Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 94181 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 471(@200wpm)___ 377(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94181 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 471(@200wpm)___ 377(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
I needed to have my bottom punished before he claimed it.
My heart raced. I could feel it in my throat. I didn’t know exactly what would happen. I knew my master. I knew his methods and his patience and the terrifying way he always seemed to have anticipated exactly what I would do before I did it. But I didn’t know what he would do with what I was about to give him, and the not-knowing felt like standing at the edge of an abyss.
I pulled the curtain aside and stepped onto the set.
The bedroom glowed white under Darlene’s lighting rig. The sheets, the pillows, the headboard—all of it caught the light and held it, and across the middle of the bed someone had placed a bolster. White leather, upholstered with the same care as the rest of the set’s furnishings, cylindrical, perhaps eighteen inches in diameter, laid across the mattress, waiting for a bride to lay herself over it. My eyes went to it immediately and then away, too quickly, the way eyes move from something that frightens them.
Melissa was at her monitors. Darlene stood behind the main camera with her usual expression of detached assessment. Amy hovered near the wardrobe cart. The crew moved around the periphery of the set with the practiced quiet of people who understood they were background.
And then Master Paul appeared from the direction of the greenroom, and everything else in my field of vision became irrelevant.
He wore a dinner jacket. Black, beautifully cut, with a white shirt beneath it. His tie of dark silk hung loose at his throat, the knot pulled down, the top button of his shirt undone. He looked like a man who had come from somewhere formal and arrived somewhere more intimate, the evening’s public obligations shed at the door. The salt-and-pepper at his temples caught the white light of the set. His brown eyes swept the room in a single, comprehensive pass that took in the crew, the set, the bolster, and finally me.
He looked at me for a moment. Something passed across his face that I couldn’t read before his attention shifted to Melissa.
“Would you mind,” he said to her. “If I took this one? To direct?”
It wasn’t quite a question. Melissa glanced at him, then at me, then back at him. Something moved behind her eyes—a calculation, a recognition.
“Be my guest,” she said, and stepped back from the monitors with a gesture that transferred the floor as easily as handing over a key.
Master Paul crossed to where Darlene stood. He spoke to her quietly, and she nodded and made an adjustment to the camera. He moved to the edge of the set and looked at me.
“Stand there,” he said, indicating the foot of the bed. “Facing it. Look at the bolster.”
I moved to where he’d indicated and turned to face the bed. The bolster lay across the mattress in front of me, its white leather surface catching the light, and I stared at it and felt my heartbeat in every extremity.
“Darlene,” he said. “Roll camera.”
CHAPTER 35
Paul
“Rolling,” Darlene called from next to Camera 1.
Five seconds. Maybe six. I stood just outside the bedroom set’s threshold and let the stillness hold.
The text from assessment had arrived five minutes ago, while I was putting on the dinner jacket. I’d read it once, put the phone back on the counter, and worked on getting my tie into the exact angle of deshabillé that the scene seemed to call for.
Subject biometrics indicating elevated cortisol and adrenaline. Autonomic profile consistent with defiance precursor. Recommend trainer preparation for resistance protocol.
I hadn’t needed it. I’d known the moment I woke her at my apartment—the way her body had gone fractionally still beneath my arm when I’d told her it was time to get up, that particular quality of stillness that wasn’t sleep and wasn’t peace, but something braced against itself. I’d kissed her temple and she’d turned her face into my chest and pressed herself against me with a desperation that told me everything the Institute’s sensors were only now catching up to.
Because, of course, Anne herself—her mind, anyway—had only just caught up to it.
I’d anticipated it, of course. I had talked the scene through with her the previous night because I wanted the information to work on her in the dark, the way yeast works on dough—slowly, invisibly, until by morning something had risen that hadn’t been there before. A girl who could lie in her master’s arms and hear what was coming for her and simply accept it, simply absorb the details and fall asleep and wake up compliant… that girl would worry me.
But a girl whose biometrics lit up the assessment board at 9:02 in the morning? A girl who stood at the foot of a white bed in a white dressing gown with her hands knotted at the belt and her pulse visible in the hollow of her throat?