This will make more sense if you have read the preceding part.
"Very well. It's like this, pretty..."
Anne-Marie's voice is calm, unhurried, as if she is telling some inconsequential story;
"I'm the manager of a very exclusive club. The members - all men - are rich sexual sadists who pay large subscriptions so that the club can provide them with luxurious and discreet surroundings in which to abuse pretty, helpless young women without restraint. The girls are not technically slaves, but in practice that's more or less the only word that makes sense of their existence. We keep them chained at night, mostly naked or semi-naked, they are fucked, whipped and otherwise used and abused by members more or less at will."
"My special expertise is in keeping the pretties up to the mark - at the right balance between terrified obedience and eager complicity. Although of course I control everything else, too."
Anne-Marie is not exaggerating. In the years she has worked for the Castle, her duties and range of powers have been continuously enlarged as the members have increasingly realised that it is her genius and all-encompassing breadth of vision which have rescued the club from its 1980's tacky tawdriness, which has successfully wooed the new billionaires from the former eastern bloc and the developing South - and which has improved what can be expected from the fillies beyond all recognition. This understanding, coupled with the complete confidence in her loyalty demonstrated by some key members, has raised her to her current, well-nigh unquestioned position as the acknowledged 'Queen of the Castle'.
Innocent that she is, Liana is utterly, hopelessly unprepared for this answer. The first few words had made sense - she could absolutely see how it could be that Anne-Marie would be in her element as a club manager. But from there on in it increasingly seemed as if Anne-Marie must be speaking another language, so impossible is it to make sense - real-world sense - of what she is hearing.
And replaying the words in her head, slowly, trying to make it add up, just made things weirder and weirder.
She had tried to start smiling after the word 'sadists', to make it clear that she understood that she was being teased, that she was ready to pout and laugh.
The smile froze before it was born, though, as it became obvious that this was no tease, but rather a deliberately unambiguous disclosure of a dark reality - one which it was equally clear that Anne-Marie had no equivocation whatsoever about.
And so the pretty girl, experiencing her nakedness now with increasing self-consciousness, loses all poise, her dismay and confusion writ clear across her body - her jaw slackens, mouth opens loosely, eyes widen as her body shrinks back, instinctively recoiling from the unacceptability of what the words mean, this shock, this calm claiming of something horrifying - something that should be attended by shame, by guilt, by excuses at the least, but which is instead followed by a relaxed smile of amusement at Liana's helpless flinching.
Anne-Marie is indeed watching her young lover attentively - savouring the play of emotions, the body language that tells such a tale across her tender, opened flesh. Body language that Anne-Marie, with her all-but-unrivalled experience in this area, is able to read better than most living persons (the subtle Madam of the Macau branch of The Castle has been in post a decade longer than Anne-Marie, and has some claim, perhaps).
Wild images, unbelievable words are jumbling and clashing in Liana's mind. Impossibilities - rejected implications, refusal.. no!
"No! No! You.. You can't.. it, it.. that can't.."
Her voice starts off sharp, but rapidly weakens, softens, tails off. Inside, she knows, for a certainty that if Anne-Marie has said it, if there has not yet appeared the slightest crack in her calmly watchful expression, that despite it being impossible that any of this is true, it must yet be so - for Anne-Marie is always reliable - the person in the world she would trust above all others. It's one of many reasons that Liana has been so completely, so gratefully conquered - the knowledge that what Anne-Marie says is so, will prove to be so; or will be made so.
Anne-Marie doesn't speak, doesn't react; just watches.
Still, smiling softly, relaxed; absorbed in her life's work - the mapping of the submissive mind in all its intriguing (and, for Anne-Marie, seductive) variety. Unlike her employers - the members of The Castle; or indeed her charges - the lovely victims of their greed and her manipulative expertise, she pays attention because she is genuinely interested, indeed fascinated, by the endless variety of ways in which a young woman - possessed, as all Castle girls are, of at least reasonable intelligence, in combination with luscious looks - can be so weak, so vulnerable, so attracted, like a moth to a flame, by a certain sort of greed, a specific hunger, by the openly reckless and vicious appetite for exploitation of that vulnerability.
For what would possess such girls, blessed by the lottery of birth as they are, to submit themselves, willingly, with no excuses, really, of ignorance or poverty, to such a catalogue of harsh and degrading abuses - to the end, usually, of all normal hopes for love, family, happiness?
Anne-Marie has, in fact, made it her business to follow up on the life trajectories of girls who have been through The Castle. This has required a cold heart and a capacity for appreciation of tragicomedy, for, as might be expected, girls who were weak enough, disaffected enough, askew in whatever way it was that led them to accept a life of sexual servitude and degradation, girls who have then been deliberately broken of all self-respect or agency, subjected to an intentional regime that brings them to some sort of Stockholm Syndrome fixation on those who are cruel and self-serving enough to enjoy doing this - these girls, once considered expendable by The Castle - often enough through simple desire for new flesh, for the fun of breaking in new fillies - these girls are not 'good bets' for happy endings.
All this being true, Anne-Marie has been somewhat surprised at the proportion of girls who do, in fact, survive in one way or another, and return to relative normality. A proportion, of course, are lucky enough to become a favourite of a member, whose protective instincts are aroused, and some of these even become wives or mistresses. Most end up as prostitutes of some description - the successful ones often as professional BDSM practitioners - interestingly with dominatrices outnumbering subs, but the majority unremarkable. Inevitably, many girls succumb to drugs of one kind or another.
The early death rate is an inescapable observation: Anne-Marie has brought short some potential Members whom she considers perhaps to be dangerously naive by asking them to stipulate that they are happy with the knowledge that the pretty naked girls whom they want to abuse will, on average, die around twenty years before the normal expectation (it's impossible to say, of course, whether it is the weaknesses that led them to The Castle in the first place, or the cruelties imposed upon them while there, which are the cause of this - but the facts are harsh).
Most surprising, was the discovery of several all-women households made up exclusively of ex-Castle girls of all ages. After some deliberation, Anne-Marie made contact with these, explaining who she was [some of these houses had no girls who had passed through the Paris Castle], and asking if she might visit. She was, of course, prepared for angry rebuffs, but in fact, in each case, received a gracious invitation to visit at her convenience.
In each home she was welcomed and met with calm grace. All were different, but there were some clear similarities; older women acted as housemothers, offering understanding and kindness to younger ones, the experience of sexual slavery still raw. In each household there was a total lack of stigma around fixations that most women had - some expressed a need to be whipped, some wanted to whip others, some wanted sexual abuse, others to live as chastely as nuns. The baseline was complete acceptance and tolerance. In each household, Anne-Marie was invited to stay for as long as she wished, and, to her surprise, in most a younger resident offered to serve her as if she were still a Castle slave, should Anne-Marie wish.
So it was that Anne-Marie had the experience of sitting at table with a room full of normal enough women, some of whom Anne-Marie had herself subjected to cruel abuse on many occasions, talking about all sorts of subjects, with, by her side, a naked young woman, kneeling, thighs spread, hands cuffed behind her back, fresh crop weals on her breasts, smiling sweetly, her head on Anne-Marie's lap, tears still wet in her eyes, knowing that all present had heard her heartrending squeals, the unmistakeable shrieks of an unhinged orgasm the previous evening as Anne-Marie's double pronged dildo had simultaneously hammered into her unaccustomed sex and asshole.
These study visits led to the foundation of a charity, subscribed to by many castle members, that makes occasional grants to such households on the basis of need. Although most houses have a more or less fixed 'no men' policy, off-premises meetings have been arranged between members and girls they recall, and some proportion of these meetings have even resulted in marriages and also re-submissions, where a woman, perhaps in her early thirties, freed from her subjugation for perhaps a decade, voluntarily gives herself again into slavery and cruelty.
It is not too unusual for it to be one of the chaste women to make such a choice. Anne-Marie is particularly interested in [and, yes, excited by] such cases, and when she can, she offers her services in re-acquainting the woman with servitude, should the Member wish it. In such cases, she spends as much time as is practical with the woman before hand, getting to know her, discussing frankly with her her safe, sweet, sisterly life in the household, and the contrast she will experience when once again enslaved.
It is particularly enjoyable, in these cases, when the woman allows Anne-Marie to make her talk about the torments she will once again be subject to, while sitting in normal surroundings. The tears, the trembling, the shuddering sighs, the emotional confusion these women suffer is - for Anne-Marie - richer than the equivalent conversations she has with younger women, and have a more poignant flavour - deeper, more plangent, as all involved know that this second enslavement is likely to signal a final end to freedom, to agency, to safety.
Anne-Marie prolongs and intensifies the emotional and psychological intensity of these sessions as much as the subject will allow, making it clear to them with complete candour that this is in the service of Anne-Marie's pleasure, and serves no other purpose. Surprisingly, this is usually met with a sad smile and an open invitation to more. 'I wish - how I wish - that it was you I was giving myself to' said one woman, sadly knowing - it was common knowledge - that unlike other Castle madams, Anne-Marie never took personal girls - instead operating a system of temporary favourites selected from the stock.
It is Anne-Marie's carefully controlled obsession with the endless facets of the question of the submissive mind that has enabled her to develop all-but mystical mastery of her craft; watching, at moments like this, utterly without prejudice, without assumption - interested in everything and anything she can glean, through all her senses, that might help her understand better just what it is that passes through the pretty's body and mind at moments like these
(the reader will note that, already, Liana has ceased to be herself in Anne-Marie's mind - has been reduced to the status of 'a pretty' - a young woman doomed to helplessness in the face of the ruthless desire that is about to overwhelm her)
