussy, then shifting nervously so that one could travel back behind her to ward a phantom whip away from her little, never-yet-disciplined bottom.

  “You’re on your back in this picture, Sally,” Eric said in a gentler tone, “so I know it might be harder to show me your bottom-hole the way I’m asking you to now.”

  A whining sound came from the young governor’s throat as she bit her lip, eyes shut even more tightly. The 10 on Eric’s screen flashed again.

  “But you’ve also pulled your knees back very far, so that Joe could get in nice and close while still getting your face and your anus into the same frame.”

  “No,” she whispered. “Please, no.”

  “That’s a pretty submissive position, Sally,” Eric continued, his voice soft and compassionate, “so I think you can probably do as I’ve told you. I think you’ve probably thought about it before.”

  Her eyes opened, and the sound that came from her chest could have moved Eric to pity if his cock hadn’t been so hard.

  “Bend over and show me your asshole, dirty girl,” he said.

  Governor Sally Donaldson obeyed, so quickly that Eric felt sure it had seemed preferable to her to hide her face from him, even if it meant the humiliating reach back, the shameful tugging open of her bottom to give her master his favorite view of a submissive young woman in need of rigorous training.

  “Good girl,” he said, his tone satisfied. The 10 flashed one more time. He could see the dainty inner lips of her pussy glisten with her arousal. “But I’m afraid you weren’t as obedient as I had hoped. You may not touch your cunt tonight, and you may not wear panties tonight or tomorrow. We’ll see how you do at the special spa, and whether you take your whipping well, and perhaps you’ll have a reward.”

  With a tap on his touchpad he closed the voice connection. On his screen, Sally straightened up at the sound of the call ending on her secure phone, looking around in surprise, face once again red as the dawn.

  “Sleep well, sweetheart,” Eric said to her image. “See you soon.”

  Chapter Five

  In the end Sally didn’t think anything else made sense but simply to go to bed. Her legs shook as she rose from the rug, and she looked at her hands as if they belonged to someone else.

  Then she looked at her clothes. Her black panties lay peeping out from the folds of her pajama bottoms, apparently harmless and innocent. For a moment, she heard Master Eric’s voice in her head, and something like an electric shock of shame and helpless, distressing arousal flowed through her body in a shudder deep in her limbs.

  “Ugh,” she whispered, then said it louder, as if the sound of the resentful, disgusted monosyllable could push ‘Master Eric’ away in space and in time and undo the horrible events of the past half hour. “Ugh. Ugh, ugh, ugh.”

  Only half an hour, she thought, glancing at the secure phone almost as if it were a viper. Less, actually. Could she even tell Rhonda that the security on the phone had been breached? Could she tell Rhonda anything—even Rhonda, who knew about the existence of the pictures?

  She doesn’t know what’s in the pictures. An image of the worst one, the one Master Eric seemed to like the most, came into Sally’s mind’s eye, now indissolubly linked with the sound of a man’s deep voice telling Sally to offer him the same shameful, tiny place she had invaded with her middle finger for Joe’s camera.

  Why? Why did I do it? And, Why did I obey that asshole at the other end of the phone?

  She had supposed herself courageous and honorable. She still didn’t think she wasn’t those good things, didn’t have those higher qualities for which the people of Madison had chosen her.

  But the courageous and honorable thing to do, in this situation, when a man who could bring all your good efforts to a crushing defeat had told you not to wear panties, seemed very difficult to identify.

  Sally set her face into the hardest mask of determination she could muster, then picked up the panties and put them on. She put on her pajama bottoms and her t-shirt, and she told herself that exhaustion disqualified her from making any decisions tonight.

  As she climbed into bed, her mind, weary though it was and confused though the horrible call had rendered it, succeeded in framing the situation so as to make it possible to sleep. Rhonda will understand why I waited, when I tell her about this tomorrow. What she wouldn’t understand is me obeying the asshole and sleeping without my panties.

  That thought—the idea of having to tell Rhonda about what ‘Master Eric’ had made her do, about the orders he had given, about the injunction against playing with herself and against panties—made her face get hot. She found to her dismay that her right hand had drifted down the front of her pajama pants and just inside the waistband of her underwear. There the feeling of her pubic hair under her fingertips brought her up short as she remembered what the voice had said about that hair.

  Sally ripped her hand away as if she had touched the handle of a cast-iron skillet she hadn’t known had been on a hot burner. She had the urge to wake Rhonda up, get the security apparatus moving. They could shut down the press if they had to, right?

  Rhonda will understand, her brain told her as it pushed down the memory of the pictures again. I can’t risk people seeing that. Not even the people I trust—especially the people who trust me.

  That thought made tears well up in the corners of her eyes, but again she framed it, Rhonda will understand.

  * * *

  “You have an appointment at a spa this morning?” Rhonda asked, a laugh in her voice as she entered Sally’s office at eight a.m.

  Sally had jumped out of bed, showered, and dressed for the day as usual in one of her favorite power suits: navy-blue serge for the northern climate, over a pink blouse, the pants stylishly tailored. She hadn’t hesitated before putting on her usual b
eige nylon panties. She had made a point of not hesitating, and had carried out her intention by telling herself in the shower, You will not hesitate: you will put on the panties and you will put on the pants, and you will go to your office and get ready to talk to Rhonda.

  “That’s right,” Sally said before she could tell herself to say something different. “It’s a new one, I guess. I want to try it. Just a facial, I thought, to relax a little after this week.”

  Inside, one part of her brain was yelling at another, What the fuck are you doing? The idea that Rhonda would understand seemed to crumble before Sally’s figurative eyes.

  Well, she definitely won’t understand now, will she?

  Rhonda laughed, looking down at her tablet. “Well, you might have invited me, too.”

  ‘Master Eric’ had planned this well: Sally had taken off for whole spa days before, in the midst of her campaign, scrupulously paying out of her own pocket and winning the favor of many a modern voter. She had taken Rhonda with her only once.

  “You know you didn’t have any fun,” she told her chief of staff. It was true: Rhonda did not have the spa gene, as far as Sally could tell.

  “Plus,” her willowy friend said, “somebody has to do some work around here. We have to get that mining bill hammered out. You promised.”

  Sally sighed, almost forgetting about the bizarre sexual blackmail plot she had intended to describe in full to Rhonda the moment the chief of staff entered. “You know I don’t feel right about that bill. I’m not going to sign it.”

  “Sally...” Rhonda said, her face assuming the patronizing expression that Sally found practically the only thing about her chief of staff that she didn’t like and admire. “You know there are interests that got you here, and that would like to see you reelected, if—”