Shameful Influence (Bound for Service Book 7)

by Emily Tilton

  “If I go against my principles,” Sally finished angrily. “No, Rhonda. I don’t care what you promised them, and that’s the end of the conversation. And I have been working very hard, and I’m going to this day spa.” Now, to her surprise, it almost felt to Sally like she wanted to go.

  “No, I know,” Rhonda said, retreating quickly. “You deserve it, after all the energy policy we made this week. Just the morning, though. No mud baths.”

  Sally sighed theatrically, hardly able to look into the other woman’s face.

  “Something’s weird with my secure phone,” she blurted out, trying to make it sound nonchalant. She pretended to be busy with papers on her desk, but ventured a glance at Rhonda’s face to see a frown there. “It... um... I think a random call got through last night.”

  “Huh,” Rhonda said. “Let me see it?”

  Sally’s heart pounded as she pulled the phone from her breast pocket and handed it over.

  “Unlock it for me, silly,” Rhonda said, reaching it back to Sally.

  Feeling like she had signed her own death sentence, Sally entered her password.

  Rhonda will understand, she tried to say, but that seemed absurd now, especially with the way Sally had broached the matter.

  “I don’t see anything in the call record,” Rhonda said, tapping the screen. “And there was nothing in the log this morning. Let me hold on to it and give it to cyber-security while you’re at the spa.”

  Sally pushed back the urge to panic, to demand the phone back, but that would look even more suspicious.

  “Thanks, Rhonda,” she said, willing the heat in her cheeks to subside. Sally’s blushes practically lit up a room, and Rhonda had developed a good deal of skill in detecting them.

  “I’ll get you a replacement before you go. Anything else before I let you make your morning calls?”

  Sally grimaced; morning calls inevitably went to the leadership of the legislature. I really do need a spa day, she found herself thinking, a thought that threatened another surge of heat to her face.

  She almost decided to get into the matter of the fortified compound on St. Hillary’s Island, but something made her hold her tongue for a moment as Rhonda looked over the list of calls Sally had to make. Were the two strange and menacing matters connected, she suddenly wondered? If she told her chief of staff about the compound, would she also be divulging the blackmail?

  At that moment she glanced at her laptop screen, hidden from Rhonda, and her eyes went wide: displayed there, in a large font, she saw Do not mention St. Hillary’s Island, dirty girl.

  * * *

  It hardly surprised her when the replacement secure phone buzzed with a text message as soon as she had climbed into her limo.

  You’ve done three naughty things since I spoke to you. I’m afraid your visit to the spa is going to be very difficult for you, Sally.

  Her face glowed hot as an oven and she dropped the phone on the car seat as if it had stung her.

  “Dave,” she called up to the front seat as the car pulled away, ready to tell her driver to stop right there and let her back out. She would confess everything to Rhonda, and Rhonda would fix it, even if Sally would never be able to look her chief of staff in the eye again.

  But the voice that called back, and the blond-bearded, half-turned chin didn’t belong to her usual driver. Sally swallowed hard.

  “Dave’s out today, ma’am,” the man in the front seat said as he pulled into what passed for traffic in Madison City. “I’m Justin.”

  Sally felt her heart rate speed up by a factor of what felt like three, or five, or ten.

  Justin? Who the fuck was Justin?

  “Justin, please bring me back to the mansion. I’m going to have to reschedule my—”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, ma’am,” he interrupted, his voice polite despite the interruption. “Your appointment at the spa is very important.”

  Sally swiveled her head from side to side, looking to see which exit from the car held the most promise for a jump to freedom.

  “Don’t try it, Sally,” Justin said, dropping the politeness as he glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “We have a tailing car who will pick you up immediately, with men who will restrain you and carry you into the spa.”

  Sally looked down at her hands, which she had clenched into fists atop her navy pants. She gathered her resistance, then looked back up into the rearview mirror to find that Justin had his eyes on the road and seemed to have no concern that the governor he had kidnapped would make any further attempt to escape. With a sob in her throat and tears welling up in her eyes, Sally looked out the window at her capital as it all too quickly flashed by, its buildings mostly half built and its people all visibly too busy to notice that their chief executive had fallen into the hands of some twisted conspiracy.

  It only took ten minutes for the car to get to the basement parking garage of a nondescript office building in a nondescript office park on the other side of town from the governor’s mansion. No signs indicated that a day spa—or any other kind of business—had occupied any of the real estate there, but there were a few cars in the garage, as well as a shuttle stop to bring workers from a nearby station of the light-rail system on which Sally prided herself.

  As her car pulled in, an empty shuttle pulled out, and Sally could see that it had let out a few passengers, who now stood in a glassed-in elevator lobby. She looked again at the door handle; if she could get out of the car, she could run to the people and tell them they had to save their governor.

  The phone buzzed. Remember the pictures, Sally. Plus the video I have from last night. I can send it all to the phones of everyone waiting for the elevator.

  Sally felt her face crumple. She turned to look through the car’s rear window and saw another black SUV, looking for all the world like her regular escort car, with two men in the front seat. When she turned forward again, the workers had vanished into the elevator as if they had never existed. Justin pulled forward.

  A dark-haired, olive-skinned woman in a conservatively cut green suit and a white coat stepped out of an elevator and turned to watch the governor’s car approach. A thrill of hope in Sally’s breast gave way to dismay as she saw that the woman had her eyes fixed on the car, and wore a hard expression. She came forward, out of the elevator lobby, to wait at the curb for Sally.

  Justin stopped the car. The woman opened the door.

  “Step out of the car, Sally,” the woman said in a no-nonsense voice that belied her charming appearance. Sally noticed with a strange little thrill that the dark-eyed stranger had a black choker around her neck that might even have been described as a collar. “You’ll come with me, now.”

  Chapter Six

  Eric watched on his laptop as Portia went through the formalities of checking Sally into the New You day spa, which did exist on paper as well as here in this office park as a reception desk with a few salon chairs. If a journalist for example wanted to trace the governor’s steps today or on a future date when Sally came for one of the special sessions Eric had planned for her, they would discover, as the New You brochure and webpage said, A calming personal retreat in the midst of a busy professional world.

  Sally, Eric supposed, might leave this ‘spa’ calmer than she had arrived, but it wouldn’t be because of a facial or a wrap. Her face on the video feed showed enough anxiety to justify the idea. Despite the young governor’s above-average ability to keep her emotions hidden, her eyes darted around the elegantly appointed little lobby as if she could find something nefarious left lying in the open.

  Her arousal had hovered around 6 in the car on the way to the Guard’s special facility, designed for the express purpose of training Sally Donaldson to be a good girl. The number had dipped as low as 2, when Sally had first contemplated jumping from the car, but had steadily risen on the ride after that.

  On meeting Portia, and probably noticing Portia’s collar, Sally had spiked to 7, then fallen to 5 as they took the elevat
or from the garage to the first floor and walked to the door with its festive placard, where the letters of New You intertwined ingeniously with silhouettes of reclining women, whose supine positions might receive either an innocent or a naughty connotation.

  The logo represented the sort of visual message Sally saw every day in a world filled with images designed to stimulate. Her repressed submissive sexuality meant that she never noticed their effect upon her consciously—but as the Institute knew, that only made her response more powerful. Eric watched without surprise as the governor’s arousal rose to 6 again as her eyes fixed on the larger version of the logo that hung over Portia’s head as she tapped her tablet, ostensibly creating an account for New You’s newest and most important client.

  “It looks like we already have your phone number, Sally,” Portia said, her eyes fixed downward on the tablet.

  The number on Eric’s screen jumped to 7.

  “So you can have a seat, and Judy will come get you in a moment.”

  Sally frowned. “Judy?”

  Portia looked up, smiling. “Your aesthetician.”

  “But...” The governor struggled, very visibly now, to keep her emotions—fear, confusion—in check, while her mind did its best to lock down the other, even more primitive response of her body. Her arousal, led by the warmth in the panties of which she must be hyper-conscious since she knew her master had forbidden them, went to 8.

  “Yes?” Portia asked, cocking her chin slightly and raising her eyebrows in an expert imitation of professional inquisitiveness. The Ostia agent waited, Eric noted with admiration, until she saw pink start to suffuse Sally’s cheeks before she continued, “Judy’s very experienced and I think you’ll have a great facial with her, but you can let us know if you’d like to try someone else for your next visit.”

  In Sally’s eyes, viewed in close-up on Eric’s screen, he could see the working of the suggestive logo, amplified by the whole context of the day spa around which he had decided to build her training. She had never, of course, considered why she liked the experience so much, undoubtedly telling herself that it had to do only with the cosmetic aspect of it. Eric knew a good deal better.

  “Okay,” she said, and turned to regard the two uncomfortable-looking chairs across from the reception desk. She chose the one on the right, and sat there, holding her small black purse on her lap and frowning at the floor for a long moment before she took her phone out and unlocked it, presumably to check her messages.

  Her arousal dropped to 6 almost immediately, but Eric let it tick down to 5 before he activated the subtle technology in the chair: a vibration right beneath Sally’s pussy at a frequency and amplitude just low enough to resist conscious detection. The crease in the governor’s forehead, which had smoothed when she opened her mail app, returned. Her mouth twitched adorably to the side, and she looked up at Portia, who had her own gaze fixed downward on her tablet.

  Eric thought he could see Sally’s blue eyes travel from Portia’s collar to the New You logo, before they descended to her phone again. She went to the home screen on her phone, then to the Stateshare app, where she pulled up the Cheatsheet. Her arousal rose to 6, and she moved in the chair, a little squirming of her bottom that showed in unintentionally sexy body language what the heat and humidity lines on Eric’s screen told him about Sally Donaldson’s naughty pussy. Her mind had obviously gone to the pictures from her old boyfriend’s phone, and what they had brought about last night in her office.

  “Go ahead, Judy,” he said into his headset.

  Judy Perrineau, thirty-six years old and a fourth-level Ostia initiate—to Portia’s third-level rank, that is, a capta as opposed to an agna—had around her neck of course the same collar of soft leather that marked both women as possessions of the Pretorian Guard. Sally’s eyes went to that collar the instant blonde Judy, wearing the uniform coat-dress of the specialist, in a green that matched Portia’s blouse, emerged from the door next to the reception desk—the door that so obviously led to the always slightly mysterious interior of a medical facility or the sort of day spa where massages and Brazilian waxes take place.

  “You can come with me, Sally,” Judy said, smiling neither in her tone nor with her face.

  Sally’s eyes went wide. She had risen with a reflexive smile of her own, but the other woman’s manner now sent the governor’s heart rate soaring, and the yellow line of her galvanics rose for the first time since the car ride. She hesitated, her eyes going from Judy to Portia.

  “Unless you want to discuss your panties right now and right here, Sally, you should get going through this door,” Judy said.

  A chat popped up on Eric’s screen.

  Nora: Oh, that’s nice

  Judy had judged the effect of the reference to Sally’s underwear with great precision. The governor glanced over at Portia and saw the receptionist looking back at her, eyebrows slightly raised. With an obvious rush of heat to her face and a less obvious one—though starkly apparent in the lines across the bottom of Eric’s screen—between her thighs, Sally demonstrated the depth of the ambivalence Eric had created with his instructions the previous night. The mere sound of the word panties could set Sally Donaldson off now, and her arousal rose correspondingly, first to 7 and then to 8, in a matter of seconds.

  Portia looked down immediately, not with evident embarrassment but rather with a perfect impression of a professional who both sees nothing and—if she does happen to see something—has seen it all before. This left Sally looking back at a bowed head and no alternative but, her pretty pink lips drawn into a thin, tight line, to meet Judy’s gaze again.

  On the lovely girl’s face—he couldn’t think of the young governor, wearing this helplessly aroused expression, as anything else—Eric could see just how badly Sally wanted to say something in protest at Judy’s cavalier speaking of a word that without really being naughty nevertheless always implied such naughtiness. More important, Sally’s eyes told of a desperate wish to know why Judy had said panties—did it have to do with the command her master had given her, or with the promise he had made that she would lose her pubic hair today, or with something else entirely?

  Judy raised her eyebrows, and held the door open, revealing the room beyond with its salon chairs, its massage tables, its wall mirrors, and its privacy screens. Eric watched Sally’s reactions to the sight cross her face: reassurance, first, but also some apprehension. The yellow line on his screen descended, probably in response to the apparent normality of the situation. Sally gave Judy one more glance, then walked through the door.

  The blonde capta playing the role of aesthetician—no stretch, since one of Judy’s job qualifications in the Ostia ranks lay in preparing new initiates for the Guard’s erotic rituals—stepped in behind Sally and closed the door. Judy’s face, merely blasé before, took on a hard, authoritative expression, mouth tight and chin raised.

  “Take off your clothes, Sally,” she said. “All of them, including the panties you were told not to wear.”

  With a slightly theatrical air, Judy turned the bolt on the door. The thunk made Sally turn around, her face already crimson at the resolution of much of her uncertainty concerning what Judy had meant. Her eyes went to the other woman’s hand, still on the bolt. Wildly, the governor turned to look around her, saw the door at the other end of the room, and rushed toward it.

  “Go, Vic,” Eric said to the nymphobus—third-level Guard agent—who had come from the car behind Sally’s and entered the New You suite through an unmarked door down the hall.

  Vic, six-foot-three and the owner of a chest that looked like it would burst out of his dark suit, stepped through the door on which Sally had pinned her hopes. The governor froze as the enormous man looked to Judy for guidance.

  “Put her collar on, please,” Judy said shortly. “Then we’ll see if I need you to restrain her.”

  Sally’s face whipped around from Vic to Judy. She had frozen in place, otherwise, and she remained that way as Vic pulled
from his inside breast pocket a length of inch-wide webbing with a thick black oblong halfway along it and Velcro fasteners at either end.

  Eric watched Sally take in the thing in Vic’s hand as the tall, black-haired man approached. The collar slightly resembled the ones worn by Portia and Judy, in color and width, but the material and especially the black device with its two shiny metal prongs clearly differentiated it.

  “What... what’s that?” the governor demanded in a frightened voice. She shrank back toward Judy, but found the capta closed behind her now, and could not get away before Judy had with trained strength and quickness grabbed Sally’s wrists and pulled them back behind her.

  “Something to help you behave, Sally,” Judy said. “Sometimes girls like you need reminders, when they first begin their training.”

  Sally whimpered at the touch of Vic’s hands on her perfect throat, and Eric could see, in close-up, the rapid pulse there. Skillfully the nymphobus threaded the collar around the girl’s neck and fastened the Velcro in back as Sally quivered at the feeling of the cold metal—not sharp but very present—against her delicate skin.

  Vic took a step back, and Judy released Sally’s wrists. Instantly, of course, the governor’s hands flew to the back of her neck, tearing at the Velcro. Eric had his finger on the controller, though, and before Sally had even managed to find the place at which she would have needed to pull in order to free herself, he had given his new bed girl her first discipline: a precisely calculated, very mild shock to her neck, an area whose erogeneity for submissive young women he knew from long experience.

  Sally’s hands stopped moving, and a low, keening sound came from her throat. Her eyes shut very tightly. A deep crease had developed on her forehead.

  “Do you think you can take your clothes off for me, Sally?” Judy asked in a patronizing voice.

  Chapter Seven