"Well, that's settled, then. I'll ... I'll go when ... when you take me. I ... I don't think I want to have any choices about anything at all, now. Not any more. Is that OK? Will ... will you control me, now, please?"
During this little speech, she has raised her head to look him, full in the eye, and even though her voice is very soft, trembling, it is also very sincere. She means what she says when it comes like this, he knows.
Again, he's impressed, but doesn't show it. Instead he smiles -- a genuine, compassionate smile, slow, almost sad. She is struggling, he can see, to hold back a torrent of emotion. He, too, is suppressing strong feelings -- his dick is a painful bar in his pants; his smile turns rueful, then amused.
The callousness of this change nearly breaks her again -- compassion, she saw it -- but so fleeting, and now he's finding humour in the situation? Humour, when she has just given away her life?
Her mouth is full of a bitter, harsh tang. Her world has gone from happy excitement and tender feelings only a few short minutes ago to this bleakness. An inescapable future of sexual abuse. It's so hard to understand how this can be the choice she has made. So hard, but at the same time there is no question in her mind. That this is it -- this has been inevitable for weeks now, and fighting it, refusing even to accept that she is fighting it, has been eating at her more and more. Underneath the sadness, the storming emotional waves, there is, she knows, a deep, deep letting go of enormous buried tension.
And as she realises this, accepts it, the emotional intensity seems to just wash away. Is she sad? Yes, terribly. Is she frightened? Yes! Is she appalled at the lurking horror of having done to her what she saw done to the luscious blonde girl? At what must have been done to her for weeks, months before that to get her to the point where she would play her part so sweetly.
Yes, she is frightened, yes, she is sad -- so much so that she can't really bear to think of it. And so she is grateful for the calming distance that acceptance brings. It's all still there, just as raw, just as horrible, but it matters less. Because she has given in.
She has given herself to him. She is no longer responsible; it's going to happen, and she can't stop it -- so, what can she do about the fear and sadness but accept them, too?
All she can do is all she has ever really been able to do for him, she realises -- do her best to look pretty, look sexually inviting; it's so clear, in retrospect, that that's all it ever was to him -- that for him the fun was actually foreplay (
'If I'm honest', she thinks; 'that's what it was for me, too..'
). He watches her, as this thought sinks in, sees her take herself in hand, straighten her back, pull back her shoulders, spread her thighs a little, push out her chest, look meekly down at his hands, control her breathing, and his dick surges again, causing him to wince. This one is going to go down very well indeed!
Smiling -- a private smile now, he decides to be cruel to her, enjoy himself. Signalling the waiter, he asks for a brandy, and for an ice cream.
She'll be on tenterhooks, expecting him to phone someone, make arrangements, but there's no hurry -- The Castle is always open for new submissions.
He's going to enjoy this. He's never been cruel with her before. Sexually aggressive, yes, demanding, yes, but always he's worked on the basis of consent. Manipulated consent, perhaps, but she has always known that she has asked for everything, and he's never taunted her about it or abused her trust. He's never deliberately hurt her without it being some sort of game that she has agreed to play.
Now, though, things have changed. She's no longer really a person. Or soon won't be, once Anne-Marie has begun to work her magic (he freely admits, as do most Castle Members, that Anne-Marie's skill puts his own into the 'amateur' category). Soon to become; '
Tits, ass, three warm, wet holes, all wrapped up in a pretty package, presented with a scared little smile and a helpless desire to serve
', as the cruder members like to put it.
It's time to have some fun with her, goad her, pressure her, begin to push her face into the harsh reality of her new existence. So he can watch as it sinks in for her, as she begins to understand just what it is she has done.
He still hasn't spoken since her request to be given over immediately; there is really no need -- everything changed at that point. But the entertaining part is that she won't understand this, has no idea at all, really, what has been going on for these ten months. For while he has never lied to her, he certainly has not told her the full truth.
And so she is sitting there, with nothing whatever to hold on to but her presentation of her body, everything else suddenly irrelevant, denied her, all claims null and void. But she is, she realises, waiting on something nevertheless -- some recognition from him, of her sacrifice, of her submission, of her gift of herself to him. Something.
But there's nothing. He says nothing, he stops looking at her even. She heard him order, hears the other diners' conversations -- so she hasn't gone deaf, despite the roaring of her own disordered pulse, all but random in her ears -- hasn't been too distracted by her inner turmoil to register -- easy as that would be to believe, so incessant is the whirlwind of wild thoughts in her head;
What about my pot-plants? How will they tell my work, so that I don't get registered as a missing person? They're going to whip me between the legs, like they did her, with people watching -- make me scream and howl like a mad thing. My pension! Will they steal my pension (as if its worth anything!)? His mark! I'll have his mark (he'd shown her how the blonde had a tattoo on her buttock that identified who had procured her for The Castle. The girl had two other marks -- she'd been bought and sold apparently; will he sell me?). Aunt Mary -- will she think I've forgotten her?/
It comes in waves, she discovers; waves of acceptance, when despite the terrible certainty of cruel abuse, of forced penetrations in front of laughing strangers that she has just offered herself up for, despite the many unanswered questions (questions she realises she probably never will be granted answers for) that relief of pressure -- of pressure that has been building for months -- is so welcome that she floats above it all.
Then, without warning, waves of panic, when the heart-wrenching cries of the blonde, her abject humiliation, comes back to her in excruciating detail: the way it was required of the girl to demonstrate how completely her self-respect had been degraded, and she struggles to contain herself, prevent herself screaming at him, running from the restaurant, saving herself.
Because that would be all it would take, she knows. He has no real hold over her, other than that which she has so willingly ceded -- and offered him, too, she knows. If she stood up now, and simply walked to the bar, asked them to call a cab for her, threatened to scream if he tried to talk to her, if she could just do that, then it would all be over -- all be gone. It doesn't have to happen! (
'Now! Right now! Do it: DO IT you stupid bitch!'
)
He can tell, watching her, what's going on with her -- reading her inner changes through her body language, at one point calming herself, accepting, and then, a minute later, tensing, pulse blipping at her throat, little jittery movements, eyelids fluttering. He too knows that nothing is sealed, as yet -- however final her words had sounded.
He is confident -- although he accepts, too, that there is no guarantee, no way that he could enforce his will on her if she should choose to back out now. And indeed, he would not wish to. The Castle is not in the business of abduction, of forced enslavement, but instead moves in a grey area between the limited, contractual consent of a prostitute, of a porn actress, where delivery of a promise is not, finally enforceable, and the utterly one-sided nature of true slavery.
Although in the laws of civilised countries, this grey area does not exist, the success of The Castle; its acceptability to the elite -- on the basis that it does not make itself too obvious, at least -- is based in the emotional reality of this gap. As Anne-Marie once pithily observed in a casual conversation after a particularly self-congratulatory meeting of the Big Table, the proposition could be stated quite simply in 'Goldilocks' terms; prostitutes are too independent, actual slaves are too dependent, girls that willingly indenture themselves are just right.
The revival of The Castle under Andrew and Anne-Marie's guidance over the past decades has been based in the refinement of this proposition -- on increasing sophistication in the management of girls like this one, on encouraging younger members to share and compete around their skills at suborning the right sort of girl, in getting them to the point where, incredibly, lovely young women become willing -- determined, even -- no matter how breathlessly, how shakily, how tearfully, to commit themselves to long periods of total submission, under the control of an institution which exists to allow sexual sadists to abuse them without restraint. To willingly sign the contract documents which commit them to such control, even though they have some idea, at least, of what this is likely to mean for them -- what abuse, what degradation, what damage.
In these conditions, it matters little that the contracts themselves are not enforceable -- would be thrown out of any sane courtroom -- would in fact provide grounds for civil counterclaims that would be easy to win, and likely to result in large compensation awards. Because the reality is that the girls whom Anne-Marie judges worthy are, in some deep, dark, unacknowledged corner of their beings, grateful for those contracts -- for the harshness of the terms of service they impose, to know that those terms will be inflexibly, even cruelly imposed upon them, through the vehicle of their indenture; grateful at some level for the treatment that they have skilfully been brought to believe they need, or deserve, or desire.
And, once a girl has been brought to sign her name to such an indenture, once her life can be managed with what the advanced management technique books might call a 'holistic regime', carefully encompassing and weaving together everything from their physical surroundings, through to their most intimate emotional frailties, by way of a juggernaut of a culture, complete exclusion of outside influences, careful mixtures of pleasure and pain, guilt, rewards, shame and of course constant fear, all overlaid with ruthless psychological manipulation -- once all this is in place, there is no release, except upon The Castle's terms; Anne-Marie's terms.
